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This examines Sigmund Freud's analysis of the American psychoanalyst Horace Frink from 1921 through 1923, with its disastrous and tragic aftermath. This renewed interest in the Frink Freud relationship stems from Frink's daughter, Helen Frink Kraft, who donated extensive new documents about her father and Freud to the Alan Chesney Medical Archives of Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1989. I will try to position myself evenly between the two extreme positions of antiestablishment “Freudbashing” and protecting Freud's reputation at any cost. Daniel Goleman (1990) has written about Frink's analysis with Freud. His tone is critical and denotes some “Freud—bashing.”
Today Horace Frink is a little-known figure in the history of the psychoanalytic movement. In the early 1920s he seemed destined to become a brilliant psychoanalytic leader, selected by Freud to be his American deputy. A founding member of the prestigious New York Psychoanalytic Society in 1911, he was twice elected its president, first in 1913, and again in 1923. His book, Morbid Fears and Compulsions (Frink, 1918) was published in 1918 and received high acclaim.
Frink went into analysis with Freud from March to July 1921. He returned to America having completed his “training analysis,” but suffering from severe psychological symptoms. Returning to Vienna, he resumed analysis with Freud from April to July 1922