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What a relief to read a calm, intellectually disciplined correspondence that highlights problems and prospects in psychoanalysis as experienced by the pioneers. In place of the overheated exchanges between Freud and Fliess, Freud and Jung and Freud and Ferenczi that have permitted hostile historians and others to play fast and loose with psychoanalysis as a misbegotten child, we have between Freud and Abraham a mutually respectful exchange of ideas, clinical problems and personal difficulties. Abraham addresses Freud as Professor throughout the years of a correspondence that includes frequent visits between the two men and their families in Vienna, Berlin and on holiday.
Abraham was no sycophant. When Freud taxed Abraham for his reservations about the staffing of a publishing project, Abraham responded (27 October 1923) angrily reminding Freud of past disagreements between them on personal matters. Freud's response in turn shows us a professional Freud acting as a colleague and not as a deranged lunatic as depicted in what Hanns Eisler has called the FBI, the Freud Bashing Industry, led by bashers like the Berkeley literary critic Frederick Crews and the psychiatrist Raj Persaud:
Let us not give too much play to the repetition compulsion. You were certainly right about Jung, and not quite so right about Rank. It does not have to be the case that that you are always right. But should you turn out to be right this time too, nothing would prevent me from once again admitting it.
Freud's correspondence with Abraham was far less intense than his correspondence with Jung, Ferenczi or even Jones. In the seven years before World War I, Freud wrote to Ferenczi every four or five days, to Jung once a week and to Jones three times a month. Freud corresponded with Abraham once a month - a sign of the more measured relationship between them.
Here is Abraham (3 June 1915) engaging Freud on ‘Mourning and melancholia’:
One other point remains: the postulation in your short manuscript th