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The Secret Ring: Freud’s Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis
by Phyllis Grosskurth, Jonathan Cape, pp 245, £18

There are many ways in which children irritate adults. One example is
how they receive presents. They complain about how its wheels are too big,
hair is too long, rules are impossible to understand – the list goes on
and so does the child until any sensible parent exclaims: ‘Well, don’t play
with the bloody thing then!’ This is the signal for the child to sob; and
then admit to itself what the parent knew all along: it loves that toy.

Phyllis Grosskurth’s account of the rise and fall of the Inner Circle,
the committee chosen by Freud in 1912 to steer psychoanalysis through its
infancy, attacks the members and their leader in a low-key, almost endless
tirade. But since that attack often employs the very psychoanalytic terms
which the inner circle did so much to make common currency, one can’t help
feeling that Grosskurth, despite herself, loves that toy.

Certainly, the dry eagerness of her narration bears the imprimatur of
that least interesting of commentators: the disappointed disciple. In her
introduction, Grosskurth employs a succession of metaphors naming Freud
as the leader of Communist cell, a ringmaster brandishing his whip, a jealous
patriarch, a ‘withholding parent’ and a kind of imperial king. Elsewhere,
members of the committee are accused of enjoying staying in good hotels;
and in the book’s epilogue Grosskurth announces that her story is about
‘real people wreaking havoc on each other.’

There is no doubt that the committee often behaved appallingly among
themselves, towards patients and towards Freud – and he towards them. Detailed,
new evidence is offered to that effect, particularly from the circular letters,
or Rundbriefe, which were the most significant formal expression of the
Committee’s power. (The other seems to have been a gold ring each member
was given by Freud, an act which perhaps seems pompous now.)

Freud had become a rather testy autocrat, virtually ordering members
to marry woman they might otherwise not have chosen, happily describing
himself as a ‘giant’ and behaving with odd lack of sympathy over members’
misfortunes, such as the death of Ernest Jones’s wife. The committee members
were not a terribly likeable bunch, in this account at least. Jones is wheedling
and deceitful, whether defending himself against the belligerent and charmless
Otto Rank’s accusation that he made an antisemitic remark, or in his fawning
accusations to Freud concerning other members. Karl Abraham comes out of
things better, and Sandor Ferenczi, likewise, is rather out of control but
appealing. Bickering, petty, over-abstracting – these were difficult, complex
people grappling with a difficult, complex body of work.

What is missing from this book is precisely what everyone was arguing
about: psychoanalytic theory. This is only supplied to describe the committee’s
shortcomings. Freud is referred to as ‘the omniscient father’, he has a
‘voyeuristic involvement’ in Ferenczi’s romance and a ‘neurotic anxiety
over receiving mail’. True, Grosskurth avoids a too Californian littering
of jargon, but in the key disputes outlined in this book – between Freud
and Jung but more importantly between Freud, Rank and Ferenczi – detailed
discussion of theory is avoided altogether. Indeed, Grosskurth argues that
‘Freud used the sexual issue merely as an excuse to rid himself of Jung’,
as though the sexual aspect of psychoanalysis was a kind of decorative flourish.
It is its kernel.

I might have had more sympathy for Grosskurth’s damning of the Inner
Circle if it had moved towards ‘division and death’. In fact, it did a remarkable
job of seeing a controversial movement into maturity. So that this book,
which could have been detailed and intricate, seems over-specialist and
trivial. There is, after all, a nonpsychoanalytic term for complaining about
your toys: ‘ingratitude’.

Andrew Clifford is a science writer.