ABSTRACT
Fliess’s biological outlook, which Freud had intended to use as an anchor for his own psychological explorations, contained an occultist credo which stopped it offering a secure basis for Freud’s new conceptions. Fliess was not ready for a change in the relationship and, moreover, did not hesitate to use his numerical determinism to predict an early death for him.
When Freud rejected Fliess’s thesis that neurotic symptoms had a predominant foundation in biological rhythms and defended psychic dynamism and his own therapeutic method, Fliess accused Freud of having abandoned science for “magic” and called him a “reader of thoughts” who merely reads his own thoughts into patients. The friendship ended. The intense bitterness and resentment were heightened by misunderstandings about the paternity of the concept of bisexuality, and later Fliess accused Freud of plagiarism.
Left alone, Freud himself took to playing with superstition and numbers: as if calling up his friend’s menacing calculations, he convinced himself that he would die at 62, and for a long time he became sensitive to every recurrence of this number in the everyday events of his life.
The Interpretation of Dreams closes with a sentence which goes back to the question of prophetic dreams. Immediately after, Freud writes “A Premonitory Dream Fulfilled.”
