Editorial

As I considered the recent submissions of articles to our Journal, I was struck by a common chronological focus of interest on the period around the beginning of the twentieth century. These are the early years in the history of psychoanalysis when it was, if no longer in its infancy, still in its childhood or first adolescence. My professional reluctance to believe in coincidence made me wonder about this observation and to speculate that a discipline stressing early life events in its theories and clinical practice would naturally emphasize that stage also when reflecting historically on its own development — as if what happened to psychoanalysis in those first twenty or so years were considered of fundamental importance, and therefore worthy of special historiographic attention, for our understanding of its future (including contemporary) vicissitudes.

Opening this issue of Psychoanalysis and History is an exhaustive essay by Wen-Ji Wang on the theme, quite relevant to what I was trying to express above, of the Bildung or ‘formation’ of the psychoanalyst. The author scholarly argues that Freud's own historical and cultural context — and, in particular, the combination of humanistic, literary and Jewish traditions — conditioned not only his theoretical assumptions and the way analysts are trained but also, more importantly perhaps, their subjectivity and sense of professional identity.

The next three articles, all by German authors, provide original perspectives on different aspects of the early history of psychoanalysis. Ulrike May considers the importance of Isidor Sadger as one of Freud's first disciples. Sadger attended Freud's lectures as an already trained medical doctor in the 1890s; his publication on Ibsen probably precipitated Freud's dream, made in 1897, of ‘the norekdal style’; and he started practising psychoanalysis himself before 1900. May's well-documented paper, which includes Freud's as yet unpublished letter of 1902 to Sadger, presents a fascinati