Freud and his Pupils—A Footnote to the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement

People like Freud have difficulty in preserving an incognito. To keep distinct the work and the personality of its creator seems impossible. In its instinctive desire to keep alive the former, the world strives through the medium of the personal to obtain a better grasp of the magnificence of Freud's achievements and thus, as it were, to bring them down to its level. Such an attempt turns in part upon the testimony of witnesses, in part—particularly in the case of the biographers of the future—upon a process of reconstruction. Most biographers—as is the habit of the majority of them—will be swayed by some more or less unconscious bias of their own: through an effort at popularization, some will falsify both work and master by superficiality; with others, fear of the truth will produce a hostile interpretation; still others—and these are the most dangerous—will be moved by an excess of adoration to present a cult in place of keeping to reality.

In his Autobiography, Freud himself has set barriers to further efforts at biography and to the analytic interpretation of his actions, in saying: 'Here I may permit myself to bring my autobiographical remarks to a close. Of such other matters as my personal relations, my struggles, my disappointments and successes, the general public is not entitled to know more. In any event, I have been more candid and more sincere in certain of my writings than those who describe their lives for contemporaries and posterity are wont to be.'

This brief account is in no way a contravention of Freud's wish. It is, rather, a small contribution to the history of the psychoanalytic movement, a backward glance towards a bit of the past of the Vienna group which, closest to Freud, had its own changes and chances.

My membership in this group through a period of more than twenty years will not impair, I trust, the objectivity of my