Fliess Versus Weininger, Swoboda and Freud: The Plagiarism Conflict of 1906 Assessed in the Light of the Documents

Abstract

Based on sources that have so far partly been neglected, this paper examines the accusations of plagiarism that Fliess levelled against Weininger, Swoboda and Freud in 1906, trying to determine to what degree they can or cannot be justified. In the case of Weininger it seems clear that his theory of bisexuality was stimulated by an indirect communication of Freud which harked back to a Fliessian idea. But there is no evidence that he had heard anything about the specific version of this theory in which Fliess felt plagiarized. In the case of Swoboda any reproach of plagiarism was out of place because he explicitly utilized ideas (about periodicity) which had already been published. He did, however, veil the extent of his dependence on Fliess, while Fliess ignored the originality of Swoboda's psychological (rather than biological) approach. The fact that Fliess set the two cases in parallel and related them both to an indiscretion of Freud, confirms the paranoid pattern of his accusations. The paper concludes that the episode is not suitable to use as evidence for a hostile paradigm of studies of Freud.

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