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The foreign language section of JAPA Review of Books is dedicated to keeping readers informed about what is happening in psychoanalytic thought and practice in countries where a language other than English is the natural first choice in the treatment of patients, in discussing clinical material, and in thinking and writing about theory. Thus, when it comes to our attention that an author we are not familiar with is writing interesting things about psychoanalysis in Spanish, Italian, French, or German, or in another language, we review that writer's books in hopes of extending his or her audience to the anglophone world.
But what can we do when we are faced with a robust but incomplete piece of psychoanalytic history? In this case, the piece of history is a partial correspondence in German between Freud and the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, director of the famed Burghölzli hospital in Zurich. What we do is two things: first, translate and/or describe the material of the historical event and, second, track its silent footprint in contemporary analytic life.
To do that, we needed two reviewers: Christian Maetzener of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute to narrate, translate, and describe the correspondence itself, followed by Hélène Tessier of Montreal, to bring a critical French eye to the correspondence, to the theoretical debates that ensued, and to their consequences in current organized psychoanalysis, as these become, in our reading, more and more apparent. Tessier began by reviewing the French translation of the correspondence, while Maetzener addressed the original German. We are extremely grateful to them for having been willing to work together.