Free Shrinks by Jeffrey A. Lieberman Page B

States occurred in September of 1909, shortly before World War I. He crossed the Atlantic on the ocean liner George Washington with Carl Jung, with whom he was still on intimate terms. It was the height of psychoanalytic unity, just before Freud’s acolytes started splintering off, and Freud believed that his novel ideas about the mind might shake American psychiatry from its lethargy. When the ship docked in New York, he reportedly said to Jung, “They don’t realize that we are bringing them the plague.” Freud’s comment would eventually seem more prescient than he realized.
    Freud had come to the States at the request of G. Stanley Hall, the first American to receive a doctorate in psychology and the founder of the American Psychological Association. Hall had invited Freud to receive an honorary doctorate from Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts, where Hall was president, and to give a series of public lectures. These talks marked the first public recognition of Freud’s work in the United States.
    It is interesting to note that it was psychologists who expressed the interest and took the initiative to invite Freud and expose America to his ideas. Psychology (translated as “study of the soul”) was a fledgling discipline that the German physician Wilhelm Wundt is credited with founding in 1879. Wundt was trained in anatomy and physiology, but when the anatomical study of mental functions led to a dead end, he turned to the outward manifestations of the brain reflected in human behavior and established an experimental laboratory devoted to behavior at the University of Leipzig.
    William James, also a physician, almost contemporaneously became the leading proponent and scholar on psychology in the United States. Like Wundt, James was a devoted empiricist who believed in the value of evidence and experimentation. It is notable that the lack of a path forward in the traditional research paradigms of medical research led psychiatrically minded physicians to invoke psychology as their scientific discipline. Hence the invitation to Freud.
    It is interesting to note that the discipline of psychology stems from physicians whose work, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to understand mental functions using (then) traditional methods of medical research had been thwarted and who were compelled to pursue their goals by unconventional means. It is also notable that the early pioneers of psychology (Wundt, James, Hermann von Ebbinghaus, and subsequently Ivan Pavlov and then B. F. Skinner) were ardent empiricists devoted to research. And while Freud was similarly driven to develop psychological constructs to explain mental functions and illnesses by the same obstacles, he eschewed systematic research or any form of empirical validation of his theory.
    At the time of his visit, Freud was virtually unknown in America; he wasn’t even the headliner when Clark sent out notices of his talk. There was no media coverage of Freud’s arrival before his talk and precious little afterward, apart from The Nation ’s coverage of the event: “One of the most attractive of the eminent foreign savants who came was Sigmund Freud of Vienna. Far too little is known in America of either the man or his work. His views are now beginning to be talked of in Germany as the psychology of the future, as Wagner’s music was once dubbed the music of the future.”
    Freud was an articulate and persuasive speaker who rarely failed to impress educated men and women. In both Europe and America, some of the greatest scientific and medical minds met with him and almost all came away converted. Attendees at Freud’s talks at Clark included James, who was so impressed by Freud that he said, “The future of psychology belongs to your work.”
    Another attendee, the anarchist Emma Goldman, known for founding Mother Earth magazine, distributing birth control, and trying to assassinate the chairman of Carnegie Steel, was also smitten.