ABSTRACT
Many psychoanalytic historians speculate that Sigmund Freud's advice to Abraham was colored by his disappointment in Fliess and thus in his earlier hopes for a psychoanalytic society in Berlin. While the psychoanalysts met informally on Wednesdays and could all fit into Freud's study, they were extremely casual. So it seemed natural that when they had to move, two of the four suggestions for bigger quarters were for coffeehouses. Speaking of the period before Adolf Hitler, psychoanalysts can superficially characterize the Austrians as having retained their early informal structure even after the formation of the International Psychoanalytic Association and a polyclinic and the Berliners as having created an exemplary formal organization. The dissimilarities between the two German-speaking psychoanalytic groups were less striking than their differences from their counterparts in the United States, where psychoanalytic terms such as defenses, Oedipus complex, fixation, and reaction formation were already becoming household words.
