BiblioVault - Books about Correspondence

James Jackson Putnam and Psychoanalysis

Letters between Putnam and Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, William James, Sándor Ferenczi, and Morton Prince, 1877–1917

Nathan G. Hale

Harvard University Press, 1971

James Jackson Putnam was an established sixty-three-year-old Boston physician and Harvard professor of neurology when he and William James traveled to Clark University to hear Sigmund Freud's lectures on psychoanalysis. Putnam had become interested in psychoanalytic theory three years earlier in 1906; and, in 1908, his interest had been renewed when he met Freud's first English-speaking follower, twenty-eight-year-old Ernest Jones. It still surprised and even disturbed his friends, however, when Putnam became Freud's first American convert as well as a founder and first president of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1911, and of the Boston Society for Psychoanalysis in 1914.

Of the 172 letters in this volume 163 are published here for the first time. All of the letters present new perspectives on the origins and early development of psychoanalysis in the United States. They provide the first documentary account of the founding of the American psychoanalytic organizations and the battles that surrounded the first public presentations of the psychoanalytic cause in Europe and America. They dramatize the extent to which Freud and Jones used Putnam as a confidant and how important Putnam's Yankee fairness, objectivity, and personal integrity were to the movement.

It is intriguing to discover how these men, long before formal training centers were established, educated each other by mail and learned by letters how to handle psychoanalytic problems never recognized or encountered before. Theory was debated as well, and the 89 letters between Putnam and Freud indicate how Freud's increasingly disillusioned stoicism clashed with Putnam's New England optimism and formed the basis for a significant dialogue on the nature of man, ethics, and the psychoanalytic mission. The letters suggest that Putnam encouraged Freud's interest in the analysis of conscience and of religion that Wilhelm Wundt and Carl Jung had earlier awakened. Nathan G. Hale, Jr., in an introductory essay, provides the background and the explanation for the surprising role Putnam played in what he came to call the "cause." Marian C. Putnam, who made the unpublished letters available, has written a warm recollection of her father. Judith Bernays Heller, Freud's niece, has translated the German texts, which are also published in the original German.

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Jane Austen

The Chawton Letters

Edited by Kathryn Sutherland

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2017

The life of Jane Austen has fascinated the millions of readers around the world who cherish her work. A new collection presents an intimate portrait of Austen in her own words, showing the many details of her life that found echoes in her fiction, especially her keen observations of the “little matters”—the routines of reading, dining and taking tea, paying visits to family and friends, and walking to the shops or to send the post.
Brilliantly edited by Kathryn Sutherland, Jane Austen: The Chawton Letters uses Austen’s letters drawn from the collection held at Jane Austen’s House Museum at her former home in Chawton, Hampshire, to tell her life story. At age twenty-five, Austen left her first home, Steventon, Hampshire, for Bath. In 1809, she moved to Chawton, which was to be her home for the remainder of her short life. In her correspondence, we discover Austen’s relish for her regular visits to the shops and theaters of London, as well as the quieter routines of village life. We learn of her anxieties about the publication of Pride and Prejudice, her care in planning Mansfield Park, and her hilarious negotiations over the publication of Emma. (To her sister, Cassandra, Austen calls her publisher John Murray, “a Rogue, of course, but a civil one.”) Throughout, the Chawton letters testify to Jane’s close ties with her family, especially her sister, and the most moving letter is written by Cassandra just days after Jane’s death. The collection also reproduces pages from the letters in Austen’s own distinctive hand.
This collection makes a delightful modern-day keepsake from one of the world’s best-loved writers on the two-hundredth anniversary of her death.

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Jelliffe

American Psychoanalyst and Physician and His Correspondence with Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung

John C. Burnham

University of Chicago Press, 1983

Smith Ely Jelliffe (1866-1945) was a distinguished American physician who became one of the first psychoanalysts in the world. This book, an account of his life and times, also includes his unpublished and hiterto unknown correspondence with Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, a correspondence of nearly thirty years which continued long after the historic break between Freud and Jung. John Burnham, a well-known historian of medicine and psychoanalysis, and William McGuire, the executive editor of Jung's collected works, have based this book on the recently discovered Jelliffe papers, an important collection once believed to have been lost in a fire.

Jelliffe's colorful and versatile career led him from botany and neurology (he was coauthor of a neurology text that remained standard for some forty years) to psychiatry, psychoanalysis (of which he was a founding father in the United States), and psychosomatic medicine (in which he also pioneered). Jelliffe also made outstanding contributions to medical journalism. With William Alanson White he founded the Psychoanalytic Review, and his work as editor of the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease from 1902 to 1944 may have set a record for editorial longevity. Jelliffe was a charismatic speaker and teacher who in all his roles induced physicians and other thinkers to explore new ideas and ways of thinking.

Jelliffe's correspondence with Jung and Freud illuminates the personal and professional lives of the three men. The letters help to clarify concepts in both the Jungian and Freudian schools. The shifting emphasis of Jelliffe's relationships with the two masters of psychoanalysis—first when the two were colleagues, then for the greater span of time when they were rivals and adversaries—is revealing of Jenlliffe's own flexible views.

Jelliffe, furthermore, provides insights into the history of medicine and medical institutions and customs through Jelliffe's frank accounts of the developing medical profession in America. Jelliffe describes, for example, what it was like for a young M.D. to set up an economically viable practice in the 1890s. In addition, Burnham explores the problem of measuring the influence of a man like Jelliffe upon the history of ideas and institutions.

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John Xántus

The Fort Tejon Letters, 1857–1859

Ann Zwinger

University of Arizona Press, 1986

John Xántus was a bit of a charlatan; of that there is little doubt. He lied about his exploits, joined the U.S. Army under an assumed name, and managed to alienate most of the people he met. Yet this Hungarian immigrant became one of the Smithsonian Institution’s most successful collectors of natural history specimens in the mid-nineteenth century, and he is credited with the discovery of many new species in the American West.

From his station at Ft. Tejon in California’s Tehachapi Mountains, Xántus carried on a lengthy correspondence with Spencer Baird at the Smithsonian, to whom he shipped the specimens he had trapped or shot in the surrounding sierra and deserts. A prolific letter writer, Xántus faithfully reported his findings as he bemoaned his circumstances and worried about his future.

Working from Smithsonian archives, natural history writer Ann Zwinger has assembled Xántus’s unpublished letters into a book that documents his trials and triumphs in the field and reveals much about his dubious character. The letters also bring to life a time and place on the western frontier from which Xántus was able to observe a broad panorama of American history in the making.

Zwinger’s lively introduction sets the stage for Xántus’s correspondence and examines the apparent contradictions between the man’s personal and professional lives. Her detailed notes to the letters further clarify his discoveries and shed additional light on his checkered career.

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Judaism Despite Christianity

The 1916 Wartime Correspondence Between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig

Edited by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Before they were both internationally renowned philosophers, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig were young German soldiers fighting in World War I corresponding by letter and forming the foundation of their deep intellectual friendship. Collected here, this correspondence provides an intimate portrait of their views on history, philosophy, rhetoric, and religion as well as on their writings and professors. Most centrally, Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig discuss, frankly but respectfully, the differences between Judaism and Chiristianity and the reasons they have chosen their respective faiths.

This edition includes a new foreword by Paul Mendes-Flohr, a new preface by Harold Stahmer along with his original introduction, and essays by Dorothy Emmet and Alexander Altmann, who calls this correspondence “one of the most important religious documents of our age” and “the most perfect example of a human approach to the Jewish-Christian problem.”

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