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Rumors and stories of Freud having an affair with Minna Bernays have not only not gone away, but, much like the repressed thoughts and memories of Freud's theory, they appear to manifest a compulsion of their own to repeat: Minna Bernays' mentioning a distressing involvement with Freud to Carl Jung (Billinsky, 1969); Jung discovering a marital triangle in Freud's dreams that distressed Freud (Billinsky, 1969); Peter Swales' (1982) finding clandestine autobiographical allusions to an affair and abortion through analysis of Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Screen Memories, and On Dreams; Peter Gay's disclosure that Freud wrote tender, intimate letters to Minna Bernays from the time he first became engaged to Martha Bernays (Gay, 1989, 1990), coupled with his disclosure that Freud's letters to Minna from the time period of the alleged affair are missing (Gay, 1989, 1990). Report of an affair has repeated and echoed for almost a century.
The present author not only found evidence that seems to confirm an affair in Freud's letters to Wilhelm Fliess from 1895 to 1897 (O'Brien, 1989, 1991) but concluded that Freud's theory served him as an intellectual defense, a complex of “substitute ideas” that enabled him to disguise and “repress” memories and self-reproaches stemming from self-perceived guilt of murder and incest within his own family and marriage. Freud's Oedipus complex—through which he identifies with Oedipus, a man who chose to blind himself to further sight of what he concluded would only remind him of his own horrible crimes—appears to have, as its hidden but real meaning, a disguised statement of his own, self-perceived guilt when interpreted within the theoretical context of his own theory of defense and repression.
To test this interpretation, samples were taken from the beginning, middle, and end of Freud's Die Traumdeutung (O'Brien, 1989). Each sample confirmed that the central theme of that work centers on Freud's personal trauma connected with