Introduction to The Sigmund Freud-Ludwig Binswanger Correspondence 1908-1938

‘I think you are forcing me too hard into a father pattern which I do not altogether fit into. On the one hand I am the venerable old father deserving of piety and forbearance, sympathy even, because he has such a burden to bear till the end of his days; then I am the sinister despot punishing every free expression with banishment; then I am Cronos who devoured his own children. I heard today that I am one of those people who are sufficient to themselves and therefore cannot accept anything from others. I think all this amounts to illusions in the mirror of transference.’

When Freud wrote these lines at the age of 56 to Johannes Marcinowski1 in November 1912, the split with Josef Breuer already lay far behind,2 but the break-up of the friendship with Wilhelm Fliess, to whom Freud had written his last letter in July 1904,3 was still painful. The defections of Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Stekel were still fresh in the memory4 and one could already sense the revolt of the ‘crown prince’ C.G. Jung who, a little later, reproached Freud with ‘playing the father’.5 Enough breaks, then, to make him defend himself from outside voices, perhaps even inside voices, who doubted Freud's ability to conduct friendships with people who developed divergent views and opinions.