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Modifying the title of Paul Simon's song, I can say of Paul Roazen: still enthusiastic after all these years! After forty years of studies in the field of the history of psychoanalysis, Roazen, professor emeritus at York University in Toronto, is still excited over his subject (and it shows in his text). This is quite remarkable, and very good news to all of us who are interested in dynamic psychology. His two latest books are collections of essays and book reviews and provide a rich source of information and insights on Freud and his followers. These books can be seen as sister volumes, for they have a similar structure and the same kind of versatile approach to the topic. There are lengthier essays in Trauma of Freud (TF) than in Historiography (HP), and the former has, in principle, a more focused topic: controversies in psychoanalysis. However, as the history of psychoanalysis is more or less a history of controversies, both volumes have essentially the same topic.
In the mid-1960s, as a young political scientist interested in Freud, Roazen interviewed twenty-five people who had once been in analysis with Freud. Since then he has interviewed many other people (more than 70 individuals in all) who knew Freud personally. These interviews have provided a rich store-house of information, opinion, and gossip for Roazen, who modestly notes in HP that “[t]o the extent I have been able to succeed in making an original contribution to this field, it has been largely due to my contact with these pioneers” (153). The interviews that he conducted probably inspired him to pursue the personal and institutional dynamics in the psychoanalytic movement. Since the publication of his book Brother Animal (1969), where he examined the circumstances around Victor Tausk's suicide in 1919, Roazen has explored the effects of personal relationships of psychoanalysts (including the therapeutic situation) on theory formation and on the institutional and social development of dynamic psychol