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Otto Fenichel was an awesome figure to psychoanalysts of my generation. When I was a young man in the psychiatric service of the United States Army during World War II, I discovered and devoured Fenichel's Psychoanalytic Theory of the Neuroses . Fenichel, it seemed, had mastered all of clinical psychoanalysis, including its theory. In addition, he seemed free from any doubt. My reading of The Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique and The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel, published in 1954, only increased my admiration.
Now Johannes Reichmayr and Else Mühlleitner have edited Fenichel's Rundbriefe, 119 letters circulated between March 1934 and July 1945 to a small group of left-wing colleagues. Fenichel's aim was to promote a synthesis between leftist political thinking and Freudian depth psychology. This correspondence not only chronicles the ultimate failure of that enterprise, but also reflects a Fenichel more multifaceted than the one I had admired so thoroughly. Although the letters reveal a familiar Fenichel, the man of awesome intellect, great fairness, and impressive creativity, with a deep interest in everything psychoanalytic, they also uncover a man who used his formidable intelligence to find fault with every new attempt to formulate the synthesis he sought.
Fortunately, Fenichel's strengths are also abundantly clear in this correspondence. Indeed, these letters, written during a time of war, exile, danger, and eventual asylum, are a veritable treasure trove of information for future historians of psychoanalysis, both in the way they capture the creative ferment in psychoanalysis in those years and in the way they describe psychoanalytic politics. They constitute a