
Still, what I found was interesting enough. Thus a dozen or so letters from Minna Bernays dating from summer 1910 were obviously replies to messages from Freud - which were It consisted of clusters of letters but displayed sizable gaps. In contrast, Minna Bernays's was more problematical: she often dashed off notes in pencil, about train schedules and absorbing domestic detail.

Freud's German script,Īfter years of study an old companion, offered no resistance. There I was, in the large, peaceful manuscript room, sitting at my familiar table. To Washington and had the pleasure - every scholar will know what I felt - of being the first to go through the precious bundle. Realistically, whatever my luxuriant fantasies, I expected no passionate passages.Īnd I knew that the absence of erotic material in these letters could offer no conclusive demonstration one way or the other: how does one prove a negative? When I learned that the Freud-Minna Bernays correspondence was accessible, I hurried Some of the evidence might be in the letters that Freud and Minna Bernays exchanged throughout their long lives, now housed at the Library of Congress and recently opened. Did he have a love affair with her, or did he not? Probably the most titillating of these, which has been generating gossip for perhaps 75 years, is his relationship with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays. Sigmund and Minna? The Biographer as Voyeur By PETER GAY s every biographer of Freud must ruefully acknowledge, that great unriddler of mysteries left behind some tantalizing private mysteries of his own. Sigmund and Minna? The Biographer as Voyeur
