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Until the publication of this exemplary edition, edited by Huppke and Schröter, Sadger's Sigmund Freud: Personal memories had suffered a sad fate. At first, the book offended several people close to Freud, and they tried to prevent its publication. During his lifetime, it could not have been published because Sadger had intended it as a posthumous account, and, when Freud died, the political situation made its appearance impossible. A second blow was recently inflicted by an unbelievably bad English translation; the book fell victim to the amateurism which continues to plague the history of psychoanalysis. Since Sadger's memoirs were not published, the story of their attempted suppression is in some ways more interesting than the book itself. If it had appeared, as Sadger intended, shortly after Freud's death, it would have provided new information about Freud's early career, in particular the Wednesday Psychological Society and his lectures at the University of Vienna. But, in 2007, this book adds few details that have not surfaced already, although it remains an important document for the early years of psychoanalysis in Vienna. Today, Sadger's recollections may reveal more about this malcontent disciple than about the man whose personality he criticized and whose work he idolized.
At the beginning of his memoirs, Sadger presents himself as the oldest of Freud's pupils still practicing, and he may, in fact, have been the first psychoanalyst after Freud (May, 2003). From the winter semester of 1895-6, when he attended Freud's first lectures on the psychoneuroses at the University of Vienna, until 1933, when he resigned from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Sadger maintained professional relations with Freud, although the two never appear to have been intimate. Probably around the time of the publication of a book on Freud by Sadger's nephew, Fritz Wittels (1924), Sadger himself began to write. By the end of 1927 or the beginning of 1928, he had completed the book;