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In 1939 John F. Rittmeister, a member of the German Psychoanalytic Institute, wrote from Berlin to a friend:
Here life goes on in a most peculiar way, sometimes as though there were nothing the matter. Before the holidays, and continuing last Wednesday, we had a far-reaching discussion in an extended group on the problem of ‘Transference’ (and projection, relationship) from which a whole crowd of things emerged…
Rittmeister, a politically active psychiatrist who had joined Marxist study groups in the 1920s, had resumed his political activities in 1942. He made contact with an anti-fascist resistance organization, was arrested in 1942, guillotined in 1943. Until his execution he continued to write philosophy, ‘The stages of morality’. The horror of his death is unavoidable to the reader—there is a photograph of the guillotine (p. 191).
This book is an unique assemblage of letters, articles and photographs from which the reader gains an intimate insight into many aspects of psychoanalytic history. We see the founders of the psychoanalytic movement and its component societies; we read the correspondence between Freud, Abraham, Jones and others; there are some letters from Freud to those psychiatrists who supported his work, one of whom was Arthur Muthmann, to whom Freud wrote a warm letter of appreciation for his book: ‘It is particularly fine and brave for you to put my name on the title page of your work’ (p. 23). The book is laid out chronologically so we pass through World War I where we see Simmel photographed in uniform to the opening of the Berlin Institute in 1920. The programme from the opening evening included a Beethoven Sonata, a Chopin Ballade, Schubert Songs (were the analysts the performers?), and a reading from Rilke by Simmel. The evening ended with Abraham's speech on the rise of the polyclinic from the unconscious.
Great figures of psychoanalysis are brought to life by the lovely photographs from their personal lives as well as from psychoanalytic confer