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LETTERS OF SIGMUND FREUD (470 pp.)- Selected and edited by Ernst L. Freud -Basic Books...
Lives of great men are far less sublime than Longfellow thought, and their letters often prove it. If Sigmund Freud had not put his genius into psychoanalysis, even his son Ernst would have seen small reason to assemble this bundle of his father's correspondence, some of it already mined by Ernest Jones in his famed biography of the Master. Freud's letters are not brilliant, witty, or especially intimate. But their truculent honesty makes for a paradoxical and amusingly human revelation. The dedicated psychologist of sex was no sophisticate, but a square...
...Freud considered himself unshockable, but a trip to Paris in 1885 made him blush. "I don't think they know the meaning of shame or fear; the women no less than the men crowd round nudities." His fiancee plans a tourist jaunt with a girl friend. Freud tut-tuts: "Should that be allowed? Two single girls traveling alone in North Germany!" At the age of 73, the famed silver-cord cutter is still in an Oedipal tangle with his 94-year-old mother: "I somehow could not forgive myself if I were to die before...
...Kisses. All of this is vaguely endearing and even consoling-a little like watching a giant computer hash up some simple arithmetic. Dr. Freud is as lovable as Professor Pnin when he pores hopelessly over a train schedule or asks a stranger the way to a coffee shop while standing in front of a coffee shop. Nowhere is Freud more touchingly fallible than in his love letters to his fiancee Martha Bernays, which occupy half this book...
...Freud's poverty, plus Martha's possessive mother, kept the couple all but separated during a four-year courtship. He was in Vienna, she was in Hamburg, and 19th century epistlemanship demanded a letter a day. Freud gushed anguished longing and Dutch-uncle lectures to his loved one. Martha was "my sweet princess," "highly esteemed princess," "dearest highly esteemed little princess," and "Your Sigmund" sent her "100,000 kisses, all of which are to be cashed." A penniless knight-errant, Freud was quite a gallant: "What can it be that you want ... a tooth out of the Caliph...