How Sigmund Freud Tried to Break and Remake His Fiancée
The area in which Martha most urgently needed reeducation, Freud believed, was that of excessive regard for her own family. He had coveted its name before their engagement, but now the very illustriousness of Martha’s connections prompted a worry that she and other Bernayses might look down on him as a parvenu. He would try relentlessly, then, to extirpate everything “Bernays” about his fiancée and bride. “From now on,” he admonished her in a falsely jovial decree, “you are only a guest in your family, like a gem that I have pawned and that I am going to redeem [auslösen] as soon as I am rich.”
Likewise, despite the syrupy passages in his Brautbriefe, Sigmund wanted Martha to remember that she herself was nothing very special. Just nine weeks into the engagement, for example, she was informed that her looks were hardly out of the ordinary. (In stressing her sober virtues instead, Sigmund was evidently trying to discourage her from flirting with other men.) And at times he teased her patronizingly about her want of experience and her inability to collaborate in his work. After she had tried to help him with a translation project, he wrote, “I am nothing short of delighted by my little woman’s unskillfulness.”
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