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On Freud's Couch is a new English language translation of a compendium of essays, originally published in Sweden in 1994, in which six Swedish psychoanalysts offer their renditions of seven of Freud's famous case treatments from 1888 to 1914. The essays derive from a series of lectures on Freud's cases given in Stockholm in 1991 that had been initiated by the Swedish Psychoanalytical Society following its 1991 symposium on
Psychoanalysis in Cultural Life, subsequently published in Swedish as Psychoanalys och Kultur. Iréne Matthis, a training analyst, supervisor, and teacher at the Swedish Psychoanalytic Institute, and one of the coeditors, is the author of the preface to the original Swedish edition as well as two of the case histories—“Frau Emmy: From Catharsis to Psychoanalysis” and “Miss Lucy: One Hundred Years of Hysteria.” Matthis's coeditor, Imre Szecsödy, a past director of the Swedish Psychoanalytic Institute, former president of the Swedish Psychoanalytical Society, and currently an associate professor of psychiatry at Karolinska Institutet, provides the preface to the English edition and contributes an extensive exegesis, “Dora: Freud's Pygmalion or the Unrecovered Patient of a Famous Analyst?” The remaining chapters are “Little Hans: The Dramaturgy of Phobia” by Johan Norman; “Horror at Pleasure of His Own of which he Himself is Not Aware: The Case of the Rat Man” by Rolf Künstlicher; “Senatspräsident Schreber, or Reading Insanity” by Lars Sjögren; and “Where the Horsetails Grow as High as Palms: The Case of the Wolfman” by Andrzej Werbert.
The cases of Emmy, Lucy, Dora, Little Hans, the Rat Man, Judge Schreber, and the Wolfman have an importance for psychoanalysts and historians of psychoanalysis analogous to the early Beethoven sonatas and string quartets for musicians and musicologists. Those works are a delight to spend time with and are also enriching as nearly limitless founts for discovery and exploration of, among other things, unfolding creative