You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In October 1986 a symposium entitled 'Freud in London—Psychoanalysis in Transition' took place in London, and this book consists of all but two of the papers presented. What exile or escape to London meant to Freud is touched upon in the introduction but not examined; Freud means psychoanalysis. Under a unifying title it is a 'mixed bag'. As in any such collection from a symposium some stand out from others, but this is to some degree a personal matter depending on one's own interests, likes, and dislikes. The contributors are drawn from a wide range of scholars specializing in Freud studies. I suspect that alongside the well known authors are many unknown to most American analysts. In the excellent introduction Edward Timms & Naomi Segal clarify the title and give concise informative descriptions of the papers.
The first paper in Section I, Sander L. Gilman's 'Constructing the image of the appropriate therapist', deals mainly with speculations that one cannot prove or disprove. After an introductory resumé of the development of psychiatry from the asylum director to Kraepelin, the remainder of the paper is about the marginal position of the Jew in society, psychiatry in medicine, and Freud's presumed seeking to conceive of psychoanalysis as a science in an effort to counter his inferior position as a Jew. Gilman concludes: 'Thus the question of whether Freud's theories are scientific or not may well rest on a definition of "science" quite different from that debated by the philosophers of science—it may well rest on the sociology of status (and its relationship to definitions of centrality and marginality) within the greater culture (p. 34).
The question of the Jewish origins of psychoanalysis is taken up in the following paper by Ivar Oxaal, 'The Jewish origins of psychoanalysis reconsidered'. Oxaal reviews a wide range of publications devoted to this theme. He 'offers a demographic answer to the question why early psychoanalysis in Vienna was "exclusivel