Peter Swales
One-time assistant to the Rolling Stones who claimed to have uncovered Freud’s guilty secret
PETER SWALES, who has died aged 73, was a former assistant to the Rolling Stones and self-taught Freud scholar who scandalised 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 – “bonking, as they say in the British press” – and had arranged for her to have an abortion after she became pregnant.
It had long been known that Minna had been close to the Freuds. She moved in with them in the 1890s, and Minna and Sigmund Freud would sometimes take holidays together.
None the less, the traditional view, promoted by Freud’s disciples, was of a scientist of flawless integrity and family man with a reputation for rigid personal morality.
“I was inclined to think, well, what guy who went off on at least 12 documented occasions on holidays to the Alps with his wife’s sister, beginning when he’s 44 and she’s 35 and at the prime of her life, and with whom he has a strong intellectual rapport – my gut reaction was, well, if the man didn’t f--- her, then he’s got to be nuts,” Swales told Rolling Stone magazine in 1984.
Swales had, however, come to his controversial conclusion 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!”).
Encouraged by Freud, the patient then “free-associates” the meaning of aliquis to “Italy”, “liquid”, and then to “blood”, leading Freud to conclude that the lapse of memory represented the unconscious expression of the man’s fear that a certain young woman might miss her period.
“It stank,” Swales recalled. “It was too good to be true.” 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.
In 1900, he noted, Minna had spent some weeks at a health spa in Merano in the Italian Alps, supposedly for respiratory troubles. Swales argued that Minna’s subsequent symptoms fitted those of a septic abortion.
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 – a discovery that led at least some defenders of Freud’s moral probity to change their minds. Swales hailed the find as “the icing on the cake”.
Freud and Minna, he observed, “were playing out an imposture. This discovery makes Freud much more interesting as a human being, but more dubious as a sexual scientist because he was less than honest about his own sexuality.”
Peter Joffre Swales was born on June 5 1948 at Haverfordwest in Wales. His father, Joffre, was a musician and his mother Nancy, née Evans, ran a music shop.
A bright boy and a youthful steam locomotive buff, Peter was educated at Haverfordwest Grammar School. In the early 1960s, however, growing his hair long, he began bunking off to London to hear his favourite rock bands and was expelled from school in 1965.
He landed a trainee position in the record-sales division of EMI in London and soon moved into the promotions department of Marmalade Records, where he caught the attention of Giorgio Gomelsky, the first manager of the Yardbirds and the Rolling Stones.
In 1968, through Gomelsky, he landed an interview for a promotional job with the Stones and walked into a Georgian town house in Chelsea to find the 25-year-old Mick Jagger in a drawing room furnished with a dark altar covered with drapes and candles. Swales was unimpressed: “Jagger talked such a lot of rot,” he told Rolling Stone in 1984. “All this revolutionary stuff… It was pretty weird, because he kept poncing about in front of a mirror in his long hair and make-up. A right little Narcissus.”
Jagger gave him a job as a general assistant to the band and the following year he was involved in organising the “Stones in the Park” gig in Hyde Park.
But Swales was wary of getting too close to band members: “I remember once smoking a huge joint in the studio of Jagger’s Chelsea home. Mick made tea, then took me around to look at his new Moog. Suddenly I got incredibly paranoid, partly under the influence of a bit of dope, and I started thinking, ‘He’s coming on to me; he’s gay! He’s always pouting and doing these weird things at me.’ And I got really scared… I fled the house at the earliest possible moment.”
He left the band in January 1970 “because most people who go to work for the Rolling Stones tend to become swallowed by the myth and spend all their time being appendages. I felt that I had my own life to live.”
With financial assistance from Prince Rupert Loewenstein, the Stones’ personal financial adviser, he founded a rock management company called Sahara, and in 1972 moved to New York, where he was appointed vice-president of Stonehill, a new publishing venture that was planning to issue a collection of Sigmund Freud’s writings about his experiments with cocaine.
Swales had become interested in drug culture while working for the Stones, and working on the book, published as Cocaine Papers in 1974, triggered a fascination with the psychoanalyst. He left Stonehill having decided to devote himself to researching Freud’s life.
Returning to Britain, he sequestered himself in the British Museum reading room and travelled across Europe to interview experts before returning to the US.
Reading through Freud’s writings, along with associated literature from medical journals, Swales began to put the fragments of Freud’s life into chronological order. He discovered huge gaps in the narrative, partly because of Freud’s reluctance to divulge much about his personal life.
The picture that emerged from his researches, published in numerous papers, was not a pleasant one. Freud, he felt, was not a man of science but an inventor of personas who misrepresented the outcomes of the treatments on which he based his theories, a man who could brook no dissent among his followers, and who bullied his patients into accepting his ideas.
Far from being the “ultra-rational” paragon of psychoanalysis, Freud, Swales argued, “was a man torn by all kinds of secret lusts, passions, thirst for revenge, murderous wishes, and hostility toward the Church and political establishment”.
To Freud’s supporters, the ideas he introduced – a way to look at inner desires and hidden motivation – are central to understanding the human psyche. Many reacted with fury when Freud’s work and ethics began coming under attack from sceptics like Swales, who duly gave as good as he got.
The “Freud Wars”, as they were known, reached a vituperative intensity over a much publicised Library of Congress exhibition, “Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture”, that was scheduled for 1996.
The exhibition was nearly stopped in its tracks when Swales initiated a petition of protest complaining that it would be a “Freudfest”, designed to airbrush Freud’s darker side, and demanding that the show should “adequately reflect the full spectrum of informed opinion about the status of Freud’s contribution to intellectual history”.
About 50 people signed it, including Oliver Sacks, Gloria Steinem, and Frederick Crews, the author of books critical of Freud.
The show finally opened in October 1998, the effect of its assemblages of Freud’s writings tempered somewhat by quotes emblazoned above the displays such as Germaine Greer’s observation: “Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.”
Swales did not go and see the show, claiming that “it’d be a bit like inviting a gourmet to go eat at Mcdonald’s.”
In 2007 Swales and his wife Julia moved to live near Izmir in Turkey.
She survives him.
Peter Swales, born June 5 1948, died April 15 2022