Is There Still an Unknown Freud? A Note on the Publications of Freud's Texts and on Unpublished Documents

It is one paradox of historical research that the further back in the past the object lies, the more we know about it. Today, we know (or could know) substantially more about Freud than we did ten years ago, and we will know even more about him in the future. And yet the writing of history may well be another impossible profession: the judgement of contemporary witnesses is biased by their own interest, their involvement and their lack of distance, and that of later generations by the ever-growing temporal and emotional distance and, in many cases, by interests of their own that often have little to do with a truly historical perspective.1 Although it may be argued that the resulting view of history is more objective than that of contemporaries, this is counterbalanced by the fact that it becomes ever more difficult to empathize, to ‘feel ourselves’ into that now distant and alien past, and to reconstruct it from ‘within’. The situation is comparable to that of infant research. The research subjects can no longer, or not yet, speak, and we have to lend them our own voice. Differently put, both infants and silent documents do have something important to say, but we have to learn and to respect their own peculiar language to understand them, without forcing our own agendas on them.

The past years have seen a veritable avalanche of publications of and on Freud: hitherto unpublished correspondence, other primary materials, and a