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Dear Mr Tuckett,
While describing the First Psychoanalytic Congress at Salzburg in 1908, Jones spotlighted Freud's presentation of the Rat Man case. In particular, Jones glorified Freud's oratorical capacity to enthral his audience over a period of some five hours:
'[Freud] sat at the end of a long table along the sides of which we were gathered and spoke in his usual low but distinct conversational tone. He began at the Continental hour of eight in the morning and we listened with rapt attention. At eleven he broke off, suggesting we had enough. But we were so absorbed that we insisted on his continuing, which he did until nearly one o'clock. Someone who can hold an audience engrossed for five hours must have something very worthwhile to say' (Jones, 1955, p. 42).
Jones's temporal account of Freud's oratorical marathon has been frequently repeated, even in my own book on the Rat Man (Mahony, 1986). Extant documentation, however, indicates that Freud's performance was impressive, but not superhuman. It was twenty-five years after the Salzburg Congress that Jones asked Freud: 'What, in your recollection was the duration of your Vortrag on Zwangsneurose at the Salzburg Congress? I find an enormous discrepancy between Sadger's memory and my own' (Freud & Jones, 1993, p. 711). Freud's reply was quite modest: 'As far as I remember, that lecture of mine in Salzburg lasted a terribly long time: 1½ - 2¼ hours? I could no longer do that today' (p. 712).
Freud's temporal estimate is borne out in an early letter that Abraham wrote to him: 'I still remember with great pleasure the two hours taken up by your paper at Salzburg' (Freud & Abraham, 1965, p. 146). The ironical poetic justice of Abraham's letter is that while evidentially demystifying Freud's performance, it testifies to the soundness of his memory a quarter-century after the fact!