Freud and Fliess: A Supportive Literary Relationship*

“Das beste, was Du wissen kannst,/Darfst Du den Buben doch nicht sagen.” (The best that you can know, you must not tell to ordinary men.)—Goethe's Faust, Part I, Scene 4.

At the May, 1981, Panel on Interpretation of the American Psychoanalytic Association, there was considerable debate as to whether there is a single correct interpretation determinable at the time of a given clinical situation. Arlow reacted with considerable surprise to Schafer's claim that the “correctness” of an interpretation could be established only by the subsequent effects within the analysis. The controversy involves epistemological issues of monism versus pluralism, certainty versus uncertainty and consistency, and obective versus subjective meanings. Grolnick made the apt suggestion that although Schafer's actual clinical work seemed quite similar to Arlow's and Brenner's, the latter had difficulty with Schafer's attempt to provide a “meta-criticism” of psychoanalytic interpretation, a theory of the psychoanalytic process within which interpretation is to be understood. Schafer's approach uses a contemporary literary critical model of interpretation, in which how and why we interpret as we do always has to be subjected to scrutiny; all assumptions need to be acknowledged and argued rather than accepted. This focuses us on the pragmatic situation of how and why we are attempting understanding and interpretation.

This study of the Freud-Fliess letters is offered in a spirit similar to Schafer's. Do not expect to find a reconstruction of what actually transpired between Freud and