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Readers familiar with the case of Victor Tausk will be particularly interested in this book, Dr. Eissler's second on the subject, which uncovers new material and thoroughly analyzes the psychopathology which motivated the brilliant young doctor to take his life.
On July 2, 1919 Victor Tausk, Freud's junior colleague, made at least one phone call to say that he was planning to be remarried in a day or so. The person he called knew that Tausk's fiancée was pregnant. He wrote two fairly routine letters and saw at least one patient. He spent the afternoon with his 17-year-old son Marius. They had a pleasant early supper together. In the evening he escorted Hilde Loewi, his fiancée, to a concert at which she performed as an accompanist. In the early hours of July 3rd, Dr. Tausk wrote a farewell letter to Freud and a detailed will. He then shot and hanged himself.
Very little appeared about Tausk in the literature until 1969 when Dr. Paul Roazen, a professor of political science at Harvard, wrote Brother Animal: The Case of Freud and Tausk, in which he depicts Freud as a cold, selfish tyrant who was jealous of Tausk's youth, brilliance, creativity and attractiveness. Roazen holds Freud responsible for Tausk's death.
Dr. Eissler, who received his psychoanalytic training in Vienna, and who enjoyed Anna Freud's confidence until her death, is committed to guarding and strengthening the intellectual legacy of Freud, as well as to protecting his good name. In an angry rebuttal to Roazen he wrote Talent and Genius: The Fictitious Case of Tausk Contra Freud, in which he accuses Roazen of literary sleight of hand, poor scholarship and wild speculation. Now, in his introduction to Victor Tausk's Suicide, he says that he wishes further to counter Roazen's insinuation that Freud was Tausk's murderer.
Victor Tausk was a dramatic and tragic figure. He came to Vienna in 1908 to join the psychoanalytic movement, encouraged to do so by Freud himself who had been impressed by a letter Tausk ha