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.
[Rundbrief]1
Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse
Herausgegeben von Prof. Dr. Sigm. Freud
Redigiert von Dr. M. Eitingon Dr. S. Ferenczi und Dr. Sándor Radó
New York, January 9, 1927
Dear friends,
I thank you for the Rundbriefe and continue my report. Of the psychologists in America, Dr. Watson, the behaviorist,2 is probably the most active. In the “New School for Social Research,” where I am also lecturing, he gave a series of lectures about his doctrine, which essentially consists of the application of Pavlov's experiments on conditioned reflexes on human “behavior” in general. In completely failing to realize the complicatedness of “behavior”3 (that is probably the best translation of the word behaviourism4), and without the slightest sense for the historical, in complete denial of the significance of heredity on top of that, he thinks he has theoretically solved the whole problem of the psychic with the aid of the simplest experiments which he performed on animals, newborns, and children. Indeed, he considers himself called upon, also in a prophylactic regard, to be able to replace all psychology, naturally also psychoanalysis. In reality, in his behavioristic experiments he unconsciously—or in mis-perceiving the sources of his knowledge—utilizes the knowledge that he gained from analytic sources. After ending his course of instruction, he organized a discussion in the school, to which he invited Adolf Meyer (Johns Hopkins University),5 William A. White (Washington),6 Dr. Edward Kempf (New York), Jelliffe, and Blumgart.7 Meyer's lecture, which I read in manuscript, is the most confused; it is full of controlled wrath against psychoanalysis, which he doesn't dare to attack openly, but casts doubt upon with allusions like “financial exploitation,” “theoretical formalism,” “sexual