You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Professor Paul Roazen died on November 3, 2005, at the age of 69, at his home in Cambridge, MA, of complications from Crohn's disease. Only a few days after learning of the death of my esteemed colleague, I received for review this latest of his many books on the history of the psychoanalytic movement.
After his early years at Harvard, Roazen taught social and political science at York University in Toronto. He took early retirement a few years ago and returned to Cambridge. Although his health had been an issue for some time, he continued his research and writing until the end.
Early in his career, Roazen devoted himself to the history of psychoanalysis, seeking to interview everyone he could find who had played a part in the movement in its earlier days. The result is a fascinating and important body of work on Freud, Helene Deutsch, Viktor Tausk, Erik Erikson, Edward Glover, Edoardo Weiss, and many others.
Unfortunately, members of the movement Freud originated have not always been able to maintain ambivalence, whole object functioning, or the depressive position with respect to the master. As Roazen puts it, “Although psychoanalytic doctrine teaches that divided feelings are inevitable in all important human relations, only toward Freud himself would orthodoxy command that such emotions be considered impermissable” (p. 68). As a result, Roazen was not always beloved by the Freudians because, while in my opinion he never devalued Freud, he also seems never to have envied and hated him enough to have to idealize him. Instead, he insisted on seeing Freud whole, warts and all, seeking to penetrate beyond the standard mythology and conventional legends that have grown up around him, as is the proper task of any scholar worth his salt.
In Brother Animal: The Story of Freud and Tausk , Roazen explored the emotionally complex circumstances surrounding the suicide of Viktor Tausk, Freud's younger colleague, who had arrived at important insights into the nature of psychosi