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The Society for the History of Medicine in New York, by inviting the author to lecture on early criticisms of psychoanalysis, has deviated from the trend prevalent in so many historical groups, i.e., to let history end in 1850. However, history is certainly not forbidden the use of the present tense. The search for historical truth may be extended to the problems of our own time, as well. This is at the same time a historical and an autobiographical sketch, commemorating in the latter respect forty years in psychiatry, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.
History, to be true, starts with indiscretions. Whether you call it Chronicles or Res Gestae Dei Per Francos or Petites Indiscretions Historiques, it was in the beginning the disclosure, to the public at large, of thoroughly guarded and classified secrets, thoughts and emotions of those at the helm, their innermost feelings, (their prejudices, stupidities) and noble aims.
Some such indiscretions or rather, disclosures with respect to psychoanalysis are offered here.
When psychoanalysis was just coming of age and first bowing to the society of older sister-sciences, the critics behaved like chaperons. They tried to preen the fledgling to control the outbursts of a temperament that threatened to run amock. In those days around 1910, I have to confess, I was one of those chaperoning critics, although I did not come out on my own, but as a member of a group. The others that ganged up against psychoanalysis were Otto Meyerhof and Otto Warburg, both future Nobel prize winners. The third number one mind was Karl Jaspers, at that time doctor of medicine, psychiatrist and assistant physician to the psychiatric hospital in Heidelberg. As you may know, he was to become one of the foremost philosophers of our time, and holder of chairs in philosophy in Switzerland and Germany. Then there was Arthur Kronfeld, holder of both M.D. and Ph.D. degrees, also a psychiatrist, an ambitious Alderian, very subjective, drawn between extremes, at