Correspondences from Dr. Freud to Dr. Simmel, 1918-1939 | NCP-LA

Title: Correspondences from Dr. Freud to Dr. Simmel, 1918-1939

ID: RG-18/RG-18

Extent: 2.0 Boxes

Predominant Dates: 1920s, 1930s

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In 1918 a mutual correspondence between Sigmund Freud and Ernst Simmel begins. It asted until 1939.

There are unwavering evidences in Freud's letters that Simmel always recourse for advice and guidance to Freud.

We do not have Simmel's correspondences to Freud. However, it is evident from the Freud's letters that Simmel candidly followed his suggestions.

In the aftermath of the War, Simmel began a systematic studies of Psychoanalysis. He was one of the founder of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and he became instrumental in the introduction of supervised analysis into the training program, a requirement that was truly an innovation for the time.

Working always within the framework of classical analysis, Simmel had avowed courage to re-examine concepts in various areas of the growing science and his original contribution received careful consideration from Freud.

Vicissitudes and the farther discourse in Psychoanalytic Theory. A new psychoanalytic narrative by Sigmund Freud,

Freud’s mature instinct theory is in many ways a metaphysical construct, comparable to Bergson’s élan vital or Schopenhauer’s Will. Emboldened by its formulation, Freud launched a series of audacious studies that took him well beyond his clinician’s consulting room. These he had already commenced with investigations of Leonardo da Vinci (1910) and the novel Gradiva by Wilhelm Jensen (1907). Here Freud attempted to psychoanalyze works of art as symbolic expressions of their creator’s psychodynamics.

The fundamental premise that permitted Freud to examine cultural phenomena was called sublimation in the Three Essays. The appreciation or creation of ideal beauty, Freud contended, is rooted in primitive sexual urges that are transfigured in culturally elevating ways. Unlike repression, which produces only neurotic symptoms whose meaning is unknown even to the sufferer, sublimation is a conflict-free resolution of repression, which leads to intersubjectively available cultural works. Although potentially reductive in its implications, the psychoanalytic interpretation of culture can be justly called one of the most powerful “hermeneutics of suspicion,” to borrow the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, because it debunks idealist notions of high culture as the alleged transcendence of baser concerns.

Freud extended the scope of his theories to include anthropological and social psychological speculation as well in Totem und Tabu (1913; Totem and Taboo). Drawing on Sir James Frazer’s explorations of the Australian Aborigines, he interpreted the mixture of fear and reverence for the totemic animal in terms of the child’s attitude toward the parent of the same sex. The Aborigines’ insistence on exogamy was a complicated defense against the strong incestuous desires felt by the child for the parent of the opposite sex. Their religion was thus a phylogenetic anticipation of the ontogenetic Oedipal drama played out in modern man’s psychic development. But whereas the latter was purely an intrapsychic phenomenon based on fantasies and fears, the former, Freud boldly suggested, was based on actual historical events. Freud speculated that the rebellion of sons against dominating fathers for control over women had culminated in actual parricide. Ultimately producing remorse, this violent act led to atonement through incest taboos and the prohibitions against harming the father-substitute, the totemic object or animal. When the fraternal clan replaced the patriarchal horde, true society emerged. For renunciation of individual aspirations to replace the slain father and a shared sense of guilt in the primal crime led to a contractual agreement to end internecine struggle and band together instead. The totemic ancestor then could evolve into the more impersonal God of the great religions.

A subsequent effort to explain social solidarity, Massenpsychologie und Ich-analyse (1921; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego), drew on the antidemocratic crowd psychologists of the late 19th century, most notably Gustave Le Bon. Here the disillusionment with liberal, rational politics that some have seen as the seedbed of much of Freud’s work was at its most explicit (the only competitor being the debunking psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson he wrote jointly with William Bullitt in 1930, which was not published until 1967). All mass phenomena, Freud suggested, are characterized by intensely regressive emotional ties stripping individuals of their self-control and independence. Rejecting possible alternative explanations such as hypnotic suggestion or imitation and unwilling to follow Jung in postulating a group mind, Freud emphasized instead individual libidinal ties to the group’s leader. Group formation is like regression to a primal horde with the leader as the original father. Drawing on the army and the Roman Catholic Church as his examples, Freud never seriously considered less authoritarian modes of collective behavior.

Composition of the Collection,

RG-18.01, Letter from Dr. Freud to Dr.Simmel, with English translation, February 20, 1918

RG-18.02, Letter from Dr. Freud to Dr. Simmel with English translation, March 24, 1924

RG-18.03, Letter from Dr. Freud to Dr. Simmel with English translation, October 26, 1925

RG-18.04, Letter from Dr. Freud to Dr. Simmel with English translation, May 10, 1926

RG-18.05, Letter from Dr. Freud to Dr. Simmel with English translation, July 23, 1926

RG-18.06. Letter from Dr. Freud to Dr. Simmel with English translation, April 1, 1927

RG-18.07, Letter from Dr. Freud to Dr. Simmel, English translation, May 18, 1926

RG-18.08, Letter from Dr. Freud to Dr. Simmel with English translation, February 5, 1926

RG-18.09, Letter from Dr. Freud to Dr. Simmel with English translation, May 10, 1926

RG-18.10, Letter from Dr. Freud to Dr. Simmel with English translation, May 10, 1927

RG-18.11, Letter from Dr. Freud to Dr.Simmel in German, May 16, 1926

RG-18.12, Letter from Dr. Freud to Dr. Simmel with English translation, July 1, 1927

RG-18.13, Letter from Dr. Freud to Dr. Simmel, with English translation, July 2, 1928

RG-18.14, Letter from Dr. Freud to Dr.Simmel with English translation, July 18, 1928

RG-18.15, Letter from Dr. Freud to Dr. Simmel with English translation, August 17, 1928

RG-18.16, Letter from Dr. Freud to Dr. Simmel with English translation, November 11, 1918

RG-18.17, Letter from Dr. Fredu to Dr. Simmel with English translation, December 25, 1928

RG-18.18, Letter from Dr. Freud to Dr. Simmel with English translation, February 22, 1929

RG-18.19, Letter from Dr. Freud to Dr. Simmel with English translation, May 12, 1929

RG-18.20, Letter from Dr. Freud to Dr. Simmel, September 5, 1929, Marie Bonaparte mentioned

RG-18.21, Postcard from Dr. Freud to Dr. Simmel with English translation, Ausgust 8, 1930

RG-18.22, Letter from Dr. Freud to Dr. Simmel with English translation, January 1, 1931

RG-18.23, Thank you card from Freud to Simmel with regard to his birthday, May 1931

RG-18.24, Letter from Dr. Freud to Dr. Simmel with English translation, December 26, 1931

RG-18.25, A thank you card from Freud with regard to Simmel's New Year wishes, January 6, 1934

RG-18.26, Letter from Freud to Simmel, , a bitter joy from parting with Simmel , November 28, 1935

RG-18.27, A note from Freud to Simmel, the same friends in Tegel and Los Angeles January 13, 1935

RG-18.28, Thank you card from Freud to Simmel, for his 80th birthday, May 1936

RG-18.29, From Freud to Simmel, The New Year wishes, postcard, January 1, 1938

RG-18.30. Letter from Freud to Simmel, Englad, with English translation, June 26, 1938

RG-18.31, Letter from Frued to Simmel with English translation, England, January 9, 1939

Author: Dr. Vladimir Melamed

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Scope and Contents:

This Collection of correspondences from Professor, Dr. Freud comprises 31 items of mail narrated by the sender largely from Vienna in 1918 -- 1938 and several letters sent from England in 1938, 1939.

The letter written by Freud on February 20, 1918, is largely and exquisite example of prolific discourse in the Theory of Psychoanalysis. Although there have been a conspicuous of the pithy deflections in the Simmel's work on the War Neuroses, Freud averted a divergence and expounded the positive conception in the given work. Being cognizant in the given discourse, Freud with gratification recapitulated the elements of coherent Psychoanalytic etiology. In Freud's view, Simmel's presuppositions were germane to the contemporaneous state of Psychoanalysis. On the other occasion, Freud underlined his support of the young colleague's works.

Freud's correspondences dated by the 1920s still reflect his active, if his state of health permit, tutelage over the growing ramification of psychoanalytic science and the corresponding to the scholarship discourses.

Freud's letters to Simmel demonstrate conscientious yearnings to be of support, render advice and overall venerate the works and activity of his young colleague Dr. Ernst Simmel.

No condescension or aloofness could be found in Freud's letters to Simmel.

Freud consistently position himself in tantamount terms with Simmel.

Freud's letters to Simmel evinced no intents of the sender to expect acquiescent responses, on the contrary they are always written in conciliatory tone, his correspondences to the colleagues are innately intransigent in terms of collegial respect, being imbued by academic emanation.

The given correspondences evoke exhilarating feeling of lucidity.

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