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There is a recognized moment in the history of successful institutions, when the generation of the ‘founders’ comes to an end, and the ‘followers’ have to take over. ‘Founders’ need qualities, including ‘charisma’, that are not needed, and may even be serious obstacles, in the running of a continuing organization. The temptation for the successors to avoid the pain of loss by idealization, by avoidance of criticism, and by seeking to perpetuate the founders’ characteristics, has to be overcome.
In the history of psychoanalysis, idealization is a theme with deep roots. Freud himself, famously, identified with heroes: Oedipus, Hannibal, Oliver Cromwell, Goethe, Moses; in 1900 he described himself to his friend Wilhelm Fliess as at heart a ‘conquistador’ (Jones, 1964, p. 297). When he spoke of himself arriving at his key ideas, he claimed to have worked for 10 years in heroic isolation: ‘like Robinson Crusoe’, he said, ‘I settled down as comfortably as possible on my desert island’ (Freud, 1914a, p. 22). He told Ernest Jones that when he published his foundational work, The Interpretation of Dreams , for 18 months there was no serious review of it in the scientific press, and for some years no sale at all.
No doubt that was how he remembered it. But recollection is an uncertain guide. The reality is that Freud's book was reviewed, at length and respectfully, in at least 11 journals within, on average, one year of publication (Sulloway, 1979, pp. 449-50).
Similarly, Jones tells us that Freud's emphasis on sex was received with outrage. He wrote dramatically in his biography: ‘Freud and his followers were regarded not only as sexual perverts but as … psychopaths. No less than civilization itself was at stake’ (Jones, 1964, p. 381). The historian of Austrian thought, William Johnston, paints a rather different picture: ‘In a city where Sacher-Masoch, Krafft-Ebing, and Weininger were read with nonchalance, Freud's pansexualism hardly shocked anyone’ (quoted in Sul