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The successful product of over fifteen years of exemplary research, Henri and Madeleine Vermorel's splendid book is based on the best sources for both Freud and Rolland, and, as is evident from the technical details given below (see notes) concerning the critical apparatus and appendices, has been assembled with extreme care and erudition.
Due credit must be given for the high scientific level of these qualities. By virtue of its subject and its value for all future serious discussions of Freud's thought, this will be an essential work. It not only deserves but even demands a place beside the major available versions of his oeuvre, of which it documents some hitherto relatively neglected respects. Let us therefore not hesitate to put it on the shelf reserved for the French translations—whether established, already published or, in some cases, still in the process of publication—of Freud's famous correspondences with Fliess, with Jung, with Abraham, with Ferenczi and with others close or less close to the creator of psychoanalysis.
This said, I shall now be expected to give as precise a review as possible of this well crafted, very interesting, but voluminous book.
I shall disappoint this expectation—deliberately. A review does not replace a consideration (Freud's Rücksicht?). Reviews are often used nowadays as summaries, and are readily substituted—especially if deemed ‘faithful’ and if the book concerned is consistent—for a direct encounter with the text; however, this review must on no account, on the pretext that there is currently a plethora of psychoanalytic literature, divert the reader from a more personal experience, which is absolutely indispensable in this case.
Considering the matter on its merits, this book must be read—and read in the true sense of the term. This is because, owing to its unexpected approach, it jolts some over-firmly rooted ideas on the biography of Freud, on the genesis of his oeuvre, and on the very foundations—some may even say, on the v