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One of the most striking features of the psychoanalytic movement was its impact on the intellectual world—the world beyond the sphere of psychiatry and the field of clinical concerns. Nowhere was this appeal to the intellectual community more powerful than in England—and particularly in that tight, incestuous, erudite, polymorphously-perverse, Cambridge-oriented, and rarified world known as Bloomsbury. Ever in search of new ideas and new cultural passions, the little circle of the Bells, the Stracheys, the Keyneses, the Stephenses and their friends, acolytes, and hangers-on were quickly drawn into the excitement generated by the early reports from Vienna, and Freud soon joined Diaghilev, Picasso and Proust as exemplar of the avantgarde spirit that pervaded the Bloomsbury atmosphere.
James and Alix Strachey were central figures in Bloomsbury. James, the younger brother of the already famous Lytton, drifted into psychoanalysis via a post-Cambridge career in literary journalism. After their marriage in 1920, they went to Vienna so that James could be analyzed by Freud; when Alix suffered a panic attack at the opera, she succeeded in having Freud undertake to analyze her as well. When Freud asked them to translate "A Child Is Being Beaten," he set them off on a career that proved pivotal for the history of psychoanalysis in the English-speaking world—concluding with the monumental achievement of the Standard Edition.
The present volume contains the correspondence that passed between James and Alix during a year of separation occasioned by Alix's decision—prompted by Freud—to seek further analysis with K. Abraham in Berlin. Since both were literate, witty, perceptive, and dedicated people, their letters provide a fascinating personal window on the psychoanalytic world in London and Berlin in the early 1920's—a world in which psychoanalysis in Britain was achieving institutional structure while that in Berlin was caught up in the cultural and political turmoil of the