["... that we are thus not dead." : Unpublished letters addressed by Sigmund Freud to Georg Hermann]

The main reason behind these three letters and these two postcards addressed in 1936 by Sigmund Freud to Georg Hermann (a German realist writer, author of a great number of psychological novels) and that are presented here by Gert Mattenklott, takes root in this Freudian leitmotiv: psychoanalysis can and must speak of the work of art, not so much in relationship to its formal or technical qualities as to the impression it gives the spectator, to its "effects". This brief exchange provided an occasion for Freud to speak of the notion of unconscious guilt when replying to an objection made by Hermann, and then essentially of dreams about travelling and trains that are missed as a defence against the perspective of death. The article and the correspondence with Hermann end in the same manner, with the two last postcards sent by Freud to the German writer who died in 1943 at Auschwitz-Birkenau.