ABSTRACT
A distinguished European psychoanalyst once wrote me that he considered the Diary of Sigmund Freud, 1929-1939: A Record of the Final Decade 1 a fraud, and his intellectual credentials were weighty enough for me to begin here by considering the merits of his point of view. Although this large book is over three hundred pages long, the German text, reproduced here, takes up only five pages. Photographs of the original handwritten entries, combined with translations, consume just under forty pages. Publishers, who one might think were eager for Freud primary material, were intially leery that there was enough, in what the editor calls “a skeletal grid of isolated words,” to constitute a real book.
