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To riff on a Passover tune, it would be enough had Richard Sterba given us the “therapeutic split in the ego”; it would be enough had he given us “therapeutic alliance.” But how much more Sterba gives us in the modestly titled Reminiscences of a Viennese Psychoanalyst. He offers a portrait of the German/Viennese gymnasium experience of personality Gebildeten, about which Arnold Richards (2006) has informed us: eight years of Greek, six of Latin, literature, mathematics, physics, history, zoology, botany, and chemistry. Add to that his extracurricular violin studies, which later helped him support himself. Then, after medical school, he was in the first class of students at the Vienna Institute, where he met a cavalcade of intellectual luminaries including Freud, Wilhelm Reich (before his psychosis a remarkable clinician), Paul Schilder, Margaret Mahler (his children's pediatrician before she practiced analysis; she made house calls), Karl Abraham (when he visited from Berlin), Heinz Hartmann, Robert Waelder, René Spitz, Otto Fenichel, Otto Isakower, Jeanne Lampl-de Groot, and of course Anna Freud. (Sterba had a photograph of his diploma, one of only two signed by Freud. When other candidates objected, Freud stopped signing.)
He reminds us of how apparently new ideas, such as Kohut's contrasting Tragic Man (and aggression as a reaction to developmental frustration) with Freud's Guilty Man, are often preceded by decades in earlier work: old wine in new bottles. When in 1914 Freud (in “On Narcissism”) extended “the dynamic deployment of libidinous forces into the realm of the ego” and postulated the aggressive drive as an independent force, his own colleagues had difficulty accepting his characterization of aggression as a reaction to ego frustration “caused by external … prohibitions” (p. 75). Reich, by contrast, became an avid proponent of aggression's