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For anyone interested in the trajectory of psychoanalysis since Freud's earliest formulations, Elizabeth Lunbeck and Bennett Simon present a fascinating, if difficult, opportunity to follow one of the first efforts to provide psychoanalytic treatment in America. Through the session-by-session process notes of Louville Eugene Emerson, one of Freud's earliest followers in America and a self-educated psychoanalyst, the authors present his treatment of Rachel C, a twenty-twoyear-old hysteric. Central also are the commentaries through which the authors situate the case historically, while they enumerate the many difficulties both analyst and patient encountered in the treatment. And there were many, starting with the very infant state of psychoanalysis and hostile climate of the times. This included not only Emerson's fellow psychiatrists at Boston Psychopathic Hospital, to which he had been appointed in 1912, but its director, E. E. Southard, as well.
Emerson was thirty-nine at the time, having come to Freud and psychoanalysis via his studies in philosophy under William James and Josiah Royce at Harvard, where he had earned a Ph.D. in experimental psychology. Afterward he taught briefly at the University of Michigan but, finding teaching limiting and already versed in psychoanalytic literature, he began to study with James Putnam and Morton Prince, leaders of the “so-called Boston school of psychotherapy,” founded in 1911. In time Emerson and Putnam would become friends and colleagues, with Emerson the latter's designated heir.