Freud, His Illness, and Ourselves

The history of Freud's illness shows that he tried to avoid confrontation with it, and to treat it as unimportant. In his personal letters, the ill body remains outside—as another person, “Konrad,” not he himself—and it is not taken into account. Particularly in Freud's correspondence with Ferenczi, we realize to what extent certain phenomena, especially depressive ones, he considered somatic, with a tendency to dismiss them, and this despite important occasional insights, such as about the role played by hate in psychosomatic illnesses. In the post-Freudian development, these topics have been more and more integrated in the dialogue, in the discourse between the analyst and the analysand.