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.
“‘Tis with our judgments as with our watches,—none Go just alike, yet each believes his own.”
There are two grand divisions of psychoanalysts. There are the psychoanalysts proper, that is, those who have attempted to enter understandingly into the intimate processes of individual life and there are the psychoanalysts who have been too proper for any such intimate undertaking. In the latter class may be counted the great majority of psychiatrists. They probably got an inkling of things in early life and decided that curiosity was a propensity not to be lightly encouraged. But the psychoanalysts proper were of a more adventurous spirit. Of course they did not suspect what they were adventuring upon—but that is the element that makes adventure. And accordingly the mess so commonly substituted for human life presented no terrors to them. The rosy apple of our human curiosity tempted them and they did eat. Whereupon the trouble began to brew. The problem now, it seems to me, is for the psychoanalyst proper to realize the mess in which unconsciously his overweening curiosity has embroiled him and to get out of it, and for the psychiatrist to realize the mess from which his habitual apathies have unconsciously preserved him and to get into it.
I remember many years ago having spent the long hours of a summer afternoon arguing with Sherwood Anderson as to the merits of the psychoanalytic aim. Anderson argued that human life was not a thing to be delved into with surgical probes—that it was not to be got at that way. Needless to say, I argued as stoutly that the surgical probe was the most wonderful of all human inventions and that it was the only way to lay open to health and growth the sick personalities of our human kind.
Said Anderson: “You blind fool. Men like you are fools. You