Though he doesn’t notice the consistency of Keynes’s treatment of these factors with psychoanalysis, elsewhere (pp. 798-9) in the same book he says the following about its “vast possibilities of application to … economics.”
“Freudian Psychology. Before the end of the century psychoanalysis was a therapeutic method - to be traced to the teaching of J.M. Charcot in Paris - that had scored remarkable successes, especially in the cases of 'hysterical' inhibition of motion, in the hands of Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud. But about 1900, though it always remained a therapeutic method, it began to reveal a very much wider aspect - it began to develop into a general theory of the working of the human mind. The old idea of a subconscious personality and its struggles with the conscious ego was elaborated and made operational with unsurpassable effectiveness by Freud.1 Again I cannot - and perhaps need not - do more than point to the vast possibilities of application to sociology - political sociology especially - and economics that seem to me to loom in the future: a Freudian sociology of politics (including economic policies) may some day surpass in importance any other application of Freudism, though so far only a small beginning has been made (W.H.R. Rivers).”
In the footnote, he writes:
“Freud's writings are now available in a cheap American edition to which the reader is referred. It occurs to me that my few sentences on Freud might be interpreted in a derogatory sense. Nothing could be further from my intention. All great achievements are but final acts of birth that are preceded by long prenatal histories. Freud had a large number of pupils who split up, however, into different groups, some of which cannot be called Freudian any more. But potential fertility for the social sciences is a feature of all of them (all of them I know, that is).”
Ted