Preface

Psychoanalysts, as I noted in our Spring 2004 issue, are always returning to Freud. Here we proudly offer four landmark articles, each of which casts genuinely new light on Freud.

First, Franz Maciejewski, renowned for his discovery of the 1898 Swiss hotel log in which Freud registered with Minna Bernays as his wife—published in American Imago in Winter 2006—launches what is destined to become a central project of Freud studies for decades to come: a rethinking of Freud's life and work in light of his relationship to his sister-in-law. Perhaps surprisingly to some, Maciejewski remains agnostic on whether Freud and Minna consummated their affair, deeming the widespread preoccupation with the “material reality” of their possible liaison inconsequential by comparison with the “psychic reality” of their desire, which constitutes “the genuine territory of psychoanalysis.” Be that as it may, Maciejewski lays down some key markers in reviewing the events that led up to Minna Bernays's arrival in the Freud household in 1896—a decade after the death of her fiancé, Freud's friend Ignaz Schoenberg—and Maciejewski convincingly argues that the “two-wives complex” of Freud's adulthood recapitulates the “two-mothers constellation” of his early childhood.

In consonance with his personal metaphor of “psychoanalysis as a journey” (Borgogno 1999), Franco Borgogno takes the case of Little Hans—that is, Herbert Graf—as a touchstone for an inquiry into what it might mean to retrace the early history of psychoanalysis from an authentically contemporary standpoint. For those in the English-speaking world who may not yet be familiar with the work of this distinguished Italian analyst, a great treat is in store. Borgogno points to Freud's assumption of the role of a supervisor to the actual analyst, Hans's father, as crucial to his ability in this case “to revise and criticize between the lines his own way of relating to patients” as unduly authoritarian. He likewise foregrounds Freud's puzzli