The Unknown Freud: On the Creativity of the Octogenarian

Almost 30 years ago, I occasionally accompanied Theodor Reik as he promenaded in Badgastein, the Salzburg spa that had seen Freud and most of the political, intellectual, and artistic celebrities of Freud's generation. Reik was always ready to tell stories about Freud, and I used these opportunities to meet with the “living history” of psychoanalysis. After all, Reik was the man in whose defense Freud had written The Question of Lay Analysis. He had also been, after Otto Rank left, the secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association for some important years. One day he mentioned an interesting episode that happened when both he and Freud had been invited to an editorial meeting of one of the psychoanalytic journals. The editors were planning to devote the next number of the journal to the forthcoming International Psychoanalytic Congress, which was to be held in Marienbad in Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1936. Freud's mood was glum. This congress could easily be the last one. The suggestion was made to concentrate the contributions to the next number on the topic, “Why does analysis work?” Freud was angry. He snapped, “We know why it works. What we don't know is why it doesn't.” Freud wanted the congress to confront the problem of dealing with the resistances, rather than to discuss what kind of interpretations to make. The story started me on a preoccupation with Freud's relationship to the psychoanalytic movement.