Three Instances of Injustice

An important new work by Eissler, Three Instances of Injustice develops a psychoanalytic point of view about the phenomenon of gossip, provides a careful disproof of one of the ugliest charges laid against Freud, and presents a thoughtful exploration of a major scandal. The book is thus a contribution to a small body of literature in which a psychoanalyst steps outside his field to comment on matters of contemporary social and political concern.
The injustices in question are those of ordinary life and do not depend for their identification on an abstruse moral theory: if the facts are as Dr. Eissler lays them out, hardly anyone will disagree that the essays concern genuine and severe forms of injustice. At least two of the essays deal with events that became causes celebres in their time, and it can fairly be stated that all three concern issues of quite general interest.
In his discussion of the case of Dr. Elizabeth Morgan, who was incarcerated for more than two years for contempt of court in the course of a dispute over custody of her daughter, Eissler may be the only commentator who takes into consideration not only the contending parties' claims and certain of the technical issues surrounding the diagnosis of sexual abuse of young children but also the relationship of the case to much broader issues, including those brought forward by the women's movement and recent Supreme Court positions on abortion and the death penalty.
Eissler has previously examined C. G. Jung's charge that Freud was embroiled in marital infidelity at the time of Jung's first visit to Vienna, but the text has not been available to an English-speaking audience. In the present study Eissler refines and extends his earlier analysis. The essay establishes the extreme improbability of Jung's proposition through a painstaking appraisal of the available evidence, while at the same time demonstrating the relationship of Jung's slander to his personality and psychological conflicts.
The third essay focuses on gossip, of which Eissler himself has been a victim. He answers criticisms of him lodged in recent biographical works and formulates a psychoanalytic outlook on gossip which has general implications for understanding the phenomena of gossip and the social matrix in which it comes to life. Not the least interesting theme in Eissler's work is its focus - explicit in one essay, implicit in the others - on the relationship between the subject of gossip and the collectivity.
K. R. Eissler's book is significant not only because of the importance of the themes he deals with but also because of the scholarship that enables him to challenge received opinion while opening new intellectual and psychological vistas.