Sigmund Freud’s Die Brautebriefe
Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays were secretly engaged in 1882. For the next four and a half years, much of which they spent apart for extended periods, they wrote to each other a series letters now known as Die Brautbriefe or the engagement letters. The letters survived the Freud’s swift departure from Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1938. They reveal some interesting details about the founder of modern psychoanalysis, including a brief enthusiasm for cocaine and a desire to control his fiancé that suggested the doctor was in need of therapy as much as any of his patients.
Freud had fallen in love with Martha because of her outgoing, forthright nature. Her early letters reveal a spirited young woman who was a bit of a tease. In a letter written just two weeks into the engagement, Martha wrote to Freud about a dream she had had about them. In the dream, they had held hands and looked into each other’s eyes and then “did something more, but I’m not saying what.” Martha also admitted to kissing another man in another letter.
Martha’s flirtatious ways could have been an excuse for some of Freud’s requirements of her. He did not want her going on outings with other men and in one letter admonished her for pulling up a stocking in public. However, there was something more going on for the overall tone of the letters suggested Freud was trying to train Martha to be his wife, curbing some of her wilder traits so that she was adequately submissive and wholly dedicated to his needs when they married.
“ I will let you rule [the household] as much as you wish,” he explained in one letter, “and you will reward me with your intimate love and by rising above all those weaknesses that make for a contemptuous judgment off women.” In short, Martha was to be a possession, not a partner. It was a matter the couple would battle out during their marriage and that Martha ultimately won by refusing to submit to the role Freud was trying to assign to her.
Then there was the cocaine. In 1884, Freud published a paper About Cocaine’ in which he recommended the drug for a thing as trivial as headaches- and to help with sexual arousal. Freud himself began to use the drug- and shared with Martha some of the effects it was having on him that she could enjoy when they next met: “Woe to you, my Princess, when I come,” he wrote in June 1882. “I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward, you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.”
Freud’s letters reveal a surprising side to the eminent doctor. However, the love letters of Kafka show his dreams were as strange as his fiction.