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suffering from spells of short-lasting, almost pathological jealousy.”5 It was also a time in which Freud was frequently depressed and hopeless almost to the point of despair. Elements of these reactions can be seen in the correspondence quoted below.
A major contributor to these reactions, especially to the jealousy and depression, was almost certainly Freud’s separation anxiety. This old anxiety would have been reactivated by the fact that his assiduously courted fiancée left Vienna the day after their engagement and returned with her mother for a 12-week stay at Wandsbek near Hamburg in northern Germany. Later, in June of the next year, the Bernays moved back to Wandsbek.6 (The Bernays were Orthodox Jews who had rather recently moved from Hamburg to Vienna, and the mother always preferred the northern city. It is, moreover, likely that Freud’s future mother-in-law was unenthusiastic about Sigmund. After all, he was a poor man; a free-thinker who rejected Jewish practices; and a man who brooked no rivals for Martha’s allegiance.7) The woman to whom he wrote the letters is of great relevance, and I pause here to provide some information about her background and character. Martha Bernays was a petite, attractive girl who came from a culturally distinguished Jewish family. Her grandfather, Isaac Bernays, had been the chief Rabbi of Hamburg, and had fought actively in the 1840s against the Jewish Reform movement, which had been especially strong at the time.8 Grandfather Bernays was a friend of the great writer Heinrich Heine, and the Bernays were related to Heine through marriage.9 Two of Isaac’s sons, Martha’s uncles, went into academic life; one, Michael Bernays, became a professor at the University of Munich. He reached this rank in part because he converted to Christianity.10 Some such conversions were deeply religious, while others involved only modest religious elements, but commonly they were primarily motivated by personal expedience. Because of official barriers to them, many Jews whose faith was not strong converted to remove hindrances to their advancement. Heine himself converted, and apparently his conversion was of the type that involved some small amount of genuine religious motivation.11 The other Bernays brother and Martha’s father both remained true to their Jewish heritage.12 Martha’s father Berman, who had died prior to Freud’s meeting Martha,13 had been a merchant, and his family was decidedly Jewish; the parents have been described as adhering to the strict rules of Orthodox Judaism.14 (Martin Freud has also described Emmeline Bernays, Martha’s mother, as Orthodox.15) The Jewish Sabbath and holidays were regularly observed in the Bernays home.16 Martha herself does not appear to have been strongly religious in any intellectual sense, but she had a deep family loyalty, was observant, and had almost certainly a respect and love for the traditional observances. Although Martha was quite capable of standing up to Freud, she nevertheless went along with the rejection of religious observances in family life.17 In the Sigmund Freud household there were no Jewish observances. Martha acquiesced in this with a |