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.
What place does this book stake out for itself as a late arrival in the vast and densely populated world of Freud studies? Hasn't everything already been said? Paul Schimmel bases Sigmund Freud's Discovery of Psychoanalysis on his reading of the Standard Edition and of Freud's published correspondance, and his secondary sources are all well-known works of biography and intellectual history by writers like Anzieu, Breger, Clark, Ellenberger, Gay, Jones, Makari, Malcolm, Sulloway, and Wollheim. So he has taken on a challenge, and it is one he succeeds in meeting: he claims our interest as readers with his own attentive interest, as a practicing analyst, in Freud's mind. The terrain is familiar, from Freud's early neurological research to the Charcot year to the Project to Studies on Hysteria to Fliess and the seduction theory to the Irma dream and then, with a jump, to “Mourning and Melancholia” and Freud's disillusionment over the realities of the war. What is distinctive is Schimmel's generous, intelligent engagement with Freud's intellectual and emotional struggles, an engagement that is psychoanalytic in the best sense, for it leaves us room to rethink our own engagements with Freud.
Starting with the title, Schimmel takes a strong position: “Something can be discovered only if it exists, and the position taken here is that