Ex-assistant to Stones self-taught Freud expert

Peter Swales, who has died aged 73, was a former assistant to the Rolling Stones and self-taught Freud scholar who scandalized admirers of the “father of psychoanalysis” with his delvings into the historical Sigmund Freud.

In 1998 the New York Times praised his “remarkable detective work over the last 25 years, revealing the true identities of several early patients of Freud's who had been known only by their pseudonyms.”

But Swales, who described himself as “the punk historian of psychoanalysis” and as the “Philip Marlowe of Freud studies,” became notorious when, in a speech in 1981, he maintained that Freud had had a secret affair with his wife Martha's younger sister Minna Bernays and had arranged for her to have an abortion after she became pregnant.

It had long been known that Minna was close to the Freuds. She moved in with them in the 1890s, and Minna and Freud sometimes would take holidays together.

Swales had come to his controversial conclusion, however, after examining a case study, described in Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), of a young man who has forgotten the word “aliquis” from a line from Virgil: “Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor” (“Let someone rise up from my bones as an avenger!”).

The young man, Swales believed, was Freud himself, and the “aliquis incident” concerned his affair with Minna and reflected his own feelings of guilt over her pregnancy and its termination.

Swales's claims were rubbished by Freud admirers who had also dismissed a claim in the 1950s by Carl Jung, Freud's disciple turned archrival, that Minna had confessed to an affair with Freud, as malice on Jung's part.

In 2006, however, a German sociologist found evidence in the register of the Schweizerhaus, an inn in Maloja in the Swiss Alps, that during a two-week vacation in August 1898, Freud and Minna had stayed in a double room as a married couple.

Peter Joffre Swales was born on June 5, 1948, in Haverfordwest, Wales. His father, Joffre, was a musician and his mother Nancy, nee Evans, ran a music shop.

In 1968 he landed an interview for a promotional job with the Stones. He left the band in January 1970.

In 2007 Swales and his wife Julia moved to live near Izmir in Turkey.

She survives him.

Peter Swales