Elma Laurvik, Ferenczi's Stepdaughter

Over three decades ago, when I first got interested in the history of psychoanalysis, analysts were a secure part of the American psychiatric profession. A number of these practitioners were discontented with Freud's written rules recommending the analyst's neutrality, and skepticism was sometimes expressed about the desirability of offering patients a blank screen on which they were supposed to deposit their emotional transferences. For years there were prominent professionals who were rejecting this orthodox approach, but it still remained the dominant reigning paradigm. Whatever the disputes about technique might have been, throughout the 1960s psychoanalysis was highly regarded as a therapeutic procedure.

Academic departments of psychology (then as now) had virtually nothing to do with the whole Freudian tradition, although philosophers, historians, and literary critics were mildly receptive to psychoanalytic thinking. Of course there was a pervasive if often unspoken cultural impact of Freud's teachings. Relatively few books existed in those days on the story of the growth of Freud's school, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that whatever had once appeared in print was bound to be overshadowed by the publication from 1953 to 1957 of the three-volume official biography of Freud written by Ernest Jones. Two prominent literary figures at Columbia University, Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus, had helped popularize Jones by publishing in 1961 a one-volume edition of his Freud biography.

In the mid-1960s it seemed to me that personally meeting the surviving early analysts was a decisive way of cutting through to find out for the sake of the history of ideas what the beginnings of analysis had been all about. It was by chance that an analyst in London, whom I subsequently discovered was known for being arrogant and high-handed, mentioned in passing that he had, under his supervision at the British Psychoanalytic Society, Jones's collection of papers.1 Suppose