Response to Richard Skues

In his article on the anonymous ‘heroine’ of Freud's first case history , Richard Skues makes the claim that Stefan Goldmann and I both erred in identifying her as Freud's own wife, Martha Bernays. Not only was our identification based on ‘remarkably thin material on which to publish [such] a thesis’, but the reason why we could sustain it in the first place is because we ‘let [our]selves be caught out by the assumption that Freud was likely to be quite untrustworthy in his case histories’ - in Skues's words, that he was a ‘duplicitous liar’ and an ‘inveterate fabricator’. Skues himself, on the other hand, avoided this pitfall by ‘start[ing] from the position that Freud is telling the truth’, which allowed him to establish ‘beyond any reasonable doubt’ that the subject of Freud's essay was not Martha but an acquaintance of hers named Cathinka Schmidl, née Kadisch. What better proof that polemics and ‘name calling’ make for bad history?

I suppose I should be grateful to Skues for setting me back on the path of sound historiography from which I (and Goldmann) appear to have so grievously strayed. But I must object most emphatically to the premise on which his construction is based: at no point in the single footnote in which I set out some of the reasons for my identification of Martha did I impute to Freud any mendaciousness or duplicity. Like Goldmann in his much more detailed article on the same subject, I was content with allowing that Freud deliberately changed some details in the case history in order to mask the patient's identity, as he did on many other occasions for reasons of medical discretion. A modicum of concealment is to be expected in any of Freud's case histories, so the question can only be whether the preponderance of the evidence is enough to tip the balance in favour of a positive identification. Setting a standard of proof beyond any reasonable doubt,