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Psychoanalysis, a New Psychosis. Une Psychose Nouvelle: La Psychoanalyse. Mercure de France, September 1st, 1916

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2018

Yves Delage*
Affiliation:
Station Biologique de Roscoff

Extract

[The following article from the pen of the eminent biologist, M. Yves Delage, was brought under the Editors' notice through the kindness of Sir Bryan Donkin. The vein of irony and caustic humour, more or less scathing, which runs through it will, no doubt, be distasteful to those who have accepted in their totality the theories of the Freudian school, but it is as well that the teaching of that school should be presented for the nonce from a different standpoint from that adopted by its whole-souled adherents. And while it may perhaps offer some rather “strong meat” for our readers' consumption, and while, in particular, the interviews so graphically described may seem too out-spoken and realistic for some ultra-sensitive British minds, it can hardly be questioned that they are, unfortunately, true to fact; and it might be a blunder on the part of psychiatrists who cannot bring themselves to admit the soundness of the principles of Freudism to content themselves with the adoption of a merely passive attitude towards them, and, ostrich-like, to shut their eyes to an aspect of a movement which is spreading with more or less rapidity in our own and other countries outside Germany, and which in the view of many sober thinkers is, in much of its theory, scientifically unsound, and at least capable of becoming demoralizing in practice; and if, through a no doubt pardonable repugnance to anything savouring of prurience or salacity, they were to allow themselves to drift into the opposite extreme of a too meticulous and hardly justifiable prudery.

Type
Part I.—Original Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1917 

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References

(1) Word for word from text-book.Google Scholar

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