MINUTES OF THE VIENNA PSYCHOANALYTIC SOCIETY

Otto Rank, hired as appointed secretary at the age of twenty-two, began drafting the Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, along with two small volumes containing papers presented and attendance lists, on October 16, 1906. Until April 27, 1910, he wrote these by hand; the acquisition of a typewriter made it possible to produce multiple copies thereafter. Rank was mobilized in 1915 and Theodor Reik took over secretarial functions for the society. However, he recorded only paper titles and attendance lists. The next minutes were not produced until November 19, 1918; they recorded a lecture given by Siegfried Bernfeld, the last in the series.

Sigmund Freud kept these minutes, though their existence was for the most part forgotten. Before leaving for London in 1938, Freud entrusted them to Paul Federn. Since 1924, Federn had been Freud's personal representative as well as administrator and vice president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. He took the minutes to the United States and published one set of them in 1947, in volume one of Samiksa, the review of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society. His attempts to publish the minutes in their entirety remained fruitless due to lack of money. At the execution of his will in 1950, he bequeathed the publication rights to Hermann Nunberg and his son Ernst Federn.

Editing of the minutes began in 1951, with the help of a five-thousand-dollar loan. The first volume in English, translated from the German by Margarete Nunberg, was published by International Universities Press in 1962; the fourth and final volume appeared in 1975. In German, the first volume was published by S. Fischer Verlag in 1976; the fourth volume, with an afterword by Harald Leupold-Löwenstein, came out in 1981. The English-language edition ends with the 250th set of minutes; the German edition stops in 1918. Both editions include the minutes of Bernfeld's lecture on November 19, 1918, and those of the society's last session on March 20, 1938. The first volume of the French edition, translated by Nina Schan-Bakman, was published in 1976 by Gallimard; the fourth volume appeared in 1983. A first volume, 1906-1908, was published in Italian and in Spanish. The manuscripts were returned to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society by Ernst Federn, in accordance with Paul Federn's wishes as expressed in one of his letters.

The publication of the Vienna minutes is of the utmost importance for the history of psychoanalysis. There are several areas that the minutes cast in a new light:

• From 1903 on, Freud was by no means as isolated in his research as Ernest Jones described in his autobiography. The men and women who accompanied him at this time belonged to Vienna's intellectual and medical elite; among them were two eminent musicologists, David Back and Max Graf. Other renowned personalities emerged within the circle of guests.
• The process that led to the split with Alfred Adler in 1911-1913 is clearer.
• Psychoanalytic knowledge was elaborated over the course of many years of clinical work with a whole series of collaborators. Freud sometimes waited ten years before publishing his observations, which, like the theories based on them, were always debated within the circle.

The minutes show why Freud referred to psychoanalysis as "an eminently social affair." They are an important presentation of an experimental group led by Freud and also help re-create the general intellectual and social climate of Vienna before the First World War.

Ernst Federn

See also: Berggasse 19, Wien IX; Rank (Rosenfeld), Otto; Wiener psychoanalytische Vereinigung.

Source Citation

Nunberg, Hermann, and Federn, Ernst (Eds.). (1962-1975). Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (Vols. 1-4). New York: International Universities Press; (1976-1981).Die Protokolle der Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung (Vols. 1-4). Frankfurt-am-Mein: S. Fischer.