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In one of its defining narratives, psychoanalysis is represented as a clinically-based discipline whose basic concepts, derived from the treatment of Viennese neurotics by Freud and a small band of his disciples, were later directed to a wide range of cultural phenomena—art, literature, sociology, anthropology—in what Freud himself dubbed “applied psychoanalysis.” This view persists today in the minds of those who are convinced that legitimate psychoanalytic “data” can only come from the clinical situation—this despite the endless variations in theoretical and technical constructs that currently claim derivation from such “data.”
It is the argument of Rose's scholarly and carefully written—and gratifyingly slender—volume that this narrative is inaccurate and misleading. The Viennese intellectuals who came to compose Freud's Wednesday circle, which had its inception in 1902, were a mixed group of physicians and laymen, drawn together less by clinical than cultural concerns, fired by moral outrage and social discontent with the prevailing bourgeois culture and eager to confront its inequities and hypocrisies with the revolutionary values that psychoanalysis seemed to provide. They sought to develop a “cultural science,” on all fours with the medical “science” that Freud had built on his early clinical explorations. They were, that is, men with a “calling” who saw in psychoanalysis a “cause,” an instrument for liberation, for effecting major social and cultural change.
In pursuit of this thesis, Rose provides a biographic survey of the members of the Wednesday circle—later, in 1908, formalized as the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society; a review of their contributions to its meetings (drawn largely from Nunberg and Federn's Minutes); and an account of the dissensions and schisms that beset it over the years as members came and went, sometimes, as with