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Over 30 years ago, Paul Roazen set out to meet everyone living who had known Sigmund Freud. His contacts eventually included 25 of Freud's former patients, all of whom are now deceased. The first fruit of this oral history project was Brother Animal (1969), an account of the tragic life and death of Victor Tausk, a brilliant early disciple who was unable to endure the intense gravitational field of Freud's influence and the swirling vortices of psychoanalytic politics that surrounded him. In the course of reconstructing Freud's role in Tausk's fate, several of Roazen's interviewees also confirmed the truth of a closely guarded secret, namely, that Freud had analyzed his daughter Anna. The controversies that arose around these disclosures led some to assume that Roazen was nothing more than a disgruntled debunker of psychoanalysis. Nothing could have been further from the truth, as three decades of scholarly output has continued to prove. Like Freud himself, Roazen is a believer in the importance of uncovering the truth, and his scorn is reserved for those such as Kurt Eissler who have tried to censor or embargo access to Freud's papers.
Freud's five famous case studies were structured to reveal far more of Freud's theories than of his technique. Only in the case of Serge Pankejeff—the “Wolf Man”—have extensive interviews been published (Obholzer, ) revealing how Freud appeared to one of these famous patients, though by now there have been numerous memoirs of Freud by other analysands (e.g., Blanton, Kardiner, and Wortis). The 10 patients included in this volume, nine of whom were also analysts themselves, make no new startling revelations about Freud. Rather, they each provide part of an ever-deepening portrait of Freud's individual, idiosyncratic, charismatic brilliance. Interpretations aren't the sort of thing one brings up in an interview decades after the fact, but over all one gets the impression from these patients that the relationship, the force of Freud's in