‘A Pretty Piece of Treachery’: The Strange Case of Dr Stekel and Sigmund Freud

Freud claimed he broke with Stekel not because of ‘scientific differences’ but because of ‘exclusively … personal qualities’. The author offers an alternative version of this significant fragment of psychoanalytic history by suggesting that Freud acted out of revenge for the humiliation that he believed Stekel and Adler inflicted upon him at the 1910 Nuremberg Congress. He suggests that casting the story of the break between Stekel and Freud in the narrative shadow of Robert Louis Stevenson's novella ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ highlights the extent to which Freud involved himself in the murkier aspects of the politics of the International Psychoanalytical Association and the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Ultimately, however, he argues, Freud was cynically prepared to use and then callously sacrifice Stekel, one of his oldest and most loyal followers, in his increasingly bitter struggles against Adler and Jung. He also touches upon the role of the ‘Secret Committee’ in the ‘Stekel Affair’ and the wider ramifications of Jung's unexpected return from America at the height of the ‘Freud resignation crisis’. He further suggests that Jung's subsequent meeting with Bergmann may have been a significant factor in precipitating Jung's decision to break his personal relationship with Freud.