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downs that his reputation has gone through there. He has also put
together a new and highly detailed account of the efforts made by
both British and American friends and officials to get Freud out of
occupied Austria and the clutches of the Nazis. These pieces of nar–
rative are entirely different in quality from the dead porcupine.
But the most interesting material of this kind has to do with
things that happened in the Freud family before Sigmund was born.
The evidence in question began to turn up in the late 1960s when
new archival searches were made among the records kept in
Freiberg, the small town in Czechoslovakia (then Moravia) that
Freud was born in.
It
was known before this that Freud's father,
KallamonJacob Freud, had been born in Galicia in 1815, had mar–
ried a woman named Sally Kanner in about 1831, and had had two
sons by her, Emmanuel and Philipp, who were born in 1833 and
1836.
It
is not known when or where Sally Kanner Freud died, but
in 1855, when the elder Freud married Amalie Nathanson, who was
to bear as her first son Sigmund Freud, she was then twenty, he was
forty, and his two already living sons were about the same age as
their stepmother. The new material concerns the year 1852, when
Jacob Freud's two sons came to join their father in Freiberg, where
he was running a small jobbing business. Documents, such as the
local register ofJews for 1852, list a woman named Rebecca asJacob
Freud's wife-she apparently moved to Freiberg during that year
along with the two sons of Jacob Freud's first marriage. Nothing
more is known of her; she is never mentioned again, and no one, to
anyone's present knowledge, ever spoke of her, or referred to her in
any other way, including Freud's father, mother, his older brothers,
and Freud himself.
It
is equally unknown whether the records are
correct. If they are, it remains a mystery what happened to her. This
is everything that has been ascertained so far with any conclusive–
ness. Clark puts it all down carefully, says it may be important, if it
is true, but under the circumstances prudently restrains himself
from making too much of it.
Clark is a sensible and old-fashioned British biographer. Marie
Balmary is a psychoanalyst practicing in Paris and a disciple of the
late Jacques Lacan. Inspired by the material about the Freud family
discovered in the late 1960s, she has written what for want of any
other term has to be called a biographical study entitled
Psychoanalyz–
ing Psychoanalysis: Freud and the Hidden Fault of the Father.
One is
tempted at this point to remark that no more needs to be said; but
