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Paul Stepansky's new book is one of the more peculiar recent additions to the history of psychoanalysis. He starts off with two opening chapters devoted to Freud's now famous pre-World War I metaphor of the psychoanalyst as a surgeon. Although Freud never repudiated the analogy he had made between psychoanalysis and surgery, Stepansky does point out that “in our own time, the surgical metaphor has surely been invoked more to be repudiated than affirmed or even qualified.” Detachment, neutrality, and the “emotional coldness” Freud had recommended became an essential part of so-called “classical” psychoanalytical technique. However, a wide variety of recent schools of psycho-analytic thinking have explicitly challenged the viability or desirability of the surgical metaphor. But not once in his book does Stepansky raise the point about how the image of surgery might encourage passivity in patients rather than the analytic ideal of self-reliance.
Having opened the book with two chapters about the surgical analogy, Stepansky offers a chapter about the rise of surgery as a branch of knowledge, and then a chapter about Freud's own contact with surgery during his medical training. One chapter goes over the well-worn territory of the Emma Eckstein episode and Fliess's botched operation on her nose. A short chapter deals with Freud's Irma dream. (It is unfortunate that Stepansky woodenly maintains that “Irma” was Anna Hammerschlag rather than Emma Eckstein, as if these were the only alternative possibilities; one would have thought that psychoanalysis taught that dreams usually have multiple sources.)
Next Stepansky deals with World War I surgical experiences that Freud and a few members of his so-called “secret” Committee had. The chief sources Stepansky relies on are the Freud correspondences with Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi, and Karl Abraham. In keeping with the recent tendency in the literature to rehabilitate the once-maligned Ferenczi, Stepansky studiously points out ho