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Eissler's subtitle, The Fictitious Case of Tausk contra Freud, is a reference to Paul Roazen's thesis in Brother Animal1 that the brilliant pioneer, Victor Tausk, best known for his paper on the 'influencing machine',2 was driven to suicide in 1919 at least in part by the indifference if not outright hostility of Freud to his troubled
and troublesome disciple. Few informed readers will fail to recognize obvious tendentiousness in Roazen's presentation of the facts and the inferences drawn from them. Eissler has most adequately corrected these.
Yet there is also an excess of zeal, as though a strained hypothesis must somehow be balanced by a strained antithesis. As Eissler himself puts it: 'I can imagine some book reviewer suggesting that the Roazen book was not good enough, to begin with, for such a serious and passionate rebuttal in book-length form… it might be stated that you have stacked your argument for Freud, as it now stands, against a poor adversary' (p. 3).
The tone is suggested by these lines in a work which, nearly twice the length of the original, might well be called The Case of Eissler against Roazen. It is all the more unfortunate that an analytic atmosphere could not be maintained, for out of conflict arises the forgotten outlines of one of the most fascinating, creative, and tragic figures in analytic history. From the depths of a Kafka-esque personality, Tausk added his concepts of identity, ego boundaries, and self-feeling to the insights provided by psychoanalysis. Freud was self-disciplined and for him the ego was a system functioning in relation to reality; for the æsthetically sensitive Tausk, it was a subjective experience which complemented this objectivity. The relationship between the two men, which