Sigmund Freud-Martha Bernays Letters: Sigmund Freud-Martha Bernays: Die Brautbriefe, Band 4: Spuren von unserer komplizierten Existenz (Courtship Letters, Vol. 4: Traces of Our Complicated Existence), September 1884-August 1885. Edited by Gerhard Fichtner, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, Albrecht Hirschmüller, and Wolfgang Kloft. Frankfurt a.M.:  S. Fischer Verlag, 2019,  667 pp.

This fascinating book of love letters is the fourth in a series of eventually five volumes containing the unabridged personal letters (in total 1,539) written by Sigmund Freud (1856-1938) and his wife-to-be Martha Bernays (1861-1951) during their four years of engagement (1882-1886), during which Freud lived and worked in Vienna and Bernays lived with her mother and her sister Minna (four years her junior) in Wandsbek, a borough of Hamburg. These volumes offer a unique window into Freud's personal and professional development as a young man, and introduce us to Martha Bernays, whose intelligence, writing skills, astonishing independence, maturity, equanimity, and love for Freud become apparent in these letters. Bernays was part of an esteemed Jewish intellectual family; self-educated, she was an ardent reader of European and American novels, poetry, and plays; she enjoyed opera and the fine arts, and maintained a lively interest in the political and social situation of her time. Reviews of the previous three volumes in this remarkable series can be found in JAPA (Maetzener 2012; Teusch 2014, 2017). These reviews include detailed presentations and discussions of the impressive editorial work and commentary by the editors, who explain the complex history of these publications, provide information about their work on this voluminous project, and describe the research that went into elaborate footnotes providing additional information about every place Freud or Bernays visited, every person they mentioned or interacted with in these letters, every book they talked about and read, the operas they heard, the

plays they saw, and the social and political circumstances surrounding each event, such as Karl Koller's engaging in a duel after having been subjected to an anti-Semitic slur by a medical administrator. In her introduction to volume 4, llse Grubrich-Simitis mentions a development in Freud research that is known to Freud scholars, but perhaps not to all readers: on