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Three Instances of Injustice is a very personal book by an eminent psychoanalyst. It contains three unrelated essays that are loosely tied together under the rubric of ‘Injustice’. They touch on subjects such as childhood sexual assault, child custody and parental visitation, the Supreme Court, abortion, capital punishment, memories of Freud's relationship to his sister-in-law, the relationship between Freud and Jung and aspects of psychoanalytic technique when patients hear information about the analyst's reputation. Dr Eissler states in the introduction that he addresses the issues with ‘a nuance more passion and vehemence then is usual’, and thus the essays have the quality of a personal manifesto.
The first essay is entitled ‘Dr Elizabeth Morgan's contempt of court, or justified suspicion and conclusive evidence of sexual abuse of children’. The situation was as follows. Dr Morgan was jailed for having sent her daughter into hiding in order to prevent unsupervised visits from her father, Dr Foretich. Morgan felt that her former husband had sexually abused their daughter and sought to have the father's visits supervised. When the judge decided that the visits with Foretich could be unsupervised, Morgan hid her daughter and refused to reveal her whereabouts. The judge then sent Morgan to jail, charging her with contempt of court. There she remained for about two years. In discussing this case, Eissler takes Morgan's side and presents his views on the subject with vehemence indeed. Eissler considers it a great injustice that Morgan was incarcerated for this length of time for doing what any concerned mother would do if she believed, as Morgan did, that the child's father was sexually abusing her.
Eissler uses magazine accounts to portray pictures of Morgan and Foretich and the judge involved. He is quite scathing about the judge and the judicial system. He also takes this case as an opportunity to discuss a number of subjects about which he feels strongly. For instan