How Freud Worked. First-Hand Accounts of Patients

How Freud Worked. First-Hand Accounts of Patients. Paul Roazen.

Northvale, N. J.: Jason Aronson Inc., 1995.

Against all newer undertakings disclosing the secrets of Freud's biography, the German theorist of psychoanalysis Alfred Lorenzer noted has to be said: The insight into Freud's way of working, as a therapist or scientific worker, is the main, if not only appropriate, Freud-disclosure we are curious about. With his new book, How Freud Worked, Paul Roazen tries to provide answers to Lorenzer's curiosity. Roazen collected firsthand accounts of Freud's patients who lived in the United States and Britain during the late 1960s and early 1970s when he began his research. Now, about 30 years later, he edited 10 of the interviews. The collection includes: Albert Hirst, David Brunswick, Mark Brunswick, Edith Jackson, Robert Jokl, Kata Levy, Irmarita Putnam, Eva Rosenfeld, and James and Alix Strachey-all except Hirst later became analysis themselves. The narrative Roazen presents is a stimulating document for the history of psychoanalysis.

"These ten examples of individual patients' lives, based on their reports of how Freud treated them, should help make more vivid just how Freud was likely to have conducted himself. One does not have to be an apologist in behalf of everything Freud ever did, or a trade-union advocate in support of the cause of the movement he created, to appreciate how different a world from ours he was functioning in. We...