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The Repression of Psychoanalysis, by historian Russell Jacoby, addresses a neglected chapter in the history of psychoanalysis and sheds light on the fate of the classical theory itself. With the remains of 11 years of secret correspondence, Jacoby pieces together the story of the political Freudians, led by Otto Fenichel, from their pre-World War I European origins to their migration to the U.S. Jacoby's earlier book, Social Amnesia , charted the demise of Freud at the hands of post-Freudians, from Adler to Laing, who exchanged the “essential antagonism between the individual and a repressive society, between pleasure and reality,” for adaptation, who “traded the revolutionary core of psychoanalysis for common sense.” Towards the political Freudians—who remained loyal to psychoanalysis and to Marxism—Jacoby is kinder. Steering an intricate course among the more clearly defined positions of the neo-Freudians, Reichians, and the official institutes, Fenichel's group strove to avoid the extremes of superficial cultural relativism or dogmatic biologism. In the face of adversity, they clung to a vision of psychoanalysis that, unfortunately, did not develop further than an ideal. Outside of Fenichel, the group did not produce much noteworthy literature, and Fenichel was deliberately furtive about politics. Yet Jacoby admires them for their lifelong commitment to social change and to an enlarged psychoanalytic project that in many ways remained true to Freud's.
Though more subdued than in his earlier works, Jacoby's prose is feisty. He writes to disturb the complacency of present psychoanalysis with these recollections of its stormy past. Students of Freud have forgotten how many of the early analysts were socialists, rebels, humanitarians, intellectuals, and radical women. Not only have analysts assumed more conventional, career-oriented garb, but the theory has shifted away from the bolder investigations of the unconscious, history, and religion to a narrower focus on met