«From the investigations and researches of the learned, there appears to be no doubt but that the most ancient of all superstitions was that in which Nature was contemplated chiefly under the attribute or property of fecundity; the symbols of the reproductive power being those under which its prolific potencies were exhibited. It is not because modern fastidiousness affects to consider those symbols as indecent, and even obscene, that we should therefore suppose them to have been so regarded by the ancients: on the contrary, the view of them awakened no impure ideas in the minds of the latter, being regarded by them as the most sacred objects of worship. The ancients, indeed, did not look upon the pleasures of love with the same eye as the moderns do; the tender union of the sexes excited their veneration, because religion appeared to consecrate it, inasmuch as their mythology presented to them all Olympus as more occupied with amatory delights than with the government of the universe.
The reflecting men of those times, more simple, but, it must be confessed, more profound, than those of our own day, could not see any moral turpitude in actions regarded by them as the design of nature, and as the acme of felicity. For this reason it is that we find not only ancient writers expressing themselves freely upon subjects regarded by us as indecent, but even sculptors and painters equally unrestrained in this particular.» (John Davenport, Aphrodisiacs and Anti-Aphrodisiacs).

‘Of course the background of a hygienic life of the community remains the philosophy of life which gives unity to the scattered energies and consequently steadiness to the individual through all his hazards of fate. It might seem doubtful whether society could get the prescription for such a steady view of the world also from the workshop of the psychotherapist. To the superficial observer the opposite might seem evident, as every word of our psychotherapeutic study indicated that that is a view of life which makes man’s inner experience simply an effect of foregoing causes. All life becomes a psychophysical mechanism and from that point of view man’s thinking and acting become the necessary outcome of the foregoing conditions. Nothing seems more unfit to give a deeper meaning to life and a higher value. And yet if there was one thought which controlled our discussion from the beginning, it was certainly the conviction that this causal view itself is only an instrument in the service of idealistic endeavors; the reality of man’s life is the reality of will and freedom directed towards ideals. One of these ideals is the reconstruction of the world in the thought forms of causality. In the service of our ideals we may thus transform the world into a mechanism: out of our freedom we desire to conceive ourselves as necessary products. Whenever we aim to produce changes in the world, we must calculate the effects through the means of this causal construction, but we never have a right to forget that this calculation itself is therefore only a tool and that our reality, in which our duties and our real aims lie, is itself outside of this construction. The psychotherapist wants to produce effects inasmuch as he wants to cure disease. He is therefore obliged to adjust his work as such entirely to the causal aspect of man, as soon as he wants to seek the means by which he can reach the end. But even the fact that he decides in favor of those ends, that he aims towards their realization, binds him to a world of purposes, and therefore, he, too, with his whole psychophysical work, stands with both feet in a reality of will which is controlled not by causes but by purposes, not by natural laws but by ideals.’ (Hugo Münsterberg, Psychotherapy).

‘The latest movement, which is entirely in its beginning, the development of which no one can foresee, but which promises wide perspectives, is connected with the name of Freud in Vienna. The entirely new turn of psychotherapy is given by the fact that his aim is not to overcome a symptom by suggestion but to make it disappear by removing the ultimate mental cause. He found that large groups of mental disturbances result from a psychical trauma, a disagreeable idea which, inhibited in the mind, becomes the source of mischief and produces phobias and obsessions and hysterical motions. The cure of the symptoms demands the recognition of this first mental accident, which may lie back for years and which may no longer be in the memory of the patient. As soon as this earlier experience is brought to consciousness again, it needs only a natural discharge and a normal expression and the symptoms which it brought about will disappear. Thus the cure itself needs no hypnotism and no persuasion or suggestion but the reawakening of forgotten situations, and only in the service of this effort hypnotism may be used to reënforce the memory. Yet this represents only the first period of Freud’s activity, in which he collaborated with Breuer, a phase which is represented by their book on hysteria, in 1895. But there followed a further development which is still more essential. The hysterical disturbance may indeed have started with such an accidental traumatic impression but that does not explain why just this impression had such a strong effect. Other impressions of equal strength and emotional vividness may have passed without leaving any damaging result. And therefore there must be some prior cause in the subject which makes just this particular impression so injurious; and here is the point of Freud’s fundamental discovery, which for the layman appears on the surface to have little probability but which has proved of greatest consequence for clinical work. It was found that only those situations become injurious and become starting points for hysterical symptoms which touch on repressed and artificially inhibited ideas of the sexual sphere.’ (Hugo Münsterberg, Psychotherapy).