Cartas de Freud a Otto Rank

Quando gigantes se comportam como anões? Sempre. A correspondência de Freud com um jovem discípulo, Otto Rank, revela que o lado humano, pessoal, domina o lado abstrato, profissional do analista; e coisas miúdas, mundanas, se revelam mais importantes do que a essência do ser humano...In 1906, Rank joined what became the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society; he was 22 years old, and Freud was 50. For a brief, shining moment, Rank belonged to a brotherly corps that included such famous names as Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, Karl Abraham, Sandor Ferenczi and Ernest Jones. But as the years went by, this fraternity gradually grew more like the primordial horde described in Freud’s “Totem and Taboo”: The strongest of these “sons” turned on their “father” and broke away from the received Freudian doctrines. For instance, where the clinical Freud emphasized sexuality and the first half of life, the more mystical Jung explored our later years, when we must achieve psychic wholeness and an acceptance of death. Adler, in his turn, developed a psychology based on social dynamics; he coined the term “inferiority complex.”
For many years, though, the young Rank served as Freud’s go-to lieutenant. Although the letters they exchanged reveal some of the inner workings of their minds, there is much more about the tensions and conflicts inside the psychoanalytic school. This history is elaborated by the editors in long, bridging sections that serve as a virtual potted history of psychoanalysis up to the late 1920s and — it must be admitted — a relief from the overly faint italic type used for the quoted letters themselves.
That history is rather deflating. Freud is obsessed with finding rich donors, creepily undertakes to analyze his daughter Anna, and, after the death of his 4-year-old grandson, announces that he will never care about anyone again. Ferenczi carries on an affair with a married woman and former patient, then falls in love with her daughter. Abraham and Jones are deeply jealous of Rank, and the latter accuses him of being “a swindling Jew.”