Book Essay on After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America;The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis

Like psychoanalysts in general, historians of psychoanalysis tend to be inward-looking. However it happens—whether through a transformative experience of reading, an encounter with an inspiring teacher, or being smelted in the crucible of therapy—we discover psychoanalysis, and over time it becomes our vocation. We learn to see the world with psychoanalytic eyes and increasingly take on a psychoanalytic identity. Things that are extraneous to psychoanalysis, concomitantly, we may (in our professional capacities) grow indifferent to, and whatever is hostile to psychoanalysis we will be predisposed to repel and refute.

It is the merit of the two books under review that they make us aware of this state of affairs and, in so doing, may help us become uncomfortable with it. The first, John Burnham’s expertly edited volume, After Freud Left—inspired by the centenary of the 1909 conference at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, which occasioned Freud’s lone trip to the United States—does so by enlarging our intellectual horizons in a way that could cause no offense to anyone. The second, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Sonu Shamdasani’s The Freud Files, although the authors’ inability to see more than one side of any question should arouse misgivings in even favorably disposed readers, constitutes by virtue of the very severity of its indictment an important contribution to the history of psychoanalysis.

Burnham, research professor in the department of history at Ohio State University and best known to a psychoanalytic constituency for having edited Smith Ely Jelliffe’s correspondence with Freud and Jung, divides his book into two parts: the first, “Freud and the Psychoanalytic Movement Cross the Atlantic,” takes us from the Clark conference to World War II, while the second, “The Fate of Freud’s Legacy in American Culture,” deals with the postwar years. The opening chapter of After Freud Left, Sonu Shamdasani’s “Psychotherapy, 1909: Notes on a Vintage,” forms a link with The Freud Files by providing “a panning shot of the state of psychotherapy and dynamic psychiatry in 1909” (p. 31), thereby enabling the reader to survey the landscape of the professional world Freud inhabited without the hindsight that has elevated the Clark conference into a world-historical event. It will doubtless come as a surprise to many to be informed that the most important psychological conference of the year was “the Sixth International Conference of Experimental Psychology in Geneva, held under the presidency of Théodore Flournoy,” while “Pierre Janet has to be considered the most significant figure in psychotherapy in 1909” (pp. 31–32). Even in the United States, the Clark conference was outshone by “a symposium in New Haven at the meeting of the American Therapeutic Society” (p. 41), while “the major book on psychotherapy” (p. 36) was a 400-page tome by Harvard professor Hugo Münsterberg.

Given that Janet, Flournoy, and Münsterberg, as well as many other once-renowned figures including Morton Prince, Boris Sidis, Paul Dubois, Paul-Émile Lévy, and August Forel, have either been forgotten completely or, at best, come down to all but the most erudite simply as names, it would be easy for psychoanalysts to dismiss Shamdasani’s excavations as yielding nothing of salience to our concerns. To be sure, it is noteworthy that the decision to form the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1910 was galvanized by Forel’s founding of the International Society of Medical Psychology and Psychotherapy, which Jung and Freud agreed to join in November of 1909 “so as not to leave the field to their rivals” (p. 38). But Shamdasani contents himself here with pointing out this conjunction, and only when his chapter is placed in the context of his collaboration with Borch-Jacobsen can one begin to appreciate the implications of the story he has to tell.

The ensuing three essays in Part I, by Richard Skues, Ernst Falzeder, and George Makari, are all major contributions by leading historians of psychoanalysis, while Hale Usak-Sahin’s “Another Dimension of the Émigré Experience: From Central Europe to the United States via Turkey” chronicles the lives of Ruth Wilmanns Lidz and Edith Weigert, both of whom were born in Germany but were forced by the rise of National Socialism to immigrate to Turkey, whence they made their way to Baltimore. There, both Weigert and Lidz were associated with Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, who had arrived in the United States via Palestine in 1935. All three women, who specialized in treating psychotic patients using psychoanalytic methods, came under the influence of the Swiss-born Adolf Meyer of Johns Hopkins Hospital, who had himself presented a lecture, “The Dynamic Interpretation of Dementia Praecox,” at the Clark conference in 1909.

The chapters of both Skues and Falzeder are concerned with Freud’s visit to the United States. In “Clark Revisited: Reappraising Freud in America,” Skues echoes Shamdasani in cautioning that “we must be careful not to read the history of this period in reverse” (p. 53), and he too undertakes to disabuse readers of many commonly held misconceptions. Skues notes that Freud owed his invitation to G. Stanley Hall, the president of Clark University, and that Hall’s “high evaluation of Freud or familiarity with his work was not necessarily matched in the broader medical or psychological fields” (p. 74). Indeed, Jung was “at least as familiar a figure as Freud, and quite probably more so, to most of those who attended the lecture sessions” (p. 74). What is more, because the famous photograph of Hall seated between Freud and Jung, with Brill, Jones, and Ferenczi standing behind them, has often been “superimposed on our reading of the other, larger photograph of the forty-two participants,” the erroneous impression has arisen that the latter image is “a record of a chiefly psychoanalytic event” (p. 72).

In a similarly skeptical vein, Skues contends that the casualness with which Freud prepared his lectures in daily strolls with Ferenczi attests “there is little sign here of anything that might remotely resemble concerted ambition” (p. 57). He characterizes Freud’s “dominant response to his visit to America” as being “about ambition fulfilled, not ambition for what was to come,” quoting Freud’s acknowledgment in “An Autobiographical Study” that “it seemed like the realization of some incredible day-dream” to step on the platform at Worcester, as well as Ferenczi’s recollection in the Clinical Diary of how “almost with tears in his eyes [Freud] thanked the president of the university for his honorary doctorate” (p. 78). But in emphasizing Freud’s lack of interest in furthering “the spread of the movement in the New World” (p. 78), Skues does not probe the motives that led Freud to regard his triumph at Clark as a supreme wish-fulfillment.

No such reluctance to engage in psychobiography is evinced by Falzeder, whose contribution, “‘A Fat Wad of Dirty Pieces of Paper’: Freud on America, Freud in America, Freud and America,” proffers the hypothesis that Freud’s notorious antipathy to this country, which became greatly exacerbated after 1909, can in large measure be attributed to “one experience he had in America that must have been utterly humiliating to him, and that undoubtedly left a strong impression” (p. 105)—namely, an episode of urinary incontinence on Riverside Drive in New York City that had been witnessed and independently reported by Jung and Ferenczi. Falzeder’s reconstruction is compelling as far as it goes, but he does not pose the logical next question: why should this traumatic experience have befallen Freud when it did? ¹

Building on his magisterial Revolution in Mind (2008), George Makari in “Mitteleuropa on the Hudson: On the Struggle for American Psychoanalysis after the Anschluss” dissects the impact of the influx of refugee analysts from Europe on the American scene. Among those belonging to “the first wave,” Makari groups Franz Alexander, Sándor Radó, Karen Horney, and Hanns Sachs as “the Berlin elite” (p. 113), and he describes Berlin as a place where “freedom from a slavish fawning before Freud had been a matter of pride” (p. 119). But, as Hungarians, both Alexander and Radó were heirs of Ferenczi as well as Abraham. Thus, when Radó, who rejected Freud’s theory of the death drive and sought to base psychoanalytic theory on a scientific foundation, clashed in New York with the Viennese Paul Federn, who prided himself on “his absolute loyalty to Freud” (p. 116), this antagonism can be understood as a displaced reenactment of the tragic estrangement between Ferenczi and Freud. To characterize Berlin as emancipated from “slavish fawning before Freud,” moreover, minimizes the orthodoxy of Abraham and Eitingon, who, together with Jones, formed a faction on the Secret Committee that staunchly opposed the proto-relational innovations of Ferenczi and Rank. As Eran J. Rolnik (2012) has documented, when Eitingon moved to Palestine and sought to cast “the Institute in Jerusalem as the avatar of the Berlin Institute,” he wrote into its bylaws a “draconian provision aimed at ensuring that none would use the name of Freud’s theory in vain” (p. 111) by requiring all members to obtain consent from the governing committee before giving any public lectures on psychoanalysis.

Makari makes clear how prophetic was the “nasty little quarrel” (p. 118) between Radó and Federn within the New York Institute. On the one side were the progressives, such as David Levy, who wrote to Lawrence Kubie that “the old timers from Vienna . . . never ask themselves, ‘What is the truth?’ They ask rather, ‘Does he agree with Freud?’” (p. 118). On the other were the Viennese, including the “fiery conservative” Fritz Wittels, who wrote to Kubie against Horney, “The issue is Freud or no Freud” (p. 121). Kubie was caught in the middle, but though he had initially “fashioned himself a standard-bearer of science in psychoanalysis” (p. 121), when the chips were down he turned against both Radó and Horney and sided with the conservatives. Ironically, however, Kubie in turn was himself “cast off” when the mantle of leadership in the New York Institute passed to Heinz Hartmann, who “had impeccable Viennese credentials and . . . had been one of the Professor’s last training cases” (p. 122).

As Makari observes, the “neo-Freudian” label that came to be pinned on Horney, Radó, and Abram Kardiner “was in itself a defeat,” since “they wanted to be part of a psychoanalytic science and did not want to be forever shadowed by the ghost of the man they sought to move beyond” (p. 122). But though the renegades may have lost the intramural battle during their lifetimes, they posthumously won the war of ideas. For if, as Makari concludes, the “Hartmann era” had dawned by 1946 when “a coalition of ego psychologists and orthodox Freudians” gained control of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and this body “transformed itself from a loosely knit federation into a central power that policed standards throughout the country” (p. 123), we can see why not only on theoretical but also on political grounds the hegemony of ego psychology—although it coincided with the high-water mark of the influence of psychoanalysis on American culture—could not be sustained. Ironically, it is the erstwhile “neo-Freudians” who are now being rediscovered as harbingers of the “relational turn” and of a more egalitarian and intersubjective clinical paradigm.

The depth and breadth of Makari’s chapter are matched by the quartet of contributions in Part II. In “Freud and the Vicissitudes of Modernism in the United States, 1940–1980,” Dorothy Ross focuses on “a group of academics and public intellectuals who propagated Freud’s authority from university chairs and in the highbrow press” (p. 163) during the decades in which his prestige was at its apogee. Ross devotes the most sustained attention to Lionel Trilling, the “leading literary champion of Freud” (p. 168) in mid-twentieth-century America. When read against the backdrop provided by Makari, however, the unintended lesson imparted by Ross’s account, at least from a relational standpoint, is how dated Trilling’s views appear today. For Trilling, the creaky mythology of the death drive, along with the concept of the reality principle, formed “the crown of Freud’s broader speculation on the life of man” (p. 168), and he took up cudgels against the neo-Freudians, personified above all by Erich Fromm, who rejected Freud’s supposed biological “bedrock” and sought to ground psychoanalytic theory on the primacy of social and historical influences on psychic life.

Trilling’s uncritical espousal of Freud’s theories was paralleled by his veneration of Freud the man. According to Trilling, who with Steven Marcus edited the abridged edition of Jones’s biography, “fame was the spur to Freud’s clear spirit” (p. 172). In the same vein, Philip Rieff, the second leading exponent of the “Apollonian Freud” (p. 167), affirmed, “The exemplary cast of Freud’s mind and character is more enduring than the particulars of his doctrine” (p. 182). Here, again, time has not treated the loyalists kindly, for the tough-minded revisionism of Fromm’s Sigmund Freud’s Mission (1959), which explored the insecurity arising from Freud’s troubled relationship with his mother, indicted Freud’s “intolerance and authoritarianism” (p. 68), and lamented the “errors and limitations” in the development of psychoanalysis, as a result of which “it suffered from the very defect it aims at curing: repression” (p. 115), has held up far better over more than half a century than has the apotheosis of Freud by Trilling and Rieff. ² As Ross somewhat reluctantly concedes, by the 1970s there was “a considerable body of personal criticism arrayed against Freud,” and a lengthening trail of evidence led to the conclusion that, on a host of important topics, “the great truth-teller, it seemed, had not told the truth about himself” (p. 187).

Training his sights on the same decades as Ross, Louis Menand in “Freud, Anxiety, and the Cold War” masterfully expounds the thesis that “one reason for the ‘fit’ between Freudianism and postwar American culture had to do with what might be called the Cold War discourse of anxiety” (p. 189). With an encyclopedic range of reference and a deft sureness of touch, Menand traces the web of connections that entwines W. H. Auden’s book-length “baroque eclogue,” The Age of Anxiety (1947), Reinhold Niebuhr, the existential Christianity of Kierkegaard (in the translations of the Episcopal clergyman Walter Lowrie), Rollo May, and many other key texts and thinkers. In particular, Menand credits May’s The Meaning of Anxiety (1950) with having done something that would not have been possible for any “orthodox Freudian” but that “was the key move in the adaptation of psychoanalysis to the social and cultural conditions of postwar America,” namely, “it historicized anxiety” (p. 198). Again, Trilling and his partiality for the death drive are invoked as a counterpoint, though it is not, as Menand states, specifically of the death drive but of Civilization and Its Discontents as a whole that Trilling wrote that it stands “like a lion in the path of all hopes of achieving happiness through the radical revision of social life” (p. 205). In response to May’s thesis that the “fear of irrational death” became widespread in the Atomic Age, Menand interjects parenthetically, “It is not obvious why death by an atomic bomb is any more irrational than death by food poisoning or in an automobile accident” (p. 202). But only with the advent of the atomic bomb has humanity been threatened with extinction as a species, and surely this explains why the fear of a nuclear holocaust arouses infinitely greater terror than even the most unpleasant form of individual death.

In her informative chapter, “Heinz Kohut’s Americanization of Freud,” Elizabeth Lunbeck illuminates the modernization of American psychoanalysis. Thanks to Kohut, the hegemonic phalanx of ego psychology, which had repelled the successive incursions of “neo-Freudianism,” was finally forced to reckon with the possibility that what had hitherto been hailed as Freud’s “brutally realistic pessimism” (p. 209), far from being an accurate representation of human nature, may well have been radically flawed. As Lunbeck expounds, Kohut cogently argued that “Freud had seen the essence of man in what was in fact the breakdown of civilized relations. Only when the self was not supported did the lust and hate that Freud took as foundational come to the fore” (p. 224). Lunbeck makes the further incisive point that Christopher Lasch’s appropriation of Kohut in The Culture of Narcissism (1978) was based on a “curiously tendentious misreading” (p. 222) of the latter’s work. Indeed, in denouncing “the defining self-absorption of contemporary culture” (p. 220), Lasch failed to appreciate that Kohut, the “avatar of a transformed healthy narcissism,” was “not his ideological ally but rather [his] antagonist” (p. 222).

When Lunbeck lauds Kohut for “nourishing, even healing, the analytic field as he laid the groundwork for the re-appropriation in the 1980s and 1990s of the banished and vilified Ferenczi” (p. 211), however, she too readily conflates the “analytic field” in the United States with conditions obtaining elsewhere in the world. In her final paragraph, Lunbeck reiterates that “the so-called ‘Ferenczi renaissance’ of the last ten to fifteen years is enabled by and indebted to Kohut” (p. 231), citing Carlo Bonomi’s introduction (1998) to a cluster of papers from the Madrid conference of the Sándor Ferenczi Society to bolster this assertion. Yet Bonomi nowhere mentions Kohut in his historical overview, and there has to this day been insufficient cross-fertilization between the American tradition of self psychology and the international Ferenczi community.

Thanks to Burnham’s learned introductions and conclusion, and the extensive cross-references among the various essays, After Freud Left possesses a more robust sense of unity than obtains in most edited collections. The final chapter, Jean-Christophe Agnew’s “The Walking Man and the Talking Cure,” does double duty as an original contribution and as a valedictory meditation on themes sounded by the other authors. His title conjoins Anna O.’s classic definition of what became psychoanalysis with Alberto Giacometti’s Walking Man, reproduced on the cover of William Barrett’s Irrational Man (1958), “the pocket guide to the existential condition that instantaneously appeared in every college bookstore” (p. 239). It is an emblem of our postmodern condition, in which psychoanalysis has been displaced from its midcentury prominence, that Giacometti’s iconic modernist sculpture, “gaunt, stiffly erect yet slightly hunched, stepping forth into the void” (p. 239), has been transformed into a commodity and was sold at auction in 2010 for 104 million dollars.

In his introduction, Burnham does not gainsay that “the invited reflections in this volume, taken together, comprise a narrative of a historical phenomenon with a beginning, a rise to a peak, and a decline” (p. 3). But if the parabola traced by the nine chapters in After Freud Left ends on a downward slope, the same cannot be said of the essays themselves, each of which vindicates Burnham’s promise to “display how the best scholars today take seriously the evidence that the impact of Freud’s ideas, for good or for ill, was indeed a major historical event of the twentieth century” (p. 3).

What is left to the imagination in Sonu Shamdasani’s chapter in After Freud Left is made graphically explicit in the book he has coauthored with Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freud Files, published originally in French in 2006 and now translated in revised form. Aligning themselves with the “revisionist” tradition descended from Henri Ellenberger and variously extended by Frank Sulloway, Paul Roazen, Peter Swales, and Frank Cioffi, Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani—Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington and Philemon Professor of Jung History at University College London, respectively, and both highly influential scholars—offer an account of the history of our field from a perspective that is not merely independent of psychoanalysis but downright hostile to it. Although there have been persistent challenges to the scientific status of psychoanalysis, the authors with considerable justification underscore the human dimension in contending that “historical study relativizes and delegitimates the theory of psychoanalysis much more effectively than any epistemological critique” (p. 236).

Flaunting their partisan stance, Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani lace their writing with generous doses of invective: “psychoanalysis is strangely allergic to its own history” (p. 32), “the work of Freud historians has made it apparent that there never was a kernel” (p. 235), “we should hasten to study psychoanalysis while we can . . . because it never was” (p. 307), and so forth. It cannot be expected that such perfervid rhetoric will garner a favorable reception from psychoanalytic readers, and indeed it would be easy to dismiss The Freud Files summarily as an exercise in “Freud-bashing.” Despite Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani’s provocations, however, I think that giving way to this response would be quite unfortunate, and that it behooves us rather to be analysts in the best sense by listening as attentively as possible to what they have to say.

For there is, in truth, a vast amount to be learned from their book, which is a formidable work of scholarship whether one agrees with their conclusions or not. From start to finish, The Freud Files is studded with arresting quotations, though often decontextualized and invariably calculated to show psychoanalysis in the worst possible light, that carry the burden of Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani’s argument. What, for example, does it say about the prevailing midcentury view of Freud that James Strachey could write: “Though it may flatter our vanity to declare that Freud was a human being of a kind like our own, that satisfaction can easily be carried too far” (p. 13)? ³ Is it possible to deny that Strachey’s elevation of Freud to quasi-divine status—a more extreme version of the attitude espoused by Trilling and Rieff—is an unhealthy idealization, and that this fantasy of Freud’s immunity to human frailties has had deleterious consequences for psychoanalysis?

Conversely, when Fritz Wittels, in his 1924 biography of Freud, declares, “The realm of psychoanalysis was his idea and his will, and he welcomed anyone who accepted his views. What he wanted was to look into a kaleidoscope lined with mirrors that would multiply the images he introduced to it” (p. 56), does whatever may be brought to bear against Wittels—starting with the fact that he subsequently reconciled with Freud and became in New York a hyper-loyalist—justify us in disregarding this testimony by a disillusioned former member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society? By the same token, when Eugen Bleuler, who made the Burghölzli hospital in Zurich the worldwide center of psychoanalytic research, wrote to Freud in 1912 that the recently founded International Psychoanalytical Association had “isolated itself with barbed wire from the external world, which hurts both foe and friend. . . . The psychoanalysts themselves have validated the malicious words of [Alfred] Hoche about sectarianism, which at the time was unjustified” (p. 88), should we emulate Freud by turning a deaf ear to this critique?

Such quotations abound throughout The Freud Files, and the authors have performed a valuable service by capturing these faded voices of the past and allowing them to be heard anew in the pages of their book. But Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani seek to mine their storehouse of raw materials to tell their adversarial version of how psychoanalysis rose to its place of cultural prominence. This construction of a counter-narrative begins in the introduction, in which Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani draw on the findings of historians of science who have shown that “the motif of the ‘revolutions’ effected by Copernicus, Galileo and Newton is a commonplace,” and, “at the end of the nineteenth century, there was a veritable plethora of candidates vying for the title of the Darwin, Galileo or Newton of psychology” (p. 2).

Although Freud never claimed to be original in this respect, it remains startling to realize that his famous typology of the three “narcissistic wounds” inflicted successively on humankind by Copernicus, Darwin, and himself had been anticipated by Flournoy, who aligned Frederic Myers—a founder of the Society for Psychical Research—with Copernicus and Darwin as the culminating member of the “triad of geniuses” who had “most profoundly revolutionized scientific thought in the cosmological, biological, [and] psychological order[s]” (p. 6). Natural though it may be for analysts to recoil from a comparison between Freud and Myers, and between our concept of the unconscious and that of the spiritualists, it must not be forgotten that Freud himself could not renounce a belief in telepathy, while Ferenczi remained to his death a member of the Society for Psychical Research. Thus, it should at a minimum cause us some healthy discomfort to have to explain why it is absurd for Flournoy to have lionized Myers in the same way that we are accustomed to think about Freud.

In the first of four chapters, “Privatising Science,” where the authors argue that Freud sought to keep psychoanalysis insulated from established institutions and venues of scientific exchange, both the virtues and the defects of The Freud Files are clearly exhibited. “From 1906 onward,” Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani insist, “a series of debates about psychoanalysis took place in psychiatric congresses, which lasted until 1913,” from which Freud remained aloof and instead “delegated the task of defending his theories to his followers” (p. 62). It is again eye-opening to be informed that, alongside Freud’s “psychoanalysis,” the Swiss psychiatrists Ludwig Frank and Dumeng Bezzola, with the support of Forel, were expounding their own version of “psychanalysis,” also known as “psychosynthesis,” indebted to the cathartic method of Breuer, while Janet was later to complain about Freud’s slighting of his own brand of “psychological analysis.” Before any of the splits within the psychoanalytic movement, as Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani tell the story, the very International Psychoanalytical Association was from its inception “the product of a schism within the psych(o)analytic movement,” since it was founded with the express aim of distinguishing the followers of Freud from the “non-Freudian psychanalysts” who asserted their autonomous right to “claim possession of Breuer’s heritage” (p. 82). In a display of high-handedness that offended many, the Munich child psychiatrist Max Isserlin, who had written a critical review of Jung’s The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, was barred from attending the 1910 Nuremberg Congress, where the International Psychoanalytical Association was inaugurated.

Although Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani are to be credited with raising many important issues for discussion, one line of questioning arises immediately from the authors’ assumption that Freud was unique—and uniquely culpable—in his strategies for promoting psychoanalysis. For it could be said no less truly of Darwin than of Freud that he sought to remain above the fray and “delegated the task of defending his theories to his followers.” Furthermore, whatever may be said against Freud’s “privatizing” tendencies could also be extended to Jung, and one might have hoped that a sense of justice would have prompted an acknowledgment (especially from the Philemon Professor of Jung History) that the doses of sauce should be apportioned in at least equal measure.

Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani call attention to the irony that Freud’s “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement” (1914), which “became a founding document of the psychoanalytic movement and the basis of its official history” (p. 101), was written in the aftermath of the “overwhelming defeat” (p. 98) he vicariously experienced at the 1913 psychiatric congress in Breslau, “the last great battle in the first Freud wars” (p. 92). Following the Breslau congress, and with the exodus of Jung and the Zurich school following on the heels of that of Adler, Stekel, and their comrades in Vienna, Freud was left in “sole possession” of the psychoanalytic field, but, in the authors’ estimation, his victory was a pyrrhic one, coming as it did “at the cost of the complete privatisation of the science of psychoanalysis . . . and of its separation from the prevailing norms of the academic world” (p. 101).

In a footnote, Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani refer to “an article on the Breslau conference,” by Ernst Falzeder and John Burnham, “which overlaps at certain points with our study here” (p. 322, n. 219). The common denominator in both accounts is that “the object of the congress was to give Bleuler an opportunity of renouncing Freud” (p. 93). But in their zeal to indict Freud because he gave up “all pretension at objectivity” in writing the “History” and “accused his adversaries of shameful motives, duplicity, incompetence, mental pathology, and in the case of Jung, racism” (p. 100), Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani neglect to inform the reader of the main thrust of Falzeder and Burnham’s paper (2007), which is that “Freud’s antagonists were employing the very methods they accused him of using” in stage-managing the Breslau conference as a setting for an onslaught against psychoanalysis, and that “Freud was not even imagining the lengths to which his opponents were going” (p. 1239).

Thus, when Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani applaud Hoche because, as early as 1910, he had accused Freud and his followers of being “a community of believers, a sort of sect, with all the characteristics which go along with this” (p. 83), they do the reader only a limited service because they do not subject his pronouncements to any of the scrutiny they direct at Freud. ⁴ Like Hoche a century ago, Freud’s current antagonists fall into the trap of “employing the very methods they accused him of using.” But the remedy for analysts is not to take it for granted that the criticisms of either Hoche or Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani have therefore been invalidated. It is, rather, to heed the words of Bleuler, who wrote in his letter of July 24, 1913, to Freud, “Hoche was intelligent enough to underline a great number of actual errors of psychoanalysts, and his own mistake was essentially that he presented psychoanalysis as if it were composed of nothing but such errors” (Falzeder and Burnham 2007, p. 1235).

The next two chapters, “The Interprefaction of Dreams” and “Case Histories,” are less original than “Privatising Science,” but carry forward the main thesis of the book in characteristically relentless fashion. The pretentious neologism “interprefaction” refers to “the transmutation of interpretations and constructions into positive facts” (p. 144), a slippage of which Freud is held to have been repeatedly guilty. As Forel wrote in 1919, while not denying “the great service of Freud,” he had “two objections” to raise against him: “first, that he ignores the works of his predecessors in a methodical manner, and second, that he presents all sorts of hypothetical things as facts” (p. 117). Or, in a statement ascribed to Freud on no fewer than four different occasions by Jung—whose trustworthiness on once-disputed matters such as Freud’s incontinence in New York, or Freud’s refusal to allow Jung to continue analyzing one of his dreams because it would jeopardize his authority, has now been incontrovertibly established: “I thought it—so it must be true” (p. 162). ⁵

That Freud’s case histories should be received with a considerable degree of skepticism has long been clear from Patrick Mahony’s work (1986) on the discrepancies between Freud’s contemporaneous notes on his analysis of the Rat Man and his published account, as well as from the interviews conducted by Karin Obholzer (1982) with the Wolf Man, who disputed not only Freud’s claims that he had been cured by his analysis but also Freud’s reconstructions of the primal scene and other purported events of his childhood. Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani synthesize this material in the service of their polemic against Freud’s case histories as “no less mythical” (p. 180) than his other writings, without pausing to consider why any of these texts have acquired the status of classics that are read anew by each generation. Perhaps their most salient point in this third chapter is that because psychoanalysis has traditionally been to a great extent “based on the veracity of its founder,” or what Frank Cioffi has called a “testimonial science” (p. 191), any demonstration of Freud’s unreliability or prevarication is not merely damaging to his personal reputation but has ramifications for the entire psychoanalytic enterprise. It is for this reason, the authors note, that the question of whether Freud had an affair with his sister-in-law “is so significant for psychoanalysis” and should by no means be dismissed a priori as “trivial and inappropriate” (p. 192).

In their culminating chapter, “Policing the Past,” Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani bring their argument full circle by showing how “the official history of psychoanalysis has been a constant defence of the Freudian legend” (p. 237). Although this chapter is likely to cause acute discomfort in conservative readers, the authors’ account of the 1950 publication of Ernst Kris’s abridged edition of Freud’s letters to Fliess, followed by Jones’s Freud biography and James Strachey’s monumental Standard Edition—the “three pillars” of this “official history” (p. 271)—rests once again on documentation to which it would be unconscionable to turn a blind eye. Even more striking than all the material excised by Kris from The Origins of Psychoanalysis is the pressure brought to bear by Anna Freud on Kris himself to omit from his introduction any intimation that Freud’s “cardiac and other symptoms” during the 1890s “were of a neurotic nature” (p. 254), and instead to ascribe to them a purely organic etiology. Given that Anna Freud had been Kris’s analyst, her 1947 letter to him, in which “the censor was now censored” (p. 256), would seem by contemporary norms to constitute a boundary violation: “But in all the sentences which refer to the self-analysis, one notices that you are still in an inner conflict, and with this there is too much explanation and apology and this arouses in the reader the impression, which you do not want to arouse: namely that with this thirst for knowledge, [Freud] found himself in forbidden territory” (p. 255).

The story behind Jones’s biography is, if anything, even more instructive. When two unauthorized biographies of Freud appeared, that of Emil Ludwig in 1946 and that of Helen Puner in 1947, Anna Freud decried the former as a “labour of hate” and the latter as “horrible,” while Erik Erikson’s 1954 article on the Irma dream made her “literally turn [her] stomach” (p. 257)—all these quotations coming from her letters to Jones as he was doing his spadework. Initially, Jones closely collaborated with Siegfried Bernfeld, but Anna Freud’s growing misgivings concerning Bernfeld reached a breaking point when she learned that he was researching Freud’s Uncle Josef, whose conviction on charges of counterfeiting was as yet unknown either to him or to Jones. Declaring herself “appalled” by this intrusion into family secrets, Anna Freud “decided no longer to respond to Bernfeld’s requests for information” (p. 262). In the end, the text produced by Jones, indispensable though it remains to this day, reflected not only his personal vendettas against Rank and Ferenczi but also a sanitized version of Freud’s life—and the history of psychoanalysis—that makes no mention of, inter alia, Fliess’s nasal surgery on Emma Eckstein, Freud’s involvement in Ferenczi’s erotic triangle with Gizella and Elma Pálos, his analysis of his daughter Anna, the suicides of Herbert Silberer and Viktor Tausk, or the murder of Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth by her nephew and patient (p. 283). Still, Jones’s epic narrative was a smashing success, garnering accolades in the popular press for having portrayed a man who was, “by common consent, among the greatest of any age” (p. 285).

Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani devote the final section of “Policing the Past” to the intrigues behind the creation of the Freud Archives, the idea for which “seems to have taken shape in July 1950, in close connection with the abridged edition of the letters to Fliess and the preparations for the ‘true biography’” (p. 287). Although Bernfeld implored Kurt Eissler in January 1951 “not to make things easy for donors wishing to lock [documents] up and bury them in Washington,” Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani wryly observe that Bernfeld “doesn’t seem to have understood that what he perceived as a ‘danger’ was precisely the objective Anna Freud had conceived for the Archives” (p. 290).

Indeed, in February 1951 Eissler assured Anna Freud that under no circumstances would he accede to Bernfeld’s plea; on the contrary, “Broadly speaking, the board of directors will stipulate a longer duration than the donor has intended” (p. 291). As a result of this policy, Eissler was able to deflect Helene Deutsch’s request to look at her own materials when she wished to show them to Paul Roazen, and Eissler’s interview with Freud’s granddaughter Sophie was restricted until 2017, “even though she had declared herself, on several occasions, in favour of a complete and immediate opening of the Archives” (p. 296). Summing up their critique, which should be weighed against the current policy of derestriction that has rendered 98 percent of the collection accessible—as well as the far tighter hold that continues to be exerted by Jung’s heirs over his legacy—Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani depict the Freud Archives as “a tomb, a crypt, where, as Bernfeld said, the radioactive waste of psychoanalysis’ history could be ‘buried’” (p. 295). They give the screw a final turn in the closing sentences of this chapter: “The Archives’ censorship, so absurd at first glance, is absolutely essential to the system it and psychoanalysis’ legendary epistemology together constitute. It’s not surprising that the Freudians have considered the work of historians of their discipline among their most serious adversaries: psychoanalysis is vulnerable to its history” (p. 299).

So, what are we—psychoanalysts and similarly introspective historians of psychoanalysis—to do? As Franco Borgogno (2013) has urged, in the truly admirable independent tradition of Bleuler, “it is we who must be the first to face, courageously and in depth, the possible consequences of the new data” brought forth by scholars, since our past defensiveness has only made us “an easier target” for “those ‘black books of psychoanalysis’ which, for this very reason, had found a further pretext to discredit and invalidate our project of understanding and cure” (pp. 250, 258). To render a just verdict on the “Hartmann era,” we must, from our contemporary coign of vantage, recognize that, even as it saw the transformation of the American Psychoanalytic Association into (in Makari’s words) “a central power that policed standards throughout the country,” this period of psychoanalytic ascendancy also gave us the unsustainable Freud legend and the tarnished legacy of the Freud Archives. In a relational spirit, perhaps we can begin to move beyond the deadlock of mutual incomprehension by appreciating that “Freud-bashing” is an intersubjective construct. For if we are able to listen to even our self-proclaimed “adversaries” differently, perhaps we will one day thank them for having performed the offices of friendship by telling us some home truths all along.