Editorial

In 1909, Freud went global. For the first and only time, he travelled to the United States from Europe to speak at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he received the only honorary doctorate bestowed upon him in his life. With Carl Jung and Sandor Ferenczi, Freud set out on the German steamship George Washington for New York City, where the band of central European psychoanalysts met up with A. A. Brill and Ernest Jones and journeyed to Worcester in order to take part in Clark University's ‘vicennial’ - the 20th anniversary of its founding. The university's president, the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, had invited scholars from around the world, including the anthropologist Franz Boas, the physicist Ernest Rutherford and the psychiatrist August Forel. The philosopher William James was in the audience, as was the anarchist Emma Goldmann, who claimed in her memoirs that Freud ‘stood out like a giant among pygmies’ (vol. 1, p. 455). Freud's lectures, delivered in German, were subsequently published as Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis and are still a serviceable introduction to many of the early Freud's main ideas.

The event was an effort by the fledgling university to take a place on the global stage, while at the same time it demonstrated that Freud's ideas had taken root far from Vienna. Although Freud would certainly have become an international figure with or without the Clark lectures, they do take place at an auspicious turning point in his life (for more on the role of the Clark lectures in Freud's career, see Gay, pp. 206-13). Ten years