Psychoanalytic Parallels*

Since the beginnings of the psychoanalytic movement it has spread with amazing rapidity in all directions until the principles, which were originally worked out for the purpose of forming the basis of a therapeutic attack upon the neuroses, have been applied to practically every department of human thought. Like all new movements that require an entire recasting of one's methods of thinking it has excited widespread antagonism, particularly from those sources where it might be expected, from the old established authorities, men who have passed the formative period of their lives, and have become substantially established and identified with well-defined psychological attitudes. In addition to this class of opponents, who constitute the weight of authority, there are of course many with violent prejudices which have been easily stirred into action by the close contact into which they have been brought to the most rigidly tabooed of all subjects,—the sexual.

In reading the criticisms against psychoanalysis I have been struck by the lack of grasp of the subject which many of the critics have shown in their articles and the almost universal destructive, iconoclastic, not to say often vituperative character of their criticisms. While I realize with what poor grace the critics can be presumed to receive the counter-charge that they do not understand the things they are criticizing, still I am constrained to state my absolute belief in its literal truth. Many of the criticisms, and those too coming from sources from which one would have expected something better, show such an absolutely superficial knowledge of the whole situation that I have wondered where they have come across the matter which has excited their opposition, and whether, by any chance, the fault might not partly lie in the exponents of the method itself. One must conclude from such types of criticism that the movement has so aroused prejudices that a judicial and scientific approach to the problems involved