The Real Freud Revealed

Nov 25, 2011 - John Kerr - The Book Beast

A long-lost memoir by one of Freud’s disciples has recently been published and reveals a man full of dark contradictions. John Kerr, who authored the book on which the film A Dangerous Method is based, explores this story.


('Recollecting Freud' by Isidor Sadger. Edited by Alan Dundes. 196 pages. University of Wisconsin. $26.95)


This the book that Sigmund Freud didn’t want you to read. It was written by one of Freud’s most faithful and dogged Viennese followers, Isidor Sadger. So great and effective was the opposition of Freud and his intimates, however, that the book never appeared in public view. Historical scholarship had it that the book was never published. Historical legend had it that the book was published, sometime in the early 1930s, but that Freud’s cronies somehow managed to buy up every copy.Any way you looked at it, this is the book that appeared not to exist.Except it did exist. And now, astonishingly, one can read it—80 years later.

The story behind the discovery of an actual copy of Sadger’s Recollecting Freud is as odd as the story of its suppression. Alan Dundes, a professor of anthropology and folklore at Berkeley, spotted the title in a bibliography of Sadger’s work. Out of curiosity, and apparently in total innocence, Dundes put in a request on interlibrary loan. Nothing. So he expanded the search to international library loan, and lo and behold, Keio University in Tokyo admitted to having a copy. In the wake of Dundes’s discovery, Leo Lensing of the Times Literary Supplement found a second copy in an archive at the Israeli National Library, and a lovingly prepared German edition, edited and annotated by Andrea Huppke and Michael Schröter, followed in short order.

Full story at The Book Beast.