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Eissler has written three essays about the human condition and the motivations that underlie behaviour. The first examines the case of Dr. Elizabeth Morgan, who was incarcerated for over two years for contempt of court, during a dispute over custody of her daughter. In the first part of the essay Eissler outlines the details of the case and differentiates between justified suspicion and conclusive evidence that children have been sexually abused. He concludes that it was the
judge's envy of Morgan that motivated his citation for contempt of court and her subsequent imprisonment. He goes on to suggest that institutional opposition to abortion on one hand, and sadism that finds expression in administering the death penalty, are also derivatives of envy. The chapter includes a digression into the Supreme Court's positions on abortion and the death penalty.
In the second essay, “C. G. Jung, a Witness, or the Unreliability of Memories,” Eissler outlines the history of Jung's repeated slander that Freud had an intimate relationship with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays. Eissler traces the rumour through a variety of sources, including Jones's biography, and finally to an interview with Jung by John Billinsky, during which Jung repeated the rumour. Eissler uses the biographies of both Freud and Jung to refute the assertion, and concludes that Jung lied about this, just as he had freely confessed in his memoirs that he had previously lied to Freud. Curious about Jung's motivation, Eissler alleges after a scholarly inquiry that, by denigrating Freud, Jung was attempting to find consolation for the painful awareness of his limitations, which was further provoked by the distressing recognition of the loss of his capacities as he aged
The third essay, “The Maligned Therapist, or an Unsolved Problem of Psychoanalytic Technique,” explores the problem of contamination of the transference and the possible impact upon analysis, when the analyst is disparaged. The issue is important,