Acts of betrayal. Reading the letters of Wilhelm Stekel to Sigmund Freud

Abstract

This paper presents a discussion of the previously unpublished correspondence between Stekel and Freud. The authors start with a brief overview of most important historic events and facts that constitute the context against which these letters should be read. The matters cover questions of publishing policy, personal priorities, and psychoanalytic principles. The authors suggest that the Stekel letters may have been preserved by Freud as evidence of the latter's estrangement from him, as tokens of betrayal. A minute discussion of the correspondence makes it possible to discuss day-to-day developments in this fateful relation, taking into account Stekel's side of the story for the first time as well, highlighting the backfiring of a strategic maneuver by Stekel to psychoanalyse the Freud family, which heralded his downfall, and also revealing the role that Victor Tausk played in this. The paper concludes with a discussion of the dialectics of estrangement.

Keywords:

• Schism in the early history of psychoanalysis
• Zentralblatt für psychoanalyse
• Freud
• Stekel
• Tausk
• dialectics of estrangement
• confrontational dialogue

Note: This paper was written during the Spring and Summer of 2005. Although the involvement of the second author in the actual writing of this paper was relatively small, he was responsible for digging out the correspondence from the Library of Congress, oversaw the translation of the letters, and commented on subsequent versions of the introductory essay, jokingly referring to his role as that of the “junior assistant.” The authors remained in regular contact until the end of September, when a first draft of this paper was finished. After Paul Roazen died on November 3, 2005, a second slightly revised version was written by the first author, which appears here.

Note: This paper was written during the Spring and Summer of 2005. Although the involvement of the second author in the actual writing of this paper was relatively small, he was responsible for digging out the correspondence from the Library of Congress, oversaw the translation of the letters, and commented on subsequent versions of the introductory essay, jokingly referring to his role as that of the “junior assistant.” The authors remained in regular contact until the end of September, when a first draft of this paper was finished. After Paul Roazen died on November 3, 2005, a second slightly revised version was written by the first author, which appears here.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Ernst Falzeder for his transcription of the Freud letters and Dave Lee for his assistance in translating the letters into English.

Notes

Note: This paper was written during the Spring and Summer of 2005. Although the involvement of the second author in the actual writing of this paper was relatively small, he was responsible for digging out the correspondence from the Library of Congress, oversaw the translation of the letters, and commented on subsequent versions of the introductory essay, jokingly referring to his role as that of the “junior assistant.” The authors remained in regular contact until the end of September, when a first draft of this paper was finished. After Paul Roazen died on November 3, 2005, a second slightly revised version was written by the first author, which appears here.

¹E. W. Scripture (1864–1945), experimental psychologist in Leipzig, later director of a research clinic at the Vanderbilt Clinic, New York, and, according to Jones, highly critical of psychoanalysis. It is interesting to note what Jones wrote to Freud on November 29, 1913 about Scripture: “he helps the psychoanalytic cause in about the same way that Stekel does” (Freud & Jones, 1993, p. 245).

²H. Rohleder (1899), Die Masturbation. Rohleder argued, according to Havelock Ellis in his chapter on autoeroticism in Studies in the psychology of sex (1927, p. 291), that “masturbation may injure mental capacity, by weakening memory and depressing intellectual energy; that, further, in hereditarily neurotic subjects, it may produce slight psychoses like folie du doute, hypochondria, hysteria; that, finally, under no circumstances can it produce severe psychoses like paranoia or general paralysis.”