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The monograph What Is Psychoanalysis? 100 Years after Freud's “Secret Committee” was written in Johannesburg, South Africa, by a Welsh-born ( in Reading, Berkshere) U.S.-Ph.D. with an international reputation in family therapy and psychoanalysis, Barnaby B. Barratt. A former training analyst of APA, professor of family medicine at Wayne State University in Detroit, Barratt now works as a senior research fellow at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and occasionally goes to India and Israel to teach. Barratt holds two Ph.D.s: 1976 from Harvard in developmental psychology and 1995 from the San Francisco Institute of Human Sexuality.
The author's leading motto is colorful and, perhaps, a bit cliché: “May all things be happy and free; may these writings contribute to the happiness and freedom of all beings.” The chapters of this monograph at first were challenging for me because the volume is complex and the contents are simple: four of Freud's basic cornerstones (“connotations”), each gleaned from “mistaken paths” of later interpretations, and spiced with some aspects of meditation from the author's experience.
I connected the author's writing with what is in the four volumes of Freud's Wednesday Psychological Society sessions from 1906-1918 (Nunberg & Federn, 1976, 1977, 1979, 1981), which I have had in German for many years. Later, by my second reading, I saw a lighter side of Barratt's monograph as well.
The Wednesday sessions were the first, overlapping and founding part of the later “Secret Committee” (Wittenberger, 1995), which was active 1912-1927. It was initiated by Ernest Jones. In my opinion, some of the author's statements do not match the contents of what was happening in the Freud committee sessions.
Barratt highly values Freud's work prior to 1914, and interprets Freud's later work as being less profound. He considers Freud's
psychoanalytic thinking more as a method than as a form of therapy, and accentuates Freud's “