More Courtship Letters of Freud and Martha Bernays: Sigmund Freud, Martha Bernays: Die Brautbriefe, Band 3. “Warten in Ruhe und Ergebung, Warten in Kampf und Erregung” (The Letters during Their Engagement, Vol. 3. “Waiting Quietly and With Surrender, Waiting Struggling and With Exasperation”). Edited by Gerhard Fichtner, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, Albrecht Hirschmüller, and Wolfgang Kloft. Frankfurt a.M.:  S. Fischer Verlag, 2015,  620 pp., €49.40.

This third volume (of a projected five) of the unabridged courtship correspondence (more than 1500 letters in all) between Freud and his wife-to-be Martha Bernays contains 306 of their letters written over a period of eight months between January and September 1884, eighteen months into their four-year separation while engaged. The subtitle of this book is a quote from one of Freud's letters (732F) in which he refers to an earlier letter from Bernays (729B).1 In this letter Freud eloquently and poignantly describes and analyzes their different temperaments, the history of their involvement, and how he has grown more patient and now appreciates Bernays's emotional independence and her ability to say no to him at times. The different modes of “waiting” described in the quote refer to the complexity of their internal struggles with “waiting for the other” and highlight their differences in temperament, with Bernays overall being more inclined to wait patiently and with surrender, whereas Freud could experience waiting as an exasperating internal struggle projected onto her during times of increased stress.