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This is a historic event: the publication of the first of five volumes of the betrothal letters exchanged between Freud and his future wife, Martha, during their long engagement, from June 1882 until September 1886. Any collection of the private letters of famous people is a unique historical source about their life and work. These letters constitute the missing link between two previously published, important sets of correspondence: the letters between Freud and a friend from his adolescence, Eduard Silberstein1; and those between Freud and his first close professional friend, Wilhelm Fliess.2 Together these three collections form a major source of what we know about Freud's personality and his psychological and philosophical ideas that blossomed in those early days, going on to bear fruit during the remainder of his lifetime in the published works that make up the Standard Edition.
The sheer size of the Freud/Bernays betrothal correspondence, well over a thousand letters, is nothing short of staggering. The moving portrait of Freud that emerges is bound to stimulate admiration and controversy alike. Some of these and other letters were previously published, also in German,3 but we now have the complete correspondence between Freud and Martha in this new 2011 collection. It represents the last labor of love of the recently deceased, great Freud historian and