What Is This Professor Freud Like?: A Diary of an Analysis With Historical Comments

In 1921, a young female doctor is in analysis with Freud. In a diary, she records what moves her. The present volume not only contains a full translation of these records, but also collects four essays by two psychoanalysts and two analytical historians who take their cue from the young doctor’s notes to think about Freud and his methods.

The discovery of the diary marks a small sensation for the history of social science. Three factors make the document unique: first, it records not a training analysis, but the analysis of an actual patient, second, the analysis took place before Freud fell ill with cancer, and third, the analysand obviously noted down what was said in the practice word by word. As Ernst Falzeder notes,“no other account published to date meets all three of these conditions”.

With contributions by Anna Koellreuter, Karl Fallend, Ernst Falzeder and André Haynal.