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This is an important and scholarly edition of this correspondence, which previously had been published in 1965 by the IPA and Hogarth, with the title ‘A Psychoanalytic Dialogue’.
The earlier edition of these letters was properly speaking not a dialogue at all. Freud's forthrightness was often edited out or rephrased, with the consequence that the reader was presented with an homogenized version of the exchanges between them. An example. In the Dialogue Freud's letter of 23 rd May 1908 a forthright paragraph is edited out altogether. It begins ‘Ad vocem Moll: the man is not a physician but a shyster’….And ends with ‘A spiteful, shifty fellow capable of every dirty trick, who compensates with official ethics’. Or in 1911 when writing about how he has taken over the leadership of the Vienna Society, the editors of the Dialogue change ‘sly and vicious’ as descriptions of Fliess to ‘subtle or even cunning’. And omit altogether the sentence ‘Above all, beware of his wife’. (3. 3. 1911).
As Falzeder notes omissions are interesting reflections of the period and he comments that since McGuire's edition of the Freud/Jung correspondence we have a different idea as to how the construction and history of psychoanalysis should be presented. In addition, letters for the years 1924 and 1925 which concerned the activities of the secret committee and the rows which were going on about theoretical debates were edited to exclude significant information. Falzeder categorizes the omissions as: ‘1. unimportant details. 2. references to third persons, to psychoanalytic politics, and to inner conflicts; and 3. intimate data about the letter writers and their family members, colleagues and patients’. Within the second category Dialogue left out letters which referred to patients and politics; for instance, Abraham's letter of the 5 th December 1911 left out his reference to ‘a very intelligent young woman doctor, Dr Horney, whom I cured of fairly severe hysteria two years ago’. Detail of th