Anchored in Cervantes trivia” is how George Prochnik ( June 14) describes the Academia Castellana, a “make-believe Spanish literary society” à deux, set up by Freud and his Romanian schoolfriend Eduard Silberstein. There is more to it: later called Academia Española, it lasted from 1871 until 1881 and consisted, mostly, of an assiduous exchange of letters, though we only have those written, wholly or in part, in fluent and idiomatic, if imperfect, Spanish, since he lacked a bilingual dictionary, by Freud. The “Academy” had its inception after both youngsters, aged fourteen or fifteen, read, probably in an anthology, one of Cervantes’s Exemplary Novels (after the Italian novella form), his Coloquio de los perros (Colloquy of the Dogs). There the two talking, rational dogs are called Cipión and Berganza – names that the friends used throughout their correspondence, Freud signing himself Cipión and adopting an attitude aptly described by Walter Boelich, who published the 100 or so letters in a German edition in 1989, as “critical, pedagogic and intelligent”. That we have only the letters written by Freud results from Silberstein not taking up his invitation, as reported by Prochnik, to burn their archives, made when Freud was twenty-one, ie three or four years before they put an end to their correspondence. Freud, as Prochnik explains, was to repeat these autos-da-fé in later years, and hence not one of the Silberstein/Berganza letters remains.
It is in Cervantes’s story that we can find, in my view, the origins of Freudian psychoanalysis. In the Colloquy, as soon as they discover that, miraculously, they can talk, the dogs decide to put this faculty to good use. Thus Berganza, who has always wanted to tell “the things that are deposited in [his] memory”, so many and so old that they have became mouldy or forgotten out of not being able to be stated, as he explains, will now be in a position to tell everything he remembers to Cipión, however abruptly and confusedly, provided he can be assured that no one else will eavesdrop during the entire night he will devote to this purpose, behind the bed of one of the patients in the syphilitic ward of the Hospital of the Resurrection in Valladolid, where the dogs have met.
Cipión, for his part, declares himself ready to listen and shows himself throughout the novella as “critical, pedagogic and intelligent”, as Freud was to do in his letters to Silberstein and, one assumes, as he would later aim to appear to his patients. Berganza does not discuss his Oedipus complex or any of the personal matters that are usually told to a psychoanalyst, but gives instead a panorama of contemporary Spanish society, centred on a few colourful episodes that he has observed, and on his interactions, as a dog, with his several masters. And, just as with the correspondence, we have only one side of the Colloquy because, despite the promise made a
