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Freud often wrote short notes and more diary-like entries from his life. Some of them are lost, such as a diary he kept in Greek during his youth and two travel diaries from the 1870s and 1880s, but most of them have been preserved for posterity.
There are many such series of notes. The first one begins in 1882 with a lovestruck Freud who collects notes and souvenirs under the category ‘Index of the letters and signs of love I have received from my dear Martha.' As entry number 3 in this collection, we find: ‘13.6. Her table card, which I stole from the table, where she squeezed my hand under the tablecloth. Together with mine.’ As entry number 6, we find: ‘17.6. Our engagement day. In the afternoon, she gave me a touchingly simple gold bracelet with a pearl, it fits on my little finger, it was too big for her.’
The next example is the ‘secret chronicle’ (Geheime Chronik) from 1883 to 1886, which is said to be a blend of ‘diary and self-confession.’ It was started in January 1883 as a joint project between Freud and Martha when they both lived in Vienna. However, the project took a downward turn after Martha returned to Wandsbek, just outside Hamburg, where she lived for most of the engagement period from 1882 to 1886. Freud complained in a letter to her that ‘one of them’ had not adequately followed up on the project. However, Martha later wrote a ‘foreword’ to the notes that had been made: ‘Romanticism lies behind us. We have decided that these sheets should bear witness to our “spiritual and material état,” to everything that we experienced together in the years that lie ahead of us; perhaps we will both take pleasure in them later, when one event has replaced the other in our memory.’
There are also many sources throughout Freud’s life; some are diary-like notes, while others are brief, bullet-point entries about events in daily life and contemporary happenings. Yet another category is travel diaries, one from the trip to Clark University in 1909 with Jung and Fere