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Rethinking the Freud-Rolland Relationship: An explication and translation of Freud's "Acropolis Letter"

Abstract:Sigmund Freud's 1936 letter (the "Acropolis letter") to the French author and Nobel Prize laureate, Romain Rolland, is considered paradigmatic of Freud's self-analyses and has been used in much biography and psycho-biography of Freud. The letter also has long been a scholarly puzzle, both in terms of its manifest content and in terms of its awkwardness as a letter to a supposed friend. While the letter culminates with Freud identifying his own aggression for his father, the letter consistently has been cited as evidence of Freud's unacknowledged aggression for Rolland. In this article, I revisit translations and understandings of the letter, presenting evidence that, contrary to widespread scholarship, Freud's relationship with Rolland was neither rivalric nor clearly antagonistic. Moreover, misreadings of the Acropolis letter, likely precipitated by imperfect translations, are identified and refuted. A new translation of the letter is presented.