You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Over thirty years have elapsed since Nathan Hale's admirable biographical sketch of James Jackson Putnam, which introduced his publication of the Freud-Putnam correspondence (1971). Putnam, hailed by Freud as the first American to interest himself in psychoanalysis, served as the reluctant founder and president of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1911. Lesser figures in the history of psychoanalysis have received lengthy biographies, and at last George Prochnik has filled the gap in full measure. He happens to be the ideal author for this task, as the great-grandson of Putnam himself, familiar with the New England traditions of the Putnam family camp from his own childhood, and the grandson of a Jewish physician who fled Vienna in 1938, with his memories of its well-upholstered haute bourgeoisie. Prochnik is also a professional journalist, with a witty and readable style and an omnivorous appetite for scholarly writings, family papers, and world literature.
Unlike Rosenzweig's detailed account (1992) of Putnam's meeting with Freud at the Clark Lectures in Worcester in 1909, Prochnik transports the reader directly from the lectures to the Putnam camp in the Adirondacks, where Freud, Jung, and Ferenczi spent three days “roughing” it. Family camps, or compounds, were a peculiarly American institution: country summer houses that varied from the opulent to very modest collections of cottages, usually centered around an isolated farm in the wilderness. Relatives, neighbors, and friends gathered there over many generations, and great-aunts and children of all ages were numerous. The Putnam camp, founded in 1885, was typical. with its emphasis on rustic living in the primeval forest, far from home. Daily activities there included rugged hikes in the mountains, the worship of Nature and natural history, and all manner of children's games,