The early reception of psychoanalysis

vicissitudes of a science of interpretation

Terwee

pp. 35-50

in: Terwee (ed), Hermeneutics in psychology and psychoanalysis, Berlin, Springer, 1990

Abstract

Freud's own view on the reception of his ideas has always been that they were received in an atmosphere of hostility. Psychoanalysis was either ignored or rejected. After a period of splendid isolation, from 1904 on he recruited a small but growing group of followers who formed his only point of security in a hostile world. Later they were to form the psychoanalytic movement. Freud tended to think of late nineteenth century Sexual Morality and antisemitism as the main causes of the rejection of psychoanalysis by the medical world and the lay public. Ernest Jones, his disciple and influential biographer, did little to correct this picture of the birth and early development of psychoanalysis.

Cited authors

Freud Sigmund