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The story of “the Committee,” the group of five or six of Freud's closest disciples who formed a secret Praetorian Guard to help him run the psychoanalytic movement and fend off attacks, has been often told, but never so thoroughly or absorbingly as in this brief book. Phyllis Grosskurth brings to it a literary talent honed on a couple of biographies and exercised in the Humanities and Psychoanalytic Thought Program at the University of Toronto, where she is a professor. She has an engaging style and the ability to tell a good story straightforwardly. The result is one of the few psychoanalytic books about which I can honestly say that I was reluctant to put it down before the end.
Indeed, the writing is so good and the reading generally so easy that occasional lapses stand out rather glaringly. Often when she describes the contents of a letter, it is impossible to tell where paraphrase leaves off and her own comment begins. Her strength is clearly as a writer, not a theorist; her summaries of the content of works by Freud and Jung are superficial at best; at worst, they give distorted and misleading impressions of the works' meaning and significance. A minor example: repeatedly, she refers to Ferenczi's theory of genitality as his “genitalia theory”!
The introductory material and a couple of early chapters retrace ground that is familiar to those who have read the standard biographies of Freud, but the bulk of this book tells the whole story of the Committee in more detail than can be found anywhere else. For the author has gone to unpublished primary sources, the circular round-robin letters (Rundbriefe) with which for years the members of the Committee kept in touch, and also their letters to one another and to Freud. Thus, she spotted many an instance in which a member of the group would say one thing privately in a personal letter and deny or distort it in the forum of the