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PARTISAN REVIEW
Borch-Jacobsen offers little that is new. The failure of Anna O.'s treat–
ment was established by Henri Ellenberger (1970) and by Hirschmueller
(1978), and Borch-Jacobsen makes extensive use of their work. Ellenberger
always insisted that the historian must distinguish carefully between fact
and conjecture, a caution not apparent in this sensational tract.
Let us return to another charge of Esterson's, notably that Freud gross–
ly misrepresented the nature of his own reception and exaggerated the
rejection and
~ontumely
of his contemporaries. Consider the reception of
The Interpretation of Dreams.
The American historian Norman Kiell has painstakingly corrected the
arguments for a largely joyous reception of this and other Freud works by
some earlier authors who were eager to refute Ernest Jones' stories of per–
secution. First, only six hundred copies were sold in the first nine years
after publication. It was reviewed, fairly extensively, and Kiell located 22
reviews between 1899 and 1902, in newspapers and Ii terary, philosophical,
or theological journals. Only three of them were in professional journals.
While lay reviewers tended to respond favorably, his psychiatric colleagues
did not. For them it was a "return to old wives' psychiatry." On the other
hand, Freud's own condensation "On Dreams," published in a medical
journal, did better. A few physicians interested in psychotherapy, Bleuler,
Jung, and Albert Moll, found it pathbreaking: it established that dreams had
a psychological significance, could lead to an understanding of human
motivation, and were not merely the meaningless result of physiological
processes, one of the then-current explanations. Nevertheless, as Decker
shows, there were serious reservations about the book.
When one considers that Freud's self-image was that of a scientist, it is
not difficult to conceive that the relative silence and the disapproval of some
of a few prominent neurologists and psychiatrists, as opposed to the approval
of laymen, i.e., clergymen and literary people, was a blow, as was the pauci–
ty of sales of what he regarded as his masterpiece. As Kiell has demonstrated,
Freud's work was often received by colleagues as well-written, interesting,
provocative, opening up new vistas, but also unscientific-again hardly what
Freud would have wanted by way of a reception.
Obviously Freud exaggerated the negative aspects of his reception, as
might any author unduly sensitive to criticism, but the strictures over his
arbitrary, unscientific, and reckless methods must have stung. Freud's exag–
geration is hardly pathological or evidence of willful distortion of the
record, let alone paranoia. And as for Esterson's claim that Albert Moll was
a martyr to Freud's denigration, in fact, Freud cited Moll several times and
looked with favor on his theory of contrectation, an impulse toward con–
tact with another person. In a lengthy footnote to
Three Essays on Sexuality
he included Moll among those authorities who regarded manifestations of
