The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement

This is Freud writing history as a weapon. Published in 1914 as his movement cracked along its first fault lines, the book functions simultaneously as intellectual autobiography and polemical broadside against former disciples. Freud traces his journey from Breuer's cathartic method through the revolutionary pivot to free association, from the abandoned seduction theory to the explosive theory of infantile sexuality and psychic reality. He chronicles how dream interpretation held him steady through years of professional isolation, how the Vienna circle formed, how the Zürich alliance with Bleuler and Jung briefly promised legitimacy, and how American journals and societies spread his ideas across the Atlantic. Then comes the wound: Adler's departure and the founding of Individual Psychology, which Freud dismisses as a capitulation to bourgeois morality. The book foreshadows Jung's coming rupture. What makes it essential is not its objectivity but its revealing partiality. Freud fights to define psychoanalysis as he invented it, and in doing so, shows us how movements are built, defended, and fractured. It is psychology as told by its founder, determined that no one else tell it differently.