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“What was it like in the early days of psychoanalysis, when you were a student in Vienna?” Esther Menaker's students had been asking her for 50 years (p. ix). When she set out to answer them by means of the book, she wondered if she should “destroy all their illusions”; focus on the “anxieties and adversities” she had experienced in those days or write these off as part of adjusting to her new, strange surroundings; or concentrate on the insights she and her husband had gained through their “classical” analyses, she with Anna Freud and he with Helene Deutsch (pp. x-xii).
Newly married, the Menakers had been privileged enough to embark on their journey yet too poor to live as comfortably as such analysands as the Stracheys or Dorothy Burlingham. But the Viennese they met expected them to live up to their American stereotype, to be wealthy and naive. Instead, they learned German by giving English lessons and increasingly peppered their initial naïveté with sharp insights about Viennese hypocrisy. The Menakers took courses at the university and pursued doctoral studies in psychology with Karl and Charlotte Bühler; they met officious landladies who rented them rooms with kitchen privileges; they took backpacking trips during summers; they were thrown into run-of-the-mill Austrian politics and mores; and particularly after their first son was born they became friendly with neighbors.
Throughout this book, Esther Menaker carefully tries to separate her own reconstructions of what she was learning through her analysis from the realities she was encountering and from the loss of self-esteem she frequently experienced; she tends to attribute this loss to the way she was regarded by the psychoanalysis she met. Menaker is frank about her disappointments and especially about the incidents indicating that Freud and his disciples did not