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  • Preface
  • Peter L. Rudnytsky

Psychoanalysts, as I noted in our Spring 2004 issue, are always returning to Freud. Here we proudly offer four landmark articles, each of which casts genuinely new light on Freud.

First, Franz Maciejewski, renowned for his discovery of the 1898 Swiss hotel log in which Freud registered with Minna Bernays as his wife—published in American Imago in Winter 2006—launches what is destined to become a central project of Freud studies for decades to come: a rethinking of Freud's life and work in light of his relationship to his sister-in-law. Perhaps surprisingly to some, Maciejewski remains agnostic on whether Freud and Minna consummated their affair, deeming the widespread preoccupation with the "material reality" of their possible liaison inconsequential by comparison with the "psychic reality" of their desire, which constitutes "the genuine territory of psychoanalysis." Be that as it may, Maciejewski lays down some key markers in reviewing the events that led up to Minna Bernays's arrival in the Freud household in 1896—a decade after the death of her fiancé, Freud's friend Ignaz Schoenberg—and Maciejewski convincingly argues that the "two-wives complex" of Freud's adulthood recapitulates the "two-mothers constellation" of his early childhood.

In consonance with his personal metaphor of "psychoanalysis as a journey" (Borgogno 1999), Franco Borgogno takes the case of Little Hans—that is, Herbert Graf—as a touchstone for an inquiry into what it might mean to retrace the early history of psychoanalysis from an authentically contemporary standpoint. For those in the English-speaking world who may not yet be familiar with the work of this distinguished Italian analyst, a great treat is in store. Borgogno points to Freud's assumption of the role of a supervisor to the actual analyst, Hans's father, as crucial to his ability in this case "to revise and criticize between the lines his own way of relating to patients" as unduly authoritarian. He likewise foregrounds Freud's puzzling refusal [End Page 1] to address in any substantive way "the specific family situation in which the patient found himself and was growing up." Borgogno gives to the mature Herbert Graf's self-characterization as an "invisible man" the "broader and more radical meaning" of a commentary on "a child in many ways not listened to and unseen," not simply by his parents, but even to some degree by Freud himself.

I am unlikely ever to publish another manuscript as long as that by Ulrike May. But its indubitable importance induced me to throw caution to the winds. May scrupulously dissects Freud's recently excavated "patient calendar," that is, the daily record he kept from October 1, 1910 to December 31, 1920 of every patient with whom he had a psychoanalytic session. Although the lode might seem meager, May manages to extract from it an extraordinary amount of precious ore about how Freud worked as an analyst as well as about the men and women who were his patients. May's present article, which deals with nineteen individuals who were not analysts, is a companion to a previous paper (May 2006) in which she surveys seventeen patients who were members of psychoanalytic organizations. In both instances, she has elected not to reveal the identities of any individuals in treatment with Freud whose names were not already in the public domain. Some are already famous, others obscure; but all can claim, as Freud said about Sergei Pankejeff, the Wolf Man, to have become a "piece of psychoanalysis" ("Wolf-Man" 1971, 150). I am delighted to welcome Dr. May to the editorial board of American Imago.

Nearly five years after his article "Proust and Parricide," Roy B. Lacoursiere returns to our pages with another extremely impressive piece of scholarly sleuthing. For the first time, Lacoursiere succeeds in reconstructing the "historical truth" of Freud's death, dismantling in the process the "biographical fictions" propounded by previous commentators. We learn that Max Schur was not present at Freud's death, and that his final injection of morphine was administered by Josephine Stross, a close friend of Anna Freud's. As Lacoursiere intimates, the tendency to idealization that led to the purveying of sanitized...

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