Freud's Mechanistic and Humanistic Images of Man

The modern reader of Freud may expect a mixture of delights and difficulties. Despite the lapse of generations, Freud remains enjoyably and absorbingly readable even in translation, plainly a master writer of prose. Yet anyone who is not thoroughly versed in his works repeatedly encounters baffling difficulties in grasping his meaning in any but a general sense.

To some degree, the problems are those to be expected in reading works that are anywhere from 30 to 80 years old: some terminology is bound to be outdated; some references to scientific or literary works that Freud could assume his contemporary readers were familiar with convey nothing any longer (or little to an American reader who does not know his continental classics). To a large extent but not completely, the devoted editorship of Strachey anticipates these problems and his footnotes provide helpful explanations. Other problems arise from Freud's habit of occasionally assuming that the reader knew his previous works, even his unpublished ones. Thus, a great deal that was baffling about the seventh chapter of the Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900)—e.g., his reference to ψ-systems-became intelligible only after the belated publication of the Project (Freud, 1895). A corollary of this point is the widely conceded necessity to read Freud sequentially; his thought cannot be understood if his developing ideas are taken out of context. Even so, much remains obscure if one has no conception of the contemporary scientific status of the issues he was discussing. Fortunately, contemporary historical scholarship is supplying a good deal of this needed background (e.g., Amacher, 1965; Andersson, 1962; Bernfeld, 1944; Ellenberger, 1970; Jackson, 1969; Spehlmann, 1953; see also Holt, 1965a, 1968).

The modern reader may have special difficulty in getting a sense that he knows what Freud was trying to say in a number of the speculative, far-ranging works of his later years (e.g., Freud, 1913, 1920, 1921, 1927, 1930, 1