This study is designed to bring the psychoanalytic practice of L.E. Emerson to the attention of practicing psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and scholars in the history of medicine and other fields. A psychologist who earned his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1909, Emerson was one of the first practitioners of psychoanalysis in the United States. From 1910 through 1915, he treated over one hundred patients, and the extensive case notes he compiled during these sessions are unique in the history of the discipline. Although substantial literature on the early history of psychoanalysis in Europe and the United States exists, since no analysts' case notes have survived in manuscript form, little is known about the day-to-day practice of psychoanalysis. The Principal Investigator plans to address this gap, focussing on the work Emerson carried out in hospitals in Ann Arbor and Boston in order to reconstruct the nature of early psychoanalytic practice. The book will consist of three chapters placing Emerson's practice in the context of contemporary psychiatric and psychoanalytic thinking, as well as of extensive edited and annotated excerpts from five cases. Its goal is to offer a detailed portrait of one analyst's practice in the context of the discipline's volatile, controversial, and exciting early years that will constitute a major addition to the literature on psychoanalysis.
