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.
Dr. Walsh's interesting paper deals with a crucial issue, namely, the influence of the early Greek philosophers on Freud's psychoanalytic thinking. From this vantage point, I will discuss briefly two aspects of the subject: Freud's creative genius, and the pitfalls and limitations in the attempt to understand the process of creativity in general.
The author's and Freud's own suggestion that he suffered from cryptomnesia in his failure to recall some of Pythagoras' concepts, and therefore treated his own ideas as though they were original, to me represents a marked oversimplification. It is suggested that many of Pythagoras' early ideas—such as the concepts
of opposites, life and death forces, his emphasis on ethics, the fundamental equality of all human beings—had a marked influence on the evolution of Freud's psychoanalytic concepts.
While it is undoubtedly true that Freud read widely, and in his early years evinced marked interest in ancient Greek civilization, epitomized much later in his experience of depersonalization upon visiting the Acropolis, it is my own opinion that philosophic thinking had little influence on his most outstanding creative breakthroughs. If one studies carefully the evolution of Freud's thinking, beginning with his project, his letters to Fliess, his autobiography, his early studies with Breuer on hysteria, one fact is strikingly apparent: Freud was consumed with a desire to explain various types of psychopathology or psychoneuroses he was experiencing in his clinical practice. These previously had not been explained etiologically or dynamically, and, sadly enough, had been treated in almost quack-fashion by the greatest neurologists, pathologists and neurophysiologists in Europe.
His work with Charcot on hypnosis, and the elaboration of his cathartic method of treatment, led finally to the establishment of the psychoanalytic method as a research and therapeutic tool in the explanation of psychopathology as a deviation from the norm.
This