Sigmund Freud
The four essays that follow were originally published (under a heading which serves as the present book’s sub-title) in the first two volumes of Imago, a periodical issued under my direction. They represent a first attempt on my part at applying the point of view and the findings of psycho-analysis to some unsolved prob-lems of social psychology [Völkerpsychologie]. Thus they offer a methodological contrast on the one hand to Wilhelm Wundt’s extensive work, which applies the hypotheses and working methods of non-analytic psychology to the same purposes, and on the other hand to the writings of the Zurich school of psycho-analysis, which endeavour, on the contrary, to solve the problems of individual psychology with the help of material derived from social psychology. (Cf. Jung, 1912 and 1913.) I readily confess that it was from these two sources that I received the first stimulus for my own essays.
