Freud's Love Letters: Intimations of Psychoanalytic Theory

During the four-year engagement of Signiund Freud and Martha Bernays between the years 1882 and 1886, Freud wrote more than nine hundred letters to his fiancée.8 Of these, Ernst Freud selected ninety-three for publication, not to illuminate the “theory and practice of psychoanalysis” but because he hoped that they would present a “portrait of the man” who wrote them.1 Yet, regardless of the editor's intention, his father's correspondence is, in fact, rich in suggestions of the attitudes and ideas that Freud was later to develop into his theoretical structure.

The letters express the day-to-day concerns and struggles of a young doctor and his feelings about his fiancée as well as other people and events in his environment—his moods, aspirations, frustrations, successes, reversals, prejudices, and interests. Therefore, they provide us with an invaluable prism through which the ambience peculiar to the structure of bourgeois society in the late nineteenth century Vienna is refracted into its component values, attitudes, and customs. Social status and sex roles are but two aspects of the social environment that reveal themselves in the letters. It is the purpose of this essay to explore Freud's early thoughts in these two, often interlocking, areas, and to show how they are precursors of the concept of the superego in his fully developed theory. I suggest that there is a strong connection between the differences in the manner that men and women in fin de siècle Vienna were thought to acquire social status and the theory that the superego became, according to Freud's later thought, less completely formed in women than it did in men. It will become clear that these early, intimate expressions of the man who was to become the founder of psychoanalysis give us a