The Scientific Works of Edward Glover1

Edward Glover, one of the great patriarchs of modern psychoanalysis, since 1914 produced 139 scientific works. The first seven concern problems of tuberculosis, in which he was working at that time, and 132 deal with problems of psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Of the latter, 11 are books and the rest consist of monographs, papers, reviews, biographical sketches and obituaries of colleagues.

Edward Glover was a many-sided man, being at the same time a medical scientist, a psychoanalytic clinician and theoretician, a research worker, a social scientist and a teacher. He was also a reformer and an advocate of a return to the more austere and scientific attitude towards psychoanalysis that is eminently illustrated by the lives and careers of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham and in the life and career, as well as in the works, of Edward Glover himself. This is not to be mistaken for nostalgie du temps passé, but rather represents a deep concern for the preservation of scientific psychoanalysis, which is threatened by what he saw as tendencies to dilute and distort basic psychoanalytic theory, by the admission into psychoanalytic societies and associations of followers of systems which Glover considered basically unscientific, and by a tendency towards relaxation of the standards set by Sigmund Freud among certain psychoanalytic practitioners, teachers and writers.

All of the preceding caused him to feel that organized psychoanalysis was bleeding itself to death. His psychoanalytic confessio fidei was an adherence to disciplined Freudian research on theoretical and therapeutic issues, as the only means which can save psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline, accepted as an equal by scientists in other fields.

He was a scientist, trained in the scientific method by his great analytic teacher Karl Abraham and by earlier teachers in biology and the basic sciences, from whom he received a sound fundamental scientific orientation. He was also an accomplished man, speaking sev