Subjectivity in Psychoanalytic Inference: The Nagging Persistence of Wilhelm Fliess s Achensee Question

An alternative subtitle to this essay, which my non-Freudian Minnesota colleagues urged upon me, would have been, "Whose mind does the mindreader read?" To motivate discussion of a topic not deemed important by some today, consider the story of the last "Congress" between Freud and Fliess, the rupture of their relationship at Achensee in the summer of 1900—the last time the two men ever met, although an attenuated correspondence continued for a couple of years more. Setting aside the doubtless complex psychodynamics, and the prior indications (from both content and density of correspondence) that the relationship was deteriorating, I focus on the intellectual content of the final collision. Fliess had attacked Freud by saying that Freud was a "thought reader" who read his own thoughts into the minds of his patients. Freud correctly perceived that this choice of content for the attack was deadly, that it went for the jugular. Freud's letter to Fliess after the meeting (Freud 1954) indicates that Fliess had written, apparently to soften the blow of the criticism, something about "magic," which Freud again refused to accept and referred to as "superfluous plaster to lay to your doubts about thought reading." (p. 330) A year later Freud is still focusing on the thought-reading accusation, and writes, "In this you came to the limit of your penetration, you take sides against me and tell me that 'the thought-reader merely reads his own thoughts into other people,' which deprives my work of all its value [italics added]. If I am such a one, throw my everyday-life [the parapraxis book] unread into the wastepaper basket." (p. 334) In a subsequent letter Freud quotes himself as having exclaimed at Achensee, "But you're