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Was she beautiful or not beautiful? … Was the good or evil genius dominant in those beams?
“I wonder whether one oftener learns to love real objects through their representations, or the representation through the real objects,” he said.
While reading George Eliot's fiction, particularly Daniel Deronda (), I was impressed by similarities between George Eliot and Freud and began to wonder if Freud had been influenced by Eliot in some way. There is no evidence of their ever having met, but both were powerful proponents of the healing power of human relationships. Indeed, Daniel Deronda, published when Freud was twenty-two years old, describes a relationship between its protagonists that in many ways prefigures brief psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy.
Investigation has revealed that Freud was in fact an admirer of George Eliot. It is well known that he was a voracious reader in several languages, including English. In 1875, his father sent him to England to reward his academic success in the gymnasium. At this time, George Eliot's fame was at its height, and her novels were on everyone's lips. Middlemarch, which had been published in 1872, seems to have made a deep impression on Freud. He had its “four volumes lying in front” of him when he wrote to Martha Bernays in August of 1885 (Jones, 1953, I, p. 168); and, according to Jones, he found that it “illuminated important aspects of his relations” with his fiancee (p. 174). It is conceivable that this illumination influenced his later theories about love relationships. In 1882, Freud expressed amazement at the depiction in Daniel Deronda of intimate ways among Jews that “we speak of only among ourselves” (Jones, 1953, I, p. 174). There is a reference to Eliot's novel Adam Bede in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900, p. 290). Freud thought so highly of George Eliot that