The Freud Files

by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

  We can say much the same thing about the ‘psychosis’ Ferenczi supposedly suffered from at the end of his life. Here again, Freud was at the origin of this mean-spirited fiction. Irritated by Ferenczi’s ‘neo-cathartic’ innovations, he had begun to suggest, during the autumn of 1932, that the latter’s physical deterioration was also accompanied by a ‘psychical and intellectual’ deterioration.249 In April of the following year, while Ferenczi struggled against death, Freud wrote to Max Eitingon that their friend had had a ‘grave delusional outbreak’.250 Five days after Ferenczi’s death, he put the final nail in the coffin: the pernicious anaemia that had taken away his disciple was the ‘organic expression’ of delusions of persecution.

  Freud to Jones, 29 May 1933: It is now easier to comprehend the slow process of destruction to which he fell victim. During the last two years it expressed itself organically in pernicious anemia, which soon led to severe motor disturbances . . . Simultaneously a mental degeneration in the form of paranoia developed with uncanny logical consistency. Central to this was the conviction that I did not love him enough, did not want to acknowledge his work, and also that I had analyzed him badly. His technical innovations were connected with this . . . These were indeed regressions to his childhood complexes.251

  It was well known that, near the end of his life, Ferenczi had bitterly complained about Freud, and some of his students, like Izette de Forest and Clara Thompson, had noted Freud’s hostile behaviour towards his ex-friend. In the biography, Jones assured his readers that there was absolutely nothing to this idle gossiping, though, he added, it was ‘highly probable that Ferenczi himself in his final delusional state believed in and propagated elements of it’.252

  Jones: [Ferenczi’s] mental disturbance had been making rapid progress in the last few months . . . Then there were the delusions about Freud’s supposed hostility. Toward the end came violent paranoiac and even homicidal outbursts, which were followed by a sudden death on May 24 . . . The lurking demons within, against whom Ferenczi had for years struggled with great distress and much success, conquered him at the end, and we learned from this painful experience once more how terrible their power can be.253

  Outraged by this description of Ferenczi’s last moments, the executor of his estate, Michael Balint, vigorously protested to Jones.

  Michael Balint to Jones, 28 November 1957: I think what you say about him [Ferenczi] is in many ways out of true and misleading. This is especially so about what you say of his mental condition during his last period. I saw Ferenczi during the last months of his life on many occasions, once or twice every week, and I never found him deluded, paranoid or homicidal. On the contrary, though he was physically incapacitated by his ataxia, mentally most of the time he was quite fresh and often discussed with me the various details of his controversy with Freud and his plan to revise some of his ideas published in his last papers . . . I saw him on the Sunday before his death and though he was very weak, his mind even then was completely clear.254

  Balint to Jones, 12 December 1957: As mentioned, I have received several letters from all over the world urging me to do something; the last being from Elma and Magda, Ferenczi’s step-daughters, who are, as you know, the legal owners of the Freud–Ferenczi correspondence, asking me to get either a rectification by you or to withdraw the permission to use his correspondence.255

  In his defence, Jones responded that he had received his information from an ‘eyewitness’ whom he did not wish to name. Balint, though, refused to accept this explanation.

  Balint to Jones, 30 December 1957: Several people, among them Clara Thompson, Alice Lowell, Izette de Forest, and so on, have already written to me strongly criticising your description. If you now state that your description is based on the evidence of an eye witness, I am afraid all of them will come forward with their testimony, perhaps even challenging the trustworthiness of your witness . . . By the way, just to satisfy my curiosity, I would like very much to know who your eye witness was. I thought I knew practically all the people who had any contact with Ferenczi during his last weeks and I can’t imagine which amongst them could get in touch with you and describe Ferenczi’s state.256

  Forced into a corner, Jones sent an evasive response; but his letter leaves little doubt as to the identity of this mysterious ‘eyewitness’.

  Jones to Balint, 16 December 1957: Freud himself was in no doubt at all that the changes of views [in Ferenczi] as well as his inexplicable estrangement were due to personal mental changes. It is true that I have come to accept this opinion also, but it did not come from me.257

  Freud had thought so, therefore it was true. The Biography, as we see, was history as seen through the eyes of Freud, the ‘eyewitness’ of the unconscious: on the one hand, there were the colleagues, disciples and patients, literally blinded by their ‘demons’ and their resistances; on the other, the serene self-analyst, capable of seeing what they themselves could not. Perfectly asymmetrical and partisan, Jones’ biography described, quasi-cinematically, the unconscious of adversaries and turncoats as if one were there. History, in turn, became interprefaction. Under the guise of a historical account, the Biography provided Jones the occasion to take up his early battles on behalf of the Freudian cause, and settle scores with his (preferably dead) opponents.

  Eric Fromm to Izette de Forest, 31 October 1957: [This is a] typically Stalinist type of re-writing history, whereby Stalinists assassinate the character of opponents by calling them spies and traitors. The Freudians do it by calling them ‘insane’.258

  Frank Knopfelmacher: It is all there: the miraculous purity of the Founding Personage, the preordained diabolism of Judas (Jung), dazzling vistas of humanity redeemed with apocalyptic visions of perdition and death . . . The steadfast centre (Jones) fighting against the left deviationists (Glover), the right deviationists (Horney, Fromm), and against the unspeakable renegades whose deviations have led them on and on along the slippery path of treachery, until they ended up in the camp of the enemy (Adler, Jung). Yet somehow, nobody gets killed in all this – only character-assassinated. The psychoanalytic game seems to be a sort of unpolitical bolshevism without teeth.259

  And then there is everything we do not find in the Biography’s three thick volumes. We vainly search for the episode of Emma Eckstein’s catastrophic ‘nasal therapy’ (there is only a mention, in passing, that she was one of the women with whom Freud maintained an intellectual relationship260). No mention of the unbelievable erotic-analytic triangle of Ferenczi, Gizella Pálos and her daughter Elma, to which Freud had played the role of family therapist.261 Nothing about the analysis of Anna Freud by her own father.262 Nothing about the suicides of Viktor Tausk and Herbert Silberer, which the analytic rumour attributed to their relationships with Freud.263 Nothing about the murder of Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth, the pioneer of child psychoanalysis, by her nephew-patient; and nothing either about the fact that the so-called A Young Girl’s Diary, which she had edited and Freud had glowingly prefaced, was in reality a complete fabrication.

  Strachey to Jones, 3 March 1956: By the way, can you give me any low down on the Halbwüchsige Mädchen [allusion to the German title of the Diary: Tagebuch eines halbwüchsigen Mädchens]? It always from the first seemed to me it must be a swindle. Was it, as I suppose, another example of Freud’s simpleminded gullibility? (His letter to H.-H. [Hug-Hellmuth], which was used as the preface to the book, will come into Vol. XIV [of the Standard Edition], the metapsychol. [ogical] volume.)264

  Jones to Strachey, 5 March 1956: There was a lot of talk about the Halbwüchsige Mädchen after the war when Rank and Storfer made desperate efforts to check its authenticity.265 Unfortunately H.H. was murdered just then and carried to the grave the secret of who the author was, which was never found out. My own impression is that the diary started by being genuine, but got touched up by either the author or H.H. Cyril Burt and others, I think William Stern in Germany, pointed out some chronological contradictions.266

  Let’s compare with t
he single mention of Hug-Hellmuth’s Journal in the Biography.

  Jones: The anti-German prejudice was of course only part of the general opposition to psychoanalysis, and the years 1921–22 . . . were particularly difficult ones for us in London . . . Sir Stanley Unwin narrowly escaped a police prosecution for publishing the translation of a book issued by the [Internationaler Psychoanalytischer] Verlag, A Young Girl’s Diary, which I had luckily refused to incorporate in our Library Series.267

  The first volume of the Biography appeared in early autumn of 1953. Jones had worked feverishly to make sure it came out before the English translation of the letters to Fliess.

  Jones to Bernfeld, 4 February 1952: The Anfänge [Origins] translation will appear in both London and New York this autumn268 and I am anxious to counteract in time any bad impression it may produce, especially among the critics. I am therefore racing against time to get my Vol. I out first.269

  The effect was immediate, exceeding all expectations. In New York City alone, 15,000 copies were sold in the first two weeks.270 Everywhere, Jones’ work was acclaimed, and the glory of Sigmund Freud immediately spread throughout the world: from London to Sydney, passing through Paris and Frankfurt. The Freudian legend had finally penetrated the masses.

  Sunday Times, 20 September 1953: Changes in the fundamental categories in terms of which we interpret the world and each other, in the very framework of our thought and language, are rare in history; and more rarely still can we attribute such a change to one man. Not to Newton certainly – for mechanism is mature in Galileo and Descartes; to Darwin and perhaps to Marx. But about Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis, there can be no doubt; the word ‘inventor’ can be used without any of the qualifications so common in the history of ideas.

  Scotsman, 8 October 1953: It is difficult to think of any scientific discoverer who so completely revolutionized the field in which he worked as Freud.

  Manchester Guardian, 9 October 1953: Dr. Ernest Jones has drawn the portrait of a man who deserves to be acclaimed, by general consent, among the greatest of any age, a man whose luminous mind shed light on the dark corners of human experience and whose extraordinary personal integrity . . . led him to a path of exploration from which the boldest had previously shrunk. He discovered a new continent of the mind and became its first cartographer.

  World of Books, November 1953: Sigmund Freud has certainly had more influence on our culture than any other mind of our own time – so much influence that it is quite incalculable.

  Griffin, December 1953: This is undoubtedly what gives Freud his place among the greatest thinkers of mankind, that he re-iterated, after Lucretius and Rabelais and Swift and Nietzsche, that thought is conditioned; and that he was able to point to conditions we knew nothing of – for the good reason that we knew them too well and had them under masks.

  It was much the same story after the publication of the second volume.

  New York Post, 18 September 1955: Sigmund Freud had no Newton before him. If the theory of relativity is said to be the greatest feat the human intellect achieved, it is difficult to find words for the attainment of Freud: because Freud also had no Max Planck, no Nernst, no Niels Bohr around him – nobody close to his own level of comprehension except the students whom he later taught.

  Bournemouth Daily Echo, 21 October 1955: Sigmund Freud must be bracketed with Karl Marx and Charles Darwin as one of the three most influential thinkers of modern time.

  Standard, January–February 1955: Today it is a commonplace that Freud’s was one of the seminal minds of all times. As with Darwin and the theory of evolution, it is less significant that he was right or wrong about this or that detail or emphasis, than that he pointed the way. For the way he pointed is one which no conscientious student of human behavior will ever be able to ignore.

  ‘Top secret’271

  One of the very few individuals to adopt a more critical stance was Bruno Bettelheim. Bettelheim, a Viennese immigrant who was not part of the Freudian inner circle, pointed out multiple ‘errors and omissions’ in the biography of Jones – ‘a man’, he said, ‘who is now old and whose personal participation and obvious partisanship have dimmed objectivity’.

  Bettelheim: Despite the deficiencies which must have been obvious to all sophisticated readers, the reviewers have outdone themselves in praise of this biography . . . This is not the definitive biography of Freud, but it is definitely an official biography, presenting that picture of him which members of the Freud family and official psychoanalysis have accepted as definitive. What a splendid history of this great man could now be written if official psychoanalysis had not sealed the Freud archives with twenty-five hundred of his letters for fifty years!272

  Bettelheim appears to have been the first to put his finger on what should have immediately been apparent to the specialised critics: Jones, in his biography, relied on correspondences and documents that were not only unedited, but also prohibited to the public and other researchers. Indeed, no one could verify the accuracy of the facts he reported because the documents he had used were locked away in the ‘Sigmund Freud Archives’ at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, for a period going well beyond the fifty years indicated by Bettelheim. Jones’ advantage over the other historians was a result of this overwhelming fact: how could his version of events be drawn into question when he alone had had access to the archives of Freudianism? Thanks to the policy of retention practised by Anna Freud and the administrators of the Freud Archives, the Holy Scripture was, very literally, incontestable and irrefutable.

  Anna Freud to Jones, 23 September 1952: Only [the] appearance [of your book] will silence the self-appointed biographers since the difference in available material will become apparent. I shall certainly do what I can to discourage others, actually I do it all the time.273

  Anna Freud to Jones, 25 November 1952: I look forward to your book stopping all the impossible attempts at biography of my father which are in the air (and on paper) now.274

  The idea of an archive that brought together all the documents of the Freudian family seems to have taken shape in July 1950, in close connection with the abridged edition of the letters to Fliess and the preparations for the ‘true biography’. Bernfeld, who had just obtained archival documents on Freud’s studies in Vienna, wrote to Anna Freud, suggesting that they join their respective archives in a ‘center of biographical documentation’.

  Bernfeld to Anna Freud, 24 July 1950: I would be curious to know if you intend to create a sort of center of biographical documentation. In other words, if you wish to add to the voluminous collections of letters, etc., that you already possess, the information that is currently in other hands.275

  The idea rapidly took hold, because, in November of the same year, Kurt Eissler, in the name of Anna Freud, contacted Luther Evans, the Librarian of Congress, to inquire about the possibility of depositing the Freudian Archives at the American Library of Congress. One month later, Eissler informed Anna Freud that the articles of incorporation for the ‘Sigmund Freud Archives’, signed by Heinz Hartmann, Bertram Lewin, Ernst Kris, Herman Nunberg and himself, had been registered in the state of New York.

  Eissler to Anna Freud, 23 December 1950: I want to inform you of the progress of our efforts to create the Sigmund Freud Archives. We have submitted the statutes in preparation for setting up the Archives as a registered company in the state of New York, and a contract is going to be signed with the Library of Congress that will allow the Archives to deposit all the assembled documents in the Library’s vaults. The board of directors will have the right to determine who can access the documents and at what date. Consequently, any possibility of indiscretion has been ruled out . . . The person that you designate could then be Vice-President and become an important liaison between you and the Archives, while making the rest of us carry out all of your wishes concerning the Archives.276

  At the same time, Eissler had written to Bernfeld to ask him for advice on the founding of such an arc
hival centre. Bernfeld, in his response, drew up a list of various collections that he believed should be part of the archives: I. Freud’s published works in every language (books, articles, interviews, witticisms and opinions expressed in public); II. Correspondences, manuscripts, personal journals, handwritten notes, annotated texts, personal papers; III. Photographs, portraits, films, family trees of the Freud, Nathanson and Bernays families, interviews with people who had known Freud; IV. Works of those (teachers, friends or associates) who had influenced Freud; V. Reviews of his works, as well as books, articles and pictures that had been approached psychoanalytically. Bernfeld also sketched out two types of possible operations, which he called ‘type A’ and ‘type B’. According to ‘type A’, the Archives would limit themselves to colligating the documents and the testimonials in order to send them directly to the Library of Congress, where they would be ‘accessible to certain people under certain conditions’.277 According to ‘type B’, the Archives would be a genuine research centre managed by a curator, ‘where the documents – under certain conditions – would be made accessible to certain people’, with the exception of those that had been donated sealed, which would be deposited at the Library of Congress. As Bernfeld noted, ‘type A’ would cost practically nothing, since the administrative and archival expenses would be entirely covered by the American taxpayers, while ‘type B’ would require a substantial budget. Nevertheless, Bernfeld made it clear that he preferred ‘type B’, adding that he would be willing to serve as curator, despite the financial sacrifice it would mean for him. Then, in a postscript to which we have already alluded, he suggested the type of research that such a curator would engage in.