The Freud Files

by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

  Bernfeld, obviously basing his work on the passage in The Interpretation of Dreams, succeeded in identifying the anonymous morphinomanic whom Freud claimed to have cured. It was Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, a colleague and a friend of Freud who had used morphine to combat the extreme pain following the amputation of a finger. Exactly as Erlenmeyer had found in his own patients, Fleischl-Marxow developed a cocaine addiction thanks to Freud’s treatment. He died six years later, addicted to both morphine and cocaine.135 Bernfeld asked Jones if the Betrothal Letters shed further light on this episode. Jones confirmed that the letters contained ‘valuable and unexpected’ information136 on this subject, and added that he would plead Bernfeld’s case with Anna Freud, to enable him to consult at least this part of the correspondence.

  Jones to Bernfeld, 28 April 1952: What a company they were. Meynert drank. Fleischl was a bad morphinomanic and I am afraid that Freud took more cocaine than he should though I am not mentioning that.137

  Jones to Strachey, 27 May 1952: The way Freud thrust the cocaine on everybody must have made him quite a menace; even Martha had to take it to bring some bloom into her cheeks! . . . He was only interested in the magical internal effects of the drug, of which he took too much himself. Even years later he and Fliess were always cocainising each other’s nose.138

  Jones to Anna Freud, 3 May 1952: I daresay you know that Bernfeld is writing up the cocaine episode. Should you agree to my sending him the extracts from the Br.Br. [Braut Briefe] on the subject? There would be nothing personal in them, but there is a full account of his experiences with it.139

  Anna Freud gave her permission, presumably because she hadn’t considered the implications. The letters revealed several ‘unexpected’ matters:140 1 Fleischl’s treatment had been a failure: ten days after the demorphinisation cure prescribed by Freud, cocaine had not suppressed the suffering nor the symptoms of lack. The physician Theodore Billroth tried a new operation on the amputated stump, prescribing morphine to Fleischl.141 Freud’s claims in his article which appeared the following month that he had cured his patient of his morphine addiction were baseless.

  2 Fleischl continued to take cocaine ‘regularly’142 in the summer, progressively increasing the dose during the winter and autumn of 1884–5. Thus, contrary to Freud’s affirmation in his talk in March 1885, it was simply not the case that Fleischl had not developed any addiction to cocaine.

  3 Contrary to what he later claimed in his rejoinder to Erlenmeyer and in the passage of The Interpretation of Dreams concerning his ‘unhappy friend’, Freud did indeed administer injections of cocaine to Fleischl in January 1885 to try to calm his persistent pain, after which Fleischl started to inject himself with excessive doses of cocaine.

  Bernfeld dealt with these issues with an exemplary tact in his article, which appeared posthumously in 1953.143 The first point was purely and simply passed over in silence and the second was hardly touched on. He simply noted, without drawing the obvious conclusion, that the passages of Ernest Jones’ forthcoming biography led him to ‘think that it was probable’144 that Fleischl’s addition to cocaine began to be noted in the winter of 1884–5. As for the third point, Bernfeld underlined the contradiction between Freud’s response to Erlenmeyer and his defence of subcutaneous injections in his article of 1885, as well as the fact that Freud never subsequently referred to this article. But these points were used to concentrate on this omission and to see it as ‘an unconscious dishonesty – a forgotten act’145 due to his feeling of guilt of having realised his unconscious desire to kill Fleischl (Bernfeld invoked the dream of ‘Brücke’s laboratory’ in The Interpretation of Dreams). This effectively diverted attention from what Freud had said about the use of the syringe. Bernfeld concluded his article by affirming that Freud had abandoned all his research on cocaine from 1887, whilst still citing a passage from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams on the topic of his practice of nasal cocainisation in 1895, conceding that Freud had for some time maintained a ‘limited and skeptical’ interest in the question for some time.146

  Despite these evasions, the article provoked a veritable ‘fizz’147 with Anna Freud.

  Anna Freud to Jones, 19 September 1952: I did not like it at all, except the facts which are very interesting. But the interpretations, with which the facts are intermingled (hers, I am sure), are loose, wrong and sometimes ludicrous. Please do not let him publish it in this form. After all, you know now how all these things really happened and it should be your role to silence the other biographers, who have to invent half of their facts.148

  Jones to Strachey, 22 September 1952: How did you know Anna’s reaction to Bernfeld’s cocaine? By the same post I get a letter from her begging me to stop him.149

  To prevent a similar explosion regarding the chapter he was preparing on the same episode, Jones quickly dissociated himself from Bernfeld.

  Jones to Anna Freud, 22 September 1952: The more I know of the history the less do I think of Bernfeld’s work. The evil genius is certainly that pest Suzanne . . . I have written a chapter on cocaine (not finished) which I hope you will like better than theirs.150

  Jones to Anna Freud, 31 October 1952: I hope you will like my cocaine chapter better than Suzanne’s melodramatic and badly informed effort . . . There has been a good deal of speculation about the mystery people have sensed in the cocaine story, so I am sure the best way to dispel it is to give a straightforward account that will make it quite intelligible.151

  In reality, Jones’ chapter reproduced Bernfeld’s article, sometimes nearly word for word, adding further information gleaned from the Brautbriefe. Jones gave a more detailed and vivid description of Fleischl and his disastrous demorphinisation cure. In a rash manner, he made explicit some points which Bernfeld had been careful to avoid. ‘For a short time’, he claimed, Fleischl’s demorphinisation had been ‘very successful’152 and ‘the cocaine had for some time helped’ to control153 some of his symptoms. These were vague and misleading statements, aimed at explaining how Freud could have made false claims for success in his 1884 and 1885 articles. Jones underlined that Freud had affirmed in his April 1885 article that his patient had not developed any addiction to cocaine, but added in a fallacious manner that ‘(this was before Fleischl had suffered from cocaine intoxication)’.154 As for Freud’s denials of the use of the syringe, Jones simply reiterated Bernfeld’s psychoanalytic exculpation, through appealing to an ‘unconscious repression’155 and to ‘unconsciously determined’ behaviour (but he omitted references to Freud’s death wishes towards Fleischl).156

  Fortunately for Jones, this was enough to soften Anna Freud, who gave his chapter her imprimatur.

  Jones to Bernfeld, 22 December 1952: Yes, A. F. has, rather to my surprise, passed all my chapters. For what it is worth I may tell you that she hopes you will not publish your cocaine one, so I don’t know what to advise you about it. She asked me to influence you not to.157

  Bernfeld didn’t understand why Anna Freud had objected to his article and not to Jones’ chapter, which, he noted, went much further than his.

  Bernfeld to Jones, 31 December 1952: Don’t try further to influence me not to publish it. I have written to Miss Freud and asked for her comments.158

  This was Bernfeld’s last letter to Jones. In December 1951, he had survived a coronary thrombosis. He died in April 1953. Ironically, it was Jones, whom Anna Freud had considered too frail for the task, who survived Bernfeld, and who profited from Bernfeld’s research in writing the Freud biography.159

  The Jones biography: the definitive form of the legend

  The episode of the collaboration between Bernfeld and Jones illustrates the manner in which the Freud biography was a communal enterprise of Freudian insiders, and how the historical information on which it was based was centralised, filtered and controlled by Anna Freud. From her house in Hampstead (now the location of the Freud Museum), she decided in a sovereign manner who could have access to what, which documents could be published or cited, and wh
ich events of her father’s life could be mentioned or rather should be omitted. Thus Jones was able to read complete correspondences and documents which were restricted for other researchers, in part or completely, for decades, and in some cases remain so: the complete letters to Fliess (published in 1985), the Betrothal Letters, the Secret Chronicle (accessible to researchers since 2000), the correspondences with Minna Bernays, Karl Abraham, Oskar Pfister, Sándor Ferenczi, C. G. Jung, Max Eitingon and Abraham Brill, as well as the journals of Marie Bonaparte. Just like Kris with the Fliess letters, Jones submitted the chapters of his biography to Anna Freud for her approval and critique. Her censure sometimes concerned trivial as well as significant points. For example, Jones was instructed not to mention Freud’s chronic constipation.160 This was one of the rare points on which he disobeyed. He was interdicted from mentioning that Martha’s brother, Eli Bernays, had illegitimate children (his legitimate son, the famous publicist Eli Bernays, threatened a law suit).161 In other letters, Anna Freud demanded that Jones should remove or modify passages on Abraham,162 and Pfister,163 and complained that Ferenczi ‘comes off badly’.164 However, in the main, she didn’t have to censor much, as Jones had already done the bulk of this. Much smarter in this regard than Bernfeld, he knew how to anticipate her desires and to avoid contentious issues or at least present them from the most favourable angle.

  Jones to Anna Freud, 28 November 1951: Your father used to call me the diplomat of the [International Psychoanalytic] Association, but sinking myself in his thoughts in this work makes me absorb something of his ruthless integrity and aversion to compromise. In the matter of his neurosis, for example, I naturally lay the chief stress on the mighty achievement of overcoming it single-handed, for I really think his self analysis was his greatest feat. But I don’t want critics to say, ‘Naturally Jones, being a blind admirer, gives a one-sided picture and omits this, that and the other.’165

  Jones’ biography was a brilliant dramatisation of the Freudian legend. As we have seen with his treatment of Bernfeld’s article on cocaine, Jones was past master in the art of utilising documents and accounts to which he alone had access to flesh out and confirm Freud’s accounts whilst eliding the contradictions. When Kris abridged the letters to Fliess, he deliberately cut their anecdotal aspects, rendering them ‘more arid’ and ‘austere’ than they actually were.166 By contrast, Jones did not hesitate to be a raconteur, embroidering the anecdotes narrated by Freud and adding more striking details. These embellishments never contradicted the master-narrative proposed by Freud and the troika of Ernst Kris, Anna Freud and Marie Bonaparte. Indeed, they fleshed it out and made it more vivid. Consequently Anna Freud, who had been irritated by the ‘sensationalism’ of the unauthorised biographies, was not troubled by them.

  This method of dramatisation is particularly evident in the treatment Jones reserved for what he called the ‘Fliess period’. Relying on the unpublished portions of the correspondence, he did not hesitate to divulge all sorts of details about the famous ‘neurosis’ that Anna Freud had suggested Kris keep quiet or at least downplay. Freud, he revealed, had for almost ten years suffered from a ‘very considerable psychoneurosis’167 – characterised by a ‘passionate relationship of dependence’168 with Fliess – from bouts of severe depression,169 from fears of death and travelling,170 from an inhibition about going to Rome,171 as well as from cardiac problems that were psychosomatic in origin172 (Jones thus repeated the diagnosis Kris had made in private). Freud, quite literally, had suffered as a martyr.

  Jones: His sufferings were at times very intense, and for those ten years there could have been only occasional intervals when life seemed much worth living. He paid very heavily for the gifts he bestowed on the world, and the world was not very generous in its rewards.173

  Jones even went so far as to mention that Freud had taken cocaine prescribed to him by Fliess to treat a nasal infection. The two men, he said in jest, evinced ‘an inordinate amount of interest . . . in the state of each other’s nose’.174 But everywhere else, Jones systematically minimised Freud’s enthusiasm for nasal therapy and Fliess’ theories. These ideas belonged to the ‘realm of psychopathology’175 and Fliess, in fact, had developed ‘persecutory ideas’176 about Freud at the time of their falling out. The emphasis Fliess placed on the somatic processes at work in sexuality ‘must have been a drag on Freud’s painful progress from physiology to psychology’,177 while their discussions were ‘duologues rather than dialogues’.178 Freud’s strange infatuation with Fliess’ wild imaginings is explained by his ‘unconscious identification’179 of his friend with his father – and this had faded away when Freud undertook an analysis of his ‘deeply buried hostility’180 towards his father after the latter’s death, discovering in quick succession the Oedipus complex, the meaning of dreams and the role of infantile sexuality that, until then, had been concealed by the (neurotic) theory of paternal seduction. In thus making self-analysis the key to Freud’s strictly psychological discoveries, Jones faithfully conformed to the version of events sketched out by Freud and consolidated by Kris,181 while giving them an even more pronounced psychoanalytic turn. History was put at the service of the scientific myth, embellished with the trappings of archives and documents.

  Jones: In 1897 [Freud] embarked, all alone, on what was undoubtedly the greatest feat of his life. His determination, courage and honesty made him the first human being not merely to get glimpses of his own unconscious mind – earlier pioneers had often got as far as that – but actually to penetrate into and explore its deepest depths. This imperishable feat was to give him a unique position in history.182

  We find the same method in the chapter dedicated to the ‘Breuer period’. In his edition of the letters to Fliess, Kris had systematically eliminated all the passages in which Freud rather viciously maligned Breuer, despite all the professional and financial assistance that his ex-friend had given him over the years. Jones, on the other hand, didn’t hesitate to point out the ingratitude and ‘bitterness’183 of Freud’s comments – something he found difficult to explain. Better yet, he scrupulously quoted all the passages in which Breuer insisted on the role of sexuality in the neuroses, thereby contradicting what Freud had written about the resistance of his collaborator. But Jones also cited the less than flattering descriptions of Breuer in Freud’s letters: that of a ‘weak’ and indecisive man whose ‘pettifogging kind of censoriousness’184 prevented him from him from fully assenting to the revolutionary theories of his young colleague. And above all, the major ‘leak’: Jones made public the fable of Anna O.’s hysterical childbirth which Freud, as we have seen, had been spreading in private to discredit Breuer and counter his objections to the exclusively sexual aetiology of the neuroses. Jones even gave the real name of Breuer’s patient, which he had discovered in the Betrothal Letters, and he claimed that one of these letters ‘contain[ed] substantially the same story’185 that Freud had told him – which was false.186 For good measure, he added his own embellishments, claiming that Breuer, after fleeing the hysterical childbirth ‘in a cold sweat’, had departed the next day with his wife for Venice where they conceived a daughter who, ‘born in these curious circumstances’,187 was fated to commit suicide sixty years later in New York City (absolutely nothing in this sensational story is true).

  Just as with Bernfeld, Jones regularly sent drafts of his chapters to James Strachey, who was working on the volumes of the Standard Edition (this project, begun immediately after Freud’s death, can be considered the third pillar of psychoanalysis’ official history, after The Origins of Psychoanalysis and Jones’ biography). In response to receiving the three chapters to be included in the first volume, Strachey sent Jones ten pages of very detailed commentary on many points, one of which was the story of Anna O.’s hysterical childbirth.

  Strachey to Jones, 24 October 1951: Breuer’s adventure. Freud told me the same story with a good deal of dramatic business. I remember very well his saying: ‘So he took up his hat and rushed fro
m the house.’ – But I’ve always been in some doubt of whether this was a story that Breuer told Freud or whether it was what he inferred – a ‘construction’ in fact. My doubts were confirmed by a sentence in the Selbstdarstellung (G. W. 14, 45): ‘Aber über dem Ausgang der hypnotischen Behandlung lastete ein Dunkel, das Breuer mir niemals aufhellte . . .’ [But over the final stage of this hypnotic treatment there rested a veil of obscurity, which Breuer never raised for me] And again (ibid, 51): ‘Er hätte mich durch den Hinweis auf seine eigene erste Patientin schlagen oder irre machen können, bei der sexuelle Momente angeblich keine Rolle gespielt hatten. Er tat es aber nie; ich verstand es lange nicht, bis ich gelernt, mir diesen Fall richtig zu deuten und . . . zu rekonstruiren.’ [He might have crushed me or at least disconcerted me by pointing to his own first patient, in whose case sexual factors had ostensibly played no part whatever. But he never did so, and I could not understand why this was, until I came to interpret the case correctly and to reconstruct . . . it.] But you seem on p. 20 to have further evidence on the subject. Were Freud’s published remarks put in that form for reasons of discretion?188