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The correspondence between Freud and Binswanger began after they had met in person and it was later to be interrupted several times because one of them would be visiting the other. These interruptions are indicated within the body of the letters in the appropriate place. Binswanger made a written record of these visits directly afterwards or retrospectively later. Even though these reports cannot make good the gap left by Binswanger's missing letters, they do afford a glimpse into Binswanger's personal impressions of the meetings. Because these notes, as far as they have been published, are no longer easily accessible or have until now not been published at all, they are reproduced below. The report on Binswanger's first visit with Freud, which took place before the correspondence began, precedes the letters in this edition.
Shortly after this visit to Vienna Binswanger made notes about it for himself, which have survived in the original:
On the day I arrived, I attended Freud's seminar2 which took place one evening each week from seven till nine. There were about thirty people there, beginners and advanced, some not doctors, no school psychiatrists; mostly young people, apart from the old guard: Sadger, Stekel, Rank, etc.3 Freud's procedure was to give several participants a subject, on which they would report orally at the next meeting. On the agenda was Shakespeare's Hamlet, from which several scenes were considered psychoanalytically, the most thoroughly Scene 2, Act III, in which Hamlet goes to his mother and says, ‘O, heart, lose not