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Personal interviews, whatever their inevitable shortcomings, can be a unique avenue of historical knowledge. In the midst of my collecting information from many people who knew Freud, Helene Deutsch—she and I were then living in Cambridge, Massachusetts—became one of my key sources of information. It was a typical part of my routine to ask any of the early analysts I met about the precise details connected with the patients they may have received as referrals from Freud. Various legends about the most famous quarrels in the history of psychoanalysis could be addressed by attending to what exactly any of my informants knew for certain from personal experience. And in dealing with Freud's clinical practices I tried to be as concrete as possible.
On May 22, 1965 Helene Deutsch, during what was becoming a regular Saturday morning interview, happened to mention, in connection with one of Freud's cases, a Swedish millionaire named Ivar Kreuger.1 Helene, who had been born in 1884, had not yet turned eighty-one at this time. She was in full possession of her faculties, and went on to live until 1982. Although I knew nothing then about Kreuger (1880-1932), I have since learned that he founded a pre-World War I trust for matches and became known as the “match-king”; his international financial agency was later wrecked by fraud, and Kreuger committed suicide. Interestingly, Freud noted “Krueger suicide” in his chronicle, which has now appeared as The Diary of Sigmund Freud, 1929-39. After Kreuger died Lord Keynes said that he had been “maybe the greatest financial intelligence of his time.” Kreuger himself had maintained: “I've built my enterprise on the firmest ground that can be found—the foolishness of people.” John Kenneth Galbraith was harsher than Keynes: “[Kreuger] was, by all odds, the biggest thief in