Freud’s ‘Two Wives’. Maciejewski, Shamdasani, Skues, Stadlen, Swales conduct Inner Circle Seminar 114 (20 May 2007)

Martha Freud    Sigmund Freud    Minna Bernays

Freud’s ‘Two Wives’

Is Psychoanalytic Biography Competent?

Franz Maciejewski

Sonu Shamdasani

Richard Skues

Anthony Stadlen

Peter Swales

conduct

Inner Circle Seminar No. 114
Sunday 20 May 2007
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

A friend of the Freud family told Anthony Stadlen: ‘Freud had two wives.’ When Jung said that Freud’s wife’s sister, Minna Bernays, had told him of her sexual relationship with Freud, psychoanalysts dismissed Jung as ‘psychotic’. When the Freud historian Peter Swales presented evidence suggesting that Freud and Bernays indeed had a sexual liaison, the Director of the Freud Archives called Swales ‘schizophrenic’. Stadlen’s research, and even more Richard Skues’s, tended to confirm Swales’s hypothesis. Even after Franz Maciejewski found, last year, that Freud and his sister-in-law shared a Swiss hotel room in 1898, booking in as man and wife, psychoanalysts continue to insist that Freud was a faithful husband. An acclaimed Jung biographer still writes of Jung’s ‘psychosis’. Today, the four Freud historians named above join with Sonu Shamdasani, the world’s leading Jung historian, to ask: Did Freud have two ‘wives’? And (the crux): Why do eminent psychoanalysts say that (1) it is irrelevant whether he did, while insisting that (2) they know that he did not?

Venue: Room F, Acland Building, Regent’s College, Inner Circle, London NW1
Cost: Students £77, others £99, in advance; some bursaries
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857 E-mail: stadlen@aol.com