Norman Kiell

This book reveals what Freud’s contemporaries wrote about his works at the time of publication. The 171 selected reviews, included in their entirety, were written before Freud’s impact on society and medicine were generally known. Most are informative and descriptive while evaluating Freud's method and conclusions. The editor provides brief biographical sketches of the reviewers and Freud’s comments on the reviews. Some of the publications in which the reviews appear are The Saturday Review, The Doublin Review, and The Times Literary Supplement, as well as medical and psychoanalytic journals in French and German. The reviewers include Joseph Jastrow, C.G. Jung, George Humphrey, Edward Lee Thorndike, and Havelock Ellis. There are thirty-two reviews directed to the various editions of The Interpretation of Dreams.
Quantitative information on the popularity of each title appears in a table in the introduction. For example, the first edition of The Interpretation of Dreams sold 75 copies per year, while the second edition, nine years later, sold 1500 copies per year. The appendix lists approximately 800 additional reviews not selected for full text inclusion.… (meer)