Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 3-4.djvu/86

, 340 JAMES S. VAN TESLAAR

j," It would not be easy at tliis early stage properly to estimate

i the great practical benefits in terms of personal and racial wel-

I fare bound to follow the wider extension and applications of psycho-

i analysis and certain to be witnessed in the immediate future. In

!' unravelling for us the natural history of mental growth and thus

f placing within our ken the means for its conscious direction and

I control, Freud's discoveries promise to accomplish, with respect to

E our knowledge of the subjective, inner world of our psyche, a

r transformation as radical as that which Newton's discovery of the

I laws governing the Cosmos has accomplished with respect to our

i knowledge of the world of external reality.

The same precision, of course, cannot be expected in the two . fields of inquiry. The laws of mind are infinitely more complicated

' and do not lend themselves to mathematical treatment like the

laws of nature. But in general aspects the comparison holds. The position of both, Newton and Freud, is alike unique in the history of science; for just as there is no other cosmic system for man to repeat Newton's discovery of its laws so there is but one sub- jective world for man to delve into and Freud has shown the way of discovering law and order therein.

The earliest significant observations were made by Freud in connection with his professional studies of persons suffering from various nervous complaints. These incidental observations have led him to most important discoveries. From the field of abnormal psychology in which they first arose, Freud and his pupils extended the important discoveries to the whole realm of psychology. Not psychology alone but all contiguous disciplines, anthropology, folk- lore, religion, economics, sociology, history, and even literary criticism, politics and biography, are becoming indebted to psycho- analysis.

The work is only at its beginnings, as mentioned, but signi- ficant contributions have already been made in some of these various directions. Already it is not premature to assert that p.sycho- analysis promises to accomplish for the whole group of the so- called Geisteswissenschaften (the cultural sciences, as contrasted to the exact disciplines) what the evolutionary theory — and specifically the work of Darwin — has done for the biological group of sciences. Indeed, in a broad sense, it may be said that psychoanalysis re- presents but an extension of the theory of evolution, an applica- tion of the principle of evolution to the study of mind or,