Freud's Remarks to Albrecht at Clark: The Editor

Freud had come to these shores early in September 1909,1 accompanied by Jung and Ferenczi, at the invitation of President G. Stanley Hall of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, to play a leading part in the international commemorations of the twentieth anniversary of the University's founding.2 Freud's responsibility was to deliver the series of lectures which were presently published in this country under the title, The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis.3 His audience included many of America's most distinguished scientists and thinkers.

Everything in Albrecht's report should quicken the pulses of those who are interested in Freud and the history of psychoanalysis, but two sets of Freud's remarks have special savor. One is about the Emmanuel Movement, a religiously-oriented movement of psychological healing then enjoying substantial support in Boston and in New England, receiving prominent notice from time to time in the press;4 the other set of notable remarks is about Hamlet.

1. Very probably, the interviewer's leading questions are part of the reason for the sharpness of Freud's strictures against the Emmanuel Movement. Freud may, also, have been irritated by stories of cures reported to him or which he noticed in American journals during his stay.

2. Freud's remarks about Hamlet are an added instance of his marvelous power to wed psychoanalysis and literature to the benefit of both. Careful readers will be intrigued by another feature of the text. The first caption mentioning Hamlet reads “Hamlet on neurology,” the final caption reads “Hamlet as a neurotic.” Freud's own remarks suggest that he thought of Hamlet in both ways, as neurologist and as a neurotic— a sort of “patient-consultant,” to adopt the phrase of a recent writer.5 Interestingly, this stress on patients as teachers is especially strong in the lectures he was concurrently giving at Clark. Both Breuer and he, Freud explains, received critical suggestions from their patients.