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As the cover of Freud Under Analysis clearly states, this book contains essays that were collected in honor of Paul Roazen. A noted psychohistorian, Roazen is perhaps best known for being the person who documented Freud's analysis of his daughter Anna. Roazen's contributions to the history of psychoanalysis far exceed this one piece of information. Through his use of oral history and intensive research he has provided us with a way of contextualizing and appreciating the lives and theories of a number of psychoanalytic pioneers, including Freud, Victor Tausk, Helene Deutsch, Otto Rank, and Erik Erikson. Roazen has at times been portrayed as being critical of Freud and was criticized by the Freudian establishment for some of his discoveries. In fact, in placing Freud in time and historical space, Roazen has served to broaden our understanding of the man and his work; this understanding can only serve to balance our views.
The essays in this extremely heterogeneous volume are loosely divided into five sections: “History and Hysteria,” “Freud and After Freud,” “Psychoanalysis and Ethics,” “From History to Fiction,” and “Existence, Ontology and Aesthetics.” The topics in these essays range from the relationship between hysteria, anti-Semitism, and syphilis to the connection between politics and aesthetics. The string that loosely binds these forays into many diverse themes is an intellectual curiosity and a desire to understand one aspect of “truth,” however unknowable this may be. This is not a book to be read from cover to cover; rather, it is better appreciated as a series of scholarly musings on a wide variety of subjects. In this spirit, this review will address three of the articles that seem to this reviewer to mirror certain aspects of Roazen's contribution to psychoanalysis.
In “Sybil—The Making and Marketing of a Disease: An Interview with Herbert Spiegel,” Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen returns to one of Roazen's most important tools—the use of the oral interview in the