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That man proposes and God disposes is a generally accepted proposition. Freud, however, being godless, did his own proposing and disposing. He proposed that his private life be kept private, reluctantly exposing—in the service of his scientific formulations in The Interpretation of Dreams and in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life—what he considered far too much of himself. Time and again he destroyed letters, papers, and notes, “mostly to our loss,” Jones, his official biographer, laments. Had it not been for Marie Bonaparte's impassioned and eloquent persuasiveness, he would have had her destroy his letters to Fliess, which she had acquired from an art dealer to whom Ida Fliess, which she had acquired from an art dealer to whom Ida Fliess had sold them after the death of her husband. An Autobiographical Study, written in 1925, is a biography of psychoanalysis rather than of the writer, exposing only as much of its creator as he deemed could reasonably be expected of him and which he could not, in all decency, withhold from his readers. Jones writes that “what he [Freud] revealed of his life was far more carefully selected and censored than is generally supposed.” Yet Freud wrote thousands of letters, their extant number estimated to be between ten and fifteen thousand, making him, according to Mahoney, one of the most prolific letter writers in the history of world literature. And letters, as we know (and as Freud no doubt knew), are disposers par excellence of privacy. Was Freud's unconscious insidiously at work to dispose?
Year by year, Freud's letters to his colleagues and intimates have been coming to light, revealing, as they make their appearance, more