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The history of psychoanalysis has been as much the subject matter of misconceptions as the history of man. There seems to be a tacit agreement that history is the history of events, and with this false premise we usually concentrate on the conspicuous events rather than on the significant ones. The most conspicuous events in human history are usually considered to be the various crises: the fall of a hero, a war, a revolution, the San Francisco earthquake, Churchill's Fulton, Missouri speech, Stalin's reply to an American newspaperman's letter of inquiry.
Psychoanalysis has not escaped this human prejudice. Imperceptibly, although quite in contradiction to Freud's own attitude, psychoanalysts have acquired the habit of viewing the history of psychoanalysis as a chain of strifes and crises. Much has been made of the fact that Breuer broke with Freud, or Freud with Breuer, that Jung broke with Freud and Freud with Adler, that Rank left psychoanalysis, that Horney resigned from something or other. Stress has been laid upon the fact that an individual or a group of analysts decided to become 'liberal' analysts, that the liberals began to divide themselves into sub and super liberals, and that the conservatives (or the reactionaries or the orthodox—the choice of term depends upon the temperament or temper of the chooser) began to break up into their own subgroups, official and unofficial. The fragmentation of the psychoanalytic movement as a scientific unit was the inevitable result of this state of affairs. It was inevitable not because psychoanalysts lacked unity of theory, or the ability to seek and search for scientific data, but apparently because there was one foundation and one only on which psychoanalysis was based, and this was the clinical foundation from which all the essential psychoanalytic concepts were born.
It is precisely this clinical foundation, this strictly empirical, therapeutic orientation that seems to have lost its rôle in modern psychoanal