ABSTRACT
Throughout Freud’s letters to Weiss about patients, a moralistic tone appears, even though it may seem out of keeping with what one now thinks of in connection with an analyst’s so-called neutrality. Historical distance is necessary: our own era’s forms of moralism can take the form of various illusions of superiority, that we are the best, and the past misguided. Like the rest of us, Freud had his decided human preferences, and the particular moralism that shows up in the letters to Weiss was a typical aspect of Freud’s own characteristic clinical approach as a whole. Freud could, for example, describe some patients he admired as “worthy” of psychoanalysis. It has to remain a bit startling to find Freud, in a famous 1912 paper, referring in passing to “a person even of only moderate worth,” 1 since so much of Christian culture has paid at least lip service to the preciousness and significance of every single human soul. The concept of worthiness logically implies the possibility that some people could be deemed worthless. 2
