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The story as such should be sufficiently well known (see Freud 1985, pp. 459-68; 1986, pp. 504-16;1 Porge 1994, pp. 73-103). In 1904, well after his relationship to Freud had cooled off, Wilhelm Fliess discovered statements about bisexuality in Geschlecht und Charakter by Otto Weininger (1903) that reminded him of some of his own ideas, by then still unpublished. He knew that there was a connection between Weininger and Freud, the link being a friend of the former, Hermann Swoboda. Suspecting that this was how his ideas had reached Weininger, he confronted Freud in a letter who basically confirmed his guess and — when asked — admitted to some personal contact with the young author, even to reading a draft of the book. In early 1906, Richard Pfennig, a librarian in Berlin who was acquainted with Fliess, published a pamphlet denouncing the alleged plagiarism by Weininger in regard to bisexuality and a complementary plagiarism by Swoboda (1904) regarding periodicity in human life; he named Freud as the go-between in both instances of intellectual theft. The same accusation was levelled by Fliess in an end-note to his work Der Ablauf des Lebens (1906a). He had laboured over this book for a long time and considered it the ‘foundation’ of a new biology; its release now apparently prompted him to take action against the two publications from several years back. Swoboda (1906) wrote a rebuttal brochure, in turn triggering a response by Fliess (1906b), and filed a lawsuit alleging slander that failed (see Tögel & Schröter 2002, pp. 319-20, 333-5).
This episode has been discussed at length over the last fifty years. Firstly, biographical studies of Freud dealt with it, such as Jones in his classic account (1953, pp. 314-16), and then Brome (1968, pp. 6-13) and Roazen (1975, pp. 110-12). The latter interpreted it as an example of Freud's own