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[postcard]
3 November 1909
407 Brunswick Avenue
Toronto
Dear Professor Freud,
I have collected a number of interesting facts about superstitions and beliefs relating to the right and left side respectively. Could you give me any idea as to the relation of the subject to sexuality? I know of course Fliess' hypothesis about left-handedness, but I don't suppose you at all agree with that.1
Things are going well here with Brill and myself.
Yours ever
Ernest Jones.
Wilhelm Fliess (1858-1928), ear, nose, and throat specialist, practicing in Berlin; close colleague of Freud between 1897 and 1900. Fliess posited that bisexuality was associated with right- and left-handedness, and that secondary sexual characteristics of the nondominant bisexual disposition are more prominent in those who are left-handed; see , Der Ablauf des Lebens: Grundlegung zur exakten Biologie (Leipzig, 1906), pp. 537-571. In a letter to Abraham of 6 April 1914, Freud denounced Fliess's theory; see H. Abraham and E. Freud (1965, p. 171). This note is also revealing of Jones's attempts at exploring his own bisexuality. See especially his comments to Putnam about right and left of I July 1910 in Hale (1971a, p. 221).