Letter

To the Editor:

Robert R. Holt is ambivalent about my book, Freud: From Youthful Dream to Mid-Life Crisis (Psychoanalytic Books, 7, 1-8). On one hand he finds it well written, persuasive, and illuminating. He tells us that my book led him to rethink important aspects of Freud's life. My demonstration of the blossoming of feminine imagery in Freud's letters to Fliess, and its relationship to the turmoil and transformation occurring deep in work and psyche during his mid-life crisis, Holt finds striking. Where I differ from previous biographers, as I do about this and other important matters concerning Freud's life and the origins of his theory, Holt finds my version an improvement.

On the other hand, Holt criticizes me for what he considers to be factual errors and misreadings. In all but one of the mistakes he specifies, I am unable to agree. The date I give for the publication of Freud's Autobiographical Study, 1926, is correct; the evidence concerning the nursemaid incident is cited on page 194 of my book and comes from Freud's own account to Fliess on October 15, 1897 (Masson, 1985, pp. 271-272). Holt feels that I fail to appreciate Ellenberger's (1970) point that contemporaries of Freud's were developing psychodynamic theories of neurosis, and that he knew of these ideas. Yet on pages 137-138 of my book, I wrote that as early as 1889 Freud had seen first hand the progress his competitors were making and that, in 1893, it had been pressure from Pierre Janet's research that had helped him convince Breuer to publish their preliminary communication on hysteria. “If he was to become the revolutionary healer of hysteria,” I concluded, “Freud would have to move fast.”

Holt asserts that I infer Freud's dream, and its complicated, binary nature—to become a great scientist and a revolutionary healer—without telling the reader how I arrive at this. The inference is based on Freud's letters to his adolescent friends, Emil