ABSTRACT
Anna Freud was herself unhappy when the Freud- Edoardo Weiss letters came out, and she successfully did what she could to make sure that the International Psychoanalytic Library at the Hogarth Press in London did not accept Weiss’s Sigmund Freud as a Consultant. Americans in particular seemed naive about the technologies of psychoanalytic technique, whether it concerned the use of the couch or the relative silence of the analyst. Weiss was trying to illustrate Paul Federn’s concept of a weak ego in schizophrenia, as opposed to Freud’s own classical psychoanalytic view that schizophrenics have an excess of narcissism. Anna Freud obviously had no faith in the public’s own capacity to sort out the good from the bad; the ideal of toleration presupposes that the truth will emerge from the open marketplace of ideas. Federn’s point of view was designed to encourage therapists to lend assistance to such patients, rather than be clinically repudiating of them.
