Edith Kurzweil
PSYCHOANALYSIS IN VIENNA
Nearly a hundred years ago Freud began to shock his
Viennese compatriots by mining his own unconscious in order to
generalize to theirs . Last summer in Vienna, the group of psychoan–
alysts, historians, sociologists, and psychologists who had gathered
in Hamburg in 1985, and under the guidance of the enterprising
French psychoanalyst Alain de Mijolla founded the International
Association for the History of Psychoanalysis, met again in Freud's
home . There, surrounded by an exhibition assembled for the occa–
sion and against many (mostly financial) odds, psychoanalysis no
longer shocked anyone . For even the average Viennese has accepted
the existence of the unconscious, although he has remained anti–
Semitic. The assembled psychoanalysts and scholars, however, con–
centrated on the past, on interpretations of Freud's texts and on
reinterpretations in light of new evidence.
The German historian Gerhard Fichtner started out by warn–
ing the participants that all historians find the stones suitable for
their own theoretical edifices, and that this is a special danger for
historians of psychoanalysis-whose stones include, among other
things, the unconscious content of Freud's newly released letters and
their "place" within the rest of his works . Even though Freud volun–
tarily destroyed all his papers in 1885, and again in 1908 when he
moved to Berggasse 19, and though he lost some involuntarily when
he emigrated to London in 1938, we know of around 8,000 existing
letters between himself and about 400 persons. Five thousand of
these, of which 3,200 have been published, were written by Freud.
At this conference of the International Association for the
History of Psychoanalysis (LA.H .P .), the 1,800 "missing" letters
were as central in the discussions as the ones that have been released
by the Freud Archives -located primarily at the Library of Con–
gress, but also in London among Anna Freud's private papers and
with some of Freud's correspondents. Would their release interfere
with the secrecy that Freud as physician was sworn to observe?
Might one or another of Freud's patients have descendants who
would suffer from disclosure? Or, as Kurt Eissler, the former head of
the Freud Archives, and his successor Harold Blum have been ac–
cused, are they being overly protective of Freud?
If
so, curiosity
