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Paul Roazen spent several years “in the company of Freud's ideas,” leading to his first book, Freud: Political and Social Tought. That work awakened his interest in Freud, the person, and the people who surrounded him in the psychoanalytic movement. As he worked on that history, he stumbled on the name of Tausk and he was told, “No one will tell you about Tausk!” His aroused curiosity and his patient scholarship led to the publication of a second book, Brother Animal, The Story of Freud and Tausk.
For at least three reasons Brother Animal is a remarkable work. It augments the recorded history of the early psychoanalytic movement, and it reveals aspects of Freud's personality hitherto unmentioned or only intimated. Finally, and most poignantly, it resurrects a man, Victor Tausk, who was almost lost to history. Tausk's is a tragic figure, his relationship with Freud a sad and inglorious one for both. After his suicide, Tausk and his place in Freud's life were shrouded in silence at Freud's command and with the support of his followers. Ironically enough, Tausk contributed to this very conspiracy to place him in oblivion — in a note left at his death, he directed that all his papers be burned, thus participating in extinguishing the brilliant ideas that had troubled Freud almost as much as their originator had.
The author of this remarkable book teaches political theory at Harvard. Perhaps it was his being an outsider to the psychoanalytic movement, besides his curiosity and scholarliness, that rendered him free, not only to ferret out, but also to write for all to read these intimate and less than healthy details and events of the psychoanalytic family. Perhaps until now we, “the insiders,” have been indeed like a clannish family, with silences, selected pronouncements and hagiographic accounts of its members. Conciously connected by a sense of propriety and loyalty, perhaps we have been overly assiquous in shoring up the public imago of earlier and latter-day psychoana