Peter Swales (historian)

Swales died at his home near Izmir, Turkey on 15 April 2022, where he had lived since 2007. He had moved there from Mott Street in lower Manhattan, where he'd lived for the previous 35 years. He died from "a short illness and infection." He is survived by his wife Julia and by his two sisters, Patricia Barker Swales and Freda Swales.

In 1998, Swales discovered the true identity of the pseudonymous "Sybil", who was alleged to have had multiple personalities.

In 1995, Swales sent a petition, for which he had acquired nearly 50 signatories, to the Library of Congress expressing concern that its planned Freud exhibition was not sufficiently critical of Freud — that it did not "suitably portray the present status of knowledge and adequately reflect the full spectrum of informed opinion about the status of Freud's contribution to intellectual history." Following the petition, the Library postponed the exhibition, invited Freud critics to participate, and opened the exhibition in 1998.

Swales "became notorious when, 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".

Peter Joffre Swales (5 June 1948 – 15 April 2022) 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 (the others are Freud Archives director Kurt R. Eissler and psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson) whose machinations are described in the 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 its writer Janet Malcolm.