Cultural transfer

1The concept of cultural transfer emerged in the mid-1980s, when Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, dissatisfied with comparative methods, developed an alternative to study the exchange of cultural goods between apparently heterogenous spheres.1 Comparative studies, Espagne and Werner argued, assume distinct identities on either side of the reception process. To compare two objects — two cultures, two creative individuals or two works — is to juxtapose them, as we can only compare things that are clearly separate. Every comparison highlights differences before it turns to points of convergence. It privileges aspects that seem particular to a given culture while overlooking the heterogeneity of the two entities being compared. The comparative method also implies cultural hierarchies. When we pin down the influence of one writer or culture on another we make unspoken assumptions about the receiving part’s inferiority, and we introduce the question of faithfulness towards the model. Espagne and Werner propose instead to think about the historical and material conditions that affect the circulation of ideas and cultural goods. Their focus is on how cultures import and assimilate behaviours, texts, forms, values and styles of thinking.

2The theory of cultural transfer is particularly well suited when it comes to studying several national spheres side by side. Rather than juxtaposing individual cultures, it enables us to identify various forms of cultural “cross-breeding” (métissage) as well as ways in which cultures are never self-sufficient. We step outside the national framework and explore cultural spheres (aires culturelles) and the episodes in which they come together. Our chronological framework need not be defined by historical turning points; instead it might spotlight key events in the process of cultures permeating one another –– waves of migration, the role of a leader and other trends or moments that might otherwise seem insignificant. There is nothing teleological about this perspective. The history of transfer is always discontinuous, interrupted. Intervals of intense contact and exchange are followed by periods of inactivity. By studying transfer we ask what conditions in the receiving culture determine the moment and manner of reception, but we also identify places of resistance; we study the openness to transfer and the continuity of traditions that oppose it. For Espagne and Werner, the actual object of transfer is less important than the conditions enabling it. They explore why one group might desire to export certain cultural contents while another group is ready to import them. This situation, Espagne and Werner suggest, indicates a deficit on the part of the receiving culture, a certain openness towards input from outside. Moreover, the question of what aspects of an original message will be transferred and how they will be understood or used depends not so much on its message or content but rather the preexisting system in which the new element comes to occupy a vacant place.

3The notion of transfer is borrowed from economics, which is why we speak about the import and export of ideas or the economic situation of reception. In French, transfert also signifies the physical displacement of an object in space, from one place to another, suggesting the actual necessity of transporting people and things. The method emphasises the sort of cultural trafficking, the “fencing” of ideas across geographical, cultural, linguistic or symbolic borders. Espagne and Werner highlight the vehicles of cultural transfer –– human vehicles as well as institutional or material ones. Their focus is on social practices and intercultural exchanges, not on their objects. This approach means that no trace can seem too banal or be ignored. Researchers of cultural transfer are interested in microhistorical phenomena, in contacts that can be sporadic, in personal encounters between individuals, in the fate of a particular copy of a given book, in letters, little notes and administrative documents. The first pieces of evidence of transfer lie not in works of literature, though comparative studies might give that impression. More often than not, individuals begin to exchange information and to form networks long before such works can appear. These networks can be private circles or any other groups that have a functioning form of circulation or exchange. A network of this kind must exist before a work — i.e. a concrete cultural product –– can come into being.

4The initial working title of my project was “The Reception of Psycho|analysis in Polish Literature and Culture before 1939,” but I soon realised that such a perspective entailed unsolvable difficulties. Thanks to Espagne and Werner’s method I was able to avoid the pitfalls of two seemingly straightforward and unproblematic terms –– “reception” and “Polish culture”.

5Above all, this method made me aware of the limitations of reception as a model. Instead of studying finished artefacts and trying to deduce how their creators might have read Freud, I decided to turn the question around and think about how Freudian theory was able to reach Polish creative circles and what material conditions facilitated its reception.

6Focusing on transfer freed me from having to see a precursor of Freud in every writer who mentioned unconscious phenomena before Freud had formulated his theory or before the writer in question could have heard about it. This method also helped me tackle the problem of literary works drawing on a web of many different inspirations. The effort of extracting Freudian elements here, while neglecting the influence of Bergson, Nietzsche or some other version of Lebensphilosophie, struck me as both unproductive and impracticable.2

7It is worth keeping in mind –– and I will return to this point in more detail shortly –– that psychoanalysis was very slow to gain followers – or even just an audience at all. The first edition of Freud’s Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) had a print run of no more than 600 copies and took eight years to sell; only 123 copies were bought in the first year. As Frederick J. Hoffman points out in his study Freudianism and the Literary Mind (1945), the medical establishment was weary of psycho|analysis and took about ten years until it gingerly came to accept it.3 Another ten years passed before the wider public –– including writers and artists –– became interested in Freudian theory. Hoffman suggests that Freud’s impact on literature was implicit rather than explicit.4 Globally, few writers were comfortably able to read Freud’s works in the original German, and most of those who were interested would have reached for a translation. Most frequently, however, yet another person would join the chain, namely the writer of a popular handbook or article. Ideally this would have been one of Freud’s non-German students, working to publicise the master’s theory at home. The vast majority of creatives, however, would have encountered Freudian theory in the context of a social gathering. These would have been piecemeal accounts by persons whose acquaintance with psychoanalysis was also second-hand at best. Naturally, each of these intermediaries, beginning with the translator, would rework Freud’s theories according to their own needs. Like in a broken telephone game, the message about psychoanalysis that reached the writer at the far end of such a chain was reduced to a handful of the most recognisable elements. Few writers in the interwar period had an actual understanding of Freud’s works. Most filled the gaps with their own conjectures.

8We have a similar situation in the field of Polish literature. We can assume that Galician writers such as Karol Irzykowski and Bruno Schulz had unmediated access to Freud’s works. Witold Gombrowicz only read Freud’s Introduction to Psychoanalysis when a Polish translation appeared. Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (known as Witkacy) read parts of the book but did not finish; what he knew about psychoanalysis, or rather how he imagined it, came from his friend, the self-proclaimed psychoanalyst Karol de Beaurain. Most writers belonged to Hoffman’s last group, learning about Freud en passant, in a coffeehouse or theatre or from their favourite weekly magazine. In an account that mirrors Hoffman’s, the historian of Polish literature Stanisław Burkot points out that among Polish writers “it was very much the fashion to describe complexes, types of psycho|pathology, the emergence and development of the libidinal drive, but –– instead of actual discoveries –– the result was an overwhelming amount of conventional schemes”.5 In most works of literature allegedly inspired by Freudianism, psychoanalytical themes boil down to an illustration of basic concepts. The most fascinating literary effects appear where writers used their superficial knowledge of Freud’s work as a point of departure in creating their own unique aesthetic concepts. This, however, is explicitly not the subject of this book.

9In the study of transfer, our work ends at the point where it would have begun if we were to examine reception in the strict sense. Reception indicates that a cultural transfer ought to be seen as complete. In this book I do not explore the simple fact that psychoanalysis was popular in the late interwar period. I am interested in the process, beginning with the very birth of psychoanalysis, that allowed for the Introduction to Psychoanalysis to be read across Warsaw in the late 1930s, while Antoni Cwojdziński’s play Freuda teoria snów (Freud’s Theory of Dreams) became a box office hit. In other words, Polish culture is not my point of departure, nor do I examine what foreign ideas reached Poland or how they were assimilated. Inverting this relationship I zoom in on Freud and his earliest proponents. I am interested in the paths along which his theories were disseminated, not their reception. Above all, my goal is to turn the spotlight on the key figures and their efforts in this cultural transfer.

10Opting for Espagne and Werner’s method I was inspired to rethink my project’s national framework. Initially I had intended to identify Poles in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and to write about “the Polish Freud|ians”. But tracking down micro-traces of my protagonists’ lives and work in archives across linguistic and national borders, I was soon forced to ask if my proposed object of study could even be found at all, or if it was merely a creation of my own quest. After all, Poland had ceased to exist as a nation in the late eighteenth century, when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned by the Russian, German and Austrian Empires; Poland was only reborn after World War I, when the Second Polish Republic was established. Throughout the nineteenth century and until 1918, therefore, the borders of “Polish culture” can only be drawn arbitrarily, and the national identity of those who contributed to its development is a very tricky question. The fact is that the key individuals presented in this book were all Jewish citizens of Austria or Russia born in formerly Polish territories.

11Looking up early psychoanalysts from East-Central Europe in major international biographical dictionaries on psychoanalysis I was astounded to find that these reference works do not go to the trouble of defining the criteria by which they identify a person’s national belonging, so that the early psychoanalysts from East-Central Europe are allotted a nationality based on editors’ and contributors’ arbitrary decisions. A few examples to illustrate this confusion: In the International Dictionary of Psychoan|alysis6 an entry on “Poland” mentions Ludwig Jekels, Hermann Nunberg, Gustav Bychowski and Eugenia Sokolnicka. The biographical entries on those individuals, however, present a rather confused situation: Ludwig Jekels is said to be “an Austrian psychiatrist” born in “Lemberg, Austria, now L'viv, Ukraine”. Siegfried Bernfeld is given the same nationality (“an Austrian”, born “in Lemberg, the capital city of Galicia”), with no connection to Poland being mentioned at all. Individuals born in parts annexed by Imperial Russia or the Habsburg Empire are also described as unequivocally Polish. This is the case with Warsaw-born Eugenia Sokol|nicka, who is described as a “Polish psychoanalyst,” as well as Berta Born|stein, born in “the Austro-Hungarian city of Krakau (today Kraków, Poland)” and Helene Deutsch from “Przemysl, Poland”. Similarly, Her|mann Nunberg, who was born in the city of Będzin in the Kingdom of Poland, is said to be a native of “Będzin, Poland”. The case of two Freudians from the city of Nowy Sącz, which became part of the Habsburg Empire even before the partition of Poland, is particularly interesting. Isidor Sadger, born in 1867, is identified as Austrian, while Beata Rank, born thirty years later, is described as Polish. The geopolitical status of Nowy Sącz had not changed in the meantime.

12In the French Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse,7 which has no entry on Poland, the individual Freudians’ nationality apparently depends on the contributors’ fortuitous understanding of historical geography. We find absurdities such as the description of Sadger as an Austrian psychoanalyst born in “Nowy Sącz in Galicia, a Polish province annexed by Imperial Russia”. Similarly, Hermann Nunberg is said to have been born in “Brendzin [sic],” falsely described as a town in Galicia, which is also falsely identified as part of Russia. Helene Deutsch, though her birthplace is listed as the Polish city of Przemyśl, is identified as an American psycho|analyst –– as are the Varsovian Gustav Bychowski and Siegfried Bernfeld, the Austrian psychologist and educator born in Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine). Salomea Kempner is identified as German (though “born in Płock, Poland”), while Eugenia Sokolnicka becomes a French psycho|analyst. To complete the confusion, the German neurologist Johannes Marcinowski, born in 1868, acquires Polish roots when he is said to be a native of “Breslau, Poland”.

13In the most important reference work on the history of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (VPS), the German Biographisches Lexikon der Psy|choanalyse: Die Mitglieder der Psychologischen Mittwoch-Gesellschaft und der Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung 1902–1938,8 Elke Mühlleitner identifies only Beata Rank, Eugenia Sokolnicka, Salomea Kempner and Gustav Bychowski as Polish. In other cases she opts for a compromise solution. Thus individuals born in Lemberg/Lviv (Ludwig Jekels and Siegfried Bernfeld), Oświęcim (Salomea Gutmann) or Przemyśl (Helene Deutsch) are simply identified as Galicians (but so is Hermann Nunberg from Będzin, which was not in Galicia but in the Kingdom of Poland).9 The lexicon also confers a Galician identity to Edward Bibring and Max Schur, who were both born in Stanisławów (now Iwano-Frankiwsk in Ukraine), David Josef Bach, Edward Kronengold and Jenny Wälder, née Pollak, from Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine), Edmund Bergler from Kolo|myia, Ludwig Eidelberg from Złoczów (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), Wilhelm Reich from Dobrzanica (now Dobrianychi, Ukraine), Józef Reinhold from Stryj (now Stryi, Ukraine) as well as Berta Grünspan, born in a place listed as “Niedzybrodrie” (meaning, perhaps, Międzybrodzie).

14Other minor sources propose different alternatives. In the index of Laura Fermi’s study Illustrious Immigrants, Siegfried Bernfeld, Berta Bornstein and Beata Rank are identified as Polish, while Ludwig Jekels, though born in Lemberg/Lviv like Bernfeld, is described as Austrian.10 Eugenia Sokolnicka, most often presented as a French psychoanalyst, occasionally appears as Czech.11 The Polish historian of psychology Cezary Domański discusses the national identity of members “from the Polish territories” who joined the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (henceforth VPS). Having identified nineteen individuals from Galicia and four from the Kingdom of Poland, he classifies them according to their “relationship to their place of origin”.12 He concludes that Ludwig Jekels, Hermann Nunberg, Gustav Bychowski, Beata Rank, Helene Deutsch, Eugenia Sokolnicka, Salomea Kempner and Józef Reinhold had a strong sense of Polishness, while David Josef Bach, Edmund Bergler, Siegfried Bernfeld, Edward Bibring, Stephanie and Berta Bornstein, Bernhard Dattner, Ludwig Eidelberg, Berta Grünspan, Salomea Gutmann-Isakower, Edward Kronengold, Wilhelm Reich, Isidor Isaak Sadger, Max Schur and Jenny Pollak-Wälder did not identify as Polish. Unfortunately we never learn on what criteria this distinction was based.

15It is noteworthy that although many VPS members were born in today’s Ukraine, researchers there lay no claims to the Freudians being recognised as Ukrainian. This seems due to the fact that the Western Ukrainian intelligentsia was mostly rooted in the Greek-Catholic clergy, which makes it difficult to imagine the assimilation of Jews into Ukrainian culture; what is more, Ukrainian identity was formed by rejecting the patronage of the Empire: at the turn of the century, a person who iden|tified as Ukrainian could not at the same time travel to Vienna to study medicine and to join Freud’s circle.13 Ukrainian historians have laid claim only to one person, namely Moshe Wulff, a native of Odesa who became a pioneer of psychoanalysis in Russia and later Palestine. Wulff was not from Galicia (i.e. West-Ukraine) but from East Ukraine, which at that time belonged to the Russian Empire. He was assimilated to Russian cul|ture and wrote in Russian, not Ukrainian. His works were included in anthologies published in Ukraine in 199614 and in Russia in 1999.15 A summary of the debate about Wulff’s identity is presented by his bio|grapher, Ruth Kloocke. Symptomatically, the title of the first chapter of her book juxtaposes different variants of her protagonist’s name, all used by himself: Moses Wulf – Moissey Wulf – Mosche Wulff – Moshe Woolf.16

16In this project, I refrained from referring to an individual sense of national identity from the outset.17 Initially, however, I did entertain the idea that a person’s use of the Polish language could be a deciding factor. In her study on Polish women students at the University of Vienna, Jadwiga Suchmiel restricts her cohort to women who listed Polish as their mother tongue on enrolment.18 In the case of the Freudians, however, no such questionnaire exists. Few of them used Polish in their writings or translations. Helene Deutsch is the only one whose autobiography thematises her childhood and the atmosphere in her parents’ home; Jekels and Sadger begin their accounts with the moment they met Freud, attributing no significance at all to the preceding phase of their lives. The other protagonists have not left us even that. Attempts to claim the earliest Freudians for Polish culture are destined to fail, as research questions phrased in such a way must inevitably lead to irresolvable contradictions. The biographical entries on the protagonists of this study found in various reference works clearly suggest that neither a person’s place of birth nor their education nor their mother tongue, and certainly not some elusive “sense of national belonging” can be seen as an indicator of their Polishness. The Polish identity of Ludwig Jewels or Helene Deutsch will always be a construct imposed by researchers whose archival findings con|firm exactly what they had been looking for.19 It seems more productive to look for Freudians who contributed – even in the smallest way – to the transfer of psychoanalysis into Polish culture. This approach allows us to focus not on their identity but on their actions, which may or may not corroborate that identity.

17Besides the method of cultural transfer, I was also inspired by Moshe Rosman’s book How Jewish is Jewish History?, which can be described as a meta history of multiculturalism.20 Rosman points out that Jewish culture has been studied either in complete isolation from the countries and cultures in which the Jews lived, or in close correlation. He proposes a fusion of these two perspectives. In the book’s Polish edition Rosman stresses that geography ought to play a key role in the rewriting of Jewish history: “In the past, Jewish history was written as if the Jews’ geographical diversity was accidental and subordinate to their cultural unity. Not so long ago, Jewish geography was defined by the boundaries of political geography, which was considered binding.”21 But “the geographies of Jewish economic and cultural ties can break the rigid classification of Jewish history in relation to the history of nation states […], they can force researchers to adopt a broader perspective and open up the field for new studies and new conceptualisations” (ibid.). Rosman argues that “the cultural interrelationship is fluid and requires description at various points of contact rather than one all-embracing characterisation”.22 Eugenia Prokop-Janiec successfully uses this approach in her study of the over|lapping of Polish and Jewish culture. Rejecting the idea of an “insular” Jewish culture in Poland, she foregrounds groups and individuals who transgressed cultural boundaries, thus facilitating cultural exchange.23

18My thinking about the cultural transfer of Freudian theory is also rooted in the concept of transnational modernism. Based on a critical ap|proach to the very idea of the nation, this paradigm also positions space as fundamental to thinking about modernism.24 I am inspired by the “topo|graphical turn’25 as well as studies on Central-European modernism.26 The story I tell here is one of those that remain invisible from the per|spective of “the national history of culture”. This traditional approach struggles to make sense of texts written in a language other than the official one, with works produced outside a group’s ethnic home territory or by those excluded from the national community. Stories like these always exist within mainstream culture, they are only waiting to be brought to light.27

19Just as I decided to disregard the question of my protagonists’ sense of national identity, I also gave up trying to define the limits of “Polish culture”. My goal, to be precise, is to study the transfer of psychoanalysis not into Polish culture but into the Polish intelligentsia.28 Given that all the leading characters in this book are Jewish it is also worth bearing in mind that in the period in question assimilated Jews constituted a large proportion of new recruits into this social class.29 Most importantly, however, I agree with Denis Sdvižkov that the history of the educated classes, especially in the nineteenth century, is a transnational one:

The intelligentsia marked a unique space with its own temporal relation|ships and unique cross-connections. It is utterly astonishing with what unbelievable ease such a thin layer was able to spread across the entire continent, especially when we consider the temporal, spacial and cultural gaps across which it stretched – gaps that would become prominent in the age of extremes.30

20Europe’s educated classes have always had remarkable mobility. People were generally ready to move for professional reasons. Studies abroad, research visits as well as educational and recreational travel were an integral part of the intelligentsia’s lifestyle. In addition, the multilingualism, broad overlaps in the literary canon and far-reaching compatibility of education systems all favoured interaction across cultures. Cultural transfer also thrived thanks to an extensive network of personal contacts, as well as new media, especially the press. For Sdvižkov, “the history of the intelligentsia is quite unthinkable without entanglement, so much so that it cannot be written as a anything but a “history of mutual relations” [Relationsgeschichte]. National dividing lines only have the effect of an imagined dis-unity” (p. 231).

21If this is generally true for all of Europe’s intelligentsia then it is particularly so in the case of Poland, which had a national intelligentsia without a state. At the turn of the century, the intelligentsia was estimated to include no more than some one hundred and fifty thousand people across the three partitioning powers.31 And yet this small group managed to establish a new cultural paradigm to replace that of the dominating noble class or szlachta. As Stefan Żółkiewski has argued, what we know as culture in the “Polish lands” in the period of 1890 to1939 (which is the period covered in this study) was in fact the culture of the intelligentsia, and Poland’s culture today is largely its heir.32 The establishment of a national public sphere was possible thanks to a dense web of social connections across the three partitions. Encounters at confer|ences, congresses or through professional associations were as important as informal bonds, such as personal and family ties, romantic attachments and friendships. Personal relationships can be traced across the partitioned territories and beyond, to forced exiles and émigrés. As Sdvižkov writes, in the case of the Polish intelligentsia we could say that “retrospectively, the sociability of this class has gained a significance that pertains to the nation in general and to universal history”.33 In partitioned Poland, the structures that sociologists call social networks (or réseaux de sociabilité in French34) also functioned as substitutes for a central government by engaging in educational work and philanthropic organisations, by running the press, credit unions and many other community support schemes and orga|nisations. As Żółkiewski points out, it was during public lectures and debates, in clubs and societies and even at the coffeehouses that “faute de mieux, public opinion was formed, for in an authoritarian regime these were best suited for [Polish] society to undertake its own initiative”.35

22I fully agree with Danuta Danek, who, discussing Gustav Bychowski, argues that “the early fascination with psychoanalysis in Poland should also be seen as part of the history of the Polish intelligentsia, which was engaged in social causes and strove for lofty social ideals”.36 The present book discusses how some members of this group were drawn to Freud’s theories and how they furthered the transfer of psychoanalysis into their own cultural sphere. It is not without significance in this context that the term “transfer” has a psychoanalytic connotation, bringing to mind the concept of “transference.” This English equivalent of Freud’s Übertragung describes the tension that arrises between the patient who actualises their unconscious desires rooted in childhood conflicts, and the analyst, who responds with counter-transference (Gegenübertragung). The occurrence of transfer is an expression of resistance, but in a therapeutic context it becomes a powerful tool. We could say that the subject of this book is not only the transfer of Freud’s theories “into” Polish culture but also its “transference” onto it.

The field of psychoanalysis

23In this book I deal with three kinds of cultural transfer: from the narrow circle of Freud’s colleagues in Vienna to Polish medical circles, from the German language to Polish, and, above all, from the field of science into the field of culture.

24I use the term “field” in the sense proposed by Pierre Bourdieu in The Rules of Art. The “field” thus refers to a clearly defined segment of the social sphere, where individuals or institutions compete for the same values. For Bourdieu it is “a force-field acting on those who enter it, and acting in a differential manner according to the position they occupy there,” but it is also “a field of competitive struggles which tend to conserve or transform this force-field”.37 The accumulation and exchange of different forms of capital (economic, cultural, symbolic capital) are tools in the struggles or games that occur in a given field, and these struggles or games allow social actors to take up and strengthen their position.

Their trajectories will be determined by the relation between the forces of the field and their own inertia. This inertia is inscribed on the one hand in the dispositions they owe to their origins and to their trajectories, and which imply a tendency to preserve in a manner of being, and thus a probable trajectory, and on the other in the capital they have inherited, and which contributes to defining the possibilities and the impossibilities which the field assigns them. (pp. 9-10)

25According to Bourdieu, new fields come into being as a result of growing autonomy and differentiation. The “field effect” arises through a critical rejection of the dominance of the powers structuring social practices, or indeed through confrontation with those powers. And yet the most important task of the newly emerging field is to define and secure its own boundaries, and no arbitrary act will suffice to establish those boundaries. The subjects constituting the field will become points of reference for one another; they must define each other, form a web of interdependencies and codify the rules of the game particular to their field. To maintain the field’s complete autonomy – a situation in which all external factors are suppressed – the actors in this field must exert a constant effort. They must be ready at all times to uphold their conviction that a given practice is meaningful.38 Furthermore, the actors and institutions in the field must be able to transpose external forces to their field’s inherent logic, but without reformulating their basic goals, in order to propose to the active subjects a legitimate way of realising their desires (pp. 228-229). The emerging field cannot achieve autonomy

unless […] the specific nomos which constitutes the […] order as such finds itself instituted both in the objective structures of a socially governed universe and in the mental structures of those who inhabit it and who tend by this fact to accept as evident the injunctions inscribed in the immanent logic of its functioning (p. 61).

26Bourdieu stresses that “the out-of-ordinary acts of prophetic rupture that the founding heroes must carry out in fact work to create the conditions necessary for making the heroes and heroism of these beginnings redundant” (p. 68). In a field characterised by a high degree of autonomy and self-awareness, mechanisms of competition will arise and pit those who have managed to attain an important position (and who are therefore most likely to come to an understanding with the world outside the field, tempted by the immediate reward of honours bestowed on them) against “the newly arrived, who by their position are less subject to solicitations of the outside world, and who tend to contest established authorities in the name of values […] which the latter proclaim, or are called on to impose” (p. 68). Such mechanisms result in some subjects in the field calling for order and sanctions: “the most terrible of which is discredit, the exact equivalent of an excommunication or a bankruptcy” (p. 68). These sanctions are most acutely felt by those players who allude to the powers outside the field. For Bourdieu, internal conflicts take the form of a battle for definitions. The stakes of this battle are the field’s boundaries and, consequently, its hierarchies:

Each is trying to impose the boundaries of the field most favourable to its interests or – which amounts to the same thing – the best definition of conditions of true membership of the field […] for justifying its existence as it stands. (p. 223)

27The process of defining a field is “the product of a long series of exclusions and excommunications” (p. 224), and it is this process that in the final analysis allows the field to be “constituted as such and which, accordingly, defines the right to entry into the field” (p. 223).

28Psychoanalysis initially fought for recognition in the fields of science and medicine –– a highly institutionalised sphere with codified rules of entry and assessment criteria. Freud did his utmost to conform to those rules, but the forces dictating the conditions within those fields, the forces that defined the range of permissible activities, worked to push him out. He responded by organising his own social practices, thus establishing a new field that functioned according to its own principles, which would become more and more codified over time. His efforts were undermined from within and from without. On the one hand, it seems that for successive dissidents of psychoanalysis, “the rules of the game [were] being played for in the playing of the game” (p. 226). On the other hand, the establishment of psychoanalysis as an independent field was threatened by members of the field of literature, to which psychoanalysis had turned when no recognition was forthcoming from the field of science. The danger in this case was not criticism but excessive support, which under|mined the emerging discipline’s independence and eventually led to its absorption into the established field.

29The history of psychoanalysis can be described in terms of its gradual departure from medicine, its attempt to construct and defend its own field, and its final settling down in the field of culture. It is worth keeping in mind the key moments in this process, as I shall return to them in later parts of this book.

30At the beginning of his career Freud was a neurologist interested in the anatomy of the nervous system. He hoped to move up the academic ladder in the established field of medicine. The period from the mid-1880s (when he studied in Paris on a fellowship) until the mid-1890s (the publication of Studies on Hysteria) can be seen as a mere prologue to what would later become psychoanalysis.39 Freud’s first use of the term “psychoanalysis” can be dated to 1896. It appears in two articles – one in French (“L’hérédité et l’étiologie des névroses”) and one in German (“Weitere Bemerkungen über die Abwehr-Psychoneurosen”) – to describe Freud’s unique therapeutic method.

31Creating his own theory of nervous illnesses, Freud not only changed his specialisation, moving from neurology to psychiatry or psychotherapy. He also challenged the authorities in his newly chosen field by questioning the hereditary nature of neurosis; he proposed a different aetiology instead: hysteria, but also obsession and paranoia, were rooted in traumatic child|hood experiences; these experiences, which were sexual in nature, were repressed from consciousness and later returned as symptoms. The publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (postdated to 1900) marks the birth of psychoanalysis as a discipline, as the term begins to signify not just a technique but metonymically comes to stand for an entire theory based on the use of this method. The moment when Freud was joined by his earliest disciples can be seen as the birth of the psychoanalytic movement. Freud had worked on his own until 1900. In 1902, Wilhelm Stekel, who had just completed his therapy with Freud, arranged for the earliest supporters of psychoanalysis to come together in Freud’s apartment at Berggasse 19 every Wednesday evening. Besides Stekel these were Alfred Adler, Max Kahane and Rudolf Reitler, all of them Jewish doctors about ten years younger than Freud. The group grew through co-optation, as regular participants introduced others over the next few years. At that time Freud had no ambition yet to spread his ideas more broadly or to become actively involved in attracting new members. No one took attendance or minutes at those meetings until 1906, when Otto Rank, the first Freudian who had no medical training, was appointed secretary of what was now called the Wednesday Psychological Society (Psychologische Mittwoch-Gesellschaft). In April 1908 the group was renamed Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung), which suggests that Freu|dian theory was taking its first steps towards institutionalisation. Still, the organisation, which now counted about twenty members, resem|bled the philosophical or artistic circles popular in Vienna’s coffeehouses more than a traditional scientific institution.

32A shift came about in 1907, when Swiss psychiatrists at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital of the University of Zürich began to take an interest in psychoanalysis. This was the beginning of the method’s international popularity, the earliest expression of a fascination with psychoanalysis outside the Habsburg Monarchy, and – which was not without signi|ficance for Freud – in non-Jewish circles. It was thanks to Eugen Bleuler, director of Burghölzli, and his assistant Carl Gustav Jung that more and more international associates of psychoanalysis made their way to Vienna, including Karl Abraham from Germany, Ernest Jones from the United Kingdom, Nokolai Osipov from Russia and Abraham Arden Brill from the United States. Another important event was Freud’s journey to the United States in the autumn of 1909. Accompanied by Jung and their Hungarian colleague Sándor Ferenczi, he travelled to Worcester, Massachusetts, to receive an honorary doctorate from Clark University.

33Earlier, in April 1908, forty-two Freudians came together at the first International Psychoanalytical Congress in Salzburg, Austria-Hungary. Realising that they needed to free themselves of the gate-keepers of the medical sciences, they decided to establish their own specialist publi|cations, which would make them independent of peer reviews by non-psychoanalysts. Jung assumed responsibility for the Jahrbuch für psycho|analytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, which was published in Vienna and Leipzig by Franz Deuticke, a scientific and medical publishing company where Freud had published several works (i.e. the German originals of The Interpretation of Dreams, Three Essays on the Theory of Sex|uality, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious). Wilhelm Stekel and Alfred Adler founded the monthly Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, published by J. F. Bergmann in Wiesbaden (Freud’s German original of On Dreams had appeared as part of J. F. Bergmann’s series “Grenzfragen des Nerven-und Seelenlebens” in 1902; the press also issued books by neurologists such as Leopold Loewenfeld and psychiatrists such as Ferdinand Probst, Ernst Jentsch and Paul Möbius).

34We might agree with Sándor Ferenczi’s observation, in 1910, that the psychoanalytic movement had gone through two phases: first the heroic phase, where Freud struggled with the disfavour of academic medicine and produced his works in relative isolation, and then the warlike phase, where associates from Vienna and Zurich were at loggerheads about his theories. At the time of writing, Ferenczi noted, a new era was dawning, namely the organisational phase in which psychoanalysis would become institution|alised.40 It was in 1910-19 that the movement became international, with local groups and internal subdivisions.

35As early as 1910, the meetings of the VPS were moved from Freud’s apartment to Café Korb; two years later they moved to the Medizinisches Doktorenkollegium. In the memoirs of Freud’s earliest students, the group’s relocation marked a turning point in the history of the movement, ending the “age of innocence” and ushering in personal conflicts and power struggles. Besides the VPS gatherings, Freud’s associates also met at his Saturday evening lectures. This was one of the ways in which Freud propagated his theories among broader audiences. The Viennese satirist Karl Kraus, for instance, attended these lectures in 1905. It was not until World War I, however, that Freud gave his most popular lecture series, “Introduction to Psychoanalysis”.

36A second congress took place in Nuremberg in March 1910. Now, following Sándor Ferenczi’s proposal, the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) was established. Carl Jung was elected chairman, and all existing associations (the one based in Vienna, but also the ones from Berlin and Zurich, which had been founded a few months earlier) were incorporated into the organisation. Over the following years they were joined by groups based in New York (1911), Budapest (1913) and London (1913).

37It was also in 1910 that Freud published an article titled “‘Wild’ Psycho-Analysis”. Here he delineates the boundaries of the field of psycho|analysis, distancing himself from self-proclaimed followers of his method:

Neither I myself nor my friends and co-workers find it agreeable to claim a monopoly in this way in the use of a medical technique. But in face of the dangers to patients and to the cause of psycho-analysis which are inherent in the practice that is to be foreseen of a “wild” psycho-analysis, we have had no other choice. In the spring of 1910 we founded an International Psycho-Analytical Association, to which its members declare their adher|ence by the publication of their names, in order to be able to repudiate responsibility for what is done by those who do not belong to us and yet call their medical procedure “psycho-analysis”. For as a matter of fact “wild” analysts of this kind do more harm to the cause of psycho-analysis than to individual patients.41

38The next two congresses took place in Weimar (1911) and Munich (1913). It is around this time that Wilhelm Stekel and Alfred Adler left the movement and founded their own schools. The Zentralblatt für Psycho|analyse, which had some 350 subscribers at the time, ceased operating as a result. Following a conflict between Freud and Jung, Karl Abraham became chairman of the IPA in 1914. Jung had already resigned from his position as chief editor of the association’s periodical; for a short time he was succeeded by Karl Abraham and Edward Hitschmann, who changed the title from Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen to Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, then the publication folded. One of its last issues contains a contribution by Freud titled “Zur Geschichte der psychoanalytischen Bewegung” (“The History of the Psy|choanalytic Movement”). This account would first be retold by Ernest Jones, Freud’s earliest biographer, and then come to function as the official history of psychoanalysis until just before World War I. Freud opens by stating that psychoanalysis was solely his creation, then goes on to portray the birth of the movement as a whole, explaining the break with his dissidents from his own perspective. He pathologises his oppo|nents and their positions, arguing that Adler’s negation of the role of the unconscious and his development of the analysis of the “ego” as well as Jung’s denial of the sexual component in the aetiology of neuroses are indi|cators of their resistance or indeed neuroses. Undoubtedly, Freud’s article was intended as a cautionary tale, making it clear to his remaining stu|dents that if they renounced Freud’s central analytical concepts, i.e. the unconscious and libido, they would most certainly be excommunicated.

39Following these events Freud decided to found a “Secret Committee”. It consisted of his most trusted students – Ernest Jones, Otto Rank, Sán|dor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Hanns Sachs and Max Eitingon – and communicated through circular letters. The role of this inner circle was to safeguard the doctrine of psychoanalysis against secessionists and to discuss the most important decisions concerning the movement’s future.42 The Secret Committee ceased to exist in 1927.

40Two publications were founded around this time. Imago was published from 1912 until 1937, while Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psycho|analyse: Offizielles Organ der Internationalen Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung [International Journal for Medical Psychoanalysis: Official Organ of the International Psychoanalytic Association] appeared from 1912 until 1941. Tellingly, the adjective “ärztliche” [medical] was dropped from the title in 1920. Addressing a readership of well-informed followers of psychoan|alysis, its role was to improve the circulation of findings within the field; minutes of meetings of the VPS and other local societies were published in the section “Korrespondenzblatt,” alongside reports on various psycho|analytic associations’ activities.

41Imago took on the task of communicating with readers outside the psychoanalytic community. As suggested in the subtitle, Zeitschrift für Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Geisteswissenschaften [Journal on the Application of Psychoanalysis to the Humanities], the articles mostly explored how psychoanalysis could be used in the humanities, including literature. Psychoanalysis had not yet been conclusively identified as either a Naturwissenschaft or a Geisteswissenschaft, to echo the distinction formu|lated by Wilhelm Dilthey in 1883. Its point of departure was strictly scientific. Freud’s early career had centred on the anatomy of the nervous system, and his earliest students were psychiatrists. However, as early as 1913, Freud’s article “Das Interesse an der Psychoanalyse” (“The Claims of Psycho-Analysis to Scientific Interest”) identified other disciplines where psychoanalysis had aroused interest and would continue to do so: psy|chology, linguistics, philosophy, biology, but also the history of civilisation. These disciplines include the natural as well as the human sciences – both, Freud suggests, can benefit from psychoanalysis. In the same year, Otto Rank and Hanns Sachs, the editors of Imago, published a book titled Die Bedeutung der Psychoanalyse für die Geisteswissenschaften [The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Humanities] with J.F. Bergmann. The Jahrbuch der Psychanalyse for 1914 contains a list of psychoanalytical publications categorised by discipline, and this list includes mythology, history of civilisation, Völkerpsychologie or ethnic psychology, linguistics, philosophy, pedagogy, mysticism and occultism. Rather than choosing one side or the other, the new discipline positioned itself at their intersection, though it would inexorably evolve towards the field of culture and the humanities.

42This development is evidenced by the fact that until 1919, both Internationale Zeitschrift and Imago were published by the Viennese pub|lisher Hugo Heller, who was famously associated with art and literature. In 1906, he had opened a bookshop at Bauernmarkt, where he also hosted exhibitions of modern graphic art as well as prestigious literary soirées. Heller had occasionally participated at Freud’s Wednesday get-togethers since 1902; he give a few presentations there, too. In 1907, he invited Freud to give a talk at an artistic salon in his bookshop. Freud presented a paper written especially for this occasion on 6 December. The previous guest at the salon was Rainer Maria Rilke, who talked about Rodin on 12 November, while the next presenter was Thomas Mann, reading a passage of his novel Königliche Hoheit (Royal Highness) in early 1908. Freud’s presentation can be seen as a turning point in the transfer of psycho|analysis into the field of culture. The paper he gave to an audience of about ninety people was titled “Der Dichter und das Phantasieren” (“Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming”). It was his first text on literature, soon to be published by Heller. Vienna’s leading daily, Neue Freie Presse, printed a review of the event, and thanks to the newspaper’s popularity with the liberal middle class, psychoanalysis became part of modern culture almost overnight. In the works of satirist Karl Krause, Freud’s name would now be inextricably linked to Heller’s, while fashionable young ladies would mention that they had “heard about it at Heller’s…”.

43Freud’s ambition had always been to speak to audiences outside the medical establishment, and his efforts were not in vain. His first book, Studies on Hysteria (Studien über Hysterie, 1895), cowritten with Josef Breuer, had already been reviewed in Neue Freie Presse; the review’s author was Alfred von Berger, professor of aesthetics, playwright and later director of the Viennese Burgtheater.43 Freud apparently also hoped to establish some association with the Danish critic Georg Brandes, who was known as a champion of modernism and liberalism, an advocate of French naturalism, Scandinavian social criticism, the group of writers known as Young Germany as well as Nietzsche’s philosophy. When Brandes came to Vienna in mid-March 1900, Freud attended his lectures and wrote about them to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in Berlin. These letters betray an enthusiasm that is rare for Freud, bringing to mind his reports on Charcot’s lectures in Paris a decade earlier. Freud appreciated Brandes’s work so much that he recommended that the essay “Moderne Geister” (originally published in Danish in 1881 and soon translated into German) to his fiancée, Martha Bernays. During VPS meetings he cited Brandes’s 1897 study on Shakes|peare.44 The day after he attended one of Brandes’s lectures, Freud sent him a copy of his recently published Interpretation of Dreams. He must have hoped that Brandes, an international authority, would support him in his struggle with Vienna’s prudish society, perhaps even promote his work along with that of other liberal writers. This hope was in vain –– the great critic did not even acknowledge receipt of the book and never tackled the subject of psychoanalysis. Freud’s failed attempt at initiating the transfer of psychoanalysis from the medical to the cultural field is also significant for the reception of his theory in partitioned Poland, as it was through Brandes that Polish modernists were introduced to a great many names.45 If The Interpretation of Dreams had managed to intrigue the great critic, perhaps he would have included lectures on psychoanalysis in the programme for his European tour. But this did not happen. Freud and Brandes only got to talk twenty years later, on 14 April 1925, at the Hotel Sacher. This meeting was arranged by Margarethe Magnus, the daughter of Freud’s sister Maria, who was acquainted with Brandes. The ageing critic spent two hours with the founder of psycho|analysis. In a letter to his son Freud described the meeting as “the most interesting experience of the last few years”.46 In a circular to the Secret Committee, meanwhile, he admitted that the discussion, though inter|esting, was “without significance for [the future of] psychoanalysis”.47

44Freud’s choice of Heller as a publisher had a significant impact on the reception of his theories. Customers at Heller’s bookshop must have stumbled on works from a scientific field that they would otherwise not have encountered. Heller published a great number of Freud’s works, such as, in 1907, his interpretation of Wilhelm Jensen’s novel Gradiva. (This was, along with Otto Rank’s study Der Künstler, also published by Heller in 1907, the first attempt to apply psychoanalysis to another domain.) Freud’s writings on the theory of neuroses (four volumes published be|tween 1907 and 1909), Totem and Taboo (1912-13) and Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1916-17) were all published by Heller. Freud’s above-mentioned Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s “Gradiva” had a print run of 600 copies and was sold out in four years (117 copies in the first year, 110 in the second, 333 in the third, the rest in the fourth year). The second edition of 1912 had a much larger print run of 1,500 copies, as did the third edition of 1924. The moment Freud switched to Heller also marked a continuous increase in the sales of his other works. Before the second edition of the Interpretation of Dreams (Heller, 1908), none of his books had a print run of more than a thousand copies, and none had a second edition. The first edition of the Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899 and postdated 1900, had a print run of 600 copies and took eight years to sell.48 The second edition of 1,600 copies sold out within three years, and the print runs of the next three editions were 2,100 (in 1915), 4,200 (in 1919) and 3,300 (in 1930). Freud’s greatest success in terms of sales was Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, a book based on presentations given in the US and intended for the broadest audience. The first edition of 1910 had a print run of 1,500 copies and sold within a year; the following editions had print runs of 2,100 copies in 1911, 3,150 copies in 1920, 4,200 copies in 1922 and 4,200 copies in 1924.49

45Before 1907, Freud’s works were unlikely to fall into the hands of writers other than the few Viennese modernists who had a particular interest in science (Hermann Bahr) or who were always on the lookout for something new (Karl Kraus), but with Freud’s entry into Heller’s circle, people like Robert Musil, Thomas Mann and Artur Schnitzler became acquainted with psychoanalysis. German-language literary magazines began to publish articles on the subject in 1908, and two years later creative writers began their treatment (Erich Mühsam and Hermann Hesse found themselves on a psychoanalyst’s couch in 1910, Arnold Zweig, Hermann Broch, Robert Musil and Alfred Döblin in the 1920s).

46At the IPA congress in Budapest, just after World War I in 1918, Sándor Ferenczi was elected chairman (he would remain in this position until 1920, when, due to the political situation in Hungary, Ernest Jones took over). Two more important decisions were taken. First, Hermann Nunberg proposed a motion to define the conditions for entering the profession. The association decided to restrict the field to those who had undergone analysis themselves (which is why from 1920, the only new patients Freud was able to accept were his students). Secondly, the IPA resolved to offer free or inexpensive psychoanalysis to low-income patients. These two landmark decisions resulted in the founding of psychoanalytical training institutes as well as open clinics, first in Berlin in 1920, then in Vienna and London. To coordinate their activities, the “Internationale Unterrichtskommission,” headed by Max Eitingon, was established in 1925. Ten years later, this shared model of psychoanalytical training had spread throughout Europe, but the IPA had also gone through some heated discussions. In the mid-1920s the members from the US, who faced stricter legislation than their European counterparts, insisted that only trained physicians should be allowed to work as psychoanalysts. Freud took a diametrically opposite stance. His 1926 polemic “Die Frage der Laienanalyse” defends his concept of “lay psychoanalysis” in no uncertain terms. This disagreement led to the secession of the American Psychoanalytic Association, founded in 1911, from the IPA. In the late 1920s, moreover, a controversy arose about child psychoanalysis, causing a rift between the Viennese school, represented by Anna Freud, and the British school founded by Melanie Klein. The latter believed that children’s free play was an equivalent to free association and could be analysed in the same manner, whereas for Anna Freud and her followers a child’s ability to communicate through language was a precondition for analysis.

47It was also in Budapest that the decision was taken to found a press, granting the movement independence from external publishing companies. Besides guaranteeing the publication and distribution of exis|ting periodicals, this would put in place a stamp of originality, helping readers tell the difference between legitimate Freudians and other individuals or institutions with questionable ties to psychoanalysis proper. Thanks to financial support from the Budapest-based businessman Anton von Freund, the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag (headed by Otto Rank) was established in 1919; a branch directed by Ernest Jones, the International Psycho-Analytical Press, opened the following year. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, an English-language periodical edited by Ernest Jones, was founded in 1920. More accessible journals aimed at a broader audience were Almanach der Psychoanalyse (1926–1938) and Die psychoanalytische Bewegung (1929–1933), whose profile recalled Imago (1912–1937). The Verlag’s first book was the sixth edition of Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, followed by re-editions of other works previously published by Franz Deuticke or Hugo Heller. All of Freud’s subsequent books, beginning with Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), would appear with this publisher, as well as the twelve volumes of Freud’s collected works (1924-34). Other books were published as part of various series, such as the “Internationale Psychoan|alytische Bibliothek” (or its English-language equivalent, the “Interna|tional Psycho-Analytical Library”) and the “Neue Arbeiten zur ärztlichen Psychoanalyse”, both aimed at specialist readers, as well as the “Imago-Bücher” series, which addressed a broader audience. The bestsellers in the interwar years were The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (11 editions by 1929, with 27,000 copies printed in total) as well as Civilization and Its Discontents (the same number of copies in only two years!). Freud’s Introduction to Psychoanalysis sold 4,5000 copies between Heller’s first edition in 1916 and the 1930 edition with the Internationaler Psycho|analytischer Verlag.

48We might say that by 1930, the little group of Freud’s students had become an institutionalised international movement. The International Psychoanalytical Congress took place fifteen times before World War II: following the one in Budapest (1918) meetings took place in The Hague (1920), Berlin (1922), Salzburg (1924), Bad Homburg (1925), Innsbruck (1927), Oxford (1929), Wiesbaden (1932), Lucerne (1934), Marienbad (now Mariánské Lázně, 1936) and Paris (1938). During the last congress, the IPA had 560 members and consisted of over a dozen local associations. Ten of them were based in Europe: Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung, Société Psychanalytique de Paris, British Psychoanalytical Society, Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft, Nederlandse Vereniging voor Psychoanalyse, Magyar Pszichoanalitikus Egyesületet, Società Psicoan|alitica Italiana, Société Suisse de Psychanalyse, Finsk-Svenska Psyko|analytiska Förening, Norsk-Dansk Psykoanalytiska Förening; there were four organisations belonging to the APA (based in Boston, Chicago, New York and Washington-Baltimore), and finally there was a Palestinian and an Indian association. Two groups operated in Japan (Sendai and Tokio). For a few years, from 1922 to 1930, the Soviet Union also had its own psycho|analytic association.

49The IPA gradually began to be completely autonomous. Freud was diagnosed with cancer in the early 1920s. Although he continued to be very productive – he developed the so-called second topic and wrote his key works on the psychoanalysis of culture in those years – he withdrew more and more from the institution, which continued to evolve without him. The Berlin congress was the last one he attended in person; his daughter Anna often represented him at events. Freud’s withdrawal, followed by the dissolution of the Secret Committee in 1927 and the departure of another dissident, Otto Rank, meant that more and more power fell to the chairmen of the IPA. Karl Abraham held the position from 1924 until his death the following year. When the next chairman, Max Eitingon, emigrated to Palestine in 1932, he was succeeded by Ernest Jones, who held the position until 1949. The 1930s were also marked by the exodus of psychoanalysis to the United States, as the great majority of Jewish analysts emigrated there after Hitler came to power in 1933. The official dissolution of the VPA on 1 October 1938, the closure of the psychoanalytical institutes in Vienna, Berlin, Budapest and Rome, as well as Freud’s escape to London the same year and his assisted suicide in 1939 closed this chapter in the history of psychoanalysis.

50Over the course of this history a therapeutic method gained autonomy from medicine and became an institutionalised discipline. This was a process of departing from the field of science and approaching literature and culture. Freud and most of his colleagues certainly intended for psychoanalysis to remain a science. After all, Freud would always claim that his work was no belief system or world view, nor a matter of opinion; he also accused successive disloyal students, from Carl Jung to Georg Groddeck, of being unscientific, comparing their work to philosophy and mysticism. Still, psychoanalysis gradually came to be perceived as a non-science – a development that was related to the fact that at the turn of the twentieth century, the field of science was also becoming increasingly autonomous, developing specific internal criteria and institutions.

51Psychoanalysis always seemed to probe the boundaries of science. It founded separate periodicals and publishing houses, held strictly internal congresses, and recruited new members through co-optation (an enduring practice that later transformed into codified requirements). These strategies were unusual in the field of science and recalled political, artistic or even religious movements. Max Graf, the father of Freud’s patient “Little Hans,” explored the analogy with religion, proposing an extensive comparison between psychoanalysis and Christianity.50 Graf suggests that in both cases a small group surrounding a charismatic leader transforms into an official church, which led to a unique power structure and the expulsion of heretics. For him, the triumph of psychoanalysis is no less than a tragedy, a departure from its own sources. If Freud was a very human Christ at the beginning, Graf concludes, towards the end he became a pope endowed with papal infallibility.

52The fact that dissidents were debarred from the movement certainly brings to mind the institution of the Catholic Church. As early as 1920, Freud writes in a footnote in the new edition of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality that the recognition of the Oedipus complex “has become the shibboleth that distinguishes the adherents of psycho-analysis from its opponents”.51 To reject one of Freud’s central concepts simply meant excommunication – a stance that would be hard to imagine in the established sciences, where the principle of freedom of research hinges precisely on the idea that as long as standard methods are maintained, the researcher can question all axioms previously considered as binding. Einstein did not cease to be a physicist when he introduced his theory of relativity. Adler, by contrast, was forced to stop calling himself a psycho|analyst once he rejected the Oedipus complex.

53The departure of psychoanalysis from the field of science took place against the backdrop of what Gadamer called the old “Methodenstreit zwischen Naturwissenschaften und Geisteswissenschaften,”52 i.e the dispute among German academics concerning the delimitation of the natural and social sciences. Psychoanalysis was conclusively removed from the natural sciences when Karl Popper, in his study Logik der Forschung (1935), charged it with non-falsifiability.53 At the same time, Freud was gaining widespread recognition in the field of culture, especially literature. In 1930, he was awarded the prestigious Goethe Prize in Germany, and six years later Romain Rolland nominated him for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

54According to Bourdieu, the study of cultural objects must be preceded by three operations that are “as necessary and necessarily linked as the three levels of social reality that they apprehend”.54 First, we must examine the position of a given field within the field of power and the evolution of that field’s position. This makes it possible to analyse the field’s internal structure, i.e. “the structure of objective relations between positions occupied by individuals and groups placed in a situation of competition for legitimacy” (p. 214). Finally we can think about the genesis of the habitus of the individuals occupying these positions. Bourdieu has defined habitus as an ensemble of dispositions to act, to think, to perceive and to experience the world in a given way, as an effect of the individual’s socialisation and embeddedness within a given cultural code, which largely determines the social behaviour of subjects within a given field. These are “systems of dispositions which, being the product of a social trajectory and of a position within the […] field, find in this position a more or less favourable opportunity to be realised” (ibid.).

55In this book I avoid the jargon of Bourdieu’s field theory, but without losing sight of his hierarchy of explaining factors as well as his most important methodological proposal:

On no account do we ask how such and such writer came to be what he was – at the risk of falling into the retrospective illusion of a reconstructed coherence. Rather we must ask how, given his social origin and the socially constructed properties he derived from it, that writer has managed to occupy or, in certain cases, produce the positions which the determined state of the literary (etc.) field offered (already there or still to made). (p. 215)

56My point of departure for any more detailed considerations is always the identification of the position that psychoanalysis had with respect to two other fields – fields with which it was in competition, namely that of science and that of culture. The internal structure of the field of psycho|analysis, the mutual relations of its members, animosities and the struggle for recognition by Freud form the backdrop against which my protagonists engage in cultural transfer. It is only with an awareness of this backdrop that we can focus on concrete individuals and their actions – both within the field and beyond.

Pariah strategies

57The biographies of the members of the psychoanalytic movement are perfect illustrations of the tensions typically experienced by Jews who came of age towards the end of the nineteenth century – a tension between the aspirations of their parents, who had provided the economic and educational conditions for their emancipation, and the antagonism of an increasingly anti-Semitic society, which refused to allow their full participation, forcing them to make career choices based on a compro|mise. One such option was offered by psychoanalysis.

58Steven Beller’s study on Jewish contributions to Vienna’s cultural life at the turn of the century sheds light on the rise of psychoanalysis.55 He draws on Carl Schorske’s now classic work, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980), which establishes a link between the flourishing of art in the Austrian capital and the failure of liberalism and the bourgeoisie’s escape from politics into aestheticism. But Beller also points to an important weakness in Schorske’s study, namely the fact that by presenting Viennese modernism as a work of the disenchanted bourgeoisie, he failed to examine the Jewishness of that class. As Beller points out, most members of the educated liberal middle classes had a Jewish family history, while their most important experience, as a group, was the failure of assimilation.

59At the turn of the century, Vienna’s Jewish population oscillated around the ten percent mark. At the same time, Jews represented over 30% of pupils at the city’s Gymnasium secondary schools, which offered a classical education and ended with the Matura examination required to apply to university. These statistics varied little across the Habsburg Monarchy. Beller demonstrates that for Jewish families, an important step towards assimilation and climbing the social ladder was to send at least one of their sons to a Gymnasium. This is evident from the data on the professions of the pupils’ fathers and the boys’ further education. Among the sons of traders no less than 80% were Jewish; 60% of the sons of financiers and industrialists were Jews; 50% of the sons of medical doctors and slightly more than half of the sons of lawyers and journalists. If we were to treat all these professions simply as the middle class, then 65.3% of this group would be Jewish. The statistics also suggest extraordinary social mobility. While sons of non-Jewish families tended to work in the same profession as their fathers, 93% of Jewish boys whose fathers were traders became doctors. Freud himself is a perfect example: born in the provinces as the son of a trader, he moved to Vienna with his family and was sent first to a Gymnasium and then to university, where he studied medicine. This was a typical trajectory for a Jew. In the 1880s, one in three students at the University of Vienna were Jewish. The greatest proportion of Jews was to be found at the faculty of medicine (38.6% in 1880, 48% in 1890, 40.56% in 1914 and 33.84% in 1926). Beller relates this to the influx of students from the Empire’s eastern territories. The candidates who made their way to the capital may have been penniless, but they were gifted, ambitious, and, consequently, remarkably mobile.

60Among the works that confirm Beller’s findings is Stefan Zweig’s autobiography, The World of Yesterday. Zweig describes his family, who immigrated from Moravia and worked in trade and business, as typical of the time. “Early emancipated from their orthodox religion, they were passionate followers of the religion of the time, ‘progress’”.56 Still, they always asked if a person came from a “good” family. As a child Zweig thought their outlook was “ridiculous and snobbish, because for all Jewish families it was merely a matter of fifty or a hundred years earlier or later that they had come from the same ghetto” (p. 11). It was not until much later that he understood that this interest in pedigree, which “appeared […] to be a parody of an artificial pseudo-aristocracy, was one of the most profound and secret tendencies of Jewish life” (ibid.). Contrary to popular opinion, he realised, the Jews’ goal was not to amass riches. That was only an intermediary stage, while “the real determination of the Jew is to rise to a higher cultural plane in the intellectual world” (ibid.). This desire was rooted in the “secret longing to resolve the merely Jewish – through flight into the intellectual – into humanity at large” (p. 12).

Even the poorest beggar who drags his pack through wind and rain will try to single out at least one son to study, no matter at how great a sacrifice, and it is counted a title of honour for the entire family to have someone in their midst, a professor, a savant, or a musician, who plays a role in the intellectual world, as if through his achievements he ennobled them all. (p. 11)

61According to Zweig, it was the Jews’ intense cultural aspirations that inspired the flourishing of nineteenth-century Vienna.

62Beller’s study is complemented in interesting ways by Harriet Pass Freidenreich’s Female, Jewish, and Educated: The Lives of Central European University Women.57 In the Habsburg Monarchy, Freidenreich writes, “women’s emancipation lagged significantly behind Jewish emancipation” (p. 3).58 Still, with the significant decline of birth rates in Jewish families (from 4.3 in the mid-nineteenth century to 2.4 in the early twentieth century) investments were made into girls’ education, especially in the case of the eldest daughters or girls who had no siblings or no brothers. As of 1896, girls were able to take the Matura examination as external candidates in secondary schools for boys, which opened the way for women to obtain a higher education. Austrian universities began to admit women in 1897, first at philosophy departments and then, starting in 1900, at faculties of medicine.59 Classical Gymnasium secondary schools for girls soon appeared. Unsurprisingly, there were more men than women among Jewish university students, but among all women students the proportion of Jews was twice as high as among the men. Before World War I, one in four to one in three of all women studying at philosophy departments were Jewish, as well as most of the women studying medicine.60

63Having examined data pertaining to Jewish women students in Central Europe, Freidenreich argues that they had a remarkably homogenous socio-economic status; in fact, we might add that their situation mirrors the male students studied by Beller. These women came from highly mobile middle-class families who had moved to urban areas. Most of them were born in a different place than their parents – in a city rather than in the provinces; their families had always migrated west, mostly from Galicia to Vienna (it is estimated that in 1910 about one in four of Vienna’s Jews were born in Galicia61). Their families were liberal to leftist; one in four of these women had joined socialist groups; three quarters among these identified as social democrats, one quarter as communists. Rarely were they members of Zionist groups, which were dominated by men and made little effort to welcome women; what is more, the women studied by Freidenreich tended to reject their Jewish roots and identify strongly with German culture. Few of them expressed any attachment to Jewish traditions or religious practices; less than 10% came from orthodox families, 15-20% identified as “former Jews,” having converted to Catholicism (mostly for practical reasons) or describing themselves as undenominational (konfessionslos). Even though they tended to think of themselves as feminists and benefitted from the gains of the women’s movement, few of them took active part in it.

64Since Jews were barred from careers in the administrative or educational sector, the Jewish men and women who graduated from Austrian universities were not free to pursue the same professions as their gentile peers. They very often turned to the liberal professions instead. Many found employment in journalism and editorial work. (Vienna’s liberal press was produced almost exclusively by Jews and also consumed by a readership that was largely Jewish; having examined the obituaries published in Neue Freie Presse, Beller estimates that Jews represented about 60% of all readers.) The majority of Jewish graduates, however, worked as doctors or lawyers (in the legal sector no other profession was accessible to Jews unless they converted). In the 1920s, about half of all doctors were Jewish, as well as three quarters of all lawyers. According to Beller, “it was this flood of sons of the Jewish commercial classes which was the truly dynamic factor in Vienna’s cultural world at the end of the nineteenth century”.62 The city’s Bildungsbürgertum, its educated middle class, was mostly Jewish.

65Beller’s findings are also echoed by Mariusz Kulczykowski, who examines the student body of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow in the period of Galician autonomy (from the late 1860s until the dissolution of Austria-Hungary in 1918). In the academic year 1917/18 Jews represented 29.6% of all students and 45.8% at the faculty of medicine. Their most important shared characteristic was social mobility. One third indicated on enrolment that their place of birth was different from their parents’ current place of residence, and their migration trajectories had a shared pattern – from villages to small towns and from small towns to bigger towns and cities.63 Kulczykowski also points out that unlike their gentile peers, the Jewish students were sons and daughters of merchants and businessmen (p. 141); with their training as doctors and lawyers they would constitute the new elite (p. 324). It is also significant that they were actively involved in the socialist movement (p. 335).

66The hopes of the second generation of Vienna’s assimilated Jews were thwarted by the municipal elections of 1895, which led to the victory of a right-wing coalition headed by mayor Karl Lueger. Vienna was the only European capital that had elected an openly anti-Semitic city council before World War I, and the city soon became a global centre of anti-Semitism. This was the end of the liberal project whose highlights had been the December Constitution of 1867 and the International Exposition of 1873. The former guaranteed, among other things, full civil rights for Jews, while the latter, being the first world’s fair to be held in a place other than Paris or London, proclaimed Vienna’s status as a metropolis experiencing stunning economic and demographic growth. The Habsburg Empire’s capital was soon to be shaken by a series of calamities: the crash of the Vienna Stock Exchange resulted in a severe depression; the city was stricken by an outbreak of cholera. Until 1867, restrictions on migration had meant that only very wealthy or otherwise privileged Jews were able to acquire the status of “tolerated” residents. When these restrictions were lifted, the city experienced an influx of indigent Jews from Galicia. They constituted a noticeable proportion of economic migrants and changed the perceived image of Vienna’s Jewish population.64 Newspapers frequently played into the stereotype of the Ostjude. This term, which originated in nineteenth-century Germany, referred to Jews from the territories that had belonged to Poland during the rule of the Jagiellonian dynasty from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century – no matter if these territories later came to be part of Prussia, Austria or Russia. As Steven Aschheim points out, emancipated German-speaking Jews used the term “Ostjuden” to distinguish themselves from their brethren in those Eastern territories.65 In the capital of Austria-Hungary, the term signified not only the opposite of Vienna’s educated, well-off and assimilated Jewry, but also the alleged truth about them – their secret or repressed identity.

67As Sander Gilman points out, Jewish doctors in late-nineteenth-century Vienna were working within an openly racist medical discourse that portrayed Jews as particularly prone to both mental illnesses and sexually transmitted diseases. By participating in this discourse, these assimilated Jews had to distance themselves from their own Jewishness, splitting up into the subject and the object of study. They were able to achieve this thanks to the concept of Ostjuden, which allowed them to deflect anti-Semitic representations away from themselves.66 With anti-Semitic sentiments on the rise, most middle-class gentiles voted for Austria’s Christian Social Party in 1895. As Carl Schorske points out, this is the year when Freud’s Studies on Hysteria were published. Schorske goes on to suggest that Freud turned to psychoanalysis when anti-Semitism was booming in Vienna; it was beginning to play a role for university authorities, crushing Freud’s hopes for a career in academia; with the victory of Karl Lueger and the Christian Social Party, moreover, the Liberals were out of the game, which is why Freud also had to give up his ambition to become a career politician.

68Some researchers have suggested that psychoanalysis was not necessarily linked with Vienna. Most prominently, Freud’s biographer, the historian Peter Gay, argues that the theory’s origins are “untouched” by Freud’s historical situation.67 This may well be right, but there are also reasons to believe that as a movement – not just as a theory – psychoanalysis could only have originated in this city. The biographies of its members appear like exemplary cases from Beller and Freidenreich’s studies. Of the 150 individuals (107 men and 43 women) who joined the VPS at any point, three quarters were Jewish and one third had migrated from the eastern territories of the Habsburg Monarchy, especially from Galicia.68 They usually came from secularised and assimilated middle-class families. Nearly all men had attended a Gymnasium in their home town and then moved to Vienna for their higher education. Most had enrolled in medicine; law and philosophy came second. Half of the male VPS members were sons of merchants, and only eleven had no higher education.

69Drawing on Beller, psychoanalysis can be said to function as a “pariah strategy,” a mechanism of social advancement accessible to the “Empire’s pariahs”. The majority of Freud’s followers joined the movement only when they were denied other educational or career options. If Jewish medical students were directed towards psychiatry, it was not so much on account of their personal interests. Non-Jewish students, who had access to a variety of specialisations, tended to shun psychiatry, which could only be practiced in hospitals and was therefore less profitable. The field was left to Jewish students, until the introduction of anti-Semitic regulations eliminated this option and pushed Jewish psychiatrists towards psycho|analysis. This young discipline was considered unscientific and functioned on the margins of the medical establishment; it was strongly associated with Jewishness; it was barely taken seriously and sometimes openly mocked; it was open to any new sympathiser and had few entry condi|tions. In other words, it seemed like the only realistic career option.

70The case was not much different for women. Typically, the educational path available to a girl was to train as a governess at best. Given the anti-Semitism and discrimination in the teaching professions, as well as the legal requirement (in force from 1873 to 1919) for female teachers to resign upon marriage, this was no way to secure a sustainable income. Medicine was the most popular career choice among Jewish women students, and it was simply the most rational. Freidenreich points out that until 1930, most women who graduated from the medical faculty were able to exercise their chosen profession; what is more, compared to other female graduates they were more likely to start a family: four out of five got married, and half of those who married had children.69 Female physicians were consistently encouraged to choose fields considered appropriate to their sex, such as paediatrics and gynaecology; these specialisations also had the benefit that work and family were easier to reconcile from a private doctor’s office than from a hospital. The third most popular choice was psychiatry. It was a relatively new field, less popular and less prestigious than the traditional specialisations and therefore more accessible to women (p. 68). Facing double exclusion from career opportunities on account of their Jewishness as well as their sex, about one in four female Jewish students of medicine opted to train in the mental health professions. According to Freidenreich, the tendency to take up psychiatry or psychotherapy was even more pronounced among female Jewish physicians than among their male counterparts (pp. 85-86). Almost all of Freud’s early women followers were recruited from this group.

71It is also worth adding that in the early twentieth century, the fact of having grown up in an openly anti-Semitic society played a major role in the mental illness of many of Freud’s Jewish patients. This point is made by Hannah Decker, who examines Freud’s famous case study on Dora.70 Four years after her analysis, the patient, whose real name was Ida Bauer, converted to Protestantism along with her husband and two-month-old son. For Decker, this decision was motivated by the young woman’s desire to protect her child from the distress she had experienced; it was Bauer’s attempt at complete assimilation as a way of finally cutting herself and her family off from the “Ostjuden”. The patients treated by Freud and his students are stereotypically presented as frustrated Jewish women from Vienna’s middle classes. Examining this cliché we should acknowledge that turn-of-the-century Vienna was characterised by oppressive sexual norms and anti-Semitic discourse, both of which may have led these women to feel “frustrated” in the first place. Freud’s famous analysis of Dora in 1900, for instance, coincided with a blood libel case. As Decker points out, this so-called Hilsner Affair, in which the Czech Jew Leopold Hilsner was tried for the ritual killing of a Catholic girl, forms the backdrop against which Dora’s illness and analysis ought to be seen, even if she never explicitly raised the topic with her therapist.

72Beller uses the notion of “pariah strategies” after Hannah Arendt, for whom the Jews’ status as scorned outsiders in European societies explains their propensity for revolt and utopia – a propensity that is “most clearly in evidence in the very countries of emancipation”.71 Indeed, in late-nineteenth-century Vienna Jews were often revolutionaries, supporters of cultural rebellions working for a new and better world. They often formed alliances with other outsiders and rebels, for instance with movements such as psychoanalysis, revolutionary socialism or the Vienna Secession, hoping to create a new society, in which they would no longer be treated as Others. The fact was that even Jews who completely cut themselves off from their roots and achieved considerable social success most often remained outcasts.72 An illustration is Gustav Mahler, who converted to Catholicism, married an Austrian and took up the immensely prestigious position of director of the Vienna Court Opera. His experience inspired him to write: “I am rootless three times over: as a Bohemian among Austrians, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew everywhere in the world. Everywhere I am regarded as an interloper, nowhere am I what people call ‘desirable’”.73

73 With the rise in anti-Semitism, people who had never thought of themselves as Jewish were branded as Jews, or they were at least reminded of their background. Jacques le Rider argues convincingly that the mass influx of moneyless Galician Jews, who made up less than one quarter of Vienna’s Jewish population, led to all Jews being identified with the new arrivals.74 According to le Rider, it was anti-Semitism that transformed Vienna’s bourgeoisie into Jews, forcing them, often for the first time, to confront their own heritage and to construct a Jewish identity that would save them from being associated with the grotesque caricature of the provincial Ostjude (p. 12). For le Rider, this need explains the simul|taneous appearance of psychoanalysis and Zionism.

74Indeed, the early life of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, has many similarities with that of Freud, who was only four years older. Born in Budapest, Herzl graduated with a law degree from the University of Vienna, then became a respected contributor to Neue Freie Presse (he was their Paris correspondent during the Dreyfus affair); he also wrote plays for Vienna’s theatres. Freud’s key principles of psychoanalysis and Herzl’s idea of Zionism were formulated at the same time. Herzl’s The Jewish State was published in early 1896. He writes:

I think the Jewish question is no more a social than a religious one, notwithstanding that it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question, which can only be solved by making it a political world-question to be discussed and settled by the civilised nations of the world in council. We are a people – one people. We have honestly endeavoured everywhere to merge ourselves in the social life of surrounding com|munities and to preserve only the faith of our fathers. We are not permitted to do so. […] In countries where we have lived for centuries we are still cried down as strangers.75

75For Herzl, the obvious cause of anti-Semitism was the fact that assimilated Jews had come to be in “fierce competition with the middle classes” (p. 25), while Zionism in his writings almost appears as a product of anti-Semitism:

It is only pressure that forces us back to the parent stem; it is only hatred encompassing us that makes us strangers once more […]. We are one people – our enemies have made us one without our consent […]. (p. 27)

76Many Freudians of the younger generation, born at the turn of the century, would find themselves among the Zionists. But his earliest followers, brutally awakened from their dream of full participation in German culture, which they valued so highly and which they considered to be their own, and forced to forge a new identity out of the ruins of their self-definition, turned to psychoanalysis as a substitute for both religion and nationality. This became clear especially after the outbreak of World War I. In 1914, Ernest Jones, a British subject, wrote to Freud that if the future of psychoanalysis were pitched against the future of his own country, he would side with the former.76 For Jones this was merely a metaphorical expression of his attachment to his master and the cause. Many of Freud’s followers in Vienna, however, made exactly this choice when, at the end of the war, they were finally able to identify with one of the “small nations” rising from the ruins of the Empire.77 Responding to Ferenczi’s laments about the fact that Hungary had signed a truce with the Allies, Freud wrote that he ought to withdraw his libido from the fatherland and store it away in psychoanalysis.78 It appears that most members of the community heeded Freud’s advice. After the collapse of the Empire, they did not return to the provinces which they had left behind in pursuit of education and a professional career. Instead, they began to construct the empire of psychoanalysis in Vienna. Their identity was, first and foremost, that of members of “the world republic of psychanalysis”.

77None of the Galician protagonists of this book returned to their home|land when Poland became independent in 1918 or ever went on to estab|lish any connection with the country. The only Freudians who worked in Warsaw in the interwar period were Eugenia Sokolnicka and Gustav Bychowski, both of them natives of the city, and their trajectories are quite different from those of Freud’s Galician followers, such as Ludwig Jekels or Helene Deutsch. While citizens of Austria tended to attend university in the capital of the Habsburg Empire, inhabitants of Congress Poland avoided the centre of the occupying force. They often went to university in Western Europe. Those who obtained their education in Switzerland would first learn about Jungian psychoanalysis in Zurich; they might later decide to visit Vienna in search of the movement’s sources. Their journey to Freud’s psychoanalytic court was as a roundabout one, as was that of their Russian-speaking colleagues. Citizens of Russia and Congress Poland tended to see themselves as proud representatives of a powerful empire who always knew they would return to their own land, if only to establish a diplomatic mission of Freud’s empire at home. Within the VPS, however, they never played a particularly important role, nor did they get as close to Freud as his followers from Galicia.

Freud’s emissaries

78In the title of this book I refer to the protagonists as Freud’s emissaries. It was Sándor Ferenczi who proposed, as early as 1912, that one representative of the psychoanalytic community – a student of Freud analysed by the master himself – ought to be sent to every European country; this person would analyse and train other analysts in the assigned place. No such project was ever set up officially, but there were various ways in which it was realised in part. Thinking about my title I was tempted to call my protagonists border crossers, smugglers or bootleggers of psychoanalysis, to highlight the adven|turous and cross-frontier aspect of their activities, and to suggest the need to overcome the receiving cultures’ resistance. Eventually I settled on a more neutral description. To talk about the agents of this cultural transfer as “Freud’s emissaries” indicates the principal vector of their activities – the fact that their point of departure was the centre in Vienna, from where they set out on their quests to conquer the unchartered territories of psychoanalysis. As it turned out, in Warsaw none of them would play a role that was comparable to Karl Abraham’s in Berlin or Sándor Ferenczi’s in Budapest, although they did fulfil their missions in Stokholm (Jekels), Paris (Sokolnicka) and Prag (Stephanie Bornstein).

79In this book I also refer to the biographies of minor actors. This is because my goal is not to reconstruct the lives of each of Freud’s followers individually, but to sketch out the collective biography of a cultural formation. The prosopographic approach seems particularly important in the case of research on groups that do not fit into national categories.79 For instance, in her above-mentioned study, Female, Jewish, and Educated: The Lives of Central European University Women Freidenreich uses the term “collective biography”. As Danuta Sosnowska has demonstrated in Inna Galicja [A Different Galicia], a study on the Polish-Ukrainian-Czech triangle during the first half of the nineteenth century, researchers on this region cannot elude biography:

Behind the general laws of national processes there are people with their individual biographies. Telling this story of a province of the former Habsburg Empire I adopted this perspective because I wanted to use their lives to show that besides the principles governing national processes – principles that they were subject to while also helping to create them – coincidence also played a role; next to the order and logic of events there was also a series of circumstances; next to conscious choices there were emotions and impulses. It is those elements that bring a nervous, un|predictable movement into the confident and logical line that we would like to draw; they indicate the new life of a nation coming into being and against this backdrop – its architects. And it is those elements that teach us to be humble, and not to try to predict what ought to happen or what might.80

80Prosopography is a form that is often used in the history of psychoanalysis, for instance in Eran J. Rolnik’s study Freud in Zion, which the author explicitly describes as a group biography of the first analyst working among the Yishuv.81 Before Rolnik, Alexander Etkind had used the same approach in his pioneering study Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia, which also focuses on individuals engaged in cultural transfer (chapters present Lou Andreas-Salomé, Sabinie Spielrein or Freud’s patient Sergei Pankejeff, known under the pseudonym the Wolf Man). Etkind explains:

The history of psychology and medicine, disciplines closely related to psychoanalysis, is directed toward the analysis of scientific ideas, methods, and categories. Less attention is paid to the people who created and practiced the science, to their personalities, biographies, and interrelations. In the history of psychoanalysis, the development of ideas is tightly intertwined with the lives of the people who created them. Both the ideas and the people were partially infused with the spirit of their times and partially set in opposition to the changing influences around them. […] The lives of analysts and patients are no less interesting (and quite possibly more interesting) than the development of their scientific ideas.82

81I also agree with Danuta Ulicka, who argues that for the history of knowledge the classification into schools and movements is less productive than a focus on the performative power of scientific work, its “effective, rather than purely declarative status”. This could be achieved by identifying theoretical tropes in the texts – tropes through which “the subject becomes present and the context emerges in which [the texts] had come into being”.83

82This is why this prosopography is also the “bio-graphy of an idea,” to borrow a concept proposed by Ryszard Nycz.84 Seen from this perspective, lives turn out to be as important as works, individual life choices deserve as much attention as the texts produced. For the main characters of this book, psychoanalysis was not a profession but an existence. Their entry onto the Freudian path became a turning point in their lives. Access to psychoanalysis gave them an identity, it reinterpreted their lives as they had been before and forced them to rewrite their biographies with the awareness they had gained. Freud’s crusade turned out to be a calling, a destiny that simply waited to be discovered. His disciples literally embodied his theories, they were human vehicles for his ideas, which spread not only through logos, through writing and reading, but also, or mostly, through bios, through their individual experiences. Following those traces, I hope to have preserved their twisted logic. I wanted my narrative to reflect the interrelated signs that Freud’s ideas were spreading. This is why the ways in which I relate individual episodes might seem to be based on associations; this is also why stories mesh and interlock, why one person brings to mind the next, why a scholarly article leads to a literary work and a seemingly marginal mention or association triggers yet another narrative.

83Among the two dominant ways of thinking about literary scholarship – philosophical and structural analyses of canonical works, interpreted through specialised tools on the one hand, and the study of literature along the lines of cultural studies or Stephen Greenblatt’s new historicism – I tend to favour the latter.85 I treat creative writing as one of the components of a given cultural reality. I erase the boundaries between different types of texts, focusing on their interference. This allows me to show how they influence one another and in what ways they represent (and at the same time produce) the culture in which they were created. The tools of cultural poetics have empowered me to foreground seemingly marginal or unimportant facts, to privilege historical details, to appreciate anecdotes as a source of knowledge and to explore the possibilities of linking materials into a whole through mostly linguistic or rhetorical means in order to highlight their function as tropes. The way my narrative is structured is also meant to allow readers to trace my journey in this project. I have not tried to effect an artificial separation between the experience of researching and its results, as I believe they shed light on each other.

84My last aim in this introduction is to outline the structure of this study. The individuals whose names appear in the headings of the six parts of this book were singled out on account of their role in the cultural transfer of Freud’s theories to the Polish intelligentsia. Each part focuses on one person and his or her contribution in this domain. I agree with Jerzy Jedlicki that “a milieu is the appropriate social form that an intelligentsia assumes”.86 Thus I have tried not to focus exclusively on momentary contacts – important though they may be from the perspective of cultural transfer – but also to present the milieus that were either targeted by Freud’s emissaries or that showed an active interest in the import of psychoanalysis. These milieus include specific professional or political groups, supporters of certain artistic movements, contributors to specific periodicals, etc. I am interested in successful attempts at transfer as well as failed ones, in which case I try to shed light on the reasons why they foundered.

85Prior to World War I, the most important actor of cultural transfer of psychoanalysis to Polish intellectual circles was Ludwig Jekels, the protagonist of the first part of this book. Born in 1867 in Lviv, Jekels began to attended Freud’s lectures at the University of Vienna as one of but a handful of listeners. He was admitted to the VPS in 1910, when the group consisted of 22 members, and he remained in the VPS as long as it existed. He participated in the first International Psychoanalytical Congress in Salzburg in 1908 and attended all following congresses. In 1912, having sold his sanatorium in Bystra near Bielsko, Jekels moved to Vienna permanently, but he never slowed his efforts to introduce Freud’s theories to medical circles at home and to translate Freud’s works into Polish. I discuss the effects of his participation in the two prewar cross-partition Congresses of Polish Neuro|logists, Psychiatrists and Psychologists. At the first congress in Warsaw in 1909 Jekels succeeded in stirring an interest in psychoanalysis among Polish doctors, but he failed to attract the attention of the broader public. The only person whom he managed to recruit to the movement for some time was Ludwika Karpińska. She would later publish impressive studies contex|tualising psychoanalysis with traditional psychology, especially Herbart’s theory, in Przegląd Filozoficzny and Ruch Filozoficzny.

86The second congress took place in Cracow in 1912, and, thanks to Jekels’ efforts, it was largely dedicated to psychoanalysis. I consider this event the peak moment of the Polish intelligentsia’s interest in Freudian theory before World War I. The Polish writer and literary critic Karol Irzykowski wrote reports for the mainstream press in Cracow (Nowa Reforma) and Warsaw (Świat and Prawda). He was the first member of his profession who realised what potential psychoanalysis had for the cultural sphere and he made great efforts to introduce it to the Polish educated classes. Among the participants of the second congress were Hermann Nunberg, who, with support from Jekels, joined the VPS three years later, as well as the self-proclaimed Freudian and “wild analyst” Karol de Beaurain, thanks to whom Stanisław Ignacy Witkie|wicz and Bronisław Malinowski became acquainted with psychoanalysis the same year. The immediate prewar years were also the time when Kazimierz Twardowski and other philosophers at the University of Lviv became interested in psychoanalysis. I discuss the relationship between Freud and the so-called Lviv school of psychology in a separate chapter, paying particular attention to Bronisław Bandrowski and Stefan Baley.

87Jekels was Freud’s first Polish translator, and his output in this domain is equally worth looking at in more detail. Before 1914, his translations of Freud’s Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (O psychoanalizie), Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Psychopatologia życia codziennego), as well as a concise introduction by Jekels himself, Szkic psychoanalizy Freuda [An Outline of Freud’s Psychoanalysis] had appeared with the publisher Altenberg in Lviv. After the war, a second edition of Psychopatology and a translation of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Trzy rozprawy z teorii seksualnej) were published by the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag in Vienna. I also present two co-translators, namely Helena Ivànka, whose name appears along with Jekels’ on the cover of Psychopatology, as well as Marian Albiński, the co-translator of Freud’s Three Essays. I conclude this part by discussing the German-language articles Jekels published in psychoanalytical periodicals, as well as his role as Freud’s envoy to Scandinavia in the second half of the 1930s: all members of the Finnish Psycho-Analytical Society, which Jekels co-founded, were analysed and trained by him.

88The groundbreaking role that Jekels played for psychoanalysis in the Polish lands before the war has an interwar counterpart in Gustav Bychowski, born in 1895. Joining the VPS in 1931, several years after he had completed his medical studies in Zurich and settled in Warsaw, he became the only member with a Polish passport. If Jekels was Freud’s emissary to Poland, Bychowski, who was more than thirty years his junior, can be seen as the first and only ambassador of psychoanalysis to Poland. While Jekels managed to have two translations of Freud’s works published by Altenberg, Bychowski arranged for a Polish edition of Freud’s Introduction to Psychoanalysis (Wstęp do psychoanalizy). The publisher was Przeworski in Warsaw and the translator was Salomea Kempner, whom I also present in this context. Like Jekels, Bychowski also wrote a handbook – Psychoanaliza (Psychoanalysis, 1928).

89Bychowski’s situation was different from Jekels not only because of the geopolitical shifts that had taken place in the meantime, but also on account of the developments in the history of the psychoanalytic move|ment. Jekels had approached Freud along the typically Galician path described above as a “pariah strategy,” and as one of the first supporters of psychoanalysis he had been received with open arms. Bychowski, mean|while, visited Berggasse in the early 1920s, when the movement was already institutionalised. He was treated with suspicion, and the Freudians took their time debating if he should even be invited to join the society. Apparently they were worried that Bychowski mostly cared about publicity and being able to add a line saying “member of the VPS” to his business cards and office door in Warsaw. A decade passed before he was able to gain his Viennese colleagues’ trust as to his loyalty and commitment to the cause. In the meantime, he worked to introduce psychoanalysis to a broader audience in Poland. On his return to Warsaw in 1922 Bychowski found employment at Warsaw’s Jewish Hospital in Czyste, where his colleagues had a keen interest in psychoanalysis and used Nasz Przegląd, a daily paper addressing the Zionist intelligentsia, as a platform to dissemi|nate psychoanalysis in these circles. Bychowski, however, chose to write for a competing publication, namely the weekly Wiadomości Literackie, which was favoured by assimilated Jews. I present a comprehensive archival survey of these two publications in order to shed light on Bychowski’s motivations and the consequences of his choice.

90In the second half of the 1930s the transfer of psychoanalysis to the Polish intelligentsia can be said to have been accomplished. When Karol Irzykowski reviewed Bychowski’s handbook Psychoanaliza in 1928, he expressed his hope that the book would fill “an embarrassing gap in the education of our intelligentsia”.87 By 1936, Bychowski was able to write in Wiadomości Literackie that “the basic concepts of psychoanalysis have simply entered the language of the intelligentsia as a social class”.88

91Most importantly, after a long period in which Polish translations of Freud’s works had been published exclusively by the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, a commercial press in Poland took an interest in the subject. Thanks to Bychowski’s efforts, Przeworski released a Polish version of Introduction to Psychoanalysis in 1936. This was a press that had already brought two other books about Freud to Polish readers, namely Freud’s Autobiographical Study (Wizerunek własny in Henryk Załszupin’s translation) and Stefan Zweig’s rather popular biography of Freud,89 a part of his cycle on mental healers. The papers discussed each of these works in detail. A comprehensive survey of all newspapers and magazines published in interwar Poland was not feasible (the number of titles that appeared at some point during that period is estimated to be around twenty thousand).90 Occasionally I refer to a variety of other publications, but my focus is on three titles, namely the above-mentioned Nasz Przegląd (with a print run of fifty thousand copies this was the most important Polish-language Jewish daily) as well as two competing weeklies with a focus on society and culture – Wiadomości Literackie and Prosto z Mostu, which had diametrically opposed ideological profiles but maintained a print run of over a dozen thousand copies each. All three publications were based in Warsaw. My decision to focus on the capital was informed not only by the fact that Gustav Bychowski lived and worked there, but also by the “Warsaw-centrism” of the literary community.91 On the eve of World War II, I suggest, the most contentious issue for Freud’s Polish readers was the transition of psychoanalysis from the natural sciences to the philosophy of culture.

92Following various attempts to adapt Freud’s method to the history of literature, in the 1930s psychoanalysis finally became part of the common language of literary critics. I discuss a review of the Polish translation of Freud’s Introduction to Psychoanalysis by the modernist Witold Gombro|wicz, who protests against critics’ tendency to impute Freud’s influence to every emerging experimental writer. Rather than examining the actual influence of psychoanalysis on a given novelist or playwright, I ask how people came to believe that psychoanalysis must have played a role in the changes in literary production. I argue that this general opinion was mostly based on the fact that Polish reviewers were convinced about the relationship between Freudian theory and the new trends in European literature, such as the novels of Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf or James Joyce. Seeing the link between experimental literature and psychoanalysis as a given, Polish critics had made up their minds before they were even able to put their hands on any works that would prove that this was the case for Polish literature as well. The seemingly profound impact of psychoanalysis on the literature of the 1930s turns out to be a critical construct. Moreover, critics initially saw psychoanalytical elements in Polish literature as evidence that it was part of the great European movements, but by the second half of the 1930s the tide had shifted and a writer who used Freudian motifs risked being dismissed as unoriginal, even opportunistic.92 I focus on one case, namely the debate surrounding Emil Zegadłowicz’s novel Zmory [Night|mares]. Gustav Bychowski – who was not only Zegadłowicz’s close acquaintance but also a literary critic, having published the studies Słowacki i jego dusza [Słowacki and His Soul] and “Proust jako poeta analizy psychologicznej” (“Marcel Proust as Poet of Psychoanalysis”93) – joined the discussion on whether the book was sincerely autobiographical or an attempt to take advantage of the “vogue for Freud”.

93The ultimate proof that the transfer of psychoanalysis to the Polish intelligentsia was complete by the late 1930s is furnished by the out|standing success of Antoni Cwojdziński’s play Freuda teoria snów [Freud’s Theory of Dreams], directed by Arnold Szyfman at the Teatr Mały in Warsaw. In this context I draw attention to earlier attempts to introduce psychoanalysis to the stage, from avant-garde projects (such as Witkacy’s Wariat i zakonnica [The Madman and the Nun]) to repertory theatre productions (e.g. R.H. inżynier [R. H. Engineer] by the hugely popular playwright Bruno Winawer).

94Between the first and the last protagonists of my book – Ludwig Jekels and Gustav Bychowski – I discuss the work of several agents of transfer, including three important women within the VPS: Helene Deutsch, Beata Rank and Eugenia Sokolnicka.

95Helene Deutsch’s life story reflects emancipatory trends in Galicia. Born in Przemyśl as Helena Rosenbach in 1884, she can be seen as a typical “new woman”. I reconstruct her identity choices on the basis of her autobiography, written towards the end of her life. Another important biographical source I discovered is Deutsch’s correspondence with her first love, Hermann Lieberman, later a leader of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). Helene Deutsch did not publish books or articles in Polish, nor was she an active proselytiser of Freud’s theories. Still, her role in the psychoanalytic movement and her contributions to Freudian theories of female sexuality ask for a detailed examination – also to address stubborn allegations of her conservative or anti-feminist beliefs. In her memoir – tellingly titled Confrontations with Myself: An Epilogue – Deutsch confesses that many of the anonymised patients described in her clinical publications were veiled representations of herself. This inspired me to read some of her theoretical texts as autobiographical. I read her work on pathological liars, George Sand and the so-called “as-if” personality as belonging to two genres – academic as well as life writing.

96Deutsch’s development as a psychoanalyst was in many ways typical of the first women who became Freud’s disciples. The case was quite different with Beata Rank, who was ten years younger than Deutsch and whose involvement with the Freudian movement can be said to be coincidental in many ways. Born in Nowy Sącz as Beata Münzer, she met Otto Rank, Freud’s favourite student and  the first psychoanalyst without a medical background, when he was stationed in Cracow during World War I. They married in 1918 and Beata, who joined the VPS in 1923, made a steep career within the organisation. Otto Rank, a philosopher by training, headed the Interna|tionaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, and he got his wife involved in it. It is thanks to her initiative that the series Polska Biblioteka Psychoanalityczna [the Polish Psychoanalytical Library] came into being. She also translated Freud’s On Dreams (O marzeniu sennem) and edited the Polish section in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse. Influenced by her husband, she developed an interest in the intersection of psychoanalysis and anthropology. Her article on the role of women in the development of human society appeared in the same issue of Imago as Bronisław Malinowski’s study on the Oedipus complex in matriarchal societies. I discuss Malinowski’s brief fascination with psychoanalysis in a separate chapter. The section on Beata Rank concludes with an account of Otto Rank’s break with Freud, which also created a rift between Beata and the VPS and put an end to her editorial work. I finally point to an unexpected source for Beata Rank’s biography, namely the journal of Anaïs Nin.

97The next part of the book focuses on Eugenia Sokolnicka, who is known mostly as a pioneer of psychoanalysis in France. I present her life and work before she left for Paris in 1921, including her efforts to establish a local psychoanalytic society in Warsaw on the eve of Poland’s independence in 1918. Her plan did not come to fruition, despite a promising start augured by the support she got from the influential philosopher and psychologist Edward Abramowski, who died the same year. In France, however, she not only managed to set up the Paris Psychoanalytical Society and to train the first generation of French analytists, but she also aroused interest in psychoanalysis among the writers associated with La Nouvelle Revue Française. The person she influenced most was André Gide, who portrayed her in his novel The Counterfeiters. Next I ask why the Polish avant-garde failed to show an interest in psychoanalysis. Their rejection of Freud’s theories, I suggest, has the same roots as their suspiciousness with regard to surrealism, which they saw to be a continuation of the prewar movements. In the 1920s, the only writers who referred to psychoanalysis were those who embraced their rootedness in the previous epoch, Young Poland. Above all, these were writers associated with the Poznań-based periodical Zdrój, such as Stanisław Przybyszewski. In his memoir, published in 1926, he presents himself as a neglected precursor of Freud. I read Przybyszewski’s work alongside the Polish translation of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, whose translators, Ludwig Jekels and Marian Albiński, rendered Freud’s “Libido” as “chuć” – a word strongly associated with Przybyszewski’s language. My intention here is to show that the Polish writer’s concepts corresponded only to the earliest stage in Freud’s thinking, when he collaborated with Wilhelm Fliess (their late-nineteenth-century correspondence documents the birth of psychoanalysis). The most remarkable coincidence is the notion of human androgyny, which Freud took over from Fliess, as did the Austro-Hungarian philosopher Otto Weininger, who in turn influenced Przybyszewski. I end by discussing the writer’s daughter Stanisława Przybyszewska and her interest in psychoanalysis, focusing on their different interpretations of Freud.

98Having presented these three women pioneers of Freudian theory, I devote a separate part of the book to the reception of psychoanalysis in Zionist circles, which represents a particular aspect of its transfer into Polish culture. Although a study on the reception of psychoanalysis among the Polish intelligentsia cannot be complete without an account of this phenomenon, I can only present a rough outline, as a more detailed study would have to be based on an in-depth archival survey of the Hebrew-language books and magazines published in the Second Polish Republic. I focus on just one aspect, namely the development of a new pedagogy based on psychoanalysis developed by Siegfried Bernfeld and his Berlin-based students, esp. the sisters Berta and Stefanie Bornstein. Thanks to the Zionist youth movement HaShomer Hatzair [The Young Guard] it prepared the ground for the collective education system in Palestine and Israel. I then move on to ask why their theories failed to resonate with pedagogues in Poland, despite the fact that they were widely known through Hebrew-language publications in the country. The Polish-Jewish educator Janusz Korczak would have been an ideal candidate, given his pronounced Zionist and leftist sympathies (he had been a co-founder and member of HaShomer Hatzair’s Chief Command in the Russian partition). However, for reasons I explore in a chapter on Korczak, he was opposed to the radical project of pedagogy based on psychoanalysis. The only link between the Berlin circles and the pedagogues in Warsaw was Gustav Bychowski, who worked to achieve a transfer of Freudian theory to Polish interwar culture.

99In the years 1935-39 the majority of European psychoanalysts emigrated to the United States. This exodus represents the end of psychoanalysis as a Central European emancipatory project spanning different cultural domains. Apart from Eugenia Sokolnicka and Stephanie Bornstein, who died before the war, as well as Salomea Kempner, who perished in the Warsaw Ghetto, all the key figures presented here found themselves in Boston, New York City or California. Their experience as émigrés was marked by geographical dispersement, an uncertain legal status and fierce competition for resources. They faced difficulties related to the requirements of the American Psychoanalytic Association, especially the stipulation that psychoanalysts be trained in medicine. The medicalisation of psychoanalysis in the US accounts for the fact that women tended to be displaced from the movement. What is more, the general hostility towards Marxism compelled European psycho|analysts to abstain from any left-leaning political engagement. This meant that while on the surface Freudian theory seemed to prosper, it never regained its ethos or its function as an emancipatory cultural project.94 The price my protagonists paid for their success in the US was a sense of uprooting. Symptomatically, the writer of Berta Bornstein’s obituary in an American psychoanalytical periodical regrets that he cannot tell his readers much about his teacher’s life before her arrival in the US, as she never talked about her past, her family, her background. Even her closest colleagues knew only as much about her as she revealed in her curriculum vitae.95 Most of my protagonists developed a similar strategy. They worked hard to be identified as “American psychoanalysts” in any reference works that included their names. I hope that my efforts to recall their lives in prewar Poland – a country that none of them would ever visit again – does not go against their wishes. My intention is to treat the traces reconstructed here – including those that the individuals in question erased or manipulated deliberately – in line with Emmanuel Levinas’s admonition, paraphrased by Robert Eaglestone: not only as a sign of the past, but most of all “the source of our obligation to the past and its call for justice”.96

100In the place of a traditional conclusion I examine a character in Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924). I ask why Dr Krokowski, a psychoanalyst who seems so typical of the literary interwar period, is portrayed as a Polish Jew. We know that Mann modelled the character on Georg Groddeck, a Catholic German.97 But there is no contradiction here. Groddeck was known as a “wild analyst” and a trouble making supporter of Freud’s theory. His refusal to comply with the psychoanalytic establishment embodies the movement’s initial subversiveness. It is this unruly enthusiasm which characterised my protagonists, and Mann intuitively identified it as quintessentially Polish. In the 1920s, psychoanalysis was becoming ever more formalised and its decision makers were beginning to push its subversive or revolutionary aspects into the movement’s subconscious. This process of repression, which was completed in the United States, also erased the Central European roots of psychoanalysis. It is thanks to Mann that both aspects of Freud’s ideas have been preserved in the collective imagination.

Notes

• 1 See M. Espagne, M. Werner, “La construction d’une référence allemande en France 1750–1914: Genèse et histoire culturelle”, AES 1987, no. 4, pp. 969-992; M. Espagne, M. Werner, “Deutsch-französischer Kulturtransfer als Forschungsgegenstand. Eine Problemskizze”, in Transferts: Les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand (XVIII^e et XIX^e siècle), ed. by M. Espagne, M. Werner (Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les civilisations, 1988), pp. 11-34; M. Espagne, “Sur les limites du comparatisme en histoire culturelle”, GE 1994, no. 17, pp. 112-121; M. Espagne, Les transferts culturels franco-allemands (Paris: PUF, 1999). In the early 21^st century Michael Werner and Benedicte Zimmermann continued to develop the concept in the direction of histoire croisée (see Werner and Zimmermann, “Penser l’histoire croisée: entre empirie et reflexivité”, in De la comparaison à l’histoire croisée, ed. by M. Werner, B. Zimmermann (Paris: Seuil, 2004), pp. 15-53). 
• 2 On non-Freudian theories of the unconscious see H.F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York: Basic Books, 1970) and B. Dobroczyński, Idea nieświadomości w polskiej myśli psychologicznej przed Freudem (Cracow: Universitas, 2005). Studies on how these concepts influenced literature include M. Stala, Pejzaż człowieka: Młodopolskie myśli i wyobrażenia o duszy, duchu i ciele (Cracow: Baran i Suszczyński, 1994); B. Szymańska, Poeta i nieznane: Poglądy filozoficzne Antoniego Langego (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1979) (esp. the section Nieświadomość, pp. 67-73) and Mistycy i pesymiści: Przeżycia i uczucia jako wartości w filozofii polskiego modernizmu (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1991). The aspects where Polish Modernist literature overlaps with some of the discoveries of psychoanalysis are discussed in P. Dybel, Urwane ścieżki: Przybyszewski–Freud–Lacan (Cracow: Universitas, 2000).
• 3 I use a later edition: F. J. Hoffman, Freudianism and the Literary Mind (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957).
• 4 Cf. Psychoanalyse in der literarischen Moderne: Eine Dokumentation, vol. 1: Einleitung und Wiener Moderne, ed. by T. Anz and O. Pfohlmann (Marburg: Verlag LiteraturWissenschaft.de, 2006); the book includes an extensive bibliography.
• 5 Cf. S. Burkot, “Od psychoanalizy klinicznej do literackiej”, RND (68) 1978, Prace Historycznoliterackie VII, p. 145.
• 6 International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, ed. by A. de Mijolla et al. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2005).
• 7 E. Roudinesco, M. Plon, Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse (Paris: Fayard, 2000).
• 8 E. Mühlleitner, Biographisches Lexikon der Psychoanalyse: Die Mitglieder der Psychologischen Mittwoch-Gesellschaft und der Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung 1902–1938 (Tübingen: Diskord, 1992).
• 9 These inconsistencies seem to confirm Larry Wolff’s thesis about the decidedly non-national character of Galician identity. See L. Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
• 10 L. Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe 1930-1941 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
• 11 The first person to describe Sokolnicka as a Czech analyst seems to have been Jean Delay (La jeunesse d’André Gide (Paris: Gallimard, 1956-1957), vol. I, p. 218). Others have repeated the mistake, e.g. Alan Sheridan in André Gide: A Life in the Present (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 353.
• 12 C. Domański, “Polacy w Wiedeńskim Towarzystwie Psychoanalitycznym w latach 1902-1938”, in Psychologia europejska w okresie międzywojennym: Sylwetki, osiągnięcia, problemy, ed. by W. Zeidler, H.E. Lück (Warsaw: Vizja Press & IT, 2011), pp. 223-235.
• 13 See. D. Sosnowska, Inna Galicja (Warsaw: Elipsa, 2008); A. Korniejenko, Ukraiński modernizm: Próba periodyzacji procesu historycznoliterackiego (Cracow: Universitas, 1998); M. Bohachevsky-Chomiak, Feminists Despite Themselves: Women in Ukranian Community Life 1884-1939 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, 1988).
• 14 История психоанализа в Украине [Istorija psichoanaliza v Ukraine], cост. И.И. Кутько, Л.И. Бондаренко, П.Т. Петрюк (Харьков: Основа, 1996).
• 15 В.И.Овчаренко, В.М. Лейбин, Антология Российского Психоанализа [Antologija Rossijskogo Psichoanaliza] (Москва: Флинта, 1999).
• 16 R. Kloocke, Mosche Wulff: Zur Geschichte der Psychoanalyse in Russland und Israel (Tübingen: Diskord, 2002).
• 17 On the pitfalls of constructing identities see M. Avanza, G. Laferté, “Dépasser la ‘construction des identités’? Identification, image sociale, appartenance”, GE 2005, no. 4, pp. 134-152.
• 18 J. Suchmiel, Polki w Uniwersytecie w Wiedniu ze stopniem doktora filozofii i medycyny, 1897-1939 (Częstochowa: Wydawnictwo Akademii im. Jana Długosza, 2008).
• 19 I should add that I find Derrida’s deconstruction of the fantasy of the archive less convincing than the response by historian Carolyn Steedman, who took the “archive fever” literally as the unique physical experience that a researcher goes through in an archive. (“Archive Fever, indeed? I can tell you all about archive fever…”): C. Steedman, “Something She Called a Fever: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust”, AHR 2001, no. 4, pp. 1159-1180. See also Steedman’s book Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).
• 20 Moshe Rosman, How Jewish is Jewish History? (Oxford: The Litman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007).
• 21 Moshe Rosman, Jak pisać historię żydowską, trans. by A. Jagodzińska (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2011), p. 209. This passage only exists in the Polish translation of Rosman’s book. This is a translation from Polish by T. Bhambry.
• 22 M. Rosman, How Jewish is Jewish History?, p. 94.
• 23 E. Prokop-Janiec, Pogranicze polsko-żydowskie: Topografie i teksty (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2013), p. 15.
• 24 See for instance L. Doyle, L. Winkiel, “The Global Horizons of Modernism”, Geo|modernisms. Race, Modernism, Modernity, ed. by L. Doyle, L. Winkiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 1-14; S. Stanford Friedman, “Cultural Parataxis and Transnational Landscapes of Reading: Toward a Locational Modernist Studies”, in Modernism, ed. by A. Eysteinsson, V. Liska (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2007), vol. 1, pp. 35-52.
• 25 See E. Rybicka, “Od poetyki przestrzeni do polityki miejsca: Zwrot topograficzny w badaniach literackich”, TD 2008, no. 4, pp. 21-38.
• 26 See M. Chmurski, “Modernizm(y) Europy Środkowej: Rekonesans”, PFL 2013, no. 1/2, pp. 395-421 (see also other articles in this issue).
• 27 Cf. R. Nycz, “Możliwa historia literatury”, TD 2010, no. 5, pp. 167-184.
• 28 A vast number of works have appeared on the Polish intelligentsia since Józef Chałasiński’s earliest sociological studies on the topic. An extensive bibliography can be found in the three-volume study A History of the Polish Intelligentsia edited by Jerzy Jedlicki (2015). Janusz Żarnowski researched the interwar period in his books Struktura społeczna inteligencji w Polsce w latach 1918–1939 (Warsaw: PWN, 1964) and O inteligencji polskiej lat międzywojennych (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 1965). The series “Inteligencja polska XIX i XX wieku”, edited by Ryszarda Czepulis-Rastenis (1981-1991), continues to be an important source of data on various aspects.
• 29 In her study of educated Jews in Warsaw in the second half of the nineteenth century, Helena Datner asks if they were simply members of the Polish intelligentsia or if they formed a separate class of Jewish intelligentsia. Cautious about the notion of identity, Datner takes an empirical approach to the problem. She examines the distribution of various professional groups across the city, educated Jews’ activities in Polish and/or Jewish circles, and the clientele of Jewish doctors and lawyers. See Ta i tamta strona: Żydowska inteligencja Warszawy drugiej połowy XIX wieku (Warsaw: ŻIH, 2007). Datner’s study is limited to the Polish Kingdom from the January Uprising of 1863 until the revolution of 1905, but it sheds light on a general development: with the decline of the ideology of full assimilation, demands begin to be heard that Jews’ access to education and leadership positions be restricted. This in turn leads to the emergence of a distinct identity – the Jewish intelligentsia. I will return to this phenomenon throughout this study.
• 30 D. Sdvižkov, Das Zeitalter der Intelligenz: Zur vergleichenden Geschichte der Gebildeten in Europa bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, Synthesen. Probleme europäischer Geschichte, vol. 3 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), pp. 230-231. Translation by T. Bhambry; the words in italics appear in English in the German original.
• 31 S. Żółkiewski, Społeczne konteksty kultury literackiej na ziemiach polskich (1890–1939) (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 1995), p. 61. In 1938, there were eight hundred thousand professionals with a higher education in the Second Polish Republic (p. 105).
• 32 Ibid., p. 16 as well as pp. 58-82.
• 33 D. Sdvižkov, Das Zeitalter der Intelligenz: Zur vergleichenden Geschichte der Gebildeten in Europa bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, p. 121.
• 34 A. Degenne, M. Forsé, Les réseaux sociaux: Une analyse structurale en sociologie (Paris: Armand Colin, 1994).
• 35 S. Żółkiewski, Społeczne konteksty kultury literackiej na ziemiach polskich, p. 145.
• 36 D. Danek, “Gustav Bychowski – zapoznana postać z dziejów kultury polskiej”, in G. Bychowski, Słowacki i jego dusza: Studium psychoanalityczne, ed. and introduction by D. Danek (Cracow: Universitas, 2002), p. xxvii.
• 37 P. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. by S. Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 232.
• 38 To believe in the significance of certain actions is an investment in the game. Bourdieu calls it illusio, “to take the real – that is, the stake of games called serious – seriously” (p. 33). It results in the illusion of a reality approved and shared by all.
• 39 On the different stages in the institutionalisation of psychoanalysis see K. Fallend, Sonderlinge, Träumer, Sensitive: Psychoanalyse auf dem Weg zur Institution und Profession. Protokolle der Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung und biographische Studien (Vienna: Jugend & Volk, 1995) as well as F.J. Sulloway, “Reassessing Freud’s Case Histories: The Social Construction of Psychoanalysis”, in Freud and the History of Psychoanalysis, ed. by T. Gelfand, J. Kerr (London: The Analytic Press, 1992), pp. 153-192. Sulloway makes an interesting use of the method proposed by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer in Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
• 40 S. Ferenczi, “Referat über die Notwendigkeit eines engeren Zusammenschlusses der Anhänger der Freudschen Lehre und Vorschläge zur Gründung einer ständigen internationalen Organisation”, JPP 1910, no. 2, pp. 741-742.
• 41 “‘Wild’ Psycho-Analysis”, SE XI, pp. 226-227. All quotations from Freud’s works are based on The standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated from German under the General Editorship of James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953–1974).
• 42 Cf. P. Grosskurth, The Secret Ring: Freud’s Inner Circle and the Politic of Psychoanalysis (London: Cape, 1991).
• 43 See G. Brandell, Freud: Enfant de son siècle (Paris: Lettres modernes, 1967), p. 12. An interesting overview of publications on psychoanalysis can be found in M. Tichy and S. Zwettler-Otte’s study Freud in der Presse: Rezeption Sigmund Freuds und der Psychoanalyse in Österreich 1895-1938 (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1999). Sylvia Zwettler-Otte summarises publications in medical journals (Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift, Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift), while Marina Tichy documents interest in Freud’s theories in the mainstream liberal press (Neue Freie Presse, Die Waage, Die Zeit, Die Fackel) and women’s periodicals (Dokumente der Frauen, Neues Frauenleben).
• 44 Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, ed. by H. Nunberg, E. Federn, trans. by M. Nunberg (New York: International Universities Press, 1967), vol. 1, pp. 267-268.
• 45 See E. Paczoska, “Georg Brandes: “Nasz człowiek” w Europie, in Europejczyk w podróży, ed. by E. Ihnatowicz, S. Ciara (Warsaw: Neriton, 2010), pp. 305-326.
• 46 S. Freud, Unterdess halten wir zusammen: Briefe an die Kinder, ed. by M. Schröter (Berlin: Aufbau, 2010), p. 360. Cf. also L. Freud-Marlé, “Sigmund Freud und Georg Brandes”, in Mein Onkel Sigmund Freud: Erinnerungen an eine grosse Familie (Berlin: Aufbau, 2006), pp. 166-169.
• 47 Die Rundbriefe des “Geheimen Komitees”, ed. by G. Wittenberger, C. Tögel (Tübingen: Diskord, 1999), vol. 4, p. 255. Freud met Brandes again two years later, shortly before the critic’s death.
• 48 123 copies were sold in 1899, 77 in 1900, 151 in 1901, 200 between 1906 and 1908. See K. Fallend, Sonderlinge, Träumer, Sensitive, p. 96.
• 49 The payments Freud received grew accordingly, but the change of currency and galloping inflation make comparison difficult.
• 50 M. Graf, “Reminiscences of Professor Sigmund Freud”, TPQ 1942, no. 11, pp. 465-476.
• 51 S. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, SE VII, p. 226.
• 52 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: Mohr, 1972), pp. xvi-xvii.
• 53 Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 62.
• 54 P. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, p. 214.
• 55 S. Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
• 56 Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography, trans. by B. Huebsch and H. Ripperger (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 6.
• 57 H.P. Freidenreich, Female, Jewish, and Educated: The Lives of Central European University Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). See esp. the chapter “Emancipation through Higher Education”, pp. 1-18.
• 58 The Jewish population received full equal rights in 1867, but these rights did not extend to women; women, whatever their religious identity, were denied the right to own property, they were barred from political organisations until 1908, and it was only after World War I that women’s suffrage was granted. On the status of women in Vienna see for instance C. Bertin, La Femme à Vienne au temps de Freud (Paris: Stock, 2009).
• 59 Cf. “Durch Erkenntnis zu Freiheit und Glück…”: Frauen an der Universität Wien (ab 1897), ed. by W. Heindl, M. Tichy, SDU 1990, vol. 5.
• 60 Urszula Perkowska demonstrates a similar situation at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, where Jewish women represented a higher proportion of all female students than Jewish men among all male students. See U. Perkowska, Studentki Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego w latach 1894-1939: W stulecie immatrykulacji pierwszych studentek (Cracow: Secesja, 1994), p. 98.
• 61 See I. Oxaal, W.R. Weitzmann, “The Jews of Pre-1914 Vienna: An Exploration of Basic Sociological Dimensions”, LB 1985, vol. 30, pp. 395-432.
• 62 S. Beller, Vienna and the Jews, p. 69.
• 63 M. Kulczykowski, Żydzi-studenci Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego w dobie autonomicznej Galicji (1867–1918) (Cracow: Księgarnia Akademicka, 1995), pp. 71-72.
• 64 Cf. W.O. McCagg Jr, A History of Habsburg Jews, 1670–1918, The Modern Jewish Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 191–192 and pp. 199-200.
• 65 See S.E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness 1800-1923 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1982).
• 66 S.L. Gilman, Freud, Race and Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Gilman argues that Freud and his students substituted universal gender difference for racial difference, taking the characteristics ascribed to Jews and attributing them to women. See the chapter “The Transmutation of the Rhetoric of Race into the Construction of Gender”, pp. 36-49.
• 67 Peter Gay, A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 79.
• 68 Elke Mühlleitner and Johannes Reichmayr present a comprehensive statistical analysis of the group in “Following Freud in Vienna”, IFP 1997, no. 6, pp. 73-102.
• 69 H.P. Freidenreich, Female, Jewish, and Educated, p. 122.
• 70 H.S. Decker, Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900 (New York: Free Press, 1991), pp. 126-127.
• 71 Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition”, Jewish Social Studies, vol. 6, no. 2 (Apr., 1944), p. 105.
• 72 In turn-of-the-century Vienna the percentage of Jews who decided to convert was higher than anywhere else in Austria-Hungary, or even in all of Europe. In the two decades from 1890 to 1910, the number of converts doubled. See M.L. Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 1867–1914: Assimilation and Identity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), p. 128, p. 132, p. 136.
• 73 Cited in S. Beller, Vienna and the Jews, p. 207.
• 74 J. Le Rider, Modernité viennoise et crises de l’identité (Paris: PUF, 1994), pp. 242-244.
• 75 Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question, trans. by S. D’Avigdor (London: Henry Pordes, 1993), p. 15.
• 76 The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908-1939, ed. R.A. Paskauskas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 307-308.
• 77 M. Kundera, “The tragedy of central Europe”, The New York Review of Books 1984, 31/7, pp. 33-83.
• 78 The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, ed. by E. Brabant, E. Falzeder, P. Giampieri-Deutsch, trans. by P.T. Hoffer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1993), vol. 2, p. 304.
• 79 My thinking about prosopographic methodology was influenced by the chapter “Retour sur enquête” in Nicolas Mariot and Claire Zalc’s book on the 991 Jews of the French town of Lens, Face à la persécution: 991 Juifs dans la guerre (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2010). The Jews of Lens are analysed as a group that constitutes itself at the intersection of identity choices, social constructs and individual strategies devised in the face of administrative categories.
• 80 D. Sosnowska, Inna Galicja (Warsaw: Elipsa, 2008), p. 36.
• 81 E.J. Rolnik, Freud in Zion: Psychoanalysis and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity (London: Karnac Books, 1997), p. xxxiii.
• 82 Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 6-7.
• 83 D. Ulicka, Literaturoznawcze dyskursy możliwe: Studia z dziejów nowoczesnej teorii literatury w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej (Cracow: Universitas, 2007), pp. 13-14.
• 84 Ryszard Nycz, Sylwy współczesne: Problem konstrukcji tekstu (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1984), p. 46 and passim.
• 85 See R. Nycz, “O przedmiocie studiów literackich – dziś”, TD 2005, no. 1, pp. 175-187.
• 86 Jerzy Jedlicki, “Foreword”, in Maciej Janowski, Birth of the Intelligentsia 1750-1831, trans. by T. Korecki (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2014) p. 21.
• 87 K. Irzykowski, “Badania Acherontu”, WL 1928, no. 36, p. 3.
• 88 G. Bychowski, “Rozmowa z Freudem”, WL 1936, no. 20, p. 4.
• 89 S. Zweig, Zygmunt Freud, trans. by M. Wassermanówna (Warsaw: J. Przeworski, 1933).
• 90 According to Andrzej Paczkowski, “about four times as many newspapers and magazines were published in the two interwar decades as throughout the history of the Polish press, which at that point spanned more than 250 years”. A. Paczkowski, Prasa polska w latach 1918–1939 (Warsaw: PWN, 1980), p. 7.
• 91 M. Szpakowska, “Wiadomości Literackie” prawie dla wszystkich (Warsaw: W.A.B., 2012).
• 92 Jerzy Speina has proposed a similar argument about references to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in Polish literature of the time. Cf. J. Speina, “Marcel Proust w Polsce: W poszukiwaniu straconego czasu – międzywojenna recepcja krytycznoliteracka” in Literatura w perspektywie psychologii (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 1998), p. 90.
• 93 G. Bychowski, “Proust jako poeta analizy psychologicznej”, DR 1930, no. 1, pp. 55-66; no. 2, pp. 149-157. For an English translation see G. Bychowski, “Marcel Proust as Poet of Psychoanalysis”, trans. by R. Levengood, American Imago 1973, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 26-32.
• 94 R. Jacoby, The repression of psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and the political freudians (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
• 95 P. Blos, “Berta Bornstein 1899-1971”, PSO 1974, no. 29, p. 35.
• 96 R. Eaglestone, “The ‘Fine Risk’ of History: Post-Structuralism, the Past and the Work of Emmanuel Levinas”, RH 1998, vol. 2, no. 3, p. 318.
• 97 T. Anz, W. Martynkewicz, “Thomas Manns Psychoanalytiker Dr. Krokowski und Georg Groddeck. Dokumentation eines Mailwechsels und eine Einladung zur Spurensuche”, literaturkritik.de, 2005, no. 8, http://www.literaturkritik.de/public/ rezension.php?rez_id=8416 [accessed on 23/05/2013].