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This absolutely splendidly edited book replaces the earlier abridged edition of the Freud–Abraham letters (Abraham and Freud, 1965)—one that had many defects associated with the
period in which it appeared. The experienced translator Eric Mosbacher was so offended by the role Abraham's daughter Hilda played in that 1965 book that he refused to have his real name attached, and therefore the pseudonym ‘Bernard Marsh’ appears alongside the name of Hilda Abraham as co-translator. Someday, three more major examples of Freud's published correspondences will also need redoing: those to Lou Andreas-Salomé, Oskar Pfister and Arnold Zweig are at present incomplete. In the meantime it looks as if the letters between Freud and Max Eitington will be the next to appear, although commercial considerations could make translations into English of that very considerable amount of text questionable. It may be that the Freud–Rank correspondence will be out not long after that. Since the ultimate extent of all Freud's letters could well exceed in size the ‘Standard Edition’, future generations should have the benefit of what many of us may not live long enough to savour. Intellectual historians are going to have plenty of work cut out for them. In the case of Jung, for example, his children never even read the letters between their parents—some one thousand of them—on the grounds of not wanting to trespass on their privacy. Something like the same number of letters exists between Freud and his wife, Martha, some of which Ernest Jones selected for use in his official biography; but a full edition will be an event in the history of ideas.
Although Abraham was not as personally dear to Freud as Ferenczi, and these letters therefore lack the fuller intimacy that is to be found in the recent wonderful Freud–Ferenczi volumes (Brabant et