Mrs. Freud

Paris-based psychiatrist and novelist Rosen writes in her postface that she wanted to bring Freud's spouse into the light, to "oblige Martha to emerge from obscurity." Her novel, an uncredited translation from the French, is epistolary, presenting a correspondence between the elderly Mrs. Freud (née Bernays, 1861–1951) and a fictional American biographer, Mary Huntington-Smith. At first reluctant, Rosen's Martha eventually comes around and freely associates about her childhood as an Orthodox Jew in Germany, her protracted courtship with the passionate and often jealous Sigi, and—at least according to this author—her frustrating marriage. Rosen's Freud did not want an intellectual partner in a wife; rather he required "patience, calm and kindness." Martha's role was supplanted over time by a series of family members and colleagues (sister Minna Bernays, Carl Jung as a student, daughter and intellectual heir Anna Freud). Rosen spends much time imagining the marriage's lost intimacy. (Martha reveals that after the birth of their sixth and final child, abstinence was their method of contraception.) Rosen's work is heavily researched but marred (at least in this translation) by stilted diction and the occasional anachronism. Clear but not inspiring, it reveals a retiring and submissive woman of her time, one who longed in vain for her famous husband's affections and for mental stimulation. (Oct.)