[Images of Freud: Freud's correspondence]

Because of the specific investment to be found in the estimated 20,000 letters or more that comprise Freud's correspondence, the study of this epistolary activity as such leads us to various insights: on Freud himself, describing himself day by day, on the history and the quality of the conscious or unconscious libidinal relations that linked him to his principal correspondents and, taking this exceptional case as our starting point, on the specificity of the need to write and receive letters that is to be found in varying degrees in every human being. Leaving to others the task of examining the contents of this correspondence in close detail as a source of biographical and theoretical information, this study is concerned with Freud's own comments on the manifold aspects of the letterwriter's craft. This approach entails a specific type of methodology: a reading of approximately four hundred excerpts from Freud's letters, restricted to the passages dealing with the material circumstances in which they were written, their graphic presentation, the strict accounts that were kept of the correspondence, the frequency of the letters, their conventional aspects or those revealing a degree of intimacy, etc. This vision that has been intentionally limited to a particular perspective allows us to take our bearings among the manifestations of a writing compulsion meant to stave off the advent of a "deadly boredom", already dreaded by young Freud at the age of 18.