Editorial: Freud in Correspondence

At the IX Forum of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) in Florence, in May 1994, one of the most appreciated items in the programme was a workshop on the history of psychoanalysis. Carlo Bonomi, who was the initiator of this workshop, suggested a continuation in the form of a project to be published in this journal and also in book format. This issue presents the first part of the project, with the title “Freud in Correspondence”. Issue no. 3 this year will contain the remaining articles1. Editors of the project have been Patrick Mahony, Carlo Bonomi and Jan Stensson. I am proud to be able to offer the readers of International Forum of Psychoanalysis the possibility of a privileged first acquaintance with this material.

Writing the history — of a person, an organization or a country — is an important part of self-understanding. As psychoanalysts we are, or should be, well aware of the many dangers and possible pitfalls in reconstructing the history of an individual, his family and other decisive persons and institutions. According to some ideas the most important thing is to arrive at a coherent and cohesive “narrative”. The dangers of methods which dispense with the search for historical facts were very amply demonstrated by Zvi Lothane in his study “In Defense of Schreber”. Lothane shows how seemingly good Schreber “narratives” have survived within and outside the psychoanalytic world, although they have been wrong or misleading in crucial respects. The misinterpretations of Schreber also point to misunderstandings in the psychiatric and the psychoanalytic self-understanding, and eventually also in the construction of theory.

Freud has been the object of a number of biographical works, both more comprehensive ones dealing with his whole life and shorter studies of special episodes or aspects. In spite of Freud's own denial of any necessity of seeing his theories in the light of his life experiences, as Marco Conci points out in his contri