A letter always arrives at its destination. (JL) Those that Freud and Zweig exchanged for thirty years bear witness to this circulation of desire and friendship. Like Bowie’s torn Union Jack coat, those “tattered remains of a metaphysical empire”, the letter carries the traces of its journey, lacerated yet intact in its essence.
There is, in the letters exchanged between Stefan Zweig and Sigmund Freud, an emotion that never ceases to move me: a discreet and profound joy, and above all a rare nobility in the way they address one another. Their correspondence testifies to a mutual respect that invents a form of delicate proximity, made of gratitude, recognition, and a scrupulous attention to words.
What moves me is the beauty of this double writing: that of Zweig, inhabited by the fervour of the man of letters, and that of Freud, inhabited by the rigour of the clinician, meeting in a common space where thought becomes living letter. Between them emerges a bond that opens a multitude of possibilities: that of a dialogue between literature and psychoanalysis, between sensibility and theory, between the art of writing and the art of listening. In these exchanges, I sense an essential trust: that of being able to confide to the other what matters most, knowing it will be received in its full amplitude.
This bond, I find again in my own way when I return, again and again, to the Freud Museum in London. I come back as one returns to a sanctuary, among the thousand and one other sanctuaries this city offers me (Bowie is another very compelling one), but with a particular reverence. Last time, I stayed longer in the garden, now in full exultation, as if the vegetation itself carried the memory of this place. It was there that I found myself inwardly saluting the memory of that improbable yet so real encounter between Freud, Stefan Zweig and Salvador Dalí, right here.
In this garden, amid the murmur of leaves and spring colours, the correspondence between Freud and Zweig takes on another dimension: it becomes almost palpable. I imagine their words still floating, settling on the walls, on the stones, on the desk, like a fine dust of ink and thought. And then these letters are living gestures that continue to open paths: for reading, for thinking, for meditating today in my own sanctuaries in the city and in language.