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this important period, and that Freud experienced her as a second mother — or even (as we shall see) as his primary mother.
It is not clear where Julius was born, since there is no record of his birth in Freiberg. Since the births of the other Freud children were recorded in Freiberg, it is reasonable to assume that Julius was born elsewhere34 — perhaps Roznau, or perhaps Vienna, the home of Amalia’s family. It is relevant that Amalia had a brother named Julius, only a year or two younger than she, who lived in Vienna. However, he died of tuberculosis on March 15, 1858, one month before the baby Julius died.35 Swales has suggested that, knowing her brother was ill, she went to visit him in Vienna while she was pregnant, and thus had baby Julius in Vienna. If so, she might easily have left young Sigmund with his nanny.36 In any case, the death of her slightly younger brother and her baby, both named Julius, within a short time of each other must have been deeply disturbing for Amalia. During the first 32 months of Sigmund’s life (i.e., until Anna’s birth), his mother was pregnant a total of 18 months. During pregnancy a mother’s milk supply diminishes. Furthermore, the fact that his mother became pregnant so soon after Sigmund’s birth (about five months afterward), and also soon after Julius’s birth, strongly implies that she did not breast-feed or at least did not fully breast-feed very long after her children’s births. It is rare for a woman to get pregnant while nursing her baby regularly during the first six months after giving birth.37 In any case, it is unlikely that Sigmund was nursed by his mother for more than a brief period. It is not entirely clear in the relevant texts whether the nanny was a wet nurse. She is sometimes described as “old,” but she may have been only in her late 30s or early 40s (i.e., “old” relative to Freud’s 21-year-old mother). There is no reference to any other wet nurse. Freud did describe her with the word “Amme,” the German word for a nurse for very young children38; Mahony notes that Amme means “wet nurse,”39 as does McGuire.40 Therefore, it is likely that Resi was Sigmund’s wet nurse. Schur, in his biography of Freud, using the information of Sajner, has written that the Freud women frequently worked together in some kind of “garment district” warehouse, while the children were cared for by a maid.41 (The maid was presumably the Czech nanny.) This also suggests that Freud’s mother was often out of the home when not directly pre-empted by her pregnancies, and again underlines the importance of the nanny as a mother-figure. If so, Sigmund would have been almost exclusively with the nanny for many weeks during his earliest years.42 Freud himself directly acknowledged the foundational significance of the nanny for his character, in his letters to his friend Wilhelm Fliess — letters written when Freud was in his 40s, during his personal psycho- |