ABSTRACT
John M. Dorsey’s memoir of Sigmund Freud and his analysis with him is the least known among the corpus presented in this book. Dorsey’s analysis took place during his two-year sabbatical at the University of Vienna and the Viennese Psychoanalytic Institute. His analysis with Freud began in October of 1935 and ended in November of 1936. Dorsey was an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst from Clinton, Iowa. One of the main difficulties Dorsey experiences as an analysand is his inhibition with respect to free-associating his thoughts. This inhibition appears in analysis in the form of what Dorsey presents as a scattered and crowded verbalization. Freud consistently affirms humanity’s crucial need to free itself from the illusions offered by religion and to face existence in its authentic form, despite the hardship. The view that Dorsey presents is explicitly the same as Freud’s, as expressed for instance in Dorsey’s call to rely solely on self-consciousness.
