It reports how Fenichel, one of the leading ‘left’ Freudians of his time, hailed the first volume of Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation in 1938–39 as a paragon of ‘psychoanalytical sociology’. Upon requesting his London friends for more information, he learned that Elias was a ‘thorough scholar’ with ‘subtle psychological flair’, ‘very clever (although not quite as clever as he thinks himself to be)’, ‘ardently wishing to co-operate with psychoanalysts’. This wish was confirmed by Elias in a letter to Fenichel where he mentioned his current research on the masturbation taboo and his plans for a journey to the USA. There was an exchange of  four letters between the two men. Schröter’s essay shows how important were the efforts at integrating psychoanalysis and sociology, of which Fenichel was a champion, as a context in which Über den Prozeß was written. In 1978 Elias composed an (unpublished) article, Notizen zu einem Brief, as a kind of belated answer to Fenichel’s last letter to him, dated October 9, 1939 .

source:

www.usyd.edu.au/su/social/elias/fig/fig14.pdf