The Sigmund Freud Museum invites to the now fifty-second Sigmund Freud Lecture.

Freud and Marriage

Neither in his scientific work nor in his relations with Martha Bernays Freud did Sigmund Freud exhibit much interest in the spiritual dimensions of marriage. At a personal level one cannot blame him for this, but it remains a matter for regret that the founder of psychoanalysis never pointed the discipline in this direction. Among the many aspects of marriage, I identify two to which Freud might profitably have turned his mind: What distinguishes the people we fall in love with (“object choice”); and how does jealousy (what he calls “normal jealousy”) work? Despite his solid humanistic education, it does not occur to Freud to build on the thinking of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics about such questions. His disengagement from contemporary movements in art and literature, and from the revolution in sexual relations taking place around him, is equally disappointing. His younger Viennese contemporary Robert Musil could have taught him much.

J.M. Coetzee was born in South Africa in 1940 and educated in South Africa and the United States. Among his academic appointments have been professorships at the University of Cape Town and the University of Chicago. He is the author of twenty works of fiction, as well as of criticism and translations. Among awards he has won are the Booker Prize (twice) and, in 2003, the Nobel Prize for Literature. Since 2002 he has lived in Australia, where he is Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide.

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