ABSTRACT
On 13 October 1971, psychoanalysts may have liked to remember and celebrate the 100th anniversary of Paul Federn, who had dedicated his life to Sigmund Freud and to psychoanalysis. For him, Freud was an incomparable genius and man, and until the last year of his life he did not conceive of his own work as anything else but an elaboration and application of what Freud had discovered. Freud was not only a great and seminal thinker and innovator—Federn considered him an ‘instrument,’ 1 a man endowed with a superior quality for detecting the truth, who had become the sole content of his life. He was by no means alone in what some consider hero worship. Other followers of Freud have expressed similar sentiments. Yet some of Freud’s most ardent admirers soon began to find fault with him and either 232left or, worse, turned love and admiration into hatred. The most famous examples are, of course, well known: Adler, Jung and, several years later, Otto Rank. Much has been made of the split within the early circle of Freud and the worship of Freud among those who remained faithful to him.
