Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I DEFINITION AND HISTORY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS Psychoanalysis, as its name denotes, concerns itself with the separation of mental processes into their constituent elements. We might, indeed, conjure up all kinds of harm if we did not at once warn against considering this provisional statement as an exact definition. There has been analysis of psychic phenomena since prehistoric times. The psychologist who separates the contents of consciousness into its constituent parts and traces them back to their causes, the historian of art who seeks the origin of an important creation, the biographer who is engrossed in the development of his hero, the physician who attempts to elucidate the compelling motives of a melancholia, the educator who endeavors to understand the mental condition of his pupil, in short, everyone who is intent upon penetrating the mental life of others would be, according to the statement heading our train of thought, a psychoanalyst. In reality, not a few representatives of ancient traditions, in view of the results of the successfully advancing movement which bears the distinctive name, pride themselves that they have already done psychoanalysis for decades. They would be quite right if the meaning of the word was derived by merely splitting it into its parts. The name has, however, gained its content by an historical process, to overlook which would create a fatal confusion. In order to escape the annoying cobwebs and arrive at the correct definition, we have to present in detail how the originator of the name and the very special procedure connoted by the same, reached his theory and technique. We shall see that the criterion of psychoanalysis lies in a special kind of inquiry into the uncon- scious mental processes which powerfully influence the ...
评价“The Psychoanalytic Method”