Otto Fenichel: 119 Rundbriefe (1934–1945), Bd. I, Bd. II. [Otto Fenichel: 119 circular letters (1934–1945)], Vols 1 and 2: J. Reichmayr and E. Mühlleitner Reviewed by Elisabeth Brainin

Not long ago Otto Fenichel's circular letters were published in an edition distinguished by excellent editing, with a clearly structured index and also a CD-ROM containing the entire text. The onerous task assumed by the two editors and the risk taken on by the small publishing house have borne fruit for every psychoanalyst. These two volumes are of historical and scientific interest to the psychoanalytic community, bringing alive as they do the development of our science, its various trends and the differences within the psychoanalytic movement, and placing them in their historical context.

The circular letters are a document of the times that reflects the main currents within psychoanalysis with all the clarity that was Fenichel's forte. Otto Fenichel was a psychoanalyst from Vienna who worked at the Berlin Institute until 1933. There he belonged to a group of young left-wing psychoanalysts known as the ‘children's seminar’, to whom he subsequently addressed his circular letters. They included a smaller circle, comprising Georg Gerö, Samuel Golan, Edith Gyömröi-Glück, Edith Jacobson, Barbara Lantos, Käthe Misch-Friedländer, Annie Reich and, until 1934, Willi Reich and Nic Hoel. Alice Balint, Therese Benedek, Berta Bornstein, Erich Fromm, Angel Garma, Martin Grotjahn, Abraham Kardiner, Sándor Radó, René Spitz, Heinrich Winnik and others were members of the wider group of circular letter addressees. All these names are familiar to every psychoanalyst today. Fenichel himself embarked on an odyssey after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany: moving to Oslo and then to Prague, he finally landed in the United States. One of the central figures of psychoanalysis, he was responsible for a ‘theory of the neuroses’ that remains in the curriculum of most psychoanalytic training institutes today. His enormous energy enabled him to tackle a workload sufficient for a whole group of people. He engaged in clinical treatment, teaching and theoretical work, all of which he pursued i