This personally told life story of one of the first collaborators of Freud sheds a great deal of light on the development of psychoanalysis and on the personalities of the men who organized the first psychoanalytic society, as well as affords an interesting view of the life of Vienna during the last years of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th.

Stekel was a unique character in many respects. He was devoted to hard work, rather boastful of his therapeutic and social successes, developed his own psychoanalytic technic, was highly intuitive, made few close friends, and was able, despite many other activities, to write an astonishing number of books and articles. From his own account one must assume that he obtained his therapeutic results by the effect of his personality, intuition, and his art rather than by the application of the scientific method. He was undoubtedly a “mystic” who believed in telepathic phenomena on