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Why would the Routledge Relational Series decide to reissue a book that was originally printed in 1933 by a seemingly obscure lay analyst? The republication of The Discovery of the Self by Elizabeth Severn was the brain child of Peter Rudnytsky, Ferenczi scholar and historian of psychoanalysis, who has written a new introduction for the book. If the name Elizabeth Severn is unfamiliar to you, Severn was an American patient of Sándor Ferenczi, who persuaded him to experiment with mutual analysis, and appears in The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi (Ferenczi, 1932) as patient “R.N.” Severn had already written two other books (Severn, 1913b, 1917) outlining her ideas on psychotherapy and the psychology of human behavior. Unlike her other books which had several printings, The Discovery of the Self, had only a single printing by Rider in 1933. In her interview with Kurt Eissler, on 20th December 1952, Severn relates how after the bombing of London in 1941, the plates for the book were destroyed, and hence there were no further printings. When I started researching Ferenczi and his patients over a decade ago, I scoured secondhand book stores for quite some time before I was lucky enough to find a copy, and with the burgeoning interest in Ferenczi and the transmission of his ideas, it is understandable that there would be interest in reissuing Severn's last publication.
Moreover, Severn wrote the book during the last year of her analysis with Ferenczi, and letters in her daughter Margaret's autobiography confirm that Severn was working on the book at end of 1932, finishing it on February 6th, 1933 (Severn, 1989). Elizabeth Severn told Eissler that it contained “the fruit of my long and intensive analysis” (1952, p. 24), and states that it “replaced the plans Ferenczi and I had had for a more scientific mutual publication,” noting that Ferenczi had read the manuscript. Severn had written it specifically for a lay public as an explanation of “the real meaning and value of p