Paul Roazen: (14 August 1936-3 November 2005)

The renowned historian of psychoanalysis, political scientist and specialist adviser to the Journal of Analytical Psychology (JAP), Paul Roazen, died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, of complications due to Crohn's disease on 3 November 2005. Paul was the author of hundreds of articles, reviews, book chapters and of 22 books, including Freud and his Followers in which he was the first to reveal to the world that Anna Freud had been analysed by her father. This earned him intense, at times overtly hostile, criticism from some corners of the psychoanalytic world but Paul had great integrity in pursuing and publishing the details of psychoanalytic history; his search for truth remained wholly non-sectarian.

Early in his career in the mid 1960s, Paul interviewed more than 70 people who had had personal contact with Freud including 25 of his analytic patients. These conversations with pioneers formed a base on which he expanded in his many original contributions to the historiography of the field; he continued to have extended encounters with many of the most influential figures in the field. In addition to the interviews with Henry Murray and Michael Fordham in the JAP (Vol 50, 1, February 2005), he had published an account of an interview with Franz Jung, done in 1995 shortly before his death.1

In his last year, Paul's intuition for archival material brought him to research the papers of William C. Bullitt (the first US ambassador to the Soviet Union and later to France). There he was able not only to document his hunch that Freud had had a more significant role to play in the writing of their jointly authored book Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study than was usually acknowledged, but also discovered a highly controversial interpretation of Christianity which Freud penned but that had been withheld from the book. The story of this find was told in the Times Literary Supplement 20 April 2005 issue; Freud's critique of Christianity possibly carried some of his resentments of