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.
This book is an important contribution to psycho-analytical literature. In it are recorded observations on the personality of Professor Freud by one of his most intimate colleagues, Dr. Hanns Sachs, who is himself a psycho-analyst of outstanding ability and experience.
In keeping with the value placed on uncensored observations by the originator of the psycho-analytical method, Dr. Sachs offers to the public a description of his own relationship to the Professor: at first in the rôle of a student of psycho-analysis and later as a colleague and friend who retained to the end homage and admiration for a great and unique personality without a trace of the type of criticism which a man of smaller calibre than that of Sachs might have recorded.
The author's knowledge and skill in the arts of literature and poetry equip him in a special way to create a book of this character. He has written a drama. The story of a great dynamic but isolated figure; isolated because of the nature of the discoveries that he had made, which, as in the case of Galileo, made him appear at first to be an enemy of mankind. The background of the drama is Vienna, the gay frivolous Vienna which existed before the first great war. The description which Sachs gives of Vienna reproduces an atmosphere of pleasure-loving wit and delicate and perhaps decadent culture contrasting with the figure of Freud who, the author says, 'walked intuitively and unknowingly in the footsteps of his ancestors and followed one of the oldest Jewish traditions: this is the belief that all Jews, born and unborn alike, were present at Mount Sinai and have there taken on themselves "the yoke of the Law".'
The devotion to psycho-analysis of Freud's original group of colleagues was determined not only by the magnetism of his great personality but also by the fact that the door which he opened to the study of the mind by his recognition and formulation of the dynamics of the unconscious released a flood of scientific interes