Back to Freud's Texts: Making Silent Documents Speak, and: Dispatches From the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Back to Freud’s Texts: Making Silent Documents Speak, and: Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions Sander L. Gilman Ilse Grubrich-Simitis. Back to Freud’s Texts: Making Silent Documents Speak. Translated by Philip Slotkin. Originally published as Zurück zu Freuds Texten, 1993. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. xv + 322 pp. Ill. $35.00. John Forrester. Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. 309 pp. $27.95. We have seen the establishment of Freud studies as a discipline over the past decade. Much has been accomplished. Yet there seems to be a major, ongoing problem that has less to do with the polemics against Freud (well discussed by John Forrester in the present volume) than with the impossibility of writing an adequate history or analysis based on faulty or missing texts. In the writing of historical and critical analyses of Freud’s work there has always been the problem of “hidden sources.” Some of that which was hidden was hidden with good reason—one does not release patient records lightly (even in the case of Allen Ginsberg, the Beat poet, who mandated the releasing of his own records to an early biographer). The rule of thumb seems to be the “hundred-year rule”: one hundred years after the death of the physician, patient records come to have “purely” historical/archival value. While arbitrary, such an approach does have the value of even-handedness. Much more troubling is the long and complex history of access to nonpatient materials in the Freud Archives. While ameliorated over the past few years (actually since the Jeffrey Masson debacle), the access question remains complex. Forrester, in the present volume of occasional pieces from the “Freud wars,” presents a reading of the Freud-Ferenczi relationship that is based on access to various stages of the letters [End Page 345] between Freud and Ferenczi and Ferenczi’s diaries. Given the fact that it took the better part of half a century to get this material into English (there was a slightly earlier French translation), and that much of it has yet to appear in German, the problems of “Freud philology” seem to lie at the “heart of the matter” of Freud studies. It is the “Kern der Sache,” which is the phrase that Freud noted in his own books when he found that which for him was the key to a text. Ilse Grubrich-Simitis’s 1993 German monograph on the history of the Freud manuscripts (in selected examples) has been the standard to which one would like to hold all of the future undertakings of Freud textual scholarship. It was the fiasco of Jeffrey Masson’s English edition of the Freud-Fliess letters that was one of the catalysts for Grubrich-Simitis’s original work. Masson’s edition was followed (rather than preceded) by an edition of the German original texts. However, this later edition was more extensive than the “original,” for scholars had found new letters that Masson had missed even though they were in a most obvious place—the Fliess papers in Jerusalem! Before the publication of her 1996 volume, Grubrich-Simitis edited the “lost” fourth metaphysical paper of Freud (“found” in the Ferenczi papers—where it was hardly “hidden,” just made unavailable). Her work is rigorous without being overly philological. So too her study of the shifts and alterations in Freud’s manuscripts (and then in the various printed versions of his texts) provides some guidelines for future editorial policy. Hers is not an exhaustive study. A truly exhaustive study would be best served, as she herself proposes, by a new critical edition of the German texts (rather than, as we have now, a German edition that relies on the Strachey English translation for its philology!). Grubrich-Simitis’s work is solid and precise. She has looked at the manuscripts and has attempted to provide indicators of what a critical report of their chronological changes would look like. Unlike the earlier (and penetrating) work on Freud’s style by scholars such as Patrick Mahoney, her book begins by asking, What exactly did Freud write? What was changed over time...