To this reviewer, the letters seem to indicate that Freud thus accepted Fliess as a friend in need, a companion on a voyage, while he obviously never completely accepted the development of Fliess's theories. There are indications that Freud's overestimation of Fliess as a theorist has been exaggerated. True, Freud attempts to go along with Fliess in the published correspondence; and we are told that some of the omitted letters show Freud's special efforts at following his friend into his theories. Yet all of this remains part of the correspondence. Freud seems to have been careful throughout not to let this so-called overestimation enter into writings destined for the public. Such phrases as he did use publicly ("magnificent simplicity," "grandiose conception") are noncommittal in regard to the scientific solidity of Fliess's theories, while Fliess's public references to his friend Freud seem to have been extraordinarily stingy. Even in the letters, Freud calls Fliess "a worse visionary [Phantast] than I." This is said jokingly and even tenderly; yet kidding references to Fliess's theories of the neurological connections between the nose and the genitals seem relentless throughout: Freud reports that "Breuer has accepted the whole of your nose" or adds to greetings to Fliess and his family greetings "to sexuality through the nose." Maybe his most obvious slur was a practical joke which he perpetrated on his friend, when on an outing in the Austrian Alps he entered Fliess's name in the guest book of a mountain hotel, naming as his profession "Universal-specialist" (285), obviously someone who knows less and less about more and more. It does not seem, then, that on the whole Freud overestimated Fliess's theories any more or any longer than he did some of his own speculations; while he stated with utmost frankness what he wanted from him: "In the first place, I hope you will explain the physiological mechanism of my clinical findings from your point of view; secondly, I want to maintain the right to come to you with all my theories and findings in the field of neurosis; and thirdly, I still look to you as the Messiah who will solve the problem I have indicated by an improvement in technique." Beyond this, Fliess seems to have had the personality and the education which permitted Freud to entrust him with "imaginings, transpositions, and guesses," and to make of him the representative of what can only be translated as "the Other" (298). In German, this is "der Andere," and if one finds it translated as "other people," one shudders to think how often the most crucial words in translation come to say the opposite of what they mean. With Fliess, Freud could institute that relationship of bipolarization which many creative men need in order to have the courage of their own originality. Such a relationship consists, to some extent, of a mutual casting in the double roles of benevolent authority and audacious co-conspirator, of applauding audience and cautioning chorus - roles which fortify both participants against the sense of guilt and against the fear of shame which might inhibit their innermost aspirations. What Freud wanted from Fliess, Jones calls "sanction," a fitting and significant designation. When completing his "project" of a psychology for neurologists, Freud thanks Fliess, in fact, for letting him take it so seriously.

That in the ensuing correspondence unrestrained terms of mutual lionization should appear; that Fliess should be made an Apollonian tower of calm strength while the writer becomes a driven Dionysian (and "shabby" Israelite"); that figures of speech should occur which picture the writer as a womanly womb for the intellectual siring of the other - all of this gradually surpasses what might have been sanctioned as an intellectual and poetic friendship. True, men in development often appreciate in one another their early and innermost aspirations rather than what they are finally going to be: "I see," Freud wrote to Fliess, "that you are using the circuitous route of medicine to attain your first ideal, the physiological understanding of man, while I secretly nurse the hope of arriving by the same route at my own original objective, philosophy. For that was my original ambition, before I knew what I was intended to do in this world" (121). Against the background of such a friendship pattern, the outlines of that emerging transference can be recognized - the first transference in history to lead, through the discovery of its own nature, to its own self-therapeutic liquidation.

The correspondence starts slowly and warms up gradually. From the first five years (1887-92), only sixteen letters are preserved, only thirteen reprinted here. They are a doctor's letters to a doctor. By the end of this period, a solid friendship seems to have formed, partly owing to the circumstance that Fliess frequented Vienna to court a Viennese girl at the time when Freud's "battle with my collaborator," Breuer, gradually led to a deep personal enmity and to thorough theoretical estrangement. In the first "drafts," Freud shakes off the shackles of traditional inhibition and personal indebtedness and sends to his friend, up in the more forward-looking Berlin, a series of clear-cut if extreme formulations concerning the origin of various neurotic states in the sexual practices of his day. ("You will, of course, keep the draft away from your young wife.") These formulations are of a sweepingly epidemiological character and end with a prediction of doom reminiscent of the pessimism of the classical economists: "In the absence of such a solution [i.e. an innocuous method of preventing conception] society seems doomed to fall a victim to incurable neuroses which reduce the enjoyment of life to a minimum, destroy the marriage relation and bring hereditary ruin on the whole coming generation. The lower ranks of society know nothing of Malthusianism; but they are following along the same path and will eventually fall a victim to the same fatality." His conclusions are "that the neuroses can be completely prevented but are completely incurable. The physician's task is thus wholly concentrated on prophylaxis." There is as yet no inkling of the unbeaten paths into the inner unknown which would have to be pursued before widespread prophylaxis (today's mental hygiene) could be envisaged. The doctors send one another case abstracts, but Fliess seems to insist on his "nasal reflex neurosis," while Freud pursues a sexual etiology somewhere between social contamination and somatic excitation. True, Freud in 1893 refers to the nasal reflex neurosis as "one of the commonest disorders," but adds, "unfortunately I am never sure of the 'executive,'" meaning "how it works." In the meantime, he pursues his etiological formula according to which neurosis is a consequence of sexual experience in which a complete discharge was impossible, either because of the inadequacy of the sexual partner, or because of the limited potency of the patient himself, or (and this assumption now begins to gain ascendancy) because of a seduction at a time when discharge was developmentally impossible, i.e., in childhood.

But then, in the letter of April 19, 1894, an entirely new note appears. Freud apparently had consulted Fliess in regard to a variety of his own symptoms and moods, which he condenses in the word "Herzeland," cardiac discomfort heightened into a general "heart misery." Fliess had cauterized his nose and had urged him to give up his beloved cigars. The intellectual communication appears jammed: "I have not looked at your excellent case histories. The reading was abandoned in the middle of a sentence..." Freud now reacts much like any patient, if one with a tragic sense of alarm over a change in relationship which he knew he should understand." "As everyone must have come under someone's suggestion, to escape his own criticism, from that time on three weeks ago today - I have had nothing lit between my lips." So says the translation; the German original says "nothing warm between my lips" and thus opens up a perspective on an elemental oral theme from infancy - a theme which then could be met by these men only with a negative transference which neither could understand. And indeed: "I am suspicious of you this time, because this heart trouble of mine is the first occasion on which I have ever heard you contradict yourself." To add an element of "acting out," Freud reports a visit to the estranged Breuer, with whom scientific cooperation was then coming to an end, to have him help clarify the question as to whether Freud was suffering "from a reasonable or a hypochondriacal depression" (83).

Whatever Freud's disturbance was clinically, he indicates one month later the kind of intellectual crisis which seems to be the cause and concomitant of his inner storms: "I have the distinct feeling that I have touched on one of the great secrets of nature"(83). This secret, of course, was the central importance in human life (and not only in psychopathology) of sexual affect as a quantity, and of differential defenses against it. That every step of his search led Freud both into oedipal guilt and into that sense of having challenged the gods which the Greeks call "hybris" is amply demonstrated throughout the letters. It can now be suggested that it is this very hybris which the young medical man, with his wide sweep of interests, had overcompensated for by applying himself to the ascetic concentration on the details of nerve structures; and that it is this same hybris (multiplied by the subject matter now emerging) which drove the maturing man deeper into neurotic conflict, and into a kind of transference (first positive, then negative) to his mentor-friend, who was also his physician and surgeon. For if now the approach to "Nature" was open again, so were all the dangers of a mutual aggravation of oedipal conflict (renewed by his father's impending death) and of a nature-philosophic speculation which now approached the hidden secrets of human nature: such overdetermination is the stuff these letters are made of.

The grandeur of Freud's aspirations then appears in a classification of the major neuroses and an outline of a theory bridging all of sexuality and psychopathology, with the intervening concept of the principle of psychic constancy. In the meantime, the letters convey a sense of two elemental truths which were soon to be more consciously perceived and to be formulated in this very correspondence: (1) that basic psychological insight cannot emerge without some involvement of the observer's impulses and defenses, and (2) that such insights cannot be communicated without the ambivalent involvement of the participants. For the present, however, that element of father transference which had begun to blur the friendship with Fliess sought refuge in a stubborn theory which would blame primarily the fathers for the neurotic suffering of generations: a theory which was to be adhered to fatefully, and abandoned only after another transference crisis.