Peter Swales (historian)

Peter J. Swales (born 1948) is a Welsh "guerilla historian of psychoanalysis", and former assistant to the Rolling Stones, who has written essays and letters about Sigmund Freud. A 1998 article in "The New Republic" 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.