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This carefully researched and elegantly constructed book offers a treasure of information drawn from the correspondence (held in the Archives of the British Psychoanalytic Society) between Jones, Anna Freud, Eitingon, van Ophuijsen, Brill and many others during the Nazi persecution. Summarising and quoting from letters written between 1933 and 1938 from and to London, Vienna, Berlin, Amsterdam and New York, Steiner transports the reader to the angst and uncertainty of those dangerously evolving scenarios, which often required thoughtful and immediate action to save lives as well as protect the Psychoanalytic Institution.
About two hundred and twenty letters were exchanged between Anna Freud and Jones alone in the years 1933 to 1939. Steiner is well aware, as he states in the introduction, of the complexities involved in an epistolary-based reconstruction of history. How much of what was written served purposes of camouflage? Was it used as a means to document positions for posterity? Unconsciously censored? Knowingly and wisely avoided? For instance, in March 1933, after a visit to Berlin and specifically to Eitingon (Polish Jewish President of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute), van Ophuijsen writes to Jones that ‘mixed marriages will be considered illegal from now on … But if you write, you must be cautious, you have not been so in your last letter to E, it might have harmed him … as it is now absolutely certain … that his correspondence is under control’ (p. 37).
Along with an extraordinary mobilisation to rescue, which resulted in most persecuted psychoanalysts being saved from dying in concentration camps, we witness many a political misassessment. For instance, Jones's agreement in 1933 to name Aryan psychoanalysts (Boehm and Muller-Braunschweig) as heads of the German Psychoanalytic Society in order to keep that Institution alive and disconfirm the Nazi belief that Psychoanalysis had a Jewish ideology was proven to be a naïve move. Five years later, in 1938,