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The interesting papers in this volume of contributions to the history of psychoanalysis were presented at a symposium that took place in Geneva on September 17 and 18, 1993. It is hard to know whether as a field, psychoanalysis is stranger than any other. But I know of no subject in which papers in journals so regularly appear that start out with what purports to be a historical survey of the literature; these pieces are usually written by busy practicing clinicians, and they necessarily rely for their citations on the educational background they have received at the various training institutes that exist. Yet there are no psychoanalytic centers where, as far as I know, the study of the history of psychoanalysis matches anything like what a university-trained person would expect. Within universities there are an increasing number of people interested in raising the level of understanding of the past of psychoanalysis to a level that would be academically respectable.
This particular collection of articles is admirably open-minded and non-doctrinaire, and there is something to be learned from each essay. Andre Haynal deserves to be congratulated for having orchestrated such an admirable symposium. My reaction to the chapters may be idiosyncratic, but I will discuss them more or less in the order I read them. Right at the outset I dived into Ernst Falzeder's “The Threads of Psychoanalytic Filiations Or Psychoanalysis Taking Effect”; I had heard Falzeder present some of this material at a lecture in London, and I was eager to get all the details straight. Falzeder is concerned with who analyzed whom, and there is a large pullout at the back of the book called “Spaghetti Junction” with the lines of influence, which Falzeder calls “apostolic succession,” made clear. I do not think Falzeder is always correct in this attempt at constructing a family tree, and it would have had to be twice the size for me to be able to follow it all, but he has performed a ground-breaking se