Letter from Fliess to Freud, July 26, 1904

Berlin, July 26, 1904

Dear Sigmund:

So what Oscar Rie told me in all innocence when I mentioned Weininger was incorrect: he said that Weininger went to you with his manuscript and you, after looking at it, advised him against publication because the content was nonsense. I believe that in this case you should have called his attention and mine to the “burglary.” Weininger himself obviously did not believe — as you do — that he could have gotten the idea of persistent and inevitable bisexuality of all living beings (not merely the predisposition to bisexuality) elsewhere. For on page 10 he states that the idea in this form is entirely new. I would be much obliged to you if you could list for me the other sources about which you wrote — Krafft-Ebing, Kiernan, Chevalier, and so on — in such a way that I could easily find them, for I am not well acquainted with the literature.

Moreover, in his arrhenoplasma and thelyplasma Weininger also stole the idea that the living substance is both feminine and masculine in all living beings — which I deduced from the regular occurrence of 28 and 23 in both men and women.

Until now I did not know what I learned from your letter — that you are using [the idea of] persistent bisexuality in your treatments. We talked about it for the first time in Nuremberg while I was still lying in bed, and you told me the case history of the woman who had dreams of gigantic snakes. At the time you were quite impressed by the idea that undercurrents in a woman might stem from the masculine part of her psyche. For this reason I was all the more puzzled by your resistance in Breslau to the assumption of bisexuality in the psyche. In Breslau I also told you about the existence of so many left-handed husbands among my acquaintances, and from the theory of left-handedness I developed for you an explanation which down to every detail corresponds to Weininger's (who knows nothing about left-handedness). To be sure, you rejected left-handedness