On hatred. With comments on the revolutionary, the saint, and the terrorist.

It is common to base an assessment of psychological health on an individual's ability to love. However, the ability to hate is no less important a manifestation of the healthy personality. The author investigates the psychology of hatred and the possible effects of psychoanalytic treatment on the development of the capacity to hate and, by extension, to engage in revolutionary political activity.

Living in history and ego strength.

From his observations as a member of the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II, the author examines the relationship between the ability to form constructive historical identifications--to "live in history"--and ego strength. He surmises that the American soldier's failure to draw upon such identifications represents an ego weakness that resulted in a greater frequency and intensity of psychopathology during the war.

[The end of an illusion, Sigmund Freud and his 20th century]. / Das Ende einer Illusion, Sigmund Freud und sein 20. Jahrhundert.

At the end of the 20th century Eissler looks back to its beginnings and the outside figure of Sigmund Freud. What good have Freud's discoveries done? What progress have they promised and which of those promises have actually been redeemed? What kind of track record does psychoanalysis have to show for itself? The author undertakes a careful assessment of Freud's stature, his limitations and his scientific achievements, and comes to the skeptical conclusion that in the last resort it was in fact the founder of psychoanalysis who destroyed the illusion he himself had long subscribed to, i.e. that there is an indissoluble link between the increase of scientific knowledge and the salvation of homo sapiens. For Eissler's Freud the survival of humanity and the scientific civilization created by mankind are irreconcilable.

A classic revisited: K. R. Eissler's "The effect of the structure of the ego on psychoanalytic technique".

Re-examining a classic paper by K. R. Eissler forty years after its publication recalled for the author his own "origins" in psychoanalysis in the same period, allowing a vivid context in which to view Eissler's contribution. Eissler's attempt to maintain a disciplined clinical position based on the structural theory as the foundation for psychoanalysis as a science, in the face of many proposed changes in both technique and theory in the decade after Freud's death, made many analysts refer to this paper as a kind of bible for the orthodox. This revisit attempts to explore the questions of how and why such a characterization of this paper has taken place.

Comments on erroneous interpretations of Freud's seduction theory.

The seduction theory, as formulated by Freud in 1896, has been erroneously understood by many to be a statement about the frequency of sexual abuse of children, but in reality it postulates a specific etiology of adult psychopathology. Freud stated two conditions that would falsify the theory. When he discovered their existence, he was forced, very much against his preference, to abandon the theory. Later, this sequence was denied and Freud's change of theory was referred to opprobrious subjective traits, assertions made without documentation except by Masson. He maintained that he had come across a document from the pen of Ruth Mack Brunswick the alleged content of which implied grave deficits in Freud's scholarship. When it became possible to examine the original document, it was found that it does not contain anything corresponding to what Masson reported. The discrepancies between his account and Mack Brunswick's draft are presented. In the document, Mack Brunswick set forth some of the observations she had made when treating the Wolf Man in the years subsequent to the patient's first analysis, which she had reported in 1928. Her enlargement of the role of seduction in the etiology of the Wolf Man's psychopathology is discussed.