Chapter VII. Betrothal (1882-1886)

No man's inner life, the core of his personality, can be comprehended without some knowledge of his attitude towards the basic emotion of love. Nothing reveals the essence of his personality so piercingly and completely as the gross, and subtle, variations of the emotional responses in this sphere, since few situations in life test so severely his mental harmony.

This was a side of his nature that Freud kept strictly reserved for his private life: his capacity for love and tenderness. His children were, of course, well aware of it in his relation to them, but of his emotional experiences with his wife—or future wife—he never spoke or wrote. The old lady herself, when the early days of their engagement were mentioned, would respond with a beatific smile that recalled her great happiness, but any information she would vouchsafe was naturally factual rather than emotional. Her lover had been wonderful, in her eyes quite perfect; that was the essence of what she had to convey. Only after her death, at the end of 1951, was it possible to inspect the voluminous love letters she had preserved, and I am privileged to have been the only person to do so.

It was not only in later years that the letters narrowly escaped destruction. After her husband's death Mrs. Freud several times threatened to burn them and desisted only on her daughters' request. During part of the engagement itself the couple maintained a joint Chronicle and the intention was to preserve this, with its record of that exciting period, and to destroy all the letters on the day they got married. When the time came, however, she had not the heart to sacrifice all that evidence of devotion, and in the event both survived. So did also a diary Freud wrote of his wooing.

Freud's first savour, at the age of sixteen, of what love could mean we have already mentioned.1 It was clearly a pure phantasy, since there was no relationship at all with Gisela Fluss