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In Midsummer 1962, the Basic Book Service announced as its Alternate Selection the newly translated Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society Volume 1, 1906-1908, edited by Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn. It was the first of what turned out to be four volumes: the others were published in 1967, 1974, and 1975. The notes begin in 1906, when Otto Rank became paid secretary of the Society. In 1913, they grow thin, and—apart from one meeting in 1918 just after the War and a moving brief account (long after Rank's break with Freud) of the people present and the agreements made in 1938 when the group was dissolved by the Nazis—they cease altogether in 1915 due to Rank's departure for military service in World War I. In eloquent detail, these volumes show psychoanalytic thinking in statu nascendi. The topics covered range from clinical cases through biology, psychiatry, sociology, and criminology to the lives of painters, musicians, writers, as well as reviews of books and scientific articles. Nunberg suggests that the “discussions … disclose, perhaps more clearly than his books and essays, how Freud's mind worked” (1962, xxix); and the minds of his colleagues are similarly revealed.
These minutes are not a sterile, bare-bones text, such as is produced by present-day analytic societies. In the very earliest days, from 1902 until 1906, there were no minutes at all of the “Wednesday Evening Psychological Meetings” that took place