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Historian Paul Roazen has crafted a delightful and thoughtful work based on interviews with ten of Sigmund Freud's former patients. The meetings with the analysands took place in the 1960's.
The author presents us with a kaleidoscope of analysands, professional and nonprofessional, European and American, who came from a variety of socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. Beginning about 1903, the treatments continued through the 1930's. They varied in length from a few months to a number of years. From the rich mosaic which the interviewer and interviewees have created, the reader can broaden his or her understanding of Sigmund Freud the clinician.
As with all oral history, there are, of course, many caveats. The author points out that when he did the interviews he was relatively young, inexperienced, and unfamiliar with the old-world culture. The former analysands were elderly, Freud had been dead for many years, and the treatments had been long over. Memory, as we know, is fallible, and often the analysand's memory of the analysis will say as much about the analysand as it does about the analysis. Transferences do not disappear. This is borne out by the variety of ways in which Sigmund Freud is remembered.
It soon becomes evident that the analysands had not chosen to see just “any psychoanalyst”—but were seeing Dr. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. It appears as though each entered treatment with the “founder,” and this played itself out during the course of the treatment. In addition, nine of the ten were treated by a man suffering from a debilitating illness, as Freud had by then contracted cancer of the jaw, and this also affected each in an individual way. Nevertheless, despite the difficulties, each patient as described by Roazen comes alive, and each of the therapeutic encounters comes alive as well. The reader is placed both within the analysis and within the interview by the author.
The analysands were struggling with a variety of problems during