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ever been found. Did Ferenczi lose it, or, as some have argued, was
Freud's speech never written down? It must have existed, holds
Nemes , or Ferenzci could not have informed Freud that he had
"taken the liberty to insert a small sentence." Nemes reconstructed
all the details before concluding that this speech must have been the
joint work of Freud and Ferenczi. Thereby, the reputation of Hun–
garian psychoanalysis also is being reclaimed.
Hans Lobner, a young Viennese psychoanalyst , discusses the
Minutes of February 24, 1909-within them a talk by Freud, "The
Genesis of Fetishism" - which only recently were rediscovered. At
that time , Lobner notes, Freud already had "previewed" some of his
later contributions on fixations, voyeurism, clothes fetishism , foot
and shoe fetishism. Here, Freud also contrasted pathological fe–
tishism with the normal clothes fetishism of
all
women : "Dress for
them plays an inexplicable role. It deals once more with repression
of the act of being-seen , this time only in the passive drive
(Trieb)
which was repressed by clothes so that clothes are being elevated to a
fetish" [my translation]. Lobner, linking notions of fetishism to the
ethnologists' search for amulets , relics, mummies , and cultural ob–
jects, finds analogies between their own searches and those of
psychoanalysts for the unique secret of each patient . Feminists, on
the other hand , might forget the historical and theoretical context
and link Freud's notion of women's "normal" fetishism to male chau–
VInIsm .
The discoveries of some lost documents and the gradual release
of others by the guardians of the Freud Archives stimulated some
participants at this conference, for instance , to write a biographical
sketch of Freud's boyhood friend Herbert Silberer; to review the
"erotic triangle" -Freud, Kraus, Wittels-within the Vienna Circle;
and to investigate why and under what circumstances Freud ac–
quired the approximately 1,900 objects (of mixed quality) in his col–
lection of antiques . Next to this "addiction," documented another
contributor, Freud's "travel addiction," induced him to undertake
about one hundred major trips and to regret that after his first gum
operation in 1923 he no longer could travel.
Inevitably , a paper was given about Freud, Thomas Mann,
and Romain Rolland , speculating whether Freud could have con–
ceptualized the death instinct if he had not lived through the First
World War, and concluding that "aggressive impulses and personal
conflicts - even of the most eminent men - are intimately linked to
