June 27, 2003

'Family Romance, Family Secrets: Case Notes From an American Psychoanalysis, 1912'

By NINA C. AYOUB

In 1912, Freudian practice in the United States was barely out of its infancy and mired in the struggle to define and defend itself. Early that year, a young working-class woman began therapy with Louville Eugene Emerson at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston. "Rachel C." might have remained a psychoanalytic footnote. Instead, her experience of incest and other sexual trauma is the troubling heart of Family Romance, Family Secrets: Case Notes From an American Psychoanalysis, 1912 (Yale