You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Over the years, Paul Roazen has built a reputation as an expert on Freud. This is not a view to which many Freud scholars would be inclined to subscribe, but their opinions do not reach the general educated public to any appreciable extent. For most people, anything written about Freud that is thought to carry authority is considered informed comment on the psychoanalytic discipline itself. Roazen's new book, Meeting Freud's Family, is likely to be seized on for further enlightenment and, in view of its title, for inside information.
In his afterword, Roazen repeats an earlier acknowledgment of his indebtedness to Helene Deutsch, who gave him a letter of introduction to Anna Freud and thereby the opportunity to interview her. He then has this to say:
As I undertook my research, there was nothing that I came across that I did not try to discuss with Helene. She was in effect a supervisor of my ongoing interviewing. I was not proceeding as a muckraking journalist, and therefore did not seek the kind of sensationalism that someone like Janet Malcolm has specialized in. I was working as an intellectual historian with a compelling interest in the history of ideas. (p. 200)
The disclaimers and the assertion can be judged by what has gone before, and it would be interesting to know what Helene Deutsch would think of this book were she alive to read it.
The introduction itself sets out the author's background and qualifications and explains the rationale for the work he has undertaken and the aim of the present book. “My formal education,” he says, “had been grounded in political science, and since as an undergraduate I had been interested in psychology and politics, it was a short step to becoming committed to the interdisciplinary nature of all the social sciences, and to the specific relevance of psychology for social thought” (p. 4). That