A History of Psychoanalysis

Abstract

To date, a variety of attempts have been made to write a history of psychoanalysis. The first, by Sigmund Freud himself, barely 20 years after the birth of psychoanalysis,<i>On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement</i>, was published in 1914. Freud's purpose was to establish his own priority as the founder of analysis and to refute the varied claims of Jung and Adler who had recently broken away from the psychoanalytic movement. Almost 50 years later, Henri Ellenberger, in<i>The Discovery of the Unconscious</i>, related psychoanalysis to the intellectual milieu of the 19th and 20th centuries, described the various movements that deviated from Freud, and demonstrated how effectively the Zeitgeist served as influence. A third attempt by Paul Roazen,<i>Freud and His Followers</i>, emphasized the eccentricities and personal squabbles among the early followers of Freud. A more recent attempt by Frank J. Sulloway,<i>Freud, Biologist of the Mind</i>, relates Freud's