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For some years Freud's writings had been either ignored in the German periodicals or else noted with contemptuous comment. Some reviews in English-speaking countries had, however, been friendly and respectful, even if they did not for a time lead to any definite acceptance of his ideas.
The first writer in English to give an account of Breuer and Freud's work was certainly F. W. H. Myers. Only three months after it was published in the Neurologisches Centralblatt (January, 1893) he described their preliminary communication1 at a general meeting of the Society for Psychical Research, and his account was published in its Proceedings for June of that year. So the first discoveries in what later became psycho-analysis were accessible to English readers within six months of their being announced. Four years later (March, 1897) he delivered an address before the same Society on ‘Hysteria and Genius’, in which he gave an account of the Studien über Hysterie. This was summarized at the time in the Society's Journal and published at much greater length in the author's Human Personality which appeared in 1903, two years after his death.
The year before Myers's review of the Studien Dr. Mitchell Clarke, a Bristol neurologist, had published a full one in Brain,2 a periodical to which Freud himself had contributed a neurological study many years before.3 Most neurologists passed it by, but two readers made a serious mental note of it. One was Havelock Ellis. Two years later he published a paper in an American periodical in which he gave an account of the Studien and accepted Freud's views about the sexual aetiology of hysteria.4 It was reprinted eight years later in the second