Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [121]
The second notable work, which appeared in 1905, was Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; it went much further than his previous work in picturing sexuality as a fundamental force in human behavior. The first essay dealt with sexual aberrations, picturing them as the consequences of incomplete or distorted development. The second dealt with infantile sexuality, enlarging Freud’s earlier views of the subject and maintaining that all human beings are innately perverse but that in healthy development the perversity is mastered. The third essay dealt with the development of sexuality in puberty and the differentiation of male and female personalities as a consequence of anatomical differences.
The explicit details in Three Essays and its theoretical ideas about infantile sexuality outraged the straitlaced burghers of middle-class Europe and America. Freud was called a dirty-minded pansexualist and “Viennese libertine,” and the book was labeled “pornography” and a befouling of the purity of childhood. According to Jones, writing in 1955, “It was this publication that brought the maximum of odium on his name; much of it still remains, especially among the uneducated. The book was felt to be a calumny on the innocence of the nursery.”60 But the book struck a responsive note. It was widely discussed in psychological and psychiatric circles, reissued a number of times, and translated into nine languages. James Strachey says that it and The Interpretation of Dreams are Freud’s “most momentous and original contributions to human knowledge.”61
Three years later Freud received an invitation to be a key speaker at the psychology conference that would be part of Clark University’s twentieth-anniversary celebration. It was the first international recognition of the man and his work. He accepted, went to Worcester, Massachusetts, accompanied by two colleagues, Sandor Ferenczi and Carl Jung, and delivered five lectures before an audience of leading psychologists and psychiatrists on the history of psychoanalysis, its major theories, and its therapeutic technique. A few listeners found the material offensive (Weir Mitchell, an eminent physician, called Freud a “dirty, filthy man,” and a Canadian dean said that Freud seemed to advocate “a relapse into savagery”62), but most listeners, including William James, were impressed. The lectures were favorably discussed in the daily papers and in The Nation, were published in the American Journal of Psychology, and greatly widened the impact of Freud’s ideas. By the time Freud returned from the conference, he was famous.
Not that this brought him tranquillity. Proud, sensitive, stubborn, and egotistical, like many other great pioneers, Freud became deeply embroiled in the politics of the movement he had started, and he struggled to control the disputes arising within it over theory and therapeutic methods. He seems to have felt that the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society should be run not as a democracy but as a hierarchy, an attitude perhaps natural to one who lived in a monarchy. But his view may also have been reasonable in one who had made important discoveries and wanted to preserve them from distortion or contamination. The resulting wrangles over theory and practice, and the bitter schisms, became a recurring pattern in the psychoanalytic movement.
To some extent the pattern may have