Psyche, Science, and Society

Maybe Freud did have an affair with his sister-in-law

December 27th, 2006

For decades it was rumored that Sigmund Freud had had an affair with his wife’s sister Minna Bernays. Carl Jung claimed so, but others denied it. Now a German sociologist has found a new tantalizing bit of evidence:

But a German sociologist now says he has found evidence that on Aug. 13, 1898, during a two-week vacation in the Swiss Alps, Freud, then 42, and Miss Bernays, then 33, put up at the Schweizerhaus, an inn in Maloja, and registered as a married couple, a finding that may cause historians to re-evaluate their understanding of Freud’s own psychology.

A yellowing page of the leather-bound ledger shows that they occupied Room 11. Freud signed the book, in his distinctive Germanic scrawl, “Dr Sigm Freud u frau,” abbreviated German for “Dr. Sigmund Freud and wife….”

Freud’s wife, Martha, knew about his trip with Miss Bernays, if not its nature. The same day Freud signed the hotel ledger, he sent his wife a postcard rhapsodizing about the glaciers, mountains and lakes the pair had seen. In the card, published in Freud’s collected correspondence, he described their lodgings as “humble,” although the hotel appears to have been the second-fanciest in town.

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.

“It makes it very possible that they slept together,” he said. “It doesn’t make him or psychoanalysis more or less correct.”

Does it matter? Psychoanalysts and Freud scholars will continue the debate. A certain faction appears to believe that psychoanalysis rises or falls with the moral reputation of its founder. If Freud was “flawed,” then so must be his creation.

Another opinion can be seen in an email I received this morning from my fellow psychoanalyst Michael Roloff:

So Freud did have an affair with Minna! Good for him!

In any case, the hagiography of Freud has been slowly dying as even psychoanalysts have gradually started to accept that all of us are human, even we analysts.

As for me, I find it interesting, just as Freud is a more interesting person the more we realize that he was a person. The fate of psychoanalysis doesn’t rest on Freud’s reputations but rather on the combination of the insights it provides into human nature, the guidance it provides for therapists, and the empirical evidence regarding its central tenets.

Entry Filed under: Psychoanalysis, Psychology