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Already steeped in Freud's writings through his research for a previous book ‘Freud: political and social thought’ the author came across the ‘suppressed’ story of Freud and Tausk when preparing another book. He included questions about Tausk when interviewing people who knew Freud and got in touch with Tausk's family.
Roazen remarks in his introduction that ‘the two men formed an uncanny pair of opposites as their strengths and frailties played into each other's hands’; and in his summing up he writes: ‘Tausk circled round Freud like a moth around a flame … his destruction at Freud's hands seemed irresistible’ (p. 158). Ten years after they first met, Tausk committed suicide.
This is an emotional book, Roazen feeling driven to reinstate Tausk, ‘to bring him back to life’, as indeed his contributions merit, but in the process he has revealed Freud's shady side as well as that of members of the group. What seems to have struck him most was the way in which Freud expected his followers to give up all other interests, thus making them dependent on him. Yet it seemed that Freud both hated dependent people and was intolerant of independent thought, which he was inclined to condemn as ‘incomprehensible’.
In Roazen's account of Tausk's life, it would appear that he was a self-destructive character unable to sustain relationships yet with great charm and brilliance of mind and with an urgent need to create. He was the first psychoanalyst to work with psychotics