You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In an unpublished letter of 30 June 1960 to Helen Walker Puner, the author of Sigmund Freud: His Life and Mind (1947), Stekel's second wife and widow, Hilda Stekel, wrote: ‘You were unbiased [in] what you wrote about my late husband, Dr Wilhelm Stekel. However I feel, and so do many others who greatly enjoyed your book, that it is a pity that you wrote only about his beginnings as a psychoanalyst. His real development happened later.’1
His real development happened later. A widow's viewpoint, certainly. But it aptly captures what Stekel himself thought about his post-1912 work, that is, his works written after his break with Freud: that they contained important improvements of psychoanalytic theory and were for that reason ignored by psychoanalysts. The catch-phrase that he often employed was that he who is standing on the shoulders of a giant sees further than the giant (Freud's answer: but a louse on the head of an astronomer does not), in addition to the complaint that his discoveries were laughed at at first but then later adopted without proper acknowledgement. No matter how contradictory these complaints concerning the reception of his work are, they point at a problem in psychoanalytic historiography that has been widely recognized since the publication of Jones's biography of Freud (or perhaps even earlier) but has not been adequately dealt with: that the history of psychoanalysis is, in many ways, determined by Freud's viewpoints (see also Kuhn 1998, pp. 1151-2).
History is written mainly by the victor, Paul Roazen echoes an old saying (2001, p. 193); and if it is not the task of the historian to straighten out biases and misconceptions, it is at least his task to explore as many sides of things