Freuds India Sigmund Freud and Indias First Psychoanalyst Girindrasekhar Bose Alf Hiltebeitel Full Chapter

Freud's India: Sigmund Freud and
India's First Psychoanalyst

Girindrasekhar Bose Alf Hiltebeitel
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Title Pages
Freud's India: Sigmund Freud and India's First

Psychoanalyst Girindrasekhar Bose
Alf Hiltebeitel
Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780190878375
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190878375.001.0001
Title Pages
Alf Hiltebeitel
(p.i) Freud’s India (p.ii)
(p.iii) Freud’s India
(p.iv)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hiltebeitel, Alf, author.
Title: Freud’s India : Sigmund Freud and India’s first psychoanalyst
Girindrasekhar Bose / Alf Hiltebeitel.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2018. |
Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018001328 | ISBN 9780190878375 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780190878382 (updf) | ISBN 9780190878399 (epub) |
ISBN 9780190878405 (online resource)
Subjects: LCSH: Freud, Sigmund, 1856 –1939—Correspondence. |
Bose, Girindrashekhar, –1953—Correspondence. |
Psychoanalysts—Austria—Correspondence. |
Psychoanalysts—India—Correspondence. | Psychology, Religious. |
BISAC: RELIGION / Hinduism / History. |
RELIGION / Psychology of Religion. | RELIGION / Philosophy.
Classification: LCC BF109.F74 H55 2018 | DDC 150.19/520922—
dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001328
135798642
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
(p.xxiii) Freud’s India (p.xxiv)
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Page 2 of 2
Figures

Alf Hiltebeitel

Print ISBN-13: 9780190878375
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190878375.001.0001
(p.vii) Figures
Alf Hiltebeitel
7.1 “Viṣṇu Ananta Deva.” Front and side views of the Viṣṇu on Freud’s
desk 196
7.2 Iconography of Paravāsudeva 203
7.3 Paravāsudeva at Badami, Cave 3 205
7.4 Śrī Śeṣanārāyaṇa 207
7.5 Viṣṇu AnantaŚayana 208
7.6 Viṣṇu, seated, with two wives on a coiled Ananta. 211
7.7 Bāla Kṛṣṇa 215
7.8 Narasiṃha 216
8.1 “Long” Madhusūdana on south-facing wall of second-floor
circumambulatory, Vaikuṇṭha Perumāḷ temple 240
9.1 Reclining icon in middle-floor sanctum, with goddeses Śrī and Bhūmi
255
9.2 West-facing Vāsudeva vyūha, ground-floor sanctum, Vaikuṇṭha
Perumāḷ temple, Kanchipuram 256
9.3 Saṃkarṣaṇa vyūha, facing out from northern wall of ground-floor
sanctum, Vaikuṇṭha Perumāḷ temple 258
9.4 Ananta positioned like Saṃkarṣaṇa on north-facing wall of outer
circumambulatory on ground floor, Vaikuṇṭha Perumāḷ temple 260
9.5 Viṣṇu off his serpent couch but still on the ocean killing Madhu and
Kaiṭabha on his lap 270
(p.viii)
Page 1 of 1
Preface

Alf Hiltebeitel

Print ISBN-13: 9780190878375
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190878375.001.0001
(p.ix) Preface
Alf Hiltebeitel
THE TITLE OF this book, coupling Freud with India, was decided upon after
considering other titles. The subtitle has been a constant. The title is not meant
to be coy; Freud did not make as much of India as he could have. It is meant to
catch the eye of two chief groups of prospective readers: those interested in
Freud and psychoanalysis, and those interested in India. That is a good-sized
readership and hardly a new combination.
I have taken some risks in presenting such breadth of material. The foremost
risk involves readers who begin with an interest in Freud and psychoanalysis,
but have little knowledge of India. These readers will be carried along through
the book’s first three chapters that treat Freud’s correspondence with Bose and
the next three that discuss Bose’s main challenges to Freud. Only the concluding
three chapters cover the complex Indian material necessary to the book’s
argument, but by then I hope to have made it accessible and intriguing.
Resistant readers could read only the first six chapters, by which they would be
replicating Freud’s own detours around Indian materials—but they can discard
that option.
The companion book, titled Freud’s Mahābhārata presents more Indian material
as part of this same project. The latter makes the Indian and primarily Greco-
Mediterranean Goddess one of its three principal characters as a figure who
links the two pioneer psychoanalysts. Freud’s Mahābhārata makes points about
how both Freud and the Hindu epic treat mythologies that complement the
discussions of Freud and Bose made in this book, and the book ends by
proposing a new Freudian theory of the Mahābhārata.
Page 1 of 9
Preface
I am less worried about readers interested in India, whom this book addresses
throughout. Indian readers are known for their longstanding comfort with an
adversarial Freud and with Freudian analysis as providing an inevitable angle on
the study of Indian life and thought that (p.x) has more interest for them than
the Indophilic Carl Jung.1 Readers about India cannot be surprised that the same
angle has been exploited since the 1950s by many serious scholars both from
South Asia and the West. The risks I take are more personal here—about Freud
and Bose, and about myself.
About Freud and Bose, I resist the hagiographic impulses that have shaped most
writing about them, and I argue that their correspondence allows one to trace
the ups and downs that put each of them, occasionally, in an unflattering light.
About myself, I speak of risk because a book on Freud, India, and psychoanalysis
these days invites a choice as to whether one talks personally about one’s life. If
I join those who have done so,2 which I do with a few sidelights about religion, it
is because I do not see the point in trying to hide the fact that thinking about my
life and upbringing has been an engaging and ongoing part of this project. I take
this risk, but only in the preface, so that readers can sometimes think between
the lines of the main text about my personal input.
Beginning and ending with the near present, I highlight thirteen vignettes in
telegraphic form, some of which have an affinity with Freud’s life, as one will
meet it in this book:
1. My mother Lucille Barnett Hiltebeitel passed away at age 101 on June

13, 2014. Freud’s mother died at 95.
2. I was my mother’s firstborn, as was Freud. Unlike Freud, I was also my
father’s firstborn. I was born in a Catholic hospital in New York City early
during World War II. During an air-raid alert, my mother was “given the
baby” and told “you take care of it!” She “threw” me “under the bed.”
3. I had a Catholic nanny named Fanny, who was Irish, from ages two to
four, before my family made its big move. Freud also had a Catholic
nanny, who was Czech, up to his third year, but in reverse circumstances.
Fanny was my nanny in New York City before we moved to Weston,
Connecticut, in the country, whereas Freud at three moved from rural
Freiberg to Leipzig and then a year later to Vienna. My earliest memory
is of crossing a New York City street (I imagine (p.xi) it to have been
89th Street near Broadway) holding Fanny’s hand. Neither nanny made
the big move.
4. My sister Jane, my only sibling, was born eleven days before my fourth
birthday, for which my mother just made it home from the hospital. Freud
had two brothers and five sisters, and thus many more sibling rivalries.
By my reconstruction from family stories reinforced by some childhood
memories, my rivalry with my sister derives from her hospital visit for a
tonsillectomy when she was about two. From that time, she suffered fears
Page 2 of 9
Preface
of being left alone, which left my mother feeling guilty that she had not
stayed with Jane in the hospital. My mother quit her job in New York City
to be able to be in Weston with Jane. My experience of this change, from
long range and over many incidents, including when my second marriage
began to unravel in the mid-eighties, is that my mother’s unending
concerns for my sister had as their counterpart a determination that all
must be alright with me. This loss of closeness with her is my distant
analogue to whatever Freud experienced when and after his immediately
younger brother Julius died at the age of eight months, before Freud was
two.
5. When I was about ten or twelve, my Jewish mother took me twice on
the holidays to the Catholic churches of my home towns—first to
Westport’s on Easter and then, along with my sister, to Weston’s new
church on Christmas Eve while it was being finished (there was hanging
plastic sheeting for walls in the back where we sat). These are two of the
few mysterious things she did with me. Freud reports that by age three,
his nanny had carried him to all five Catholic churches in Freiberg.3
6. My Lutheran-by-birth father’s hypersensitive ears developed since
childhood a hatred of Lutheran choral exuberance, which had to do with
his preference for the visual arts and his life as a painter. He made
stained-glass windows for the Rockefeller Chapel in Princeton, New
Jersey, when he was in art school. I have panels of a Virgin Mary and a
Joseph that he made.
7. He told me at the lunch table once when I was about fifteen,
uncontradicted by my mother, “Son, I am not your father; I am your
mother.” I had just gone to the kitchen for a second glass of milk, which
he accused me of “swilling.” My mother replied, “Oh, leave him (p.xii)
alone.” My father’s remark made a contradictory impression on me. I felt
I had lucked out in having a nurturing, though somewhat nutty, father to
compensate for my mother’s haughtiness. I took his remark to be about
who wore the pants in the family, or about the bisexuality of both
members of my parental unit.
8. In 1970, my uncle Alfred, after whom my mother had named me, died
at eighty-two. According to my mother his last words, after a life of
identifying as a Viennese expatriate Jew who escaped the holocaust, were
“Save me, Jesus.” His mother was Catholic.
9. My father died in 1984 when I was forty-two, just as Freud was forty-
one. Having dealt with Parkinson’s disease since about 1969, he was
courageous about his loss of painting skills with his loss of hand
coordination, and also about growing housebound and being unable to
take walks in the woods. But exchanges with him grew more scarce and
difficult. I was in Washington and came up to Weston to see his body and
attend the cremation. Some months later, the family reunited to place his
ashes in the outlet of a brook on a trail named after him in the Weston
Page 3 of 9
Preface
Conservancy, at which I read a passage from his library by Henry David

Thoreau about thrashing through underbrush. When I published my first
book on the Draupadī cult in 1988, about the cult’s mythologies, I
dedicated it “in memory of my father who taught us to see.”
10. My sister was killed in early 1996 when her car was hit from behind
by a truck at a red light that rammed her into another truck ahead of her.
She was returning home after seeing her Jungian therapist. I received the
news that evening from her husband, who called me from Russia. My two
sons, Adam and Simon, and I decided to drive the next day from
Washington to Norwalk, Connecticut, to break the news to my mother.
She was playing cards with friends when we arrived in the late afternoon.
She said that when she saw us through the window, she knew we were
bringing bad news.
11. Not long after Jane’s funeral, my mother decided to move to
Washington, D.C., to live near me. For several years, she saw a therapist
about my sister, but fired her when she fell asleep while my mother was
talking. Thinking that my father would have wished it, I tried being a
dutiful son, seeing her at least once a week, usually to take her out to
dinner, and introducing her to friends, including girlfriends and my
eventual third wife. Women usually liked her. But two events made me
rethink my accommodation. In 2007, she was rushed to a hospital where
two (p.xiii) weeks of tests with no exercise (despite my urgings to her
doctor) found nothing wrong with her. Upon release, she had lost motor
skills, could no longer use a walker, and was obliged to relocate from her
chosen residence at a Hyatt. Physical therapy was a nonstarter and she
became wheelchair-bound. Meanwhile, in 2006, I was told I had an
essential tremor, which I knew would probably soon mean a diagnosis of
Parkinson’s, which it did by 2008. Because my mother had suffered
through my father’s Parkinson’s, and because I had learned to expect no
sympathy from her, I decided not to tell her. Then after her hundredth
birthday in January 2013, I began to see much less of her. I arranged her
birthday party at my wife’s country place in Middleburg, Virginia, calling
my mother’s few surviving relatives, and threw a catered party for
twenty-eight guests. Just a week later, my daughter-in-law told me that
my mother had told her and Simon that she was “surprised that Alf had
done nothing for my hundredth birthday.”
12. My mother’s death in June 2014 was to me a surprise, since I had
decided she would live to 104, and that we would have more time to grow
alike in our senility, like Molloy and his mother in Samuel Beckett’s
trilogy.4 I was in Colombia when I received the news that she was losing
consciousness, and I decided not to go back. She was with Simon, who
was overseeing her last shift from assisted living to hospice care. I urged
him to follow up on his plans to come with his wife and two girls to
Colombia to join me and my wife the next day, and leave her with Adam.
Page 4 of 9
Preface
She died holding Adam’s hand soon after Simon and his family had gotten
to Colombia. Through all this, I was prepared by Freud’s biography to
recall that he did not mourn his mother’s death, felt no grief over it, and
did not attend her funeral. Freud, too, had the fear that his mother, who
died at ninety-five, would outlive him. More than this, I believe that my
mother’s grip on things was not unlike that of Amalia Freud as Freud and
her grandchildren knew her. Freud’s son Martin called her a “tornado,”5
and a granddaughter described her as “full of charm with strangers
(p.xiv) but overweening, demanding, and tyrannical with her family” and
“a most selfish old lady.”6 At her son’s seventieth birthday celebration to
which Freud had discouraged her from coming, but at which she was
nevertheless the first guest, she announced to the assembled party, ‘I am
the mother.’ ”7 My father and sister had terms for my mother’s huffiness
long before I did. My father called her an “injustice collector” to explain
her skill in showing everyone else at fault whenever there was a family
argument. In the late 1960s, my sister coined the name “war hostess” for
her trait of commandeering our friends and other guests for after-dinner
games and arguments, long before there was a component of senility to
her behavior, such as Simon writes of:
I recall how often (and I mean incessantly) she would tell me with
great pride those last few years of her life about the time you’d
been called off to Spain to deliver a series of lectures that would
prepare Spain for war. It’s such a wonderfully strange idea. I
picture you at a lectern, tens of thousands of Spanish soldiers
standing at attention in neat cohorts that stretch to the horizon
before you, the king and queen with all the generals with all their
medals arrayed on chairs to your sides on the golden dais, nodding
gravely as you explain, as Kṛṣṇa did to Arjuna, that they need to
stop hesitating and fulfill their Kṣatriya duty.
I was in Spain for a month in 2009 to lecture on the heroines of the

Indian epics.8 Year after year, my mother would await the announcement
of the MacArthur “genius awards,” sure that I must be a contestant.
Worst of all for me, she felt entitled to be mean to whomever she felt like
telling off, even after being told I had made peace with them, or with
myself about them.
13. I have always had a predilection for goddesses that I don’t claim to
understand, but which probably has something to do with the fact that I
converted to Roman Catholicism during the writing of this book.
(p.xv) The first chapter written for the whole study, about three dead mother
stories in the Mahābhārata, is now chapter 3 of Freud’s Mahābhārata. But both
books have been impacted by André Green’s article “The Dead Mother,” which is
about an imago that “has been constituted in the child’s mind, following
maternal depression, brutally transforming a living object, which was a source of
Page 5 of 9
Preface
vitality for the child, into a different figure,” one who may eventually give the
patient “the feeling that a malediction weighs upon him that there is no end to
his dead mother’s dying.”9 Green sees Amalia Freud’s dealing with the death of
Julius behind Freud’s variation on “the dead mother complex”10
But why go into all this? Old age is no picnic for anyone, and my mother’s foibles
made me cringe only in her last years. I tell such stories after much thought and
vacillation because I lived with them, and recalled many more like them, as this
book took shape, and I feel that it is a fuller and more honest book thereby. I feel
some survivor guilt,11 and I acknowledge that Freud only spoke positively about
his mother. To paraphrase one of his well-known epigrams: biography is destiny.
I started work on the project in the fall of 2012, and I soon began to announce
the book in publications as “forthcoming,” with “Uncanny Domesticities” as part
of the title, giving name to a trope that ran through early chapters as applied to
Freud, Bose, and the Goddess. I kept that title until late 2015, when I scrapped
it. I decided then to overhaul the whole book and retitle it, for a time settling on
either “Viṣṇu on Freud’s Couch” or “Freud on Viṣṇu’s Couch”: titles that I
eventually rejected because they were limited by their play on the older title,
Vishnu on Freud’s Desk,12 and because they applied only to the third part of this
volume. In the meantime, I had found Henri and Madeleine Vermorel’s 606-page
Sigmund Freud et Romain Rolland: Correspondence 1923-36: de la sensation
océanique au trouble du souvenir sur l’Acropole. The Vermorels’ book first
caught my eye in August 2014, on a shelf for returned books at the Freud
Museum library in London. I was immediately intrigued that the dates of the
Freud–Rolland correspondence overlapped the time span of the Freud–Bose
letters, and since I knew that the Freud–Rolland correspondence (p.xvi)
touched on India, I thought there could be the potential to read the two
exchanges for light they might shed on each other. I read the book over the
2014–15 winter holiday. I then took time out from Freud and company to write
Nonviolence in the Mahābhārata: Śiva’s Summa on Ṛṣidharma and the Gleaners
of Kurukṣetra.13
Having put the Freud–Bose book in the twilight for a while, once I returned to it,
owing to what I had discovered in the Vermorels’ book, I decided in December
2015 to thoroughly rewrite the three chapters-which now intercalate the two
correspondences—and to highlight some of the Vermorels’ fruitful findings
elsewhere. Since readers will be making the Vermorels’ acquaintance in these
early pages—most, I suspect, for the first time—I will say some words about
them, and about what it means that a chance find looms so large in this book. (It
was also at the Freud Archives, in its bookshop, that I found Janine Burke’s The
Gods of Freud,14 which led me to the poet H. D., whose 1933–34 work with
Freud is also introduced in chapter 3.)
Page 6 of 9
Preface
It seems, as a rule, that writers on Freud in English know they should read about
him in German, but very few read about him in French. The result is that, aside
from Jacques Lacan and his followers, French scholarship on Freud and
psychoanalysis tends to exist in the English-speaking world as an unvisited
island.15 Yet the body of non-Lacanian collaborative work in French is distinctive
and considerable, and from the 1950s through their 2013 publication, De la
psychiatrie à la psychoanalyse,16 the Vermorels have been on its pulse as
writers, readers, and respondents. As a recent interview of Henri Vermorel by
Marie Roumanens says,17 the Vermorels began their careers as interns and then
as doctors together in the 1950s, participating in the movement for a humane
opening of psychiatric institutions in France after the Second World War.
Members of the Psychoanalytic Societies of Paris and Lyon, each has a private
psychoanalytic practice at (p.xvii) Chambéry, the capital of the Savoy
Prefecture, and both have taught clinical psychology and psychoanalysis at the
University of Savoy for over thirty years. Roumanens lists three reasons for
carrying out her dialogue with Henri: that he began his work (with Madeleine,
as he quickly points out) at a time when psychiatric hospitals included a farm
where patients worked; that his (and their) work took part in a transformative
movement that saw psychoanalysis begin to think about relations to the
environment; and that he (with Madeleine) renewed the study of the origins of
psychoanalysis by showing the influence of German Romanticism on Freud’s
thought. It is the latter that they work into their book on Freud and Romain
Rolland, as well as their 1995 book, Freud, Judéité, Lumières et Romantisme.18
The Vermorels offer a new interpretation of Freud’s lifelong yet, as they argue,
deepening interests in religion, and they interpret the correspondence with
Rolland about the “oceanic feeling” as impactful on Freud’s late-in-life interests
in pre-Oedipal themes involving the mother. I will argue that this coincides with
what Bose was challenging Freud to consider, which allows me to explore what
Bose might have been able to contribute from an Indian perspective to Freud’s
rethinking, had Freud been as encouraging of a give-and-take exchange with
him about things Indian as he was with Rolland. Both the correspondence with
Bose and that with Rolland ended as Freud was shifting his ground to turn, for
his last sustained effort, to Moses and Monotheism.19 On the one hand, this last
turn coincides with what Richard A. Bernstein (in Freud and the Heritage of
Moses) and Jacques Derrida (in Archive Fever) have hit on in Freud’s softening
on religious traditions (not on religion itself), whereby he relates them to a
people’s collective traumas. On the other hand, it finally made both Rolland’s
and Bose’s openings onto Hinduism seem antithetical to Freud’s driving
interests.
To my surprise, this book and its companion volume thus have a chance to say
something new about Freud himself, not to mention about Freud and Bose,
Judaism and Hinduism, images and their rejection, God and the Goddess, and
Page 7 of 9
Preface
Moses and the Mahābhārata in the light of Freud’s analysis of religious

traditions in terms of peoples’ collective traumas. (p.xviii)
Notes:
(1.) See Kapila 2007, 127–34.
(2.) I think of Sarah Caldwell 1999a, 1999b; Jeffrey Kripal 2000, 2001; David
Gordon White 2003; and among those working on Buddhism, Gananath
Obeyeekere 2012.
(3.) Bernfeld 1951, 115, 128.
(4.) Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1968).
(5.) The comment follows Martin Freud’s (1958, 11) depiction of Amalia’s
background from East Galicia on the Ukrainian-Polish border. “They . . . had
little grace and no manners; and their women were not what we should call
‘ladies.’ But . . . they, alone of all minorities, stood up against the Nazis.”
(6.) For other details and context, see Heller 1973, 335–39.
(7.) All quotes are from Abraham 1982, 443.
(8.) See Hiltebeitel 2016a,the essay I gave in Wulff 2016.
(9.) Quotations from Green 1983, 142 and 153.
(10.) Green 1983, 148–49, 158, 163, 168; see FM, ch. 2.
(11.) Max Schur frequently uses this term for Freud’s response to Julius’s
“sudden disappearance” (1972, 159–72, 240–41).
(12.) Vaidyanathan and Kripal 1999.
(13.) Hiltebeitel 2016.
(14.) Burke 2006.
(15.) Two exceptions prove the rule. Parsons read the Vermorels’ book after
completing his dissertation on Freud and Rolland’s correspondence while
turning it into a book (1999a). He cites theirs only where it confirms things he
says, and ignores its originality. Armstrong (2001) then reviews both books
favorably, overlooking Parsons’s deficiency. Armstrong’s review of the Vermorels’
book is thoughtful, but he overrides one of their most fruitful insights and
replaces it with his own mediocre solution (see the end of chapter 3, this
volume).
(16.) Vermorel and Vermorel 2013.
Page 8 of 9
Preface
(17.) In the electronic journal écopsychologie. http://eco-psychologie.com.
(18.) H. Verrmorel, A. Clancier, and M. Vermorel [1992] 1995.
(19.) See Schorske 1993.
Page 9 of 9
Acknowledgments

Alf Hiltebeitel

Print ISBN-13: 9780190878375
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190878375.001.0001
(p.xix) Acknowledgments
Alf Hiltebeitel
THIS VOLUME, FREUD’S INDIA, was for a long time conceived of as one with its
companion volume, Freud’s Mahābhārata, down even to the time of its
submission to Oxford University Press. It was the word-count maximum of
another press that led to its split into two books. The second book could thus
take shape independently—as I describe further in the preface and
acknowledgments of Freud’s Mahābhārata, so that readers will have a clearer
path to intelligibility in both books. Of those acknowledged here, none read the
second volume separately; thus, the acknowledgments made here count for both
volumes.
I lead off by thanking this book’s most steady reader through its many changes
and developments, from its earliest chapter to its completion: the psychoanalyst
Dr. Christopher Keats, who offered many timely and valuable suggestions, as
well as much encouragement. Toward the end, the project got a long-overdue
full critical discussion by its two anonymous Oxford University Press readers,
one of whom discarded his anonymity, Jeffrey Kripal, and the other whom I could
recognize as Marshall Alcorn. Both had the unusual combination of
psychoanalytic insight and experience of India that this project could really
benefit from, and both made invaluable suggestions that I followed. Also, my
friend Randy Kloetzli can be a curmudgeon on Freud, but that did not stop him
from reading two drafts with care and insight, knowledge of Indology, and a
sense of much-appreciated humor. I also thank Christiane Hartnack, who read a
draft in 2016. Thanks go to Vasudha Narayanan for getting into the spirit of my
search for answers to questions about Bose’s seventy-fifth birthday gift to Freud
and for contributing her insights. Thanks also are due to Diane Jonte-Pace for an
early note of encouragement.
Page 1 of 2
Acknowledgments
I thank Bryony Davies at the Freud Museum in London for her help during my
visits there in August 2014, and for sending me and giving permission to publish
four images of the “Viṣṇu on Freud’s desk.” I thank (p.xx) Mark Baron and
Elise Boisanté for giving me access to pertinent images in their collection, and
for their permission to publish three of them as figures. Thanks are likewise due
to Raoul Goff and to Parabola Books for permission to print two figures, and to
Pandita Geary for helpfully making those arrangements. All five of those
permissions concern images that appear in Gods in Print: Masterpieces of
India’s Mythological Art. A Century of Sacred Art (2012) by Richard H. Davis,
who was also encouraging and helpful. I also thank Oxford University Press for
permission to reproduce five images from Dennis H. Hudson’s The Body of God:
An Emperor’s Palace for Krishna in Eighth-Century Kanchipuram (2008).
I thank Lewis D. Wyman, Reference Librarian at the Freud Archive at the

Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C., for his help with navigating the
collection there. Thanks are due to my George Washington University Religion
Department colleagues for supporting my pre-retirement two-year leave of
absence that allowed me to write the two books, and to the GWU Committee on
Research and University Facilitating Fund for the 2014 award that supported my
summer research at the Freud Museum in London.
Midway through the writing, before I read Henri and Madeleine Vermorel, and
before I really knew what I would be doing with this project, I sent a draft to
William “Hank” Abrashkin, who had asked to see what I had written. Hank is the
younger brother of my oldest and best friend West, who died in 1996. His own
Freud-resistant questions and off-the-cuff comments were helpful in envisioning
a general current-day readership, and often were a reminder of things his
Buddhist brother might have said. I thank my sons Simon and Adam for their
help, encouragement, and timely consultations, and Simon moreover for being
willing to put his own writing and editing skills to the potential task of being my
literary executor, should Father Time put an end to my oversight of the two
volumes. Through the five years of work on this project, my wife Elena Eder has
been the real beacon, with her wonderful and supportive ways, carving out time
and workstations for me to make my portable offices in Cali, Colombia;
Washington, D.C.; and Middleburg, Virginia. Elena read many of my books on
Freud while backing up my studies with her own library that includes the
Standard Edition of Freud’s works translated by William Strachey and Ernest
Jones’s three-volume biography of Freud. She had the prescience fifteen years
ago to insist that I read Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents and Bruno
Bettelheim’s Freud and Man’s Soul, neither of which I had finished until this
project was underway. My love, debts, and thanks cannot be measured.
Page 2 of 2
Abbreviations

Alf Hiltebeitel

Print ISBN-13: 9780190878375
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190878375.001.0001
(p.xxi) Abbreviations
Alf Hiltebeitel
KNOWING THE FOLLOWING abbreviations for works cited and discussed in this
book may be helpful to the reader.
FM
Freud’s Mahābhārata, the companion volume to this book
BhG
Bhagavad Gītā
DM
Devī-Māhātmyam
Mbh
Mahābhārata
Up
Upaniṣad
(p.xxii)
Page 1 of 1
Introduction

Alf Hiltebeitel

Print ISBN-13: 9780190878375
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190878375.001.0001
Introduction
Beginnings of Tension and Drama in the Surviving Bose–Freud Correspondence
Alf Hiltebeitel
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190878375.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords

Chapter 1 compares Freud and Bose biographically: their childhoods, early
psychoanalytic discoveries, marriages, residences, careers, founding of
psychoanalytic movements in Europe and India, respectively, and later years.
Freud’s writings on his own life are compared to Bose’s silence about his. The
chapter opens discussion of Freud’s relation to his father Jacob and mother
Amalia, and Freud’s screen memories about the death of his baby brother Julius
when Freud was not yet two. It then goes into the first phase of their
correspondence, which centers on a drawing of Freud made sight unseen by an
Indian artist and forwarded by Bose, and a photograph of Freud sent by himself
that Bose had requested.
Keywords: Jacob Freud, Amalia Freud, Julius Freud, Freiberg Moravia, Vienna, Hindu joint family,
Parsibagan Lane, Calcutta, iconography
SIGMUND FREUD IS much better known than Girindrasekhar Bose, and has
been the subject of many full-length biographies, whereas no one has written
one about Bose. I suspect the main reason for the latter’s lack is the scarcity of
details Bose left about himself—particularly that he sought to advance his career
without leaving a record of self-promotion. Even adding what has been said in a
few sketchy pages about him by others leaves the impression that a Bose
biography would have to be filled in with life-and-times detail about the
development of his career. This book will mention all the known details available
from these sources, but only as they emerge from his correspondence with
Page 1 of 20
Introduction
Freud. It is there that I will address the biographical asymmetry. And I will
attempt to level the field simply by treating them as equal partners in their
correspondence.
It is important to state at the outset that both wrote to develop the science of
psychoanalysis. We can best view Bose as an original psychoanalytic thinker who
sought out Freud as a mentor and offered him an intelligent critique. Bose’s
letters show him respecting Freud as the founder of a discipline in which he
pursued both discipleship and local leadership in Calcutta. Differences emerged
between them, but they shared a commitment to the psychoanalytic movement’s
claims to being science.
(p.2) True, we shall find that Bose had distinctive ideas about psychoanalysis
that contained his own Indian and Hindu experiences. But he seems not to have
advanced them as a colonial or anti-Western critique from the standpoint of a
“secret self under colonialism,” as Ashis Nandy has taken him to have done,
particularly in his Bengali writings. Amit Ranjan Basu, “after reading most of
Bose’s Bengali writings,” says that “one finds Nandy’s essay limited in scope,
and not adequately representative of the wide-ranging variety of Bose’s secret
selves.”1 Basu adds, “Unlike the straight-jacketed nationalist projects which saw
the colonial demon everywhere, the discipline of psychology provided a more
flexible nuanced space for consent and contest. In this endeavor, no ‘Hindu
psychoanalysis’ like the ‘Hindu alchemy’ was born.”2
Bose was also not looking for a “Hindu modal personality,” as were two of his
British colleagues working in India, as well as many since his time who have
taken up the question of “the Indian Oedipus” to profile a distinctive Hindu
psychology. Nor did Bose develop a notion of a “split mother” (variants of this
construct are good/bad mother; spousified/unspousified goddess; and breast-
goddess/tooth-goddess) in discussing Indian childrearing or goddesses.3 I see
nothing particularly Hindu or Indian about a “split mother”4—a formulation that
owed a debt to Freud.5 I will also not pursue the idea of a Hindu or Indian modal
personality based on an alternative Oedipus, since I agree with Robert P.
Goldman,6 as would Bose, (p.3) that the Freudian Oedipal triangle is well-
attested in India, even if Bose thought that Freud’s formulation of it needed
rethinking. Both ideas have served to promote Indian exceptionalism.
This chapter begins with features of Freud’s and Bose’s home lives that are
roughly comparable. My inclination is to see a basis for sympathies between
Bose and Freud. Pre-World War II Europe and late colonial India between 1922
and 1937 offer a period when both men knew that varied voices sought to link
their own familiar enough Judaisms and Hinduisms not only with the origins of
religion but also with attacks for their alleged backwardness, and with emerging
Page 2 of 20
Introduction
nationalisms and essentialisms that neither signed on to.7 Both also felt the
impact of hegemonic Christianities and insidious understandings of the Aryan.8
Based on Freud’s own writings, almost everyone who writes about Freud has
something to say about his home life: natal, growing up, married, and aging.
Each period has also been mined for things Freud was silent about, including
scandals, but the evidence for the scandals is thin.9 In contrast, Bose maintained
total silence about domestic matters, never writing about his own life as an
object of analytic self-scrutiny.
Madalon Sprengnether observes that for Freud’s first three years in Freiberg,
Moravia, “we find a family structure that differs considerably from the one that
characterized his subsequent years of development in Vienna.”10 Freud spent his
earliest years quartered in the same single room as his parents, in which a
younger brother (Julius, who died) and sister Anna were born. His two half-
brothers from his father’s first marriage, Emmanuel and Philipp, also lived close
by, and Emmanuel’s children, John and Pauline, were Freud’s closest playmates.
There was also Freud’s (p.4) Catholic nanny. Sprengnether characterizes the
domestic arrangement in Freiberg as “what we would now call a ‘blended
family,’ ”11 which is not a far cry from an Indian “joint family.” It contrasted to
the Vienna household, which was more patriarchal and organized around the
father, Jacob Freud. “In Vienna, [Sigmund] faced the inevitable Oedipus situation
alone.”12 The Vermorels say that Vienna was a tough place for Jacob, who
became inactive as opportunities ran out during an economic crisis, while the
family lived on subsidies given to Freud’s mother, Amalia. They cite Ruth
Abraham (Freud’s disciple Karl Abraham’s daughter), who suggests that Freud
had resentments toward Jacob that were aggravated near the end of his failing
life, and that the humiliations he felt toward him went back to a prior period of
his life. Freud’s adolescent fantasies of identification with political leaders and
prophets (Hannibal, Napoleon, Moses, etc.) reflect a tentative idealization that
contrasted with the age of Jacob’s feebleness. Meanwhile Amalia, whom we met
in this book’s preface, held her weekly Sunday and holiday gatherings, to which
Sigmund would always come late. Abraham even concludes “that the Oedipal
father is constructed largely from characteristics and experiences with Freud’s
mother. These characteristics and experiences were originally projected by
Freud onto his father, and later, by extension, onto the universal Oedipal
father.”13 But Freud surely knew his father better than this implies. I suspect
that Freud grew up with a grudging admiration of his father’s ability to keep his
attractive young wife pregnant.14
No doubt Freud’s success owed much to the positive overinvestment that he

says his mother made in him, but he seems to have been willing to sacrifice very
little of his personal life to fit her ambitions for him. Freud (p.5) said that his
relationship to his mother was behind what the Vermorels call his “conquistador
persona.” As he says in “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” “When one has been the uncontested
Page 3 of 20
Introduction
favorite of his mother, . . . his conquering sentiment, this assurance of

success, . . . is not rare.”15 “The hero,” says Freud, “was probably afforded by
the youngest son, the mother’s favorite, whom she had protected from paternal
jealously, and who, in the era of the primal horde, had been the father’s
successor. In the lying poetic fancies of prehistoric times the woman, who had
been the prize of battle and the temptation to murder, was probably turned into
the active seducer and instigator to the crime.”16
With this strained relationship in mind, it is possible to make a revealing, if

uneven, comparison between Freud and Bose in the manner of handling their
mothers’ deaths. Bose reportedly showed no affect at the time he learned of his
mother’s death in 1929, which might remind one that Freud’s felt “no
grief” (kein Trauer) when his mother died, and he did not mourn her. As
Hartnack retells Bose’s story, “The Berlin sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who
met him on a world tour in 1929, was surprised at how well he controlled his
emotions”; Hirschfeld had seen Bose get some news urgently whispered into his
ear while they were having a conversation, and learned some days later that the
news had been of Bose’s mother’s death.17 Freud wrote about his mother’s
death with relief:
I will not disguise the fact that my reaction to this event has, because of
special circumstances, been a curious one. Assuredly, there is no saying
what effects such an experience may produce in deeper layers, but on the
surface I can detect only two things: an increase in personal freedom,
since it was always a terrifying thought that she might come to hear of my
death; and secondly, the satisfaction that at last she has achieved the
deliverance for which she had earned a right after such a long life. No grief
otherwise, such as my ten years younger brother is painfully experiencing.
I was not at the funeral; again Anna represented me.18
(p.6) Their differences in age at their mothers’ deaths are, of course, striking.
When Bose’s mother died, he and she were about forty-two and seventy,
respectively.19 Freud and his mother were seventy-five and ninety-five,
respectively. Having written “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud knew what he
was talking about when he told friends he did not mourn his mother’s passing,
which occurred only six years before his own. All this we know through Freud’s
own writings. With Bose, it is only through a virtual stranger’s report that we
learn of his lack of emotion when his mother died.
Like anyone else, Freud could never bring his pre-Oedipal years into clear focus.
Says Max Schur of his first three years in Freiberg, “Being unable to reconstruct
these events completely, he had to create maximum distance. And yet he did it
with a maximum of ingenuity, which makes one regret not being able to follow
him in this flight of imagination.”20 But as he “rationalized an ideal patriarchy,
one he may have wished to experience as a child and which he strove to
Page 4 of 20
Introduction
establish in the context of his own marriage and extended family,” so “casting
his lot with that of Oedipus”21 must have something to do with a felt tension
between the two household structures. That would not have pertained to Bose,
who moved from a smaller joint-family household to a bigger one.
Two additional similarities are striking. Both considered themselves sons of their
fathers’ second marriages, in which their mothers were much younger than their
fathers and the fathers’ first wives.22 And both were uprooted from rural towns
and moved to an “imperial” city—Freud by age four, Bose by age five. In Freud’s
case, we have his efforts at psychoanalytic self-analysis in those formative years;
in Bose’s case, there’s nothing of the kind.
A comparison of Freud’s and Bose’s adult residences also yields obvious

similarities, as has been set forth by Hartnack, who knows Vienna intimately:
Like the Berggasse in Vienna, Parsibagan Lane is not located in but near
the heart of the city. The Alsergrund district in Vienna, (p.7) where Freud
lived and worked, is close to the university, but not inside the “Ring” as it
is called in Vienna, where all the buildings and offices of imperial
importance were located. Likewise, the Bose residence is also close to
Calcutta University, but not to the Maidan, and the former “saheb para.”
Parsibagan, like the part of Vienna in which Freud lived, was a typical
upper middle class residential area. In both cases the houses were new
and imposing. Yet they were far from being the kind of urban palaces that
the wealthy elite in Calcutta or Vienna could afford.23
Freud’s residence, to which he moved in 1881, was his own purchase after he
married, and it remained his headquarters for the next forty-seven years, until
his forced move to London.24 Bose moved into his home in 1905 at age five, after
it was purchased by his father. Sharing it with his brothers, Bose lived there the
rest of his life.25
Each residence became a place for both Freud and Bose to meet with the
respective psychoanalytic societies they founded. Freud says the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Society was begun in 1902, with the impetus of Wilhelm Stekel,
when “a number of younger physicians gathered around me with the declared
intention of learning, practicing, and disseminating psychoanalysis.”26 It “met
around a long table in his waiting room amidst cigar smoke and spittoons.”27
Margolis describes the scene in connection with Freud’s self-proclaimed
“addiction.” When colleagues “arrived for their weekly meeting, they found all
prepared for the hours of presentations and discussions that were to follow, not
least the preparations for smoking.”28 In 1911, Stekel joined Alfred Adler’s
break with Freud, but Freud reconstituted the group and kept it going.
Page 5 of 20
Introduction
Bose hosted similar gatherings. Bose and the fifteen other founding members of
the Indian Psychoanalytic Society met regularly in the residence of the Bose
family.29 Bose also met there regularly with a group (p.8) of Bengali writers,
who read and discussed their latest works in progress. The Bengali term for the
gatherings was an adda, “a place for careless talk or the chat of intimate
friends . . . for it was bound by no rules or regulations. Among its members could
be counted many great names, artists, poets, journalists, historians, litterateurs,
medical men, psychologists, and scientists. It was known as the Arbitrary Club,”
and the Utkendra Samiti (“Eccentric Club”) in Bengali. “Along with tea, chess,
and cards, members would hold discussion on all possible topics. . . . The
atmosphere of the Club was at that time surcharged with the electric current of
psychology and literature.”30 At these meetings psychoanalytic ideas were
related to prevailing concepts and conditions in Bengali Hindu culture.31 Both
Freud and Bose encouraged a combination of strictly psychoanalytic purposes
and what Freud called “applied psychoanalysis,”32 discussing art and literature
at their respective gatherings. For instance, Freud read a draft of his Leonardo
da Vinci study at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.33
As we have seen, Bose and Freud differed in the ways their public and private—
or outer and inner34—domains were recorded.35 According to Nandy, once the
Bose family moved to Calcutta and began to keep “the social company of
reformist Brahmos . . . the Brahmos now began to make fun of the orthodox
ways of the Boses,” including their domestic pieties.36 The Bose family’s
“orthodox ways” are said to have included their devotions to their Kāyastha
caste’s “family divinities” (kuladevatās). Although I risk the charge of
jāti-profiling to mention it, if (as seems altogether likely) Bose’s own “family
deity” was the typical one for Kāyasthas, Citragupta, his kuladevatā could have
provided him with a culturally iconic figure identified with nothing less than the
writing technique Bose used for the transcription of his psychoanalytic cases.
The Boses would have maintained a domestic cult for Citragupta, the patron
deity and eponymous (p.9) ancestor of their scribal Kāyastha caste, and the
record-keeping assistant of Yama, god of the dead. Like Citragupta, Kāyasthas
“set the greatest store by their profession of writing and say that the son of a
Kāyasth should be either literate or dead”; the term lekhak, or “writer” for a
Kāyastha is defined “in Purāṇic literature” as one “who can express much
thought in short and pithy sentences, who is able to understand the mind of one
when one begins to speak.”37 Consider how Bose details his methods and
purposes in transcribing his sessions with patients:
It was the original custom for the analyst to note down in writing the ideas
brought up by the patient by free-association. . . . I have however
continued to use the old method because, in the first place, I can always
adopt a mechanical attitude towards the writing, and bring about a partial
dissociation of this particular activity from my main mental current. My
mind is not much distracted by the act of taking down the patient’s
Page 6 of 20
Introduction
thoughts. . . . My patients get habituated to the condition in a very short

time and do not feel any distraction either. As they are generally asked to
keep their eyes closed they do not even see me writing.38
As Bose seems to be aware, Freud began likewise by writing notations during

sessions with patients, up through the time he corresponded with Wilhelm
Fliess, to enable “the work of synthetic cogitation, which remains dependent on
a written record.” Freud, however, alternated his notetaking with periods of
“evenly suspended attention, without taking notes.”39 Bose extends his advocacy
for the practice in terms of the analyst’s implicit contract with the patient:
The psychologist takes a note of his own mental states and asks other
individuals to do the same under certain specific settings which constitute
the conditions of his observation and experiment and having collected as
many data as he can [he] submits them to (p.10) statistical treatment and
arrives at certain conclusions regarding the operations of the mind. . . .
[H]is deductions have the same validity as the physicist.40
As concerns objectivity: “I can certainly claim a greater scientific objectivity and

validity for my data.”41 As to theories that might arise from the records kept: “A
reliable and permanent record of past cases is of great use in testing the
correctness of a theory that may suggest itself at a later period.”42 As concerns
length and summarization: “the actual records of [the case studies] . . . run into
several hundred pages each.”43 And as confirmation of one of the corollaries to
his theory of opposite wishes: “an analyst, who takes care to note down the free-
associations of his patients, is sure to come across the see-saw mechanism as I
have described it.”44
Whether or not Bose reflected on Citragupta’s ledgers in defending his own in

this way, or indeed on Citragupta assessing the acts of persons passing through
death in Yama’s court, the comparison enables one to encapsulate Bose’s
manner of recording the detailed and orderly case histories that show him
prompting patients to fix circuits by making opposite-wish “adjustments.”45
Hartnack contrasts Freud’s metaphor for the psychoanalyst as “an archaeologist
who digs into an individual instead of a cultural past” with Bose’s belief “that he
worked like an engineer who fixes circuits that are not functioning properly.”46
But Citragupta also brings up the question of karma, raising questions about it
that must be asked of Bose, as we shall do in chapter 4. Citragupta assesses the
current state of the circuits of karma so that Yama, judge of the dead, can assign
a suitable rebirth that might fulfill or punish leftover conscious wishes,
presumably including formerly unconscious opposite ones that have become
conscious over a terminated lifetime or await another life to come to fruition; or
he may pronounce the cure: salvation. Bose is not talking about karma, but his
theory of opposite wishes has what I will call (p.11) a “penumbra of karma”
about it. The seesaw mechanism may remind one of Citragupta’s scale on which
Page 7 of 20
Introduction
he weighs the good and bad karma of those who arrive before him.47 Bose even
goes one-up on Citragupta, in that he brings unconscious opposite wishes
directly into the adjustment or the cure in this life, not between this one and the
next.
I turn now to the first phase of the Bose–Freud letters. Their correspondence
raises two main “dramatic” questions, even if scholarship to date has not
formulated them. The first, to be explored in chapter 3, is, why Bose never
complied with Freud’s repeated invitations to contribute an article on his theory
of opposite wishes to one of the Freudian circle’s international psychoanalytic
journals. The one article Bose did submit to the International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, on “The Duration of Coitus” (1937), relates his case studies to
contemporary literature on sexology and the Kāmasūtra. It says nothing direct or
theoretical about wishes, and it was certainly not what Freud asked for. The
second question, to be discussed in chapters 7 and 9, is why Bose and his
colleagues sent Freud an obscure image of Viṣṇu from distant Kerala, rather
than a Bengali image, which would suggest a Goddess.
But tension and drama are felt earlier in the correspondence than with these two
questions, as even this introductory chapter will begin to show. My
interpretation of the letters derives from reading between the lines and giving
careful attention to dates, to Freud’s contemporary exchanges with others, and
to the two authors’ concurrent scientific writings. No such dynamic is imagined
in other accounts of either Bose’s or Freud’s careers, and readers should make
what he or she will of my invasions of the men’s privacy. Bose’s widow Indrumati
Bose gave the Bose–Freud letters to the Freud Archives in London, at Anna
Freud’s request in 1963.48 The correspondence makes several references to lost
letters; if found, the letters might alter the drama—but very little, I will argue.
The remaining letters reflect three clear phases:
1. Twelve getting-to-know-you letters (December 1920–December 1923),

examined in this chapter. These letters center on Bose’s requests for a
photograph of Freud.
2. Ten letters exchanged more than six years later (January 1929–
February 1933), examined in chapter 2. These show a surge of increasing
(p.12) collegiality, even bonhomie, until they end, revealing strains in
the relationship.
3. A 1933 New Year’s letter from Freud that is answered with Bose’s last
letter. Freud closes out the correspondence on November 27, 1937, with
his only letter in German, which is followed by a “friendly letter” in
English from Anna Freud.
The first two phases both begin with Bose’s sending Freud his current writings
on psychoanalysis. In each case, Freud responded with appreciation but also
Page 8 of 20
Introduction
with consistent reservation. All three phases end abruptly, and probably on both
sides but more clearly on Freud’s, with signs of withdrawal.
Rather than reproducing the Bose–Freud letters in full, summaries will suffice
for the purposes of this book.49 I will do the same in the next two chapters both
with their letters and with the Freud—Romain Rolland correspondence that was
mentioned in the Preface. When I quote passages in discussions, to avoid
repetition I sometimes shorten the summary by marking the segments omitted
with an asterisk, followed by an ellipsis (*. . . ). Where this is done, it means the
asterisked passage will get a later airing and discussion.
It should be mentioned that Freud’s letters to Bose are mostly short and that he
never exhibits in these letters the literary flair that has been noted in much of
his other correspondence. Presumably, feeling restricted to the English language
has something to do with this nonexpansiveness, but Bose’s own brevity also
sets the tone. Bose likewise developed a literary side, becoming a novelist and
children’s fiction writer in Bengali. The opening phase of twelve letters is
interesting for its air of tentativeness, as both authors feel each other out.
Phase 1
1. Bose to Freud
December 1920
The initial note accompanies Bose’s dissertation, “The Concept of

Repression,” and requests Freud’s “opinion and suggestions about my
work.” Bose says, “Along with my friends and relations I have been a warm
admirer of your theories and science, and it might (p.13) interest you to
learn that your name has been a household word in our family for the past
decade.”
2. Freud to Bose
May 29, 1921
Acknowledging receipt of “your book,” Freud writes that he is “glad to

testify [as to] the correctness of the principal views and the good sense
appearing in it,” to which he adds: “It is interesting that theoretical
reasoning and deduction play so great a part in your demonstration of the
matter which with us is rather treated empirically.” Freud registers
“surprise . . . that Psycho-analysis should have met with so much interest
in your far country.” He ends, “P.S. I shall always be glad of more of your
news.”
3. Bose to Freud
Page 9 of 20
Introduction
[Undated]
Bose asks for details on the price and publisher of the International Journal
of Psychoanalysis, and he writes, “I hope you will pardon my liberty if I ask
you to send a photograph of yours. Myself, my relations and friends and a
wide circle of admirers have been eager for it. Such a gift from your hands
would have valuable associants [sic].” He asks on behalf of his book’s
agent whether Freud could write “an expression of opinion” for its
publication, and whether the book “has got any chance of success in
Austria and Germany”; and what periodicals it might be advertised in. Bose
is “sorry to have troubled you but my ignorance about Austria and
Germany is my excuse.”
4. Freud to Bose
August 3, 1921
Freud writes a postcard while “away in the mountains and likely not to
return until October 1,” after which he will send the blurb for “The
Concept of Repression” and the photo. He will also see to it that contact
information on the two journals, including the English-language Journal of
Psychoanalysis, is sent from the publisher.
5. Bose to Freud
November 24, 1921
Having thought to wait until Freud returns to Vienna from his holidays,
Bose repeats his two requests and thanks him for the (p.14) information
about the Journal of Psychoanalysis; “I have now been receiving the
publication regularly and I like it very much.” He mentions his efforts
through Ernest Jones “to have an Indian Psychoanalytical Association at
Calcutta affiliated to the International Association,” and hopes to send
Freud soon a copy of the Indian Association’s draft rules and regulations.
He also sends a paper, the first half of which he has written, on “Mental
Pathology,” one of four “practical papers” for M.A. and M.Sc. students of
Calcutta University. He concludes, “Psycho-analysis is daily gaining
popularity here and even the lay periodicals and dailies in vernacular are
discussing the subject now.”
6. Bose to Freud
January 26, 1922
“Most likely you have received my last latter to which I am expecting a

reply.” Bose adds, “we have been able to start a Psycho-analytical Society
in Calcutta” while having applied for international affiliation, and sends the
Page 10 of 20
Introduction
Proceedings of the inaugural meeting, welcoming Freud’s suggestions. He

adds, “A friend of mine, Mr. J. Sen—a celebrated Indian artist and an
ardent admirer of yours—has drawn from imagination a pencil sketch
which he thinks ‘you ought to look like.’ ” Bose sends Freud the original,
“keeping a copy for myself which I would like to compare with your photo
when it arrives. . . . He has not the slightest information about your
features.” Bose asks, “Will it be possible for you to come out to India for a
few weeks and deliver a course of lecture[s] in the Calcutta University? If
so, I shall be glad to know about your terms so that I might place them
before the proper authorities.”
7. Freud to Bose
February 20, 1922
“At last I can send you the photograph you wished for—it will come to you
from Hamburg—and write the few lines which you ask on behalf of your
agent.” He invites Bose “to change my expressions so as to suit your
purpose” since “my English is very deficient.” Freud’s blurb reads, “It was
a great and pleasant surprise that the first book on a psychoanalytic
subject which came to us from that part of the world (India) should display
so good a knowledge of psychoanalysis so deep an insight into its
difficulties and so much of deep-going original thought. Dr. Bose has
singled out the concept of repression (p.15) for his inquiry and in treating
this theoretical matter has provided us with precious suggestions and
intense motives for further study. Dr. Bose is aiming at a philosophical
evolution and elaboration of our crude practical concepts and I can only
wish, Psychoanalysis should soon reach up to the level, to which he strives
to raise it.” Freud has heard about Bose’s founding of the Psychoanalytic
Association of Calcutta and sends his congratulations, adding, “May we
meet one day not too far off, as I am rather old (66 years).”
8. Freud to Bose
March 1, 1922
[This is apparently the postcard mentioned by Bose in his undated reply.

Freud begins answering Bose’s letter 6; their two last letters had crossed.]
“The imaginative portrait you sent me is very nice indeed, far too nice for
the subject. You will soon have occasion to confront it with the photo and
see that the artist did not take into account certain racial characters.” . . .
P.S., “I am too old to come over to India and very busy here. Try it the
other way around and come to Europe.”
9. Bose to Freud
Page 11 of 20
Introduction
[Undated]
Bose thanks Freud for a missing postcard of January 1, 1922, for “the very
kind opinion you have given on my book,” and for the photo: “Your portrait
has been very acceptable to a wide circle of friends.” As regards Bose
coming to Europe, “I must confess that it would give me the greatest
pleasure*. . . .”
10. Freud to Bose
October 27, 1922
Freud sends congratulations “on the reception of your society as one of the
groups in the [International Psychoanalytic] Association which occurred at
the Berlin Congress a month ago. . . . Now, as I am Editor of the German
Zeitschrift für Psychoanalysis as well as of the English Journal of
Psychoanalysis I beg you to consent that your name may be printed on the
cover of both journals as the leader and representative of the Indian
group,” as is done with the presidents of other groups. Freud concludes
with his “hope to find soon some of your contributions in our journal.” (p.
16)
11. Bose to Freud
November 13, 1922
Bose thanks Freud for his “very kind letter” (number 10). He says that
Ernest Jones had asked him “to act as associate editor for India” for both
journals, which he says, “I shall try my best to do. . . . I may be able to get
the help of German knowing friends here. I hope to send you some
contributions for the Journal in the near future. Wishing you a [crossed
out: “happy”]50 merry Christmas and a happy New Year and many many
returns of the same.”
12. Freud to Bose
December 28, 1923
“Dear Professor Bose, A happy New Year to you and as much success in
your work as you deserve. Yours most sincerely, Freud.”
My first comments in this chapter go to the correspondence’s opening, and my

last to phase 1’s closing. Accompanying Bose’s initial undated letter of
December 1920, Bose first sent his doctoral dissertation, “The Concept of
Repression,” and asked for Freud’s “opinion and suggestions,” and soon
thereafter for an endorsement of it. A “short introduction” by Freud now graces
my own edition.51 Already, Freud expresses a reservation about Bose’s
Page 12 of 20
Introduction
dissertation: “It is interesting that theoretical reasoning and deduction play so

great a part in your demonstration of the matter which with us is rather treated
empirically.” That he is being critical appears unmistakably from the ensuing
comment that he trusts the translations “we are preparing here will slowly
improve the situation.” The critique is consonant with other comments Freud
will make in later phases of their correspondence. Those familiar with “Freud’s
dismissal of philosophy”52 will also appreciate the ironic tone of the concluding
remark in his endorsement of Bose’s dissertation: “Dr. Bose is aiming at a
philosophical evolution and elaboration of our crude practical concepts and I can
only wish, Psychoanalysis should soon reach up to the level, to which he strives
(p.17) to raise it.” Freud had for some years ceased to define “the mind-body
problem which preoccupied both Freud and Fliess” as “my original goal of
philosophy.”53 As we shall see in chapter 4, that problem lies at the heart of the
philosophical program that Bose envisions for psychoanalysis.
A second detail worth noting is the imbalance one sees in the way that
invitations to travel are extended and received. Freud could barely conceive of
going to India when Bose invited him in 1922, the year before Freud’s first
cancer operation curbed any thoughts of foreign travels. After the operation,
Freud ventured a difficult but rewarding trip to Rome with Anna, and then did
not travel after 1924, for several years.54 Bose made a formal invitation: “Will it
be possible for you to come out to India for a few weeks and deliver a course of
lecture[s] in the Calcutta University? If so, I shall be glad to know about your
terms so that I might place them before the proper authorities.” But Freud
brushed it aside in a P.S. on a postcard: “I am too old to come over to India and
very busy here. Try it the other way around and come to Europe.” It is made to
look like an afterthought, with nothing corresponding to the niceties of Bose’s
invitation. Bose then entertains the idea of coming to Europe: “I must confess
that it would give me the greatest pleasure to see you and travel with that end in
view. Probably time will come for such an opportunity.”55 But it never did, and
Freud never invited Bose again. Freud was sixty-four years old, and we may
chalk this up to what Hartnack calls “the missed chances” of their
correspondence:
Confronted with the challenge to explore the “dark” continents of their

time—the unconscious, women, and the non-Western world—Freud focused
on the first, admitted his difficulty in working on women, and remained
disinterested in an intercultural exchange that went beyond confirmation
of his own expansionist strivings. . . . He thus missed the chance to learn
from colleagues abroad who were sympathetic to his ideas, and who could
have contributed to clarifying the “dark aspects” in his own theory.56
(p.18) The letters portray Freud and Bose as stay-at-homes, although this
would have meant different things for each of them. Freud wrote often of his
love of adventure, but he limited it to rigorous tours of European and
Page 13 of 20
Introduction
Mediterranean lands made familiar through his studies, language competence,

and dreams.57 An early train episode recalls what Schur calls Freud’s “mild
‘train phobia,’ ” to which Freud attributes momentous importance.58 He made a
total ordeal of his one ocean trip to America.59 Bose, on the other hand, is
recalled for fastidiously maintaining a controlled environment still closer to
home. One man recalls going twice on successive days, “armed with a
stopwatch, from Bose’s home to the Howrah railway station . . . once without
and once with luggage, as a rehearsal for Bose’s planned train journey the
following day”; another remembers Bose “once saying that, for his holidays at
Deogarh in Bihar, he pre-calculated all possible expenses, including that of the
wear and tear of his car tyres.”60 Although he may have traveled to other cities
in India for conferences, there seems to be no record of Bose traveling farther
than from Calcutta to Bihar, from which his family hailed.
The next matter to take up is Bose’s request for a Freud photograph. Bose twice
asked for one,61 and in the meantime sent him a portrait by an Indian artist who
drew Freud sight unseen. The photo and sketch may be said to establish an
iconic presence of Freud for Bose and for “a wide circle of admirers” and
“friends.” Seeing the sketch, the “amused Freud . . . wrote to Lou Andreas-
Salomé: ‘Naturally he makes me look the complete Englishman.’ ”62 When Freud
finally sent Bose the photo, he commented, “You will soon have occasion to
confront it with the photo and see that the artist did not take into account
certain racial characters”63—that is, “racial characteristics.” Neither account
squares with Hartnack’s report of Anna Freud’s recollection about the portrait:
that Freud “was glad to look like an Englishman, and not Jewish”64
(p.19) Finally, we come prepared to address the curious ending to phase 1. On

the face of it, this first phase ended quite trivially. After Freud told Bose he
would be able to see “racial character[istics]” in the photo he had sent him, Bose
signed his next letter, “Wishing you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year
and many happy returns of the same. Yours very sincerely, G. Bose.” Freud’s
brief reply three days after that holiday, but a full year later, was, “A Happy New
Year to you and as much success in your work as you deserve. Yours most
sincerely, Freud.”65 And that was the totality of Freud’s greeting. It is hard to
imagine Freud getting frosty over “Christmas” (he himself mentioned Christmas,
Easter, and other Christian holidays frequently in letters sent during his
courtship66 and in letters to European colleagues67). But his surviving
correspondence with Bose breaks off here for over six years. Why would Freud
risk such an outcome with a potentially valuable and well-meaning colleague?
One cannot make out sufficient reason for Freud to have taken umbrage at
Bose’s wishing many Merry Christmases to a man with self-pronounced Jewish
“character[istics],” nor can we assume that Bose, at least at this point, was
airing an “opposite wish,” conscious or otherwise, or that Freud might have
suspected such a wish. The remark on Bose’s part looks foolish but totally
innocent. In fact, the “happy” he crossed out before the “merry” suggests some
Page 14 of 20
Introduction
naïvité: Did Bose almost forget the conventional Christmas greeting, or did he
intend at first to wish only a happy New Year and toss Christmas in for good
measure? His November 15 letter would have reached Freud in time to cover
both holidays. Whatever Freud made of it, he left himself a year to think it over.
Freud’s response, however, reads like a rude joke, one harbored over a year, and
probably privately, for who would he impress by telling it? Bose’s subsequent
silence for over six years strongly suggests that he understood Freud’s bad
humor. He never wrote back about Freud’s sign-off. But by the time he wrote
Freud again in 1929, he had used his (p.20) time productively, and he chose to
make a fresh beginning to their exchange by sending Freud thirteen of his
recent articles.
Freud had a no-nonsense stance of not suffering fools gladly, and not that Bose
was one, Freud had a reputation for being on the watch for them. Some
quotations will bear this out:
Charcot was the renaissance man Freud desired to be, “like Goethe,
Montaigne . . . men who radiate an interest in everything, with a ‘gift for
observation and ellipsis’ and a loathing of ‘banalities and the
commonplace.’ ”68
No, this is not a good grey old man mellowed by the years, but an
inexorable scrutinizer, a rigorous examiner, who will neither try to deceive
nor allow himself to be deceived.69
Not to make further excuses for either of them, I think we can attribute Freud’s
1923 letter to a bad humor of this sort.
Looking ahead to chapter 2, we must anticipate that Freud and Bose will find
their way out of this current impasse. Carrying forward a question raised in this
chapter, which allowed that missing letters might alter my picture of tensions
and drama, it is worth putting to rest any likelihood that missing letters could
have changed much. The only two instances where the extant correspondence
definitely alludes to missing letters occur at the beginning of phase 2 and toward
the end, in phase 3. In each case, they follow a hiatus of several uncomfortable
years begun after different kinds of falling out had occurred—the first, as noted,
looking rather trivial. Each of these two missing letters seems to have been sent
by Bose using the pretext of asking for Freud’s view of a paper by an Indian
colleague, perhaps at the latter’s request. As letters 13 and 14 will suggest, Bose
must have launched phase 2 with a missing letter of that kind, sending Freud a
study by his colleague Ranjan Haldar of Tagore’s poetry. In this case, he also
mentioned some work of his own that he would like to send to Freud. As we shall
see in phase 3, Freud will also allude to one or two missing letters from Bose
centered on a reference to Bose’s administrative (p.21) conference activities in
Calcutta—and on the face of it nothing more. This time, Bose’s letter was
Page 15 of 20
Introduction
apparently occasioned by a paper he then sent to Freud by another of his

colleagues, S. C. Mitra. A possible missing letter, at most a brief cover letter, will
also be alluded to by Freud in letter 23, where Freud mentions receiving an
article from Bose about which Bose asked for Freud’s opinion. Freud probably
anticipates receiving this article from Bose in letter 17.
We can imagine simple enough reasons for Bose not having kept copies of these
two or three cover letters. More important, as one might expect, he seems to
have saved all of Freud’s other letters, including the very last one, in German,
which he never directly answered. In short, the tensions and drama I ascribe
would not be affected by anything in missing letters such as these. (p.22)
Notes:
(1.) See Nandy 1996; Basu 1999, 40.
(2.) Basu 1999, 49. On “the ‘Hindu alchemy,’ ” see White 1998, 55, 104–106, and
372n22, on the discredited ideas of Profulla Nath Ray, who in 1903 wrote of
rasaśāstra (Indian alchemy) as “iatrochemistry” (a term going back to
Paracelsus), and claimed its origins went back to Buddhist siddhas who
converted to Hinduism to avoid Muslim persecution. Kapila (2007) also finds
Nandy “misleading,” making the same point: “It is significant that Indian
psychoanalysis and its high culture of difference did not—like other ‘national
sciences’ such as chemistry—call for a ‘Hindu psychology’ ” (138).
(3.) See Nandy 1996, 351 and 355, on the “Hindu modal personality”; 359–60, on
the “split mother,” citing numerous authors from 1923 to 1988, including his
own Nandy 1980 He attributes this “concern with the split mother” to Bose,
crediting him with a “particularly resilient” key to interpreting the Indian
Goddess. Nandy does not document Bose’s alleged usage. Nor does he provide
an adjacent reference for Sudhir Kakar’s attribution that the “split mother” is
“the ‘hegemonic myth’ of the Indian culture” (Nandy 1996, 359).
(4.) Cf. Garcès 2008, 4, 88–89, 151–52, 162–63, 192, 205–20, on Eve, Mary, and
marianismo in Latin American culture.
(5.) See Freud 1953–74, 11:165–75; Sprengnether 1990, 40; cf. 37, 220, 234.
(6.) See Goldman 1978.
(7.) See Harding 2009, 9: “Bose’s writing contained nothing in the way of a
sustained political commentary.” Bose was evidently sympathetic with Gandhi’s
Quit India Movement but reticent to join it (Hartnack 1999, 97). Cf. Loewenberg
1996, 25–27, on Freud’s antipathy toward the construction of a religious
national mythology, evidenced in his politely rejecting a 1929 invitation to
support a right of access for Jews to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.
Page 16 of 20
Introduction
(8.) On Jung’s view of Christian and Aryan psychic structures, see FM, ch. 1.
(9.) There are uncertainties over who knew about his father Jacob’s second wife,
Rebekah, and whether his mother, Amalia, had an affair with one of Jacob’s two
sons from his first marriage, leaving the possibility that Jacob was not Julius’s or
Sigmund’s father (see Sprengnether 1990, favoring this idea); and during his
marriage that Freud had an affair with his sister-in-law Minna Bernays (on
which Jung was certain; see Kerr 1993, Swales 1982, and again Sprengnether
1990).
(10.) On these contrasting periods, concentrating on Freud from ages three to

ten, see also Bernfeld 1951.
(11.) Sprengnether 1990, 13–14.
(12.) Bernfeld 1951, 125.
(13.) Abraham 1982, 441.
(14.) Robert Holt (1992, 12) says, Freud’s
parents were remarkably dissimilar in a number of ways. The mother

seems to have been a stronger and more active person than the father was.
But are those not stereotypically masculine characteristics? As a matter of
fact, in virtually every way that Jacob and Amalie’s personalities
contrasted, she had more of the “manly” qualities such as competence,
dominant masterfulness, and aspects of hostile aggressiveness, while he
excelled in the “ladylike” virtues of quiet, gentleness, kindness,
peaceableness, and graceful acceptance of the inevitable.
Holt goes on to say that Amalia “never invaded masculine turf by earning money
when he could not. He wore the pants” (12).
(15.) Freud 1953–74, 22:133; see Sprengnether 1990, 165; Vermorel and
Vermorel 1993, 491.
(16.) Freud 1953–74, 18:136.
(17.) Hartnack 1999, 97.
(18.) Freud letter to Ernest Jones; see Schur 1972, 424; Freud makes the same
point in a letter to Sándor Ferenczi; see Margolis 1996, 145.
(19.) Bose’s year of birth is uncertain.
(20.) Schur 1972, 475, critiquing Freud’s “stubborn” ideas about phylogeny,
which I discuss in FM, ch. 1. See also Grubich-Simitis 1987.
Page 17 of 20
Introduction
(21.) Sprengnether 1900, x (I have reversed the two quotes, which make one
sentence).
(22.) “Considered themselves,” since before Freud’s mother, his father

apparently had had a second wife, of whom Freud seems unaware.
(23.) Hartnack 1999, 106.
(24.) Gay [1988] 2006, 74.
(25.) Hartnack 1999, 95.
(26.) Gay [1988] 2006, 173, citing Freud 1953–74, 14:25; see Gay [1988] 2006,
173–79, on the Society’s early history.
(27.) Kerr 1993, 353.
(28.) Margolis 1996, 101–102.
(29.) Hartnack 1999, 2, 95.
(30.) Kapila 2007, 128 and 147n25, sourcing her gloss on adda, and citing
Hartnack 1999, 87.
(31.) Hartnack 1999, 95–96.
(32.) As the Vermorels (1993, 560–66) say, “Applied Psychoanalysis” is Freud’s

term, in which he puts literature and art to the purpose of psychoanalytic
construction, not the other way around.
(33.) Gay [1988] 2006, 274.
(34.) Kapila 2007.
(35.) See the recollections of Bose assembled in Nandy 1996.
(36.) Nandy 1995, 89; Nandy 1996, 347; cf. Hartnack 2001, 94.
(37.) Russell and Hīra Lāl [1916] 1969, 3:422. Their chapter on Kāyasthas
(3:404–22) summarizes Gazetteer literature on the caste over north India, with
accounts of their service to Muslim and British rulers and attainment of high
social status in Bengal as “pure Śūdras” with varied ties to Brahmins. A son of
Brahmā (405), Citragupta is honored as the Kāyasthas’ “divine ancestor” at
weddings, Holi, and Diwāli (421).
(38.) Bose 1933, 86–87.
(39.) See Grubich-Simitis 1996, 79.
Page 18 of 20
Introduction
(40.) Bose 1933, 42.
(41.) Bose 1933, 87.
(42.) Bose 1933, 90.
(43.) Bose 1933, 90.
(44.) Bose 1933, 103.
(45.) See chapters 4 and 6, this volume.
(46.) Hartnack 2001, 128 and note 15, citing Bose 1952a, 10.
(47.) See the oleograph on the cover and frontispiece of Hiltebeitel 2010.
(48.) Indian Psychoanalytic Society [1964] 1999, preface (henceforth IPS).
(49.) For Bose and Freud, see IPS [1964] 1999; and Ramana 1964.
(50.) Bose’s deletion of “happy” is visible in the handwritten original on

microfilm, digitalized in the Library of Congress’s Freud Archive.
(51.) See Blowers 2006.
(52.) Armstrong 2005, 212; see Freud’s dismissive words about philosophy in
Freud 1953–1974, 22:160–61, cited in Schur 1972, 437.
(53.) Schur 1972, 97n3, 93.
(54.) Schur 1972, 361.
(55.) See asterisk in letter 9.
(56.) Hartnack 1999, 101, my italics.
(57.) On Freud’s vacation travels and hikes in the decade up to 1900, see Jones
1953–57, 1:332–37. On his annual summer trips up to 1904 with his brother
Alexander, see Freud 1953–74, 22:239–40.
(58.) Schur 1972, 181.
(59.) Kerr 1993, 235–68; fainting, etc.
(60.) For these anecdotes, see Nandy 1996, 360–61.
(61.) IPS [1964] 1999, 3, 5.
(62.) Hartnack 2001, 139 and 160n44.
(63.) IPS [1964] 1999, 7, 8.

Page 19 of 20
Introduction
(64.) Hartnack 2001, 197 and 199n7.
(65.) IPS [1964] 1999, 10 (December 28, 1912).
(66.) Jones mentions Freud’s dream to “one day be able to give [his fiancée
Martha Bernays] a golden snake bangle” until “at Christmas 1885 . . . he
managed to procure her a silver one in Hamburg” (Freud 1953–57, 1:156–57).
Freud chose Easter Sunday 1886 for the press announcement of his new medical
practice (1:143).
(67.) From my rough count while reading Schur on Freud’s European

correspondence, Freud mentions Christian holidays at least nine times,
including Christmas to Fliess (Schur 1972, 212); and Easter to Jung (230). Fliess
sent Freud a Christmas present in 1898 (Jones 1953–57, 1: 292, cf. 118, 314).
(68.) Burke 2006, 86 and note 52, quoting a book on Charcot.
(69.) Stephan Zweig 1973, 93, on Freud. Cf. Vermorel and Vermorel 1993, 11–12,
citing Joan Riviere on Freud: “on percevait . . . son horreur des préambules et
des salamalecs. . . . Je n’oserais pretender qu’il supportât de bon coeur les
imbéciles.”
Page 20 of 20
Restoration of the Bose–Freud Correspondence

Alf Hiltebeitel

Print ISBN-13: 9780190878375
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190878375.001.0001
Restoration of the Bose–Freud

Correspondence
Light Shed on Its First Two Phases, from Freud’s 1923–37 Correspondence with
Romain Rolland, and a Missed Chance to Compare Views on the Pre-Oedipal
Alf Hiltebeitel
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190878375.003.0002
Abstract and Keywords

Chapter 2 compares the second phase of the Bose–Freud correspondence with
the first two periods of Freud’s correspondence with Romain Rolland. Freud’s
preference for Oedipal insights is explored along with his slow-to-emerge
interest in the pre-Oedipal, as discussed by Harold Blum and Madalon
Sprengnether. Both Bose and Rolland introduced pre-Oedipal themes to Freud,
Bose in his letters and writings and Rolland in the “oceanic feeling” he described
to Freud, which Freud acknowledged in Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud
also explored the pre-Oedipal before this in his study of Leonardo da Vinci, as
discussed by Ilse Barande. The chapter ends with an insight from Henri and
Madeleine Vermorel about Freud’s letter to Rolland, “A Disturbance of Memory
on the Acropolis,” that opens up Freud’s earliest screen memory about the death
of his brother Julius.
Keywords: Oedipal, pre-Oedipal, Romain Rolland, oceanic feeling, Leonardo da Vinci, Civilization and
Its Discontents, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis, ” Henri and Madeleine Vermorel
IN 1923, DURING which he took nearly all of the year to answer Bose’s “Merry
Christmas” from 1922, Freud had his first operation for oral cancer in April.
Earlier that year, he struck up a different kind of correspondence with Romain
Rolland, whom Freud courted. Rolland had a friend; and on February 9, Freud
wrote that friend’s son, the scientist and aesthetician Edouard Monod-Hertzen,
Page 1 of 33
and asked him to send Rolland “a word of respect from an unknown admirer.”
Rolland quickly answered on February 22. They would exchange twenty letters
between 1923 and 1937: seven from Rolland, eleven from Freud, and with two
missing. William Parsons divides their correspondence into three periods and I
will do the same, using his term “periods” to parallel the “phases” of the Bose–
Freud exchange. To allow Rolland and Freud to complete their back-and-forth
about the “oceanic feeling” in period 2, I include more letters than Parsons does
from that period and fewer in period 3.1
It would take a few years for the Freud–Rolland correspondence to become

pertinent to the Freud–Bose exchange. This occurred when Rolland became a
source of information about India. Rolland does this (p.24) in period 1, with his
book on Mahatma Gandhi,2 referred to by Freud in letter 6. Rolland will hit full
stride on India in period 2 with his books on Swamis Ramakrishna and
Vivekananda and in his letters about the oceanic feeling. I therefore skip over
much in the period 1 letters. Again, I provide only the condensations of these
letters, with asterisks at some ellipses indicating passages to be quoted in the
discussion.
Period 1
1. Freud to Rolland
February 9, 1923
Freud’s letter via Edouard Monod-Hertzen.
2. Rolland to Freud
February 22, 1923
“Very touched” by Freud’s “forwarded letter,” Rolland says: “Allow me to

take this opportunity to tell you that your name is now among the most
illustrious in France. I was among the first Frenchmen to know you and to
read your work. About twenty years ago . . . I found The Interpretation of
Dreams in a Zurich bookstore, and I was fascinated by its vast subliminal
visions which articulated several of my intuitions. You were the
Christopher Columbus of a new continent of the spirit. . . . Your letter
reveals a great melancholy of today’s miseries. If it is sad to be, as you are,
in a country that has been ravaged by war, it is no less sad, believe me, to
be, as I am, in a victorious country and to feel disconnected from it: for I
have always preferred to be among those who suffer rather than among
those who cause suffering. Time, alas! (and the lunacy of people), takes it
upon itself to render everything equal. . . . But humanity has a hard life,
and I am convinced that from these convulsions the spirit will renew itself.
Page 2 of 33
It is a heavy price to pay for renewal. But you know that nature is not
economical and it is pitiless.”
3. Freud to Rolland
March 4, 1923
“That I have been allowed to exchange a greeting with you will remain a
happy memory to the end of my days. Because for us your (p.25) name
has been associated with the most precious of beautiful illusions, that of
love extended to all mankind* . . . .”
4. Rolland to Freud
[Undated]
Rolland sent Freud his novel Lululi, after Freud’s March 4 letter,
dedicating it “To Freud the Destroyer of Illusions.”3
5. Freud to Rolland
March 12. 1923
“Thank you very much for the small book. I of course have been long
familiar with its terrible beauty. I find the subtle irony of your dedication
well deserved since I had completely forgotten Liluli when I wrote that silly
passage in question in my letter, and obviously one ought not to do that.
Across all boundaries and bridges, I would like to press your hand.”
6. Freud to Rolland
June 15, 1924
“Mahatma Gandhi will accompany me on my vacation, which will begin

shortly. When I am alone in my study, I often think of the hour that you
gave me and my daughter, and I imagine you again in the red chair which
we set out for you.4 I am not well. I would gladly end my life, but I must
wait for it to unravel.”
7. Freud to Rolland
January 29, 1926
“Unforgettable man, to have soared to such heights of humanity through

so much hardship and suffering! I revered you as an artist and apostle of
love for mankind many years before I saw you. I myself have always
advocated the love for mankind*. . . . When I finally came to know you
personally I was surprised to find that you hold strength and energy in
Page 3 of 33
such high esteem, and that you yourself embody so much will power. . . .”
(p.26)
8. Rolland to Freud
May 6, 1926 [telegram]
“With all my heart I share with those who celebrate your birthday.[5 May
the power of your mind pierce the night of life for a long time to come! . . .
”
9. Freud to Rolland
May 13, 1926
“Your lines are among the most precious things which these days have
brought me. Let me thank you for their content and your manner of
address. Unlike you, I cannot count on the love of many people*. . . . It
seems to me a surprising accident that apart from my doctrines my person
should attract any attention at all. But when men like you whom I have
loved from afar express their friendship for me, then a particular ambition
of mine is gratified. I enjoy it without questioning whether or not I deserve
it, I relish it as a gift. You belong among those who know how to give
presents.”
The Vermorels speak of common “stakes” in the Freud–Rolland correspondence,

most of which are evident from its start and none of which—especially the first—
apply to Freud and Bose’s:
1. Each is in touch with the other’s culture.

2. Each builds on a grief of youth to be a hero who creates something
universal.
3. It is between a Jewish atheist and a churchless Christian.
4. It concerns two writers as creators, touching on illusion, mysticism,
and the domain of the sacred that is literature and science.6
To mark another obvious difference from the Freud–Bose correspondence, we

see the laudatory tone that both Freud and Rolland bring even to their earliest
letters. Each knew how to say what the other wanted to hear. In opening this
new friendship, Freud was making himself vulnerable to some of the same
propensities that brought him troubles in his (p.27) friendships with Wilhelm
Fliess and Carl Jung. These included an overvaluation of the friend,7 an
“effusiveness” in correspondence;8 an “unruly homosexual feeling” with Fliess
and to a lesser degree with Jung, that Freud mentioned in his self-analysis;9 and
Freud’s cautiousness, as with Jung, about anti-Semitism.10 The Vermorels imply
Page 4 of 33
that he had resolved to handle his friendship with Rolland without rupture, by
showing greater reserve and distance.11
There is also Freud’s tendency to make seemingly gratuitous comparisons

between them. After granting that Rolland’s name conjures up “one of the most
precious and beautiful illusions, that of love extended to all mankind,” Freud
extends a Jewish calling card (as with Bose) by bringing up the record of past
and current anti-Semitism: “Such experiences have a sobering effect and are not
conducive to making one believe in illusions. . . . My writings cannot be what
yours are: comfort and refreshment to the reader. A great part of my life’s work
(I am ten years older than you) has been spent [trying to] destroy illusions of my
own and those of mankind. . . . If in the course of evolution we don’t learn to
divert our instincts from destroying our own kind, if we continue to hate one-
another for minor differences and kill each other for petty gain, if we go on
exploiting the great progress we have made in the control of our natural
resources for our mutual destruction, what kind of future lies in store for us? It
is surely hard enough to ensure the perpetuation of our species in the conflict
between our instinctual nature and the demands made upon us by civilization.
My writings cannot be what yours are: comfort and refreshment to the reader.
But if I may believe that they have aroused your interest, I shall permit myself to
send you a small book which is sure to be unknown to you, Group Psychology
and the Analysis of the Ego published (p.28) in 1921. . . . It shows a way from
the analysis of the individual to an understanding of society.”
“I myself have always advocated the love for mankind not out of sentimentality
or idealism but for sober, economic reasons: because in the face of our
intellectual drives and the world as it is I was compelled to consider this love as
indispensable for the preservation of the human species as, say, technology.”
“Unlike you, I cannot count on the love of many people. I have not pleased,
comforted, edified them. Nor was this my intention; I only wanted to explore,
solve riddles, uncover a little of the truth. This may have given pain to many,
benefited a few, neither of which I consider my fault or my merit.”12
Freud is probably responding (in the last two cases, belatedly) to what Rolland
says in letter 2 about “the political ruin of western Europe” and “that nature is
not economical.” But one gets the sense that these well-constructed asides form
a continuous thought and were essential to what Freud wished to communicate,
whereas for Rolland they may have begun to sound preachy and to have felt
uncomfortably adversarial. Rolland did not answer them.
In this initial period, there are some telling lines. In Freud’s first letter after his
first cancer operation (over a year after it), he writes, “I am not well. I would
gladly end my life, but I must wait for it to unravel”—to which Rolland answers
nothing. But I would emphasize what Freud says about Rolland’s telegram on
Page 5 of 33
Freud’s seventieth birthday: that he will “relish it as a gift. You belong among
those who know how to give presents.” I believe this thought has a continuity for
Freud in rousing his energies to write “A Disturbance of Memory on the
Acropolis” for Rolland’s seventieth birthday, and in what Freud came to realize
about Rolland’s next letter mentioning the “oceanic feeling,” which Rolland
writes after receiving Freud’s The Future of an Illusion. For Freud, the “oceanic
feeling” would be a gift that would keep on giving.
But let us now swing back to Freud and Bose. I turn to the central and liveliest
phase of their correspondence. As noted at the end of chapter 1, Bose found a
fairly clever way to restore communication with Freud via a lost cover letter.
(p.29)
Phase 2
13. Freud to Bose
January 2, 1929
“I am glad of having got your letter. Since you joined our Association I
regretted that our Indian group did not attain closer contact with the
others. Any sign of the contrary is pleasant to me. To be sure I am not
surprised by the result of Prof. Haldar’s study of Tagore poetry. But it may
be convincing to other people as well and so I think it ought to be
published. May I wait for your permission to send it to Dr. Jones with my
recommendation? The part of your own work which you will send to me
may be sure of my intense interest. My health is not strong, my mind still
active although not productive.”
14. Bose to Freud
January 31, 1929
“A copy of Haldar’s paper . . . has already been sent to Dr. Jones. Prof.
Haldar will be very grateful if you would kindly recommend it for
publication in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.” Under separate
cover, Bose sends “some of my own papers.” Some “are written on popular
lines and are meant for inclusion along with other papers in a book which
is in preparation for the lay public. The other articles are of a more
technical nature and are meant for another book” and will be
“supplemented with short clinical records in support of the contentions put
forth in them. . . . I would draw your particular attention to my paper on
Oedipus wish where I have ventured to disagree with you in some
respects.” Bose provides “the order in which the articles are to be read”:
Popular Articles
Page 6 of 33
1. Free Association Method in Psychoanalysis
2. Sex in Psychoanalysis
3. Psychoanalysis in Business
4. Temper and Psychoanalysis
5. Crime and Psychoanalysis
Technical Articles
1. Relationship between Psychology and Psychiatry
2. Reliability of Psycho-analytical Findings (p.30)
3. Is Perception an Illusion?
4. Nature of the Wish
5. Analysis of Wish
6. Pleasure in Wish
7. The Genesis of Homosexuality
8. The Genesis and Adjustment of the Oedipus Wish
Bose also includes “a Bengali book on dreams. . . . [13] Your portrait which
appears in the book is from a pencil drawing by my friend Mr. J. K. Sen the
renowned artist from the photograph you kindly sent me some years ago.
Please accept the book as a token of my deepest regards for the Father of
Psycho-analysis. An abridged translation of the contents of this book will
appear as a chapter in my popular book.”14
15. Freud to Bose
March 9, 1929
“Best thanks for your sendings. I have read all of your papers, the popular
ones as well as the most important scientific ones and I am impatient to
see them published in books as you promise. You directed my attention on
the Oedipus wish and you were right in doing so. It made a great
impression. In fact I am not convinced by your arguments. Your theory of
the opposite wish appears to me to stress rather a formal element than a
dynamic factor. I still think you underrate the efficiency of the castration
fear. It is interesting to note that the only mistake I could notice in your
popular essays relates to the same points. There you say Oedipus kills
himself after blinding which he never did. In the scientific paper you give
Page 7 of 33
the story correctly. On the other side I never denied the connection of the
castration wish with the wish to be female nor that of the castration fear
with the horror of becoming female. In my ‘Passing of the Oed. Complex’ I
tried to introduce a new metapsychological possibility [of] destroying a
complex by robbing it of its cathectic charge which (p.31) is led into
other channels besides the other idea of repressing it while its cathexis is
left undiminished. But [I] confess I am no more convinced of the validity of
my own assumptions. We have not yet seen through this intricate Oedipus
matter. We need more observations. P. S. Thanks for the Bengali book!”
16. Bose to Freud
April 11, 1929
Bose is “grateful for going through my papers,” and for pointing out the
mistake on Oedipus, which he will correct. “Of course I do not expect that
you would accept off-hand my reading of the Oedipus situation. I do not
deny the importance of the castration threat in European cases; my
argument is that the threat owes its efficiency to its connection with the
wish to be female. The real struggle lies between the desire to be male and
its opposite the desire to be female. I have already referred to the fact that
castration threat is very common in Indian society but my Indian patients
do not exhibit castration symptoms to such a marked degree as my
European cases. The desire to be female is more easily unearthed in Indian
male patients than in European. In this connection I would refer you to my
paper on Homosexuality where I have discussed this question in greater
detail. The Oedipus mother is very often a combined parental image and
this is a fact of great importance. I have reasons to believe that much of
the motivation of ‘maternal deity’ is traceable to this source.”
“My theory of the opposite wish is not a mere formal philosophical

statement as you suppose it to be. Like any other scientific theory it is a
specific formulation that will explain many facts of mental life. To cite a
few instances it gives the exact dynamics of repression when a particular
wish is pushed into the unconscious; it explains in a simple manner the
mechanisms of imitation, retaliation, conscience, projection, etc. The facts
that have led you to suppose the existence of the repetition compulsion in
addition to the pleasure principle would be more easily explained on the
basis of this theory. When a person receives a shock certain wishes of a
passive type are satisfied, perforce leading to the release of the opposite
type of wishes—corresponding to the situation of the agency which
brought about the shock. This is an effort at identification with the
offending agent. The repeated bringing up of the (p.32) shock situation in
dreams is an effort on the part of the unsatisfied wish to get a satisfaction.
Page 8 of 33
This is determined by the pleasure principle. There is no need to suppose

the functioning of the repetition compulsion.”
“The theory of the opposite wish will explain the occurrence in pairs in the
same individual of such traits as sadism and masochism,
observationism[15] and exhibitionism etc. This theory will also explain the
relationship between the different wishes that emerge from the
unconscious in a definite sequence during analysis. This theory enables the
analyst to predict beforehand the possibility of emerging in consciousness
of a particular repressed wish from an examination of grammatical forms
of speech.”
Bose has reserved a separate chapter of his book, which he will send to
Freud when it is written, on “practical points of applicability of this
theory,” which he has modified since his Concept of Repression “in view of
new facts that have come up during analysis. . . . I am sorry to have
troubled you with this long letter, my only excuse is that I want my findings
to be tested in the light of your experience.”
17. Freud to Bose
May 12, 1929
“Thank you for your explanations. I am fully impressed by the difference in

the castration reaction between Indian and European patients and I
promise to keep my attention fixed on the problem of the opposite wish
which you accentuate. This latter one is too important for a hasty
decision.” Freud wonders “what the relation of the opposite wish to
ambivalence ‘may be.’ ” He is glad to expect another publication from
Bose.
18. Bose to Freud
[Undated]
Bose details the contents of a package that includes “one ivory statuette”
that he and his colleagues in the Indian Society of Psychoanalysis (p.33)
have sent to celebrate Freud’s seventy-fifth birthday, and asks Freud to
inform him of the articles’ safe arrival.16
19. Freud to Bose
December 13, 1931
“Now I am in possession of all your sendings. . . .” “The statuette is

charming. I gave it the place of honour on my desk. As long as I can enjoy
life it will recall to my mind the progress of psychoanalysis, the proud
Page 9 of 33
conquest it has made in foreign countries and the kind feelings for me it
has aroused in some of my contemporaries at least.”
20. Bose to Freud
October 4, 1932
Bose thanks Freud “for all the kindness you have shown to my daughter
and my son-in-law while they were in Vienna. They are full of gratitude to
yourself, your wife and daughter and your sister-in-law. My daughter had
been hearing about you ever since she was a little child and she has
written to me a glowing account of her impressions about yourself.”
21. Freud to Bose
November 8, 1932
“I could not read your kind letter without feelings of embarrassment. In

fact I do not deserve the gratitude of your children owing to the fact that I
and my daughter were full in work, my wife and her sister not speaking
your language and difficulties in our household making it hard for us to
invite them for meals. So I had to be glad that one of my friends and pupils
did it for me. I was very sorry that your charming daughter did not like our
dogs. But you know in life we often get praised or blamed for no merit of
our own.”
I will move lightly over this phase 2 exchange, which provides topics I extract for
not only this but all this book’s remaining chapters as well. Some passages will
not be discussed until chapters 4, 6, and 7.
Freud was apparently pleased to reopen the correspondence after over six years,
and to put behind him whatever ill mood provoked his belated (p.34) response
to Bose’s 1922 “Merry Christmas.” Their exchange through phase 2 begins
cordially, but hits a snag when Bose says, in letter 14, “I have ventured to
disagree with you in some respects.” The correspondence then opens their only
real debate, which centers on letter 16, in which Bose defends himself
theoretically about opposite wishes and speaks of the “Oedipus mother” as the
source of “the maternal deity.” Bose does not spell out what he means by these
terms. We will pick up a thread on Bose’s “Oedipus mother” in a moment. Freud,
however, steers their discussion away from these two topics and toward opposite
wishes. Two letters then talk about Bose’s daughter appearing at Freud’s
doorstep, and the two men take time out to enjoy their positions as patres
familias.
Let us now pick up the thread of the “Oedipus mother.” Bose says, “The Oedipus
mother is very often a combined parental image and this is a fact of great
importance. I have reasons to believe that much of the motivation of ‘maternal
Page 10 of 33
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of New-Englands
plantation
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.
Title: New-Englands plantation

with the sea journal and other writings
Author: Francis Higginson
Release date: October 4, 2023 [eBook #71799]
Language: English
Original publication: Salem, Mass: The Essex Book and Print Club,
1908
Credits: Steve Mattern, John Campbell and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NEW-

ENGLANDS PLANTATION ***
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
The main text of this book is a facsimile reproduction of printed documents from
around 1630, and include many printing errors from those original documents.
Spelling and punctuation are very inconsistent. These issues have been left
unchanged in this etext to maintain the authenticity of the original works.
The character ſ (long-form s) has been replaced by the modern s.
The anchors for the eight footnotes are denoted by [number]; these Notes have
not been moved and can be found before the Index near the end of the book.
There is also one other footnote in the book with the anchor [A] on page 53; this
footnote has been moved and placed after the eight numbered Notes.
Some characters and groups of characters have an overline, similar to a
macron. These will display on this device as
m n o u (m n o and u with overline)
co os oe mo (co os oe and mo with overline)
con (con with overline)
Some minor text changes to the Introduction and the Index are noted at the end
of the book.
PUBLICATIONS OF
THE ESSEX BOOK AND PRINT CLUB
No. I
NEW-ENGLANDS
PLANTATION
&c.
New-Englands
PLANTATION
WITH
The Sea Journal and
Other Writings
By Rev. Francis Higginson

First Minister of the Plantation at Salem
in the Massachusetts Bay Colony
The Essex Book and Print Club

SALEM MASSACHUSETTS
1908
ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVE COPIES
PRINTED AT THE RIVERSIDE PRESS
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
FOR THE ESSEX BOOK
AND PRINT
CLUB
Introduction
“New-Englands Plantation,” a tract published in London early in
1630, contains the earliest printed account of the colony established
by Endecott in 1628, at Neihum-kek, now Salem. A description of the
natural conditions surrounding the new settlement is also preserved,
the narrative presenting, in the quaint phrase of the original, “a short
and true description of the commodities and discommodities of that
countrey.” The tract was written by the Reverend Francis Higginson,
who came in the emigration following Endecott, and who was
eminently fitted, both by education and profession, to prepare for the
friends in England a faithful account of the life in the new country, not
only to gratify a natural curiosity, but also to attract a further
emigration.
Francis Higginson probably was born in Claybrooke Parish,
Leicester, England, in 1587-88. He received his degree of M.A. in
1613 at Jesus College, Cambridge, and two years later he was
settled over Claybrooke Parish, where he preached with distinction
until at last his nonconformity brought him into danger of
imprisonment. About that time “The Governor and Company of the
Massachusetts-Bay in New England” obtained a charter from
Charles I, and Higginson was invited to join the party which was
being organized to make the first settlement in the new country. As
minister he was to have equal political authority with the members of
the governing council. He accepted the invitation, and with his family
landed safely at Neihum-kek, now Salem, Massachusetts, on June
30, 1629, and on the 6th of August following, was ordained teacher
of the church, with Samuel Skelton as pastor. By virtue of his office
he became not only a spiritual guide but a leader among his people,
more especially during the trying winter and spring following the
arrival of the ships. The exposure and the privations endured during
that time proved too severe, and consumption laid hold upon him. He
died August 6, 1630, “in the prime of his life and on the threshold of
a great career,” leaving a widow and eight children, one of whom
also became a minister and served the Salem church for nearly fifty
years.
The manuscript of “New-Englands Plantation” probably was sent
home to England upon the return of one of the vessels that had
brought over the planters. It was received in London before
November 20, 1629 (see Young’s “Chronicles of the Colony of the
Massachusetts Bay,” pp. 107, 242). Higginson had not expected that
it would be printed, as it was written for “the satisfaction of loving
friends” who had requested a letter upon his arrival, giving some
account of the voyage across the Atlantic and of the newly settled
country. Only the latter part of this letter was printed, the earlier
portion, describing the voyage, not being deemed of sufficient
importance to be thus preserved. Three editions were published, all
bearing date of 1630. The author’s name appears on the title-pages
of the second and third editions. In 1634 was published William
Wood’s “New Englands Prospect,” which gave much detailed
information regarding the country and the settlements in the
Massachusetts Bay. This superseded the earlier account by
Higginson, and the latter dropped out of sight and in time became
very rare. In 1792 it was reprinted in the Massachusetts Historical
Collections. In 1836 it was included in Force’s “Tracts,” and in 1846
in Young’s “Chronicles of the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay.”
The several editions may be described as follows:
First Edition
New-Englands | Plantation. | or, | A Short and Trve | Description of
the | Commodities and | Discommodities | of that Countrey.| Written by
a reuerend Diuine now | there resident. | [Printer’s ornament] | London,
| Printed by T. C. and R. C. for Michael Sparke, | dwelling at the Signe
of the Blew Bible in | Greene Arbor in the little Old Bailey. | 1630. |
Small 4to. 21 unnumbered pages. Collation: Title (1), reverse blank;
To the Reader, signed M. S. (1), reverse blank; New-Englands
Plantation (17); ends “Finis.” Signatures, B- (D on last page).
Second Edition
New-Englands | Plantation. | Or, | A Short and Trve | Description of
the | Commodities and | Discommodities | of that Countrey. | Written by
Mr. Higgeson, a reuerend Diuine | now there resident. | Whereunto is
added a Letter, sent by Mr. Graues | an Enginere, out of New-England,
| The second Edition enlarged. | [Printer’s ornament] | London, | Printed
by T. & R. Cotes, for Michael Sparke, | dwelling at the Signe of the
Blew Bible in | Greene Arbor in the little Old Bailey. | 1630. |
Small 4to. 27 unnumbered pages. Collation: Title (1), reverse blank;
To the Reader, signed M. S. (1), reverse blank; New-Englands
Plantajon (23); ends “Fjnjs.” Signatures, B (beginning with “New-
Englands Plantajon”)- D(4)
Third Edition
New-Englands | Plantation. | or, | A Short and True | Description of
the | Commodities and | Discommodities | of that Countrey. | Written by
Mr. Higgeson, a reuerend Diuine | now there resident. | Whereunto is
added a Letter, sent by Mr. Graues | an enginere, out of New England,
| The Third Edition, enlarged. | [Printer’s ornament] | London. | Printed
by T. and R. Cotes, for Michael Sparke, dwelling | at the Signe of the
Blue Bible in Greene-Arbor, 1630. |
Small 4to. 23 numbered pages. Collation: Title (1), reverse, To the
Reader, signed M. S. (2); New-Englands Plantation (3-17); [Ornament]
A Letter sent from New-England, by Master Graues, engynere now
there resident (18-19); A Catalogue of such needfull things as euery
Planter doth or ought to Prouide to go to New-England, etc. (20-21);
The names of the most remarkable places in New-England (22-23);
ends “Fjnjs.” Signatures, A7; 1 leaf, B-D in 4s.
Copies of the several editions are preserved in the following

libraries:
First Edition.
Harvard University Library.
Essex Institute Library, Salem, Mass. (This copy has title-page and last
leaf in fac-simile.)
John Carter Brown Library, Providence, R. I.
New York Public Library (Lenox Library).
New York State Library, Albany, N. Y.
Library of Congress.
Library of E. D. Church, Brooklyn, N. Y.
Library of a Collector, Brooklyn, N. Y.
Library of Frederick R. Halsey, New York City.
Library of Edward E. Ayer, Chicago, Ill.
Second Edition.
Boston Public Library.
Library of E. D. Church, Brooklyn, N. Y.
Library of a Collector, Brooklyn, N. Y.
Library of Henry Huth, London, Eng.
Third Edition.
Boston Public Library.
Massachusetts Historical Society Library.
John Carter Brown Library, Providence, R. I.
Philadelphia Library Company. (This copy has title-page of the first
edition bound with text of the third edition.)
British Museum Library.
Library of Edward E. Ayer, Chicago, Ill.
In the following pages the first edition of “New-Englands

Plantation” is reproduced in fac-simile from a copy in the John Carter
Brown Library, at Providence, R. I., through the courtesy of the
Librarian, Mr. George Parker Winship. The third edition also has
been reprinted from a copy in the library of the Massachusetts
Historical Society for purposes of comparison and to preserve the
additional matter that it contains. The account of the voyage to
Neihum-kek and other writings of Higginson are from the manuscript
formerly in the possession of Governor Hutchinson and now
preserved by the Massachusetts Historical Society.
CONTENTS
PAGE
“New-Englands Plantation,” by Rev. Francis

Higginson, London, 1630. Fac-simile of the 15
first edition
“Generall Consideracons” for the planting of
39
New England
The Agreement between Mr. Higginson
49
and the New England Company
A true relation of the last voyage to New
55
England in 1629 by Mr. Higginson
“New-Englands Plantation,” London, 1630.
85
The third edition
A letter that Mr. Higginson sent to his
115
friends at Leicester
Notes 123
Index 127
NEW-ENGLANDS PLANTATION
NEW-ENGLANDS
PLANTATION.
OR,
A S H O RT A N D T RV E
DESCRIPTION OF THE
COMMODITIES AND
DISCOMMODITIES
of that Countrey.
Written by a reuerend Diuine now

there resident.
LONDON,
Printed by T. C. and R. C. for Michael Sparke,
dwelling at the Signe of the Blew Bible in
Greene Arbor in the little Old Bailey.
1630.
To the Reader.
REader, doe not disdaine to read this Relation; and looke not here
to haue a large Gate and no building within; a full-stuffed Title with
no matter in the Booke: But here reade the truth, and that thou shalt
find without any frothy bumbasted words, or any quaint new-deuised
additions, onely as it was written (not intended for the Presse) by a
reuerend Diuine now there living, who onely sent it to some Friends
here, which were desirous of his Relations; which is an Epitomy of
their proceedings in the Plantation. And for thy part if thou meanest
to be no Planter nor Venturer, doe but lend thy good Prayers for the
furthrance of it. And so I rest a well-wisher to all the good designes
both of them which are gone, and of them that are to goe.
M. S.
NEW ENGLANDS
PLANTATION.
LEtting passe our Voyage by Sea, we will now begin our discourse
on the shore of New-England. And because the life and wel-fare of
euerie Creature here below, and the commodiousnesse of the
Countrey whereas such Creatures liue, doth by the most wise
ordering of Gods prouidence, depend next vnto himselfe, vpon the
temperature and disposition of the foure Elements, Earth, Water, Aire
and Fire (For as of the mixture of all these, all sublunarie things are
composed; so by the more or lesse inioyment of the wholesome
temper and conuenient vse of these, consisteth the onely well-being
both of Man and Beast in a more or lesse comfortable measure in all
Countreys vnder the Heanens) Therefore I will endeauour to shew
you what New-England is by the consideration of each of these
apart, and truly endeauour by Gods helpe to report nothing but the
naked truth and that both to tell you of the discommodities as well as
of the commodities, though as the idle Prouerbe is, Trauellers may
lye by authoritie, and so may take too much sinfull libertie that way.
Yet I may say of my selfe as once Nehemiah did in another case:
Shall such a Man as I lye? No verily: It becommeth not a Preacher of
Truth to be a Writer of Falshood in any degree: and therefore I haue
beene carefull to report nothing of New-England but what I haue
partly seene with mine owne Eyes, and partly heard and enquired

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Freud's India: Sigmund Freud and

India's First Psychoanalyst

Freud's India: Sigmund Freud and India's First

Print publication date: 2018

(p.i) Freud’s India (p.ii)

(p.iii) Freud’s India

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(p.xxiii) Freud’s India (p.xxiv)

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1. My mother Lucille Barnett Hiltebeitel passed away at age 101 on June

Conservancy, at which I read a passage from his library by Henry David

I was in Spain for a month in 2009 to lecture on the heroines of the

Moses and the Mahābhārata in the light of Freud’s analysis of religious

(3.) Bernfeld 1951, 115, 128.

(7.) All quotes are from Abraham 1982, 443.

(8.) See Hiltebeitel 2016a,the essay I gave in Wulff 2016.

(9.) Quotations from Green 1983, 142 and 153.

(12.) Vaidyanathan and Kripal 1999.

(13.) Hiltebeitel 2016.

(14.) Burke 2006.

(16.) Vermorel and Vermorel 2013.

(17.) In the electronic journal écopsychologie. http://eco-psychologie.com.

(18.) H. Verrmorel, A. Clancier, and M. Vermorel [1992] 1995.

(19.) See Schorske 1993.

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I thank Lewis D. Wyman, Reference Librarian at the Freud Archive at the

Access brought to you by:

Freud's India: Sigmund Freud and India's First

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Access brought to you by:

Freud's India: Sigmund Freud and India's First

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Abstract and Keywords

No doubt Freud’s success owed much to the positive overinvestment that he

favorite of his mother, . . . his conquering sentiment, this assurance of

With this strained relationship in mind, it is possible to make a revealing, if

A comparison of Freud’s and Bose’s adult residences also yields obvious

thoughts. . . . My patients get habituated to the condition in a very short

As Bose seems to be aware, Freud began likewise by writing notations during

As concerns objectivity: “I can certainly claim a greater scientific objectivity and

Whether or not Bose reflected on Citragupta’s ledgers in defending his own in

1. Twelve getting-to-know-you letters (December 1920–December 1923),

The initial note accompanies Bose’s dissertation, “The Concept of

May 29, 1921

Acknowledging receipt of “your book,” Freud writes that he is “glad to

November 24, 1921

January 26, 1922

“Most likely you have received my last latter to which I am expecting a

Proceedings of the inaugural meeting, welcoming Freud’s suggestions. He