Test and Protests: Sigmund Freud/Martha Bernays: Die Brautbriefe. Band 3. ‘Warten in Ruhe und Ergebung, Warten in Kampf und Erregung’, edited by Gerhard Fichtner, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis and Albrecht Hirschmüller in collaboration with Wolfgang Kloft (Frankfurt a. Main:  S. Fischer, 2015,  617 pp.)

The third volume of the Sigmund Freud-Martha Bernays Brautbriefe takes us from the beginning of January to the end of August 1884. Freud's first letter, on 2 January 1884, opens with a sentence that sets out one of the persistent themes of the correspondence:

I was just hesitating whether I should chat with you or read medical newspapers, but humanity and love took the upper hand and I am writing to you. (512F)1

Love and work are at odds. What we are reading - as far as Freud's side of the correspondence is concerned - is a narrative of love taking the upper hand.

But, more often than not, his theme, as well as hers, is his work. Clearly, without a basis of unremitting work this long engagement will never be terminated, nor will there be any foundation for their future married life. Martha fully accepts this situation as their fate. Her letter on 2 January 1884 welcomes the fact that so much work is coming his way. She accepts the role of encouraging and consoling her hard-working fiancé: she worries that he is not getting enough sleep.

If we accept that the marital duties of a late-nineteenth-century doctor's wife were not genetically innate or ‘hard-wired’, then we concede that considerable cultural grooming has been necessary for the couple to reach this point of apparent