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.
Nathan G. Hale, Jr.: Freud and the Americans London: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Max Schur: Freud: Living and Dying New York: International Universities Press, 1972.
IN 1909 FREUD MADE HIS ONLY visit to America, to deliver the Clark lectures. In 1916 he delivered a revised version of them at the University of Vienna. The American lectures introduced psychoanalysis to American psychiatrists, psychologists, social scientists, and neurologists. They were extensively covered by the press, and led to the creation of a movement, and to the doctrine's popularization. The Viennese lectures, at first attended by many, had few listeners at the end. One of the latter was the medical student Max Schur, who later on as Freud's physician and still later as a trained analyst, was in the unique position to enrich our biographical knowledge of Freud.
While Schur's psycho-biography adds primarily to our knowledge and to the legend of Freud as a person, Hale's Freud and the Americans is primarily cultural—historical. Both books increase our understanding of Freud and Freudiana, and will themselves lead to new polemics and reinterpretations of psychoanalytic history and theory. To the extent that Freud's theory of the unconscious has been diffused in myriad ways and has been held responsible for societal ills, sexual liberation, repressive sublimation, racism, and sexism, to that extent reexamination of the original sources within their cultural contexts are necessary. As both history and legend grow, the difficulty of separating the two increases. Because the theory itself, rooted in the personality of its founder and in Viennese culture, has subtly or radically changed when absorbed