Freud's Influence on American Psychology

In discussing Freud's influence on general and experimental psychology in America we need go no further back than 1909, the date of Freud's visit to the United States. It is true that before this time some American psychologists had studied Freud's writings in German and that the rudimentary ideas of psychoanalysis had been presented in a few seminars and lecture courses. As early as 1906, in the first issue of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, J. J. Putnam had published an article on the psychoanalytic treatment of hysteria. This journal circulated widely among academic psychologists. However, except for a handful of people Freud was unknown and without influence in American psychology until his addresses of 1909 had been published in the American Journal of Psychology the ensuing year. That Freud was enthusiastically received is indicated by his own account:

The introduction of psychoanalysis into North America took place under particularly glorious auspices. In the autumn of 1909, Jung and myself were invited by President Stanley Hall, of Clark University, to take part in the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the opening of Clark University, by giving some lectures in German. We found, to our great astonishment, that the unprejudiced men of that small but respected pedagogic-philosophical university knew