Trauma within psychoanalysis was to become my personal trauma

I had the privilege of working with Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud, in her house in Hampstead. For reasons that have always been a bit obscure to me, she allowed me to see, copy, and eventually edit and translate all the unpublished letters from her father to his friend Wilhelm Fliess. She went further: she allowed me to work at her father’s desk, where I found a series of letters having to do with Sandor Ferenczi’s last paper, the extraordinary essay about child sexual abuse he called “Confusion of tongues between adults and the child.” These unpublished letters make it very clear that Freud was very upset that Ferenczi was returning to what he called his “initial error.” Ferenczi read the paper out loud to Freud. Later Freud wrote to his disciples that “Ferenczi must NOT be allowed to give this paper.” These letters and Anna Freud’s decision to allow me to publish them (when she was under pressure to forbid me to use any of the unpublished letters, either in the edition I had prepared of the Complete Freud/Fliess letters (Masson, 1985), or in the book I was writing which became The assault on truth) has always been something of a puzzle. I believe I have solved the riddle. This is what I write about.