A Professor Through the Looking-Glass: Contending Narratives of Freud's Relationships with the Sisters Bernays

In 1982 Peter Swales claimed that Minna Bernays, Freud's sister-in-law, aborted Freud's child in Merano in September 1900. Letters published subsequently reveal flaws in Swales's hypothesis. Drawing on current literary theories the author recontextualises the ‘aliquis slip’ within a new narrative of the Freuds' 1900 summer holiday, revealing not an abortion crisis but Freud's momentary fear that his wife Martha was again pregnant. A chronological reconstruction of the production the ‘aliquis slip’ and Freud's financial error offers new ways of reading Freud's subsequently composed texts. A precision dating of the ‘table d'hôte dream’ allows it to be set withi its syntagmatic chain, thereby suggesting Freud's marital crisis and bitterness at his failed professorial application. It is a cocaine aniversary dream dredging up a sixteen-year grudge against Martha and the recently elevated Professor Königstein, both of whom Freud still held responsible for his failure to best Koller in discovering the anaesthetic properties of cocaine in eye surgery.