ALS in German, signed “Freud,” one page both sides, 8.25 x 10.75, personal letterhead, May 19, 1908. Handwritten letter to the Berlin psychologist Albert Moll, a key founder of sexual sciences and medical psychology, in part (translated): “Your proposal to found a central organ for psychotherapy in order to enable a merger of scientific work and a professional assessment of your work has my full approval. I specifically can only win with such a regulation of reporting. So I would like to thank you for that…
But I have to tell you a fact that you may not be aware of. At a meeting of my friends and followers in Salzburg in April of this year, it was decided to create a periodical magazine under the title 'Yearbook for Psychoanalysis and Psychopathology.’ The publication of the same in two half-yearly volumes is guaranteed by the publishers. Jung in Zurich will be the editor, Bleuler and I will probably act as co-editors. I don't know whether the negotiations about our yearbook still need to be modified, but I think that your magazine with a more comprehensive program could offer us no replacement. Our analysis takes up a lot of space, we have too much material rather than too little, and so the publications would suffocate everything else or not come into their own.
However, I believe that our undertaking does not have to be in contrast to yours. Löwenfelt [the founder of sexual pathology Leopold Löwenfeld] must have had the same opinion when he advised you to contact me. Because he was present in Salzburg himself and helped with good advice. If your paper takes on the character of a central paper, which appears about 12 times a year and, in addition to careful reports, contains smaller original contributions and those for which rapid publication is an option, we can very well make use of it in order to be in contact with the other psychotherapeutic directions to stay and make ample contributions from our own camp. I will, in anticipation of your consent, send your letter from yesterday to Bleuler and Jung in order to provoke their statement and either give you a further report myself or get Jung to do so.” In fine condition, with file holes, and a tiny tear, to the left edge. Moll’s referenced magazine was the ‘Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft’ (Journal for Sexual Science), which he first published in 1908 as one of the first journals dedicated to the field of sexology.
The “meeting of my friends and followers in Salzburg” proved to be the first International Psychoanalytical Congress (IPC), which occurred on April 27, 1908, and served as an international meeting of colleagues who shared a common interest in psychoanalysis. The event was initiated by Carl Jung and Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, with Freud eventually welcoming the idea and suggesting Salzburg as the host location. Jones wished its title to be the International Psychoanalytical Congress, but it was Jung who decided to call it the First Congress for Freudian Psychology.
Among the results of this first IPC was Freud’s presentation of the case of the Rat Man, and the inception of the first psychoanalytic journal, the Yearbook for Psychoanalytic and Psychopathologic Research, a forum dedicated to the latest research and theoretical developments in the fields of psychoanalytic thought.
As quoted from his 1914 book History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, Freud gives an account of the Salzburg meeting and the referenced journal:
‘In 1907 the situation suddenly altered and quite contrary to all expectations; it became evident that psychoanalysis had unobtrusively awakened some interest and gained some friends, that there were even some scientific workers who were prepared to admit their allegiance. A communication from [Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler] had already acquainted me with the fact that my works were studied and applied in Burgholzli.
In January 1907, the first man attached to the Zurich Clinic, Dr. Eitingon, visited me at Vienna. Other visitors soon followed, thus causing a lively exchange of ideas. Finally, by invitation of C. G. Jung, then still an assistant physician at Burgholzli, the first meeting took place at Salzburg, in the spring of 1908, where the friends of psychoanalysis from Vienna, Zurich, and other places met together.
The result of this first psychoanalytic congress was the founding of a periodical which began to appear in 1909 under the name of ‘Jahrbuch fur Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische Forschungen,’ published by Bleuler and Freud, and edited by Jung.’
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