Karl Jaspers - Yale University Press

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too, will adopt the title if it seems suitable for a British audience, but the criteria, as
you know, change from one country to another even when they share the language.
Mr. Donaldson is preparing the contract, and you’ll have it betöre long. It had to
wait for the final arrangements with Gollancz.
With all good wishes,
Sincerely yours,
Eugene Davidson
541 Eugene Davidson an Karl Jaspers
Typoskript; DLA, A: Jaspers, auf Briefpapier der Yale University Press, New Haven
February 26,1952
Dear Professor Jaspers:
A number of us here have had an opportunity to read your REASON AND ANTI-
REASON with pleasure and enlightenment.1226 As always, you write with great elo-
quence and insight, and I am sure that the book will influence the thinking of a good
many people who have observed the great tendencies toward rote thinking and huge
orthodoxies in the so-called intellectual world. It would be a worthy successor to WAY
TO WISDOM on our list, and our Committee on Publications has been glad to ap-
prove our issuing it with, however, one qualification. Certain of our readers feel quite
strongly that what you say about psychoanalysis applies more to the European than
to the American Situation,1227 and they think it would be unfair to the genuine contri-
butions of the movement not to make clearer the point that you are attacking its ex-
cesses and zealots. They think this could be readily achieved either by your inserting
a few sentences in the text or by writing a paragraph of introduction. Unfortunately,
I haven’t the German text at hand, but on p. 9 of the translation after the sentence
reading, »But in one of the trends developing within the psychoanalytical movement,
which appears to be steadily increasing, something quite different is happening,«a we
should suggest that you could make clearer precisely who is being attacked and the
limitation of the attack.1228 You do make clear in the course of these pages that you are
not talking about all psychoanalysis or that you are not attacking Freud per se. Nev-
ertheless, on p. 10 when you write, »But the psychoanalysts, by arousing false hopes,
etc.,« the reader is likely to lose sight of your qualifying sentences and be led to an un-
justified antagonism to everything that the movement has produced.1229 If you could
make it clear that you are talking about some psychoanalysts, some exaggerated as-

a von But bis happening, Anstreichung am Rand und Notiz S. 18 bezogen auf die entsprechende Stelle in
der deutschen Ausgabe