Electra "ancient and modern". An evening of the Wednesday Society in 1905 (with an unpublished postcard from Freud to Paul Federn)
Lensing, L.A.; Freud, S.; Federn, P.
Luzifer-Amor Zeitschrift zur Geschichte der Psychoanalyse 19(38): 46-75
2006
ISSN/ISBN: 0933-3347 PMID: 17333716 Document Number: 604582
A postcard that Freud sent to Paul Federn on May 18, 1905, documents a meeting of the Wednesday Society devoted to Sophocles' Electra and to the controversial adaptation by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The debate surrounding Hofmannsthal's play had already ignited on the occasion of its world premiere in Berlin in October 1903. Freud and the other members of the Wednesday group would have gathered first impressions from the predominantly negative theater reviews in Berlin newspapers and, above all, in a hostile pan of the play published in the influential Viennese daily Neue Freie Presse. As late as the summer of 1904 essays appeared in prominent journals such as Die Fackel and Die Zukunft, in which Electra was defended and praised, alternately, as a character embodying radical sublimation or as a modern hysteric based on the findings of Breuer and Freud. A statement of Freud's, made in 1909, suggests that the outcome of the 1905 discussion had been a negative one. The few traces of the Electra myth in Freud's later remarks and publications point to productive resistance that contributed in the years 1907-1910 to a firmer theoretical grounding of the Oedipus complex.