Translator's Prologue To: Dreaming Like Waking

No modern author has been so criticized and vilified for his views as Freud. From the beginning of the psychoanalytic movement some of his hostile critics, though admitting the logic and soundness of many of the Freudian ideas, have nevertheless maintained that they were not original, that they were discovered by others and were known before Freud wrote them. Let me therefore repeat what I said on another occasion when some claimed that Freud got some of his basic ideas on hysteria from Hippocrates:2 “As Freud's discoveries touch the whole gamut of human feelings, it would indeed be strange if one should not encounter similar views expressed here and there by others. But deeper investigation readily shows that whereas some have anticipated something, some fraction of his theories, none has ever expressed one of his basic principles. Janet is the only one who actually claimed that Freud usurped some of his views, but this has been amply disproved by Freud, Jones and others. Freud himself, has always given full credit for any idea he has adopted from others. There are numerous references in his works to the great part played by Breuer in the beginning of his scientific career, and when his attention was called to the fact that someone had anticipated any of his views, he never failed to acknowledge them.” Thus when his attention was called to the fact that Schopenhauer anticipated his idea of repression he graciously acknowledged it, despite the fact that no one but a pupil of Freud would have noticed this resemblance as it is expressed in “The World as Will and Idea”. In the same manner Freud speaks of Nietzsche, who intuitively sensed some of the theories laboriously worked out by Freud on the basis of clinical material. Freud claimed that at that time he had not read the works of these philosophers.3