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The correspondence between Sigmund Freud and Eugen Bleuler was published in Basel in 2012 under the title “Ich bin zuversichtlich, wir erobern bald die Psychiatrie”: Briefwechsel 1904-1937. The main German title—in English, “I am confident we soon will conquer psychiatry”—is a quotation from Freud's letter of December 30, 1906, to Bleuler. The sentiment underlines an important theme of Freud's interest in Bleuler's work: his hope that Bleuler's sympathy for psychoanalysis would secure the new field's position within academic psychiatry. The French edition of the letters, published in Paris in 2016, takes a slightly different tack. It dispenses with Freud's quote in the title, which simply reads: Lettres, 1904-1937 Nevertheless, it proposes a reading orientation that like the German edition highlights the relations between psychoanalysis and psychiatry: both the series introduction by Michel Gribinski and the introduction by Thomas Lepoutre and François Villa, “Freud et la psychiatrie,” insist on the relevance of the Freud-Bleuler correspondence in understanding the contemporary attitude of psychiatry toward psychoanalysis.
Since Christian Maetzener's review of the German edition gives a thorough account of the context of the publication and of the correspondence, I will briefly comment on the debates between Freud and Bleuler over theoretical issues and then present a few reflections on contemporary psychoanalysis inspired by Lepoutre and Villa's paper, as well as by the correspondence itself.