Final Analysis by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Author:Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson [Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Memoir
Publisher: Untreed Reads Publishing
Published: 2013-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

ON ENTERING THE INNER CIRCLE

In 1912 Ernest Jones proposed forming “the committee” of six “loyal” and “conservative” analysts who would guard the royal kingdom of psychoanalysis founded by Freud: Sandor Ferenczi, Ernest Jones, Otto Rank, Hans Sachs, Karl Abraham, and Max Eitingon. Freud was thrilled with the idea, and presented each of the palace guards with an engraved antique Greek jewel from his collection, which they mounted into gold rings and thus became, like Frodo in Tolkien’s Lord of the Ring, ring bearers. Freud described the committee as a “secret council composed of the best and most trustworthy among our men.” He wrote to Jones saying that “this committee would have to be strictly secret [his emphasis] in its existence and in its actions.”

Before Freud died, Anna Freud received one of the rings from her father. She, too, kept up the idea of a special group of men (she included no other women) who could be counted upon to guard the sacred flame. Their existence was not public knowledge, but it was known that she always maintained a special relation to a powerful male figure. After the death of her father, the mantle was passed to Ernest Jones, and when he died in 1958, to Willi Hoffer, a Viennese analyst living in London. Upon Hoffer’s death, in 1967, Kurt Eissler became Anna Freud’s closest confidant about matters having to do with the inner workings of psychoanalysis.

For some time I had admired a group of analysts whose scholarship or ideas I found exhilarating: Max Schur and his thoughtful if somewhat tormented Freud Living and Dying; Otto Isakower’s strange papers on vision; the dazzling papers by Siegfried Bernfeld on Freud’s biography (they had been liberally used by Ernest Jones in his three-volume biography); and the quirky, arcane books and brilliant articles of Kurt Eissler, a psychiatrist and analyst, the only one among the four still living and Anna Freud’s confidant.

Kurt Eissler was clearly a member of the inner circle of psychoanalysis. Moreover, he was rumored (falsely, as it turned out) to have been close to Anna Freud’s father as well. There were many rumors circulating about Eissler, who was called the pope of orthodox analysis. He would give no interviews. He would not allow himself to be photographed. He was a hermit.

What was not a legend was that he had started and maintained the Freud Archives, the greatest repository of Freud’s letters in the world, but one whose content was still largely kept secret, and he was the author of many serious and absorbing books about psychoanalysis, published in both German and English, such as the massive two-volume work on Goethe, a book on Leonardo, two on Freud’s troubled and gifted student Viktor Tausk, on Julius von Wagner-Jauregg’s relationship to analysis, on Freud at the University of Vienna, and still another on lay analysis. His views could be eccentric. At the time, I did not think carefully about what these works actually said in relation to my own beliefs, some of which were very different from Eissler’s.

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