Freud's Freudian Slip: Illicit Affair With His Wife's Sister

“They not only shared a bed, they were even up to misrepresenting their relationship to strangers as that of husband and wife, a subterfuge they surely then maintained whenever feasible during subsequent holidays together in faraway places.”

It seems the father of psychoanalysis so carefully guarded the actual nature of his relationship with his wife's sister that rumors it was a love affair had been dismissed as malicious gossip by Freud supporters. Some researchers went as far as speculating Freud's sister-in-law became pregnant with his child but had an abortion. Everybody did find it odd that the three--Freud, his wife and his sister-in-law--all lived under the same roof for 42 years. Now comes definitive proof of the affair in Freud's own handwriting. During a vacation to the Swiss Alps, Freud registered he and his sister-in-law in a hotel ledger as “Dr Sigm Freud u frau,” German for “Dr. Sigmund Freud and wife.”