Karen Mack, Jennifer Kaufman and the life of ‘Freud’s Mistress’

Minna Bernays may not be a household name, but her brother-in-law -- Sigmund Freud -- is. Bernays, who was rumored to have had an affair with the psychoanalyst at the end of the 19th century, is the main character of Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman’s 2013 historical novel “Freud’s Mistress.”

Novelists can’t seem to leave Freud and his entourage alone. D.M. Thomas had him on the brain in “The White Hotel” and “Lying Together”; Freud also inspired Thomas’ “Eating Pavlova” and Goce Smilevski’s “Freud’s Sister”; and his wife, Martha, takes center stage in Nicolle Rosen’s “Mrs. Freud.”

Seldon Edwards sent the protagonist of “The Little Book” back to 19th century Vienna, where he met a number of the locals, including the father of modern psychiatry. (Freud has also proved irresistible to Hollywood, in films from “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” to “A Dangerous Method.”)

Mack and Kaufman’s heroine is, like so many characters in historical fiction, a rather brilliant young woman who cannot follow her dreams and desires because of social constraints. Her mother says she’s “too bookish, too biased and intolerant of people who disagree with her.”

Minna is unmarried and employed as a companion to a thoughtless, wealthy woman. She has read Shakespeare and Goethe, and when she seeks medical aid for an ailing young maid, she is dismissed from her job. What else can a girl do but move in with her sister, her husband and their six children?

Martha Freud may have little interest in her husband’s work (or so “Freud’s Mistress” suggests), but her sister is another matter.

Mack and Kaufman’s Freud shares his ideas about talk therapy with Minna: “When I asked them to lie down on a couch and talk about their past — abusive fathers, distant mothers, childhood traumas, whatever drifted into their mind without censorship — all of their disturbing, even horrifying memories spewed forth.”

He discusses a patient who recalls his earliest sexual memories, “the presexual sexual shock.” Oedipus makes an appearance. So does the id, the ego and the superego. Naturally, Minna is more than capable of holding her own in their discussions. And she is thrilled to be a part of it all.

They become lovers, they sneak off together and, eventually, Freud dumps Minna for another conquest. This is not a surprise, exactly, but it gives us another reason to empathize with the 21st century woman who seems to be stuck in Minna’s body.

Scholars have been obsessed with Freud’s sex life for decades, looking for evidence of liaisons, hidden and otherwise. Writing in the New York Times in 2006, Ralph Blumenthal noted the discovery of a hotel ledger that seemed to indicate Freud and Minna registered as a couple while on vacation in Switzerland in 1898.

“The revelation is also likely to reignite a long standing debate about Freud’s personal life,” Blumenthal concluded. “The father of psychoanalysis … plumbed the darkest sexual drives and secrets of the psyche. But scholars still argue about how scrupulous Freud was in his own behavior.”

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