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To read the correspondence between Freud and Binswanger is quite a moving experience, mainly because it reveals the lifelong, mutual respect and warmth that permeated their relationship. Beginning with their first meeting in Vienna during a fortnight in 1907, through their additional five personal meetings—the last one encompassing four days in 1936—and their occasional meetings at psychoanalytic congresses, a deep friendship, almost love, developed between the two men. Their correspondence, which continued with varying intensity for thirty years, has now been published by Gerhard Fichtner in its entirety, insofar as documents have been available.
Fichtner's edition is an admirable feat. It offers a conscientious set of footnotes and an excellent introduction. Obviously, the editor has done extensive research; he has, for instance, added the most comprehensive bibliography to date of Binswanger's works. In contradistinction to earlier publications of the Freud-Binswanger correspondence, the letters in this volume have not been censored at all, except that patients' names have been concealed. The book can be compared in quality only to the publication of the Freud-Jung letters.
The Briefwechsel includes 195 written documents, mostly letters but also postcards, telegrams, etc. Of these, 116 written messages are from Freud to Binswanger, and 70 from Binswanger to Freud. Nine letters between Binswanger and Maeder, Häberlin, and Anna Freud complete the volume.
Most of Freud's letters seem to have been preserved, but only about half of those written by Binswanger. Almost all of Freud's letters to Binswanger were carefully kept by him and his family, while some of them have been found in the files of patients of the sanatorium Bellevue in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, where he worked