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This recasting of a first edition (Vermorel & Vermorel, 1993) long out of print, is devoted to the relationship between Freud and Rolland. The new publication provides an opportunity to study this intellectual encounter, and pay tribute to the historical research of Henri Vermorel and Madeleine, his late wife. The first edition was part of the historical trend in France for studying Freud's work, as initiated by Alain de Mijolla. The first publications of the Vermorels are to be read in the context of the earliest publications of Freud's correspondence in France, and the second volume of the Revue Internationale d’Histoire de la psychanalyse, devoted to Freud's correspondence, presented it in this vein as an historical source, as evidenced by Gerhard Fichtner's pioneering research (1989). At that period, researchers studied almost all of Freud's correspondence for the first time. Vermorel, therefore, in his first edition, emphasized the turn-of-the-century spirit of the age with its profusion of intellectuals.
The second edition, completely revised, changes the title and, de facto, the perspective, recasting the Freud–Rolland relationship and their respective writings as if it were a dialogue between them. Vermorel's rereading leads us to a deepening of the question of the creative process of these exceptional people. The approach taken, as an extraordinary dialogue, is all the more fruitful in that it is based on very few letters and even fewer direct encounters.
This remarkable dialogue, imagined by Vermorel, somehow parallels Freud's well-known process of choosing an interlocutor as an imaginary duplicate. Vermorel, by creating a kind of fiction, relies on the respective writings of Freud and Rolland following their meeting in May 1924, which for him can be read also as open letters that would have responded to each other. Even if Rolland is not named, it is to him that Freud addresses himself in “Ci