Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society

Otto Rank, one of its members, as secretary entrusted with keeping the minutes of its proceedings. The first volume of these minutes, carefully edited by Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, is now available in an English translation prepared by Mrs. M. Nunberg. Its value should be great to all interested in the history of psychoanalysis, and no less to those interested in the history of ideas. A group of twenty-two men met weekly during the academic year at Sigmund Freud's house to discuss psychoanalytic theory, method, and the application of analysis to problems of literature, art, education, and culture generally. Sixteen of these men were physicians, only one or two being psychiatrists. The others were musicologists, philosophers and other lay scholars. All were passionately interested in Freud's ideas and each served in his own way to relate them to the outside world, and to provide necessary criticism. Sometimes the criticism was not very refined, being based on resistances or on personal pique. The confidential nature of the meetings, which were open to a few qualified guests, also made for a freedom of discussion now probably rare in psychoanalytic circles. Freud comes off very well in this revelatory document. To be sure, Rank was at that time his most totally devoted pupil and when he quotes Freud's summaries one has the impression that it was these remarks for which the rest of the discussion was mere preparation and skirmishing. Yet one sees Freud as both tolerant and magisterial, flexible and certainly judicious and opinionated. In this period he was engaged in reconsidering his fundamental ideas, such as the theory of anxiety, and he needed the assistance of an audience that was at least sympathetic to his earlier findings. But he was often hampered by their excessive orthodoxy, as much as by their revolutionary proposals. To his own great axiom he seems to have remained true: "I learnt to restrain speculative tendencies and to follow the unforgotten advice of my master, Charcot: to look at the same things again and again until they themselves begin to speak." One has the opportunity in these pages also to become more closely acquainted with Alfred Adler, by far the most original of the members. He was a paradoxical person, who foresaw the need for a psychology of the ego which could explain its socio-cultural contexts, and yet could insist with humorless persistence on the universality …