Hoffman, Leon. "Freud’s Adirondack Vacation." NEW YORK TIMES August 29, 2009.

SIGMUND Freud arrived in Hoboken, N.J., 100 years ago today on his first and only visit to the United States. He came to lecture on psychoanalysis and to receive an honorary degree from Clark University, in Worcester, Mass. It was, he said, “an honorable call,” a mark of his academic success. Freud was then 53 and had been practicing for 23 years. At the time, most doctors here and in Europe still considered mental illness to be caused by “degeneration” of the brain. They assumed that there was little to be done for it beyond physical treatments like diet, exercise, drugs, rest and massage. But a growing awareness that the mind could influence bodily functions was giving rise to debates about the nature of the unconscious mind. G. Stanley Hall, the president of Clark and the first person to earn a doctorate in psychology from Harvard, invited American scientists to hear Freud’s ideas about the unconscious roots of mental illness. William James, the philosopher and psychologist, was among those who attended, as were other prominent academics, like Adolf Meyer, who would become perhaps the most important psychiatric educator in the first half of the 20th century, and Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology. Emma Goldman, the noted radical, who was also there, remarked, “Among the array of professors, looking stiff and important in their caps and gowns, Sigmund Freud, in ordinary attire, unassuming, almost shrinking, stood out like a giant among Pygmies.” Speaking in German and without notes, Freud delivered five lectures covering the basic principles of psychoanalysis: hysteria and the psychoanalytic method, the idea that mental illness could arise from a person’s early experience, the importance of dreams and unconscious mental activity, infantile sexuality and the nature of transference. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/29/opinion/29hoffman.html?_r=1.