This book review summarizes an anthology of essays by Freud's early colleagues called "The First Freudians". The essays explore a variety of topics including Freud's influence on medicine, the analysis of children, dream interpretation techniques, sexuality and its role in neuroses, and ego psychology. The review discusses how the essays provide insights into the pioneering work done by Freud and his associates to develop psychoanalysis as both a new science of the mind and a form of therapy. It concludes that the anthology is a valuable resource for understanding the origins and early development of psychoanalysis.

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BOOK REVIEW
Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek (Ed). The First Freudians (New York: Jason Aronson, Inc,
1973), pp. 270.
This anthology of essays on psychoanalysis were initially published in the
International Journal of Psychoanalysis and have been brought together to give readers
a feel for the ideas, topics, and themes that excited the first Freudians.
The term ‘first Freudians’ comprises those who gathered round Sigmund Freud at
Vienna and elsewhere and functioned collectively as pioneers of a new science of
mind. They also explored the uses and applications of the new science in a range of
disciplinary contexts that are alluded to here.
Their interests and background were varied, but they were all united by a desire to
understand the role that the unconscious plays in the Freudian theory of the subject.
While it may not be possible to summarize the entirety of the concerns raised by
these pioneers in this brief review, I will try and touch upon the most important
areas comprising both the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. The term ‘practice’
here includes both clinical and extra-mural approaches to psychoanalysis.
The areas of concern included Freud’s relationship to the clinical medicine of his
time.
Sándor Ferenczi, the Hungarian psychoanalyst, is mainly preoccupied with ‘Freud’s
influence on medicine’ since psychoanalysis was able to demonstrate that a number
of clinical disorders had a psychological aspect. It was therefore a good idea for
doctors to acquaint themselves with the basics of analytic theory even if they did not
intend to become psychoanalysts.
The most important contribution that psychoanalysis could make in this context was
to make available a theory of the neurotic symptom.
This helped doctors to make sense of not only the aetiology of a number of
psychosomatic disorders, but also the forms of neurotic attachment that patients had

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to their symptoms. So it was not necessarily the case - as many patients maintained -
that they were serious about attaining a cure.
Physicians in a number of areas like gynaecology, paediatrics, and dermatology (in
addition to psychiatry) reported that the psychoanalytic model of the symptom or
theory of the neuroses helped them with their diagnoses in their respective areas of
expertise.
What psychoanalysis reminds doctors everywhere is the importance of treating the
patient rather than the disease, and the fact that what fantasies the patients harbour
about the disease has a role to play in whether or not they will seek a timely cure
from the doctor or find ways of resisting the treatment because of a neurotic need to
suffer (i.e. punish themselves).
Ferenczi also discusses the dynamics of the Freudian clinic with specific reference to
the ‘transference and resistance’ and the manifestations of the unconscious in the
give-and-take between the doctor and the patient.
Freud’s recommendations to physicians practicing psychoanalysis were also useful
to those serving as general practitioners or medical specialists. Ferenczi points out
that that his life as a medical student and as a young doctor would have been a lot
easier if he had been taught the Freudian approach to clinical dynamics early on in
his career.
What was at stake for the pioneers however was not only Freud’s influence on
medicine, but also Freud’s influence on lay analysis.
This is a area that is taken up by Max Eitingon for discussion and was a topic that
was dear to all the early pioneers who felt that the practice of analysis must be
opened up to lay practitioners with a background in the humanistic disciplines.
Making a medical degree a pre-qualification reduced the pool of applicants who

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were in a position to develop the theory, practice, and the institution of
psychoanalysis.
The early Freudians were also open to the investigation of phenomena such as
telepathy and clairvoyance.
Eduard Hitschmann, for instance, argues that these phenomena are projections of
psychic phenomena on to the outer world and that success in predicting or
anticipating the occurrence of such events in the life of the patient can be subject to a
psychoanalytic explanation.
It is therefore important to not dismiss out of hand phenomena that seemed to
border on the occult, but consider whether they could be redefined as attempts to
externalize the forms of intuition and the internal logic of the patient’s unconscious.
The pioneers were interested both in the analysis of adults and those of children.
The main theoretical problem in the analysis of children related to the question of
whether children will manifest the transference in the clinical sense of the term and
on whether children have an unconscious.
If they do, what is required at the level of methodology? Will free-association
suffice? Will children be able to free-associate without resistance?
Are children to be analysed at the level of their unconscious? If so, how will the
analyst access their unconscious? Will it be based on what the children say or what
the children do? What are the meta-psychological implications of analysing
children?
So, for instance, what do we mean by the term ‘repression’ in the case of children?
How do we differentiate between primary and secondary forms of repression in
those who are extremely young?
Do children have all the psychic agencies that have been identified in Freud’s
theories of the psyche? If yes, at what age do these agencies develop into constructs
that can be analysed?
These then are a sample of the questions that are discussed by analysts like Anna
Freud and Melanie Klein who made the analysis of children their main area of
expertise.

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Obviously, there is not much agreement between these analysts and the
disagreements were to lead to institutional schisms later on in the practice of child
analysis. But, what is being foregrounded here are not so much the answers to these
questions about the analysis of children but the importance of these questions
themselves.
There are also essays on the techniques relevant in interpreting dreams.
Karl Abraham for instance is worried about the problem of secondary elaboration.
This pertains to the difference between the dream in the mind of the dreamer and
the actual choice of words or narrative structure that the patient deploys to describe
the dream in detail to the analyst from the couch.
How can the analyst be sure that the patient is describing the dream correctly?
Should the analyst use whatever the patient actually says as the starting point of his
analysis – in terms of the method of free association? Or should he focus on what
was actually dreamt? Which of these approaches will represent the correct approach
to dream analysis?
Abraham points out that encouraging the patient to jot down the dream on waking
up in the middle of the night or early in the morning has not been successful and
that the traditional method of just asking the patient to say whatever comes to his
mind in acts of free association is the best approach to dream interpretation.
Abraham’s essay marshals the reasons for his conclusion on the best way forward in
the context of dream interpretation.

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Paul Federn analyses a specific instance of a common dream – that of flying in terms
of its phallic symbolism. While contemporary analysis of dreams may not follow the
pattern that he is suggesting, his analysis gives us at least a feel for what typical
dream texts were like and how they were treated in analysis.
The remaining essays can be grouped under the following categories: sexuality, ego
psychology, and the metaphysics of psychoanalysis.
The essays on sexuality comprise the role that it plays in the aetiology of the
neuroses by A. A. Brill and on the essential aspects of sado-masochism by Marie
Bonaparte.
There are also reflections on feminine sexuality and the fantasy that women harbour
to be men by Hanns Sachs.
Brill is mainly preoccupied with Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality and the role
that must be attributed to it in the aetiology of the neuroses given the diphasic onset
of sexuality in the human species.
The final set of essays is mainly on ego psychology, the problem of adaptation, and
the concept of health in psychoanalysis including a consideration of the differences
between the psychic agencies of the ego and super-ego within Freud’s structural
theory of the mind.
Ego psychology has become a lot more controversial now (than when it was first
developed in the United States) in the wake of the Lacanian critique, but these essays
by Ernest Jones and Heinz Hartmann will give readers a flavour of what it must
have been like to attempt an incorporation of mainline psychoanalytic theory within
American psychology.
And, finally, the essays by James J. Putnam and Robert Wälder pose philosophical
questions about the metaphysical implications of psychoanalysis and on whether or
not psychoanalytic treatment has consequences for the amount of freedom that is
enjoyed by the subject.

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Can a neurotic really enjoy his freedom even if it were available politically? How
will the discovery of symptomatic constraints in the human mind force us to rethink
what we mean by freedom in the larger sense of the term?
The metaphysical questions inherent in psychoanalysis includes the mind-brain
problem, the inner world-outer world distinction, the physical versus psychological
approaches to theories of mind, the forms of psychic energy that constitute the
libido, etc.
This is one of the best books that have been put together for those who have taken
the trouble to read at least the basic texts of Sigmund Freud and would like to learn
more about who his associates were, why they came together in the context of the
Wednesday society at Vienna, how psychoanalysis spread in Europe and the Anglo-
American world, and why in the light of recent developments like the ‘French Freud’
it is worth going back to consider how the first Freudians set psychoanalysis on its
course as both a form of analysis and as a form of therapy.
Needless to say, this book will also be a useful resource for historians of
psychoanalysis and practitioners of psychoanalysis who will still find that there is
still a lot of material here that is relevant and useful for their purposes.
SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN