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.
Carlo Bonomi's A Brief Apocalyptic History of Psychoanalysis is a fascinating read informing the reader about the relational dynamics among Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Fliess, Sandor Ferenczi, and Carl Jung, as illuminated by a careful analysis of the dreams of two of Freud's patients: Emma Eckstein (the object of “Irma's injection”), and Sergei Pankejeff (the “Wolf Man”), as well Freud's self-analysis of his reported dreams. Bonomi, a psychohistorian, starts with the premise that there is something missing in our understanding of why Freud turned away from the idea that environmental trauma has an important impact on psychic development. In investigating that period in the early history of psychoanalysis, he arrives at the conclusion that Freud reacted defensively to his patients' trauma history as it reflected his own. Erasing trauma from his thinking and theoretical research was a compromise formation that protected him from the troubling affective reaction to castration anxiety that was more than a metaphor and represented his own actual personal history as well as that of his patients, especially Eckstein.
Bonomi's methodology is a sound psychohistorical research approach citing various sources. Firstly, he studies in detail several of Freud's dreams cited in The Interpretation of Dreams and places them temporally in the actual historical context when they were dreamt, providing the reader with the day residue sparking the dreaming. His sources for temporally locating
the dreams are the various correspondences now widely available for study, as well as known historical information from various biographies. The result is a Nachträglichkeit analysis of Freud's dreams filling in gaps in the dream interpretation that were either too personal or too traumatic for Freud to disclose and were consequently elided due to suppression or repression type ego defenses. Secondly, Bonomi has rigorously researched others' contributions to interpreting Freud's dreams (Anzieu, 1975