Book Review Essay – Psychoanalysts in Correspondence: Henry Zvi Lothane (Ed.). The Untold Story of Sabina Spielrein: Healed and Haunted by Love – Unpublished diary and letters.  The Unconscious in Translation, 2023,  445 pp., $65.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-1942254201Astrid Thome (Ed.). Ludwig Klages und Friedrich Salomon Rothschild – Briefwechsel 1929–1956 [Ludwig Klages and Friedrich Salomon Rothschild – Correspondence 1929–1956].  Verlag Karl Alber, 2023,  443pp, €99.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-3495995488Karl Fallend (Ed.). Mimi & Els – Stationen einer Freundschaft – Marie Langer – Else Pappenheim – Späte Briefe [Mimi and Els – Stations of a Friendship – Marie Langer – Else Pappenheim – Late Letters].  Erhard Löcker Verlag, 2019,  350 pp., €31.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-3854099697

In 1991 I had the good luck of editing the Italian version of the young Freud’s letters to his high school friend Eduard Silberstein and of writing an introduction to it, in which I could state that the self-analytical thread that we find fully developed in his later letters to Wilhelm Fliess (Masson, 1985) was already present in his letters to Silberstein (Boehlich, 1990). In fact, the shape itself which he and his friend tried to give to their letter exchange sounds very much like what many years later became the psychoanalytic frame. Here is what we can read in Freud’s letter to Silberstein dated September 4, 1874:

Hence my proposal amounts to stipulating that every Sunday each of us, the two sole luminaries of the Academia Espanola, send the other a letter that is nothing short of an entire encyclopedia of the past week and that with total veracity reports all our doings, commissions and omissions, and those of all strangers we encounter, in addition to all outstanding thoughts and observations, and at least an adumbration, as it were, of the unavoidable emotions. (Boehlich, 1990, pp. 57-58)

In 2011 I was able to publish an article on the correspondence (1939–1951) between Wilfred Bion and his first training analyst, John Rickman (1891–1951), which allowed me to show how already during the war they had exchanged ideas about the field concept, as it had been formulated by Kurt Lewin.

Even more important to know is the fact that the word “countertransference” comes up for the first time and is mentioned more often in Freud’s letters to C.G. Jung than in Freud’s own works (see McGuire 1974). This is also the reason why I dedicated much room to the relationship between Freud’s letters and his works in the book I published in 2019 under the title Freud, Sullivan, Mitchell, Bion, and the multiple voices of international psychoanalysis.

In his 2023 book A brief apocalyptic history of psychoanalysis: Erasing trauma, Carlo Bonomi has rewritten the history of psychoanalysis