Freud Family History: Sigmund Freud, Martha Bernays: Die Brautbriefe, Band 1. Sei Mein, Wie Ich Mir's Denke, Juni 1882-Juli 1883 [The Letters during Their Engagement, Vol. 1. Be Mine the Way I See It, June 1882-July 1883]. Edited by Gerhard Fichtner, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, and Albrecht Hirschmüller. Frankfurt a.M:  S. Fischer Verlag, 2011,  625 pp., €48.00.

Thirty years after Anna Freud mentioned to Kurt Eissler (then director of the Freud Archives) that she had no objection to publication of the Brautbriefe after the year 2000, the first of five volumes of the complete edition of this voluminous correspondence between Martha Bernays and Sigmund Freud during their engagement has been published. Eissler at the time immediately began to arrange for a complete transcription and contacted the Freud researcher Ilse Grubrich-Simitis. Because the sheer mass of the correspondence—more than fifteen hundred letters (746 by Sigmund, 793 by Martha)—made the project too large for her to tackle alone, she enlisted the help of Gerhard Fichtner and Albrecht Hirschmüller, both well known for transcribing and editing Freud correspondence (Fichtner 2003; Hirschmüller 2005) and for their work on the history of psychoanalysis. The three editors plan to publish the remaining four volumes at yearly intervals.

The existence of this correspondence was long known to Freud researchers. Ernest Jones, in connection with his biography of Freud, was the first outside the family to look at these letters, which he saw after Martha's death in 1951. Ernst Freud, Sigmund's youngest son, feeling that the Jones biography lacked authenticity, decided in 1960 to publish a collection of Freud's letters to remedy this (Freud 1961). The largest portion of that collection was a selection of ninety-three of Freud's letters during his engagement to Martha Bernays. None of Martha's letters were included.

The Freud-Bernays correspondence dates from a time when writing letters, sometimes more than one a day, was the only way to stay in touch.