'You might think,' says her biographer, 'that Martha was weak in returning to Hamburg. But she had no choice. It would have been unheard of for a girl of her standing to live alone with a man.' Martha poured her passion into letters, two or three a day; Freud responded just as often. She called him 'My beloved man' - the German Mann also means 'husband'.
Freud wrote: 'My beloved girl,you are happiness itself for me. Without you I would not have the desire to live. Only for your sake, I would like to conquer part of the world, so that we can enjoy it together.' He described how their future home should be furnished, down to the pictures. Then there is a brusque return to reality: 'Oh my dear Martha, how poor we are. When people ask us what we have for our life together, we can only say: nothing but our love for each other.' Another time he wrote: 'Let's marry in poverty, be content with only two rooms and let's eat stale bread. I'm fed up with this situation.'
Martha, who spent much of her time doing crocheting and lacework for her future home with Freud, was passionate in her letters: 'My beloved sweet Sigi, why can't we be together? I could not sleep half the night... your dear and noble image was before me and my longing for you was so intense... I want to be the way you want me to be. Just love me a little, a little passionately. You kiss so wonderfully. Cover me with love...'
Freud's letters were not always romantic. His obsessive jealousy surfaced repeatedly. He warned Martha against making friends with artists, as they needed only to write a song to unlock a woman's heart. He had only science, and microscopes can't woo women. When Martha told him of a skating rink she wanted to try, at first he ordered her to stay away - if she slipped and fell, a man might touch her. Then he wrote to say she could go, but only if she didn't do so with a man holding her.
The letters show Martha was deeply involved in Freud's emotional and professional development. And he was not beyond using her as a guinea pig, as in the case of his experiments with a little-known substance - cocaine. He sent her some doses and instructions after having discovered it made him feel enthusiastic and brave. He wrote that the cocaine would give colour to her cheeks - he had long complained that she was too pale. Martha replied that she didn't need the cocaine, but she had tried it, and it had indeed felt pleasant.
Freud guessed it might be a useful anaesthetic. He wrote a scientific paper on cocaine, but was in such a hurry to visit Martha that he didn't pursue tests on its anaesthetic properties. A colleague did, however, and discovered it was the only drug that could be used for eye operations. The doctor won fame and wealth. Later, Freud gallantly observed that the years he enjoyed with Martha were worth much more to him than this missed success. It could be claimed that, were it not for Martha, Freud might have continued in the medical branch and never gone into psychoanalysis. What is known is that neither of them became addicts, although for much of the 1890s, Freud consumed a little cocaine before important meetings.
Over the three years that they were separated, Freud visited Martha a dozen times, travelling third class by train. He stayed for several weeks when he could afford to, a lodger at a cheap hotel, as there was no question of him sharing a roof with Martha. But her mother did allow Martha to cook stews and bake cakes for him, and they were sent round to his hotel. The visits did little to alleviate the tension, and he suggested that she abandon her family and join him in Vienna. Martha came close to agreeing. She planned to find work so that she could live with him, and she argued that one of the merits of this was that she could save money for her mother. Freud wrote back angrily, saying that she didn't understand: the plan was for their sakes, not for her mother's. His letter reveals that he wanted to control not only what Martha did, but also why she did it.
In the end, it was Freud who made a big sacrifice. He decided to abandon his university career so that he could open a neurologist's office and marry Martha. He opened his first private office on Easter Monday, 1886, and planned to marry in the summer. Emmeline interfered one last time, telling him he had military service to complete that summer. So they married in September. It was a small affair. Freud agreed to a Jewish wedding, but throughout their marriage, religion was banned from the house.
Martha had six children in the first eight years of their marriage. Given Freud's ambition to succeed professionally, the burden of raising them fell on her. There is no sign of her complaining, and convention dictated that marital problems were not aired publicly. One early biographer, who knew the family, reported that the only conflict between them in more than 50 years of marriage was about mushrooms - whether they should be cooked with their stalks or without. It sounds a promising field of research for psychoanalysts - could there be a parallel with castration?
One of the rare signs of tension, which Freud alluded to, was the irritation he felt at what he saw as Martha's tendency to suppress her natural aggressiveness. He complained that she was hiding her negative feelings, and tried to persuade her that she should express her emotions. But Martha felt it was not polite, not chic, to show her emotions. And yet, according to Behling-Fischer, Freud didn't want to see these negative feelings: 'One of the reasons why he kept Martha at arm's length from his work was that he learnt so much about anger in the world, he wanted the illusion that there was no anger in his own house. Martha had to be better than the rest of the world.'
Not that Martha wanted to know too much about her husband's work, which raised eyebrows in Viennese society, as it involved him discussing sex with female patients. When they were still engaged, she did show some interest in a patient, Bertha Pappenheim, a friend of hers. Pappenheim, labelled 'Anna O' by Freud, suffered from depression and had hallucinations. At one stage she became convinced that she was pregnant by a colleague of Freud's. This doctor was so shocked that he abandoned her. Freud described this to Martha in one of his letters, but added that he couldn't go into too much detail before their marriage - no doubt about something sexual.
Freud never did analyse his sexual relationship with his wife. He was as open about his patients' intimate affairs as he was tight-lipped about his own. One exception is a reference he makes to a dream that, he says, could have been prompted by the good sex he had 'last Wednesday morning'. Another is the dream of Irma's injection. It involved him examining a woman in the presence of other doctors. One doctor is responsible for her illness, perhaps because of an unclean injection. Freud had this dream at a time when Martha was again pregnant, and it is believed to be linked to an ailment she suffered from.
