Freud without hindsight: reviews of his work, 1893–1939

NORMAN KIELL, Freud without hindsight: reviews of his work, 1893-1939, Madison, Conn., International Universities Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. xvii, 758, $65.00. The history of the reception of Freud's work has long been a matter of discussion. Freud felt deeply isolated in the scientific world up to the first years of this century. But was this feeling in accordance with the facts, or merely his very subjective point of view, as Ellenberger and others have suggested? Contemporary reviews are probably the most important measure of the reception of one's scientific work (others are the number of books sold, academic titles and prices, nowadays perhaps the number of items in the "Science Citation Index", a rather strange instrument for the evaluation of one's work). The purpose of Kiell's book is to present an exhaustive bibliography of reviews on Freud's works and to reprint a representative sample of them (mostly difficult to obtain) for the English-speaking world. Nothing similar, apart from a collection of 17 reviews of the Interpretation of Dreams edited by Gerd Kimmerle, has been published before (Freuds Traumdeutung. Fruhe Rezensionen 1899-1903, Tiubingen, Edition Diskord, 1986). The bibliography presented by Kiell contains some 800 reviews, divided into four categories: Books, Collections, Shorter Writings, and Letters. Presenting such exhaustive material is, of course, complex and difficult, and some compromises are unavoidable. Kiell omits the titles of the original reviews. This sometimes makes it hard to identify the reviewed work, for example among the reviews of Freud's Sammiung kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, or those of some shorter papers (pp. 737-41). In further editions the reviewed work of Freud should be marked, for example in the style of the new bibliography by Ingeborg Meyer-Palmedo and Gerhard Fichtner (Freud-Bibliographie mit Werkkonkordanz, Frankfurt, S. Fischer, 1989). Although the bibliography is not the main purpose of the book, the question arises as to what extent Kiell has really traced the review material. No one would pretend to have found every review ever written on a work of Freud's. G. Fichtner in Tubingen has been collecting Freud reviews for a number of years without making systematic efforts at such a project. His collection (which, unlike Kiell's, includes "pre-analytic" works) contains about 1,064 reviews. A comparison of the reviews of the Interpretation of Dreams shows that Kiell lists 66 reviews, Fichtner 119, including 40 of those listed by Kiell. So Fichtner missed 26 of Kiell's reviews, and Kiell missed 79 of Fichtner's. Kiell lays some stress on the English-speaking world, while Fichtner more broadly catches German-language reviews. The picture may be a bit different for other works of Freud, but this example shows the problem. Kiell reprints on 666 pages a sample of 172 reviews of 39 works by Freud, of which 78 appeared in English and 89 have been translated from the German and a few from French. All were written during Freud's lifetime, while the bibliography contains also reviews written after Freud's death. Each review has a short biographical introduction about the reviewer and the context of the review, as well as about Freud's reception of the review, if known. Those introductions, although not always without errors, are very welcome, for Freud's reaction to some reviews is of great importance. Of course the author of a reviewed book has a subjective point of view. But very often he knows best if a review has really caught the essentials of his publication or not. Freud had a feeling for this, since he himself was an experienced reviewer (more than 70 reviews by Freud have been located: F. G. Fichtner, 'Unbekannte Arbeiten von Freud-Schatze im Keller', Med. hist. J., 1987, 22: 246-62). In the book's 28-page introduction, Kiell usefully reflects on methodology, as well as the problems that arise in translating Freud-or reviews of Freud. In an overview of earlier research on the reviews of Freud's work he tries to re-evaluate how authors like Bry and Rifkin, Ellenberger and Decker rated reviews ofthe Interpretation ofDreams, sometimes correcting their opinion: the early reviews are much less favourable than they thought. Freud was quite right to feel isolated, misunderstood, and ignored in the years after the publication of his magnum opus. A book like this can hardly be without mistakes. There are, however, a few avoidable errors, for example on page 9, when Kiell mentions Freud's phantasy of an inscription about the revelation of the secret ofdreams, which was not on the wall of Berggasse 19 but on the Cobenzl, a hill near Vienna, where Freud dreamt his famous Irma-dream in the villa "Bellevue". An even more important example: review 27 was not written by Friedrich Eckstein, but by his sister