You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Wortis begins his paper by expressing his appreciation of some of the 'positive contributions' of psychoanalysis. He continues by raising criticisms, some of which are based on a distorted picture of psychoanalytic principles. The reviewer is of the opinion that Wortis, after a thorough study of Freud's works, would not agree that Freud's 'scientific method for understanding human behavior is essentially antiquarian and biological', nor with the formulation: In
actual treatment of an individual case, this means intensive biographical investigation and personality probing and dissection with only cursory attention to the problem of conduct and practical life'. To the reviewer's knowledge, it is being taught in all psychoanalytic institutes that an analysis without thorough attention to the problem of conduct and practical life would be a ridiculous thing. The present 'psychosomatic' literature also obviously contradicts the statement that psychoanalysis 'has almost completely lost interest in the material physiological basis of mental function'. The reviewer, while believing himself a follower of Freud's school of psychoanalysis, would nevertheless criticize 'most contemporary middle class standards' no less than Wortis, and he certainly does not 'regard comfortable adaptation to a static social order as either a possible or desirable standard or psychotherapeutic goal'.
There are a few sentences which give the impression that Wortis not only criticizes psychoanalysis without justification, but that he does not indeed understand some of the basic psychoanalytic principles, as for instance when he writes: 'The analysis, in other words, is a preliminary to treatment and is not in itself a treatment, just as historical analysis is a guide to social action but no substitute for it', or when he says about the play, Lady in the Dark: 'Actually the lady's conflict did not lie in the past, but in the present: the conflict between business success and femininity is