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Editor, Psychoanalytic Review
c/o National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis
150 West 13th Street
New York, NY 10011
Re: “The Cure of Souls in the Therapeutic State”
by Dr. Thomas Szasz
Dear Sir:
On page 49 in the 1st issue of Vol. 90 of your publication, the above-listed paper's author wrote: “Despite the historical record, many people—mental health professionals, writers, book reviewers—often erroneously identify Freud as a psychiatrist…. Freud was not, and could not have been, a psychiatrist. Why not? Because he was a Jew.” On page 50, Dr. Thomas Szasz's attempted substantiation of his quoted premise reads, in part, as follows: “Because being a psychiatrist meant being an employee of a state hospital, in Austria-Hungary, Jewish doctors could not become psychiatrists.”
In 1880, two years before Freud was awarded his M.D. degree, Dr. Arnold Pick (who like Freud, his fellow Jew, was born in Moravia and also graduated from the same medical school in Vienna) became the Director of a new mental hospital in Dobrzan, then situated in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Six years later— when Freud was leasing his first professional office at 7 Rathaus-trasse in Vienna—Pick had been appointed Professor and head of the Psychiatric Clinic at the German University in Prague, which was likewise under the jurisdiction and control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Sincerely,