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For a very brief moment, I admit, I thought this was a hoax. The recovery of a completely unknown book of recollections of Freud by the pioneer psychoanalyst Isidor Sadger, originally published in the early 1930s in Austria, so obscure that it was never quoted by any scholar because, apparently, only one copy survived, now locked up in an inaccessible library somewhere in Japan: that seemed too far fetched to me to be true. But it is true. Except that (as Paul Roazen guessed) the book was probably never released by the original publisher, and thus, in a sense, was never published (but how then did that one copy end up in Japan; that remains a mystery to me).1
Alan Dundes, a renowned anthropologist from Berkeley with an interest in the application of psychoanalytic theory to folklore, was put on its trail by chance and managed to get hold of a photocopy of this extremely rare book through a Japanese student of his; he had it translated into English and found a publisher for it. What excitement … Tragically, Dundes unexpectedly died weeks before it was released, at the age of 71. That this ill-fated book is now out in the public for the first time in its existence is a small miracle in itself and something to celebrate.
first encountered Freud in the winter of 1895-96 when he attended his lectures at the University of Vienna, but he only became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1906, four years after its founding. Although he worked as a neurologist, his psychoanalytic work was mostly not clinical, but more often occupied with the genre of ‘psychography’. He was not a major figure within the psychoanalytic community. Sadger was considered a rigid follower of Freud - to the extent that Freud himself characterized him as ‘that congenital fanatic of orthodoxy, who happens by mere accident to believe in psychoanalysis rather than in the law given by God on Sinai-Horeb’ - but Freud also valued