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Appointment in Vienna is a story of idealization, disillusionment, and hope. It is the story of Esther Menaker and her husband Bill, two young students who came to Vienna in 1930 with high hopes and great expectations. They were to study psychoanalysis, in those days a field for pioneers and explorers—conquistadors of the psyche. It was a field that offered the promise of self-fulfillment for themselves and an opportunity to help those neurotically afflicted.
They also yearned for and looked forward to personal acceptance and understanding from the great figures in psychoanalysis who were to be their mentors, teachers, and analysts in Vienna. Instead, their self-esteem was often shattered by the arrogance and insensitivity they encountered. The attitude toward them could best be summed up by a phrase used by Freud to describe American psychiatrists coming to Vienna to study psychoanalysis—“export trade.”
Esther Menaker's analysis with Anna Freud foundered on two scores. First, it was a repetition of some unfortunate aspects of her relationship with her mother. Second, it reflected the character of the analytic work of that day, an adherence to interpretation of drive conflicts rather than to a human and empathic response to patients. Esther's mother was quite authoritarian, and so was Anna Freud. If a patient did not accept an interpretation, there was no room for further discussion. Since the interpretation was addressed to the unconscious, not accepting it naturally meant that the patient simply did not know his unconscious, which the analyst of course did. This left patients in a confused and dependent position with no way out.
Early in her analysis with Anna Freud, Esther was afraid that Sigmund Freud might soon die, and one of her first dreams was about this. Anna Freud responded by telling her that anxiety about Freud's death must refer to death wishes, and that there was a relationship between such wishes and anxiety. Since Esther felt she did not experience dea