On May 29, 1986, Dr. Snyder conducted a joint interview with Peter Gay, Sterling Professor of History Yale University, graduate Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis, author of the National Book Award winning Enlightenment and Interpretation, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Professor of Letters Wesleyan University, Harcourt Award winning author of Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. Dr. Gay is writing a biography of Sigmund Freud, and Dr. Young-Bruehl a biography of Anna Freud.
Dr. Elise Snyder: It's quite extraordinary to have two major biographies of interest to the psychoanalytic world coming out at the same time. Tell me what kind of book you are writing, how big it's going to be and what sources are available to you. Elisabeth?
Professor Elisabeth Young-Bruehl: A little more than a year ago, Anna Freud's literary executor asked me if I would like to do this book, the first authorized biography.
Dr. S: You are, of course, a biographer of note.
Prof. Y-B: The biographer of note for a biography that is probably not of enormous interest in analytic circles. Hannah Arendt was quite hostile toward psychoanalysis. In fact, one reason I've become very interested in psychoanalysis is that this woman, who was my teacher and vastly admired by me, had, I think, a very grave blind spot. I wondered what would happen if one took very seriously the political theoretical work of someone like Hannah Arendt and then put to it everything that she neglected that's in the domain, as it were, of psychoanalysis. So that when the literary executor came to me, there was a very nice conjunction of wishes, though I had sworn to myself I would never do another biography because the first had been so exhausting. The writing of that biography was in some ways the payment of the debt a student has to a teacher; finishing the biography was an end to mourning. I don't have the same personal relationship with Anna Freud.
Dr. S: And you, Peter?
Dr. Peter Gay: My biography began with a request by Norton for a little introduction of approximately 5,000 words. That was a long time ago. The book will be a big, fat, one-volume work of about 500 printed pages: text, plus notes, and a very argumentative bibliography because I plan not to argue at all in the text. In the bibliography, I will mention other views and why I disagree with them, since I don't want to be sovereign, or sound as though I neglect everybody with whom I disagree.
Prof. Y-B: The biography I envision will be in the neighborhood of 300 printed pages, not a megabiography; something that's manageable for a non-specialist reader. The emphasis will be as much on Anna Freud's work as on her life. I think the work is as little known to the general public as is the life.
Prof. G: There's a resemblance between what we're doing, although, of course, there have been many biographies of Freud. The Jones is on my desk, and I must reckon with him all the time. My book will also be a life and works. I, too, want to bring work and life together, without vulgarizing, without reducing the work entirely to Freud's problems. For example, it's not impossible,
and I think it would be useful to understand, why he got interested in the Schreber case, or in Leonardo da Vinci just when he did. One thing I discovered that I did not know, and was not prepared for, was that Freud really took work very hard. He used the words “tortured” and “tormented” all the time. He was tormented by ideas. They were things that happened to him, a disturbance that had to be discharged. He would say, “I'm obsessed with Leonardo,” or, “I'm obsessed with the fact that the opening scene of King Lear and The Judgment of Paris and the story of the three caskets in Merchant of Venice must have the same roots.” He couldn't rest until it was done. What interests me is how certain things began to agitate him at a certain time. It's that, I think, which will integrate the work and the life.
Prof. Y-B: There are particular moments in Anna Freud's life which, I feel, require the kind of attention that's sometimes called psychobiographical. At these junctures, many things in her life came together at one time, and particular things came out of that. For example, in the life of any analyst, the training analysis would be such a juncture. Certainly, this was true for Anna Freud, who was analyzed by her father, but there is no primary or direct documentation to reconstruct with. We know each of them was writing at that time, and we have the recollections of various people. When there is something of major importance with only indirect documentation, one must proceed somewhat speculatively. I do have access to Anna Freud's literary estate which consists of her correspondence. She wrote almost as prodigiously as her father. Most of the letters are post-World War II. She kept carbon copies of the typed letters, and I am trying to assemble the handwritten letters of which she kept no copies. I am contacting people from whom I can, perhaps, gain access to the prewar correspondence. Finally, I am interviewing those contemporaries who are still living and many younger people with whom she worked.
Dr. S: It's clear why we need a biography of Anna Freud. We don't have one. But why do we need another one of Freud? Are new sources available?
Prof. G: Since Janet Malcolm's brilliant book, things have changed. There are still a great many restrictions which have to do with donors who specified certain dates. With that, nothing is to be done. But, a great deal is becoming available thanks to the new direction the Freud Archives, Inc., is taking. It is being very helpful in allowing scholars (not just me) to look at the material. There is, however, a great deal of material which is not in the Freud Archives. For example, the Freud-Ferenczi correspondence now belongs to the city of Vienna. Harold Blum and others are now looking at a large list and may free up numbers of smaller correspondence. There is one very big correspondence which I've just been turned down on by Dr. Eissler. He controls the famous letters between Freud and his fiancée, (approximately 900), which are in the Library of Congress under lock. I've seem them; that is, I've seen the out-sides of the boxes.
Prof. Y-B: Oh, for x-ray vision. There's also the father-daughter correspondence which is in London. Access is very complicated. Some papers are controlled by the Sigmund Freud Copyrights, an organization established by Ernst Freud (Sigmund Freud's son) in collaboration with Anna Freud. They tried to make sense out of Freud's complex dealings with various translators and copyrighters and to put in order Sigmund Freud's papers. This organization handles the financial dealings of the family. Some papers, like Jones' letters from Anna Freud, are with the Institute for Psychoanalysis in London. Some papers are in private hands. Kurt Eissler did the Freuds a very great service by assembling all the papers in Washington. The second generation of Freudians has not yet been studied nor has the material relating to them been assembled. That first generation of trainees, of whom Anna Freud is in some ways the premiere trainee, has not been discussed historically. My biography will be, I suppose, one of the first efforts to bring those people and their relationships to Freud, and to each other, into perspective.
Prof. G: I'd like to give you an example of how this newly available material is helpful. A number of later writers accused Jones of being bigoted, partisan and tendentious about Freud's associates—out of jealousy and envy. Jones said that Ferenczi was rather out of his mind towards the end of his life. When Jones published Freud's response to his letter of condolence after Ferenczi's death, he published only Freud's statements about his sadness. He omitted a page and a half in which Freud diagnosed Ferenczi. Whatever judgment Jones made about Ferenczi's psychosis was not his own, but Freud's. The Abraham correspondence, too, is now available. The editors of the published correspondence, for example, left out a single word in Freud's characterization of Fleiss whom Abraham had met and rather liked. In the published version, Freud says that Fliess was a charming fellow, but a hard man. The word that the editors omitted was “wicked”, or “evil”. They must have thought that Freud would seem harsh, so they left it out. Simpler, more familiar things, like vacation plans were also left out. This is too bad because Freud's relationship with Abraham was cozier than the published stuff indicates. Another reason for a new biography is that there are a great many rumors about Freud. The famous charge is that he had an affair with his sister-in-law. While this would not have been such a dreadful sin, there's nothing to confirm it in the unpublished letters I've, so far, been able to find. Freud wrote very nice letters to Minna before his marriage, but it's very clear that Freud was quite monogamous and interested solely in her sister.
Prof. G: Writing biography is quite different from writing history.
Prof. Y-B: Yes, biography requires a level of detail you probably had never dealt with before.
Prof. G: Actually, I have dealt with it some. I've been very interested in diaries and very private responses, but certain things become very interesting and more important than you might have thought. I'll give you an example. Was Freud circumcised? Yes. I've seen a document. Was he bar mitzvah? Probably not. The question of the observance of Jewish holidays suddenly becomes very interesting in view of the fact that he writes so much about Judaism and it's so important to him that he's not religious.
Again, what were his relations with his sisters and his brother? His sister, Anna, wrote a memoir in 1930 that's very interesting, but when you begin to read the dates …
Prof. Y-B: You realize it's all wrong.
Prof. G: Completely. She's not senile; she's just careless. Errors of that kind warn you to take it easy and not trust too much. Freud says in his brief autobiography, and others have picked it up, that his family was originally quite well off and later ruined. From what I know, it seems they were by no means ever very prosperous. Lots and lots of things become interesting that otherwise would have been not uninteresting, but more marginal. As a historian writing a biography, I find that I have a lot of background material which I like to use. What was Vienna like in the liberal age? What was Vienna like in March 1938? What was it like on the days that Anna Freud was asked to go to the Gestapo?
Prof. Y-B: All good biographers are concerned with their responsibility to present another single individual's life very cautiously. If you get it wrong about what Vienna was like in 1938, you do no harm to a person's, a single person's, reputation. But biography is a very different matter from history. It's a much more intimate matter, and it's a business into which caution is built. You cannot spend a huge amount of time with another person without caring for him or her. If you're not debunking, and if you have any kind of sensible human relationship with anyone, you come to care very much, not only for the person but also for how he or she will be perceived as having lived. So, you go slowly with the controversial or difficult parts of that individual's life.
Prof. G: There is, of course, the problem of getting to like the person with whom you are dealing. Clearly, the biographer should not make a saint, a plaster human being who never gets angry, is never unjust, never unfair, never irrational. Freud was all those things. It is part of the biographer's task to integrate such things into the life.
Prof. Y-B: His daughter is so like him in these tiny details.
Dr. S: You said, Elisabeth, that there was relatively little material of Anna Freud's from before the war. Why is that?
Prof. Y-B: Most of Anna Freud's correspondence was simply abandoned when they left Vienna. What survived are her letters to various people who kept them. We have a complete collection of Anna Freud's letters to Eitingon, from 1920 to 1942.
Prof. G: Where did you find them?
Prof. Y-B: They're part of the Anna Freud Literary Estate. They're quite fascinating, full of household details of various kinds. There is a complete, and I must say horrifying to read, description of every stage of her father's illness which she reports to Eitingon in enormous detail.
Prof. G: She was there every day, putting the prosthesis in and taking it out. I'm dealing with something very problematic for a biographer: the last weeks of Freud's life; an event with only one witness. I guess there were some others. Anna Freud and Jones came in and said goodbye. That's all. You really cannot improve on Schur's description of the last two days.
Prof. Y-B: Yes, you can.
Prof. G: If you could get the material.
Prof. Y-B: Max Schur's letters to Anna Freud contain many discussions of “how shall we tell the story of the last days”.
Dr. S: Tell us about the last days.
Prof. G: The last days are described very touchingly by Max Schur. Actually, there are two descriptions: Max Schur's book, and his Freud lecture. Obviously, it is very possible that the other person who was there, Anna Freud, might have written something. I don't think it would change the last pages of my book very much, but what I am troubled by (and this is a historian's kind of problem) is having only one witness available. Even though you think your witness is one of considerable honesty and integrity, there is still something different between what Max Schur wrote in the 50's (which was rewritten by others in the 60's), and what he might have written in a letter to his wife in America, on September 23, 1939. I'm hoping there is something contemporary.
Dr. S: Do you have some data on that, Elisabeth?
Prof. G: You're bound to have something because Anna Freud was there more than anybody.
Prof. Y-B: There is an elaborate correspondence between Anna Freud and Max Schur about his Freud lecture (the first time he spoke publicly about Freud's death), about Schur's biography of Freud, and about how to tell things. In this correspondence, there are drafts of different versions of the end.
Prof. G: While new information on the end would not lead to radical changes, one gets an urge toward being as authentic as one can be. I think that is very important.
Prof. Y-B: But there are, in a certain sense, two, at least two, versions of that end, which are both true.
Prof. G: Did you say Schur said, “Tell Anna”?
Prof. Y-B: You are really a historian, Peter. Admit it. And I, I don't know. The crux of the question in biographical terms is whether the morphine dose that Schur prescribed at the end was designed to permit Freud a certain kind of graceful exit, or whether it was a minimal amount given to assuage Freud's pain.
Prof. G: Was it the stoic suicide or not?
Prof. Y-B: That is the question.
Prof. G: My assumption, at this point, is that it was.
Prof. Y-B: I say that there are two truths to this. Even if it were the case that the morphine dosage was not designed to be lethal, it is clear that, at that juncture, Freud was not functioning. That is the important point, regardless of the dosage and regardless of Max Schur's attitude toward euthanasia.
Prof. G: In the simplest, the purest sense, I'm writing a biography of Freud, and not of Schur. The question is, did Freud say to him, “Listen! Remember what you promised me the first day we met? That you wouldn't let me suffer”?
Prof. Y-B: That's what I mean by the relativity of historical truths.
Dr. S: What you are really asking, Peter, is not what size dose did Schur give, but did Freud ask him to do it?
Prof. G: Yes, that is my question. Does he shake his hand, as he says in the book and in the lecture?
Prof. Y-B: I think the presentation in the book is perfectly authentic, and also that Schur, quite rightly, tried to protect himself against a charge of euthanasia. So, the end was written to give the impression that they had a pact which was carried out, but not to give the impression that the physician was actually responsible for the death. So, that's what I mean by two stories. That's a very important thing about biography, which Schur and Anna Freud understood when they and others censored a good deal of Freud's work.
Prof. G: First of all, as you suggested, there are two questions. If you take, let's say, Freud's correspondence, where
a word here, a letter there, has been removed, it's a reflection of the kind of middle class culture from which Anna Freud and the others came. This in itself is interesting. There's no point in judging if it's good or bad. It doesn't obstruct the work of the biographer or the historian. On the other question, I would simply say, I'm in favor of as much candor as is humanly possible. My one reservation would be patient's names, particularly if their families are still around. I want to see everything, partly from curiosity, but also because the moment anything is censored, it leads to a kind of festering rumor that something exists which should be hidden. The question of what is discreditable changes from time to time. Jones (whose biography needs to be praised much more than it has been) cleaned up the English in Freud's letters to him. I'm now restoring all the mistakes that Freud made. They're very human and charming errors. They make Freud's English more individual than anything else. Jones complained that he couldn't read Gothic script, and Freud wrote back and offered to write in English. The fact that Freud, who was so sensitive, who would have liked to be perfect, and who loved English and English literature, was willing to write and make mistakes should be, if anything, celebrated and published. Jones didn't think so. My access, not only to Jones' transcriptions but to the letters themselves, allows me to see Freud in more complex ways.
Prof. Y-B: I agree with you completely. I think it is detrimental to the work of psychoanalysis to be cavalier, in any way, with the confidentiality of patients. Freud's patients are, by and large, long dead, but Anna Freud's are not. Anna Freud was always so very careful about preserving the Hampstead Clinic from publicity, from any kind of newspaper articles about herself. This did not stem entirely from her reserve but also from her concern about producing problems in the analyses. She was very, very careful about all this, and anybody who takes up her story ought to be, too.
Dr. S: I feel extremely privileged to have spoken with you and, also, in a sense, to have watched you work. I saw you picking each other's brains. It was quite extraordinary. You were doing a little research in each other's archives.
Prof. G: Perhaps, it was more like trading baseball cards?
Dr. S: Thank you both.
Dr. S: Anna Freud is also the object of rumor. How do you deal with things like that?
Prof. Y-B: More cautiously than the people who make the rumors. Since rumors always connect to something of importance, you can learn a great deal from them. The biographer takes these rumors and falsifications as the locus of questions that need to be asked. I have the challenging task of presenting a life which is of great fascination for its superb sublimations. For example, in a recent biography of Melanie Klein, Anna Freud is described as “the Viennese spinster” who had no interest in the darker sides of human personality and who somehow stayed only in the shallows. This is a tremendous falsification, but I think it's one that is very important to acknowledge. It's hard for most people to understand that a woman who has never married and whose love life has been much speculated about, but, in fact, is not much speculatable about, could be so interesting and so deep. While Anna Freud's life was, in some respects, personally restricted, in other respects, it was not restricted at all. To make such a life interesting to the general reading public is a very compelling task.
Prof Y-B: Also, any person who was associated with the subject of your biography has only a partial view. No rich and round portrait of the subject can be given without the biographer having a very finely tuned sense for what each associate, given his or her own peculiarities, personalities, perspectives and context, could have known about the subject of the biography. When you hear, for example, that Anna Freud was lacking in warmth, you immediately call up in your mind a list of people for whom that would absolutely be the case and another list for whom that would not be the case at all. If you know the differences between those people, you are able to explain something about your subject.
Prof. G: I would add this: Sometimes relations with one person are extremely complicated. People have said both that Freud was fond of Jung and that Freud manipulated Jung, and …
Prof. Y-B: … and both of these are true.
Prof. G: Yes. In fact, in one letter, Freud said, very frankly, that, on the one hand, he needed Jung because he was this big, tall Swiss Aryan, and that, on the other hand, he also liked him. One might take such letters at face value as meaning precisely what they're saying, but…
Prof. Y-B: … but anybody who writes biographies, or is even passingly psychoanalytically informed, has to proceed on the assumption that every relationship has some amount of ambivalence in it.
Prof. G: That leads, of course to the interesting question of why Freud said there is one relation which is not ambivalent, that between the mother and the son.
Prof. Y-B: That's your problem, thank goodness! I have to deal only with what such an opinion might mean for a daughter.
Prof. G: That's true. But I do have to deal with the question of why he said that. Let me ask you a question, and then exploit you. Have you run into any of Anna Freud's letters to William Bullitt? He's a very mysterious creature.
Prof. Y-B: No. There are a number of letters after the war to Jones and others about Bullitt, but not any prewar letters.
Prof. G: The whole Woodrow Wilson book is such a mystery. I've been working on it. The main problem is the authorship. I've been trying to get the manuscript, but it seems to be in the hands of Bullitt's daughter, who apparently won't let anyone see it.
Prof. Y-B: The general feeling in the correspondence I've seen is that Freud wrote only the introductory part.
Prof. G: That is the view of Erikson and also of Richard Hofstadter who reviewed the book when it came out.
Prof. Y-B: There is an extensive correspondence between Erikson, Anna Freud and various other people. In a certain sense, Anna Freud and her circle orchestrated the reviews of that book. They stated, again and again, that Freud's contribution was minimal.
Prof. G: It looks that way, but I've also been reading Bullitt's letters to Colonel House to whom he reported regularly. Also, there is a letter from Freud, in 1934, in the Hoover Institution, of which I've just heard. It seems there was an early version in which Freud really had a bigger share. I would like to think he had no share in the final version, but I'm afraid …
Prof. Y-B: Certainly, the legend that existed in the Freud family doesn't seem accurate.
Prof. G: In his introduction, Bullitt claims that each of them signed the chapters in order to show that they'd worked on them together.
Prof. Y-B: If that had been the case, why would Bullitt have been so shy about coming forth with the manuscript? He would have been delighted to say, “This chapter is by Freud”.
Prof. G: Bullitt's style is all over the manuscript itself and Freud's is over the introduction. I agree with that, but I think Freud's distaste for Wilson was absolutely extreme. There was almost nobody he disliked more.
Prof. Y-B: That is unquestionable. Freud hated balmy idealists.
Dr. S: You've said that Anna Freud's life can be seen in terms of her very extensive sublimations. Her personal life, at least from what little I know, seems to have run on a fairly even keel without major events occurring. It appears to have been a life rich in ideas and work.
Prof. Y-B: I think I may have given a false impression. There were events in her life. For Freud, a man who had hated Vienna all of his life, leaving at the end of his life was a different matter than for Anna Freud who loved Vienna. And that departure was followed closely by the death of her father. That enormous emotions were aroused by these two big losses (which are very deeply connected) may not fit the popular romantic idea of biography, but they are laden events which are the truth of this kind of biography.
Prof. G: In that sense, your biography is harder to write than mine. We have to make it clear to people why this stuff is fascinating.
Dr. S: Freud made the events in his life.
Prof. Y-B: Yes, and then everybody rallied around him and reacted. I never knew, until I opened the correspondence of the Anna Freud Literary Estate, that Anna Freud did not write about the impact of leaving Vienna and losing her father until 1948. You can imagine what holding on to such events for nearly 10 years, and finally speaking them, would mean to such a person. These are not dramatic historical events, but in the context of the way people organize their lives and do or do not talk to other people about how they feel, these are very traumatic events.
Dr. S: You are writing about a very reserved person and you're writing a very intimate biography.
Prof. Y-B: I think so. But I don't know yet because I'm not there yet. When you consider child psychoanalysis and its profound indirect impact on Mr. and Mrs. Everybody's life, through child welfare agencies, divorce court proceedings, methods of child rearing, in conjunction with this reserved and private person, you discover a very interesting tension. You don't find anything quite like that in the life of Freud, who was such an autobiographer.
Prof. G: I intend to get very intimate with him, as well. For example, one is interested, partly because everybody else is, in Freud's sex life. I don't feel an obligation to trace it down to the last detail, nor will anyone ever be able to do that, but, still, one can write about his interests in that area. I think one has to, and I have some guesses which I will be presenting.
Here is another example. At the end of the first world war, he was the one, not his wife, as I would have expected, who organized food supplies and the importation of shoes and clothes and cigars. From his correspondence with his nephew, Samuel Freud, you discover that he was an organizer of the most meticulous, you might say housewifely, sort. So the old cliché about his wife taking on all the burdens of daily life so that Freud could sit and work is incorrect. Freud was very much in there taking care of his family.
Prof. G: What do you mean, they censored a good deal of Freud's work?
Prof. Y-B: I mean, when they published letters. They did this in a principled way. One of the most important stories is the one that lies behind this presentation of Freud to the world after his death. It is about the people who were close to him, what they cared about, and their ideas about what was important for the history and future of psychoanalysis. Theirs were well taken decisions, not simply blithe censorship which sought to remove everything unpleasant about Freud from the record. By the time people started to censor Freud's letters, they had had at least 40 years of experience with distortions and misunderstandings of Freud. They were operating, not on the strict principle of let everything be made public and see what happens, but on the basis of the reception of psychoanalysis for 30 or 40 years. I want, as you do, to see the full unadulterated text, so that I can make up my own mind.
Dr. S: You are saying that we can understand and describe in historical terms why they were willing to falsify or abridge the details of the events to which they were party. Each of you is now writing what will obviously be a significant biography. Both of you live in a place that's half outside of psychoanalysis. I want to ask what you think about, how shall I put it, the truth? What really happened? Those terrible words. How are you going to deal with it?