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The four volumes of Psychoanalyse in Selbstdarstellungen (Psychoanalysis in Self-Portrayals) are a collection of 32 autobiographies by senior internationally known psychoanalysts, each containing eight autobiographies, followed by a bibliography of publications by its author. It is a publication of immense interest not only to the German-speaking, psychoanalytically educated and historically minded reader. It deserves to be introduced to a wider international readership. This extensive German publication project is part of the wider research into the history of what happened to psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis in Germany before and after 1933. It was led by a group of second-generation German psychoanalysts, among whom Hermanns, the author and editor of the volumes under review here, is a leading representative.1 In his foreword Hermanns acknowledges having been inspired by the oral history workshops in the United States. However, instead of interviewing his subjects as in the oral history tradition, he asked psychoanalysts to write their autobiographies. The title of the collection refers back to Freud's ‘Selbstdarstellung’ (An Autobiographical Study, 1925, SE 20) which was written for the German medical handbook of the 1920s Medizin der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen (Contemporary Medicine in Self-Portrayals, 8 vols). However, while Freud's autobiography entirely