The Late William D. Robson-Scott

DEAR SIR,

I think it would be appropriate to have some acknowledgment in the Review of the work of the late William D. Robson-Scott, who died in June, while on Holiday in Florence, at the age of 78.

Robson-Scott was a scholar with two interests, the German language and literature, and psychoanalysis. His translation of The Future of an Illusion was published in 1928, which made that work available in English very promptly after its appearance in Germany. It formed the fifteenth volume of the International Psychoanalytical Library and the basis for the S.E. translation.

Robson-Scott first learned of Freud's work at school, from Adrian Stokes, who became his lifelong friend, and whom he introduced to Ernest Jones, and that led to Adrian Stokes' association with Melanie Klein.

It may be of interest also to recall that Robson-Scott's mother was a cousin of that scholar and writer of extraordinary versatility, Andrew Lang, whose numerous works included the anthropological studies which received a good deal of appreciative notice in Totem and Taboo. They were both connected by marriage with J. J. Atkinson, whose 'Primal Law' was published by Lang in the same volume as one of his own works, and so became available to Freud, who summarized 'this highly remarkable theory' in Totem and Taboo, and found it very congenial to his own views.

Robson-Scott was a teacher in the universities of Berlin and Vienna before the war, was seconded to the War Office from 1939 to 1945, became Professor of German at Birkbeck College, and, after his retirement in 1968, Hon. Director of the Germanic Institute of the University of London. His wife, Elaine, who had been head of the Department of German in the University of Cardiff, was a very active collaborator in all his activities. Together, in the past decade or so, they made available in English the correspondence between Freud and Arnold Zweig, followed by the Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas Salome letters. Robson-Scott's last work is The Y