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The modesty of Professor Sullivan's title—“From Breuer to Freud”—should not blind us to the sweep of his argument or the range of his learning. His paper will quickly be hailed as one of the choice studies of the basic structure of psychoanalysis as a scientific theory of mind.
It is a particular pleasure to welcome his essay at this time. His ranging imaginative sympathies and solid training in experimental research lend Professor Sullivan's pages a flavor not characteristically found in studies inspired by the so-called logical empiricist school, with which he identifies himself.
What a refreshing contrast it presents in both substance and spirit to the unpersuasive indictments of psychoanalysis by a roster of philosophers of science—notably Professors Sidney Hook of New York University, Ernest Nagel of Columbia, and Arthur Pap of Yale in the volume, Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method, and Philosophy, which has just been published by the New York University Press! (How, incidentally, explain the fact that Dr. Sullivan, who avows so great a debt to Gustav Bergmann of Iowa and Herbert Feigl of Minnesota—outstanding midwestern representatives of the Unity of Science movement—should fortunately prove so much more sensitive to the problems than the aforementioned Eastern associates of the same movement?)
Dr. Sullivan would be the first to admit that he has not said the last word on the origins of psychoanalysis. Is the evidence so clear that Breuer was consistently more adroit and judicious than Freud in the realms of methodology? This is not the impression which Breuer communicates in his theoretical chapter in Studies on Hysteria. It seems especially difficult to accept Dr. Sullivan's critical point that while Freud “was trained in a medical school associated with the