Allen Esterson

Was Einstein's first wife his uncredited coauthor, unpaid assistant, or his unacknowledged helpmeet? The real "Mileva Story." Albert Einstein's first wife, Mileva Einstein-Maric, was forgotten for decades. When a trove of correspondence between them beginning in their student days was discovered in 1986, her story began to be told. Some of the tellers of the "Mileva Story" made startling claims: that she was a brilliant mathematician who surpassed her husband, and that she made uncredited contributions to his most celebrated papers in 1905, including his paper on special relativity. This book, based on extensive historical research, uncovers the real "Mileva Story." Mileva was one of the few women of her era to pursue higher education in science; she and Einstein were students together at the Zurich Polytechnic. Mileva's ambitions for a science career, however, suffered a series of setbacks-failed diploma examinations, a disagreement with her doctoral dissertation adviser, an out-of-wedlock pregnancy by Einstein. She and Einstein married in 1903 and had two sons, but the marriage failed. Was Mileva her husband's uncredited coauthor, unpaid assistant, or his essential helpmeet? It's tempting to believe that she was her husband's secret collaborator, but the authors of Einstein's Wife look at the actual evidence, and a chapter by Ruth Lewin Sime offers important historical context. The story they tell is that of a brave and determined young woman who struggled against a variety of obstacles at a time when science was not very welcoming to women.

Book jacket/back: Although it is now widely held that the scientific basis for Sigmund Freud's theories is decidedly wobby, and his surmises often appear woefully incomplete at best, there yet remains an impression that Freud was a bold explorer of the mind's hidden depths, a penetrating if fallible discerner of unsuspected motives behind the superficially innocent forms of behavior. And if even that is now more frequently questioned, we are at least left with the consolation that Freud, however misguided, was a man of unsported integrity, who sincerely strove to uncover the truth and accurately reported what his clients told him. Only a few writers have heretofore intimated the possibility that Freud's accounts of his cases are systematically and self servingly untruthful, but now Allen Esterson picks up the trail, and demonstrates, by acute detective work, that Freud's work cannot be relied upon (Esterson leaves open the extent to which this can be attributed to self-deception or to calculated fraud). The notorious 'child seduction' incidents, which supposedly led to the framing of the fundamentals of psychoanalytic theory, have occasioned much controversy over the question whether Freud was right to consign these reminiscences of sexual molestations in infancy to the realm of fantasy. This dispute is entirely beside the point because, as Esterson shows, Freud's clients did not report memories of childhood molestation. Here as became habitual with him, Freud muddled his own conjectures of what was going on in his clients' unconscious with their accounts of what they remembered, and, over time, Freud came to represent the former as the latter. Esterson takes us through all the key published cases in Freud's cases in Freud's career, showing that Freud's reports are often at least strongly indicative of misrepresentation, and in some cases demonstrably misleading. Esterson's indictment builds irresistiby to a 'proof beyond reasonable doubt' that Freud's claim to rank as a major thinker is unfounded, and indeed quite preposterous, though his extraordinary achievement as persuader and rhetorician is unassailable.