Peter Swales, a self-taught scholar who shook up the cloistered world of Freudian studies with brash research and theories that painted Sigmund Freud’s personal life as something less than exemplary and cast aspersions on some of his psychotherapy, died on Friday at his home near Izmir, Turkey. He was 73.
His wife, Julia Sachon Swales, said the cause was a short illness and infection.
Mr. Swales could not have been a more unlikely figure in the circle of scholars who have been disputing or defending Freud in recent decades, a clash, sometimes labeled the Freud Wars, that was particularly heated in the 1980s. Whereas many of the combatants had Ph.D.’s and held academic posts, Mr. Swales was a high school dropout, though he evolved into a dogged independent researcher. Before he burst onto the Freud scene with a 1981 lecture at New York University, the highlight of his résumé was a stint as an assistant to the Rolling Stones.
Since Freud’s death in 1939 the “Freud establishment” (as Mr. Swales called it) had tended to promote a view of Freud as a paragon. An influential biography by Ernest Jones, “The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud,” published in the 1950s, was largely uncritical. Freud’s daughter Anna Freud (who died in 1989) worked to keep his image untarnished, and so did Kurt Eissler, who for years was the director of the Sigmund Freud Archives.
So Mr. Swales drew considerable attention when, in a lecture at the clinical psychology program at N.Y.U. in November 1981, he not only said that Freud had had a sexual relationship with Minna Bernays, the sister of Freud’s wife, Martha; he also presented evidence that Minna may have become pregnant and had an abortion and that their relationship was reflected in Freud’s work.
There had long been speculation about the relationship between Freud and his sister-in-law, who lived with the Freuds for many years, but Mr. Swales’s mix of research and educated guesses went further than others had.
Peter L. Rudnytsky, professor of English at the University of Florida and head of the department of academic and professional affairs of the American Psychoanalytic Association, said by email that Mr. Swales’s N.Y.U. lecture “rocked the psychoanalytic world by laying out a dazzling case that Freud encoded a secret confession of his love affair with his wife’s sister in two works that he wrote following their travels together in the summer of 1900.”
“Even today,” added Professor Rudnytsky, who interviewed Mr. Swales at length in his book “Psychoanalytic Conversations” (2000), “Swales’s thesis arouses vehement opposition from the old guard, but the evidence supporting it has only grown stronger in the intervening decades, and it has permanently altered — in W.H. Auden’s words — the ‘climate of opinion’ about Freud.”
Mr. Swales, whom The Washington Times once called a “punk debunker,” produced a series of other papers in the 1980s and ’90s that rattled the Freud establishment, identifying particular patients and sometimes questioning Freud’s notes and conclusions. And though he had no academic standing, the thoroughness of his research earned him respect by some who did, like Frederick Crews of the University of California at Berkeley, who cited him repeatedly in his 2017 book, “Freud: The Making of an Illusion.”
A number of Mr. Swales’s findings have since been supported by others. In 2006, for instance, a sociologist named Franz Maciejewski tracked down a Swiss hotel register in which Freud and Minna had registered as man and wife for a two-week vacation in the Alps. And certainly Mr. Swales’s constant questioning of the standard biographies and interpretations of Freud helped encourage others to reassess that towering figure of psychoanalysis.
“Peter Swales was not always right about Freud and his followers,” Daniel Burston, an associate professor of psychology at Duquesne University who has written on Freud and the impact of Mr. Swales and other revisionist scholars, said by email. “But he was always original, fearless and funny; an extremely diligent and resourceful archivist who was not cowed by authority, whose many discoveries often overturned conventional wisdom, and whose perspective will intrigue future historians of psychoanalysis for years to come.”
Peter Joffre Swales was born on June 5, 1948, in Haverfordwest, Wales. His father, Joffre, was a musician who created a marching band for children. His mother, Nancy (Evans) Swales, ran a music shop.
Peter dropped out of school at 17 and went to London, drawn by the music scene. A job in the promotions department at Marmalade Records led to an interview with Mick Jagger, who gave him a job as a general assistant to the Rolling Stones.
“Nominally the promotions man, Swales in fact served an undefined role as general assistant and subtle master of hustle and hype,” Rolling Stone magazine wrote in a 1984 article about him.
He didn’t stay with the band long, and in 1972 he moved to New York. Soon he was working at Stonehill Publishing, which in 1974 brought out “Cocaine Papers,” a book of Freud’s writing about his experiments with cocaine. Working on that volume triggered Mr. Swales’s fascination with Freud, and when he left Stonehill in 1974 he began doing his own research, discovering things that were not in the conventional Freud narrative.
By mid-1975 he had moved to New Mexico, where, he told Rolling Stone, “somewhat reluctantly and rather to my surprise, I had to confront the fact that I was an intellectual, and that if there was one thing I was good at, it had to do with the realms of ideas and research.”
As that research deepened, Mr. Swales came in contact with other scholars. One was, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, who was projects director for the Freud Archives but who lost that post shortly before Mr. Swales’s 1981 lecture, when Dr. Masson voiced some of his own against-the-established-wisdom ideas about Freud in an interview with The New York Times.
Both Mr. Swales and Dr. Masson, who were not on good terms, were featured in Janet Malcolm’s 1984 book, “In the Freud Archives,” reporting that originally appeared in The New Yorker and that turned into a protracted legal battle between Dr. Masson and Ms. Malcolm.
Mr. Swales and his wife, who married in 1974, had lived in Turkey since 2007. He is also survived by two sisters, Patricia Barker Swales and Freda Swales.
Ralph Blumenthal contributed reporting.
