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I feel them cling and cleave to meAs vines going eagerly up; they twineMy life with other leaves, my timeIs hidden in theirs, their thrills are mine
It was a fortunate occasion, no doubt, when in 1906 the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society decided to install Otto Rank as its salaried secretary to keep protocols of their weekly meetings and that these documents have survived history and were published half a century later. In four volumes of 300 to 500 pages each, 250 minutes of the “scientific meetings” of the Society are collected.1 They cover the period 1906–1915 (Nunberg and Federn, 1962–1975; hereafter referred to as Minutes). During those 9 years, a small group of interested followers of Freud grew into a branch of an international enterprise that had its own journals, quarrels, and politics. Then came the war: Rank had to join the army and the minutes came to a halt.
It is true that these protocols may be helpful to gain insight into the process of institutionalization of psychoanalysis, but despite or perhaps precisely because of the enormous quantity of the material, we are faced with two problems: how to use it and for what precise purpose?
The first problem points to the fact that the minutes are obviously neither verbatim transcriptions nor shorthand reproductions of (recorded) conversations. They are ad hoc reconstructions of the conversations by one person who also participated in them. The minutes consist of attendance lists of virtually