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What makes someone want to become a psychoanalyst? That's one question. What makes someone want to remain a psychoanalyst? That's another question. There are as many answers to these questions as there are psychoanalysts, because each one of them has to find away to make Freud work for them. For Ulrike May, author of the new book Freud at Work, the answer to the latter question is clear: the study of the history of psychoanalysis is her preferred means to interrogate her relation to psychoanalysis. She is a practising psychoanalyst in Berlin and a lifelong scholar of the intellectual history of Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud at Work brings together a number of her previously published papers, most of which were originally published in German. This book makes May's historical research available to an English readership.
Freud at Work focuses on Freud's clinical and intellectual work roughly in the period between 1910 and 1920. The first part consists in seven chapters that deal with the formulation and development of original psychoanalytic concepts such as narcissism, sexual trauma, oral aggression, anal eroticism, and the death drive. On the basis of the correspondence between Freud and his disciples, the minutes from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and published (auto)biographies and writings, May is able to reconstruct the development of these concepts almost from the moment they were first brought up. May demonstrates very convincingly that these core concepts were originally suggested by, or created in dialogue with, Freud's disciples from the early days, rather than invented by ‘the Master’ in