Those 45 Minutes Changed My Life: The Meeting of Sigmund Freud and Margarethe Lutz

Abstract

The editors of this series of papers introduce the account of Margarethe Lutz, a patient who saw Sigmund Freud for one session and spoke of it 70 years later. It was an experience, she said, that “changed her life.” The editors note that there are few, if any, accounts of treatment with Freud that illustrate in such detail the unfolding of an individual session. The editors asked the authors of the seven papers in this issue to address the question of what, in this single session, may have led to its life-changing impact and the implications this may have for the way contemporary psychoanalysts and psychotherapists think about their work.

Keywords:

• Sigmund Freud
• classical psychoanalysis
• Margarethe Lutz

“Those 45 minutes completely changed my life.” So said 88-year-old Margarethe Lutz,¹ an Austrian sculptress, to her interviewer, Peter Roos in April 2006 (Roos, this issue). She was talking about her single session with Sigmund Freud 70 years before, in 1936, when she was just 18 years old.

Margarethe’s story is riveting. Clearly a troubled adolescent, she behaves strangely at home. Her father, a usually authoritative and powerful man used to having things his way, has no idea what to do. He consults the family physician, Dr. May (Dohler, 2009), and, on his advice, takes his daughter to Freud. What happens next is startling.

From the beginning we have a picture of the vitality and sheer psychic power of Freud’s manner and mind. It is, at one and the same time, the Freud we have read about and know. And yet what happens contradicts all the usual and customary ways we have of thinking about the progenitor of classical psychoanalysis.

Margarethe told the story of her encounter with Freud several times. We review this background and other sources of information about her in our Afterword following these papers. But until now the story has never been published or discussed in the psychoanalytic literature. The astonishing account of Margarethe’s one session with Freud, by Peter Roos, was published in the German weekly Die Zeit in 2006. It is presented here in translation by Kenneth Kronenberg. Seven psychoanalytic clinicians with differing perspectives and backgrounds have written brief articles in response to this clinical account. Each was asked to address his or her own view of its implications for the way contemporary psychoanalytic clinicians think about the nature of their work. They were specifically asked to address the basic question of what led to the powerful experience of lifelong change from this single session.

Clearly, finding new clinical material about Freud’s work with a patient is in itself a notable event. Perhaps most significant, there is no other known account that illustrates the unfolding of an individual session with Freud at this level of nuance and detail, and from the perspective of the patient’s own experience. The papers presented here are just the beginning of a discussion of this remarkable clinical moment. We welcome the contributions of others as this previously undiscussed case of Freud’s becomes more well known in psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic scholarly forums. Because the papers are brief, we forgo the customary editors’ note on each paper. We follow in the Afterword with some brief comments.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonathan H. Slavin

Jonathan H. Slavin, PhD, ABPP, is Clinical Instructor in Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; Adjunct Clinical Professor, Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis, New York University; Founding Director, Tufts University Counseling Center (1970–2006); Former President of the Division of Psychoanalysis (39), American Psychological Association; and Founding President, Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. Dr. Slavin’s published work has focused on fundamental human elements in the psychoanalytic relationship including love, sexuality, desire, truthfulness, and personal agency, and their role in the repair of the mind.

Miki Rahmani

Miki Rahmani, MA, is Chief Psychologist, South Jerusalem Mental Health Center, and is a former longtime member on the Faculty of the School of Education, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. In more than 35 years of clinical teaching and consulting she has taught annual courses, seminars, and workshops on the supervisory relationship, the supervisory process in clinical work and in education, and the treatment process.

Notes

¹ Identified as Margarethe Walter in the account by Peter Roos. See editors’ Afterword in this issue regarding the name of the patient.