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In 1997 Editorial Biblioteca Nueva brought out the third volume of a critical edition of the correspondence of Sigmund Freud edited and with a commentary by Nicolás Caparrós.
The author is a doctor of medicine and psychiatrist practising in Madrid, Spain. He has spent fourteen years producing this critical edition of Sigmund Freud's correspondence. His previous publications are Crisis de la familia [Family crisis] (Madrid: Fundamentos, 1973, 1977); Psicología de la liberación [The psychology of liberation] (Madrid: Fundamentos, 1976); La construcción de la personalidad. Las psicopatías [The construction of personality. The psychopathies] (Madrid: Fundamentos, 1981); Psicopatología Analítico-Vincular I and II [Psychopathology in terms of analysis and linking I and II] (Madrid: Quipú Ediciones, 1981, 1992); and Tiempo, Temporalidad y Psicoanálisis [Time, temporality and psychoanalysis] (Madrid: Quipú Ediciones, 1994).
Caparrós has sought to publish Freud's complete letters in chronological order of writing with the aim of putting an end to the current situation in which they are divided among a large number of partial editions. Although these are admittedly all interesting, the fragmentation tends to hinder rather than facilitate the achievement of an overall view. The author attributes this state of affairs to two factors.
Firstly, with the important exception of the Freud-Fliess letters brought out in 1950—an edition with many omissions and abbreviations—the correspondences have been published in dual form. For instance, we have volumes for Freud/Ferenczi, Freud/Pfister, Freud/Andreas-Salomé and Freud/Zweig. Caparrós quotes Allouch on the consequences of this approach to publication: ‘It seems odd and even foolish. Imagine a physicist studying the motion of the bodies in the Solar System in twos—Earth/Moon, Saturn/Sun, Venus/Mars, Jupiter/Moon, etc. Such a method would never have led to the discovery of the laws of gravitation' (p. xviii). I have my own hypoth