Marginal Historiography: on Stekel's Account of Things

Abstract

Psychoanalytic historiography has been, and to a certain extent still is, written mainly from the victor's (Freud's) perspective. One of the first attempts to deliver an alternative account was published in 1926 by Wilhelm Stekel in a little-known paper entitled ‘On the history of the analytical movement’, which he wrote in response to Freud's (1925) An Autobiographical Study as an attempt to supplement or even counter Freud's version. This paper offers a dialogical reading of Stekel's paper, focusing not on the question of whether or not Stekel was right, but on the problem of marginalization itself. What discursive processes contributed to the marginalization of Stekel's position, and in what sense could Stekel's paper be called an instance of self-marginalization? Analysing various intertextual links between Freud's and Stekel's accounts, the author finds that the two accounts were caught up in an antagonistic dialectic from which it was impossible to escape. Following this paper, an English translation of Stekel's 1926 account is presented here for the first time.