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After a prolonged delay, the third volume of the Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, covering the period from October 5, 1910 to the end of 1911, has been made available. The background—Freud's delivery of the minutes into the hands of Dr. Paul Federn, acting president of the Society, for safekeeping when he went into exile in 1938, and the ultimate publications of the first volume by the editors, Dr. Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, in 1961, and the second volume in 1967—are well known to us from earlier works. The third volume appears after death of Dr. Nunberg, but bears his introduction and marks of his editing.
The original records were kept by Otto Rank as paid secretary of the Society from 1906 until 1915 when he entered the military service. This promoted uniformity of style; but at best, the long-hand records by an active participant in the proceedings had to bear an uneven character. As Dr. Nunberg points out in his introduction to the first volume: “After 1910, they become shorter; the contractions and omissions become so numerous that the reader can only surmise a great deal of what was said in the discussions” (xviii). Moreover a certain freedom of translation was used by Mrs. Nunberg, who helped greatly in making all three volumes more readable. Rank himself did not use direct quotations, but rather “the subjunctive mode of indirect speech; because the corresponding English construction would result in unnecessarily clumsy sentences, we have substituted the indicative mode of direct speech” (xiii). Problems for the reader are not diminished by the paucity of annotations and references and the absence of an index, which will first be