Spoken Memories: Audio Recordings of K. R. Eissler’s Interviews about Sigmund Freud

K.R. Eissler (1908-1999) was an inveterate collector of historical documents and oral histories documenting the life and career of Sigmund Freud. The Viennese-born and trained psychoanalyst was founding secretary and executive director of Sigmund Freud Archives External (SFA), a nonprofit organization established in 1951 to collect and preserve the papers of Sigmund Freud and others who played important roles in the development of psychoanalysis. Eissler and his fellow SFA board members, most of them forced exiles from Austria with the rise of Naziism, succeeded in assembling the world’s largest collection of Sigmund Freud historical materials, including family papers, correspondence, writings, patient files, legal documents and certificates, notebooks, films, photographs, and other items that reveal Freud’s life and work, including his early medical and clinical training; his relationship with family, friends, colleagues, students, and patients; his association with early psychoanalytic societies; his perspectives on analytical training; and his numerous writings.

While collecting the tangible, K. R. Eissler also sought the intangible—memories of Freud, which he captured in hundreds of oral history interviews with Freud’s family, his housekeeper and personal physician, colleagues and associates, critics, patients, and casual acquaintances. Eissler’s two collecting endeavors went hand in hand. He began many of his interviews with a solicitation of Freud letters and other documents. The interviews date from 1951 to 1978, with most made before 1960, often during Eissler’s summer vacations. Interviewees shared their memories of Freud primarily in German or English, and sometimes both. Some interviews are short – recreating a single, fleeting meeting with Freud. Interviews with Freud’s family members, inner circle, and some patients often run long, at times recorded in multiple sessions over days or years. Transcripts of many of these interviews, made at Eissler’s direction, have been part of the online Sigmund Freud Papers since 2017. Eissler also donated the audio recordings of his interviews, which are housed in the Library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center.

In 2018, nearly twenty years after Eissler’s death, Sigmund Freud Archives secured funding from the New-Land Foundation to digitize, preserve, and make available these interview recordings. In 2023, through a collaboration between Sigmund Freud Archives and the Library of Congress, a large portion of these interviews became available for streaming on the Library’s website. The digital audio collection makes it possible to step back in time, often to a mere dozen years following Freud’s 1939 death, to listen to the spoken memories of the people who knew him best.

The table below lists the interview recordings that are available for streaming. Included for each interview is the name of the interviewee, the date of the interview, its principal language(s), a link to its typed transcript, and a link to the audio recording landing page. Audio recordings can be accessed from their landing page by clicking on the “Play” icon. Catalog records for reels or cassettes containing multiple interviews list the starting point for each interview. Typed transcripts can also be accessed from the landing page.

Some Eissler interview transcripts and audio recordings are not listed below. The online Freud Papers include transcripts of interviews for which there are no audio recordings, and these transcripts can be accessed on the digital collection’s website. Similarly, some audio recordings have no corresponding transcript. Some of these recordings are not available currently for streaming. For more information about these recordings, contact the Library’s Recorded Sound Reference Center.