Martha Bernays ( ; ; 26 July 1861 – 2 November 1951) was the wife of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
Bernays was the second daughter of Emmeline and Berman Bernays. Her paternal grandfather Isaac Bernays was a Chief Rabbi of Hamburg.
Background
Martha Bernays was raised in an observant
Orthodox Judaism family,
[Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1989, p. 38] the daughter of Berman Bernays (1826–1879) and Emmeline Philipp (1830–1910). Her grandfather,
Isaac Bernays, was the
chief rabbi of Hamburg and a distant relative of the German
Romantic poetry poet
Heinrich Heine, who frequently mentioned Isaac in his letters.
[David Bakan: Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition. Princeton 1958, p. 196.] Isaac's son,
Michael Bernays (1834–1897), Martha's uncle, converted to Christianity at an early age and was professor of German at the University of Munich.
[Bakan, 57, 196.] Although the Bernays and Freud families were well-acquainted – her elder brother Eli married Freud's younger sister, for example
[Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1964) pp. 111-112] – the latter were more liberal Jews, and Freud in particular had no time for ritual observances. Martha told a cousin that "not being allowed to light the Sabbath lights on the first Friday night after her marriage was one of the more upsetting experiences of her life".
[Peter Gay, Freud (1989) p. 54] She was also the aunt of
Edward Bernays, an Austrian-born American publicist and the "father of
public relations".
Her maternal cousins were brothers
Julius Philipp and
Oscar Philipp, founders of
Phibro, which became the largest metal trading company in the world.
Courtship and marriage
Sigmund Freud and Martha met in April 1882 and after a four-year engagement (1882–1886) they were married on 14 September 1886 in
Hamburg.
[ Letters of Sigmund Freud; selected and edited by Ernst L. Freud, Basic Books, 1960; p. 7 ]
Freud and Bernays's love letters sent during the engagement years, according to Freud's official biographer Ernest Jones, who read all the letters, "would be a not unworthy contribution to the great love literature of the world." Freud sent over 900 (lengthy) letters to his fiancée, which chart the ups and downs of a tempestuous relationship, marred by outbreaks of jealousy on his part as well as affirmations that "I love you with a kind of passionate enchantment".[Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1964) pp. 109, 116-119, 133]
Their eventual marriage was a much more harmonious affair: Martha consoling herself after his death with the thought that "in the 53 years of our marriage there was not a single angry word between us".[Peter Gay, Freud (1989) p. 60] The couple had Freud family: Mathilde (born 1887), Jean-Martin (born 1889), Oliver (born 1891), Ernst (born 1892), Sophie (born 1893), and Anna Freud (born 1895).
Martha Freud died in 1951. She was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and her ashes placed in the Freud Corner, into the same Ancient Greece funeral urn that holds her husband's ashes.
Character
The young Martha Bernays was a slim and attractive woman who was also a charmer, intelligent, well-educated and fond of reading (as she remained throughout her life).
[Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1964) pp. 110-111, 165-166] As a married woman, she ran her household efficiently, and was indeed almost obsessive about punctuality and dirt.
[Peter Gay, Reading Freud (1990) p. 172] Firm but loving with her children, she spread an atmosphere of peaceful joie de vivre through the household (at least according to the French analyst René Laforgue).
[Peter Gay, Freud (1989) pp. 59-61] However, Martha was not able to establish a strong connection with her youngest daughter, Anna.
Relationship with her sister
Bernays's younger sister, Minna Bernays, was very close to the young couple, and moved in with them in the 1890s, to set up what has (jokingly) been called a ménage à trois.
[Peter Gay, Reading Freud (1990) p. 161] Sigmund and Minna would sometimes holiday together;
[Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1964) p. 150] and the suggestion has periodically been made that she in fact became Freud's mistress.
Jung for example reported (late in life) that from Minna he "learned that Freud was in love with her and that their relationship was indeed very intimate".
[Quoted in Peter Gay, Freud (1989) p. 752] Freud historian Peter Swales "became notorious when, in 1981, he maintained that Freud had had a secret affair with his wife Martha’s younger sister Minna Bernays ... and had arranged for her to have an abortion after she became pregnant."
[ "Peter Swales, former assistant to the Rolling Stones said to have discovered Sigmund Freud's guilty secret — obituary," Telegraph Obituaries, 6 May 2022.][Peter J. Swales, "Freud, Minna Bernays, and the Conquest of Rome: New Light on the Origins of Psychoanalysis," The New American Review (Spring/Summer 1982), pp. 1-23.]
This claim was (and is) controversial. The publication of a hotel log from 1898 registering the pair as "Dr Sigm Freud u frau" in a double room prompted some Freud scholars, including his defender Peter Gay, to regard the conjecture of Freud and Minna having an affair as possibly accurate.[Eysenck, Hans. Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire. Transaction Publishers, 2004] Other proponents of the affair, however — relying on their analysis of Freud's own autobiographical writings — believe that it was consummated only in 1900.[Peter L. Rudnytsky, Rescuing Psychoanalysis from Freud: And Other Essays in Re-Vision, Karnac Books, Ltd. (2011); Routledge (2018), p. 17]
Opponents point to the unlikelihood of such a betrayal taking place between sisters as close as Minna and Martha, especially given the mores of the time,[L. H. Lefkovitz, In Scripture (2010) pp. 76-8] and to the less sensational possibility of the hotel simply being full at the time.[L. Davidoff, Thicker than Water (2012) p. 17] Pending publication of the Freud/Minna correspondence for the period 1893–1910, the truth behind such speculations may not be known for sure.[Peter Gay, Reading Freud (1990) p. 179]
What does seem certain is that Martha herself in no way knew of, or colluded in, any such affair. Freud described her as thoroughly good, where he and Minna were more self-willed and wild;[Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1964) p. 159] and for better or worse her commitment to conventional morality, domestic duty and family values is clear.[Peter Gay, Freud (1989) pp. 59-60] (Her husband too had shocked André Breton by his lack of any Bohemianism,[Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (1997) p. 276] and considered a sexually promiscuous woman as "simply a Haderlump a".[E. Timms, ed., Freud and the Child Woman (1995) p. 169]) Martha's attitude to infidelity is perhaps best illustrated by her reaction to their friend Stefan Zweig's leaving his wife Friderike for a younger woman: six years after Zweig's death in 1942, Martha wrote to his widow that she still resented "our friend's infidelity to you!"[Quoted in Peter Gay, Freud (1989) p. 60 n.]
See also
Further reading
-
Katja Behling, Martha Freud: A Biography, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005 (translated by Rupert Glasgow from the German Martha Freud: Die Frau des Genies, Berlin: Aufbau, 2002)
-
Esti D. Freud, "Mrs Sigmund Freud", Jewish Spectator, XLV (1980) 29-31
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Martin Freud, Sigmund Freud: Man and Father (1958)
External links
