tell much about and concerning which our text-books in psychology still say
so little: studies in these fields are marking a new epoch, and here the
chief merit of Freudism is found.



THE NECESSITY OF METAPHYSICS

BY JAMES J. PUTNAM, M. D.

SOME years ago, at the Weimar Congress of the International Psychoanalytic
Association, I read a paper on the importance of a knowledge of philosophy
and metaphysics for psychoanalysts regarded as students of human life.
Perhaps if I had had the experience and ability to contribute the results of
some original analytic investigation on specific lines, I should not then
have ventured into the philosophic field. Perhaps, indeed, if those
conditions now obtained I should not be bringing forward similar arguments
again, and if any one feels tempted to maintain that philosophic speculation
is a camp of refuge for those who, in consequence of temperamental
limitations and infantile fixations which ought to be overcome, draw back
from the more robust study of emotional repressions on scientific lines, I
should admit that the allegation contains an element of truth. But in spite
of this, and in spite of the fact that there is some truth also in the
statement that the effects--good and bad--of emotional repression make
themselves felt, as a partial influence, in all the highest reaches of human
endeavor, including art, literature, and religion;--in spite of these
partial truths, philosophy and metaphysics are the only means through which
the essential nature of many tendencies can be studied of which
psychoanalysis describes only the transformations. And this being so it is
perhaps reasonable that one paper should be read at an annual meeting such