"Freud and the Child Woman" or "The Kraus Affair"? A Textual "Reconstruction" of Fritz Wittels's Psychoanalytic Autobiography

A review essay on a book edited by Edward Timms, Freud and the Child Woman: The Memoirs of Fritz Wittels (New Haven, CT: Yale U Press, 1995) discusses Wittels's relationship with Sigmund Freud & Karl Kraus, 1906-1910, & his subsequent break with them over the publication of a revenge-driven novel Ezechiel der Zugereiste ([Ezekiel the Newcomer] 1910). Irma Karczewska, the "child woman" of Timms's title, was an actress in Kraus's social circle. It is argued that Wittels's autobiography ought to be treated as psychoanalytic fiction in which Wittels attempts to deal with his obsessive Oedipal relationships with his twin mentors, Freud & Kraus. Timms instead dramatically revises the text to make it seem a memoir of the golden age of Vienna (Austria). Numerous editorial decisions by Timms are questioned, & the whole tenor of his presentation of the break & subsequent libel trial over the novel is argued to be untrue to the ambivalent & acrimonious relationship between Wittels, Kraus, & Freud. H. von Rautenfeld