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James and Alix Strachey were members of the Bloomsbury set associated with Cambridge University, a group possessed of an intellectual brilliance and leadership, commingled with sexual fluidity, that disposed several of its members to an interest in psychoanalysis. These characteristics were decidedly pronounced in James and in his older brother, Lytton Strachey, whose biographies
of Queen Victoria and of Elizabeth and Essex set a new style and fascinated Freud. James's first description of Alix, in a letter to Lytton, described the American-born young woman as "delightful—an absolute boy" (p. 23). He lamented that, although he had raised a beard, he had not succeeded in convincing anyone that he had "fucked a woman" (p. 21).
James and Alix were a devoted couple for nearly fifty years, with no need, as the letters attest, for pretenses by either of them. They married in June of 1920 (a suicidal threat by Alix seems to have had something to do with this), and their honeymoon proved to be the prelude to James's analysis with Freud. The latter was favorably impressed by James's ambition to become a psychoanalyst himself, though less so by the notion that his ambitions should lead to a reduction in fees.
After James's analysis began, Alix developed "neurotic symptoms," and she asked to be analyzed by Freud too. Though Freud deemed this unusual, he acquiesced. Soon he had an unusual proposal of his own to make: he suggested that they translate one of his works into English. Freud was delighted with their accomplishment and assigned them other works, so that their translations became a regular part of their analyses.
When Alix's analysis had to be interrupted, permanently as it turned out, in February of 1922, because of influenza, she was tended by Freud's own physician, Felix Deutsch. When they left Vienna in June 1922, Freud affirmed that they were both competent to practice psychoanalysis, and he gave them his case histories to take home for translation. This