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‘The great dissensions are little addressed’, says editor Bob Hinshelwood in his introduction to this selection of papers from the International Journal of Psychoanalysis during the 1920s. This rather glosses over the point that the purpose of the journal in its first decade, under the editorship of Ernest Jones, was to show a professional community working collaboratively together to elaborate its theories, apply them to clinical practice and resolve in the process their intellectual conflicts.
Hinshelwood's collection includes excerpts from the debates on how to analyse children that involved Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, Melanie Klein and Anna Freud; papers by Joan Rivière and Karen Horney challenging the accounts men had offered of women's inner worlds. There is also an analysis by Edward Glover of Sándor Ferenczi's proposed modifications to psychoanalytic technique, and Jones's own quizzical look at the superego, Freud's latest idea at the time.
There are several dangers in reading these papers with the hindsight provided by the years that have elapsed since they were written. One is that we end up viewing them through the eyes of the conflicts that were to come in the following decade. As a result, we uncover signs that Ferenczi was itching to start his withering denunciations of the classical analytical position in his Secret Diary; the first rumblings of the rancorous discord that provoked the Controversial Discussions between followers of Anna Freud or Melanie Klein; Karen Horney taking the first steps that led to her joining the other ‘interpersonalists’ as they quit the American Psychoanalytic Association in the late 1930s.
The second danger follows from this - that we fail to give credit to the intellectual struggle involved in forging the cogent arguments presented on these pages. Reading, for example, Ferenczi's 1926 paper on ‘The problem of acceptance of unpleasant ideas’, it is easy to see it as a rather unsatisfactory adumbration of the ideas that we know of a