Link With Edgar Allen Poe, Found!
In previous postings at our website and Blog (i.e., “Did Freud Plagiarize Poe?” and “Commentary on Poe’s Imp of the Perverse) I brought to reader’s attention evidence showing Freud was an out and out plagiarist. I showed that he not only plagiarized the great German philosophers (and others) such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer—and produced evidence of the fact by citing recent scholars and Thomas Mann—but I also made the case that Freud made major use of the works of Edgar Allen Poe. He not only “borrowed” much from Poe for his psychoanalytic “technique” (á la Detective Dupin of The Murders of the Rue Morgue” etc.) but also used specific language from Poe’s murder maniac in Rue Morgue to describe his own exact feelings. These are feelings specific to the serial killer. Freud loved to make murder confessions but he always thinly disguised them as mere dreams or attributed his murder mania to “infantile” impulses. In the examples I give, however, I show that Freud adopted the language of the murder maniac in Poe’s story to describe himself quite in keeping with the kinds of “games” serial killers like to play to both reveal and conceal their crimes.
Although I felt I had strong proof of the linkage between Poe and Freud well in hand, nonetheless I continued to look through many works and biographies of Freud and was unable to locate any specific references to Edgar Allen Poe by Freud—whose work I was convinced Freud must have known and pirated. It is well known that Freud was an inveterate reader of English novels and other works but, though he cites many English writers there was nothing to be found on Poe. I attributed this to the fact that Freud wanted to hide the Poe connection as being, even for him, too telling. His use of Poe was, so to speak, a private “joke.” Finally my continuing efforts to find a Poe-Freud link were rewarded. While doing research for another article I will soon post on the website—one which gives more detailed information on Freud’s murder of Pauline Silberstein (see just posted “Indictment of Freud” currently featured on the home page)—I had occasion to once again examine Freud’s early letter to Eduard Silberstein. Yesterday, while doing so I happened on the below information. The quotation from Freud given below can be found in Sigmund Freud’s Letter to Eduard Silberstein 1871-1888I, Harvard University Press, 1990).
On February 21, 1875, 5 months before traveling to Manchester, England where I claim Freud murdered John, as my website abundantly documents, Freud wrote a letter to his boyfriend Eduard Silberstein. In the letter he tells Eduard that he proposes they have an “auto-da-fé” (an execution at the stake during the Spanish Inquisition) and destroy the writings of their secret society, the A.E. (Academia Espanol).
Today I indulged in a pleasure I have missed for a long time. I paged through and read the A.E. papers, which I obtained yesterday from your brother (who has grown into a strapping young fellow), and reveled in the memory of days gone by. I wanted to propose an auto-da- fé, but now lack the courage and instead confirm that I shall take over the secretariat of the A.E. from you and accord the archives due care and protection.
Freud then goes on to say he is sorrowed to discover some of his writing are missing and he muses over some of the writings that he rereads. Among those are:
Several polemical articles by our several hands from that period of romantic revelations, my memorial on the subject of the Cretaceous which led to G.’s dismissal. My awful nocturne in which I vie with Poe, and a hair-raising episode from your novel “Konrad,” in which you vie with Balzac. The beginning of my novel “the Journey to Roznau,” luckily truncated. (underline added)
So, this entry, when Freud is almost 19, clearly indicates that he not only read Poe, as I concluded, but consciously imitated him in his own creative writings. Clearly Freud is saying that he had imitated Poe and his friend had imitated Balzac in their respective writings. The old canard, “Imitation is the highest form of praise” is obviously applicable. I will soon present readers with a new Blog and additional evidence on Freud’s murder of Pauline Silberstein who is included in the list of Freud’s murder victims in the just posted article on “Freud’s Indictment.” Moreover, I hope to share as well some comments from a reader from Australia who had some interesting comments.
Eric
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