nd stopped. But this investigator determined that nothing but the
absolute impossibility of going further should make him cease from
urging his patients into an inexorable scrutiny of the unconscious
regions of their memories and thoughts, such as never had been made
before. Every species of forgetfulness, even the forgetfulness of
childhood's years, was made to yield its hidden stores of knowledge;
dreams, even though apparently absurd, were found to be interpreters of
a varied class of thoughts, active, although repressed as out of harmony
with the selected life of consciousness; layer after layer, new sets of
motives underlying motives were laid bare, and each patient's interest
was strongly enlisted in the task of learning to know himself in order
more truly and wisely to "sublimate" himself. Gradually other workers
joined patiently in this laborious undertaking, which now stands, for
those who have taken pains to comprehend it, as by far the most
important movement in psychopathology.
It must, however, be recognized that these essays, of which Dr. Brill
has given a translation that cannot but be timely, concern a subject
which is not only important but unpopular. Few physicians read the works
of v. Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, Moll, and others of like sort.
The remarkable volumes of Havelock Ellis were refused publication in his
native England. The sentiments which inspired this hostile attitude
towards the study of the sexual life are still active, though growing
steadily less common. One may easily believe that if the facts which
Freud's truth-seeking researches forced him to recognize and to publish
had not been of an unpopular sort, his rich and abundant contributions
to observational psychology, to the significance of dreams, to the
etiology and therapeutics of the psychoneuroses, to the interpretation
of mythology, would have won for him, by universal acclaim, the same
recognition among all physicians that he has received from a rapidly
increasing band of followers and colleagues.
May Dr. Brill's translation help toward this end.
There are two further points on which some comments should be made. The
first is this, that those who conscientiously desire to learn all that
they can from Freud's remarkable contributions should not be content to
read any one of them alone. His various publications, such as "The
Selected Papers on Hysteria and Other Psychoneuroses,"[1] "The
Interpretation of Dreams,"[2] "T
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