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Volume 3 includes weekly minutes of the Society and covers the period October 5, 1910, through December 20, 1911. The intellectual atmosphere of these meetings was rather plodding, as the discussants reached for additional areas that could be explained by the correlated concepts of libido and unconscious process. Notable exceptions were presentations by Adler and Stekel, which retain the intellectual ferment of the earlier years of the psychoanalytic movement. The years 1910 and 1911 were a time of transition in which Freud's first instinct theory was rapidly outgrowing its usefulness while the inevitable next step, toward a theory of aggression, had not yet been formulated. In this climate both Adler and Stekel presented theories stressing an aggressive drive, Adler focusing more on the drive for mastery and power, Stekel portraying aggression as a destructive “criminal” drive. Freud and his other followers in the Vienna Society (Sadger, Rank, Federn, Tausk, and Sachs, to name a few) were still busily unearthing offshoots of libido and viewing libido as the source of both health and neurosis, while viewing aggression as a side issue. Adler especially, and Stekel toe, soon became nuisances by pushing aggression into the foreground as the source of health and neurosis, while tending to relegate libido to a side issue. The resulting atmosphere was potentially explosive, because Freud viewed both of them with suspicion, as detractors of his view. The outcome was inevitable. First Adler (during 1911) and then Stekel (a year or so later) were not so gently squeezed out of the Society as though they were psychoanalytic antichrists.
Psychoanalysis was dealt a severe blow by these acts of intolerance and narrow-mindedness, which were to serve as a warning to future detractors and set the scene for intolerance to new ideas, something which still plagues the psychoanalytic movement. This turmoil within the Society during 1910 and 1911 stands out more than the subject matter of