It need not be thought that the cathartic method did us no good. The United States, just emerging from the taboos of Queen Victoria, was in need of hyssop. Some of us, brought up among tables and chairs having limbs in lieu of legs, were really in a bad way. But Freud has become much more than a physician. Through books which sell in hundreds of thousands, he seeks to officiate as a pedagogue, a scientist, a philosopher and a priest. Therefore it may not be amiss to enquire into his antecedents and his character, and then to ask ourselves what his teachings amount to as theory and how they influence our lives if put into practice. In order to be perfectly fair, I shall confine myself almost exclusively to the analysis of a single book, the master-piece into which he has put his most fully elaborated and carefully worked out speculations, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” using the third edition of the authoritative English translation of A. A. Brill. This work, whatever it may be as psychology, is certainly one of the greatest autobiographies in existence; for in it Freud not only tells us his dreams--which alone would tell us nothing--but the incidents from which he deems the dreams to have sprung, and the thoughts and memories which his study of the dreams have brought to mind. It is a method to be recommended for those who wish to stand quite naked before the world. By the time he has done, not even Rousseau or Benvenuto Cellini are better revealed. “When I was six years old,” he writes,[48] “and was receiving my first instructions from my mother, I was asked to believe that we are made of earth, and that therefore we must return to earth. But this did not suit me, and I doubted her teaching. Thereupon my mother rubbed the palms of her hands together--just as in making dumplings, except that there was no dough between them--and showed me the blackish scales of epidermis which were thus rubbed off as a proof that it is earth of which we are made. My astonishment at this demonstration _ad oculos_ was without limit, and I acquiesced in the idea.” And so, in maturer years, when he came to dream of a woman rubbing her hands together, the incident was recalled, and he identifies the dream woman as one of the Fates! For once his conclusion is not far-fetched. One of the Fates, indeed! To speak his own jargon, it may have been from those blackish scales of epidermis that he received the psychic blow which resulted in his life-long anti-religious mania. His love of God (he once used to read Philippson’s Bible, and to dream of the illustrations) was made ashamed by this ridiculous demonstration _ad oculos_, and forced out of consciousness. The course of history was turned on a certain famous occasion by the cackling of a flock of geese. It might have been turned again by the timely use of a cake of soap upon a maternal epidermis.