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George Prochnik's Putnam Camp is an extravagantly scholarly contribution to intellectual history. It explores a fascinating, previously under-researched aspect of the development of the early psychoanalytic movement
and will give cultural historians valuable new material through which to examine the assumptions, aspirations, and illusions of the late Enlightenment era. Psychoanalytic readers will find it absorbing, both for its illumination of the decade when psychoanalysis began to conquer the culturally alien terrain of North America and for the details of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and James Jackson Putnam. It also contains intriguing information about supporting characters such as Jung, Ferenczi, and a little-known American neo-Hegelian feminist named Susan Blow, who was Putnam's main muse.
I have always been fascinated by Freud's short and ambivalent experience in the United States, and especially by his warm friendship with Putnam, a scion of the American Puritan intellectual tradition exemplified by Hawthorne, Emerson, Alcott, and the New England Unitarians and Transcendentalists. One can hardly imagine a more unlikely pairing: the secular, urbane, sardonic Viennese Jew and the spiritually hungry, earnest, romantic American Protestant. Yet the two not only enjoyed each other, they also respected and loved each other. On learning of the death of his American friend, Freud wrote with anguish to Jones of the loss of “dear old Putnam” (p. 375), a frequent sobriquet.
This poignant affection is particularly striking in light of the fact that Freud and Putnam had an ongoing, serious argument about fundamental ideas. Their nine-year friendship—from Freud's appearance at Clark University in 1909 until Putnam's death in 1918—was organized around an unceasing effort to persuade each other of the validity of their respective, contrasting views on life, psychology, and the soul. Possibly because the older Putnam was never a young disciple, fated to idealize an