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Heresy was once a matter of life and death. Perhaps it still is. In her preface to this memoir, based upon her interviews with Sandor Rado recorded in the 1960s and edited for publication by Paul Roazen, Bluma Swerdloff notes that Rado has been ‘effectively written out of psychoanalytic history’ (p. vii). This is a remarkable vanishing act for someone who was once a close colleague of Freud's, Rank's successor as editor of the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse and Imago (1924-34), the first Education Director of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute (1931-41), and then the founding director of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center (1945-55). With the trope of their title and their stated intention to redress this seemingly bizarre act of historiographic erasure, Roazen & Swerdloff suggest that Sandor Rado (1890-1972) was a brave dissident who took on the leviathan psychoanalytic establishment of his day and paid the ultimate price.
Having immersed himself in Freud's writings and performed yeoman service for the psychoanalytic movement at Freud's behest, Rado transformed himself into an independent and original thinker, becoming one of the earliest and most outspoken critics of psychoanalysis from within the profession. Once he cast off the mantle of acolyte, Rado waxed eloquent in his commentaries on the stultifying features of organised psychoanalysis and emerged in the 1930s as a self-styled champion of intellectual freedom. While still serving as Education Director at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, Rado delivered an impassioned critique of psychoanalytic training, deriding the tendency to indoctrinate rather than foster true intellectual growth. At around the same time he embarked on a series of radical and unprecedented critiques of libido theory. At that time and in that context, these were truly courageous dissents from psychoanalytic orthodoxy and they earned Rado the enmity of many of his colleagues.
Later in his career, already demonised for h