Sigmund Freud Anna Freud: Correspondence 1904-1938, Edited by Ingeborg Meyer-Palmedo - book review

Letters between Sigmund Freud and his daughter offer some longeurs – but also rewards

Competing for admiration: Sigmund and Anna Freud (Getty Images/Hulton Archive)

This book comprises the early twentieth version of texting and tweeting, as well as the lengthy letters which these days we are not in the habit of writing. Every surviving and available letter, postcard and telegram passed between Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna Freud are arranged in chronological order. Each has been transcribed, translated and annotated. There is an occasional paragraph added by the editor, that adds factual context to the correspondence.

There is also an introduction. This is the only place where any meaning-making by the editor is attempted and only here can we detect the editor’s personal voice. A voice that goes beyond respectful, into the realms of worship. It seemed to me as if here was a woman caught up in an ambition to be another daughter - as good a daughter as Anna - and a modest one: in this 500 page shrine everything is perfectly collated, ordered, logged; every bit of background that could be found has been meticulously researched and impartially presented. And for this momentous task she does not even have her name on the cover. Her only omission is the lack of an index. Maybe in this way, Anna and Sigmund’s editor, Ingeborg Meyer-Palmedo, retains a key for herself?

If Sigmund and Anna had Google and smartphones, they would have saved themselves some trouble. Many of their telegrams, letters, and postcards are about the effort of locating and securing decent hotel accommodation and ways of travelling to and from it. “We are leaving in the morning of Thursday for Munich where will spend the night and expect to be in Berchtesgaden at Friday noon…make sure you don’t arrive in Villa Hofreit after us…”

Amongst the inconsequential chat that only belongs in the world of those who wrote it regarding the weather, arrangements, indigestion, and how many mushrooms are available for picking in the forest, readers wade in to find out what they can about Anna and her father. Anna was sent away to Merano for a “rest cure’ for months and months when she was turning from a girl into a young woman. There is so much talk about the desirability of Anna’s need to put on weight that one wonders whether Anna might have been anorexic. For instance, Anna to Sigmund from Merano when she was 17: “Today is my weighing day again and this week I have put on another 1 kg. that is really a lot and so you can see that I am really making every effort with eating …I have also become far more sensible since I have been here…but it is not possible for you to notice it from so far away.”

Her exile continues even as her elder sister, Sophie, gets married and Anna has to miss the wedding. Even the-eager-to-please-her-father-Anna is surprised by that and thinks it strange.

Sophie was apparently a beauty, Anna not as attractive. Unable to compete for her father’s admiration for her looks, I have a theory that this may have been motivation for Anna to sublimate her libido and enter into her father’s world of work. Her father appears torn by the course Anna is taking; he acknowledges that she is an intellectual but thinks that the path her more conventional sisters take into marriage and childbearing is the one from which Anna will have the most fulfilment. Anna never directly contradicts him but talks a lot about her desk in many of her letters - perhaps as a subtle way to hint at her identity to her father. When he asks her what jewellery she would like, she asks for an ornament for her desk instead.

Anna, justifiably or not, feels superfluous to her family and refutes Sigmund when he tries to reassure her to the contrary. If she did not feel accepted in the family circle, then perhaps she reckoned that she could find acceptance in the world of work. She made herself indispensible to Freud, and later, to institutes of psychoanalysis where she held various official posts. There, she was not superfluous, she was central and important.

Sigmund, in these letters, is not always as vindictive as he is often rumoured to be. Dr Paul Federn, whose theories differed from Freud’s, believed that Freud no longer approved of him, yet Sigmund told Anna that this was not the case, and wanted Anna to tell Dr Federn he was mistaken. Another example comes with his former friend, Lou Salomé, who had snubbed the Freuds after her marriage. Rather than condemn her, Freud is resigned, understanding and gentle about her decision. He does express disappointment to Anna at times, such as in the case of the Hungarian psychoanalyst, Sándor Ferenczi, (a close associate who later reverted to some of Freud’s discarded theories) but on the whole, he is more kind than critical. Then again, some of Freud’s letters remain sealed until 2020 in the Washington Library of Congress on the instructions of Anna Freud, so were presumably not available for this collection.

Ennui brought on by spending hours reading what initially seemed like dull, fully-annotated, family news gradually inspired feelings of privilege at being able to track the progress of this relationship from parent to child, and from adult to adult. Then, towards the end of his life, Anna becomes the parent and Sigmund, worn down by worries and ravaged by cancer, becomes the child. Their loving feelings for each other are moving, particularly as Sigmund learns to value Anna as a colleague as well as a daughter.

When I began this book I intended to treat it as information to further my understanding of psychoanalysis but it was only when I ceased to treat it as a text book and instead inhabited the slower pace of its subjects that I could begin to appreciate it and I should probably take my lead from Ingeborg Meyer-Palmedo and leave off from self-indulgent attempts to analyse any of it.

It was only when I ceased to hurry and allowed myself to experience it like a painting or a landscape, letting it wash over me, that I could absorb what it had to offer. After a first reading in the chronological order it was presented in, I enjoyed it more by opening at random, picking out a letter as though it was loose, in a drawer, rather than ordered in a book. Read this way there is less frustration by the scarcity of obvious meaning and a reader can both experience and appreciate the ordinary in the lives of these two extraordinary people. This volume will serve as useful source material for anyone wanting to study Sigmund and Anna Freud. As well as being a reliquary for inconsequential tokens, it holds interesting clues about the nature of their relationship and lives.

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Philippa Perry is a psychotherapist and author. Her latest book is ‘How to Stay Sane’ (Pan Macmillan)