This book presents the results of a research project on the early reception of analysis in two influential Viennese medical weeklies, the Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift and the Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift. It provides a detailed account of the articles published between 1895, when Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria were first published, and 1938, the year analysis was forbidden in Austria by the Nazi regime. The study puts paid to the widespread prejudice (casually re-enforced by Freud himself) that psychoanalysis had at first been ignored by both academic circles and the general public. In fact, supporters as well as opponents observed the emergence of the new science with keen interest and a highly ambivalent mixture of resistance, prurient curiosity and genuine fascination. The large number of references gives evidence for an impressively early tribute to the secret attractiveness of analysis.

The Author: Sylvia Zwettler-Otte is Training Analyst and was president of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society from 2000 to 2004. She works in Vienna in private practice. She has published and edited various books in German.