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The publication of the 119 Rundbriefe, or circular letters, is an essential addition to the growing library of the epistolary history of psychoanalysis that arose around Freud and his legacy. Freud's still untapped enormous correspondence on the shelves of the Library of Congress exceeds, by some accounts, the size of the entire Standard Edition. In the 1970s appeared the seminal Freud/Jung letters, in addition to published exchanges with Abraham, Arnold Zweig, and Binswanger, to be by followed by the Spielrein/Freud/Jung correspondence (Lothane, 1996a) and more recently by Freud/Fliess, Freud/Jones, and Freud/Ferenczi letters. Thus, the publication of these 119 letters constitutes a historical occasion.
For decades Otto Fenichel (1897-1948) was widely known as the author of the 1945 encyclopedic The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, the Bible, for want of textbook, of Freudian psychoanalysis. The emphasis here is on causal theory, in medical parlance: etiological, theory, of neurosis, which for Fenichel meant the Freudian doctrine, that is, sexual, theory of causation of neurosis. Is neurosis universally caused by sex? Freud's early answer was embodied in his original libido theory and powerfully stated in the canonical 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the locus classicus of “orthodox” Freudism. The Freudist doctrine of sex provoked opposition already during the first ten years of the existence of psychoanalysis, both within psychoanalysis and as a public debate; and it is still with us. The first historical schism over the sexual theory of neurosis was played out between Freud and the first schismatics: socialist Adler in 1911 and spiritualist Jung in 1913, who both opposed what they saw as Freud's reductionist pansexualism. Causal theories were a mixed bag in Freud