On the Freud Watch: Public Memoirs (review)

Author of sixteen books and editor of five more, Paul Roazen has been a leading historian of psychoanalysis for a generation. Starting as a student of political philosophy, he published his first book, Freud: Political and Social Thought (1968), at age thirty-two. Determined to interview all those then living who had known Freud, he published a rich trove, Freud and His Followers (1975), winning admiration from general readers, eternal gratitude from historians, and brickbats from the establishment. Roazen's effective curiosity, intelligence, and sincerity broke down barriers to an overprotected inner sanctum. Anna Freud, Kurt Eissler, and other establishment Freudians, who considered it a dereliction to cooperate with this independent outsider, scorned Roazen; to their dismay, he engaged many analysts, including Charles Rycroft and, most notably, Helene Deutsch, who allowed him to write a biography and edit her works.

The present book contains fifteen chapters and a personal epilogue. Roazen writes in a conversational style, using minimal analytic terminology. Most of the text should appeal to nonspecialists. Roazen begins with his exposure to psychiatric grand rounds at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center (formerly the Boston Psychopathic Hospital), where he was impressed by the legendary clinical director Elvin Semrad, a caring listener and a frank but gentle talker. Subsequent chapters take up Freud's heretical and long-hidden analysis of his own daughter, Anna (uncovered by Roazen); a critique of training analyses; Freud's correspondence with Ferenczi and Abraham; a fine essay on socialists, conservatives, and liberals in the psychoanalytic pantheon; Canadian political psychology; a detective story linking a patient of Freud's with one of Deutsch's; and a collection of Roazen's letters to editors. Two of the essays are literary, on Charles Dickens (David Copperfield) and Eugene O'Neill (Long Day's Journey into Night).

To Roazen, the eye-opening exaggerations of psychoanalysis are more welcome than the narrowing vision of diagnosis and pharmaceutical treatment that pervades psychiatry now. In his view Freud was a great thinker and writer—not always an exemplary scientist, colleague, or therapist. The technique he invented may be considered an ethical encounter: Roazen cites Peter Lomas, but Otto Rank said it first in Will Therapy (1936).

Of particular moment for readers of this journal are "The Importance of the Past," "Winners and Losers in Historiography," and "The Vitality of Neurosis." Regarding the first, Freudians are, paradoxically, allergic to their own history, and it is little exaggeration to say that Paul Roazen is to psychoanalytic orthodoxy what Charles Darwin is to creationism. As to winners and losers, factors beside merit sometimes decide; Roazen notes fads and phases with perplexity, hopeful that history will eventually reward the deserving. Finally, Roazen, a versatile scholar, chides us for knowing more and more about less and less:

A diagnosis is in itself, I believe, a kind of insult to humanity. . . . Any Dickens novel contains food for expanding the narrow range of most contemporary psychiatric thinking. . . . A recent fashion for finding clients who are "bi-polar" reflects as much about the state of today's medication as it does changes in diagnostic fashion. Once the term "borderline" was similarly abused, and even neurosis was taken to be a wastebasket term. That Freud really intended a new moral ethic to arise out of psychoanalysis has simply been obliterated. (p. 214)

Roazen's life work, "filling in some of the silences . . . correcting amnesias" (p. 20), follows and enlarges upon Freud's own mission. This book, dessert for those already nourished by Roazen's full menu, can also serve as appetizer for those who have yet to join his table.