The author sets out to shed light on the frequently used but nonetheless fuzzy term classical psychoanalysis, beginning with an outline of the history of its development. The term first achieved currency in the United States in the 1950s, introduced by immigrants and refugees from Central Europe. Will demonstrates that behind the objective engagement with the question of what classical analysis actually is (Eissler's standard model of pure interpretation, the ideal of abstinence, anonymity, impartiality, and objectivity), there lurks the unconscious motive of coping with the traumas spawned by the National Socialist regime of terror, the destruction of psychoanalysis in Central Europe, and the death of Freud. Only in a secondary stage did the defensive power claims and the idealization of classical analysis develop, though from a historical viewpoint, its distortions of Freud's original principles make the designation neoclassical psychoanalysis more appropriate. An “American” Freud had little to do with the original Viennese counterpart.