Chapter XVII. Retrospect

MY publishers have urged me to write a chapter assessing Freud's influence on the world. With all respect to them I cannot think that they could have formed a very proper estimate of the size of such a task. This is not the only reason why I shrink from it, but it is itself a good one. Freud's name must have been mentioned many millions of times in newspapers, novels and other books, not to speak of the more technical fields ranging from medicine to pure psychology, from education to religion. It would need a corps of research workers to collect, correlate and co-ordinate this vast material. It is evidently beyond the powers of any individual.

There are two further difficulties to be overcome, one in the province of the historian, the other in that of the psycho-analyst. When we consider the ‘climate of opinion’ which W. H. Auden said Freud has created we are faced with the problem of isolating Freud's contribution to it from the numerous other agencies that have been at work in the past half-century. An obvious example of this is the greater freedom and frankness in the sphere of sexuality that has undoubtedly made its appearance in this period. While it is likely that Freud's doctrines have been a powerful factor in bringing this about it is certain that many others, political, sociological and economic, have co-operated, so it would need a very nice weighing of all the evidence before Freud's contribution could be justly assessed. The same is true of many other changes, in the fields of education, psychiatry and so on.

The psycho-analyst's difficulty in forming an estimate is a little harder to describe, but none the less real. What chiefly impresses him is the shallowness of so much of what passes as acceptance of Freud's ideas, and the superficiality with which they are treated. They are so often bandied about lightly as a form of lip service that one cannot help suspecting that much of the so-called acceptance is really a subtle form of rejection, a protection a