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The star of the psychoanalyst Sandor Rado (1890-1972) has long been dark. Such neglect should not be Rado's fate. His achievements and failures are too interesting, too revealing of our intellectual history and of the fabric of the psychoanalytic community in Budapest, Berlin, and New York. Rado's trail, however, is not an easy one to pick up. While decades ago his published writings were collected (Rado, 1956a, 1962) and a book was culled from his later lectures (Rado, 1969), today he is rarely cited, taught, or given a significant role in our histories of psychoanalysis. Furthermore, it seems that his personal papers have been lost. Given that absence, we are fortunate to have Paul Roazen and Bluma Swerdloff's Heresy: Sandor Rado and the Psychoanalytic Movement (1995). Their book contains an oral history culled by Roazen from interviews conducted by Swerdloff with Rado in 1964 and 1965, as well as Freud's correspondence with Rado and an elegant introductory essay by Swerdloff. The volume is a crucial and intriguing resource in helping us reassess Rado's legacy.
A Hungarian born in 1890, Rado helped found the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society in 1913. After a decade of weekly informal coffeehouse interchanges with Ferenczi, Rado moved to Berlin in 1922 where he was analyzed by Karl Abraham for two years. Later, he became director of training at the Berlin Institute and was in good part instrumental in creating the Berlin curriculum. This was not an insubstantial feat, for this curriculum was adopted in 1938 by the