Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007

Cover of Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007
Kathleen Holt
EDITOR
Jennifer Viviano
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Leigh van der Werff
PUBLICATIONS ASSISTANT
Allison Dubinsky
COPY EDITOR
Editorial Advisory Board
Tom Booth
Brian Doyle
Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Marianne Keddington-Lang
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Linny Stovall
Rich Wandschneider
Curt Yehnert

Oregon Humanities, a journal of ideas and perspectives about the humanities, is published biannually by the Oregon Council for the Humanities, 812 SW Washington Street, Suite 225, Portland, Oregon 97205.

We welcome letters from readers. If you would like a letter published, subject to editorial discretion, please include a daytime telephone number. Letters may be edited for reasons of space or clarity. Oregon Humanities is provided free of charge.

To be on the mailing list to receive this magazine, please e-mail us, or call the OCH office at (503) 241-0543 or (800) 735-0543.

To submit articles and essays for consideration, please read our writers' guidelines.

Secret Lives: Sigmund Freud

Recently scholarly sleuthing has uncovered evidence adding to a mystery that has long confounded those who study the life and work of Sigmund Freud, the "father of psychoanalysis" and author of The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and many other books and essays: did Freud have an illicit affair with his wife's sister, Minna Bernays?

Sigmund Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886. They had six children. Martha's younger sister Minna joined the Freud household after the death of her fiance and lived with the Freud's from 1896 until her death in 1941. Freud's first official biographer, Ernest Jones, author of Sigmund Freud: Life and Work (published from 1953-1957) took pains to cast the relationship between Sigmund and Minna, which included traveling, sans Martha, in a completely platonic light.

In an interview published in 1969, however, Carl Jung, long a student of Freud, reported that Freud did have an intimate relationship with his sister-in-law Minna. Freud scholars such as Kurt R. Eissler and Peter Gay dismissed Jung as a slandering rival. When, in the 1980s, scholar Peter Swales suggested that in addition to an affair, Freud impregnated Minna and then facilitated her abortion, other Freud scholars discounted his work as "Freud-bashing."

A recent discovery by German scholar Franz Maciejewski may change the official word on whether Freud had a sexual relationship with Minna. In his recent article in American Imago, Maciejewski details how he retraced "the first trip Freud and Minna ever took alone together." While examining the original guestbook at the Hotel Schweizerhaus, Maciejewski found that Freud misrepresented Minna as his wife in the registry: "[Freud's] entry reads, 'Dr. Sigm. Freud u[nd] Frau/Wien.' Freud and his 'wife' occupied Room No. 11, which is to this day a standard double room." For Maciejewski, and many other Freudian scholars, the hotel ledger is "empirical evidence" of the long-suspected affair.

In a December 24, 2006, New York Times article, journalist Ralph Blumenthal reports, "The evidence is persuasive enough for Peter Gay, the Freud biographer and longtime skeptic on what he called 'the Minna matter,' to say that he is now inclined to revise his work accordingly." Gay says, "It makes it very possible that they slept together. It doesn't make him or psychoanalysis more or less correct."

--Mary Rechner

Published in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities