Peter J. Swales

Peter Joffre Swales was a Welsh "guerilla historian of psychoanalysis and former assistant to the Rolling Stones". He called himself "the punk historian of psychoanalysis", and he is well known for his essays on Sigmund Freud. A 1998 article in The New York Times Magazine noted 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." He is one of three men whose machinations are described in Janet Malcolm's 1984 book In the Freud Archives, which originated as two articles in The New Yorker magazine that provoked Masson to file an unsuccessful $10 million libel suit against the magazine and Malcolm.