Sigmund Freud - Die Frage der Laienanalyse. Unterredungen mit einem Unparteiischen. - 1926

FREUD (Sigm.). The Question of Lay Analysis. Conversations with an Impartial Interlocutor. Leipzig, Vienna, Zürich, International Psychoanalytic Press, 1926. 8vo, 123 p., [9] p. (catalogue), yellow cloth binding with the publisher’s name printed in black on the front board and spine.

Original edition on wove paper.

Freud (1856-1939) defends, in the form of a dialogue with an imaginary impartial interlocutor, the right of non-physicians to practice psychoanalysis, against regulatory attempts, notably in the United States, to reserve the practice to the medical profession only. Written following the complaint filed against Theodor Reik in Vienna, the text develops a definition of the cure by words freed from any medical technique and asserts the international vocation of the psychoanalytic movement.

This copy, lacking a dust jacket, is annotated throughout in the same hand that signed and commented, the same year, the copy of Die Zukunft einer Illusion also presented on Catawiki: passages underlined in pencil, and in the margins, on almost every page, a commentary or a translation into Russian of Freud’s argument (thus, about the absence of authority in psychology: “нет общего фундамента […] отсутствие авторитета,” or, noting the idea that every philosopher, poet and historian forges his own psychology: “каждый философ, поэт, историк и биограф создает свою психологию”). The reader also notes critical echoes, such as the remark about American social workers and the risk of Europe being surpassed by a psychoanalysis imported from America, annotated in the margin of a brief comment.

No signature or date appears on this copy, but the consistency of the handwriting, the critical vocabulary used, and the reading method (underlinings followed by a gloss translation into Russian) allow nearly certain attribution to the same owner as the signed copy of Die Zukunft einer Illusion by Victor Walter, a Russian-speaking reader in Paris, eager to translate and discuss as closely as possible the German text of Freud’s publications.

Yellowed cloth, other flaws are minor.

(Grinstein, I, 595).