so. How dangerous it is to speak or write of things one knows nothing about! As regards this book, however many mistakes I may make about fringe matters, the core of what I am saying was burned into my soul by the fire of experience. At worst I may be guilty of misinterpreting experience, but not of writing of things I know nothing about.
I do not want to be misunderstood; I have a great respect for Freud. His ability to comprehend the whole world and all human nature in his imagination, so as to produce a coherent, if flawed, picture of man, can only be described as genius. His ability to break free from so many of the suffocating conventions in 19th century thought - brilliant. But if he could make such a fundamental and elementary mistake, which of course vitiated the whole argument in his book, it not only diminishes confidence in the rest of what he wrote, it diminishes confidence in what the generations of his disciples have written too. The errors of the master are visited on the pupils; just as surely as the sins of the fathers are visited on the children. This is exactly the fear the public have about psychologists, that whereas much of what they say may be true, all their conclusions are suspect because of their capacity to make colossal blunders about the most elementary truths about human nature. The public's distrust of psychology is not just the distrust of a science, which is after all still very much in its infancy, but also the deep instinctive wisdom that just as God is not a machine, so man is not either.
What has to be faced is that the soldier, the doctor, the business man, and the lawyer knows ten times, a hundred times more about human nature than the psychologist - who is not also soldier, doctor, business man, lawyer, etc. Their knowledge is practical, rather than theoretical; but none the worse for that. They know how to handle human beings in their own particular way. However being practical men, they are not given much to abstract thought, except insofar as…