In Memoriam

Martha Bernays Freud, Sigmund Freud's widow, who died of heart failure on November 3, 1951, aged 91, in her London home, has never actively participated in the development of psychoanalysis. She is not reported to have attended meetings or congresses, on which Freud appeared as speaker and even of the older group of analysts only those were acquainted with her, who had the privilege of meeting her as hostess in her own home. Those few describe her as a woman of very great charm, of spontaneous warmth combined with the utmost perfection of social graces; as the head of a household, whose smooth and imperceptible functioning seemed to form the appropriate background for Freud's life and his working habits. Those who had closer contact with her also recall that from time to time a witty and penetrating remark seemed to indicate that behind the almost retiring dignity of demeanor there was a keen and vivacious observer, who knew and understood more than the casual visitor was supposed to realize.

Readers of Freud's writings will recall the part Mrs. Freud played in her husband's earlier life and particularly an episode reported without regret in the autobiography. The young investigator Freud interrupted his study of the cocca plant in order to visit his fiancée in her distant home town, Hamburg, and this interruption made the ophtalmologist Koller and not Freud, who had initiated the investigation, the discoverer of Cocaine.

In the recently published letters of Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, we read about the first years of marriage following a long engagement, about the growing family, about the joys and sorrows in the rearing of six children. We become aware of Freud's intense concern with every detail of the family's life and of many experiences shared by husband and wife. But even to the intimate friend, Freud's inner relationship to his wife is not divulged—a restraint familiar also from The Interpretation of Dreams where the stream of associatio