Page:Freud - Wit and its relation to the unconscious.djvu/12

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TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

plished with the edition of the present volume, and it is therefore with a sense of great satisfaction that the translator's preface to this work is written. But although the original task is finished the translator's work is only beginning. Psychoanalysis has made enormous strides. On the foundation laid by Professor Freud there developed a literature rich in ideas and content which has revolutionized the science of nervous and mental diseases, and has thrown much light on the subject of dreams, sex, mythology,[1] the history of civilization and racial psychology,[2] philology,[3] aesthetics,[4] child psychology and pedagogics,[5] philology,[6] and mysticism and occultism. With the Interpretation of Dreams and Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Professor Freud has definitely bridged the gulf between normal and abnormal mental states by demonstrating that dreams and faulty acts like some forms of forgetting, slips of the tongue, slips of reading, writing, etc., are closely allied to psycho-

  1. Cf. the works of Freud, Abraham, Rank, and others.
  2. Cf. Freud: Totem and Taboo, a translation in preparation, and the works of Jones, Rank and Sachs, Jung, and Storfer.
  3. Cf. Freud, Berny, Rank, and Sachs, and Sperber.
  4. Cf. Freud: Leonardo da Vinci, a translation in preparation, and the works of many others.
  5. Cf. v. Hug-Hellmuth: Aus dem Seelenleben des Kindes, and the works of Jones, Pfister, and many others.
  6. Cf. the works of Freud, Putnam, Hitschmann, Winterstein, and others.