Freud and the Child Woman

Fritz Wittels (1880-1950) was a pioneering Viennese psychoanalyst, the first biographer of Freud (1924), and intermittently friend and rival of Freud himself, of Wilhelm Stekel, and of their famous satirical adversary, Karl Kraus. Towards the end of his life, while living and practising as an analyst in the United States, Wittels wrote a 200-page memoir of his early life and career in Vienna. The typescript memoirs, held in the archives of the Abraham Brill Library, New York, are published here, accompanied by a range of illustrations. Incomplete in places, they have been edited, contextualized and introduced by Edward Timms, whose explanatory notes include the identification of the child woman of the title. In his memoirs Wittels writes about the erotic sub-culture of fin-de-siecle Vienna and about early controversies within the psychoanalytic society. His picture of the interaction between the two should appeal not only to historians of psychoanalysis, but to anyone interested in the Viennese cultural avant-garde. The erotic triangles in which Wittels, Kraus and Freud were involved are shown to have impinged directly on the activities of the famous society.