the freud & martha corespondence

Die Brautbriefe: The Freud and Marthacorrespondence*

Riccardo Steiner

12a Belsize Lane, London, UK – [email protected]

Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays

Die BrautbriefeBand 1. Sei mein, wie Ich mir’s denke. Juni 1882–Juli 1883Herausgegeben von Gerhard Fichtner, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis und Albrecht

Hirschm€ullerS. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2011

The Bridal LettersVol. 1. Be mine as I want you. June 1882–July 1883

Edited by Gerhard Fichtner, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis and Albrecht Hirschm€ullerS. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2011

‘Through our combined memories’: Die Brautbriefe,Anna Freud, Ernest Jones, and the Bernfelds

The most beautiful letters, one could write a book about them…The whole series makes a tremendous love epic. Yes, he was very passionate andexpresses the most tumultuous emotions in the pithiest language … Martha comes

out of the letters excellently but Freud was very neurotic.(Letter from Jones to Siegfried Bernfeld, 9 May 1952–29 June 1952)

Saved from confiscation and probable destruction by the Nazis after theoccupation of Austria in 1938, the Brautbriefe are the letters that SigmundFreud and Martha Bernays exchanged from June 1882 and May 1886,during the long and painful period of their engagement. The Brautbriefeare part of a wider collection of personal and official letters, manuscripts,and documents related to the life and work of Freud and his relatives,friends, colleagues and acquaintances. Freud and his family managed tobring the collection to London in 1938, together with a large and substan-tial part of Freud’s library and precious collection of antiquities. For morethan ten years the letters between Freud and Martha have remainedcarefully protected by Freud’s family, held at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Lon-don NW3.

*For J. Starobinski

Int J Psychoanal (2013) 94:863–935 doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.12118

Copyright © 2013 Institute of PsychoanalysisPublished by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA on behalf of the Institute of Psychoanalysis

�e International Journal of

According to E. Jones (1956, vol. 1, p. 109), following her husband’sdeath in 1939, Martha Bernays wanted to do what her young fianc�e hadfamously asked her to do – destroy them.1 She desisted only at her chil-dren’s request.It was Jones who in 1945 already had in mind to write a sort of biogra-

phy of Freud (Steiner, 2000); Jones was the first for many years – and oneof the few – to have access to the Brautbriefe. Towards the end of the 1940sJones had been appointed as Freud’s official biographer, after much doubtand hesitation, by Anna Freud in consultation with her family and some ofher closest friends who were in London or who had emigrated to the USA,such as E. Kris and his wife, M. Schur, K. Eissler in New York, and M.Bonaparte in Paris, to mention just a few (Steiner, 2000). Jones’s character-istic “harshness” (Young–Bruehl, 1988, pp. 306, 347) and his role in pro-tecting M. Klein before and after the arrival of the Viennese in Englandcould not be easily forgotten by Anna.And yet Jones had contributed so much in saving Anna’s father and fam-

ily and friends. This, together with the fact that in the same years J. Stra-chey, with the help of Jones but also in constant consultation with Anna,had started the Standard Edition, played its part in persuading Anna ofJones’s loyalty to her father (Steiner, 1995, 2000).During the first months of 1952, perhaps not by chance a few months

after the death of her mother, Martha, on 2 November 1951, Anna Freudannounced to Jones that she and her family had discussed the possibilityof allowing him to read and use the Brautbriefe (Young–Bruehl, 1988,pp. 306–10; Behling, 2005, p. 162).Helping Jones was not an easy task for Anna, particularly in this case.

She wanted to have total control over Jones’s writings but, at a more per-sonal level, she had to face moments of constant and at times disturbingemotions in searching through those documents, stored but disorganized indozens of boxes at Maresfield Gardens; she would do this in the eveningsor during the time she could spare from the long hours of clinical andadministrative work at the Hampstead Clinics. Those documents remindedher of so many private moments of her father’s and mother’s and her ownlife in Vienna, her childhood and youth with them and her family, now lostforever.To complicate this search, Anna experienced a sort of chronic depression

for the loss of her father which tormented her for years (Young–Bruehl,1988, pp. 286–317). And one should not forget the difficulties Anna and theViennese still had to face in their work in London in spite of the conclusionof the so-called Freud–Klein Controversies in 1942–45 (King and Steiner,1992).In the case of the Brautbriefe, those personal documents went even fur-

ther back to a period in which Anna had not yet been born and did notknow her father, which made her feel even more nostalgic and in some waysdepressed:

1Freud to Martha, 28 April 1885; Freud, 1961, pp. 152–3.

864 R. Steiner

Int J Psychoanal (2013) 94 Copyright © 2013 Institute of Psychoanalysis

Today my father’s death has his 13th anniversary and I still wish I had known himat the time of the Brautbriefe. At least I shall meet him through the medium ofyour work.

(Anna to Jones, 23 September 1952)2

The search for the Brautbriefe had been rather clumsy and the resultsunexpected at times. Consider the letter dated 24 May 1952 from Anna toJones:

There are hundreds of additional letters which I found and packed for you justnow… from 1882–86 my father’s and my mother’s indeed.

(Anna to Jones, 24 March 1952)

Anna added: “I do not know how you will cope with them now”, proba-bly alluding both to the fact that Jones had nearly finished writing the firstvolume of the biography and to the pressure that all this new and so fasci-nating material put on him.3

A few months later Anna told Jones that she had also found a bookletentitled Geheim- Chronik [Secret Chronicle], which she could not transcribebut she wanted to be sure that it could not be seen “except by you” (Annato Jones, 3 November 1952).4

It had therefore not been easy for Anna and her family to decide whetherto allow Jones to read and use the Brautbriefe. Indeed, if one sought anemblematic example of the complex reasons which motivated Anna’s needfor total control over the way Jones was writing his biography of Freud,one could find it in these letters.Aside from Anna’s personal reasons, there was a cultural and in some

ways also political strategy: the need to create and transmit to thepsychoanalytical movement and the general public a certain image ofFreud, his life and work, that Anna and her friends thought represented his

2See also the moving letter from Anna to Jones dated 31 January 1954 (Steiner, 2000).3The letters were frantically transcribed and translated for Jones by his wife Kitty, who had great diffi-culty at the time in deciphering Freud’s shadow-Gothic handwriting (Jones to Bernfeld, 26 June 1952);Freud himself comments on his difficult-to-read handwriting in a letter to Martha (15 August 1882;Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 87). The letters were sent to Jones by Anna in instalments. There is an amusingseries of letters from Jones to Bernfeld in which he describes all this (Jones to Bernfeld, 26 June 1952and 3 August 1952). According to Jones, there were between 1,700 and 2,000 letters. In reality, there areall together 1,539 (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 58). According to T. Roberts (Grubrich-Simitis, Einf€uhrung,in Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 14), Jones made use of and quoted more or less 213 Brautbriefe in his biogra-phy. I still remember how, during the commemoration for the centenary of the birth of Jones in 1979 atthe British Psychoanalytic Society, Anna ironically described the way she and her family helped Jones,sending him documents and letters by hand, by post or bringing them to him during their visits toJones’s retirement cottage at Elsted in Sussex. Anna and her family did not care very much about secu-rity!!! All this made it very difficult for Anna to trace and get back all those precious original lettersand documents later on (Freud A, 1979).4“Just imagine … last night, still searching for letters, I found the Geheim-Chronik. A small black book-let, begun on 25 January 1883, ended 21 September 1886. There are only 30 pages written in it, in ‘alter-nation’”, wrote Anna to Jones on 3 November 1952. See Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 531–42, for the editedtranscription. The Geheim-Chronik was a sort of secret diary written alternately by Freud and Martha,in which they commented on some of the main events during their engagement.

Die Brautbriefe: The Freud and Martha correspondence 865

Copyright © 2013 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2013) 94

‘true image’5; this strategy meant creating a biographical historiography,which used the available documents in a rather artisanal, personal, censuredand more than once dogmatic and ideological way. A biographical histori-ography, to use Halbwachs’s felicitous definition, based on the method ofthe ‘collective memories’ of those who had personally known Freud as themain criterion of truth (Steiner, 2000), would have helped to preserve whatthey thought to be the true and idealized image of Freud as a person andas the hero of psychoanalysis against all sorts of threats, the dangerousmounting criticisms, and what they considered to be incorrect and hereticalviews concerning psychoanalysis in those years (Steiner, 2000).Anna, her family and her most intimate friends had therefore tried to cre-

ate a sort of cultural ‘quarantine line’ around Freud, his personal life andhis work.6 Aside from certain discredited attempts to write Freud’s biogra-phy when he was still alive (just think of Wittels, 1924), what had disturbedand worried Anna and her friends towards the end of the 1940s was Lud-wig’s (1946) book and, above all, Puner’s (1947) attempt at a biography ofFreud (Steiner, 2000).But now there was also constant pressure on Anna and her friends from

all sorts of other researchers wanting to write something about her father,and demanding information and documents (Young-Bruehl, 1988, pp. 306–7). Just think of what Anna wrote concerning E. Homburger Erikson, a for-mer prot�eg�e of hers who had now emigrated to America: “I have read onepaper by Erik Homburger [Erikson] which literally turn my stomach”(Anna to Jones, 25 November 1952). Anna was referring to Erikson’s analy-sis of Freud’s Irma dream. And consider what she wrote in the same reveal-ing letter to Jones:

I look forward to your book stopping all the impossible attempts at ‘biographies’of my father in the air (and on paper).

The extremely well-documented and pioneering historical work on theearliest years of Freud’s life and scientific career written by the Bernfelds(1949, 1944, 1981[1944]), Anna’s longstanding friends from Vienna and Berlinwho emigrated to San Francisco in the late 1930s, was one that Anna hadsupported at the beginning – despite Jones’s opposition! (Young–Bruehl,1988, p. 347). But it too had aroused Anna’s anxiety and disapproval. It isworth noting that Jones went on to use and at times plagiarize the

5To a certain extent that was also the belief of their British and English colleagues. E. Jones and J. Stra-chey were both convinced that only those who had known Freud could, for instance, truthfully translatehis work into English (Steiner, 1987), although in their correspondence of the late 1940s and early 1950s –in spite of what they officially wrote to Anna – they expressed their personal criticisms and reservationsas far as the Freud–Fliess correspondence, heavily cut and controlled by Anna and E. Kris, was con-cerned (Masson, 1985; Steiner, 1995). It is important to remember that, during her commemoration ofJones’s work as a biographer in 1979 in the speech given at the British Psychoanalytic Society, Annainsisted on Jones’s model of biography as ‘factual’ and that his aim had been ‘to adhere strictly to thetruth’ (Freud A, 1979; Steiner, 2000)!!6One should not forget that it was during those years that K. Eissler, helped by generous American pri-vate donors, had started the Freud Archives – which he directed and controlled, for better or for worse,for years! – in New York. A huge number of Freud’s letters, manuscripts and documents concerninghim and his followers are now at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

866 R. Steiner


Bernfelds’ work in the first volume of his biography of Freud (Grubrich-Simitis, 1981; Steiner, 2000).But what had most disturbed Anna were the psychoanalytic interpreta-

tions of the life of the young Freud, in particular those made by SuzanneCassirer Bernfeld, which in a letter to Jones dated 15 November 1950 Annadescribed as “more phantasy than reality”. Jones sensed that the Bernfeldswere falling out of favour and that Anna now preferred his work.It is not so difficult therefore to understand Anna’s and her family’s emo-

tions and uncertainties in deciding whether to allow Jones to publish theBrautbriefe. Due to the personal and at times extremely delicate nature ofthe contents of the Brautbriefe, Jones had to demonstrate and prove his loy-alty to Freud’s family. He had to moderate the inevitable temptation to usepsychoanalysis to psychoanalyse Freud. The Brautbriefe were a potentialgold mine for this type of interpretation.It is impossible here to discuss in detail the historiographical methodology

adopted by Jones in writing his biography, which has to be put in the culturalbut also socio-political context of the biographies of great men of science, artsand politics written in those years, and the transformations that this kind ofhistoriographical genre was undergoing (see Kracauer, 1977[1933]; L€owenthal,1984; Batchelor, 1995; Holmes, 1995; Backscheider, 2001; Steiner, 2000,2001a; Tridgell, 2004). One would have to consider in particular the longstand-ing British empirical tradition of writing biographies (Steiner, 2000). Suffice tosay here that Jones seemed to have chosen a sort of middle way between, onthe one hand, the iconic 18th century approach to biography, based on ‘facts’and epitomized by The Life of Samuel Johnson written by Boswell (1791–92)who, like Jones, personally knew his biographee (Boswell and Hibbert, 1986[1791]). And on the other, a biographical approach which could make use ofthe new vistas of psychoanalysis in describing characters and motivations.However, because of his role as Freud’s appointed official biographer,

Jones had to steer clear of avant-garde iconoclasm in his pursuit of the hid-den truth of his biographee. Just remember L Stracheys pioneering Eliza-beth and Essex (1925) Holroyd (1981) (Strachey, Holroyd 1981).One has to say that making use of his sophisticated and over the years well-

marinated diplomacy, Jones tried more than once to defend his autonomy as abiographer and his wish to pursue the ‘full truth’. He recalled to Anna herfather’s “ruthless integrity and aversion to compromise in his work”, and heeven quoted Cromwell’s (one of Freud’s heroes) injunction to his portrait pain-ter – “Paint me warts and all” (Jones to Anna, 28 November 1951). Yet, in thecase of theBrautbriefe, things were more complicated and charged with all sortsof emotions. Jones had to walk a tightrope.It was not the first time that Anna and her family had sat together at

home, or with Jones, and “through our combined memories” (Anna toJones, 31 July 1951) tried to answer Jones’s endless queries about the earlyyears of Freud’s life and work.But this time Anna and her family had needed more than one family meet-

ing to decide whether to allow Jones to read and use the Brautbriefe, with theguarantee that he would be the only one to have the right to publish them.Referring to those letters, on 19 March 1952 Anna wrote to Jones:



The question you raised has aroused quite an emotional upheaval in our otherwiseunemotional family. Mathilde and I felt we had just to preserve them unread forthe future as too intimate. Ernst feels the other way, namely that a biographer has

to be given every conceivable help. Martin wavers but inclines more to Mathildeand my view. I think in the end we will come round to Ernst’s point of view.7

On 28 March 1952 Jones wrote back to Anna. After cautiously goingthrough the various possible solutions to dealing with the Brautbriefe,including destroying them, “which would be an unforgivable crime”, withcharacteristic rhetoric he invited Anna to “let me go through them and thenpreserve them. I need hardly say that I should not think of quoting anypassage without first submitting it to you”.A few days later, Jones declared to Anna:

I appreciate fully your intellectual Yes and your emotional No and I congratulate

you on what I am quite sure is the right outcome. No one knew better than yourfather how emotions hold up reason, but he had great faith in its being the ultimatevictor.

(Jones to Anna, 1 April 1952)

It was Freud’s son, Ernst Freud – who incidentally later on did not seemso enthusiastic about Jones’s biography (Grubrich-Simitis, Einf€uhrung, inFichtner et al., 2011, pp. 13–14) – who managed to overcome the resistanceof Anna and her other siblings. The fears felt by Anna and the majority ofher family with regard to the Brautbriefe suddenly intensified. And later,Anna never allowed Jones to use her personal correspondence with herfather directly; instead, she distilled some information from it for Jones,because it was too personal.8

Indeed, Anna’s sense of discretion, the particular relationship she hadwith her father, along with her fear of violating the ‘sancta sanctorum’ ofthe intimacy between her young father and her mother (with whom she didnot have an easy relationship) (Young-Bruehl, 1998, pp. 302–10; Behling,2005, pp. 129–30, 160), meant that Anna did not even allow herself to readsome of those Brautbriefe!9

The Brautbriefe instilled in her an “enormous longing for the past and ontop of the remote past, which has never been my own”, she told Jones, adding:

I looked into one or two … and I realize now I cannot read them for objective pur-poses … you will read them better than me as a more detached reader.

Later on Anna read the correspondence when she was involved in theGerman translation of Jones’s biography (see the letter from Anna to Jonesdated 30 August 1956; Steiner, 2000).Jones not only used diplomacy to reassure Anna about the Brautbriefe, in

a rather seductive way, he also tried to recall how attracted he had been to

7See also the letter from Anna to Jones dated 30 March 1952.8See, for instance, the letter from Anna to Jones dated 23 February 1954 (Steiner, 2000).9See the letter from Anna to Jones dated 8 April 1952.

868 R. Steiner


her in the past, concluding: “I have always loved you in quite an honestfashion” (Jones to Anna, 5 July 1956); Jones reminded Anna of his court-ship of her when on her first trip to England in 1914 when she was veryyoung and attractive. Incidentally, this courtship had greatly worried Freud,who knew of Jones’s past as a womanizer (S. Freud to Jones, 22 July 1914;Paskaukas, 1993, p. 294). Since Anna had not allowed Jones access to hercorrespondence with her father, Jones was unaware of Freud’s letter toAnna, dated 16 July 1914, in which Freud strongly warned his 18 year-oldagainst Jones’s courtship, due to his roughness, the unpredictability of hismanners and behaviour, his difficult upbringing and his age; at 35, he wastoo old for Anna (Meyer-Palmedo, 2006, p. 138).As a result of the way Jones approached the letters – walking on egg-

shells in order not to upset Anna and her family – the Brautbriefe had man-aged to restore and reinforce the not always easy friendship between Jonesand Freud’s family, instilling some tenderness too. At one point, after hav-ing read the second chapter of the first volume of his biography of Freud –in which, one should not forget, the Brautbriefe and references to themoccupy more than three chapters – Anna even confessed to Jones that read-ing it made her frequently dream of her father. In a letter to Jones dated18 September 1956, Anna said:

I have lived in and with your book all these weeks … It does the most extraordi-nary things to me, especially to my dreams. I dream of apartments of the past and

happenings which never existed or took place … I believe I am really dreamingabout my father’s past and not of mine. Like most children I have always been jeal-ous of his past that I did not share … your descriptions bring it home to me whata long and full life he had before my time, that I really only appear somewhere in

the middle as a very insignificant item…

Anna never replied to Jones’s mention of his courtship. But a few monthslater, in a letter dated 9 January 1954, Anna wrote to say that she had hada dream about Jones in which they had been trying together to understanda passage of her father’s work that was in Latin – “mirabile dictu”.One cannot therefore deny that the Brautbriefe had mobilized all sorts of

mirabilia, all sorts of emotions between Anna and Jones (and I leave it tothose who passionately apply psychoanalysis even to the life of its pioneersto interpret them). This is not surprising when one thinks of the radiantpower of passion that Freud and the young Martha expressed in these letters.However, aside from all those personal feelings and confessions, one can

also detect the imposing, coercive strength of the cultural and political strat-egy of Anna and the Viennese, as far as the Brautbriefe were concerned.Was it indeed worth openly circulating so many of the intimate details of

the lives, characters and feelings of the young Freud and Martha, their diffi-cult personal relationship and sexual frustrations during the long years oftheir engagement, as well as the difficulties and even financial misunderstand-ings between the two families (Jones, 1956, pp. 148–62)? And what about allthe uncertainties and complex changes in Freud’s scientific and professionalcareer? The letters also include many references to Minna – Martha’s sister



who had died in 1941 after living with Freud and Martha in Vienna followingthe first few years of their marriage. Freud had been in correspondence withMinna from the first months of his engagement with Martha. By the way,the supposed love relationship between Freud and Minna later has becomeone of the preferred hunting-grounds for the sleuths of the scandalistic andrevisionistic historiographies on Freud who also draw on the Brautbriefe.10

The family’s uncertainty about publishing the letters was intensified bythe fact that neither Anna nor her brothers and sisters had been alive at thetime of the events. Anna, for instance, became much more certain regardingwhat she could remember about her father when she had to refer to factsconcerning his life since she was a child (Steiner, 2000). But what wouldhappen if someone misused all that personal and revealing information andtried to establish a distorted, reductive, denigrating link between Freud’stroubled life during his engagement with Martha and his achievements as apsychoanalyst? Would someone, as Anna suggested to Jones in a letterdated 7 November 1951, exaggerate what even Jones (always ready to pa-thologize everybody) called Freud’s ‘neurosis’?11 It is not by chance thatwhat Jones had written to Bernfeld about Freud being “very neurotic”(Jones to Bernfeld, 29 June 1952) never appeared in this format in Jones’sfirst volume of Freud’s biography.How would one establish the boundaries between the truth and the delib-

erate distortions and exaggerations? Obviously, the attempt to use the per-sonal pathology of any famous figure in order to try to denigrate her or hisachievements is not a problem that only concerns psychoanalysis, althoughthe use of psychoanalysis to write so-called pathographies of artists, writersand scientists is perhaps the inevitable result of the discoveries of psycho-analysis itself. But, due to the issues Freud dealt with, and some of the nor-mative implications present in his conclusions concerning sexuality, mentalsanity and mental pathology, the whole matter was very complex indeed.The danger lay in furnishing further ammunition to those attempting todenigrate both Freud, as a person, and psychoanalysis – attempts whichhave been ongoing since before the 1940s and 1950s.12

In the letters, starting with the year 1884, there are numerous referencesto one of the thorniest moments of Freud’s pre-psychoanalytic career,namely his experiments with and personal use of cocaine. The letters weretherefore seen as potentially extremely dangerous if misused. Jones had toplay all his diplomatic cards, but also accept Anna’s potential veto, as faras those aspects of the letters were concerned. Indeed, at the beginning of

10See, for instance, Swales (1982), Gay (1989a, pp. 752–3; 1989b; 2006, in Blumenthal, 2006), Roazen(1993), Maciejewski (2006), as well as the reply of Hirschm€uller (2007) to Maciejewski’s paper and theother articles published in the 2007 edition of American Imago.11See, for example, what Anna wrote to Jones on 7 December 1951: “I understand the biographer’s diffi-culties with reference to ‘neurosis’ [of course referring also to her father]. People seem to overdo it at themoment”. She suggested that Jones should read an article published by E. Buxbaum on this subject inthe Menninger Bulletin, and the comments and responses to it by Suzanne Cassirer Bernfeld.12Consider, for example, what Anna wrote to Jones concerning the reviews of the first volume of hisbiography of Freud: she was reading carefully when she mentioned “the ambivalence of various review-ers … very amazing, very interesting, very disappointing. It shows how much of the former dislike ofpsycho-analysis is alive still, in spite of the apparent acceptance…” (Anna to Jones, 26 September 1956).

870 R. Steiner


September 1952 Anna had received a paper by the Bernfelds on the topic ofFreud and his use of cocaine, which W. Hoffer, the editor of the Interna-tional Journal of Psychoanalysis, sent on to her. It was Jones who had sentthe Bernfelds’ paper to the International Journal. Anna was extremely anx-ious about the Bernfelds’ claims about her father’s experiments, his use ofcocaine and the famous Fleischl von Markow episode. And the Bernfeldshad not even had access to the Brautbriefe!Anna was unaware of what Jones had tantalizingly written to the Bern-

felds concerning these issues. Something needed to be done to stop the Bern-felds. So Anna put pressure on Jones to make sure that their paper wouldnot be published in its original form in the International Journal of Psycho-analysis. She wrote to Jones on 19 September 1952 to express her view:

I did not like the paper at all except for the facts, which are very interesting. Buther interpretations [Anna was referring to Suzanne Cassirer Bernfeld] with which

the facts are intermingled are loose, wrong and sometimes ridiculous. Please do notlet him [Bernfeld] publish it in this form. After all, you know how all these thingsreally happened, and it should be your role to silence the other biographers, who haveto invent half of their facts.

(Italics added)

The paper was never published in the International Journal of Psychoanal-ysis (Steiner, 2000).It is impossible to go into all the details here about the correspondence

between Jones and the Bernfelds during those months. Yet those details(Steiner, 2000) show that labyrinthine tricks, difficulties, inevitable compro-mises and intellectual sufferance of those who did and did not have accessto the documents characterize the first attempts at the historiography ofFreud and psychoanalysis during the early 1950s.Jones’s ambiguity, his well-known capacity to play double games with

people and his tantalizing attitude towards others like the Bernfelds speakfor themselves. On the one hand, Jones seemed to want to help the Bern-felds get more information concerning what they wanted to know about thewhole story of Freud’s use of cocaine. On the other hand, he had at thesame time to face Anna…Already reneging on his promise to Anna, on 24 April 1952 Jones wrote

to S. Bernfeld:

The Brautbriefe certainly reveal a different Freud from what is otherwise known[…] They all ought to be published some day in the future and I will fight hard to

prevent them from being destroyed!!

A few months later when Anna read “the cocaine episode”, as she called it,in the manuscript of the first volume of Jones’s biography, she wrote to Jones:

The medical career is excellent in the way it creates the picture of hard work, depri-vations and search. The ‘Cocaine Episode’, of course, is very different in its atmo-sphere of storm. You make it seem very plausible, even to me, to whom this



atmosphere of ‘Sturm und Drang’ is difficult to visualize in connection with the manwhom I have known late.

(Italics added)

As we have seen, at some points we can detect Jones’s resentmenttowards Anna and her control to which he had to submit. One is remindedof Jones and Strachey’s criticism of Anna and Kris’s censorship when theywrote to each other about the censored edition of the Freud–Fliess corre-spondence in 1949–50 (Steiner, 1995). On 15 April 1952, Jones wrote toS. Bernfeld:

You do not reckon with the petitions and the secrecy of the family … the decisionto let me see the letters was reached only after heartbreaking discussions and afterexacting all sorts of pledges from me.

Jones even went so far as to imply that Anna could destroy the Brautbriefe(24 April 1952, and see also Bernfeld to Jones, 31 December 1952).13 In amoment of indiscretion, on 19 May 1952, Jones wrote to the Bernfelds, stat-ing that in the letters: “Freud sends cocaine right and left. The latest is toMartha to bring a blossom to her cheek.” Jones thereby further aroused theenormous curiosity of Freud’s two old friends who had landed in San Fran-cisco – so far away from Vienna, London … and those precious documents!But perhaps the statement that condenses all I want to stress about the

characteristics of this historiography, still so partial and censored even asfar as the Brautbriefe are concerned, is to be found in Jones’s letter toS. Bernfeld on 28 April 1952:

And I am afraid Freud took more cocaine than he should have, although I am not

mentioning that.(Italics added)

In the end, Jones won Anna’s praise by intervening in the matter of themanuscript that Bernfeld sent to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.Probably, it was the way he handled the cocaine episode that reinforcedhis friendship with Anna and her trust in him. It is obvious that Joneswanted – besides reaching a deeper identification with Freud – to be defini-tively accepted in the inner circle of Freud’s family and friends, from whichhe had felt rather excluded in the past (Steiner, 2000). Just consider Anna’slast statement in a letter to Jones, dated 5 November 1952:

I wonder how you succeed in making your accounts plausible, whereas in the hands

of Suse Bernfeld the story becomes offensive.

But I do not think I have to stress further the price Jones had to pay forbeing so plausible.

13Bernfeld wrote, in a letter to Jones dated 31 December 1952, that he hoped Jones could persuade “theFreud family to print all the Brautbriefe […] I think they would rate a unique place amongst the corre-spondence of the great man”.

872 R. Steiner


The Bernfelds? Just read the following excerpt from Siegfried Bernfeld’smoving letter, written when he was ill and recovering from a heart attack afew months before he died. Ignoring what Jones had done with his manu-script, and yet still enormously curious about the young Freud, his early lifeand career, and full of nostalgia for that Vienna where he had also studiedand lived, Siegfried Bernfeld begged Jones (who was also getting old,unwell, and aware of his impending death and the enormous task of finish-ing his work), to send him the original manuscript of his biography ofFreud, which contained references to the Brautbriefe … which Jones thenhad to cross out:

I feel that every line which you cross out should be preserved at least in my files. Ihate the idea that in a few months those Brautbriefe will go back to Anna Freud

and remain inaccessible for a long time.(S. Bernfeld to Jones, 3 March 1956)

No wonder therefore that Jones was so enthusiastic about the Brautbriefe.In a letter he wrote to Siegfried Bernfeld, dated 3 August 1952, he describedthem as “a treasure trove of the richest material in all directions: works,relationships, ideas, passions, hopes, fears”.Even the extremely cautious, diplomatic and reserved K. Eissler, who was

nevertheless very helpful to Jones, wanted the Brautbriefe to be microfilmedbecause of their importance and the danger that they could be destroyed.14

After the death of Anna Freud, the Brautbriefe would eventually reachthe Freud Archives in New York and they were deposited at the Library ofthe Congress in Washington, DC.In the meantime, the era of the personal witnesses, the historiography of

Freud, the history of psychoanalysis in ‘statu nascendi’ in which the Braut-briefe played such an important part, and the attempts to create a mythicalimage of Freud based on all sorts of personal and ideological reasons, grad-ually faded away on both sides of the Atlantic. This was due to the passingaway of the older generation of Austrian emigr�e analysts who had a nostal-gic loyalty to a certain image of Freud and tried to over-protect his privateand public life (just think of Eissler’s control of the Archives in Washing-ton, DC); the shift was also due to changes in the broader cultural andsocio-political context in which post-Freudian psychoanalysis started todevelop that inevitably affected the writing of biographies and psychoana-lytic historiography.

The 2011 Brautbriefe editionMartha Bernays made her appearance at lastMartha Bernays tritt endlich in Erscheinung

A realistic portrait of Sigmund FreudEin realistiches Bild Sigmund Freuds

(Grubrich Simitis, Einf€uhrung, in Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 41–5)

14Letter to Jones not dated but probably around November–December 1956 (Steiner, 2000).



More than 60 years have passed since that moving, sad, rather suffocating,painful and intriguing saga took place on both sides of the Atlantic, involv-ing Freud’s and Martha’s families and friends, and the heated exchangesconcerning the Brautbriefe that I have recalled. The edition of the Braut-briefe edited by G. Fichtner, Hirschm€uller and I. Grubrich-Simitis (fromnow on quoted as Fichtner et al., 2011) now allows us to read in the origi-nal German the first of five volumes comprising all the available lettersexchanged between Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays.15

It took more than ten years of the most excruciating, precise and creativephilological, historical and exegetic work on the part of the three Germanscholars to produce what can today be considered probably the masterpieceof research on Freud’s private and scientific pre-analytical life.The complex vicissitudes of the Brautbriefe after they were deposited at

the Library of Congress are narrated in the Vorbemerkung [Preface] of theBrautbriefe (Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 7–11). Overcoming her and her fam-ily’s anxieties about the possible misrepresentations of the lives of hermother and father, two years before her death in 1980 Anna Freud statedthat she did not object to the Brautbriefe being published in toto in thefuture, although not before the year 2000.Obviously, in the meantime they were studied by more than one scholar

and in particular by P. Gay (1989a) for his biography of Freud. The lettershave been constantly at the centre of the so-called Freud Wars of the ‘gutter’and of the revisionist historiography that has flourished around Freud’s life.16

The edition by Fichtner et al. (2011) used a transcript of the letters madeby K. Eissler (although completely revised by Fichtner, Grubrich-Simitisand Hirschm€uller). K. Fichtner was a palaeographer by profession and atthe time the greatest living expert on Freud’s handwriting and manuscripts,who unfortunately died in early 2012.It may be an exaggeration to claim that the Freud Archives have been

finally hit by that ‘storm from paradise’ which moves the angel of history, theangelus novus about which W. Benjamin speaks so movingly in Thesis IX ofhis Theses on the Philosophy of History (Arendt, 1970, p. 258). I would not callthem the ‘three angels of history’ of the Brautbriefe, but certainly the threeGerman scholars who edited the Brautbriefe have witnessed the strong breathof fresh air that the opening of the Freud Archives, thanks to its directorH. Blum, has brought to studies of Freud and to the origins of psychoanaly-sis. Thousands of documents have been liberated, although at this date notcompletely (Derrida, 1995; Yerushalmi, 1994) from the weight of the accumu-lated dust of excessive fears, prejudices, mysterious legends, and inevitablemalicious gossip which had surrounded the Archives for decades under thedirectorship of K. Eissler. Indeed, the editorial achievement of these threeGerman scholars has only been possible because, in addition to their own

15One has to acknowledge the generosity and the dedication to the cause of psychoanalysis of theGerman publisher Fischer Verlag of Frankfurt am Main.16For instance, just think of the most recent book by Markel (2011), Anatomy of an Addiction, and ofthe row created by F. C. Crews’s review of it in the New York Review of Books (29 September and 13October 2011): Crews had access to the Brautbriefe now too. See also the letters by Markel and Crewspublished by the New York Review of Books on 10 November 2011.

874 R. Steiner


unique knowledge of Freud manuscripts, his family and his cultural scientificand social background and context acquired through decades of work, theyhad free access to all sorts of necessary and complementary letters and docu-ments deposited in the Freud Archives; they were then able, through their col-lective effort, to integrate and make sense of this enormous wealth ofinformation. The work of the editors has to be seen in the light of the strongGerman academic, historical and philological, historiographical tradition.This means that every possible care has been taken to provide the best possi-ble philological, established and annotated text of the Brautbriefe: thisincludes descriptions of the quality of the paper, the measure of each singleletter, the colour of the ink, the kind of dip-pens and nibs used, the headingsof the letters, along with every possible deletion, correction, variant of wordsor of dates (sometimes a real puzzle), and the idiomatic ‘colour’ of the Ger-man or the Austrian German language; these details were all registered orexplained or prudently guessed at by Fichtner and his colleagues.Incidentally, Fichtner collated all the information about the Brautbriefe

in an enormous computerized database. The database can give us an ideaof the particular historiographical approach toward editing the Brautbriefein comparison with the artisanal and personal methods of collecting infor-mation employed by A. Freud, E. Jones and the Bernfelds.17

Every personal name, every literary, scientific, philosophical, religiouswork, in whatever language quoted by Freud and Martha, every topograph-ical and geographical location, every item of historical or social informa-tion, has been added or clarified, annotated or commented upon, and whennecessary a corrected quotation from a poet or a writer is inserted by Grub-rich-Simitis and Hirschm€uller.In what follows I will be focusing only on the first of the five volumes of

the Brautbriefe, which contains all sorts of information about Freud’s andMartha’s families, such as a wonderful series of photographs of Freud,Martha and their relatives that are an essential part of the correspondence;it also contains a succinct chronology and an exhaustive bibliography, aswell as the Geheim-Chronik and letters from Freud to his sister Rosa andMartha’s mother Emmeline.18

Ilse Grubrich-Simitis’s elegant, extremely scholarly and balanced GeneralIntroduction is a very respectful, but at the same time not parochial, ideal-ized or moralistic way of looking at the relationship between Freud andMartha. With great historical sensitivity, she points out the importance offeminism in the rediscovery of Martha, and when necessary she uses a con-temporary interdisciplinary approach based on the history of mentalities,and cultural anthropology, to contextualize the correspondence between theyoung fianc�es and their families and friends, and the cultural, social, every-day life of those years.

17Nevertheless, one should not forget that the Bernfelds were the first to try to collect even the mostminute information on Freud’s life, his first studies, etc., and had created a sort of filing system of allthat information.18Beside the lack of a subject index in the first volume I wonder why the Editors did not add the impor-tant letter from Freud to Minna on the subject of Emmeline, dated 21 February 1883, Vienna (Freud E,1960, pp. 36–8; 1961, pp. 52–4).



She creates what she rightly calls “a realistic image of Sigmund Freud”[“ein realistisches Bild Sigmund Freuds”]. Grubrich-Simitis is also able forthe first time to point out in great detail the extremely interesting andimportant links between the language that both Freud and Martha used inwriting to each other with the future work of Freud as a psychoanalyst(Einf€uhrung, in Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 23–7).But, as Grubrich-Simitis (Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 14–15, 41–4) rightly

points out in some of the most perceptive pages of her Introduction, thereal novelty of the Brautbriefe is to be found in Martha’s strong voice,her presence as a partner, lover and supporter of the young Freud, andalso as a writer in her own right. All of Martha’s available letters arepublished in this edition for the first time. And for the first time sheappears in the foreground – indeed, I would say she often occupies theentire stage.For me, Freud’s image becomes realistic because of the presence of Mar-

tha in this correspondence. Grubrich-Simitis draws the reader’s attention toFreud’s difficulties and to Martha’s handling of their deferred sexual rela-tionship (Einf€uhrung, in Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 36–7), as well as Martha’scapacity to tolerate and understand Freud’s at times explosive emotions;this is quite astonishing if one bears in mind that she was only around21 years old when they first met.It is Martha’s appearance and the fundamental role she starts to play in

Freud’s life from the beginning of their engagement which illustrates justhow radically different the Fichtner et al. (2011) edition is from the previ-ous very selective collection of Brautbriefe, edited by Ernest Freud (1960,1961). In his famous edition of his father’s selected correspondence from1873 to 1939, which contained 98 of the Brautbriefe,19 Ernst did not selectand publish one single letter written by Martha to Freud (Fichtner et al.,2011, pp. 14–15).Of course, Ernest Freud’s entire selection could have given the readers of

the 1960s a more than sufficient idea of Freud’s qualities as a writer.20 Butin Ernest Freud’s collection the resulting image of Freud, his private lifeand feelings is rather idealized and distorted.Having said this, I think one has also to acknowledge a sort of ideal line

of continuity between Ernst Freud’s selection of Brautbriefe, the wishes ofFreud’s family in general, and the Fichtner et al. edition.Disagreeing implicitly with Jones’s interpretative attitude in his biography

of Sigmund Freud (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 14), in Ernest’s (1960) introduc-tion to his father’s letters he wrote that: “I want my Father’s every letter tostand by itself unencumbered. His voice, his spirit, alone, should be allowedto permeate this book” [“Jedes Brief meines Vaters soll als Dokument f€ur

19They were later on published separately in a single small volume (Freud E, 1968).20In a letter to Fluss dated 16 June 1873 (Freud E, 1960, p. 6), Freud tells Fluss that his professor atschool thought he possessed what “Herder […] so sch€on einen idiotischen Stil nennt, das ist einen Stil,der zugleich korrekt und charakteristisch ist” [“Herder … so nicely calls an idiotic style, that is to say astyle at once correct and characteristic”] (Freud, 1961, p. 26, my italics). It is in this letter that Freudinvites Fluss to preserve their correspondence.

876 R. Steiner


sich allein stehen. Nur seiner Stimme und Gestalt soll man in diesem Buchbegegnen” Freud E, 1961, p. 4, my italics].21

There is no doubt that Grubrich-Simitis and her colleagues did not forgetthose statements. The publication of Martha’s letters adds her full voiceand her spirit to that of Sigmund Freud, without being cluttered up withexcessive psychoanalytic and wild interpretations.22

In spite of Jones’s liberties in interpreting Freud, which led to E. Freud’scriticisms that I have just mentioned, but which nevertheless were ratherrestrained to my mind – and at least on the surface accepted by Anna –compared with what one could read on the founder of psychoanalysis andhis private life in the historiography which followed for more than half ofthe last century and the beginning of the new millennium, the Editors(Fichtner et al., 2011) would probably agree in principle even with whatJones had written to Anna concerning the need for the full truth in bio-graphical and historical research. Incidentally, to a certain extent even ErnstFreud seemed to agree with some of Jones’s principles in the early 1950swhen, as we know, he originally supported Jones’s wish to have access toand use of the Brautbriefe. And in the end, one has to say, in allowing theletters to be published in toto, even Anna seemed in her own cautious andpersonal way to subscribe to this view.The three German scholars have therefore successfully managed to put at

the reader’s disposal as many available ‘historical facts’ as possible, to allowthe reader a richer and more exhaustive interpretation of the Brautbriefe.Even if, as everybody who has done this kind of research knows only toowell subjective choice and interpretation are factors in any selection of ‘his-torical facts’, and these choices and interpretations have to be consideredcase by case. I therefore do not think that the three German scholarsbelieve their work represents the ‘final truth’ of objective research and edit-ing even as far as the Brautbriefe is concerned.

The letters: Freud and Martha

I am so exclusive where I love [Ich bin so ausschließlich wo ich liebe].(Freud to Martha, 19 June 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 94)

I can love you only very much, indeed quite ‘terribly’, if you are content with this

[Ich kann Dich nur sehr, ja ganz ‘schrecklich’ lieb haben, wenn Du damit zufriedenbist].

(Martha to Freud, 24 June 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 111)

Like a caged lion [Wie ein gefangener L€owe im K€afig].(Martha to Freud, 2 July 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 142)

21Grubrich-Simitis worked with Ernest in the late 1960s and early 1970s on other biographical researchesinto Freud (Freud E et al., 1976. In this work the editors used many Brautbriefe which had not beenpublished before (Grubrich-Simitis, Einf€uhrung, in Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 14).22Although Grubrich-Simitis (Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 33–7) with great finesse tries to link Freud’s earlyand at times very traumatic life experiences to the way he behaves in his relationship with Martha, usingthe most up-to-date biographical researches on the earliest years of Freud’s life, the same could be donefor Martha’s early life (Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 29–31).



You see what a despot I am [Du siehst was f€ur Despot ich bin].(Freud to Martha, 8 July 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 173)

My beloved tyrant [mein geliebter Tyrann].

(Martha to Freud, 10 July 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 182)

Suddenly, from a very old collection of handwritten letters and an albumof photographs yellowed by the passing of time, through the editing workof the German scholars Fichtner, Hirschm€uller and Grubrich-Simitis, thepassionate and troubled relationship of this young engaged couple comes tolife for us with extraordinary sharpness and vigour. The first letter in ourpossession is dated 11 June 1882 and is written by Martha to Freud. Thelast letter of this first volume of the Brautbriefe is dated 12 July 1883 and iswritten by Freud to Martha.Freud was nearly 26 years old and Martha was nearly 21 when more

than 130 years ago they met by chance in Vienna in April 1882. Cupidstruck at first sight that evening in the humble23 home in Leopoldstadt,Vienna, at least for Freud. One feels that the same happened to Martha,although with a more cautious and reserved intensity at first.To better understand how and why it happened in that way I think the

reader should be briefly reminded of some aspects of the socio-cultural his-torical context of this encounter (Gibs, 1997).Try to imagine Leopoldstadt, which formed District II of Vienna during

those years. It was the lower middle class mainly Jewish ‘quarter’ – if onedoes not want to call it a shtetl or ‘ghetto’ of which it could remind one – ofCatholic Vienna, where Jews had lived since mediaeval times. Its housingwas crowded and often shabby. The streets were narrow, but lined with anabundance of shops of all sorts and full of more or less recent immigrants.Particularly noticeable were the €Ostjuden, walking, chatting, selling and buy-ing on the streets, wearing their traditional dress (Mayer, 1917; Rabinbach,1975) – all so different from the affluent streets and houses around theRingstrasse in the central part of Vienna where, besides the elegant suburbs,most of the rich Jewish middle class gradually established their homes fromthe second half of the 19th century onwards and where Freud will live lateron (Schorske, 1979, pp. 24–111; Berkley, 1988, pp. 9–10, 120–47; Beller,1989, pp. 67–73; Gay, 1989a, pp. 9–15; Wistrich, 1989, pp. 45–76; Berger,2003; Schubert, 2007; Feuerstein and Milchram, 2007).As the reader probably knows, it was in Leopoldstadt that Freud and his

family had mostly lived and were living in 1882 (T€ogel, 1996, p. 117) fromthe time his father Jacob, a poor merchant, brought his small family fromFreiberg in Moravia to Vienna in 1860; he brought his very young wifeAmalia, Sigmund, who was 4, and Sigmund’s younger sister Anna24 (Freud,1925, pp. 4–5; Jones, 1956, pp. 12–20; Glicklhorn, 1969, pp. 37–43; Gay,

23‘Humble’ is the term used by M. Freud (1957, p. 20) to describe his father’s family home. See alsoFreud-Bernays, 1973, p. 141 (Ruitenbeek, 1973).24The families of both Jacob and Amalia came from a rabbinical tradition. Jacob’s ancestors lived inLithuania and east Galicia. Amalia was born in Brody, Galicia, deeply imbued with the Hassidic JewishOrthodox tradition (Aron, 1956, pp. 286–95; Freud M, 1957, p. 11).

878 R. Steiner


1989a, pp. 7–21).25 Freud’s family joined the anxious crowds of Jewishimmigrants who started coming to Vienna during the second half of the19th century to escape financial and political difficulties, as well as pogromsin the case of the Polish-Russian Jews (Rabinbach, 1975). They travelledfrom Bohemia and Moravia, and the so-called €Ostjuden, coming fromGalicia, all regions which Le Rider rightly calls the ‘colonies’ of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Bartal, 2005; Le Rider and Rachl, 2010 pp. 5–13; Berk-ley, 1988, pp. 27–58; Hobsbawm, 2013).For pragmatic reasons the Emperor Franz Joseph wanted to make better

use of the Jews since the upheaval of 1848; under his so-called liberal plu-ralistic politics he reformed the mediaeval policies of control and taxationand exclusions, which had characterized the way they had been treated bymany of his predecessors (Berkley, 1988, pp. 27–32). Within two to threedecades from 1848 onwards, those immigrants had enormously increasedthe Jewish population of Vienna (see Drabek et al., 1988; Berkley, 1988,pp. 27–38; Beller, 1989).26 Packing themselves mainly into Leopoldstadt, theJewish immigrants looked for and developed new jobs and initiatives, work-ing hard for a better future. Many of them, as in the case of Freud, suc-ceeded in integrating themselves with great academic and professionalsuccess into the famous German-speaking h€ohre Kultur of the gentile Aus-tro-Hungarian Empire, which could open the doors to all sorts of liberalprofessions (Weinzierl, 2003).Particularly after Franz Joseph’s 1867 inter-religious Act, which guaran-

teed for the Jews, at least on paper, a sort of equal civil rights, includingthe right to reside and the freedom to profess their religion (Berkley, 1988,pp. 30–7), and driven by their wish to study (Gay, 1989a, pp. 14–7), theJewish immigrants were able to make use of all sorts of opportunitiesoffered by a good, non-discriminating, higher state education. This offeredJewish men, at least, the possibility of graduating from Vienna Universityin a variety of disciplines. There is not a single study on the Jews in Viennaof those decades which does not stress the almost explosive rise in the num-ber of Jews in higher education and university at that time. Yet – and thisis important to remember as far as Martha was concerned – women,whether Jewish or non-Jewish, were not allowed to take university coursesuntil the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Berkley, 1988, p. 20; Albisetti, 1996[1988], pp. 35–46,Hobsbawm, 2013), and the range of subjects they studied in their collegesof higher education was much more restricted.

25According to T€ogel (1996, pp. 15–18), Freud and his family lived at various addresses from 1875onwards. When Freud met Martha, he was living with his family at 3 Kaiser Joseph Strasse in Leopolds-tadt. Freud’s family had gradually increased since their arrival in Vienna. It eventually consisted of fivesisters and another brother. Four of the sisters and the brother were born in Vienna.26It is impossible here to go into detail concerning this complex and landmark chapter in the life ofVienna as capital of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire. Suffice to note here that, not to mentionthe few hundred Jews present in Vienna before 1848 still vexed by all sorts of uncivilized controls andlimitations in their professions and practice of their religion, from 1857 to 1880 the Jewish population inVienna increased from 1.3% of the total population to 10.1% (Rabinbach, 1975, p. 48; Beller, 1989,p. 44; Berkley, 1988, pp. 145–6).



The young Freud was therefore undoubtedly one of the best examples ofthe need, so clear and prominent in him since his years spent at the Real-Ober Gymnasium of Leopoldstadt, to acquire the necessary ‘Bildung’ [edu-cation] and to professionally and intellectually integrate himself into that‘Kultur’ which he had worshipped since he was a young adolescent (Freud,1925, p. 7; Schorske, 1979, pp. 181–7; Boehlich, 1990, pp. 24–5; Gay,1989a, pp. 3–36; Steiner, 1994). And then he tried to climb the difficultacademic ladder at Vienna University as a medical scientist researcher(Freud, 1925, pp. 9–18; Bernfeld and Cassirer Bernfeld, 1981[1944]; Jones,1956, pp. 30–6427 ; McGrath, 1974; Gay, 1989a, pp. 19–20).But as far as his private life was concerned, Freud still lived as many of

the young Jews of those years did, in a sort of cocoon in Leopoldstadt, in aclose-knit group made up of Jewish families and mainly Jewish friends –although he was also educated at the RealOber Gymnasium and then at theUniversity. And it is to this everyday private life that I would like to brieflydraw the attention of the reader, if he wants to better understand what hap-pened that evening in April 1882 at Freud’s house.I do not want to go into the complex problem of Freud’s Jewish identity

related to his upbringing in that particular family, with that particularfather and mother (Kr€ull, 1986; Diller, 1991; Margolis, 1976; Breger, 2000),in which he had such a privileged position. Nor do I want to discuss –although I will have to come back to these issues later on – the ‘progressiveliberal influence’ his father had on him since he was a small boy, and thestrong independence of mind Freud showed since he was very small towardshis own father, even as far as Jewish religion and traditions were concerned(see Freud M, 1957, pp. 20–4; Freud-Bernays, 1973, pp. 141–2).On those issues, too much has already been written. Those were of course

the deepest, most personal roots of that cocoon. Obviously with the passingof time, and changing political and social circumstances in Vienna, Europeand even Palestine, the inevitable ambiguity, tensions and conflicts related tothose aspects of Freud’s cultural identity as an integrated liberal Austrian andcentral European Jew would articulate, shift and become more complicated.Just think of the advent of Nazism (Loewenberg, 1971; Cuddihy, 1974;Roberts, 1977; Schorske, 1979, pp. 181–207; Rozenblit, 1983, pp. 87–106;Scholem, 1984; Gay, 1978; Mosse, 1985; Le Rider, 1990, pp. 223–44; Beller,1989, pp. 34–48; Gay, 1987, 1989a, pp. 12–20; Diller, 1991; Yerushalmi, 1991;Loewenberg, 1995, pp. 17–45; Grubrich-Simitis, 1997).I would like to draw the attention of the reader of this first volume of the

Brautbriefe to the inevitable role that Freud’s cocoon was still playing in hiseveryday life during those years. It did not allow him to forget his complexcultural Jewish identity, not only within his family but even outside it. Onecould say that this close Jewish milieu, whether hated or loved, and withoutexaggerating its importance, created the necessary conditions for Freud tomeet Martha. This self-selecting community – the Bund, as Freud called it(Jones, 1956, p. 179) – was composed largely of doctors or researchers (Beller,1989, pp. 67–98), but other occupations figured in this community too:

27He used most of the pioneering researches of the Bernfelds in this area, which I mentioned earlier.

880 R. Steiner


I. Sch€onberg, one of Freud’s best friends, was a philosopher (Fichtner et al.,2011, p. 94), not to mention Paneth, Freud’s friend during his late adoles-cence. But they all had one thing in common: they were young men lookingfor a fianc�ee or a wife. They saw each other in the company of their sistersand relatives and close friends at their homes in Leopoldstadt or nearby, or atthe Caf�e Kurzweil, where they would have discussions and games of chess(Jones, 1956, p. 179). They relaxed together with walks and meetings in thehills surrounding Vienna or, for instance, at the Prater (a park located in theViennese district of Leopoldstadt). As far as these young men were concerned,they were all potential fianc�es of their friends’ sisters and, as far as the girlswere concerned, with the friends of their brothers.Although it was not only typical of the Jews (Stone, 1982, pp. 331–40, 1987;

Gay, 1984, pp. 176–7; Giddens, 1992), one should not forget the condition ofyoung Jewish girls in a Jewish patriarchal society in and outside Vienna dur-ing those years. Religious orthodoxy played a very restrictive role (Rozenblit,1983; Kaplan, 1991; Hobsbawm, 2013), and they had far fewer chances ofprofessional and academic improvement and freedom than their brothers, orthe friends of their brothers. Family and inter-family contacts had an enor-mous and overriding importance in this context. Meetings and family partiesdesigned to facilitate introductions or foster encounters which could developinto engagements and marriages and combined marriages by the families werenot uncommon, particularly given the social conditions of those girls (Kaplan,1991; Beller, 1989; Sulzgruber, 2005). Think too of the opportunities that thisgroup of friends had to speak or to listen, on the streets of Leopoldstadt orthe Caf�e Kurzweil, to that Austro-German language so full of Yiddish expres-sions, and the exchanges of Jewish jokes, and the Yiddish and Hebrew oftenspoken at home.28 And think of the hidden, but so important, unconsciousfamiliarity of the body language, of certain gestures and sights that they allcarried, as Freud himself did, imprinted on their minds and their bodies andbones, born, shaped and transmitted through centuries, due to the communallife and even the persecutions in the shtetls, and still present in the Jewishinhabitants of Leopoldstadt. And think also of the shared Jewish festivities,of the specificity, smell and flavour of certain foods, and the meaning of allthat… even in families that were not strictly Orthodox.All this, and of course other reasons too, constantly reminded Freud of

his roots, mirroring or echoing what he found at home where he had beenliving since he was born, giving him an at times rather suffocating sense ofbelonging to a specific community, starting of course with his own rathercomplex family story and experience, which has been so clearly describedby Grubrich-Simitis (Einf€uhrung, in Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 36–7).29

28Amalia – Freud’s mother – spoke Galician Yiddish all her life, even in Vienna (Diller, 1991, p. 60). Ofcourse, at least as far as the young Freud was concerned, it was a different matter when he had to writeor to communicate with non-Jewish colleagues, friends and professors. The quality of his German wasalready evident if one reads the letters he wrote to E. Fluss, or the Freud–Silberstein correspondence,besides of course his scientific work.29See also – although with some cautiousness because of the constant attempts to interpret the relation-ship between mother and son – Diller (1991) and Margolis (1976) on the special role that Amalia, themother of Freud, played concerning Freud’s feelings and character and relations with women.



And one should not forget, in such a closed and complicated family, theimportant conscious and unconscious roles Freud played for his sisters; heacted as an affectionate but also strict, and at times cultural, mentor(Freud-Bernays, 1973, p. 142).30 All this inevitably orientated his affectivechoices in a certain way.Then, last but not least, there was the presence of the always latent anti-

Semitism in reinforcing all those links, and in helping to close ranks, in aminority community of rather recent immigrants who still carried the mem-ories of persecutions and pogroms in Eastern Europe. This was the anti-Semitism of which Freud had already had experience as a boy through theautobiographical stories of his father (Freud S, 1900, GW 2, p. 203; SE 4,p. 197) and then as a student at the Gymnasium (Freud S, 1900, GW 2, p.202; SE 4, p. 196), not to mention what happened later on as far as his uni-versity career was concerned (Schorske, 1979; McGrath, 1974; Le Rider,1990, pp. 231–47; Gay, 1987, 1989a).This anti-Semitism had been tamed for a while during the so-called

‘golden period’ of the liberal reforms of Franz Joseph (Fraenkel, 1967; Bel-ler, 1989, pp. 188–97; Berkley, 1988, pp. 31–8). But it was now, at thebeginning of the 1880s resurgent in and outside Vienna, for various reasons(Boyer, 1981).Furthermore the political and financial failures of the Austro-Hungarian

Empire had culminated in the crash of the Viennese stock market in 1873and in the Long Depression that followed. The economic consequencesof that crash also affected Freud’s and Martha’s families (Le Rider, 1987,pp. 244–420; Berkley, 1988, pp. 65–78; Gay, 1989a, pp. 15–21).I do not think I am exaggerating therefore when I claim that it would

have been very difficult to imagine that Freud intended to find a non-Jewish young woman as his fianc�ee and future wife. In other words, it isvery difficult to imagine that in those years he would have considered aninter-religious marriage possible. And the same could be said even morestrongly for Martha vis-�a-vis her potential husband.Freud learned much of Jewish religion and culture from his father when he

was a young boy. And at school, with extraordinary teachers such as S. Ham-merschlag – who, like Freud’s father, was a Reform Jew (Rainey, 1975) andwould later become one of Freud’s much needed financial helpers – Freudstudied Jewish religion and culture in much greater depth than one mightsuspect. And yet, despite all that, Freud had been a “godless Jew” since hewas a young university student, if not earlier (Gay, 1987; Le Rider, 1990, pp.223–31). It would therefore be to my mind ridiculous to claim that thepsychoanalysis he discovered later on could be considered a Jewish science.

30Freud will more than once compare his love for Martha, and the kisses given to her, to his love for hissisters. In the first volume of the Brautbriefe – see, for instance, Freud’s letters to Martha dated 26 Juneand 4 July 1882 (Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 115, 150) – Martha becomes in some ways a substitute forAnna, Freud’s eldest sister, as far as his cultural suggestions for readings of books were concerned: seethe letter Freud wrote to Silberstein, dated 20 December 1874, in which Freud tells Silberstein about acollection of biographies by Grube he wanted to give to his sister Anna for New Year (Boehlich, 1990,p. 90). But, according to Anna, when she was a young, 15 year-old adolescent he told her not to readBalzac and Dumas because he thought she was too young (Freud-Bernays, 1973, p. 142)! J. Mitchell(2003) who is so interested in the role played by siblings could find rich food of thought in all this.

882 R. Steiner


As we will see, all these complicated issues will seriously interfere in hisdealings with Martha, who came from Germany and from a much moretraditional and devout Jewish Orthodox family.Bearing in mind what I have just mentioned, let us go back to that even-

ing, one imprecise day in April 1882 when Freud met the young MarthaBernays. It must have been one of those typical evenings for the Freud fam-ily, when the young Sigmund made his way very quickly through the streetsof Leopoldstadt travelling back from Br€ucke Laboratories, where he wasworking as a physiologist, to his “humble” home (Freud M, 1957, p. 20). Itwas an apartment where, in addition to a living room and a kitchen, therewere three bedrooms into which were crowded all his sisters, his brotherand his parents. Freud, however, was allowed to have his own special “sin-gle” room, where he would often retire after work to eat by himself, or bejoined by his friends to study and discuss all sorts of scientific or cultural orpolitical issues (Freud M, 1957, pp. 9–14).31

Perhaps the best portrait of those evenings is still the one sketched by hissister Anna (1973, pp. 140–3) in which, incidentally, one can really catchthe social implications of that particular atmosphere of formal good man-ners, but also of distance, between the young Jewish men and women inthose families, not to mention the more or less discreet controlling roleplayed by the parents … the girls anxiously hoping, and always waiting, tobe noticed by the young men, who in the case of Freud’s friends were alltoo serious and too busy to notice them.32

I do not think it is difficult to imagine the young Freud’s pleasurable sur-prise in suddenly spotting Martha. Incidentally, this was a difficult time forFreud, who in 1881 had only recently graduated in medicine after a longand protracted period of study. He was worried about his career prospectsas a researcher, despite his brilliant discoveries, and he was enduringchronic poverty, having to support his own family and continually havingto ask for loans from his friends, such as S. Hammerschlag, J. Breuer andothers (Gay, 1989a, p. 37–53). A few weeks later, Br€ucke – Freud’s greatmentor and master (Freud, 1925, SE 20, pp. 9–10) – strongly advised himto abandon his academic career at the Br€ucke Institute and work instead asa doctor, to earn more money and be better able to support himself and hisfamily.

31Freud had been always treated as special by his parents since he was a child, due to his exceptional intel-ligence and good results at school: M. Freud (1957, pp. 10–2) and A. Freud-Bernays (1973, pp. 140–2)both emphasized the fact that he was allowed to have his own private room. Another important detail isthat Freud was allowed to use an oil lamp in the evenings, whereas the rest of the family had to use can-dles. Freud will use this oil lamp to write to Martha during the first months of his engagement while stillliving at home.32Although one has to be very careful in making this kind of comparison, due to the risk of easy andsuperficial analogies, one could think of literary references from different cultural and social contexts,and earlier periods, to that of Freud’s family and friends in Vienna. Take, for example, the five Bennettsisters of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1811) all waiting to be married! Of course, the Bennett sis-ters did not live in Vienna during the 1870s and 1880s, were not Jewish and belonged to a differentsocial group to that of Freud’s fianc�ee and her family, but this serves to emphasize the common trendswhich characterized the female condition in Europe during the 19th century. And one could find otherexamples…



Whether Freud’s sisters had deliberately invited Martha and her sisterMinna, whose family they knew,33 to their house in order to introduce Mar-tha to Freud is of course a matter of speculation. But if, as Hirschm€uller sug-gests (2005, p. 207, in de Mijolla, 2005), Minna had got engaged toSch€onberg, one of Freud’s closest friends, and probably his closest friend atthat time, in February 1882, we can perhaps surmise that Freud had alreadyheard of the existence of Martha before he met her. Certainly, Sch€onberg wasone of the few people who knew both Freud and Martha before their meeting,and then knew of the relationship that began to form following that meeting.This was one of those occasions when one has to understand the facilitat-

ing importance of that closed milieu I mentioned earlier in favouring thesekinds of encounters with all their possible developments and happy endings.It was love at first sight – certainly for Freud.But just think of the first scene of this encounter. What did Freud see in

his first glance at Martha? It was “a little girl who was sitting at the long,familiar table at his house” [“ein kleines M€adchen das am bekannten langenTisch saß”], and who with her little fingers was peeling apples [“und mitkleine Fingern €Apfel sch€alte”], as he wrote to Martha three years and a fewmonths later, remembering their first encounter (Freud to Martha, 26 June1885).34

What a stereotypical image, even for those times, of a potential younghousewife … and as we will see, this is what Freud wanted Martha to be!Of course, one could remark on the affectionate but also mildly patronizingtone of Freud’s description of Martha as a “kleines M€adchen” and of her“kleine Fingern”, although the phrase ‘kleines M€adchen’, which appears fre-quently in the first volume of the Brautbriefe, was in those days a commonterm of endearment with which to address one’s young fianc�ee. And, afterall, Martha was indeed as pale and petite as Freud suggests. Thinking ofthis, besides other more illustrious literary examples, I am reminded of therole played by the apple of Adam and Eve in the biblical Paradise, and ofGoethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1981[1774], p. 28), published inEnglish as The Suffering of Young Werther (1962[1774], p. 59),35 the mosticonic epistolary romance of German Sturm und Drang proto-Romantic lit-erature,36 which describes how Werther falls in love with Charlotte afterseeing her cutting the bread for her siblings! After all, as we have seen, evenAnna Freud called those years of her father’s life his ‘Sturm und Drang

33Anna, the eldest of Freud’s sisters, became engaged to Eli – Martha’s brother – at Christmas 1882.Minna – Martha’s sister – became engaged to I. Sch€onberg on 12 February 1882, at the age of 17.Sch€onberg would die later on (Hirschm€uller, 2005, p. 207).34I would like to thank Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, who allowed me to see this letter, which is not in the firstvolume of the Brautbriefe.35Incidentally, Freud had been reading Goethe’s Werther since he was young. It is quoted in the corre-spondence with Silberstein (Boehlich, 1990, pp. 23–4). He referred to the same work in a letter to Mar-tha dated 8 July 1882, in which he tried to ridicule Fritz – one of his rivals for Martha’s love (Fichtneret al., 2011, p. 174).36In the Geheim Chronik the first statement by Martha dated 26 January 1883 seems to hint at a roman-tic moment in their relationship – “Die Romantik liegt hinter uns” [Romanticism belongs to the past](Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 531). Although one has to say there were several more so-called ‘romantic ten-sions and moments’ later on in their engagement.

884 R. Steiner


period’! I leave to the enthusiasts of psychoanalytic interpretations thepossible meaning of all those girls with knives in their hands!A few months later, in a letter to Freud, Martha mentioned one of the first

evenings they were together with Minna in Freud’s living room and Freud’simplicit need to have her all for himself. Martha spoke of his restlessness, hisrunning up and down “like a caged lion” [“wie ein gefangener L€owe imK€afig”], firing angry glances at her, here and there, instead of sitting downand taking part in the conversation (2 July 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 142).One can catch something of Freud’s restless, anxious, absolute passion in

the first letter he wrote to Martha printed in the Brautbriefe (15 June 1882;Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 86)37 in which he openly declared to her how – in thespace of no more than two months and a few meetings, during which theyrarely had a moment to themselves – she had changed his life: “Dear Martha,how did you change my life!” [“Teure Martha, wie haben Sie mein Leben ver€an-dert!”] And it is in this letter that he asked Martha whether the next time theymet she would allow him to address her with the more intimate pronoun ‘du’.38

But who was Martha? Gay (1989a, p. 37) describes her as “slender, lively,dark and rather pale, with expressive ‘dark’ eyes”. She was certainly attrac-tive.39 The photographs of that time bear testimony to a rather restrainedaristocratic elegance, and her eyes reveal, I would say, a sort of internalfirmness, a tranquil intensity and a deep internal emotional life. Onlyrecently, as Grubrich-Simitis rightly stresses, has there been the chance toget to know Martha better (Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 15–23), particularlythrough Behling’s (2005) beautiful biography, but see also Badou (2006).Martha was the daughter of Berman Bernays, who was the son of the

famous Jewish Sephardic scholar and educator Hacham [wise man] IsaacBernays, the strict Orthodox Chief Rabbi of Hamburg’s Jewish community(Krohon, 1974, pp. 29–55, 117–28; Behling, 2005, pp. 9–11) and a personalfriend of the poet Heinrich Heine, among others. Martha’s father BermanBernays therefore belonged to one of the most illustrious intellectualGerman-Jewish Orthodox families40; he was a rather troublesome man who

37This letter – nota bene! – bore in the top left corner the printed name of his father. Later on Freudwrote on headed paper bearing the consonants S and M interlocked.38In German, as in other languages, there is a rather pronounced difference between the more formal (or‘polite’) singular pronoun ‘Sie’ and the more personal and intimate (or ‘familiar’) ‘du’. This nuance hasno equivalent in modern English.39In more than one letter in this first volume both Freud and Martha discussed Martha’s appearance.Martha was very modest about herself and thought that Minna was more attractive. Freud reassuredMartha more than once that for him only she existed – see the important letter dated 6 September 1882;Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 344. And yet, perhaps one of Freud’s most telling and important letters on thissubject is the one dated 2 August 1882 in which he gently reproaches Martha because she undervaluesherself. He explains to Martha that he is attracted not only to her beauty but also to her inner world,and that he is not attracted so much by simple external beauty (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 242), althoughhe also sometimes expresses himself in a rather odd way, as when (2011, p. 360) he describes Martha’seyes as “so groß wie Suppenteller” – as big as soup-plates! In this case he obviously did not have inmind the biblical Song of Solomon (King James Bible, 1991, p. 638) in which the beloved is told ‘thouhast doves’ eyes’!40Two of the sons of Isaac Bernays, uncles of Martha, were the famous classicist Jacob Bernays – whoseresearches on Aristotle’s theories on tragedy and catharsis influenced Freud (Steiner, 1994) – andMichael Bernays, a professor at Munich University and a great expert on the work of Goethe andShakespeare. Jacob left all his money to Martha, Minna and Eli when he died.



at one point decided to move from Hamburg to Vienna to find a better job,and died suddenly in 1879. Due to the difficulties related to the professionalcareer of her father, Martha, together with her sister Minna, who was fouryears younger, and her brother Eli (the survivors of a much broader groupof siblings) and their mother Emmeline were41, like Freud, living at thattime in Vienna in District II (Behling, 2005, p. 7) in rather difficult financialconditions. The two sisters were working at home, reading, knitting and …waiting, understandably hoping to find the right fianc�e and then get mar-ried. They were supported by relatives, particularly by Jacob Bernays, andEli was a sort of young substitute head of the family.42

But that did not mean that Martha had not been properly educated,although with the restrictions that I mentioned earlier. She spoke perfectGerman, with a Prussian accent that she would keep until the end of herlife, in spite of having lived for more than 50 years in Vienna (Behling,2005, pp. 20–3). Although she did not have the chance to study for a uni-versity degree, what she reveals through her letters to Freud, besides her attimes so introspectively perceptive, passionate or even humorous style ofwriting, is an extraordinary interest in and knowledge of literature, and notonly German literature. She had a Bildung und Kultur [education and cul-ture] which sometimes makes one think of a sort of natural scholar.43 Onoccasion she even wrote poems to Freud. She pursued these intereststhroughout her life (Freud M, 1956, pp. 15–21; Behling, 2005, pp. 20–23,158–60). Of course, her family background played a part in all this.Biographers since Jones (1956) – using what Freud and Martha wrote in

their correspondence later concerning their first encounters – have managedto reconstruct more or less correctly the first two months of their furtivemeetings and exchanges. Indeed, the first letters we possess, edited by Ficht-ner et al. (2011, pp. 83–4), are short notes or letters from Martha andFreud dated 11 June and 13 June 1882, which imply that something hadalready happened between the two during the months between April andJune 1882. It is to these letters that I would now like to turn.On the day that Martha wrote to thank Freud for a gift – Dickens’s

David Copperfield – she addressed Freud with the traditional and formalpersonal pronoun ‘Sie’ (Martha to Freud, 11 June 1882), having earlier senthim a little cake she had baked44 (Martha to Freud, 11 June 1882; Fichtner

41Martha’s mother Emmeline came from a very strict Jewish Orthodox background in northern Ger-many and she remained a strict observant of the Jewish faith all her life (Behling, 2005, pp. 16–19).42Just to show how close the acquaintance of Freud and Martha was, the father of Bertha Pappenheim(Bertha will become the famous Anna O – Breuer’s patient about whom Freud wrote to Martha in a let-ter dated 19 October 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 378) had been appointed as one of the guardians ofEmmeline Bernays’s children after the death of her husband (Behling, 2005, p. 7).43Although I could find many examples, consider just this one: in a letter to Freud dated 5 July 1883(Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 498), when she was on holiday at Wandsbek, Martha wrote that she had startedreading a book that the family had at home but which she had not read until now – the correspondencebetween Schiller and Goethe! In my opinion, thinking also of her age and the context in which she wasliving, this shows the depth of Martha’s literary interests.44They exchanged presents according to Vielliebchen – the Viennese tradition that involves the kernels ofa nut – because in their stroll in a garden in M€odling on 10 June 1882 they had together found adouble-flowering almond (Behling, 2005, p. 29).

886 R. Steiner


et al., 2011, p. 81). She signed herself ‘Martha Bernays’ in the first letterand ‘Martha’ in the second.In another letter (14 June 1882, Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 85) Martha

thanked Freud for “the heavenly roses” [“die himmlischen Rosen”] whichhe had sent her. Martha signed the letter ‘von Martha’ – ‘from Martha’.There is a sort of understandably self-protective incredulity, and at the sametime a flattered coquettish shyness and prudence in Martha’s first notes andletters to Freud, who was already famous among his friends as ‘Herr Dok-tor’.45 His powerful presence was that of a ‘conquistador’, as Freud calledhimself later on, and the photographs of Freud in those years (see Fichtneret al., 2011, p. 244) do show the penetrating power of his eyes.His questions, his rather insistent kindness and his gifts were of course excit-

ing and a little embarrassing forMartha. At the same time, however, she seemedto gradually drop her defences, as seen in the changes to her signatures.46

As a result of their private talks and meetings, Freud came to the rapidconclusion that Martha was the woman of his life, as he expressed in theletter dated 15 June. A hint of Freud’s possessive anxieties, with whichMartha would have to cope, was already present in this letter. Knowingthat Martha would be going away on holiday in a few days, Freud said hewanted to write to her but everything had to be kept secret due to their cir-cumstances in order not to compromise her; here, Freud refers to himself asan “a poor man” [“armer Mann”] (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 88) and refersto his “helpless imprudence” [“schwere Unbesonnenheit”] (2011, p. 88).During the weekend of 17–18 June (Martha to Freud, 9 July 1882, Ficht-

ner et al., 2011, p. 179) Martha went for dinner at Freud’s house, and theyfurtively touched hands under the table [“unter dem Tisch”],47 as she laterrecalled nostalgically (19 July 1882). Martha gave Freud a ring that hadbelonged originally to her mother and had been given to her by her father(Freud to Martha, 23 July 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 214). They kissed48

45Martha still addresses Freud as “sehr geliebter Herr Dr.” [much beloved Mr Doctor] in a letter to himdated 17 June 1882 in which she invites him for a stroll in the Prater (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 89).46A few weeks later (Martha to Freud, 6 July 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 156), in reminding Freud andalso herself of those first days and encounters, she described for him her first impressions on meeting him,when they spoke after walking down from Kahlenberg and in Vienna’s Prater on 30 May 1882. And whenMinna returned home, Martha told her about Freud’s interest in her, his questions about her life and theirreading. Martha sounded genuinely surprised that “der Dr.” [the doctor] – as she called Freud, very respect-fully – had been so interested in “uns” [us]… It is quite telling that she dared not use the word ‘me’!!47In reality it was not a “Spiel […] das niemand merkte” [game (…) that nobody was aware of] as Marthawrote to Freud on 9 July 1882 (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 179): in a letter dated 12 August 1882 Freudinformed Martha that “alle Schwestern” [all (my) sisters] had known that they had pressed their hands “un-ter dem Tischtuch” [under the tablecloth] that famous evening (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 276). Freud recalledthis episode in €Uber den Traum, (1901, GW 2/3, pp. 651, 662; On Dreams, 1901, SE 5, pp. 638, 649).48See how delicately Martha reminded Freud of that first kiss in a letter dated 8 July 1882 (Fichtneret al., 2011, p. 177): “Und heute – heute ist es drei Wochen, daß wir uns zuerst gek€ußt” [And today –today it is three weeks since we kissed for the first time]. But see also what the passionate Freud hadwritten to Martha a few weeks earlier, on 26 June 1882 (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 115): “… und wisse,daß ich meine Schwestern in 26 Jahren nicht so oft gek€ußt habe als Deine s€ußen Lippen Samstag undMontag nach unserer Verlobung” [… and (I want you to) know that in 26 years I have not kissed mysisters as often as I did your sweet lips on Saturday and Monday after our engagement]. There was someconfusion between Martha and Freud as to the days involved, because Martha also mentioned the Sun-day evening and the dinner.



and made the secret decision to get engaged, promising to each other tostay together from then on, whatever the difficulties they would have toface.The following day, Monday 19 June, Martha took the train to Wandsbek –

a little town near Hamburg with a small but active Jewish community(Louven, 1989, pp. 95, 135), where her uncle lived and where the family hadvisited since she was a child. As painful as the sudden ‘Trennung’ [separation]might appear to have been (Martha to Freud, 20 June 1882; Fichtner et al.,2011, p. 96)49 in the first letters they exchanged after Martha left Vienna, theatmosphere is of a dreamlike, romantic love born out of their experiences andmemories of brief but intense and secret encounters, their love and decision toget engaged.It was Freud who, in his letter to Martha dated 19 June 1882, refers to

the “Einzelheiten” [details] of their encounters “so mysteriously enchantingthat the dream phantasy could have never been capable of devising them”[“so fremdartig begl€uckend, wie die Traumphantasie sie nie zu ersinnen ver-mag”]. According to Freud, their encounters were superior even to a dream.And note how he deploys the literary and romantic term “Traumphanta-sie”. Freud describes Martha as his “dearly beloved girl” [“teueres, heißge-liebtes M€adchen”], and he tells her that she has increased his self-esteemand given him “new hope and strength to work” [“neue Hoffnung und Ar-beitskraft”] which he needs so much. After asking Martha to give him asmany photographs of her as a child as possible, in addition to the one thatshe already gave him,50 he quotes from Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister, atext he had known since his adolescence (Boehlich, 1990, pp. 23–4). For thefirst time, Freud even quotes Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (1779); Nathan,the ‘wise man’ of the book’s title, is a famous tolerant enlightened Jew, andI will return to his importance to the relationship of Freud and Martha.Freud concludes the letter with a warning that anticipates what will follow:“I am so exclusive when I love” [“Ich bin so ausschließlich, wo ich liebe”](Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 93–4).And what about Martha? She starts her letter, breaking all the previous

formal conventions of her writing: “Sigi, my Sigi! I call you today for thefirst time by your name!” [“Sigi, mein Sigi! Ich nenne Dich heute zuerstbei Deinem Namen”] (Martha to Freud, 20 June 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011,p. 95). Martha claims that on the train to Wandsbek she was feeling, think-ing again of him, of his every word, of their short meetings and love,closing her eyes to be with him and her feelings and memories…Martha seemed totally in love, and again, like Freud I would say, as if in

a sort of daydream. Of course, ‘die Trennung’ [the separation] will not lasttoo long, Martha claims. She will write when she can. Freud is the first she

49Incidentally, Martha, with great intuitive capacity and without the help of psychoanalysis, used dieTrennung, and the frustrated emotions related to it, later on to try to placate Freud and to explain tohim the reasons for their reciprocal frustration and difficulties in communicating resulting from theirseparation.50The requests for photographs would continue; at one point, Martha affectionately – but with a hint ofirony suggesting Freud’s baby-like possessiveness!! – called him “du Nimmersatt” [you insatiable (per-son)] (Martha to Freud, 2 July 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 144).

888 R. Steiner


has written to … Martha ends by saying that she wants to kiss Freud’shands51 and “serious eyes” [“die ernsten Augen”] (Fichtner et al., 2011,p. 97). But in this same letter Martha also tells Freud about Max, one ofher old friends whom Freud knew; Max had waited for Martha at the sta-tion and had, via Fritz, another friend they had in common, heard aboutMartha’s and Freud’s love.The personal language of love, particularly evident in the opening and

closing of the letters, is a specific charm of the Brautbriefe; in the case ofMartha, she reveals a surprising freedom, when one considers her back-ground and the rhetorical conventions of writing letters of that time, inexpressing her love and feelings towards Freud.The specificity of Martha’s and Freud’s characters and vicissitudes of

love will lead them to the creation of their own personal “written languageof love and undoubtedly makes the Brautbriefe, as Grubrich Simitis has soperceptively pointed out, one of the last great epistolary love affairs in theAustro German and European culture of that period” (Fichtner et al.,2011, pp. 52–7). It is really a very significant example of what has beencalled the ‘postal culture’ (Henkin, 2003)52 – of a certain European andnon-European educated class during the 18th and 19th centuries, the writingdisplaying similar connotative characteristics (Bossis and Porter, 1990, Pet-rucci, 2000, Antonelli, 2003; Stein, 2006).53 Derrida’s (1980) La carte postaledeserves a particular mention in this context too.Due to the secrecy and difficulties of the encounters between Freud and

Martha, what they wrote to each other allows us to make a sort of top-onymic study of their love encounters, even the later encounters, because sooften they had to meet in a particular street or square near churches andmonuments in Vienna.The reader has to imagine what sort of consequences the separation

entailed in the everyday world in which Freud and Martha were living atthat time (Zweig, 1943; Magris, 1964; Hobsbawm, 2013). As regards trans-port, for example, there were no cars, of course, but only trains with whichto travel from one town to another. In Vienna, if they could not meet bywalking, Freud and Martha were able to use the traditional horse-drawncarriages and the horse-drawn tram [Pferdbahn] or, outside Wandsbek orVienna, a steam train [Dampfbahn].54

51In the letter Martha refers to Freud’s hands as “die garstigen braunen H€ande” [(your) horrible brownhands] (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 97), alluding perhaps to the stains that resulted from his work in theBr€ucke laboratory. See Fichtner et al., 2011, note 9, p. 97.52Consider, for example, to mention just one among many illustrious examples, the connotative incipitsof the letters between F. Kafka and Milena.53Not to mention what for me is still one of the fundamental studies in this fascinating area of research,namely L. Spitzer’s (1921) research on the epistolary language used by Italian prisoners of war in theirletters, and their way of expressing or not expressing themselves and their feelings, during World War I.54See the moving letter to Freud dated 28 June 1883, Wandsbek, in which, due to Freud’s constant pres-sure and complaints, Martha is so desperate that the only solution is to take the “Pferdebahn” [horse-drawn tram] to get to the hospital where Freud is at that time working and then go with him to his littleroom to have a good cry in his arms (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 470). For “die Dampftramway” [steam-powered tram] see the letter from Freud to Martha dated 24 August 1882 (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 317).



Berkley (1988, p. 17) reminds us that until as late as 1890 doctors at theVienna General Hospital were still performing operations by candlelight.This kind of lighting was of course used in Freud’s and Martha’s houses inthe evenings and in Freud’s little office in the Wiener Allgemeine Kranken-haus [Vienna General Hospital]. Freud began working there, followingBr€ucke’s advice, at more or less the same time as he got engaged to Martha,in order to earn some decent money as a doctor. He began living perma-nently in a little room at the hospital on 1 September 1882 after having lefthis family home for the first time (Freud to Martha, 5 October 1883,E. Freud, 1976, p. 104; Freud to Martha, 19 August 1882, Fichtner et al.,2011, p. 301).And one can easily imagine that Martha found herself in the same condi-

tions in Vienna and Wandsbek when writing in the evenings or at night.They wrote to each other still using dip-pens with a metal nib and of coursethey needed an inkwell.Martha sometimes even used pencils, secretly hiding herself away to write

to Freud on Saturdays to avoid the control of her mother who, due to herreligious orthodoxy, would not allow her to write at all. Pencils were indeedeasier to hide and to use than dip-pens (Jones, 1956, p. 127). Freud andMartha, like so many others in similar situations in those days, thereforehad to rely on trains and on the efficiency of the Austro-Hungarian andPrussian postal services. And of course the sudden separation, after theirsecret engagement and reciprocal promises to love each other, because theyfreely chose each other, increased in both of them the need to write one,two, sometimes three letters per day. And in Freud’s case, sometimes theletters were four or five pages long. Freud’s passion and frustrated love inthose circumstances gave him enormous energy.All this could easily constitute the ingredients of the plot of a typical

19th century romantic realistic novel (see Auerbach E, 2003[1946], pp. 324–456; Luhmann, 1986, pp. 129–45; Bergmann, 1987; Stone, 1987, pp. 329–36;Viederman, 1988, in Gaylin and Person, 1988, pp. 11–14). To these ingredi-ents one could add the following: sexual frustration, because it seems atleast from the Brautbriefe that Freud and Martha did not sleep togetherbefore getting married; the intensity and depth of their feeling, reciprocalself-interrogation, intimacy and sexual longing which is so characteristic ofromantic love (Giddens, 1991, pp. 35–47; Kristeva, 1987; Girard, 2011);Freud’s poverty, as well as Martha’s; the differences between their culturalbackground; the religious issues; and, finally, the young age of Martha.And one is tempted to say that in their act of writing, even in the tactile,physical, secret act of sending or receiving, opening and reading their let-ters, they were trying to find a sort of written dialogic substitute, a surro-gate in the absence of all those spoken and unspoken communications oftheir feelings so condensed through their brief conversations, and physicalencounters, where only kissing each other was allowed.One might say that these letters are no different from those sent by other

educated bourgeois couples in those days throughout Europe and outside.There is nevertheless certainly something remarkable in the correspondencebetween Freud and Martha. From the beginning, besides the way in which

890 R. Steiner


they open or close their letters, which would deserve a specific study, one isstruck by the wealth of literary quotations they refer to. Due to the well-known imprecision of Freud’s quotations in particular, this must havecaused more than one headache for the editors of the Brautbriefe! Thosequotations, like the adjectives or nicknames used at the beginning and endof their letters, were chosen according to the particular emotional momentin which Freud and Martha found themselves.55 The poetry seemed to playan enhancing support for their emotions particularly when they met or aftera new separation. I will return to the importance of those references andquotations for Freud as a psychoanalyst. It is as if all the statements con-cerning love that they had found in the poets and writers they had readsince they were young had combined with their own, more or less, uncon-scious, primordial infantile and early adolescent love and sexual feelingsand phantasies. Martha, for instance, had a particular passion for R€uckert,an Orientalist and very interesting German and popular Romantic poet,56

from whom she sometimes gleaned inspiration to write her love poems toFreud. It is as if the literature helped them to acknowledge and betterexpress what they felt, and at the same time give their feelings a particularcultural shape, mostly German, but not exclusively.Consider Freud’s love of Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare, Byron, Dickens,

late 18th century and 19th century so-called romantic love poetry and nov-els.57 At one point Freud quotes verses by the late 18th century Scottishpoet R. Burns that Byron used as an epigraph for The Bride of Abydos(1813) (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 514), and Freud refers to a sort of sadnessthat he felt at the time he read those verses and did not yet know Martha,and which came back to him; he could really understand the sadnessthrough something similar that he found in Martha’s feelings and verses(Freud to Martha, 9 July 1883; Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 513–4). Marthahad similar experiences. At one moment, in the middle of one of their cri-ses, she quotes the famous verses of Tristan (c.1200) from a modern Ger-man version that had been familiar to Freud since his adolescence, andwhich were rendered in modern German as “There is no love without pain”[“Lieb kann nicht ohne Leiden sein”; Tristan, 2003] (Martha to Freud, 26August 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 326–7). The verses had soundedmore mysterious to Martha when as an adolescent she had first read Tristanbut, experiencing love and pain now, Martha could understand what thoseverses meant.Of course I could quote more of the sources used by Freud and Martha

to better understand their love for each other. But what I have just said is

55For instance, when Freud and Martha have to meet that year in Wandsbek in July 1882, their letterscontain ever greater numbers of quotations from the love poems of B. Auerbach, Goethe, R€uckert,Heine, Shakespeare, Wieland, etc. On more general subjects, from time to time, there are also quotationsfrom Jewish culture. But I will come back to all this in a while.56R€uckert was also used by Schubert and Schumann, and also by G. Mahler as a librettist, for instance,in his Kindertotenlieder. Martha, in sending some verse to Freud in a letter dated 26 June 1882, says thatthey are from “meines geliebten R€uckert” [my beloved R€uckert] (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 181).57When necessary there will be references even to Biblical texts or, in the case of Freud, to a poet likeMilton, besides of course the Shakespeare of the sonnets as well as the plays.



enough to prove how the Brautbriefe is a wonderful and privileged exampleof de Rougemont’s (1972, pp. 126–31) fascinating although questionablethesis on the influence of mediaeval poetry and culture on the cultivatedEuropean bourgeois notions of love throughout the centuries and includingthe 19th century. Indeed, the German Romantic poets that Freud and Mar-tha quoted were inspired by the medieval love poetry of the French Pro-venc�als and the Minnes€anger. Although of course one has also to bear inmind the historical and sociocultural differences between those old poemson love and the 19th century Romantic ones. Incidentally, de Rougemontmakes of Tristan the core iconic poem to support his views!58

Even in the case of Freud and Martha, therefore, one is tempted to ask,along with Stone who echoes La Rochefoucauld (1987, p. 329; and deRougemont, 1972): “Did poetry invent romantic love, or love inventpoetry?”59 With Freud and Martha, I would not say it happened the way itdid in Dante’s Divina Commedia (1985[1307–12], p. 46), where Paolo andFrancesca fall in love reading the poem Lancelot!60 But between the two ofthem, and between their feelings and passion for certain Romantic but notonly Romantic poets, there was a remarkable connection.Yet the romantic, dreamlike, idealized atmosphere we detect in the letters

I have just quoted changed into an at times tragicomic series of events,fears, accusations, reproaches, doubts, terrible uncertainties, self-accusationsand self-scrutiny, despair, and sudden recovery of love and hope. All thosecontradictory feelings escalated, particularly in the case of Freud. The let-ters in which he expressed his feelings reveal a real, emotional, violent andpotentially at times destructive Sturm [storm]. These letters became a des-perate sort of performative writing intended to really shake Martha in orderto, I would say, bend her to his will, to indelibly and almost physicallystamp on her his need for total, absolute possession and obedience.As I said, these were all warning signals of a potential storm – which then

exploded. Of course, one has to think of die Trennung, which became muchmore painful than first imagined for both of them but particularly forFreud. There is no doubt that had they the chance to meet more often, tospeak to each other at length and even share an affectionate kiss, as Marthalater wrote to Freud with great common sense and patience (28 June 1883;Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 470), it would have helped if not to solve then at

58I cannot of course go into detail here on, for instance, the similarities and the differences between thefamous themes of the amor de lonh [love from a distance] of J. Rudel – one of the most famous Pro-venc�al troubadours who, we should not forget, wrote in and for an aristocratic milieu! (de Rougemont,1972) – and what could be called the amor de lonh of Freud and Martha. Incidentally, some of Rudel’sthemes, as with those of many of the other troubadours – just think, for example, of A. Daniel – werevery well known to the romantic German poets quoted in the correspondence between Freud and Mar-tha (see the indexes in Fichtner!!) such as Auerbach, Goethe, Heine, Lenau, R€uckert and Uhland etcwho, fascinated by poetry of the Middle Ages, were deeply influenced by the troubadours through ‘dieMinnes€anger’ [the Minnesingers] and direct readings and translations.59Stone seems to echo de Rougemont’s views based on La Rochefoucauld’s famous aphorism (1705,p. 50): “Il y a des gens qui n’auraient jamais �et�e amoureux, s’ils n’avaient jamais entendu parlerd’amour” [There are people who would never have been in love, if they had never heard talk of it](La Rochefoucauld, 1791, p. 27).60Lancelot is a medieval romance in which the author describes the reciprocal falling in love of SirLancelot and Queen Guinevere.

892 R. Steiner


least to make sense of and diffuse the stormy waves of love, anger, hate,impotent fury, personal insecurity and irrational jealousy which at onepoint Freud started to discharge in his letters to Martha.One has nevertheless to remember that, before he met her, Freud seemed

to have had only a flimsy infatuation for a young girl called Gisela, duringthe summer holidays in August 1872 when he was 16 years old. In reality,the attraction was to the girl’s mother, about whom he wrote a masterlypsychological portrait to his friend Silberstein.61

Unfortunately, the documents at our disposal do not shed any light onFreud’s private, emotional and sexual life during the ten years that followed(Jones, 1956; Eissler, 1971, pp. 242–7; Gay, 1989a; Fichtner et al., 2011, pp.45–52). The availability of this complete edition of the Brautbriefe, editedby Fichtner, Hirschm€uller and Grubrich-Simitis, will I am sure open anentire new chapter on the psychoanalysis of Freud’s character and inten-tions. While trying to avoid speculative interpretations, if one thinks aboutthe total and nearly obsessive dedication to his studies and at the same timethe financial difficulties in his personal life as a young student andresearcher, one can conclude that this implied an intense and ready-to-explode emotional internal phantasy life; an internal life concerning primi-tive feelings, love and idealization of the loved one, as well as a persecutoryfear of abandonment, fear of loss, nostalgia for the loved one, stimulatedfurther by all the readings of poets.One could claim that meeting Martha, and Martha reciprocating his love

as far as she could, made Freud believe in the possibility of the total fulfil-ment of his accumulated longing, at times so difficult to express in words,for an ideal and absolute love – a love that he immediately declared toMartha. The complex internal and external reasons for his confessed insecu-rity (of course, not having had any relationship or girlfriend during allthose years did not make things easier, as he himself acknowledged), canhelp us understand Freud’s extreme declarations of love to Martha in hisfirst letter.62,63

It is as if Freud found in Martha not only physical attractiveness but alsothe refuge for all his anxieties – the anchor or safety net to which he had“gekettet” [chained] himself, to use one of his metaphors (Freud to Martha,22 June 1883; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 431). This is also poetically expressedin a poem about two lovers being one, Auf der H€ohe, by B. Auerbach(1865), which Martha, responding to his need to feel constantly at one withher, mentioned in a letter to Freud in September 1882 (Fichtner et al., 2011,p. 346): “We two are bound together” [“Wir beide sein verbunden…”] The

61See the letter from Freud to Silberstein dated Freiberg 4 September 1872 (Boehlich, 1990, pp. 12–19).62Consider how Freud came back more than once, and at times in a very dramatic way, to this issue.For example, in his letter to Martha dated 23 June 1882 he writes: “Ich sehe in deiner Liebe den einzigenfesten Punkt in meinem Leben” [I see in your love the only secure point in my life] (Fichtner et al.,2011, p. 107). And in a letter to Martha dated 7 July 1882 he writes: “… denn ich kann nicht leben ohnedeine ganze volle ausschließliche Liebe” [for I cannot live without your total, complete, exclusive love](Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 164).63Many of the letters already published by E. Freud (1960) concerning those issues should already befamiliar to readers.



poem’s rhyming scheme (internal as well as end rhyming) is based on ‘-ein’and ‘sein’; the word ‘sein’ is the verb ‘to be’, and it is also, significantly, apossessive adjective/pronoun. Moreover, the word ‘sein’ contains the compo-nent ‘ein’ – the German word for ‘one’ – which reinforces the idea of thetwo lovers being bound together, as one! (Martha to Freud, 8 September1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 421). Jones was, in the early 1950s, alreadyspeaking rightly of a relationship in which the goal was at times, particularlyfor Freud, “fusion rather than union” (Jones, 1956, p. 122).If there is a word that violently shakes Freud’s writing like an emotional

seismic upsurging, a basso continuo, throughout the whole first volume, con-densing his anxious fear of losing Martha and his wish to fuse with her, itis the verb ‘besitzen’ [to possess], also linked to the innumerable times hestresses that Martha must be his – and only his.64 Freud writes: “I have topossess you totally and to be the only one” [“Ich muß Dich ganz undalleine besitzen”] (Freud to Martha, 29 August 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011,p. 332). There is no better evidence than this term for the emotional, evenprimitive, visceral feelings contained in the everyday language of the pre-psychoanalytical Freud, which resurfaces in the later technical language ofpsychoanalysis; a resurfacing which has, in this case, been so distorted andobfuscated by the decision of Jones and Strachey to translate ‘besetzung’ as‘cathexis’ and its variations since 1921 (Bettelheim, 1983; Ornston, 1985;Steiner, 1987).Incidentally, one could even say, to my mind, that Freud’s absolute and

total need to ‘besitz’ [possess] Martha contained some aspects of what isnowadays called ‘projective identification’ (Steiner, 1984).More or less a week after they kissed and considered themselves engaged,

and Martha left Vienna, in a letter from Wandsbek dated 22 June 1882where Martha calls Freud “mein Geliebter” [my beloved] and “mein Einzi-ger” [my one and only] (Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 97–8), she asks Freud ifshe can still maintain a friendship with two musical acquaintances: MaxMeyer, a pianist and composer, who had collected her at Hamburg andwhose songs she admired, and Fritz Wahle, a violinist. They were admirersof Martha and she had flirted with both before she met Freud, and, inFritz’s case, even after meeting Freud (as we will see). Freud knew bothmen.65

Max had asked Martha whether she could still be a sort of sister to him(Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 98). From that moment on, the storm of Freud’sjealousy, mixed with his shyness, sense of inadequacy and insecurity, domi-nated nearly all the letters Freud wrote to Martha; these continued in atragicomic crescendo until the moment when, around the middle of July,after having succeeded in finding some money to travel, Freud was able to

64See for other uses of this verb the letters from Freud to Martha dated: 7 July 1882 (Fichtner et al.,2011, p. 165); 6 September 1882 (2011, pp. 343–5); 5 October 1882 (2011, p. 366); 2 July 1883 (2011,p. 488).65Freud, for instance, tells Martha in a letter dated 22 June 1882 (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 102) that Fritzis helping him receive her secret letters and that nobody else should know about these letters (2011,p. 104). Apart from Fritz, only Max, Sch€onberg and a brother of Fritz knew about Martha’s andFreud’s secret liaison.

894 R. Steiner


visit Martha in Wandsbek and secretly saw her there for a few days. As wewill see, Freud was often acutely self-aware post-factum and in particularafter the ‘emotional explosions’ that resulted in the distortion of his feelingsand phantasies towards Martha. Indeed, at one point later on Freud wroteto Martha that: “My phantasy is a bit sick and plays nasty tricks on me”[“Meine Phantasie ist ein wenig krank und spielt mir b€ose Streiche”](8 August 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 265). Freud masterfully scrutinizedand reproached himself and even tried sometimes to understand his rivals(Jones, 1956, pp. 116–34; E. Freud, 1960, 1961). The most famous letter isthe one dated 11 July 1882 in which Freud tries to explain to Martha thepowerful hold that artists have over women, compared with that of poor sci-entists (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 187). These letters can help us to betterunderstand his later powers of analysis and introspection as a psychoanalyst.In a letter to Martha dated 30 June 1882 (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 135),

Freud calls himself “the gloomy tyrant” [“der d€ustere Tyrann”], a thoughtwhich is echoed affectionately by Martha in several letters: “my beloved‘tyrant’” [“mein geliebter ‘tyrann’”] (Martha to Freud, 10 July 1882; Ficht-ner et al., 2011, p. 182); “my tyrant” [“mein Tyrann”] (Martha to Freud, 9July 1883; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 510). On other occasions he calls himselfa despot: “You can see what sort of despot I am” [“Du siehst, was f€ur Des-pot ich bin”] (Freud to Martha, 8 July 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 173).At one point, to justify the strength of his desire to possess her and makeher his own – something which made her feel ill – he acknowledged thatthis could be “egoistisch” [selfish] but concluded that if that were the case,love could be nothing else but “egoistisch”! He felt he had no more to add(Freud to Martha, 17 August 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 293).But, in spite of all those statements, at times Freud sounds like a sort of

modern Pygmalion who could not bear that Martha – the perfect idealizedcreature moulded by his phantasy – revealed herself to be less than the per-fect specimen. This is the undercurrent of the at times intolerable anxiety,appalling dread [“die entsetzliche Angst”] (Jones, 1956, p. 125) that we findeven in the final letters in this first volume of the Brautbriefe. At times onehas the impression that Freud would have liked Martha to be a sort of ana-tomical specimen that he could fix firmly and control securely under hismicroscope! It is a complex mixture of a patriarchal attitude towards Mar-tha, reinforced by the personal difficulties in Freud’s character.In Freud’s relentless attempt to control Martha he writes: “But until now

I wanted to make of you something different” [“Aber ich wollte bisher wasanderes aus Dir machen”] (Freud to Martha, 30 June 1883; Fichtner et al.,2011, p. 477, my italics). At times, besides the tragic Othello one isreminded of another tragicomic lover – Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, whosejealousy was such that he could not bear the pain of knowing or seeing anytrace that revealed the love between Medoro and his beloved Angelica.66

66See Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1964[1532], Canto 23, pp. 590–1). In Canto 24, Ariosto tellsthe reader that love is nothing but insanity (p. 600). Of course, this view has a long ancient Greek andLatin tradition behind it which seems in one way or another to have percolated through to Freud whenhe mentions that his phantasy is a bit sick. See above.



Freud’s often patronizing and infantilizing style of writing to Martha, whenin the grip of his anxieties, runs through the whole first volume of theBrautbriefe and should be studied in detail. It could lead to a better under-standing of the continuity and gap between the young Freud’s approach towoman (Freud as a young man, lover, husband, and then father) and Freudas a psychoanalyst. Indeed, what I have just stated could even lead to a bet-ter understanding of the famous letter Freud wrote to Martha on 15November 1883; this is the letter referred to by Jones (1956, p. 137), pub-lished in full by E. Freud (1961, pp. 89–91), and studied by others, in whichFreud, commenting on J. Stuart Mill’s pamphlet on women that he hadtranslated, criticizes the excessively liberal views of the English philosopher,and tells Martha that her role, like that of women in general, is to be andto remain a good housewife.67

But let us go back now to Max and Fritz and see where it all seems tohave started and understand what Freud wanted to make out of Marthaduring those first months. Max was the first to have upset Freud, makinghim suspicious when he read what Martha had written about the musicianand knowing the power of his charm over her as an artist (Freud to Mar-tha, 23 June 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 106). For a while Freud seemedto cope, to the extent that he wrote to her magnanimously that of courseMax could be her brother, and Sch€onberg (the fianc�e of Minna, Martha’slittle sister, whom he was getting to know) and even Fritz … they could allbe her dear friends.Freud was proud that so many people loved Martha, even though, for

example, he was aware of the warmth of Martha’s relationship with Fritz(Freud to Martha, 26 June 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 115–6). Toenable us to better understand what was going on, the editors publish a let-ter from that period, sent by Fritz to Martha, which sounds a little toowarm and even somewhat provocative towards “Herr Doktor”, as Fritzironically referred to Freud. One has to say that there was still a fire burn-ing under the ashes between Fritz and Martha, at least as far as Fritz wasconcerned, because Fritz openly declares to Martha “how much I love you”[“wie sehr lieb ich Dich habe”], although he acknowledges in his letter thatthe word ‘love’ is a little too dangerous (Fritz to Martha, end of June 1882;Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 130).In so many letters Freud calls Martha “Marthchen, mein Marthchen”

[Matty, my Matty], “mein s€ußes Marthchen” [my sweet little Martha],“mein holdes M€adchen” [my sweet girl], “mein s€ußes M€adchen” [my sweetgirl], “meine s€uße Martha” [my sweet Martha], “mein s€ußes Kind” [mysweet child]. For Freud this was not merely a rhetorical device; it seems hereally did feel that Martha was like a child he could mould as he wanted.

67It is indeed interesting that Freud mentions Stuart Mill’s work already in the first volume of the Braut-briefe (Freud to Martha, 18 July 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 212). In the same letter he imagines afuture when, having Martha all for himself, she will have to sit on his knees in the evenings after finish-ing work and read for him aloud. The tone is affectionate but the patriarchal and patronizing attitudecannot be denied, particularly in the words “muß Du immer auf meinen Knien sitzen” [you will havealways to sit on my knees].

896 R. Steiner


Suddenly, however, the tone of Freud’s letters change. He reveals to Mar-tha that he knew that Fritz and Martha exchanged kisses before and afterthe famous promenade that she and Freud took in Kahlenberg, when Freudexperienced such strong feelings for her that he found it almost impossibleto stop pronouncing her name and holding her hand (Freud to Martha, 4July 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 149–50). Fritz told Freud, which meansMartha had been silent about this.Freud hoped that when they next met they would be able to speak about

what had remained until then “unanswered” [“ohne Antwort”] – his uncer-tainty concerning Martha’s love for him, which he felt did not have the sameintensity as his own for her, and in particular the fact that when he was stilla “Fremder” [stranger], he had already started to feel so much for her, with-out her realizing (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 149). At times Freud revealed diffi-culty in understanding that Martha was not a figment of his imagination andthat she might have had her own private life, somewhat more flirtatious thanthe one Freud had during the years of his adolescence and as a young man,and a need for her own time and space in which to feel and react to Freud’slove (although, as we have seen, she was in reality very quick and passionatein her response to Freud’s love for her). Freud’s anger and frustration wereunpredictable. His anger could suddenly explode in the most banal lettersabout the everyday, as if he was persecuted by his jealousy. When Freud wasin the midst of one of his storms, it would appear suddenly in his letters as ifhe has been possessed by a sort of obsessive angst, which was superblyexpressed using a stylistic register that sounded both tragic and comic at thesame time. Just think about what he writes to Martha, referring to the kissesshe and Fritz exchanged: “but if you come back, I want to kiss off yoursacred lips every trace of the alien” [“aber wenn Du kommst, will ich vonDeinen heiligen Lippen jede fremde Spur wegk€ussen”] (Freud to Martha,4 July 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 153, Freud’s italics). This passionatestatement appears in a letter to Martha, after a few paragraphs in which hequietly reports to Martha his meetings with her brother Eli in Vienna andwith his own family and so on. The statement seems marvellously condensed,as if Freud were a romantic passionate character in a novel, or a classicalopera, expressing his passionate and jealous suffering for his absolute love.There is also something comic in all this… At one point, Freud comparesFritz to Goethe’s Werther, but in reality Freud himself seemed to be a sortof Werther (Freud to Martha, 4 July 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 153).Note the choice of words the two writers used to describe the lips of theirbeloved: Freud refers here to Martha’s lips as “sacred” [“heiligen”]; Goethe(1881[1774], p. 34) describes Charlotte’s lips as “alive” [“lebendigen”]!Two days later, in stressing that Martha should understand that she

belongs to him, Freud even resorts to using Napoleon’s famous statementwhen he was crowned King of Italy in 1805: “Woe to him who touches it”[“Guai a chi la tocca”]!68

68When Napoleon was crowned King of Italy in 1805, the famous mediaeval ‘corona ferrea’ [iron crown]was put on his head and he is supposed to have claimed: “Dio me l’ha data. Guai a chi la tocca” [Godgave it to me. Woe to him who touches it] (Perfetti, 1993, p. 48).



Things started to get even worse. Freud wanted to come to Wandsbekafter 15 July to hear Martha say, in her own voice, that she loved him andonly him. He did not ask her to break her friendship with Fritz, but heneeded always to establish the truth – he knew Fritz loved her.Sch€onberg tried to help his friends, Freud and Fritz, to clarify matters by

arranging a meeting between them in a cafe in Vienna. Freud had read theletters Martha and Fritz had exchanged. At the cafe, Fritz tried to calmFreud; he even wrote a letter to Martha in Freud’s presence in order toreassure Freud. But in this letter Fritz addressed Martha as ‘my dearestMarty’ and expressed his undying love for her. Freud was furious and torethe letter to pieces. Fritz left the cafe, totally mortified. Freud andSch€onberg followed him outside with the intention of calming him down,but Fritz broke down in tears (Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 165–6). Freud feltmoved, and escorted Fritz home.In this same letter, Freud explains to Martha why Fritz, although

engaged to somebody else, still loves her. And, with one of his typical‘coups de g�enie’, he writes a brilliant analysis (although exceeded in its bril-liance by what he will write later on as a psychoanalyst) in which he statesthat contradictions cannot be tolerated in ‘Logik’ [logic] but can happilycoexist in feelings. One cannot ask artists to be coherent because they haveno reason to “submit” [“unterwerfen”] their “internal life” [“inneres Leben”]to the “strict control of reason” [“strengen Kontrolle des Verstandes”](Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 167).Whether Freud himself was in control is another matter. A day later,

after his habitual professions of love for Martha (Freud to Martha, 8 July1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 172–3), he started dismantling Fritz’s char-acter and forbade Martha “kategorisch” (categorically) to answer any let-ters in which Fritz mentioned his love or called her “meine Martha” [myMartha]. At one point, after having stated that Fritz “needs to be treatedstrictly” [“bedarf einer strengen Kur”] (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 173), hewrites that Martha should not mention Freud’s wishes to Fritz. But hewanted to see all of Fritz’s letters. He insists again and again that sheshould not allow a friend to call her ‘my Martha, my dear Martha’ [‘meineMartha, meine geliebte Martha’]. The reason, Freud claims, is that: “It nolonger makes the right impression when I call you that” [“es macht nichtmehr den rechten Eindruck, wenn ich Dich so nenne”] (Fichtner et al.,2011, p. 174).Freud met Fritz again in Vienna. But his anxiety remained, to the extent

that on 11 July 1882, in a letter in which he calls Martha “my most belovedand unique girl”, and criticizes himself for his earlier outburst and harsh wayhe treated Martha, Freud describes himself wandering through Vienna atnight for hours on end, his mind full of worries and thoughts concerningMartha’s letters that he frames as a trilogy – “You, Wandsbek and ourfuture” [“an Dich, an Wandsbek und unsere Zukunft”] (Fichtner et al., 2011,p. 186). The letter ends with the famous statement quoted by Jones (1956,p. 125) and others ever since, on the existence of “a general enmity betweenartists and us workers engaged in the detail of scientific work” [“eine gene-relle Feindschaft zwischen den K€unstlern und uns Arbeitern im Detail der

898 R. Steiner


Wissenschaft”] (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 187). In this confession regarding hislimitations as a scientist, Freud betrays his sense of inferiority – that artistspossess all the keys necessary to access women’s hearts, whereas scientistshave to stay outside the castle and are lucky if they can find a single key.In spite of all Martha’s reassurances Freud must have still have been

struggling to find the right key to unlock the door to her heart when, a fewdays before taking the train to Wandsbek to visit her, he reminded Martha,half in jest and half in earnest, that “in our old mother tongue” [“in unsereralten Muttersprache”] her name meant “bitteres” [bitter, or sour] (Freud toMartha, 13 July 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 195). He seemed not to real-ize Martha’s right to have had some friends before she met him – friendsand flirtations which could not have been given up after only meetingFreud once.But had Martha really been so bitter or sour with him? A few days

before the ‘storm’ had started, and still unaware of Freud’s jealousy, anxi-ety and anger, she wrote a letter to him (Martha to Freud, 24 June 1882) inwhich she referred to herself as a “Ding” [thing] of no importance, and pas-sionately declared to Freud that: “I can only love you very much, indeedquite ‘terribly’, if you are content with that” [“ich kann Dich nur sehr, jaganz ‘schrecklich’ lieb haben, wenn Du damit zufrieden bist”] (Fichtneret al., 2011, p. 111). Martha wrote that on reading what he told her aboutMax: “I couldn’t help but cry a little” [“mußte schnell ein bißchen weinen”].And on looking at his photograph she felt a little frightened becauseFreud’s eyes seemed to her “so terribly severe and serious” [“so furchtbarstreng und ernst”] (Martha to Freud, 26 June 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011,p. 116).She went on writing to Freud with enormous affect, quoting verses from

“my beloved R€uckert” [“meines geliebten R€uckert”], informing him abouther life in Wandsbek, promising total secrecy about his letters, describing tohim with great sensitivity one of her dreams, relating how marvellous it hadbeen when in the dream they were back together looking into each other’seyes and holding hands. Flirting mischievously, Martha adds that in thedream, and in her phantasy [‘Phantasie’], they did something “but I do notsay what” [“das sag ich aber nicht”] (Martha to Freud, 28 June 1882; Ficht-ner et al., 2011, p. 126).In the same letter, as if intuitively foreseeing perhaps what could follow,

she tells Freud in her so gently articulated style that he has to accept her asshe is, “sometimes unfortunately a bit silly, not very clever, like a lamb, andhas nothing, and he calls her … Marty” [“manchmal leider ein bißchendumm, wenig geistreich, ein bißchen ‘Lammnatur’ und hat nichts und ernennt sie … Marthchen”] (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 127). Of course, onecould argue that she was deliberately undermining herself, adopting theguise of the stereotypical obedient passive little girl and fianc�ee in order toplease and calm Freud. But, as we will see, she could be firm with Freud oncertain matters, reminding him of the boundaries concerning herself and heraffections for her family that he must not overstep.If there is a single term that to my mind characterizes Martha’s attempt

to deal with and balance her emotions and those of Freud, thinking by



contrast of what I have said about his explosive absoluteness, his at timesimpatient, tyrannical, anxious and voracious need to ‘besitz’ [possess] her,and try to make of her what he wanted, it is this term: ‘ein bißchen’ [a little].This gently but firmly emerges from Martha’s letters even later on, at verycritical moments. It works not only as a rhetorical artifice behind whichMartha could repair herself, but also as a means of taming Freud, of bring-ing him back to reality or, to use a contemporary psychoanalytical expres-sion, to contain him.‘Ein bißchen’ started working as a sort of refrain in her letters or, so to

speak, a rhetorical mole that would gradually, with great difficulty but atthe same time gently and firmly, find its way into Freud’s mind and emo-tions. I am thinking particularly of when Martha started asking Freud tohave “ein bißchen Geduld” [“a little patience”] with her, for her feelings,etc.69 Having said that, when confronted with and shocked by Freud’s feel-ings about Martha’s relationship with Fritz, and his relentless howling accu-sations, she did not question the perfection of their love and loyalty to eachother, or his need for total frankness – a need that she had, according toFreud, nevertheless ignored.She claimed she did not deserve the horrible outflow of misunder-

standings expressed in Freud’s letters. She said there had not been enoughtime in Vienna to explain everything to him; he was allowing his behaviourto be guided and dictated by other people’s statements about her. She saidher love for him was absolute, he was everything for her (Fichtner et al.,2011, pp. 177–8). And, like a true romantic heroine, at the end of her lettershe even tells him that if “einmal” [one day] he no longer wants her, she willbe suicidal.

If you … if you … if you … if you … you … you … you … [Wenn Du … wennDu … wenn Du … wenn Du … Du … Du … Du …]

(Freud to Martha, 19 October 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 379)

You terrible man … I will be an Agnes for you, not a Dora, not a ‘child-wife’.[‘Du schrecklicher Mann. … Ich will Dir eine Agnes sein und keine Dora, kein

‘child-wife’.](Martha to Freud, 21 October 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 382)

After 16 July 1882 they managed to meet in Wandsbek where Freudstayed for a few days. The letters written in the days prior to Freud’s arri-val are a crescendo of poetic quotations. In a letter to Martha dated 14 July1882 (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 201), Freud quotes a marvellous passage ofverse from Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night, or What You Will, beginning‘Journeys end in lovers meeting’. (Shakespeare, 1994[1590–96])Nobody except a few friends were aware of Freud’s arrival and secret

stay in Wandsbek. Freud even had the chance to go to Hamburg and paytribute to the statue of “our great Lessing” [“unseren großen Lessing”](Freud to Martha, 18 July 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 208). They wrote

69See, for instance, the letters from Martha to Freud (Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 260, 304, 480).

900 R. Steiner


to each other even on those days! They met on the streets but above all in“the silent park” [“den stillen Park”], or ‘Geh€olz’, as it was called by thelocals, where Martha had previously imagined walking with Freud, watch-ing the squirrels, hanging from his arm so heavily that he had to pull heralong, or sitting together on the grass reading to each other (Martha toFreud, 7 July 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 161–2). Freud and Marthamanaged to arrive at an understanding concerning Fritz’s and Martha’sbehaviour and Freud’s torment and jealousy. But, above all, it was anopportunity to embrace, and kiss each other again, which in the end seemedto be the language that helped them find peace and contentment more easilyand better than any spoken word.Consider the following example. In a letter dated 27 July 1882, the day

before Freud returned to Vienna, in an ecstatic, lyrical mood, Martha callsFreud: “My beloved, my one and only, my Sigi!” [“Mein Geliebter Einziger,mein Sigi!”] (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 221). At one point, she feels soinspired she even quotes the Talmud of Babylon, as well as Schiller andother poets. She reminds Freud that earlier that day “my beloved kissed meso often and so passionately” [“mein Geliebter hat mich heut so oft und sost€urmisch gek€ußt”], and she tells him that on her way home she was still soexcited that people around her thought she had been drinking champagne.Freud, in a more formal, classical mood, later compares himself and Mar-tha to Adam and Eve alone in the Geh€olz, as if it were a sort of replica ofthe Garden of Eden (Freud to Martha, 14 August 1882; Fichtner et al.,2011, p. 282).It is of course impossible to describe in its entirety the profusion of

renewed love and promises, and Freud’s remorse for having hurt Martha,that is expressed in the letters surrounding Freud’s trip to Wandsbek. But afew examples can give an idea of the tone of their correspondence at thattime. With a good sense of humour, Freud refers to his tirades against Mar-tha as his “Strafpredigt” [“punitive sermon”] (Freud to Martha, 18 July1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 208). And in a letter written from Vienna onhis return from Wandsbek, Freud writes: “How differently I write and thinknow, than before I kissed you in Wandsbek. As I promised you, I will beyour servant in life … and your leader, your guide, if you ask for my pro-tection” [“Wie ganz anders schreibe und denke ich jetzt dar€uber, als bevorich Dich in Wandsbek gek€ußt. Wie ich versprochen, will ich Dein Dienersein im Leben […] und Dein F€uhrer, wo Du nach meiner St€utze rufst”](Freud to Martha, 29 July 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 231).But the peace between them did not last, despite their reciprocal promise,

made in Wandsbek, of total clarity and honesty concerning every letter theywould write to or receive from Fritz and Max and every meeting theywould have with them. At one point, Freud even threatened Martha that hewould end their relationship if she did not put an end to her friendship withFritz (Jones, 1956, p. 127).70

There were of course moments of renewed passion and dreamlike statescommunicated by letter as, for instance, in the letter in which Freud imagines

70Jones is quoting the letters dated 5 August 1882 and 5 July 1885 in which Freud hints at this threat.



their future together, when Martha is his and his alone and she takes hissurname – and becomes his “teure Hausfrau” [dear housewife], nota bene!They wrote about the fruitful life they would have together, for themselvesand for others, “till we have to close our eyes in the eternal sleep” [“bis wirdie Augen schließen m€ussen zum ewigen Schlaf”] as Freud wrote to Marthaon 4 August 1882 (Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 249–50). And one has to say thatthe life Freud went on to share with Martha later on matched in many ways,at least for a long time, the life imagined in this letter.It is during that time, on 18 August 1882, that Freud, revealing again his

enormous talents as a writer, wrote to Martha one of the most moving let-ters (already reproduced in full in Freud E, 1960, p. 29; 1961, pp. 44–5)concerning their future, in which he comments again on their poverty. Heimagines somebody asking them: ‘What is your dowry?’ [‘Wass bringt ihrdazu mit’], to which they reply: ‘We have nothing but our love for eachother’ [‘Nichts als wir einander Lieb haben’]. He imagines their little housewhich, because of their poverty, comprises just two or three little rooms,and he describes in detail and with such tenderness their unpretentious fur-niture. One could call it a sort of modest Biedermeier-style interior.However, their daydreams could be escapist: the reality was quite different.

Beside the tragicomic fury and jealousy of Fritz and Max which continues dur-ing the following months, something else was gradually emerging that wouldfurther complicate their relationship, creating new tensions and emotional upsand downs, and leading to another wave of ferocious and hurtful ‘storms’.Freud and Martha had to wait until the beginning of September 1882 to

see each other again, in Vienna. At one point, Martha wrote to Freud thatthere was a chance she would not be able to see him before the winter. Dur-ing the whole of August it was as if Freud was going through a process ofself-scrutiny, pointing out with torment how distant, impotent and reallydesperate he felt because of the disproportion between the love he felt forMartha and what she felt for him; he expressed his constant fear of losingher, complaining about his miserable status and comparing himself to “poorMr. Dick” [“dem armen Mr. Dick”] in Charles Dickens’s novel David Cop-perfield (Freud to Martha, 5 August 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 252–4).Martha’s patient reassurances, her understanding of the enormous stress

Freud was under because of his professional work, emerge in her letters, attimes through a sensitive use of a more direct ‘spoken’ way of expressingherself to accentuate the immediacy of her tenderness, devotion and wish tobe close to Freud, almost caressing him sometimes with her words: “Is thatnot what we said, my beloved?” “How do you feel?” “Don’t you remem-ber?” “You see my darling, we…” “You, my beloved…” At times she askshim for “a little respect” [“ein bißchen Respekt”], the same respect that shehas for him, affectionately reminding him in closing one of her letters: “Wemust be patient a little longer, adieu for today, my sweet treasure. A greet-ing and a kiss from your Martha” [“Noch ein bißchen Geduld m€ussen wirhalt haben, adieu f€ur heut mein s€ußer Schatz. Gruß und Kuß von deinerMartha”] (Martha to Freud, 7 August 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 260).The alliteration in the German repetition of ‘s’ (‘ss’ or ‘ß’), as well as thevocal ‘u’ increases the emotions and affects that Martha wanted to convey.

902 R. Steiner


Feeling so poor and experiencing all the ups and downs of his medicalcareer did not help Freud (Freud to Martha, 1 August 1882; Fichtner et al.,2011, p. 239). They discussed money and savings many times during thosemonths because they had even created a sort of jointly held cash box tocover their everyday expenses – trips, presents, the cost of their letter paper,and even the postage.Gradually, however, something else started to emerge. It is obvious from

the first letter in which they seriously considered a life together – the letterfrom Freud to Martha dated 15 June 1882 – that Freud felt there could be dif-ficulties with her family due to his financial status, Martha’s family situation,and, as in the case of so many young women of her social condition, the factthat Martha was expected to find a husband who could guarantee her finan-cial security, not to mention the problems related to the orthodox Judaism ofMartha and her family, as we will see in a while. It shows the strength of Mar-tha’s character, her independence and courage (despite the stereotypical imageof the obedient little girl that she often projects in her letters71 ), that she choseFreud because she has fallen in love with him. He was her ‘Der WissenschaftMann’ or ‘Der Herr Doktor’, the Man of Science, Mr Doctor, who had suchgreat ideals but was penniless, with an uncertain future ahead of him.Their sometimes adolescent quarrelling about Max and Fritz was one

thing, but Martha’s mother and brother Eli soon presented a problem of anentirely different magnitude. They were not rivals in his courtship of Mar-tha but, for want of a better word, enemies. These external factors startedto interfere with Freud’s desired union with Martha, helping to fuel hiscompulsive fear of losing her. For, as he once wrote in a letter to Martha,“only when you are mine will my life begin”.These obstacles were not only due to the distortions of his Phantasie, to

use Freud’s expression, already so rich in its future psychoanalytical impli-cations, but his Phantasie played a role in mobilizing and fuelling the emo-tions of the new dramatic ‘storm’.In spite of her illustrious background, one should not forget that Martha,

although she was protected by her brother Eli, was without a father, a cir-cumstance which seemed to facilitate Freud’s renewed tyrannical outburstsand demands, as Eli soon became the target of some of his violent out-bursts. Freud (and perhaps Martha too) was aware that Martha’s motherEmmeline, who was not so despotic as Freud’s mother72 (M. Freud, 1957,p. 14; Behling, 2005, p. 17), already suspected something about their rela-tionship. She did not like them being together too often and she told

71Consider, for example, the passage in this marvellous letter in which, in a very seductive but also sin-cere way, because of her admiration for the man of science, she imagines sitting near Freud in order tolearn from him … silent, “m€auschenstill” [like a little mouse], listening to him and what he is about toread to her. But one has also to point out that only a few lines earlier in this letter Martha has askedFreud to treat her with “ein bißchen von dem ‘Respekt’” [a little ‘respect’], which I have already men-tioned – the same respect she has had for him since meeting him (Martha to Freud, 7 August 1882;Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 260).72One should read the portrait that M. Freud made of his grandmother Amalia, stressing the despotic,harsh, fighting nature of a Galician Jew – one of those women who, later on, could be found defendingthe Warsaw ghetto during the Jewish uprising under the Nazi occupation, he added (Freud M, 1957,p. 12–14).



Minna, according to Freud: “We seem to get on too well” [“denn wir pas-sten zu gut zueinander”] (Freud to Martha, 18 July 1882; Fichtner et al.,2011, p. 210).Freud was much more explicit later on about Emmeline’s possible knowl-

edge of their secret relationship and how dangerous that could be (Freud toMartha, 29 August 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 332). It is more than pos-sible, in spite of Jones’s reservations about some of her late decisions whichcomplicated Freud’s and Martha’s engagement, that Emmeline knew whoFreud was through Eli, Minna and others, and was thinking of the socialand financial risks inherent in a possible engagement of her young daughterto such a bright young man, full of promise, but also debts, and without aproper job, and that she was therefore trying to protect Martha.Martha came back to Vienna – and to Freud – escorted by Eli in early

September. They both had to resume their usual tricks in order to meet.Letters, written every day and sometimes more than once a day, wereexchanged through friends or sent to false addresses. They met mainly onthe streets or the squares of Vienna where they shared furtive kisses. Occa-sionally they met at the home of one or the other, faking a sort of formalfriendship. It is true that from the first of September Freud was able to seeMartha occasionally, but always chastely, in his little room at the hospitalwhere he was living.73

Freud began to attack the deep relationship Martha had with her family,particularly with her mother and Eli. Minna was spared this assault becauseFreud felt she was a sort of understanding ally and he often correspondedwith her in a very affectionate way. Freud wrote bluntly to Martha on6 September that her mother “is splendid, but a stranger to me, and sheprobably always will feel like a stranger to me” [“ist blendend, aber fremd,und wird mir’s wohl immer bleiben”] (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 344). Thecampaign had started and it would be difficult to stop because Freud feltthat Martha was too weak, acquiescent and obliging with her family, and inhis jealous fear and blindness he seemed not to realize at first how badly hecould hurt Martha.At the same time, in constantly reminding her that she now belonged to

him, it was as if Freud intuitively foresaw something – something thatwould pose a grave threat to their relationship. But his reproaches and furyusually exploded rather unpredictably. Take, for example, the letter to Mar-tha dated 19 October 1882 (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 377), which starts withFreud telling Martha how busy he is with his job, put under constant pres-sure by his boss at the hospital where he is working. He goes on to peace-fully inform Martha of his meeting with Breuer and tells her for the firsttime about the fascinating case of Bertha Pappenheim. Then, suddenlychanging both the subject and the rhetorical, emotional tone of his writing,he complains angrily to Martha about what he has heard from his sisters

73In a letter dated 25 September 1882, Freud discusses several projects and even envisages, after finishinghis training, becoming a doctor, going to England, the Americas or Australia if he cannot earn enoughin Austria, with Martha joining him after a year or two to live with him in one of those countries (Ficht-ner et al., 2011, p. 358).

904 R. Steiner


concerning the way she is being treated at home by her mother and brother:she is forbidden to do this, to do that, to learn English; they do not giveher money to buy books, and so on.In his fury Freud writes “wenn du” [if you] six times in the space of just

14 lines, and uses the pronoun ‘du’ [you] nine times. It was as if Freudwanted to forcibly compel Martha to listen to him. The forceful repetitionof the words ‘wenn’ [if] and ‘du’ [you], and the dark colour of the ‘u’ seemsto express an emotionally charged and menacing energy, as if, so to speak,Freud wanted to perforate the letter in order to stamp his thoughts on Mar-tha’s mind, to pin her down and persuade her that she was no longer aworthless child who must keep quiet about everything unpleasant and obeyher relatives. If she does not understand this, if she does not react againsther family, then she will lose all claims to their being together, Freud con-cludes; he has had enough of her feebleness.And then he attacks Eli. He was not the good young man Martha

thought he was, Freud argued. This was merely the opening shot in hiscampaign against Eli; there would be many others, to the extent that the sit-uation became so difficult between Freud and Eli that, a few months later,Freud refused to attend Eli’s marriage to his own sister Anna.74

Well, at this point we see Martha reacting without fear, defending herdignity and acting with outstanding maturity.75 She had already kindlyreminded Freud on 25 September (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 355) that shewas “keine ‘Freifrau’”, in other words, she was not the mistress of her ownhousehold or a free woman – she was still bound to her family and couldnot, therefore, do exactly as she wanted.On 14 October, having read all that Freud had said against her family,

she rose to their defence, telling Freud, gently but firmly, that if he lovedher: “You should at least like my family a little” [“mußt Du auch meine Le-ute wenigstens ein bißchen lieb haben”] (Martha’s italics), and “not judgethem so harshly, so coldly and rigidly, as after all they don’t deserve it”[“sie nicht so hart, so kalt und streng beurteilen, wie sie’s doch nicht verdie-nen” (Martha’s italics] (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 372).On 21 October 1882, confronted with Freud’s latest outburst, Martha

wrote a letter that ranks, to my mind, among the very best in the entire firstvolume. Besides her dignity, she reveals an outstanding strength in her feel-ings and thoughts, given that she is only 21 years old at the time of writing:

On what basis should I be persuaded by you that my relatives are tyrants? […] Andwould you now have me love you without any regard? No my dear, [such love, with-

out regard] does not exist, at least for me. For me, love and regard are the same.(Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 381–2)

74The problems between Freud and Eli were also due to the way Freud thought Eli had behaved withhis young brother Alexander. He wrote a letter on this subject to Emmeline that would also be read byEli!! (S. Freud to E. Bernays, 25 October 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 546–7]. In the Brautbriefe onecan find a letter written later on to Martha dated 18 March 1883 (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 416) in whichFreud again accuses Martha of allowing herself to be tyrannized by Eli, who had by then become one ofhis worst enemies.75See, for instance, the very moving and revealing letter to Freud dated 12 December 1882 (Fichtneret al., 2011, p. 411) in which she declares her total devotion and dependence on him.



Martha concludes the letter with a sort of epigraphic statement which, inmy opinion, beautifully condenses the kind of future relationship she willhave with Freud and the fundamental supportive presence she will be forhim, confirming the wisdom of the proverb that behind every great manthere is a great woman: “You horrible man … I will be your Agnes, not aDora or a ‘childwife’’] (my italics)76 [“Du schrecklicher Mann”, sheexclaims, earnestly and affectionately at the same time. “Ich will Dir eineAgnes sein und keine Dora, kein ‘childwife’”].Freud and Martha were of course continuing to meet because they were

both in Vienna at this time, but that did not stop Freud complaining toMartha in writing that she did not love him as much as he loved her, andthat she preferred her family to him and his family: “Of course, you loveme too, as a dear young girl can love; but you remain a Bernays; my rela-tives mean nothing to you” [“Du hast mich gewiß auch lieb, wie so ein te-ures M€adchen kann; aber Du bist eine Bernays geblieben; meine Leutebedeuten Dir nichts”]. Freud goes on: “You should not have let yourself betreated like a weak-willed child, and you cannot deny that you have beentreated like one. You are Eli’s domestic slave, and you tremble when he‘beckons’ you” [“Du solltest Dich nicht als willenloses Kind behandeln las-sen, und Du kannst nicht leugnen, daß man Dich so behandelt. Du bist ElisHaussklavin und zitterst, wenn er ‘winkt’”].And then the ‘finale’, in which one sees the desperate Pygmalion at work:

“You will, in any case, become how I want you” [“Du wirst doch werden,wie ich will”].77 He continues: “Do not delude yourself. Elise [one of Mar-tha’s friends] and Eli and Fritz [Freud, in his rage, throws even Fritz intothe mix] and what’s their names, they are all dead for you, you belong onlyto me and you know now that I am not going to share you” [“Dennt€ausche Dich nicht, Elise und Eli und Fritz und wie sie alle heißen, sind totf€ur Deine Empfindung, Du geh€orst ganz mir, und daß ich nicht teilen will,hast Du erfahren”]. Perhaps Freud felt that something very dangerous andpainful was about to happen.On 24 October 1882 (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 385), Martha informed

Freud of her mother’s plan to leave Vienna and move back to Wandsbek(Hamburg) the following summer. In her letter, Martha sounds desperate:her relationship with Freud is now threatened. She wants to tell her mothereverything but she cannot do that. With hindsight, I think, one can say thatwhatever reasons Emmeline has for returning with her daughters to Ham-burg, one cannot deny that she also wanted to protect Martha against get-ting too involved with Freud: she was aware of his brilliant mind and his

76Martha is referring here to the female characters in Dickens’s novel David Copperfield, a copy of whichwas, incidentally, the first present Freud gave to Martha (see p. 886). She seemed to have read the bookvery well! Dora was the weak, infantile young woman whom David married; Agnes had been his wise,stable and reliable friend since his childhood and he goes on to marry her after Dora’s death. See alsoFichtner et al., 2011, p. 382, note 2.77Freud’s patronizing, Pygmalionesque attitude is also evident in many later letters. See, for example,what he wrote to Martha on 30 June 1883 (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 477): “Aber ich wollte bisher was an-deres aus Dir machen” [But until now I wanted to make something else out of you]!

906 R. Steiner


charm, but also the fact that he was penniless and burdened with debt. ForFreud, it must have felt like the realization of his worst nightmare: despitehis efforts, Martha was falling deeper into the clutches of her relatives. Theyoung couple would now have to face the prospect of another – this timevery uncertain – separation, with all the endless added frustrations that thisentailed. The resentment Freud felt towards Martha’s family, and of coursetowards Martha too, could only increase.What followed in the next months could, in some ways, be anticipated,

knowing as we do now a bit more about Freud and Martha. However, inOctober 1882 the date of the Bernays’ departure from Vienna had not yetbeen fixed. Of course, as with previous instances of Freud’s fury, it was fol-lowed by a period of reconciliation and passionate affection,78 made possi-ble perhaps only because both were still in Vienna and able to see eachother.Of the two lovers, it was Martha who was the more composed and

thoughtful, and the more psychologically aware of their difficulties. Morethan once she pointed out to Freud the difficulty of seeing each other onlyfor a maximum of two hours, and in having to express and discuss in sucha short time everything that mattered to them. In a letter to Freud dated27 November 1882 she stresses that “the best, the warmest feelings that wehave for each other remain unspoken” [“das Beste, das wir f€ur einanderempfinden, das W€armste doch ungesagt bleibt”] (Fichtner et al., 2011,p. 407). Unspoken, but certainly felt – to the extent that in one of themost amusing and telling letters of those weeks, with his medical-doctorpreoccupations coming to the fore, Freud started to worry about thehealth of Martha, who got so “erregt” [excited] by his kisses that she couldnot sleep (15 November 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 397). He noticedthe “so delicate blue rings around your beautiful eyes” [“so zarte blaueRinge um die sch€onen Augen”] and was prepared to hold back, to behavemore like a friend than a lover because the health and the physical fitnessand strength of his beloved girl “is dearer to me than the joy of caressingyour delicate body” [“ist mir teurer als das Gl€uck, den zarten Leib zuliebkosen”].Finally, at Emmeline’s home in Vienna on 26 December 1882, Freud and

Martha announced their engagement to Emmeline and Eli, there withAnna, and also to Sch€onberg (Minna was in Sicily) (Freud to Martha,27 December 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 412). This probably further rein-forced Emmeline’s resolve to leave Vienna and take her family back to hernative country.During the months that followed, until Martha, now often addressed by

Freud as “my little Princess” [“meine Prinzesschen”], left Vienna forWandsbek, the letters very often bear witness to Freud’s anxious anger

78See, for instance, the closing remarks in the letter from Martha to Freud dated 18 November 1882, inwhich – as if she had read Catullus’s Carmina (1955, pp. 30–1), the ancient Roman poet and his poemon the thousand kisses and then a hundred he wanted from his lover Lesbia – she writes that she kissesFreud a thousand times, but then she coquettishly adds that perhaps 990 times are enough (Fichtneret al., 2011, pp. 399–400)!



towards Martha and her family. At the time Freud had started workingwith Meynert who would play quite a role in his future decisions concerninghis career in the field of neurology and psychiatry (Freud to Martha, 7May 1883; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 427). But at one point he writes to Mar-tha that the study of the human brain no longer interests him. It is as if weare witness to a tormenting pang of contemptuous despair that embittersFreud but also affects Martha.“For me, your importance lies in your name Martha not in the word

‘Bernays’,” Freud writes provocatively to Martha on 3 March 1883(Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 415), before adding that her mother and Eli havevery little in them that connects with that famous name. In so writing,Freud more or less consciously admits to a sense of personal inferioritytowards the background of Martha’s important family (ibid., p. 415). On21 February 1883, Freud wrote a letter to Minna that the Editors havenot included but which was published by E. Freud (1960, pp. 36–8; 1961,pp. 52–4), in which, in a stylistically masterful way, Freud sketches a por-trait of Emmeline;79 he practically accuses her of being a self-centred oldlady who cannot accept ageing and, in her decision to go back to Ham-burg, he accuses her of jeopardizing not only his relationship with Mar-tha, who is ready to fight to preserve it, but also that of Minna andSch€onberg.There are not many letters in what has been preserved of the correspon-

dence dating from January 1883 until Martha’s departure for Wandsbek on15 June 1883. But one has the strong impression that Freud was fighting abattle that he was losing, as far as Martha and her family were concerned.His insistence on attacking Emmeline and even Eli – “this infantile person”[“dieser kindischer Mensch”] (Freud to Martha, 18 March 1883; Fichtneret al., 2011, p. 416) rendered the situation ever more difficult for Marthawho was desperately torn between Freud and her family, and it served onlyto reinforce her defence of her family. Even Minna pointed this out toFreud later on in a letter dated 21 June 1883 (Fichtner et al., 2011, pp.447–8), in which she tries to make him realize that, in severing his relation-ship with Emmeline, he is making Martha’s emotional life more and moredifficult. She was now alone in Wandsbek and had to look after the healthof her mother while she did not feel well herself.The summer break that followed served to precipitate the situation yet

again, albeit preceded by tender letters reminding each other of the anni-versary of their first meeting, their secret engagement and so on. On 17June 1883 (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 437), Martha writes to Freud – in herusual state of rapture – that she is so happy to have been Freud’s loverfor a year and that she could not possibly kiss anybody else now.Notwithstanding the anniversary, Freud and Martha’s relationship nowfaced a formidable array of obstacles and challenges. They were once

79The portrait of Emmeline is comparable, stylistically speaking and for the psychological subtleties withwhich Freud describes her character, to that of the mother of Gisela he sent more or less ten years ear-lier to his friend Silberstein (see p. 893).

908 R. Steiner


more physically and geographically separated. Their only viable means ofcommunication and connection, for the foreseeable future, lay in the writ-ing of letters, unsupported by the meetings in person that had until thenprovided the means to resolve misunderstandings and provided a safetyvalve for their frustrations. Freud’s poverty was so chronic, his profes-sional duties so burdensome, and the distance between Vienna and Ham-burg so great, that he could not travel to Wandsbek to see Martha. Theirfuture remained uncertain and unresolved.In addition, Martha had to look after her mother, which made her

exhausted and unable to write as often as before or reply to Freud’s lettersas quickly as he would like. Freud was confronted with what Martha, withher usual poetical sensitivity, defined as “the endless desert” [“die endloseW€usste”] … the vast and seemingly unconquerable distance that separatedthem (11 May 1883; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 431). And, although its time-span was yet not completely clear, their separation would continue formany months … which would turn into years.Yet more challenges and threats to their relationship arose. Freud’s anx-

iety, his overwhelming love for Martha and his need to control and pos-sess her, allied with Martha’s difficulties in finding a way of coping withall this during those months, as well as her continuing health problems,meant that she began to sound much weaker and more compliant towardsFreud.Now, even more than before, Freud felt like a ‘caged lion’. Because of

the cage that he felt Emmeline, “the enemy of our love” (Jones, 1956,p. 136), had put him in, Freud started to flood Martha again with letterafter letter full of verbal reproaches, mainly concerning what he believed tobe Martha’s unwillingness to be totally open with him as promised, to writeto him and tell him all that was happening day by day in Wandsbek and,above all, about her inner life, from which Freud felt in danger of beingexcluded (Freud to Martha, letters dated 21, 23 and 27 June 1883; Fichtneret al., 2011, pp. 453–7, 466–7).In a letter dated 30 June 1883 (Fichtner, 2011, pp. 475–8)80 Freud con-

fesses: “But until now I wanted to make something else out of you” [“Aberich wollte bisher was anderes aus Dir machen”]. Instead, he had to face thecomplexity of Martha’s relationship with her family.Freud’s old insecurity concerning Martha’s real feelings returned but it

was Freud who was behaving like an immature child…81 Like a case of d�ej�avu that kept returning, the crisis followed a similar pattern to the previousone during Martha’s first summer in Wandsbek in 1882. But this time, notbeing able to cope with Freud’s fury and distress, Martha at one pointbecame ill and fell into tearful desperation. Not knowing any more what to

80Although Eli did not go to Wandsbek, he did not follow his mother’s wish because a few months laterher married Freud’s eldest sister Anna.81See, for instance, what Freud wrote to Martha on 26 June 1883: he wants to be reassured “daß Dirniemand n€aher – in keiner Sache n€aher – steht als ich” [that nobody is closer to you – in any mattercloser – than me] (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 465).



say or do, but accepting that Freud might regard her behaviour “wretched,miserable weakness” [“elende Schw€ache”], on 28 June, 1883 she wrote thatshe just wished she could be in Vienna, take the horse tramway to the hos-pital, visit him in his little room, abandon herself in his arms and “have agood cry” [“ausweinen”] (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 470). In a letter dated 29June 1883, Freud penned an angry series of accusations against the weak-ness in Martha’s behaviour with her mother and Eli (Fichtner et al., 2011,pp. 473–4). And the very next day he even threatens never to write to heragain (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 477).And then there were the post-climax-like moments of reconciliation with

reciprocal excuses and expressions of remorse from Freud (2 July 1883;Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 488) in which he openly declares how shameful hefeels for all the duresses he has inflicted to her, and repeats that he feelsjealous and just wants “to possess you and to totally possess you” [“Dichzu besitzen und Dich ganz zu besitzen”]. Martha asks Freud to “really havea lot of patience with me” [“recht viel Geduld mit mir zu haben”] (30 June1883; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 481). In a very psychologically subtle letter toFreud, dated 2 July 1883, Martha explains to her fianc�e that if she has hurthim: “It was unconscious and unintentional” [“so geschieht es unbewußtund ungewollt”]. Note the first appearance of the term ‘unbewußt’ [uncon-scious] in the correspondence (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 485).82 In a letter toMartha dated 4 July 1883, in one of his daydream-like anticipations of theirfuture life together, when Martha is his wife and he can make up for every-thing, Freud writes that he will “caress so fervently your delicate beautifulbody, which is then mine, and always always remind myself how I havehurt you and how you belong to the angels” [“den zarten sch€onen Leib, derdann mein eigen ist, so innig liebkosen und mich immer immer daran erinn-ern, wie wehe ich Dir getan habe und wie Du engelgut bist”] (Fichtneret al., 2011, p. 496). Incidentally, this was the second and yet final time inthe first volume of the Brautbriefe that Freud alluded to Martha’s body asa sexual object, aside from her lips, kisses, embraces, and so on.83

The letter with which the Editors end the first volume of the Brautbriefeis one from Freud to Martha dated 12 July 1883 (Fichtner et al., 2011,p. 521). It is one of the most beautiful and telling of Freud’s letters, sopoetically inspired and crafted, and free of the verbosity that is to be foundin many of his other letters. At one moment, as if in free association, day-dream or a deep philosophical mood, he writes: “I do not know how todayI started to think like that.”Freud tells Martha that everybody should choose one of the Great and

Powerful as a kind of domestic god and patron protector. He refers to Mil-ton, whose Paradise Lost, along with the English history of that period

82Martha even chose a very pretty illustrated writing paper for one of her letters, dated 3 July 1883(Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 489–92), which was as usual full of poetic quotations, including one from apoem by Auerbach on two lovers being as one, which she had already used. The letter was embellishedwith illustrations, in the form of medallions of scenes featuring children and one medallion depicting alarge love-heart. The Editors of the Brautbriefe have reproduced the letter in facsimile form (p. 490).83The first instance occurred in the letter dated 25 November 1882 that I quoted earlier.

910 R. Steiner


(including Cromwell, of course), for whom he had already expressed hisadmiration84; he spoke of the magic power Milton has of removing onefrom such an unsatisfactory and unchanging present so that in the end theearth lies there like a small dot in the Universe and the broad sky opens up.But he ends up choosing Lessing as the one who can lead ‘uns’ (us) in

this world. As if in a daydream, he suggests to Martha that they shoulderect a statue of Lessing in their living room (a reminder of Freud’s visit toHamburg where he saw Lessing’s statue which he had described in his ear-lier letter to Martha (see p. 900), wherever that will be, and place his booksin a prominent position. And he reminds Martha that she had even senthim a beautiful postcard of that statue, which he intends to frame and dis-play in his little room at the hospital.I think that the numerous references to Lessing and Nathan der Weise

that we find both in Freud’s and Martha’s letters, and in this letter in par-ticular, can help me to introduce some final observations regarding thecomplex issues of Freud’s Judaism vis-�a-vis that of Martha.Lessing’s work Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1769), a dramatic

play focused on the character of Nathan, a Jew who does not claim or fightfor the primacy of Judaism over Christianity or Islam, but is in favour of atolerant co-existence of the three religions (Mittner, 1964, pp. 237–46;Arendt, 1991, pp. 3–9). Nathan is the epitome of the enlightened Jewish tra-dition of M. Mendelssohn, the great German-Jewish thinker of the Enlight-enment, and a friend of Lessing; Lessing moulded the character of Nathanon Mendelssohn (Momigliano, 1987, pp. 146–59; Sorkin, 1996; Feiner,2004). Lessing had a profound influence on Freud’s father Jacob, whotaught Freud about Lessing’s work. Freud himself identified so closely withthe tolerant Nathan and detached himself much more than his father didfrom Judaism as a religion.A few days earlier, in one of his Jeremiaden [Jeremiah phases], Freud had

become very worried about the health of Martha, whose constitution hadbeen weakened by enduring Freud’s anxieties and intolerance during thosemonths. Freud now felt that her health and what she ate, or could not eat,was his concern. Is it not significant that in the name of his tolerant atheis-tic rationalism, when discussing Martha’s health problems in a letter dated11 July 1883 (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 517), Freud becomes quite intolerantas he tries to convince his “Marthchen” [Marty] to free herself from whathe calls “a mad barbaric constriction” [“von einem tollen barbarischenZwang”]?Indeed, like the really godless Jew that he was, Freud started attacking

one of the most sensitive and painful loyalties of Martha – her loyalty toher father’s and her mother’s background – her religious orthodoxy thatexpressed itself in her ‘kosher’ food. According to Freud’s enlightened andtolerant (but at the same time intolerant) reason and passion, this kosher

84Freud to Martha, 16 August 1882 (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 291). Freud defines Milton’s Paradise Lostas the sublime “Denkmal” [monument] of that period in English history, meaning the period of the Puri-tans and of Cromwell – whom Freud admired so much. Reading Milton had consoled and supportedhim, when he thought that he was a stranger to his beloved “M€adchen” [girl].



food was damaging her health and was another sign of her weak, passivedependency on her family. Yet it was also the sign of a tradition in whichone can clearly see the cultural and religious, if not social, differences85

between, on the one hand, Freud’s family background and, on the otherhand, Martha’s Judaism. This was an issue which of course would play amore or less hidden but very important role in many of their futuretroubles.86

Of course, we must wait for the complete edition of the Brautbriefe. Butthe first volume can help us to better understand the complex problem ofFreud’s Jewish identity, its contradictions and later developments, and howit affected his relationship with Martha.Indeed, Freud’s and Martha’s references to Jewish culture and tradition

should be studied in detail87 although one has to handle this issue with careand balance, as Grubrich-Simitis points out in her Einf€uhrung (Fichtneret al., 2011, pp. 39–43). What is at times striking, particularly in Freud’scase, nevertheless, is his sense of belonging to his people – something weknow he never denied or forgot at any point in his life.Volume one of the Brautbriefe contains several psychological portraits of

Freud’s teachers and friends – J. Breuer and T. Meynert. But speaking ofNothnagel, the famous professor of general medicine at Vienna GeneralHospital with whom Freud worked for several months in 1882, Freud says:“No, the man does not belong to our race” [“Nein, der Mann ist keinerunserer Rasse”] (Freud to Martha, 5 October 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011,p. 367). Note how emotionally and culturally charged “unserer” [our]sounds when Freud says Nothnagel is not a Jew. Just think of anotherexample of an early famous letter from Freud to Martha dated 23 July1882, written from Hamburg, which starts with a quotation from Nathander Weise (Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 215–19; Freud E, 1960, pp. 19–24,1961, pp. 35–40). In this letter, Freud reminisces about an old Jewish manin Hamburg who supplied him with the writing paper monogrammed withthe initials S and M that he had wanted, and who reminded him of some

85There is a well-known popular Yiddish expression, yekke, that the €Ostjuden used to describe in a ratherderisive, disparaging way – albeit betraying at the same time a sense of cultural inferiority – some of thecharacteristics of the often more sophisticated, integrated, Westernized, mainly Sephardic Jews fromnorthern Germany. I do not want to suggest that this was Freud’s attitude towards the Bernays – hehad, after all, composed a very respectful portrait of Martha’s grandfather in his latter to Martha dated23 July 1882 (Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 215–19). Certainly, the Galician Ashkenazis and other €Ostjudeninfluenced by the Haskalah movement inspired by M. Mendelssohn’s enlightened Judaic way of think-ing, in spite of the fact that Mendelssohn lived and thought in Germany, were more liberal and lessorthodox in their Judaism than certain Sephardic north German Jews (see Bartal, 2005, pp. 5–8, 57–101;Feiner, 2002; Le Rider and Raschel, 2010; Solomon, 2010, in Le Rider and Raschel, pp. 103–31), ofwhom Martha’s family was such a prominent representative. Although in the letter quoted above Freudportrays Martha’s grandfather as a sort of almost-Reform Jew, there is a small but interesting detail thatshould perhaps be remembered: the Reform rabbi I. N. Mannheimer, who married Jacob and Amalia –Freud’s parents – participated in a polemic in 1841 against Isaac Bernays, Martha’s famous grandfather(Aron, 1956, p. 286)! In the case of Martha’s Orthodox observance of some of the Jewish religious rules,such as eating ‘kosher’ food, maybe one has to consider also the influence of her mother.86As all his biographers have pointed out, it was only with great reluctance that Freud later on agreedto a religious marriage.87I cannot quote here all the references both Freud and Martha make to the Bible, to Jewish culture,etc, in just the first volume of the Brautbriefe.

912 R. Steiner


traits of Nathan the Wise. Freud goes on to praise the teacher of that oldman – I. Bernays, Martha’s grandfather – and his enlightened teaching ofJudaism (Bollack, 1998, pp. 45–86), despite Bernays’s acceptance of theJewish kosher rules – something Freud seems to have forgotten whenreproaching Martha!88 And he nearly compares I. Bernays to Nathan theWise! And in this letter is we find several references to ‘uns’ and ‘wir’ [us/we] in relation to the Jews.We also find Freud’s famous reference to the destiny of the Jews after

the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by the Roman emperor Titus(Steiner, 2000). The letter ends with his famous statement that, as far as heand Martha are concerned, he believes that “even if the form wherein theold Jews were happy no longer to offers us any shelter, something of thecore, of the essence, of this meaningful and life-affirming Judaism will notbe absent from our home” [“wenn die Form, in der die alten Juden sichwohl f€uhlten, auch f€ur uns kein Obdach mehr bietet, etwas vom Kern, dasWesen des sinnvollen und lebensfrohen Judentums, wird unser Haus nichtverlassen”] (Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 219; Freud, 1961, pp. 39–40).This kind of Judaism is of course something that Martha, more than

Freud, would struggle to accept, and we do not know really how painful itwas for her to renounce the shelter provided by the rules and rituals of herJewish Orthodoxy.89 But just think of this last example in a letter to Mar-tha dated 24 August 1882, Freud says that George Eliot, although a “Nich-tjude” [non-Jew], included in Daniel Deronda many fine and boldobservations about “uns J€uden” [us Jews] (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 316),“something that we usually are able to mention only in the closest of ourcircles because anyone else would see them as much too impudent…”Well, we must wait for the publication of the other volumes to reach a

full picture of this so intense, conflicted and at the same time moving lovehistory. But, before concluding, I think something more should be saidabout the fascinating emergence in these letters of a vocabulary that is stillembedded in the everyday, often emotional and visceral language of Freudand Martha, but which later on we encounter again in the so-called techni-cal terms of Freud’s psychoanalysis. The terms do not of course have thesame meanings because they inevitably acquire different ones when used inrelation to Freud’s discovery of the Unconscious. At the same time, how-ever, one cannot deny that in psychoanalysis the origins of certain concep-tual and emotional terms can be traced back to the Brautbriefe. Certainly,the conceptual terms of psychoanalysis come in part from the language ofthe natural sciences, which can lead to a scientism so fashionable in the

88When criticizing Martha for her kosher rituals in the letter I have just mentioned, Freud seems to nearlycontradict himself in forgetting how understanding he felt just the previous year about I. Bernays’s wishto respect the kosher tradition based on the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures and what God toldAdam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (Fichtner et al., 2011, pp. 217–8; Freud, 1961, pp. 38–9.)89According to Behling (2005, pp. 156–7), Martha never lit the candles again on Friday night for theSabbath for 50 years after marrying Freud; she lit them again, for the first time in 50 years, on the Fri-day following Freud’s death. Elliot Phillips – one of Martha’s cousins – claimed in a letter to Jonesdated 28 October 1956: “I remember very well her telling me how not being allowed to light the Sabbathlights on the first Friday after her marriage was one of the most upsetting experiences of her life.”



so-called empirical scientific psychoanalysis of today, which aims to mea-sure and calculate even the intensity of the emotions and characteristics ofthe Unconscious; but these terms also often come from the language of lit-erature and romantic philosophy. Think of the dreams that Freud and Mar-tha reported to each otherThink of Freud and Martha’s concern with accurately expressing their

dreams, and their use of the terms ‘Phantasie’ [phantasy] or ‘Traum Phanta-sie’ [dream phantasy]. Think about the visceral creative stream of the lan-guage of everyday life and emotion, from which comes Martha’s use of theterm “unbewußt” [unconsciously] (Fichtner et al., 2011 p. 465), “verdra-engt” [repressed] (2011, p. 531) and, above all, Freud’s use of ‘besitzen’ [topossess, to own, if not also to occupy, as this verb also means in German].And just remember Freud’s use of the term “verwerfen” [to repudiate](2011, p. 175), “erregt” [be excited] (2011, p. 396), and “nachtr€aglich” [later,or ‘deferred’ action, as translated rather dubiously by J. Strachey] (2011,pp. 265, 446, 517), an adjective on which contemporary psychoanalysis haspoured rivers of ink trying to make sense of it. Freud even speaks of“unheimlich” [uncanny] (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 367) and “analysieren” [toanalyse] (2011, p. 451)! I am sure that a closer reading will reveal muchmore about the future glossary of psychoanalysis, so deeply rooted cultur-ally and historically in the personal life of both Freud and Martha in thoseyears.

The Brautbriefe and psychoanalysis

… ich k€ame per Luftballon’ [… I came by hot-air balloon](Martha to Freud, 26 August 1882; Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 327)

To rescue the past from the enormous condescension of the present90

One has to stress that, even when we will have at our disposal theentire Freud–Martha correspondence, we will still have only a less partialunderstanding of what went on between them during those years and thenature of their feelings. Even the first volume of the Brautbriefe bears wit-ness to something one has to imply from all sorts of other, more or lessprivate, archival historical documents. There is always an inevitable dis-crepancy – a gap, something left hidden and unknown for all sorts of rea-sons which are impossible to discuss here (Steiner, 1993, 1994) – betweenwhat was originally felt and thought and what was written; therefore,between what has become a public, documented expression and thethoughts and feelings that the correspondents did not commit to paperand that therefore do not form part of the public record. Not to mentionsome of their actions.Even in the case of the most ‘sincere’ correspondence, as the Brautbriefe

seem to be, by definition not all of the correspondents’ thoughts and

90A paraphrase of the famous statement about the working class by E. P. Thomson (1963). I would liketo thank Prof. J. Mitchell for drawing my attention to the statement.

914 R. Steiner


actions could be communicated – even Freud and Martha were themselvesaware of that, as we have seen. Therefore, their correspondence can onlybe partially studied, more or less cautiously interpreted or, for thosewho like this kind of biographical or historical methodology, ‘psychoanaly-sed’…When reading the Brautbriefe, besides the specific personality of the cor-

respondents and their personal problems, as well as the missing documents(it should be said that even in the case of the Brautbriefe not all the lettershave survived), or documents that have been deliberately hidden ordestroyed, one should consider the cultural and historical contexts, rhetori-cal conventions and censorship. One must also consider the personality andcultural ‘horizons’ of the interpreter of these letters (Steiner, 1994).We must also not forget that, in many cases, and perhaps even in the

Brautbriefe, written words can sometimes be used to avoid saying whatshould be said (Gay, 1984, pp. 109–10).The inevitable limits of any attempt to come to a final and definitive

truth about what went on between Freud and Martha, and the possibleimplications for Freud’s work as a psychoanalyst, should, I think, be keptin the background – even as far as the considerations and questions whichwill lead to the conclusion of my work are concerned.Everything that belongs to unknown aspects of Freud’s personality and

his affective and intellectual life, even of the so-called personal ‘dark side’of his character – his tyrannical need to totally control Martha, forinstance, and his anxious fear of any rival, of which the first volume of theBrautbriefe bears more than one example – is of course of primary impor-tance and can help us to better understand psychoanalysis as both a disci-pline and a movement. However, one must accept that, as in the case ofany great creative individual, there can never be a mechanical cause andeffect link between a person’s life and his or her creative work.‘La psychoanalyse, c’est moi,’ one could say for Freud, paraphrasing

Flaubert’s famous statement – ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’ But, as in thecase of Flaubert, whose characters embody aspects of his life and phantasieswhich are perhaps more those of his imaginative creativity than, strictlyspeaking, his biographical life (Kris, 1952, p. 288; Starobinski, 1970,pp. 78–83), so the same can be said, mutatis mutandis, for Freud and hiscreative work.Having said all that, one could ask a series of questions. It has been pos-

sible to find a cultural line of continuity between the Brautbriefe andFreud’s later work as an analyst, but can one try to go further than that?Or, in spite of their enormous autobiographical and biographical value, arethese letters so dated and so entrenched in a sort of archaeological past ofpsychoanalysis that they can have meaning for scholars interested in thatpast, but very little importance in reality for Freud’s psychoanalysis, not tomention for contemporary psychoanalysis? I think it is legitimate to try tofind further possible traces in the letters of Freud’s later work as a psycho-analyst, besides all that I have already noted, about all those tumultuousfeelings, those dreams and projects, ‘l’amour passion’, as Stendhal (1842)



called passionate feelings mixed with excitement and frustration and pain.91

These feelings were transformed into a more placated and peaceful love andaffection for Martha later on in the Brautbriefe, at least from time to time –until they get married (Jones, 1956, pp. 145, 153–68)92. And it is also legiti-mate to ask what role Martha played in the traces left by the Brautbriefe inFreud’s work as a psychoanalyst.Jones (1956, p. 111, p. 133)93 and Gay (1989a, p. 38)94 among others95

have rightly pointed out the role that Martha’s and Freud’s sexual frustra-tions and anxieties played in Freud’s early psychoanalytic papers and firstrudimentary psychoanalytic explanations, when he was trying to make senseof neurasthenia, anxiety and actual neuroses, psychoneuroses and of coursehysteria, obsessions and phobias; Freud tried to locate the symptoms ofthese conditions in repressed or inhibited sexuality and abstinence, particu-larly before but also during marriage (1985[1887–1904]).Indeed, consider Freud’s 1895 paper, On the right to separate from neuras-

thenia a definite symptom-complex as ‘anxiety neurosis’ (SE 3, pp. 100–1)[‘ €Uber die Berechtigung von der Neurasthenie eine bestimmten Symptome-Complex als “Angstneurose” abzutrennen’ (GW 1, pp. 322–3)]; or whatFreud wrote later on the role of sexuality in neurosis in ‘Die Sexualit€at inder Aetiologie der Neurosen’ (1898, GW 1, pp. 491–516, passim; SE 3,pp. 261–85, passim).In those papers, over and over again, using his first very complicated

model (which of course did not exclude hereditary factors), Freud came

91I do not know whether Freud actually read Stendhal’s essay De l’amour (1822), one of the most influ-ential books of the 19th century on this subject (see Bergmann, 1987, pp. 129–36). Freud quotes thebook and its author only indirectly, through Heine’s poem Der Asra, based on a passage of Stendhal’sbook (Freud S, 1915, Zeitgem€aßes €uber Krieg und Tod, GW 10, p. 338; Reflections on War and Death,SE 14, p. 290).92In the Geheim-Chronik, the first long note, dated 26 January 1883, is from Martha who states withbold finality that: “Die Romantik liegt hinter uns” [Romanticism is behind us] (Fichtner et al., 2011,p. 531). According to Jones (1956, p. 153) on 29 October 1883 Freud wrote to Martha that his love waspassing from a lyric phase into an epic one. Freud and Martha will nevertheless go on to enjoy furthermoments of romantic or lyric love during their long courtship. And we are of course very, very far awayfrom what M. Schur (1955) – whose intimate knowledge of Freud’s family life during the last years ofhis life cannot be disputed – wrote to Jones on 30 September 1955, commenting on the first volume ofhis biography of Freud, more than 70 years after the documents I have just quoted: “As to Martha here,I have my doubts whether at the time I knew them she still was the one and only. As far as I can see,he spent less and less time with her. There was an air of understanding forgiveness for her increasinglypedantic attitudes.” After having stressed Freud’s kindness towards Martha, Schur claimed: “Freud wasalways controlled and polite but there was so little left of the great love that I was quite surprised by vol-ume one. In his last years it was only Anna” (my italics). But we have to bear in mind that this first vol-ume of the Brautbriefe refers really to a unique moment in the life of Freud and Martha. No passion assuch could last for a long time.93Jones, referring to Freud’s worries about the black rings around Martha’s eyes, that are said to be dueto his passionate kisses and embraces, claims that it was the first hint of what Freud was later todescribe as the anxiety neurosis of engaged couples.94Gay, referring more generally to Freud’s and Martha’s sexual abstinence, which was dictated to a greatextent by their class and culture of those times, states that those interminable years of waiting left theirimprint on the formation of Freud’s theories about the sexual aetiology of most mental ailments, andthat, when in the 1890s Freud theorized about the erotic travails attendant upon modern life, he waswriting in part about himself and, one could add, also about Martha.95See, for example, the chapter (although rather questionable at times) entitled ‘Martha – the loss of anillusion’ in Breger’s book (2000, pp. 86–96), and also Behling (2005, passim).

916 R. Steiner


back to the external sociological causes of restrictions imposed by what hecalled ‘Kultur’ [civilization], expressed in a restrictive education, compulsiveabstinence, fear or condemnation of masturbation, which he saw as causingall sorts of symptoms in both men and women during their engagement butalso their marriage.Consider his and Martha’s autobiographical experience of being sepa-

rated and having to wait so long to be together and to get married,although waiting had been quite a common experience in their families too:Emmeline had to wait nine years to marry B. Bernays (Behling, 2005,p. 19). And think too of all that this could imply for many aspects ofFreud’s later views, not only on sexuality but on anxiety too, and so on.96

If one wants to follow this line of thought, arguing that one can discernthe partial impact and re-elaboration of autobiographical experiences andsufferings in those papers of Freud mentioned above, one could also see adevelopment that leads, as Strachey rightly observed (SE 3, p. 262), toFreud’s (1908) famous paper, ‘Die Kulturelle Sexual Moral und die Mod-erne Nervosit€at’ (GW 7, pp. 148–53, 166–7) [Civilized sexual ethics and mod-ern nervous illness (SE 9, pp. 186–92, 204)]. The impact of these early yearscan also be seen in Freud’s (1912) paper, On the universal tendency todebasement in the sphere of love (SE 11, pp. 184–90) [‘ €Uber die allgemeinsteErniedrigung des Liebeslebens’ (GW 8, pp. 83–90)] and his sociologicalobservations on virginity, not only among primitive but also so-calledcivilized people and couples, in ‘Das Tabu der Virginit€at’ (1918, GW 12,pp. 261–80) [The taboo of virginity (1918, SE 11, pp. 193–208)]. In the end,one could even recall – without forgetting ‘Hemmung Symptom und Angst’(1926, GW 19, p. 157) [Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926, SE 20,p. 141)] – what Freud wrote on the same subject in 1930 in ‘Das Unbeha-gen in der Kultur’ (GW 14, pp. 460–75) [Civilization and its Discontents(SE 21, pp. 101–16)].The conflicting experiences and frustrations of the long betrothal with

Martha (Gay, 1989a, pp. 36–7) and the effects that this had on both ofthem seems therefore to be something that Freud could never completelyforget in his late work. It accompanied him like a long shadow until his lateyears. Although the memories and experiences were of course mellowed by,and blended and enriched with, all sorts of other clinical, theoretical, philo-sophical and social views and discoveries.But perhaps one could go even further. Of the famous discussion on the

‘necessary condition for loving’ in Freud’s paper, A special type of choice ofobject made by man (SE 11, pp. 166–7) [‘ €Uber einen besonderen Typus derObjektwahl beim Manne’ (1910, GW 8, pp. 67–8)] – the first of three paperscollectively called Contributions to the Psychology of Love – could one not

96I drew the attention of the reader to the way Freud and Martha coped, or did not cope, with ‘dieTrennung’ [the separation]. Well, one could be tempted to ask, if it does not sound too speculative anddeterministic, how much of that experience – let us forget about Freud’s and Martha’s early experiences –was then metabolized and transformed into Freud’s entire meditation on the nature of ‘Angst’ [anxiety]?The difference between anxiety as a signal of the danger, for instance, of being abandoned, of losing theobject and the actual pain of losing it is described in the essay Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926,SE 20).



say that Freud had in mind his own terrible, jealous triangle between Mar-tha, Max, and himself, and then also Fritz?I have in mind, in particular, Freud’s description of the effect that an

engaged woman can have on a man who loves her; she can become ignoredor even rejected, but through the presence of a rival she becomes ‘Gegen-stand der Verliebtheit’ (Freud S, 1910, GW 8, p. 68) (the object of “passion-ate feelings”, as Strachey idiosyncratically translates the word‘Verliebtheit’97 [Freud S, 1910, SE 11, p. 166]).And in the Contributions to the Psychology of Love one could perhaps

find another echo of the Brautbriefe. In his paper ‘ €Uber die AllgemeinsteErniedrigung des Liebeslebens’ (1912, GW 8, p. 81) Freud tries to definethe mature form of love, in which sensuality and affection are united, con-cluding that: “The greatest intensity of sensual passion will bring with it thehighest psychical valuation of the object” [“Die h€ochsten Grade von sinnli-cher Verliebtheit werden die h€ochste psychische Wersch€atzung mit sich brin-gen”]; he adds that this is part of the normal overvaluation of the sexualobject on the part of a man (and not of the woman therefore!), which couldremind us of his affective but also sensual overvaluing of Martha.98 And isit not curious that, to describe all those feelings, Freud quotes the verysame passage from the Bible he used, nota bene, 30 years earlier in one ofhis dreamlike, passionate letters to Martha, prizing her as a jewel, express-ing his unique, total love for her? Nevertheless, he makes an interesting slipof the pen in his letter to Martha.99

But of course, in all the attempts to trace these lines of continuity that Ihave hinted at until now, one has also to be aware of the significant and attimes enormous gap between Freud as a young man – his passionate, con-flicted, abstinent love relationship with Martha and their reciprocal prob-lems – and Freud as a married man, fathering in the end five children andhaving to face the inevitable changes which time and the wear and tearof everyday life brought to his relationship with Martha (Gay, 1989a,pp. 161–4). But, above all, one has to put all those old memories and experi-ences in the context of Freud’s work as a psychoanalyst and his complex

97The word ‘Verliebtheit’ means ‘being in love’.98Freud had already mentioned and discussed overvaluation of the sexual love object in Drei Abhandlun-gen €uber Sexual Theorie (1905, GW 5, pp. 49–50; Three Essays on Sexuality, SE 7, pp. 150–1).99The passage quoted by Freud in his letter to Martha dated 14 August 1882 (Fichtner et al., 2011,p. 283) is as follows: “Das Weib soll Vater and Mutter verlassen und dem Manne folgen, der es erw€ahlt”[The woman must leave her father and mother and follow the man who has chosen her]. According tothe Editors (Fichtner et al., 2011, p. 284, note 3), Freud seems to echo more the common version circu-lating in German culture. They quote Ein Sommer in London, the novel by Theodor Fontane (1854),who also refers to the woman who leaves her father and mother to follow the man who has chosen her.The Editors then quote the version from the Bible of Philippson (1 Moses 2, 24), a copy of which Freudpossessed: ‘Where is the man who has to leave his father and mother and cleave unto his woman so thatthey become one flesh?’ The Editors seem not to have noticed the difference between ‘woman’ and‘man’. Freud in his 1912 paper seemed to remember the quotation more correctly, although he is usuallyvery approximate in his quotations: “Der Man wird Vater und Mutter verlassen nach der biblischenVorschrift, und seinem Weibe nachgehen” (GW 8, p. 81) [A man shall leave his father and his motheraccording to the biblical command – and shall cleave unto his wife] (SE 11, p. 181). Obviously at thattime Freud wanted Martha to leave her family. But what about him? Could he not bear to leave hisown father and mother?

918 R. Steiner


meditations on the issue of love, including his different ways of looking atlove; indeed, in 1926, in answer to a questionnaire in a French periodical onthe essence of love beyond sexuality (Reik, 1942, p. 97), Freud claimed thathe did not know what to answer because he had “not yet found the courageto make a broad statement on the essence of love” and he thought “ourknowledge is not sufficient”. And yet, perhaps because he could not find adefinitive answer, Freud continued to ponder some specific problemsrelated to love until the end of his life, as I will try to show (Bergmann,1987; Steiner, 2001b).100

I have to assume that the reader is familiar with Freud’s views on love; itwould be impossible to discuss them in detail here because they coincidewith the changing of Freud’s clinical, theoretical and socio-cultural views ofpsychoanalysis as he understood it. In spite of the fundamental importanceof sexuality in Freud’s clinical and theoretical views, it was not the only fac-tor in his continually evolving meditations on the nature of love: the changeand evolution in his work was driven by all sorts of new evidence comingnot only from his own life, his wife, his children and his grandchildren, butalso from his patients, his relationships with colleagues and friends, the psy-choanalytic movement and the study of broader social phenomena, such asgroups, the changing of the political, cultural and social context in which hewas living and, finally, from the use of different cultural sources besides thepoets and writers of his and Martha’s youth. For example, in addition tothe hidden wisdoms of the myths of Oedipus, Narcissus, etc., or the workof Nietzsche, the following figures had profound influence on his thinking:Schopenhauer (1958[1858], pp. 332–566), Plato of the Symposium (1993[385–80 BC]). (See Bergman, 1987; Steiner, 2001b.)In attempting to deepen the search for a possible relationship between the

first volume of the Brautbriefe and the later vicissitudes of Freud as a psy-choanalyst, one could consider the letters in relation to Freud’s later recur-rent, complex, labyrinthine and at times contradictory attempts to studynarcissism and what he calls, “narcissistic love linked to ego libido” and“object love linked to object libido” (Zur Einf€uhrung des Narzismuß, 1914,GW 10, pp. 141–2, 153–70; SE 14, pp. 76, 87–102). Indeed, one might askhow much his own tyrannical wish to control Martha and what he wrote toher about the egoistic nature of love during the first months and years ofhis engagement played a part in what he wrote on narcissistic love in hisfamous essay of 1914 and even later on?At the same time, thinking about Freud’s enormous, immediate attach-

ment to Martha as soon he met her, his feeling of being totally lost without

100Bergmann (1987, pp. 156–80), in what can still be considered a pioneering book on love through thecenturies, focused on Freud and his successors as the last recipients of such a long tradition, and comesto the conclusion that one could find three different theories concerning love and its nature in Freud.Although I agree with him, he seems to have forgotten, or not clearly insisted upon, the importance ofsome statements by the late Freud on the way love expresses itself in old age (Steiner, 2001b). Had Iknown the Brautbriefe at that time, I could have shown some interesting similarities between what Freudlater wrote on the characteristics of mature love, and even love in old age, and what he wrote to Marthaon the vanishing and superficial importance of pure, external, physical beauty compared with what Mar-tha was stimulating in him because of her inner beauty, on which their love could grow and find a per-manent basis.



her, and how she began to represent the meaning of his life, and that with-out her he could not live, one could ask how much of that personal experi-ence might have been present and metabolized, more or less unconsciously,in those passages in which Freud describes the lover’s depletion of narcissis-tic love for himself when in love with his beloved (1914, GW 10, pp. 141,153–4; SE14, pp. 76, 88); these reflections incidentally seem to echo whatFreud had already observed in the Schreber case (1911, GW 8, SE 12),which I will comment on in a moment. It is also in these pages that Freudcomes to the famous conclusion that men love in a different way fromwomen – although the difference should not be considered as some sort ofgeneral rule or “regelmassig” (1914, GW 10, p. 154), which Strachey (in SE14, p. 88) translates as “universal”.101 (Also discussed in On the universaltendency to debasement in the sphere of love, SE 12).Remember the young Freud’s constant complaints that Martha could not

and did not love him as he did her and, as I have already stressed, his emo-tional but also sensual overvaluation of her in the few passages in which hementions her body in the Brautbriefe.102

I could continue in this sort of exercise because the paper On narcissism(Freud S, 1914, GW 10, pp. 160–5; SE 14, pp. 93–7) also contains thefamous passages on the ideal ego, the heir of one’s own infantile narcissisticperfection, which then becomes part of the adult individual and can bequite demanding. We saw how much Freud got fused, if not confused, withMartha, asking her to be what we might say with hindsight was also hisown ideal ego.I hope it is clear that what I have tried to point out concerning the possi-

ble links between the first volume of the Brautbriefe and the later vicissi-tudes of Freud as a psychoanalyst, and even of Martha as his lover andthen wife, implies the existence of their unconscious or less conscious per-sonal, internal phantasy life and its infantile roots. The Brautbriefe never-theless, to my mind, constitute a very important moment in time whenFreud’s and Martha’s infantile unconscious phantasies and early infantileproblems did find a sort of manifest conscious ‘adult’ way to express them-selves, which cannot be ignored.Yet it is at this point that we must also consider and respect the at times

enormous gap between the Freud of the Brautbriefe and his later work. Doyou remember the tremendous, almost obsessive importance that the twoattributed to kissing each other and the misery of the abstinent young

101I am referring here to the famous passage, “Die volle Objektliebe nach dem Ahnlenungstypus isteigentlich f€ur dem Mann charakteristich” in Zur Einf€uhrung des Narzißmus (Freud S, 1914, GW 10,p. 154) [Complete object love of the attachment type is, properly speaking, characteristic of the male](On narcissism, SE 11, p. 88).102All those possible hints and echoes could finally be compared with his famous phenomenology of nar-cissistic and altruistic love in the same 1914 paper On narcissism: “Man liebt (1) Nach dem narzisistchenTypus (a) was man selbst ist (sich selbst) (b) was man selbst war (c) was man selbst sein m€ochte (d) diePerson die ein teil des eigene Selbst war (2) Nach dem Anlehnungstypus: (a) die n€ahrende Frau (b) densch€utzenden Mann” (GW 10, p. 156). [A person may love (1) according to the narcissistic type (a) whathe himself (i.e., himself) is (b) what he himself was (c) what he himself would like to be (d) someonewho was once part of himself; (2) according to the anaclitic type (attachment type) (a) the woman whofeeds him (b) the man who protects him] (SE 14, p. 90).

920 R. Steiner


couple? They kissed each other passionately on the streets and in thesquares of Vienna, in the woods of Wandsbek, and in Freud’s little room atthe hospital … and even through their letters themselves, one is tempted tosay. One could argue that these letters acted as a substitute for this physicalexpression of love. Now, just think of what Freud wrote, 20 years or soafter these passionate but not entirely satisfactory exchanges.Although in 1882 he was a medical doctor in training, with a superb

career as a researcher and dissector of animal tissue already behind him, itwould have been to my mind extremely difficult to imagine at the time oftheir passionate embraces and Freud’s “st€urmliche” [passionate] kisses withMartha that he would go on to write such an, albeit involuntary, de-roman-ticized parody of the kiss in his anatomical, clinical, ‘objectively’ accuratedescription of the act of kissing. Freud even hints at the fact that if pursuedtoo exclusively the kiss could be considered a form of perversion if it doesnot lead to the sexual act that it should prepare for (Freud S, 1905, ThreeEssays on Sexuality, SE 7, pp. 147–8; ‘Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexual Theo-rie’, GW 5, pp. 48–9). It is difficult to imagine Freud explaining all this toMartha!103

What I have in mind is the paragraph in his 1905 work I have just men-tioned, (‘Deviations in respect of the sexual aim’, SE 7, p. 149; ‘Abweichungin Bezug auf das Sexualziel’, 1905, GW 5, pp. 48–9). I do not think it is anexaggeration to claim that here again echoes of his own autobiographicalexperience and frustration must have played their part in what he observesabout the kiss, its importance in preparing for the sexual act and the highsexual esteem in which it is held among many nations (including the mostcivilized ones) [“bei vielen V€olkern (die h€ochsts zivilisierten darunter)”]. Butthe link that can perhaps be discerned between the Freud and even theMartha of the Brautbriefe and what Freud says in his 1905 paper is para-doxical: indeed this time there is a profound gap between the Freud of theBrautbriefe and Freud the scientist.And what about Freud’s cutting, anatomical reminder, expressed in a lan-

guage that deliberately follows that of his scientific sources – the doctorsand sexologists of the time – that as far as the kiss is concerned, in spite ofall this high sexual esteem, one should remember that the parts of the bodyinvolved, namely the lips “…are not part of the sexual apparatus, but con-stitute the entrance to the digestive tract” [“…nicht dem Geschelechstapparatangeh€oren, sondern den Eingang zum Verdauungskanal bilden”] (Freud S,1905, SE 7, p. 150, my italics; 1905, GW 5, p. 49, my italics). That is ofcourse the case even when Freud stresses that kissing is normal – if it is nottoo exclusively protracted. So where did all Freud’s ‘st€urmliche’ [passionate]intensity end up (remember Martha’s ‘heiligen Lippen’ [sacred lips])? In theentrance to the digestive tract!

103I wonder nevertheless whether one can totally exclude the possibility that Freud, in one way oranother, had in mind the excessive frustrated kissing with Martha when, a few years later in his 1914essay On Narcissism (GW 10, p. 167; SE 14, p. 100), he wrote that the state of being in love “hat dieKraft Verdr€angungen aufzuheben und Perversionen wieder herzustellen” [has the power to removerepressions and reinstate perversions].



Consider this other example, which again bears witness to the gapbetween Freud and even Martha of the Brautbriefe, and Freud as husband,father and psychoanalyst with Martha as his wife. Whatever contradictionsone can find in Freud’s psychoanalytic views concerning primary and sec-ondary narcissism in trying to describe the earliest stages of the psychologi-cal life of the baby, think of what he stated about adult love in 1905 inThree Essays on Sexuality [Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualit€at]: “There arethus good reasons why a child sucking at his mother’s breast has becomethe prototype of every relation of love. The finding of an object is in fact arefinding of it” (SE 7, p. 22); “Nicht ohne guten grund ist das Saugen desKindes an der Brust der Mutter vorbildlich f€ur jede Liebesbeziehung gewor-den. Die Objekfindung ist eigentlich eine Wiederfindung” (GW 5, p. 123).Freud was stressing here the fundamental importance of the mother and alsoof the parental couple in all this. It is very difficult to imagine that he couldbe aware of what he stated as a psychoanalyst, during those first months ofhis engagement with Martha and even later on. Incidentally, both had towait quite a long time to find or re-find that original happiness of the babyat the breast. Although, even in their case, it was a relative happiness…One could therefore say that it is Freud as a later psychoanalyst who, with

hindsight or ‘nachtr€aglich’ [by deferred action], could have helped his youn-ger self to really make better sense of the multifaceted and at times contra-dictory love experiences with Martha in those first months of theirengagement and even later on. Indeed, one could ask what sort of infantileexperience Freud was looking for and reliving, or even refinding, althoughwith great frustrations and difficulties, in his passionate love for Martha andin Martha’s love for him? And what about Martha herself? Was Martha areal or phantasized mother? Was Freud for Martha a real or phantasizedfather and maybe also a mother? And what about the importance of theirinfantile phantasies of their own families? Perhaps some of Freud’s follow-ers, such as Melanie Klein, and others too, could help answer those ques-tions. But one would then end up analysing Freud and Martha using Freudand his followers – a legitimate goal, but not one that I am aiming at here.There is one last theme, nevertheless, to which I would like to draw the

reader’s attention, bearing in mind all that I have said about the need toavoid considering the Brautbriefe as just some sort of mechanical anticipa-tion of Freud’s psychoanalysis, or as a sort of film negative which is justwaiting to be developed. I hope that what I am going to briefly point out inending this paper could persuade even the most sceptical reader of theBrautbriefe that the letters do not represent simply the ‘archaeological pastof psychoanalysis’, and that they do not belong only to the world of yester-day or to the world of many years before yesterday, to paraphrase the titleof Die Welt von Gestern by Stefan Zweig (1943) (see also Magris, 1964;Hobsbawm, 2013).It is true: the past in those letters is, at times, so to speak, so past that

we can only be tenderly touched in comparing it with our present. Justthink of one of Martha’s letters to Freud, in which she wrote of her loveand her longing for him. Martha states that if she had been wealthy shewould have taken “den Luftballon (my italic)” [the hot-air balloon] – a very

922 R. Steiner


expensive and exclusive form of transport, but faster than most others inthose days – to Vienna from Wandsbek (26 August 1882; Fichtner et al.,2011, p. 327). But it would be too easy to just ironically compare that ‘Luft-ballon’ with a private helicopter or private jet of today; to paraphrase thewords of the great British historian E. P. Thompson (1963), we must rescuethe past from the enormous condescension of the present.For, in that albeit phantasized and so dated ‘Luftballon’, Martha and by

extension even Freud carried something which is not only irreversibly pastand dated, it is, as I will briefly try to show, part of a universal experience inspace and time; at the very least it belongs to what the great French historianBraudel called ‘la longue dur�ee’ [the enduring or long-lasting]104 – in thiscase, of feelings and emotions through time and space and different cultures.Of course this something also belongs to Martha’s and Freud’s specific, his-torical, socio-cultural and autobiographical experience … of being in love.Notwithstanding what I have recalled as the inevitable gap between

Freud and Martha as lovers and what followed later on, and what Irecalled from Freud’s work of 1905 concerning the infantile roots of everyadult experience of love, which were of course not envisaged or consciouslyexperienced at the time of Freud’s and Martha’s engagement, the Braut-briefe as such are an extremely interesting and important reference pointeven as far as Freud’s psychoanalytic attempt to study the specific conditionof falling and being in love is concerned. This is one of the themes he con-stantly came back to until the end of his life.In my view, Freud’s psychoanalytic description of that particular experi-

ence cannot be ignored and is still a binding point to start from, even today,whatever Freud’s followers inside psychoanalysis or those inspired by hiswork or working independently outside psychoanalysis have studied, argued,elaborated or critically objected to. I have already referred to some scholarsbut to mention just a few others (if this list were to be exhaustive it wouldbe enormous) see: Freud A (1937, pp. 73–4), Barthes (1977), Baumann(2003), Green (2000, pp. 41–72), Green and Kohon (2005), Kernberg (1985),Klein M (1946, particularly pp. 8–15; 1955, particularly pp. 144–5; 1957, pp.176–88),105 Kohut (1980, pp. 476–85), (Kristeva 2000), Lacan (1966, 1998),Passerini (1999), Passerini et al. (2010), Bettetini (2012, pp. 35–97).106

Let us, for instance, consider the so-called Schreber case (1911), as I sug-gested a few paragraphs above. When dealing with Schreber (Psycho-ana-lytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia. Dementia

104Steiner, 1994.105I am thinking in particular of Klein’s observations on the love for the mother’s breast, which is notonly the nourishing breast but also a very complex, emotional, loving experience. Much of what I amgoing to say on Freud’s views could of course be re-interpreted using Klein’s (1946) paper on projectiveidentification, which contains similar descriptions to those of Freud as far as the loss of the self intoanother object is concerned, and On Identification (Klein, 1955) in which she clearly re-reads Freud’sviews on the idealization of the loved object etc, using her views on projective identification (pp. 144–5).But Klein also stressed the notion of altruistic surrender in A. Freud’s (1937) work The Ego and theMechanisms of Defence.106Of course I cannot deal here with what has been written on love by the writers, poets and musicians,or painted by painters or sculpted by sculptors, of the 20th century. And that is without mentioning thephilosophers!



paranoides [Freud S, SE 12, pp. 68–9]; ‘Psychoanalytische Bemerkungen€uber eine Autobiographishisch Beschriebene. Dementia Paranoides’ [1911,GW 8, p. 307]), Freud managed to compare and contrast Schreber’s delu-sion of the end of the world with the climax of the ecstasy of love, in whichit is not the ego and its extreme pathological narcissistic needs, but the sin-gle love object that absorbs all the libidinal cathexes directed upon theexternal world. And, a few pages earlier, Freud contrasts Schreber’s megalo-mania with the state of an individual whose megalomania is never “so vehe-mently suppressed” (GW 8, p. 302) [“so intensiv unterdr€uckt”] (SE 12,p. 65) than when he is in the grip of “an… overpowering love” [“eine …m€achtigergreifende Verliebtheit”]. To support his views, Freud quotes a pas-sage from the Ghazals – love poems by one of the greatest Oriental poets ofall time, namely the Persian mediaeval poet Muhammad ibn Muhammad107

(Schimmel, 1982, 1992a; Harmless, 2008):

For when the flames of love arise,Then self, the gloomy tyrant, dies.

(SE 7, p. 65)

Denn wo die Lieb’erwacht. StirbtDas Ich, der finstere Despot.

(GW 8, p. 302)

Just remember this quote and now let us go a little further. In the 1914paper On Narcissism, describing the state of the impoverishment of the egowhen in love due to the overvaluation of the object, Freud recalls again thephantasy of the ‘end of the world’ of the paranoid President Schreber (GW10, p. 141; SE 14, pp. 74–6). And just a few years later, in Introductory Lec-tures on Psycho-Analysis (SE 16, lecture no. 26; ‘Vorlesungen zur Einf€uh-rung in die Psychoanalyse’, 1917, GW 11, vorl. n. 26), Freud comes back tothe same issues once more adding something new. It is impossible to go intoall the details here of lecture 26, and compare it with what Freud hadalready said in his 1914 paper On narcissism. But in describing the conditionof being in love he contrasts it again with narcissism, while stressing thatwhen there is an altruistic transposition of egoism onto the sexual over-valued object, the object becomes “supremely powerful” [“€uberm€achtig”]and “the object has as it were absorbed the ego” [“es hat das Ich gleichsamaufgesogen”] (GW 11, p. 433; SE 16, p. 418).Let us try to follow Freud even further… What about what we can read

in the famous Chapter 8, entitled Being in love and hypnosis [‘Verliebtheitund hypnose’], in Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921, GW 13,pp. 122–8; SE 18, pp. 111–16)? The chapter is extremely condensed andmade more complicated and interesting by all that Freud had further elabo-rated in those fundamental years between 1914 and 1921 concerning hisclinical and theoretical views on psychoanalysis.108 Consider, for example,

107This is the name which appears in SE 12, p. 65.108See, for example, ‘Trauer und Melancholie’ (Mourning and melancholia, 1917) and ‘Jenseits des Lust-prinzip’ (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920).

924 R. Steiner


the role played by identifications and introjections in Freud’s descriptionnow, of the various ways that one can identify with the love object viaintrojection; the way the love object can take the place of the ego or of theideal ego, and the relationship, nota bene, between being in love and hypno-sis (which would deserve greater attention), and between sensual and subli-mated non-sensual love and affection.Here again, together with old themes already touched on in his 1914

paper On Narcissism, which he revisits and expands, what is so striking ishis coming back to comment on the state of being in love (one has to saynevertheless mainly as far as the man is concerned) … focusing particularlyon the young man’s sentimental passion, the loss of power and distortion ofjudgement of the lover when in the grip of the overvaluation and “Idealisi-rung” [idealization] (GW 13, p. 124; SE 18, p. 112), as Freud now calls it,of the beloved object. The beloved object, which can become a part of one’sown ideal ego109 can in certain cases make the ego feel more and moremodest and unassuming,110 until finally the loved object “gets possession ofthe entire self-love of the ego of the lover” [“es gelangt schließlich in denBesitz der gesamten Selbstliebe des Ichs”] (GW 13, p. 124; SE 18, p. 113) …“The object has so to speak consumed the ego” [“Das Objekt hat sozusagendas Ich ausgezehrt”] (ibid.).Curiously enough, Freud also comes back even to that form of love that

cannot be physically satisfied – unhappy love111 – and that can lead to anextreme overvaluation of the object, which can put into question any criticalfunction of what he still calls here the ideal ego. He now calls this extremeovervaluation “devotion of the ego to the love object” [“Hingabe des Ichsan das Objekt”] (GW 13, p. 125; SE 18, p. 113). Of course, here we can seeFreud in full theoretical flow, revisiting and re-examining old views,expanding on them, correcting them and hinting at new developments. Butif one just considers the recurrent theme of the depletion, at times even thenear disappearance, of what he calls the ego of the lover, is it a matter ofpure speculation and projection by the interpreter of those texts to stressthat perhaps the shadows of his own autobiographical experiences were stilllingering around in these sophisticated new formulations?But now look at this: the presence of Freud’s earlier experiences can even

be felt in the short, apparently minor paper of Humour (SE 21, pp. 164–5;1927, GW 14, p. 387), which has behind it the new theoretical frameworkof Beyond the Pleasure Principle and, above all, of the 1921 work The Egoand the Id, a framework which is quite different from the one we found inthe papers On narcissism and so on that I have just quoted. In Humour, toexplain dynamically the interaction between the ego and what he now callsthe superego, Freud comes back as a useful example to the situation of

109Remember what Freud had already observed in his papers on Schreber (1911) and narcissism (1914)concerning the depletion of the ego of the lover and the phantasy of the end of the world when in love.110.. echoing again what Freud had already observed, quoting the famous mediaeval Persian poet in theSchreber case concerning the nearly total repression of the megalomania of the lover and contrasting itwith Schreber’s flourishing megalomania.111He refers here quite clearly again, as in his old papers, to unconsummated sensual love because sexualsatisfaction ‘always involves a reduction in sexual overvaluation’.



being in love, which he differentiates from “ordinary erotic love cathexis”because in the state of being in love the object one loves is much more cath-ected and “the ego empties itself, as it were, in favour of the object” [“dasIch gleichsam nach dem Objekt entleert”] (GW 14, p. 387; SE 21, p. 165).Incidentally, one could add, what a beautiful anticipation of certain aspectsof projective identification!Now consider what Freud claims later in Civilization and its Discontents

[Das Unbehagen in der Kultur] (1930, GW 14, p. 423; SE 21, p. 66), in whichhe reiterates, according to Strachey, what he had already suggested in theSchreber case (1911, GW 8, p. 307; SE 12, p. 69): Freud gives us anothermore articulated version of the phantasy and feelings of the end of theworld and to the ecstasy of love: “At the height of being in love, the bound-ary between an ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evi-dence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that ‘I’ and ‘you’ are one,and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact” [“Auf der H€ohe der Verliebt-heit droht die Grenze zwischen Ich und Objekt zu verschwimmen. Allen Zu-egnissen der Sinne entgegen behauptet der Verliebte, daß Ich und Du Einessein und ist bereit sich also es so w€are, zu benehmen”].112

Although in a rather condensed form, Freud finally returns in An Outlineof Psychoanalysis (SE 23, p. 151) [‘Abriss der Psychoanalyse’ (1940, GW 17,p. 73)] to what seems to be an issue he had to constantly readdress in oneway or another when he discusses the vicissitudes of the libido: “It is onlywhen a person is completely in love that the main quota of libido is trans-ferred onto the object and the object to some extent takes the place of theego” [“Nur in im Zustand einer vollen Verliebtheit wird der Hauptbetragder Libido auf das Objekt €ubertragen, setz sich das Objekt gewissermassenund die Stelle des Ich”].But Freud’s interesting and, to my mind, even moving need to return to

the same issues does not have only a possible link to the content of thoseautobiographical experiences and emotions; one could perhaps even arguethat he was also gradually trying to make sense of so many aspects of hislove for Martha through his late discoveries.The fact is that when he really tried to start making sense, psychoanalyti-

cally speaking, of some aspects of what he called ‘being in love’, at times hemade use – whether or not he realized it – of the same literary sources thatMartha and he were using at the time that they fell in love and were at the‘height of being in love’. Those literary sources enabled them at that time,as we have seen, to better understand what they felt for each other. I havealready mentioned the passage from the Bible that Freud quoted in his1912 paper (p. 75), but bear in mind too Goethe’s East–Western Diwan,which was quite well known to Martha and Freud.113

112But remember what Martha, and not only Freud, felt during those first months of engagement whenshe more than once quoted a poem by E. Auerbach in which the lovers are described as being as one(see p. 910).113Goethe’s East–Western Diwan is quoted by Martha to Freud in a letter dated 26 October 1882 (Ficht-ner et al., 2011, pp. 387–8). She quotes another passage used as an epigraph in her sister Minna’s letterto her, but it is quite obvious that both she and Freud knew Goethe’s work. Indeed, she says that thatpassage was very much loved by both of them.

926 R. Steiner


When, in Lecture 26 of the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis(1917) that I mentioned earlier, Freud wanted to find an illustrious supportto underpin his views on the condition of being in love, which is so differentfrom narcissism and in which the lover becomes so dependent on thebeloved that he feels lost and empty without her,114 he refers to a passagein Goethe’s work East–Western Diwan that describes how the lover feelslost if his lover abandons him. Interestingly, Goethe, quoted by Freud,claims that the lover “verk€orpere” [incorporates himself] in the lover whomshe might choose instead of him (S. Freud, GW 11, p. 434; SE 16). Justthink of the early months of Freud’s love for Martha … of Fritz, of Max,etc., and of his absolute need to claim her all for himself, to the point thathe wrote to her that he had chained himself to her (see p.89). Incidentally,again, what fascinating anticipations of some aspects of projective identifi-cation.Think also of these two other details. In first mentioning, in the Schreber

case (1911), the end-of-the-world phantasy typical of people in love – not tobe confused with that of paranoiacs – where the love object seems to absorball “the cathexes directed to the external world, depleting the ego of thelover”, Freud quotes Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde (1911, GW 7,p. 307; SE 12, p. 69); in the Brautbriefe, Martha refers directly to the liter-ary work, which was, as I tried to show, familiar to the young Freud evenbefore he met Martha.115

But probably, at least for me, the most interesting detail that again illus-trates the fundamental role played by Martha and her ‘Luftballon’ of poets,imagination and love feelings, and of the Brautbriefe in general, in what fol-lowed even decades after, is the passage that Freud quoted – not so muchto embellish his text as to demonstrate once more the validity of his views –from that famous Persian poet and author of some of the most inspiring,mystical and erotic poems of world literature, whom I have already men-tioned, namely Muhammad ibn Muhammad (see Schimmel, 1982, 1992a,1992b; Harmless, 2008, pp. 3–36; F. Lewis, foreword, in Rumi, 2009). Thiscontravenes those attempts at finding testable evidence, empirically mea-sured, even of the state of being in love, and its feelings, by certain repre-sentatives of contemporary psychoanalysis! After all, Freud was persuadedthat poets had a better understanding of these matters than psychoanalysis.These verses must have had a rather ambiguous resonance in Freud,

thinking of the contradictory vicissitudes of his ego and his self-esteem

114Goethe’s work is deeply influenced by Oriental poetry and thinking. The passage quoted by Freudimagines Hatem, a lover, speaking about his beloved Zuleika: Does she expend her being on me, myselfgrows to myself of cost Turne she away, then instantly I to my very self am lost. (SE 16, p. 418)Wie siesich an mich verschwendet Bin ich mir ein wertes Ich; H€atte sie sich weggewendet, Augenblicks verl€orich mich. (GW 11, p. 435)115These references to Tristan and Isolde would have greatly interested de Rougemont (1972[1939]),whose fascinating and very important work on love in Western civilization I mentioned earlier in thispaper (p. 892) and who made of Tristan and Isolde the archetype of the notion of love which, in hisview, influenced modern and contemporary Western culture. De Rougemont did not mention or com-ment on Freud’s and Martha’s quotation of, and interest in, Tristan and Isolde – the letters to Silbersteinand the correspondence with Martha were unpublished at that time, although the Schreber case hadbeen published long since!



when he fell in love with Martha. Bear in mind his early confessions ofbeing a tyrant or despot. It is the same word used by the Persian poet todefine the ego!116 I have no doubt that all this could be traced back toFreud’s own autobiographical infantile vicissitudes, for he had been thefavourite and despotic child of a despotic mother. But what matters here isthe subtle cultural network of old literary sources.I deliberately left out the fact that in quoting those verses Freud used a

translation made by R€uckert, the great German Orientalist poet and scholarof the 19th century (see the still fundamental essay by Schimmel, 1966).R€uckert’s own poems were often translations of ancient mediaeval Persian-Indian poems.It was therefore ‘mein geliebtest R€uckert’ – to use the words of Martha,

who even tried to imitate R€uckert in her own poems – who, through histranslations of Muhammad Ibn Muhammad, again helped Freud todescribe the theme that, as we have seen, became a sort of leitmotif inFreud’s meditation on the state of being in love and the loss of what hecalled the ego of the lover into the other, or the feeling of being emptiedout by the other. Martha often used R€uckert’s poetry to express more elo-quently her feelings of love during the first years of her engagement withFreud. Freud’s feelings were at the same time being enriched by his ownreflections on R€uckert’s poetry, which he undoubtedly would not have readso much of, and recalled so much of, had it not been for Martha. AndR€uckert (not only his name and what it evoked, but also certain relatedmemories and experiences) would be recalled when Freud felt it was neces-sary. Even in later years, Freud attributed significance to R€uckert. Forexample, in the final lines of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920, SE 18,p. 64), he writes, quoting Ruckert: “What we cannot reach flying we mustreach limping/ The Book tell us it is no sin to limp” [“Was man nicht erflie-gen kann,muss man erhinken/Die Schrift sagt, es ist keine Suende zu hin-ken”].Perhaps one of the most fascinating and interesting conclusions, without

of course exaggerating its importance, is that through their more or lessdirect or indirect links with Oriental poetry of all ages, and through theirimportant role in German Orientalism of the 19th century (Gutjahr, 2000;Said, 2003[1978], pp. 167–8),117 R€uckert and Goethe helped Freud the psy-choanalyst – who cannot be conceived of without Freud and Martha thelovers – if not universalize then certainly make less Eurocentric and dated,in cultural terms, what he meant by the experience of being in love. Mutatismutandis, on a larger and more significant scale it had already happenedwith Freud’s use of the myth and legend of Oedipus in all its historical andgeographical ramifications to support its universal meaning for psychoanal-ysis (Steiner, 1994).Incidentally, the great British anthropologist J. Goody (1998, pp. 96–123;

2010, pp. 21–32) has recently, in a series of fascinating papers, again drawn

116See the quotation from the Persian poet Muhammad ibn Muhammad a few paragraphs previously, inwhich he also mentions the ego as a despot!!117Said ignores R€uckert, but he was much more influential and important as an Orientalist than Goethe.

928 R. Steiner


our attention to the well-known influence of Arab poetry on the mediaevalProvenc�al school of love poetry, which in turn influenced directly or indi-rectly so many of the German and non-German Romantic poets who wereread, loved and quoted by Martha and Freud; but Goody also points to theimportance through the centuries of non-European, Oriental and even Afri-can influxes or analogies on our Western cultural – at least written – experi-ence and notions of love and of being in love. Both Freud and Martha, intheir love as we read it in the Brautbriefe and then later on, could be saidto confirm Goody’s views.118

That is what makes this first volume of the Brautbriefe so unique andessential for psychoanalysis, and I am sure that this will be the case for allthe other volumes too. The work of the Editors is an act of love for psycho-analysis and makes one fall in love with the love story which lies at the rootof psychoanalysis itself, in spite of – and I would say also because of – theenormous difficulties that the editing of a work like this implies.Indeed, thinking too of some of the personal vicissitudes of some of the

Editors, I wonder if it would not be appropriate to refer to what WalterBenjamin rightly called the ‘acedia’ of the historian; the acedia that mediae-val theologians thought to be the root cause of sadness, of which Flaubertwrote: “Few will be able to guess how sad one had to be in order to resusci-tate Carthage” [“Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu etre triste pourressusciter Carthage”] (1970[1940], p. 258).The Editors’ work is an act of love that becomes particularly meaningful

given that the psychoanalytic world of today seems too often to be remotefrom, and unwilling to understand, its own past and the – emotionallyspeaking – vital importance of its origins, its richness and its complexity,because it is focused only on its present, which is all too often supercilious,technology-driven and ‘liquid’.It is difficult to imagine today a young psychoanalyst giving pride of

place in their living room to a statue of Lessing and to copies of his books.It is difficult to even imagine a bust of Freud in that living room! Better aplasma television, obviously.The Brautbriefe, in whatever form (I would accept them even in Kindle

form if they could find a publisher willing to translate them comparable tothe generous Fischer Verlag of Frankfurt), should be a required presence inthe library, in the living room or in the consulting room, and be requiredreading for the young generations of psychoanalysts of today and of thefuture. After all, to quote again an ageless passage from a letter in the firstvolume of the Brautbriefe (Freud to Martha, 8 July 1882, Fichtner et al.,2011, p. 170) in which Freud comments on “die Vergangenheit” [the past]and “die Gegenwart” [the present], as if he were already a psychoanalyst:

118All this can help us to further understand the links between psychoanalysis and Oriental forms ofthinking, which is a fascinating issue in need of further exploration and understanding. Just think of B.Low’s concept, the Nirvana principle, taken from Schopenhauer’s Buddhist readings, and its role inFreud’s Jenseits des Lustprinzips [Beyond the Pleasure Principle] (1920, GW 13, p. 60; SE 18, pp. 55–6),not to mention Plato’s Symposium, which raises the problems of its Oriental sources too (Steiner, 2001).But remember too later on E. Fromm, or, in the UK, M. Milner and W. Bion, and their interest inOriental thinking, to mention just a few names.



“One has to consider the past, since without understanding it one cannotenjoy the present; nor can one understand the present without knowing thepast” [“Die Gegenwart kann man nicht genießen, ohne die zu verstehen,und nicht verstehen, ohne die Vergangenheit zu kennen”] (Freud E et al.,1976, p. 92). In this case, I would also add, and without enjoying and lovingthe past too, as those love letters allow, I hope, many of us to do.

AcknowledgementsI would like to thank for their help Professor J Goody (Cambridge), I. Gru-brich Simitis (K€onigsberg) Professor A Hirschm€uller (T€ubingen), M. Molnar(London) Professor J. Mitchell (Cambridge). D. Scott (London) has been ofinvaluable help too. Without the patient and creative editing of Tim Long(Perth) I would not have been able to submit this paper for publication.

ReferencesAlbisetti JG (1996b). Schooling German girls and women: Secondary and higher education in thenineteenth century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP.

Albisetti JG (1996a). Female education in German–speaking Austria, Germany and Switzerland. In:Crandeur M, Maynes MJ, editors. Austrian women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Cross–disciplinary perspectives, 39–55. Providence, RI: Berghahn Books.

Antonelli G (2003). Tipologia linguistica del genre epistolare nel primo Ottocento. Roma: Edizionedell’Ateneo.

Arendt H, editor (1970). In: Benjamin W, Illuminations. London: Fontana–Collins.Arendt H (1991). Foreword. In: Lessing GE, Demetz P, editors. Nathan the wise. Minna von Barnhelmand other plays and writings. New York, NY: Continuum.

Ariosto L (1976, 1532). Orlando Furioso. In: Segre C, editor, Milano: Mondadori, 13.Aron W (1956). Notes on Sigmund Freud’s ancestry and Jewish contacts. YIVO Annual of JewishSocial Sciences 9:286–95.

Auerbach B (1895, 1896). Auf der Ho’ he. Roman in 8 B€uchern. In: Berthold Auerbach: Schriften Bd.,Stuttgart: Cotta, 1–4.

Auerbach E (2003[1946]). Mimesis: The representation of reality in western literature. Princeton, NJ:Princeton UP.

Backscheider P (2001). Reflections on biography. Oxford: Oxford UP.Badou G (2006). Madame Freud. Paris: Payot.Bartal I (2005). The Jews of eastern Europe (1777–1881). Philadelphia, PA: U Pennsylvania Press.Barthes R (1977). Fragments d’un discours amoureux. Paris: Seuil.Batchelor J, editor (1995). The art of literary biography. Oxford: Clarendon.Bauman Z (2003). Liquid love. Cambridge: Polity.Behling K (2005). Martha Freud: A biography. Cambridge: Polity.Beller S (1989). Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A cultural history. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.Benjamin W (1970[1940]). Theses on the philosophy of history. In: Arendt H, editor. Illuminations,257–8. London: Fontana–Collins.

Berger H (2003). Social structure of the Jewish quarter in Vienna during the liberal era (1850–1900).The History of the Family 8:531–44.

Bergmann M (1987). The anatomy of loving. New York, NY: Ballantine.Berkley G (1988). Vienna and its Jews: The tragedy of success, 1880–1980s. Toronto: Madison.Bernfeld S to Jones E. All the letters quoted are in the archive of Jones’s papers at the Institute ofPsychoanalysis, London.

Bernfeld S, Cassirer Bernfeld S (1944). Freud’s early childhood. Bull Menninger Clin 8:107–1.Bernfeld S, Cassirer Bernfeld S (1949). S. Freud’s scientific beginnings. Am Imago 6:163–96.Bernfeld S, Cassirer Bernfeld S (1981). Introduction: Bausteine der Freud–Biographik. In: Grubrich–Simitis I, editor. Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp.

Bernfeld S, Cassirer Bernfeld S (1981[1944]). Freuds fr€uhe Kindheit. In: Grubrich–Simitis I, editor.Bausteine der Freud–Biographik, 15–18. Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp.

Bettelheim B (1983). Freud and man’s soul. London: Chatto & Windus.Bettetini M (2012). Quattro modi dell’amore. Bari: Laterza.

930 R. Steiner


Blumenthal R (2006). Hotel log hints at illicit desire that Dr Freud did not repress. The New YorkTimes, 26 December.

Boehlich W, editor (1990). The letters of Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein 1871–1881, PomeransAJ, translator. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

Bollack J (1998). Jacob Bernays: un homme entre deux mondes. Paris: PU Septentrion.Bossis M, Porter CA, editors (1990). L’�epistolarit�e �a travers les si�ecles: geste de communication et/oud’�ecriture. Stuttgart: Steiner.

Boswell J, Hibbert C, editors (1986[1791]). The life of Samuel Johnson. New York, NY: PenguinClassics.

Boyer WJ (1981). Political radicalism in late imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian popularmovement 1848–1897. Chicago, IL: U Chicago Press.

Breger L (2000). Freud: Darkness in the midst of vision. New York, NY: Wiley.Catullus (1955[c.61–54BC]). Carmina. Milano: Mondadori.Crews FC (2011). Physician, heal thyself. The New York Review of Books, 29 September–13October: 92–9; 87– 91.

Cuddihy J (1974). The ordeal of civility: Freud, Marx, L�evi-Strauss and the Jewish struggle withmodernity. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Dante A (1985[1307–12]). La divina commedia. Canto V: L’inferno, Villaroel G, editor. Milan:Mondadori.

de Mijolla A, editor (2005). Dictionnaire international de la psychanalyse, vols. 1–2. Paris: Hachette.de Rougemont D (1972[1939]). L’amour et l’occident. Paris: Plon.Derrida J (1980). La carte postale: De Socrate �a Freud et au–del�a. Paris: Flammarion.Derrida J (1995). Mal d’archive. Une impression Freudienne. Paris: Galil�ee.Diller JV (1991). Freud’s Jewish identity: A case study of the impact of ethnicity. London: Associated UP.Drabek A, H€ausler W, Schubert K, Stuhlpfarrer K, Vielmetti N (1988). Das €osterreichische Judentum:Voraussetzungen und Geschichte. Vienna: Jugend und Volk.

Eissler KR (1971). Talent and genius. New York, NY: Grove Press.Eliot P to Jones E, letter dated 23 October 1953 in the collection of Jones’s papers in the Archives ofthe Institute of Psychoanalysis, London.

Feiner S (2002). Haskalah and history. The emergence of a modern Jewish historical consciousness.Oxford: The Litmann Library of Jewish Civilization.

Feiner S (2004). The Jewish enlightenment. Philadelphia, PA: U Pennsylvania Press.Feuerstein M, Milchram G (2007). J€udisches Wien. Vienna: Mandelbaum.Fichtner G, Grubrich–Simitis I, Hirschm€uller A, editors (2011). Sigmund Freud, Martha Bernays. DieBrautbriefe. Band 1. Sei mein, wie Ich mir’s denke. Juni 1882 – Juli 1883. Frankfurt a/M: Fischer.

Fraenkel J, editor (1967). The Jews of Austria: Essays on their life, history and destruction. London:Valentine Mitchell.

Freud A to Jones E to Jones E. All the letters quoted in the paper are in the collection of Jones’spapers in the Archives of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London.

Freud A (1937). The ego and the mechanisms of defence. London: Hogarth.Freud E, editor (1968). Brautbriefe. Briefe an Martha Bernays aus den Jahren 1882–89. Frankfurt amMain: Fischer Verlag.

Freud A (1979). Personal memories of Ernest Jones. Int J Psychoanal 60:285–7.Freud E, editor (1960). Sigmund Freud: Briefe 1873–1939. Frankfurt a/M: Fischer.Freud E, editor (1961). The letters of Sigmund Freud 1873–1939, Stern J, Stern T, translators.London: Hogarth.

Freud E, Freud L, Grubrich–Simitis I, editors (1976). Sigmund Freud: His life in pictures and words.New York; NY: Norton.

Freud M (1957). Glory reflected. London: Angus & Robertson.Freud S (1895). €Uber die Berechtigung von der Neurasthenie einen bestimmten Symptomenkomplexals ‘Angst–neurose’ abzutrennen. GW 1, 315. [On the grounds for detaching a particular syndromefrom neurasthenia under the description ‘anxiety neurosis’. SE 3, 85.]

Freud S (1898). Die Sexualit€at in der €Atiologie der Neurosen. GW 1, 491. [Sexuality in the aetiology ofthe neuroses. SE 3, 261.]

Freud S (1900). Die Traumdeutung. GW 2–3. [The interpretation of dreams. SE 4–5.]Freud S (1901). On Dreams. SE, 638–49.Freud S (1905). Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie. GW 5, 29. [Three essays on the theory ofsexuality. SE 7, 125.]

Freud S (1908). Die ‘kulturelle’ Sexualmoral und die moderne Nervosit€at. GW 7, 143. [Civilized sexualmorality and modern nervous illness. SE 9, 179.]

Freud S (1911). Psychoanalytische Bemerkungen €uber einen autobiographisch beschriebenen Fallvon Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides). GW 8, 240. [Psycho–analytic notes on an autobiographicalaccount of a case of paranoia (Dementia Paranoides). SE 12, 1.]



Freud S (1912). €Uber die allgemeinste Erniedrigung des Liebeslebens. GW 8, 78. [On the universaltendency to debasement in the sphere of love. SE 11, 179.]

Freud S (1914). Zur Einf€uhrung des Narzißmus. GW 10, 137. [On narcissism: An introduction. SE 14,69.]

Freud S (1915). Zeitgem€aßes €uber Krieg und Tod. GW 10, 324. [Thoughts for the times on war anddeath. SE 14, 275.]

Freud S (1917a). Trauer und Melancholie. GW 10, 428. [Mourning and melancholia. SE 14, 237.]Freud S (1917b). Vorlesungen zur Einf€uhrung in die Psychoanalyse. GW 11, 1–482. [Introductorylectures on psycho–analysis. SE 15–16.]

Freud S (1918). The taboo of virginity. SE 11, 193–208.Freud S (1920). Jenseits des Lustprinzips. GW 13, 3. [Beyond the pleasure principle. SE 18, 7.]Freud S (1921). Massenpsychologie und Ich–Analyse. GW 13, 73. [Group psychology and theanalysis of the ego. SE 18, 69.]

Freud S (1925). An autobiographical study. SE 20, 8–9.Freud S (1926). Hemmung, Symptom und Angst. GW 14, 113 [Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety. SE20, 77.]

Freud S (1927). Der Humor. GW 14, 383. [Humour. SE 21, 159.]Freud S (1930). Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. GW 14, 421 [Civilization and its discontents. SE 21,59.]

Freud S (1940). Abriss der Psychoanalyse. GW 17, 67. [An outline of psychoanalysis. SE 23, 281.]Freud-Bernays A (1973[1940]). My brother Sigmund Freud. In: Ruitenbeek H, editor. Freud as weknew him, 140–5. Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP.

Gay P (1978). Freud, Jews and other Germans: Masters and victims in modernist culture. New York,NY: Oxford UP.

Gay P (1984). The bourgeois experience: Victoria to Freud, vol.1. Education of the senses. Oxford:Oxford UP.

Gay P (1987). A godless Jew? Freud, atheism and the making of psychoanalysis. New Haven, CT:Yale UP.

Gay P (1989a). Freud: A life for our time. London: PaperMac.Gay P (1989b). The biographer as a voyeur: Sigmund and Minna. The New York Times, 29 January.Gay P (2006). Interview. In: Blumenthal R. Hotel log hints at illicit desire that Dr Freud did not repress.The New York Times, 26 December.

Gaylin W, Person E, editors (1988). Passionate attachments: Thinking about love. New York, NY:Free Press.

Gibs H (1997). Leopoldstadt: kleine Welt am grossen Strom. Vienna: Mohl.Giddens A (1991). Modernity and self–identity. Cambridge: Polity.Giddens A (1992). The transformation of intimacy: Love, sexuality and eroticism in modern societies.Stanford, CA: Stanford UP.

Girard R (2011). G�eom�etries du desir. Paris: L’Herne.Glicklhorn R (1969). The Freiberg period of the Freud family. J Hist Medicine 24:37–43.Goethe W (1962[1774]). The suffering of young Werther, Steinhauer H, translator. New York, NY:Bantam Books.

Goethe W (1981[1774]). Die Leiden des jungen Werther. Frankfurt a/M: Insel.Goody J (1998). Love, lust and literacy. In: Food and love, 176–204. London: Verso.Goody J (2010). Love and religion. In: Passerini L, Ellena L, Geppert ACT, editors. New dangerousliaisons: Discourses on Europe and love in the twentieth century, 21–32. New York, NY, Oxford:Berghahn.

Green A (2000). Science and science fiction in psychoanalysis. In: Andre G, Stern D, Sandler J et al.,editors. Clinical and observational psychoanalytic research: Roots of a controversy, 41–72. London:Karnac.

Green A, Kohon G (2005). Love and its vicissitudes. London: Routledge.Grubrich–Simitis I, editor (1981). Bernfeld S, Cassirer Bernfeld S. Introduction to: Bausteine derFreud–Biographik. Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp.

Grubrich–Simitis I (1997). Early Freud, late Freud. London: Routledge.Grubrich–Simitis I (2011). Einf€uhrung. In: Fichtner G, Grubrich–Simitis I, Hirschm€uller A, editors.Sigmund Freud, Martha Bernays. Die Brautbriefe. Band 1. Sei mein, wie Ich mir’s denke. Juni 1882 –Juli 1883, 12–57. Frankfurt a/M: Fischer.

Gutjahr O, editor (2000). West€ostlicher und nords€udlicher: Divan. Goethe in interkultureller Perspektive.Paderborn: Sch€oning.

Halbwachs K (1969[1946]). La m�emoire collective. Paris: PUF.Harmless W (2008). Mystics. Oxford: Oxford UP.Henkin D (2003). The postal age: The emergence of modern communications in nineteenth–centuryAmerica. Chicago, IL: U Chicago Press.

932 R. Steiner


Hirschm€uller A (2005). Minna Bernays. In: de Mijolla A, editor (2005). Dictionnaire international de lapsychanalyse, vols. 1–2, 206–8. Paris: Hachette.

Hirschm€uller A (2007). Freud and Minna Bernays. Evidence for a sexual relationship betweenSigmund Freud and Minna Bernays? Am Imago 64:125–29.

Hobsbawm E (2013). La fine della cultura. Milano: Rizzoli.Holmes R (1995). Biography: Inventing the truth. In: Batchelor J, editor. The art of literary biography,37–56. Oxford: Clarendon.

Holy Bible (1991[1604–11]). King James version. Glasgow: Collins.Javadi H, Yarshater E, editors (2009). Mystical poems of Rumi, Lewis F, foreword, Arberry A,translator. Chicago, IL: Chicago UP.

Jones E to Freud A. All the letters quoted in this paper are in the Freud Archive at the Library ofCongress, Washington D.C.

Jones E to Siegfried Bernfeld and Susanna Cassirer Bernfeld. All the letters quoted are in theBernfeld Archive at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Jones E (1956). The life and work of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth.Kaplan M (1991). The making of the Jewish middle class: women, family and identity in imperialGermany. New York, NY: Oxford UP.

Kernberg O (1985). Internal world and external reality: object relations theory applied. Northvale, NJ:Aronson.

King P, Steiner R, editors (1992). The Freud–Klein controversies 1940–45. London: Routledge & theInstitute of Psychoanalysis.

Klein M (1993a). Notes on sozrme schizoid mechanisms. In: Envy and gratitude and other works1946–1963, 1–24. London: Karnac & the Institute of Psychoanalysis.

Klein M (1993b). On identification. In: Envy and gratitude and other works 1946–1963, 141–75.London: Karnac & the Institute of Psychoanalysis.

Klein M (1993c). Envy and gratitude. In: Envy and gratitude and other works 1946–1963, 176–235.London: Karnac & the Institute of Psychoanalysis.

Kohut H (1980). Two letters. In: Advances in self psychology. Goldberg A, editor. 476–85. New York,NY: International UP.

Kracauer S (1977[1933]). Die Biographie als neub€urgerliche Kunstform. In: Das Ornament der Masse,45–63. Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp.

Kris E (1952). Psychoanalytic explorations in art. New York, NY: Columbia UP.Krohon H (1974). Die Juden in Hamburg. Hamburg: H. Christian.Kristeva J (1987). Tales of love. New York, NY: Columbia UP.Kristeva J (2000). La g�enie f�eminine: M. Klein. Vol. 2. Paris: Fayard.Kr€ull M (1986[1979]). Freud and his father. New York, NY: Norton.La Rochefoucauld F de (1705[1665–78]). R�eflexions ou sentences et maximes morales. Amsterdam:Mortier.

La Rochefoucauld F de (1791). Maxims and moral reflections by the Duke de la Rochefoucauld.Manchester: Nicholson, 1987.

Lacan J (1966). �Ecrits. Paris: Seuil.Lacan J (1998). The seminar XX, encore: On feminine sexuality, the limits of love and knowledge.Miller J-A, editor. New York, NY: Norton.

Le Rider J (1990). Modernit�e viennoise et crises de l’identit�e. Paris: PUF.Le Rider J (2007). Der €osterreichische Begriff von Zentraleuropa: Habsburgischer Mythos oderRealit€at? The 2007 Ingeborg Bachmann Centre Lecture. London: University of London.

Le Rider J, Raschel H (2010). La Galicie au temps des Habsbourg (1772–1918). Histoire, soci�et�e,cultures en contact. Paris: PUF.

Lessing GE (1779, 1993). Nathan der Weise. In Werke und Briefe. Vol. 9. In: Bohnen K, Schilson A,editors. Frankfurt: Main Deutscher Klassiker Verlag.

Loewenberg P (1971). Sigmund Freud as a Jew. A study of ambivalence and courage. J Hist BehavSci 7:363–9.

Loewenberg P (1995). Fantasy and reality in history. New York, NY: Oxford UP.Louven A (1989). Die Juden in Wandesbek, 1604–1940. Spuren der Erinnerung. Hamburg:Heinevetter.

L€owenthal L (1984[1944]). The triumph of mass idols. In: Literature and mass culture, 56–78. London:Transaction.

Ludwig E (1946). Der Entzauberte Freud. Z€urich: Posen.Luhmann N (1986). Love as a passion. The codification of intimacy. London: Polity.Maciejewski F (2006). Freud, his wife and his ‘wife’. Am Imago 63:497–506.Magris C (1964). Il mito asburgico nella letteratura austriaca moderna. Turin: Einaudi.Margolis D (1976). Freud and his mother. Northvale, NJ: Aronson.



Markel H (2011). Anatomy of addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted and the miracle drugcocaine. New York, NY: Pantheon.

Masson JM, editor (1985 [1887–1904]). The complete letters of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Fliess.Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

Mayer S (1917). Die Wiener Juden: Kommerz, Kultur, Politik 1700–1900. Vienna, Berlin: L€owit.McGrath W (1974). Dionysian art and populist politics in Austria. New Haven, CT: Yale UP.Meyer–Palmedo I, editor (2006). Sigmund Freud–Anna Freud: Briefwechsel (1904–1938). Frankfurta/M: Fischer.

Mitchell J (2003). Siblings. Cambridge: Polity Press.Mittner L (1964). Storia della Letteratura Tedesca, vol.3. Torino: Einaudi.Momigliano A (1987). On pagans, Jews and Christians. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP.Mosse G (1985). German Jews beyond Judaism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP.Ornston D (1985). The invention of ‘cathexis’ and Strachey’s strategy. Int Rev Psychoanal 12:391–400.

Paskaukas R, editor (1993). The complete correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones1908–1939. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

Passerini L (1999). Europe in love, love in Europe. Imagination and politics between the wars. NewYork: NYU Press.

Passerini L, Ellena L, Geppert ACT, editors (2010). New dangerous liaisons: Discourses on Europeand love in the twentieth century. New York, NY, Oxford: Berghahn.

Perfetti F (1993). Napoleone Bonaparte. Rome: Guanda.Petrucci A (2000). Scrivere lettere. Bari: Laterza.Plato (1993[385–80 BC]). The symposium. In: The symposium and the Phaedrus. Plato’s eroticdialogues. Cobb W, editor. New York, NY: NYU Press.

Puner H (1947). Freud: His life, his mind. London: Transaction.Rabinbach A (1975). The migration of Galician Jews to Vienna 1857–1880. Austrian History Yearbook11. Houston, TX: Rice UP.

Rainey R (1975). Freud as student of religion: Perspectives on the background and development ofhis thought. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press.

Reik T (1942). From thirty years with Freud. London: Hogarth.Roazen P (1993). Meeting Freud’s family. Amherst, MA: U Massachusetts Press.Roberts M (1977). From Oedipus to Moses. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Rozenblit M (1983). The Jews of Vienna, 1867–1914: Assimilation and identity. Albany, NY: SUNYPress.

Ruitenbeek H, editor (1973). Freud as we knew him. Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP.Said E (2003[1978]). Orientalism. London: Penguin.Schimmel A, editor (1966). Friedrich R€uckert, 1788–1866. €Ubersetzungen persischer Poesie.Ausgew€ahlt und Eingeleitet von Annemarie Schimmel. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Schimmel A (1982). As through a veil: Mystical poetry in Islam. New York, NY: Columbia UP.Schimmel A (1992a). I am wind, you are fire: The life and work of Rumi. Boston, MA: Shambhala.Schimmel A (1992b). A two–colored brocade: The imagery of Persian poetry. Chapel Hill, NC: U NorthCarolina Press.

Scholem G (1984). Zur Sozialpsychologie der Juden in Deutschland 1900–1930. In: Judaica IV: 231–48. Frankfurt.

Schopenhauer A (1958[1858]). The metaphysics of sexual love. In: The world as will andrepresentation, vol. 2. New York, NY: Dover.

Schorske CE (1979). Fin–de–si�ecle Vienna: Politics and culture. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.Schubert K (2007). Die Geschichte des €osterreichischen Judentums. Vienna: B€ohlau.Schur M (1955). Letter to E Jones dated 30 September. Archives of the British Society ofPsychoanalysis.

Shakespeare W (1994[1590–96]). A midsummer night’s dream. Oxford: Oxford UP.Solomon F(2010). Zur Haskala und zum Zionismus in Galizien. In: Le Rider J, Raschel H, editors. LaGalicie au temps des Habsbourg (1772–1918). Histoire, soci�et�e, cultures en contact, 103–31. Paris:PUF.

Sorkin D (1996). Moses Mendelssohn and the religious enlightenment. Berkeley, CA: U CaliforniaPress.

Spitzer L (1921). Italienische Kriegsgefangenenbriefe. Bonn: Hanstein.Starobinski J (1970). La relation critique. Paris: Gallimard.Stein P (2006). Schriftkultur. Eine Geschichte des Schreibens und Lesens. Darmstadt: Primus.Steiner R (1984). Some introductory notes on J. Strachey’s translation of Freud’s work. Unpublishedpaper given at a special meeting of the British Psychoanalytic Society, January 1984.

Steiner R (1987). An international worldwide trademark of genuineness…? Int Rev Psychoanal 14:57–83.

934 R. Steiner


Steiner R (1993). Introduction. In: Paskaukas R, editor (1993). The complete correspondence ofSigmund Freud and Ernest Jones 1908–1939. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

Steiner R (1994). In Vienna veritas…? Int J Psychoanal 75:511–83.Steiner R (1995). Et in Arcadia ego. Int J Psychoanal 76:739–58.Steiner R (2000). Jones Freud-biographie. Psyche 54:2–3: 99–142, 242–82.Steiner R (2001a). Enlarged, unpublished version of the paper ‘The future as nostalgia. Some noteson E. Jones’s biography of Sigmund Freud.’

Steiner R (2001b) Unpublished paper ‘Freud on love’ given at the English Speaking Conference,London, October 2001.

Stendhal (1822). De l’amour. Paris: Mongie.Stendhal (1947[1842]). On love. 3rd edition. New York, NY: Liveright.Stone L (1982). The family, sex and marriage in England (1500–1800). Harmondsworth: Pelican.Stone L (1987). The past and the present. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Strachey L, Holroyd M, editors (1981[1925]). Elizabeth and Essex. Oxford: Oxford UP.Sulzgruber W (2005). Die j€udische Gemeinde Wiener Neustadt. Von ihren Anf€angen bis zu ihrerZerst€orung. Vienna: Mandelbaum.

Swales P (1982). Freud, Minna Bernays and the conquest of Rome: New light on the origins ofpsychoanalysis. New American Review, Spring/Summer, 1–23.

Thompson EP (1963). The making of the English working class. London: Gollancz.T€ogel C (1996). Freuds Wien: Eine biographische Skizze nach Schaupl€atzen. Vienna: Turia & Kant.Tridgell S (2004). UnderstaZRnding our selves: The dangerous art of biography. Bern: Lang.(European Connections, vol. 12.)

Viederman M (1988). The nature of passionate love. In: Gaylin W, Person E, editors. Passionateattachments: Thinking about love, 1–14. New York, NY: The Free Press

Weinzierl E (2003). The Jewish middle class in Vienna in the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies, 1–15. Minneapolis, MN: Center for Austrian Studies (CAS), University of Minnesota.

Wistrich R (1989). The Jews of Vienna in the age of Franz Joseph. Oxford: Oxford UP.Wittels F (1924). Sigmund Freud: His personality, his teaching and his school. London: Allen & Allen.Yerushalmi Y (1991). Freud’s Moses: Judaism terminable and interminable. New Haven, CT: Yale UP.Yerushalmi Y (1994). S�erie Z. Une fantaisie archivistique. Le D�ebat 92:141–53, 1996.Young–Bruehl E (1988). Anna Freud: A biography. London: Macmillan.Zweig S (1943). The world of yesterday. London: Cassel.



the freud & martha corespondence

Documents