‘… Written Away and Worried Away …‘1: Sigmund Freud / Martha Bernays: Die Brautbriefe, Vol. 5: ‘Dich so zu haben, wie Du bist‘, edited by Gerhard Fichtner, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis and Albrecht Hirschmüller in collaboration with Wolfgang Kloft (Frankfurt a. Main:  S. Fischer, 2025,  717 pp.)

My title is taken from a letter of Martha's written at the end of June 1886 [1497B]. That letter and those words mark the end of a momentous quarrel, the last ‘battle’ (‘Kampf‘) of their engagement.

This fifth and final volume of the Brautbriefe (‘Engagement Letters‘) begins on 11 October 1885, the date Freud left Wandsbek, where he and Martha had spent over five weeks together. That day he began his journey to Paris where he would be spending the following four and a half months. This would be a critical period which would determine the direction of his career. After his return to Vienna on 4 April 1886, until the wedding on 13/14 September, he would be under constant, almost unremitting pressure – for the present, to establish a viable medical practice, and, for the future, to create the financial and domestic preconditions for married life.

In her wide-ranging introduction to volume 1, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis cannily warns against ‘glorification of interpretation, arrogance of interpretation’.2 In his foundational biography of Freud, Jones, who was the only biographer to have had unlimited access to the Brautbriefe, rightly drew attention to physical and mental pressure as a mitigating circumstance for Freud's unreasonable behaviour during that final quarrel. Bearing both these considerations in mind, readers of the

Brautbriefe will certainly look to this final volume for more information on that potentially fatal rift between the two.

Clearly that was only one fairly brief incident, and future historians or biographers will be mining the various strata of this vast correspondence for all types of information. Grubrich-Simitis's introduction sets out the ency