Be the Woman I Imagined

This first of five volumes of the complete correspondence between Sigmund Freud and his fiancée Martha Bernays is, quite simply, a revelation. It is the most engrossing of all the collections of Freud’s letters—and he was an extraordinary letter-writer. In addition, the editorial team has done an outstanding job. Grubrich-Simitis provides a superb introduction to what she rightly calls the adventure of reading these letters, and the work that she, Fichtner, and Hirschmüller have done with the text is impeccable, their commentary meticulous yet terse.¹ A model edition. One now has a better idea of the suspense felt by readers of the installments of David Copperfield (one of Sigmund’s first presents to Martha and an important point of reference during a violent quarrel), although we, unfortunately, will have to wait a year between volumes, not just a month.

The complete correspondence is to contain 1539 pieces, of which only 93 of Sigmund’s and none of Martha’s were published by Ernst Freud (S. Freud, 1960). As Grubrich-Simitis notes, Ernst chose to represent the light side of his parents’ love story and tells us little about Sigmund’s recurrent attacks of jealousy and crises of distrust (p. 32).² She is justified in asserting that the complete edition offers something completely new (p. 15), and, one may add, even after only one volume. Not only is this Freud’s most massive correspondence; it is “the most intimate,” the one in which “he reveals himself in the most direct, undisguised, and unprotected manner” (p. 18). The result is often painful, and, at the risk of neglecting the evident devotion and tenderness of many of Sigmund’s letters, I will focus on their darker side. Grubrich-Simitis assures us that gradually, over the course of the entire correspondence, the fiancés developed great trust in one another and that their loving but conflictual sentimental education led to profound changes in both (p. 40). The title of what will be published as the final volume of the correspondence, To Have You the Way You Are—a phrase from one of Sigmund’s letters (p. 37)—points to the resolution of his troubling desire to bend Martha to his will. One can more readily believe in a change of this kind, since respect for his children as they are and a remarkable freedom from paternal authoritarianism characterize Freud’s letters to them (Freud, 2010).³ Nevertheless, many of Sigmund’s letters in this first volume are deeply disturbing.

Sometime in the spring of 1882 Sigmund met Martha through his sisters. The first extant letter, in which Martha addressed her admirer with the formal you, dates from June 6. On the 17th they became secretly engaged, and two days later Martha left for Wandsbek and did not return to Vienna until September 11. On December 26 they revealed their engagement to Martha’s mother. During the next two months they apparently did not write one another at all, and only 25 of the 230 items in this volume were written between March and June 15, 1883, when Martha moved to Wandsbek. Over the next three years and three months they rarely saw each except for Sigmund’s two visits to Wandsbek of a month (September, 1883) and six weeks (September–October, 1885). They were finally married on September 14, 1886.

This first volume ends almost a month after Martha moved to Wandsbek, and the couple has barely survived Sigmund’s latest and most severe attack of jealous possessiveness. This attack was so virulent and so unreasonable that it would have been understandable had Martha called off the engagement. For, despite what Freud’s biographers have told us, the Proustian proportions of Sigmund’s furious need to possess his fiancée’s heart and mind and to subordinate her beliefs and behavior to his will are startling. Jones, who had...