“The Secret Ring: Freud’s Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis”, by Phyllis Grosskurth

 

245 pages, Da Capo Press, ISBN-13: 978-0201090376

The Secret Ring: Freud’s Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis by the late Phyllis Grosskurth is a revelation about the “court” of fellow shrinks that Sigmund Freud created in order to enforce the heterodoxy of psychoanalysis as preached by him and to defend against blasphemous ideas from the heathen deniers of his central role in the movement – I use religious terminology only half-seriously, for this seemingly rational man, one of the founders of the movement that today harms as many people as it “helps”, was as dictatorial as any Pope in enforcing his decrees and in punishing any transgressors.

Mittwoch Psychologische Gesellschaft, The Wednesday Psychological Society (to give the organization its official name; it later became the Wiener Psychoanalytische Vereinigung, Vienna Psychoanalytic Society) was the forerunner of the organizations that now exist, and consisted of a Who’s Who of the early psychoanalytical movement: Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Reich, Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Carl Jung, Sándor Ferenczi, Guido Holzknecht, Isidor Isaak Sadger, Victor Tausk, Hanns Sachs, Ludwig Binswanger, Carl Alfred Meier, Sabina Spielrein, Ernest Jones and others that were invited to join as the years went by (it would ultimately be succeeded by the modern-day International Psychoanalytical Association).

It was, in fact, Jones’ suggestion that “a secret committee be formed as a Praetorian guard around Freud” as necessary to defend the Godfather from the many slings and arrows that were flung his way by his many detractors – but it was also, unofficially, put in place to keep a watchful eye on Jung in order to better “preserve the purity of psychoanalytic theory”; thus, the whole Freudian/Jungian schism was there from the start. Freud was enthusiastic about the idea, especially by the “secret” aspect of the committee, going so far as to decree that any “rejection of any part of the theory meant personal rejection of him” and that “anyone whose ideas differed from his own…was an ‘enemy’”.

But this “secret ring” (complete with an actual ring that each member was to wear at all times) didn’t last for very long, as the members of this specialized confraternity more often than not couldn’t see eye-to-eye on any number of subjects (in Grosskurth’s words, the “fantasy had been dissolved by the harsh reality of human beings unable to get along together”). The last official meeting of this group that Freud personally participated in was in mid-1926, after which it became the IPA, as noted above. It’s been said that psychiatrists are as crazy as their patients and, after completing The Secret Ring, I was convinced of the veracity of this statement.