Excerpt from Addresses on Psycho-Analysis
The Editor of this series must feel a special satis faction in being able to issue as its opening volume this collection of the psycho-analytical writings of Professor James J. Putnam, the distinguished neurologist of Harvard University. Professor Putnam, who died in 1918 at the age of seventy-two, was not only the first American to interest himself in psycho-analysis, but soon became its most decided supporter and its most influential representative in America. In consequence of the established reputation which he had gained through his activities as a teacher, as well as through his important work in the domain of organic nervous disease, and thanks to the universal respect which his personality enjoyed, he was able to do perhaps more than anyone for the spread of psycho-analysis in his own country, and was able to protect it from aspersions which, on the other side of the Atlantic no less than this, would inevitably have been cast upon it. But all such reproaches were bound to be silenced when a man of Putnam's lofty ethical standards and moral rectitude had ranged himself among the sup porters of the new science and of the therapeutics based upon it.
The papers here collected into a single volume, which were written by Putnam between 1909 and the end of his life, give a good picture of his relations to psycho analysis. They show how he was at first occupied in correcting a provisional judgement which was based on insufficient knowledge; how he then accepted the essence of analysis, recognized its capacity for throwing a clear light upon the origin of human imperfections and failings.
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