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A review of this fascinating new little book needs, I think, to come in 2 parts: (1) an examination of its merits and limitations, and (2) an explanation of how a text 1st written in the late 1920s came to be published now for the first time.
The author, Isidor Sadger (1867-1942), was a Viennese neurologist who first heard Freud lecture in September 1895, and then later joined
Freud's Wednesday Psychological Society. The name of that organization was later changed to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and Sadger remained in it until 1933. The book itself contains, he tells us, “nothing other than what I personally experienced, and the impressions that Freud's character, his actions and writing made on me. In no place have I sought to present biographical details that I did not myself witness” (p. 5).
At those 1895 lectures on the psychoneuroses where Sadger first heard Freud, there were only 2 other young medical auditors. Since Freud subsequently repressed the memory of that series of talks, erasing them from his 1914 “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” Sadger comments rather eloquently on what it tells us about Freud's characteristic way dealing with his professional beginnings:
For a great man who has worked his way up from humble origins, there are 2 possibilities: Either he places his tattered boots with which he marched into town under a glass dome and tells everyone, “In these tattered boots I came into town and now I am a great man!” or he never had to wear torn boots in the 1st place. (p. 9)
Sadger concludes that Freud chose to think he “never had such boots; he was a great man from the very beginning” (p. 9). Sadger was trying to say something specific about what characterized Freud's genius, remaking his past. One additional constituent to the artistic charisma Freud already had in 1895 was an absence in his presentation of “psychiatric gibberish, all that scrambling after new technical terminology that only the initiated could understand, and by