Nearly fifty years is a long time to wait before writing about one's meaningful encounters with Freud. It was in 1904 that the then nineteen-year-old Bruno Goetz sought out Freud for the first of three monthly visits, ostensibly for the cure of a facial neuralgia, probably a migraine headache. Not until 1951, a few years before his death, did this little-known poet write about his visits with the famous creator of psychoanalysis, and these recollections had to wait almost another two decades before being published in 1969 in a small edition of four hundred copies. More than another decade has elapsed before the appearance of this English translation, the first to our knowledge. Many reasons could account for this delay, among which the apparently highly ambivalent relation of the author to Freud's ideas—in contrast to his, perhaps, overidealized image of Freud, the man—may be the most important.

Bruno Goetz was born in Riga (Latvia) in 1885 as the son of a ship's captain who later became a teacher of navigation in a school for sailors. He