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In his classical – and at the same time brilliant and coincise – book A short history of psychiatry (1959), the German-American-Swiss pioneer in the field of medical history Erwin Ackerknecht (1906–1988) spoke of Freud’s discovery and formulation of psychoanalysis in terms of his synthesis and integration of the three following scientific and intellectual dimensions: his fascination with the work of Darwin and the English empirical tradition, his neuropathological training at the Vienna Medical School, and his exposure to the psychological research work carried out in France by Charcot and by the School of Nancy. Since at least the publication of Edith Kurzweil’s (19126–2016) book The Freudians. A comparative perspective (1989), we have been familiar with the complex relationship between the pluralistic and international roots of psychoanalysis and the ways in which it has been received, assimilated, and further developed in the individual countries of the world. In my recent book Freud, Sullivan, Mitchell, Bion and the multiple voices of international psychoanalysis (2019), I explored not only the biographical and contextual roots of the work of the authors mentioned in the title, but also the ways in which their work is so important in contemporary psychoanalysis. The book I am reviewing, published by the Turkish-Austrian colleague Hale Usak-Sahin in 2013, also belongs to this category of intellectual adventures and research projects.
Born in Austria at the end of the 1970s, the author grew up bilingual, with Turkish as her mother language. Probably because of the psychological challenges she had to meet in such a situation, she chose to study psychology, completing her studies in 2004 with a diploma thesis on a selection and analysis of life histories of Turkish women in Austria (Sahin, 2006). Between 2008 and 2011 she had the chance to further develop this interest in the direction of psychoanalysis in the context of her doctorate studies, under the guidance of t