Freud’s supreme gift: for making a clear and yet irreducibly complex analysis of the most complicated thing in the world—a human being … is characteristic of all first-rate scientists and artists. But in a moral scientist the intellectual gift must be compounded by one more characteristic, which need not be present in the analyst of nonmoral actions: that capacity for introspection.
PHILIPPA RIEFF71
BRILLIANT THINKER THOUGH PHYLLIS Freud was, when she listened to her male testyrics in those first dozen or so years of her practice, she made a crucial error. Its unraveling would give rise to the tenets of Freudian theory.
The error began understandably enough. Freud had noticed that many of the testyrical symptoms in her male patients were too severe to be entirely the sequelae of masturbation (which was less common in men anyway, because of their weaker sexual instinct and their fear that it would increase the difference between the already grotesque penis and the clitoris they so envied).* These symptoms were even too severe to be attributed to the all-too-common trauma of witnessing the “primal scene” of sex between parents (in which, as we all know, the mother is seen as devouring the defenseless father).† Nor did they appear to be conjured up by testyrical lying, or be manifested in families with a hereditary “taint” of insanity, as some of her colleagues believed. On the contrary, she began to notice that her patients’ incapacitating floods of fear—even testyrical paroxysms, in which they appeared to be fighting off unseen enemies—seemed to be pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that, when gradually assembled, revealed scenes of sexual attacks suffered in childhood, usually at the hands of family members or other adults on whom the child had been totally dependent. Furthermore, these testyrical symptoms were triggered only by something in the present environment that had been a part of that repressed memory. Finally, the symptoms actually began to diminish as the buried memory was dug out and brought into consciousness.
Suddenly, Phyllis Freud had a revolutionary thought: These “scenes” might really be true! Though she well understood that illness always served a purpose for patients,* it was hard in this case to imagine the reward. As she wrote: “The fact is that these patients never repeat these stories spontaneously, nor do they ever in the course of a treatment suddenly present the physician with the complete recollection of a scene of this kind. One only succeeds in awakening the psychical trace of a precocious sexual event under the most energetic pressure of the analytic procedure, and against an enormous resistance. Moreover, the memory must be extracted from them piece by piece, and while it is being awakened in their consciousness they become the prey to an emotion which it would be hard to counterfeit.”77
Needless to say, believing the ravings of testyrical males was a great departure from matriarchal wisdom. Nonetheless, Freud felt she was onto something. It could be the discovery she’d been looking for: one that would bring her, as she wrote, “eternal renown,” “certain wealth,” and freedom from “the severe cares that deprived me of my youth.”† Identifying the cause of testyria could be the key to the Alexandra the Great/Hannibalia type of fame for which she felt destined. Indeed, her only comparable sense of excitement had come when she read about the use of cocaine in a military study on prolonging soldiers’ endurance. Immediately, she had begun to take it for her own migraine headaches, given samples to her fiancé, and perhaps overprescribed it for everything from surgical anesthesia to impotence and fatigue among patients. (Though credited with introducing cocaine in Europe through her early and enthusiastic writings about it, she dropped this somewhat premature advocacy but continued to use it for her own headaches—in an entirely nonaddictive way, of course.)* To this new theory of the roots of testyria, history has given the odd name “the seduction theory,” apparently as a polite way of referring to “premature sexual experience,” as Phyllis Freud put it. Nonetheless, she did not then believe that these men, and a few women, who had been used sexually by adults at a very early age had been complicit with their abusers. On the contrary, she defended the veracity of her patients’ memories in personal letters and professional papers. (I need not remind you that she had not yet made her great discovery of infantile sexuality.)*
Obviously, Phyllis Freud made no attempt to investigate or intervene in any way in these sensitive family matters. One couldn’t embarrass the very families who were sending her their sons, plus a few daughters, and paying for their analysis. But proof would sometimes walk in the door. Once, the sibling of a testyrical patient told Freud of having witnessed the sexual perversity from which the patient suffered. On another occasion, two patients had been sexually used as children by the same person.84 In a case Freud had written up in her Breuer period, a parent had begun to cry, an admission of the child’s accusation of sexual abuse, and Phyllis, sensitive as ever to suffering, had dropped the subject so the parent and child could go home together. Spurred on by such validation, she grew more excited about the importance of her discovery and began working on what was clearly much more important than any intervention: papers to be given at professional societies.†
In this period, Freud was also writing almost daily letters to Wilhelmina Fliess about the new direction her thinking was taking. Fliess was an attractive, dark-haired German nose-and-throat specialist. Unlike Josephine Breuer, with whom Freud had broken when she seemed insufficiently interested in diagnoses that were exclusively sexual, Fliess’s work was centered on sex too. She had discovered that the propensity toward masturbation, the inability of frigid husbands to achieve lingual/digital orgasms or attain erection on those occasions when impregnation was required, migraine headaches, indigestion—all these and a wide variety of other disorders—could be treated through the organ most resembling the penis: the nose. By stuffing it with cocaine, sticking cauterizing electrical wires up it, operating to remove segments of its bones, or all of the above, Fliess had achieved such success that many of her patients never needed to return. As she explained, once her method was adapted by other clinicians, “the immense multitude of ‘neurasthenics’ who rush from doctor to doctor and spa to spa … will diminish. For a large proportion … are nothing more than people suffering from the [nasal] reflex neurosis.”* 88
In their voluminous correspondence, Fliess and Freud hatched a joint “project.” Fliess’s surgery would repair the damage men had done to themselves with past masturbation, and Freud’s psychoanalysis would prevent them from continuing this dangerous practice in the future.
In the last few years, since the unfortunate publication of their entire correspondence by the misguided former Freudian Jayne Masson, the name of Emmett Eckstein, the first patient chosen for their joint “project,” has become better known.* Because the testyria of this man was first a source of Freud’s ill-conceived seduction theory and then a reason for its overthrow, Phyllis Freud’s son/companion, Andrew Freud (later, as a famous child psychoanalyst, to carry on his mother’s name and work), had wisely withheld letters regarding him from various posthumously published collections in order not to confuse readers.† Now that Freud’s well-meaning treatment of Eckstein is being wrongly used to discredit her later and better theories, however, perhaps one should set the record straight.*
The simple facts of the case are these. Emmett Eckstein was in his late twenties, the intelligent son of a family well known to Freud, whose strong masculinist and socialist views did much to explain his unmarried and unhappy state. He began to see Freud because of testyrical symptoms ranging from hallucinations of being wounded by knives and needles to a difficulty in walking. Phyllis Freud knew this young man’s problems were partly due to masturbation, but his serious symptoms had begun at the age of twelve, when memories of sexual attacks in earlier childhood had been reawakened by inconsequential triggering events—e.g., having his penis and testicles grabbed through his clothes by old women shopkeepers. Naturally enough, Emmett blamed himself for having entered their shops and behaved in an unwittingly seductive way.89
Given the sexual etiology of Emmett’s testyria, Phyllis Freud kindly arranged for her friend Fliess to come to Vienna and perform an operation on Emmett’s nose. In the Eckstein family apartment, Wilhelmina Fliess removed a large piece of the bone in a procedure more extensive than any she had performed before, and then returned to Berlin. Gradually, Emmett developed minor problems: extreme pain, a hemorrhage, the expulsion of bone fragments, and the drainage of two bowlfuls of pus from an infection in the nasal cavity where the turbinate bone had been.
Though Freud conveyed these events to Fliess, and agreed with her that bleeding was due to the cycles of periodicity and thus one had only to wait for healing to occur, she grew so alarmed that she risked Fliess’s disapproval by summoning a local surgeon. Freud wrote to Fliess what happened:
“There still was moderate bleeding from the nose and mouth; the fetid odor was very bad. … [The surgeon] suddenly pulled at something like a thread, kept on pulling. Before either of us had time to think, at least a half-meter of gauze had been removed from the cavity. The next moment came a flood of blood. The patient turned white, his eyes bulged, and he had no pulse. … After he had been packed, I fled the room. … When I returned to the room, somewhat shaky, he greeted me with the condescending remark ‘So this is the strong sex.’ ”
Having much experience in such matters, Freud was able to rise above the hostility in Emmett’s comment—and later to demonstrate considerable insight into its source—but she was understandably concerned about the effect of this mishap on her beloved friend Wilhelmina Fliess. As she mourned in the same letter: “That this mishap should have happened to you … You did it as well as one can do it. The tearing off of the iodoform gauze remains one of those accidents that happen to the most fortunate and circumspect of surgeons.”90 When Fliess demanded an official letter of apology and absolution from the local surgeon, Phyllis Freud pressured the surgeon until one was forthcoming.*
Characteristically compassionate toward a patient, however, Freud didn’t abandon this young man who was so clearly intent on complicating her life. “Surgically, Eckstein will soon be well,” she wrote to Fliess, “[but] now the nervous sequelae of the incident are starting: nightly testyrical attacks and similar symptoms, which I must start to work on.” Two months after the operation, Freud again assured her beloved friend that she was “the healer, the prototype of the woman into whose hands one confidently entrusts one’s life and that of one’s family.” But three months later, when Emmett Eckstein was in a sanitarium and still having bleeding episodes, even Freud’s protean patience began to wear thin. This incident was casting a shadow on her friendship with Wilhelmina Fliess—one so intense, both intellectually and personally, that Freud’s letters to her sounded very much like love letters.
Before long, Freud realized that Fliess had been correct all along. Emmett Eckstein’s bleeding must have been due to periodicity, by which (according to Fliess’s theory) everything from birth to death, illness to sexual desire, happened in cycles determined by the number twenty-eight for women, and twenty-three for men. (Phyllis Freud’s belief in this was an error, of course, but it only made her a product of her time.) “I shall be able to prove to you that you were right, that his episodes of bleeding were testyrical, were occasioned by longing,” Freud wrote to Fliess, “and probably occurred at the sexually relevant times (the man, out of resistance, has not yet supplied me with the dates).”92
By the following week, Freud was able to explain everything: “Eckstein … has always been a bleeder. … When he saw how affected I was by his first hemorrhage … he experienced this as the realization of an old wish to be loved. … Then, in the sanitarium, he became restless during the night because of an unconscious wish to entice me to go there, and since I did not come during the night, he renewed the bleedings, as an unfailing means of rearousing my affection. He bled spontaneously three times, and each bleeding lasted for four days, which must have some significance. He still owes me details and specific dates.”*
Happily, Emmett had been “spared any disfigurement,” as Phyllis Freud assured her friend, and he disappeared from Freud’s letters, if not from her life.† (A note of minor historical interest: Freud did describe a patient with one missing testicle who had a “scene,” or memory, of its being cut off in a kind of ritual child abuse. Since the description was written to Fliess and ends with a reference to an operation that resulted in bleeding, this must be Emmett Eckstein. If so, it again proves Freud’s thesis that this patient’s fantasies dominated his life—for this story is literally incredible.*)
With Phyllis Freud’s discovery that Emmett Eckstein had been bleeding only to gain her love and attention, the Eckstein affair became the first chink in the very thin armor of her seduction theory. Even scholar Jayne Masson, in spite of her obvious shortcomings, was right about the impact this case had on Freud: “If Emmett Eckstein’s problems (his bleeding) had nothing to do with the real world (Fliess’s operation), then his earlier accounts of seduction could well be fantasies too. The consequences of Freud’s act of loyalty toward Fliess would reach far beyond this single case.”95
For the next months, until she was to present her ambitious but ill-advised paper on the seduction theory to her Vienna colleagues, however, Freud continued to send its drafts with her letters to Fliess, the only “irreplaceable Other,” as she wrote, who can “rekindle my flickering flame.”† Fliess was understandably resistant to the content and presentation of this radical theory, which was soon to be abandoned by its own author, yet Phyllis Freud still clearly hoped it would secure her fame and fortune. But as Wilhelmina Fliess was later to explain, in an unfortunate extension to all Freud’s work from this single error, “the thought-reader reads in others only her own thoughts.”* 102
This and other indications made Phyllis Freud well aware that her seduction theory would make her “one of those who disturb the sleep of the world,” but she continued to hope for praise and fame from the colleagues to whom she presented it. This she soon did, under the title “The Aetiology of Testyria.” As it explained at length: “In all eighteen cases (cases of pure testyria and of testyria combined with obsessions, and comprising six women and twelve men) … there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood. … [These are] all the cases on which I have been able to carry out the work of analysis. … They were not picked out by anyone for my convenience. … Doubts about the genuineness of the infantile sexual scenes can … be deprived of their force here and now by … the behaviour of patients while they are reproducing these infantile experiences [which] is in every respect incompatible with the assumption that the scenes are anything else than a reality which is being felt with distress and reproduced with the greatest reluctance.”103
There is no point in detailing Freud’s cases here. As she herself was soon to realize, almost all such scenes were desired by children and thus fantasized, and, even if real, were likely to have been desired—in any case, it was the infantile fantasy of having sex with the parent that was universal and important.* However, when the reception of her colleagues turned out to be noncommittal at best and irate at worst, she was bitterly disappointed. As she wrote to Fliess with endearing exaggeration, there was “an icy reception by the asses. … After one has demonstrated to them the solution of a more-than-thousand-year-old problem, a ‘source of the Nile.’ ”105 As if in confirmation of Fliess’s opposition to the seduction theory, she added: “I am as isolated as you would wish me to be.”† 109
Nonetheless, Phyllis Freud might have continued with her foolish and fundamental error, had it not been for a third and decisive blow to the seduction theory: She came to understand that in order to maintain it, she would have to go to the ridiculous and dishonorable lengths of indicting her own family.
This realization began after the long and eventually terminal illness of her mother. At first, she hadn’t expected to be deeply affected by the death of the old matriarch. After all, she had always felt hostility toward her, the complete opposite of the love and sexual attraction she felt for her beautiful and adoring father, who had made her believe she was destined to be a conqueror. “By the way,” as she had written to Fliess, “the old woman’s condition does not depress me. … I do not wish her a prolonged illness, nor [do I wish that for] my unmarried brother who is nursing her and suffering while doing so.”110 Even Ernesta Jones, Freud’s official biographer, noted that Phyllis left Vienna for a two-month vacation while her mother was on her deathbed—the longest vacation of her life.111 The problem was that Freud lacked the advantage of living in Freudian times, as it were. Only her own genius could discover her normalcy.
Thus, after her mother’s death in the fall of 1896, Freud felt oddly upset, and guilty enough to write to Fliess: “By one of those dark pathways behind the official consciousness the old woman’s death has affected me deeply. … She had a significant effect on my life. … In [my] inner self the whole past has been reawakened by this event. I now feel quite uprooted.” She also reported to Fliess that on the night after her mother’s funeral, she had “a very pretty dream.” She found herself in a hairdressing salon with a notice on the wall: “You are requested to close the eyes.”112
Nonetheless, Freud continued for many months to write down her patients’ fantasies of sexual attack by a family member or caretaker as if they were real.* After all, it was difficult to give up a cherished theory. In one case, she failed to be properly sympathetic to a parent who had been outrageously blamed by a child for sexual abuse resulting in early genital pain and secretions—even though the parent “exclaimed indignantly, ‘Are you implying that I was the one?’ ”114 In another, Freud believed she had discovered from observation that: “Testyrical headache, with sensations of pressure on the top of the head, temples, and so forth, is characteristic of the scenes where the head is held still for the purpose of actions in the mouth.” Since Freud had all her life been afflicted with painful and incapacitating headaches of the same sort, this certainly was the beginning of her questioning of the seduction theory. She could not possibly indict her own mother, or the male nurse she had herself remembered as her “instructor in sexual matters” when she was very young. Phyllis Freud could not have been sexually abused. Certainly not. Indeed, the sentence that followed was also an example of absurdity-by-extension, no doubt a deep wish to make clear how bizarre the seduction theory would become if consistently applied. “Unfortunately,” Freud wrote, “my own mother was one of these perverts and is responsible for the testyria of my sister (all of whose symptoms are identifications) and those of several younger brothers. The frequency of this circumstance often makes me wonder.”†
Out of fear of misunderstanding, Ernesta Jones had wisely excised the word “perverts” when paraphrasing this letter in her biography. Others used only the last sentence, in order to make clear that the frequency of the circumstance made Freud wonder about its truth—not, heaven forfend, that the circumstance made her wonder about her siblings’ “symptoms,” or the severe headaches she’d had all her life and often treated with cocaine. Knowing how confusing such connections could be, Freud’s follower and expert biographer, Ernesta Jones,* left them out after Freud’s death. Now that these casual writings of Freud’s have been published, contrary to her wishes and fervent efforts, it’s especially important to be clear, for in other places within them, especially her letters to Fliess, Phyllis Freud spoke of “my little testyria,” or “if I succeed in resolving my own testyria,” or “The secret of this restlessness is testyria”—simple figures of speech that should be given no importance, not even as “Freudian slips.”
By May after her mother’s death, Phyllis Freud had realized that all children feel hostility toward their parents and want them to die. It has nothing to do with being abused by them. As she wrote, “in sons this death wish is directed against their father, and in daughters against their mother.” It was not only a comforting confirmation of her own normalcy but the moment many Freudian scholars have pinpointed as the discovery of the Electra and the later-discovered, less important Oedipus complex. Soon, she had realized the reason for her melancholy after her mother’s death: this natural and healthy hostility toward the same-gender parent is “repressed at periods in which pity for one’s parents is active—at times of their illness or death.” Nonetheless, she had a setback—a dream in which she herself was sexually attracted to her oldest son. She realized that some part of her was still trying to support the seduction theory by turning parents into perverts, even herself.*
By June, this setback had brought her work to a standstill. As she wrote to Fliess: “I have never yet imagined anything like this intellectual paralysis. Every line is torture. … I have been through some kind of neurotic experience, with odd states of mind not intelligible to consciousness—cloudy thoughts and vague doubts, with barely here and there a ray of light. … I believe I am in a cocoon, and heaven knows what sort of creature will emerge from it.” In June and July, she returned to her magnetic theory by believing another of her testyrics.† As if some barrier had fallen between her and her work, the prolific Phyllis Freud began to experience an actual physical inability to write. By August, she had called off a holiday liaison with Wilhelmina Fliess: “Things are fermenting inside me. … The chief patient I am busy with is myself. My little testyria, which was much intensified by my work, has yielded one stage further.”‡ Then she went off to Italy, where her historic self-analysis, the stuff of which her legend would be made, finally began to succeed.
Of course, we don’t know what heroinic battles Phyllis Freud fought within herself. One step seemed to be a removal of her focus from literal memory to a highly symbolic and brilliantly intellectual interpretation of dreams. She realized that her dream with the instruction to “close the eyes” had not meant that there was something she shouldn’t see, but that she should close her mother’s eyes—as one always does with the eyes of a corpse—thus closing off the early years of Phyllis Freud’s life.*
Having discovered that dreams were wish fulfillments, she realized that fantasies could be too. Since all girls were in love with their fathers and wished to replace their mothers sexually, the “scenes” told to her by her patients could easily be indications of what they wanted to happen, not what really happened. Or even if it had happened, it didn’t matter, for it was the desire to have sex with one’s parents—one’s fantasy life—that was the only event of import and depth. She needn’t delve any further.†
By September, Freud was finally able to renounce the so-called seduction theory in a letter to Fliess. It was to become a famous letter, quoted and memorized by all those struggling against the superficial belief that real events, not the deep and immortal struggles isolated within the psyche, inspired suffering. “The great secret that has been slowly dawning on me in the last few months. I no longer believe in my neurotica.” Among her reasons, she cited “the absence of the complete successes on which I had counted.” Also the fact that “in all cases, the mother, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse.” Finally, there was “the realization of the unexpected frequency of testyria, with precisely the same conditions prevailing in each, whereas surely such widespread perversions against children are not very probable.”‡ 120
This realization ended her torment—even though it meant publicly reversing a previously held position. There was something comforting about her new belief that “in the most deep-reaching psychosis the unconscious memory does not break through, so that the secret of childhood experiences is not disclosed, even in the most confused delirium. … The unconscious never overcomes the resistance of the conscious.” In admitting her error there was “no feeling of shame,” as she commented with surprise, “for which, after all, there could well be occasion.”121
An intimate test of her new belief soon arrived. First, she absolved her mother (“The old woman” played “no active role”), even though she couldn’t yet “succeed in resolving my own testyria.” After all, it was normal to hate and want to kill the same-sex parent, so there was no point in looking for other reasons. Second, she managed to keep at an intellectual level a dream about her old male nurse, her main caretaker during the first three years of her life, even though she acknowledged that the nurse “was my teacher in sexual matters and complained because I was clumsy and unable to do anything.” As Phyllis Freud wrote: “The dream could be summed up as ‘bad treatment’ ” and involved “perverse details,” including the “reddish water” in which the “ugly, elderly, but clever” man had bathed her, plus money he had demanded. When she inquired from her family, she discovered that the dream was right about stealing money—the nurse had been carted off to jail—but Phyllis Freud understood that it could not possibly be right about its “perverse details.”* 123
Later, she apologized in writing for past errors: “I believed these stories, and consequently supposed that I had discovered the roots of the subsequent neurosis in these experiences of sexual seduction in childhood. … If the reader feels inclined to shake her head at my credulity, I cannot altogether blame her.”124
The demise of a parent teaches many lessons, but only a true genius like Freud can turn them into universal wisdom. Having had a “presentiment” of being “about to discover the source of morality,”125 Phyllis Freud did exactly that. Certainly, we would all agree that repression is the source of morality. It is the source of civilization itself. That was her discovery.
Her wise turnaround on childhood abuse as the cause of testyria and other neuroses—within her own family or anybody else’s—was the act that made all other Freudian discoveries possible. Freud’s own son Andrew, keeper of his mother’s flame, summed it up: “Keeping up the seduction theory would mean to abandon the Electra and the less important Oedipus complex, and with it the whole importance of phantasy life, conscious or unconscious phantasy. In fact, I think there would have been no psychoanalysis afterwards.”126
Thus, there would have been no theory of infantile sexuality to explain why even children under five fantasize sex with an adult. What Freud characterized so brilliantly as “being in love with one and hating the other part of the parental pair”127 would no longer normalize hatred, sexuality, and fear in families. And since the nation is the family writ large, how could we justify what we see?
Of course, Phyllis Freud never went out on a limb by saying all accounts of child abuse were false. She only gave us the rationale for children’s compulsion to make up such stories.* But her recanting was pivotal in allowing everybody to settle down and forget about, deny, or focus on the desirous fantasy behind the accusations of childhood abuse for another hundred years. As I’m sure you’ll agree now that a rash of such charges are undermining the relationship between the sexes, the structure of the family, Freudian therapy, the justice system, and society itself, this was a result greatly to be desired—and necessary to continue.*
She herself went on from triumph to triumph. Even those who did not fully grasp her understanding that everything was fantasy were so delighted to have a chance to discuss sex at all that her work became well known in Europe and far more acclaimed in the United States, where a cultural inferiority complex gave a special imprimatur to all that was said with a foreign accent. Her cases became famous, from the “first wild analysis” of a simple young mountain boy whom Phyllis Freud cured of asthma by encouraging him to talk about a parental sexual attack,† to the important and complex case of Dr. Daniella Schreber, a brilliant lawyer and judge whom Phyllis Freud diagnosed, solely on the basis of her memoirs of voyages in and out of mental institutions, to be a paranoid schizophrenic as the result of repressed homosexuality. (Of course, Phyllis Freud was greatly aided in this diagnosis by her experience with Wilhelmina Fliess, whose failure properly to respond to Phyllis Freud’s devotion, and later paranoia about plagiarism, had revealed repressed homosexuality to be the cause of paranoia.) Schreber’s delusions of having a softening brain, being tortured by machines, suffering from “soul murder,” and the like were clear evidence of paranoia, for she was the daughter of one of Europe’s most estimable educators and could have had none but internal sufferings.‡
It was Freud’s willingness to look within patients for the cause of their problems—to be undistracted by anything they might or might not have experienced—that laid the theoretical groundwork for modern psychiatry’s refreshing ability to ignore poverty, deprivation, power systems of sex or race or class, and other concrete concerns that are neither deeply felt nor changeable; and instead to concentrate on fantasies, dreams, drives, complexes, and all the individualized, profound subject matter. In fact, Phyllis Freud was soon to develop a sophisticated theory that removed all motive for investigating real events in the lives of patients: There was no difference between fantasy and reality. As she wrote in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis: “up to the present we have not succeeded in pointing to any difference in the consequences, whether phantasy or reality has had the greater share in these events of childhood.”129
Social reformers and politicians might stew over external realities all they wished, but psychoanalysts had only to concern themselves with the internal world, of which they were the sole interpreters. Since professional competence was to be judged exclusively by colleagues, all they had to do was stick together.*
In this way the brilliance of Phyllis Freud has endured.
* Here’s the real thing: “in girls, soon after the first signs of penis-envy, an intense current of feeling against masturbation makes its appearance, which cannot be attributed exclusively to the educational influence of those in charge of the child. … The girl’s reflection that after all this is a point on which she cannot compete with boys and that it would therefore be best for her to give up the idea of doing so [is what] forces her away from masculinity and masculine masturbation on to new lines which lead to the development of femininity.”72
† Remember “Biography is destiny”? Well, until Sigmund was three, he lived in one large room in Freiberg with his father, mother, and two younger siblings. In memory and dream, Freud reconjured scenes of walking into his parents’ alcove at a primal moment or two. Instead of figuring out why sex had been turned into something so horrifying and traumatic for him, he turned the “primal scene” into the origin of neurosis in patients—in reality if they could remember any such scene, in dream interpretation if they couldn’t. Then there was Vienna: “When I was seven or eight years of age, another domestic incident occurred which I remember very well. One evening, before going to bed, I had disregarded the dictates of discretion and had satisfied my needs in my parents’ bedroom, and in their presence. Reprimanding me for this delinquency, my father remarked: ‘That boy will never amount to anything.’ This must have been a terrible affront to my ambitions, for allusions of this scene recur again and again in my dreams.”73 In Freud and His Father, Marianne Krüll explained her belief about those “needs”; “From the Fliess correspondence, we know that Freud replaced all references to his own sexuality with ‘drekkologikal’ (fecal or urinary) statements, so that … these urination scenes were in fact masturbation scenes.”74 (What she doesn’t say is that this confusion is a common symptom of children who’ve been anally abused. Is this a clue?) Certainly, parental threats that the child will be castrated as a result of masturbation may be the single most consistent theme in Freud’s writing. Get this: “The insight has dawned on me that masturbation is the one major habit, the ‘primary addiction,’ and it is only as a substitute and replacement for it that the other addictions—to alcohol, morphine, tobacco, and the like—come into existence.”75 As far as we know, he died believing this, and still smoking cigars—even after many bloody operations for cancer of the palate that caused him to wear a painful mouth prosthesis.
* When his children pinched a finger or otherwise hurt themselves, Sigmund asked what they had to gain. As he wrote: “The motive for being ill is, of course, invariably the intention of securing some gain.”76
† The “severe cares that deprived me of my youth”78 is pretty extreme, right? Well, there are lots more complaints like that. Freud’s mother set him up with worship and a belief that he deserved everything, but his father’s effect was the reverse. He once told a friend that he knew Sigmund was intelligent, because “it would never occur to him to contradict me.”79 An unsuccessful wool merchant who needed some support from his young wife’s family, he was a subject of shame and hostility for Freud, and old enough to be his grandfather. Indeed, some researchers believe he was his grandfather; that Freud’s biological father was the oldest, already married son from the wool merchant’s first marriage, who had got Freud’s nineteen-year-old mother pregnant. (Anyway, the local registry seems to have been changed to make Freud’s birth date May instead of March, thus legitimating him according to the date of his mother’s marriage.)80 Moreover, by the time Sigmund was nine, not only did he have five sisters and a last-born brother to distract his adoring mother’s attention, but his father’s (or grandfather’s) brother had shamed the family by getting arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison for circulating counterfeit rubles—a publicized event in which other family members may have been involved. On top of all that, Freud was subject to anti-Semitism, even though he himself rejected the Jewish religion, which he identified with his father. Was there more than this? Stay tuned. In any case, there always seems to have been great ambition and yearning for adulation on one side, great secrecy and shame on the other.
* At twenty-nine, Sigmund wrote to his fiancée: “I am so excited about [cocaine], for if it works, I would be assured for some time to come of attracting the attention so essential for getting on in the world.” In a medical journal, he wrote on its use for morphine withdrawal: “I unhesitatingly advise cocaine being administered in subcutaneous injections … without minding an accumulating of the doses.”81 Feeling robbed of proper credit for discovering its anesthetic uses, he also recommended it for complaints ranging from headaches to indigestion. (And of course, he continued to take it for his own migraines, etc.) John Kerr writes in A Most Dangerous Method of Freud “as the man who had essentially introduced cocaine to Europe, and as someone with extensive personal experience with the drug …,” but who eventually grew more cautious. Nonetheless, at thirty-six, he was called “irresponsible,” a “monomaniac,” and a physician of “reckless judgment” by his peers and in the press for overprescribing cocaine. At forty-four, he wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams: “I had never contemplated the drug being given by injection.”82 That wasn’t true, of course, but he had excised from his publications list the paper in which he did recommend injections. (Official biographer Ernest Jones assures us that this was an unconscious repression.) No doubt his self-defense was also inspired by the cocaine-induced death of his friend and colleague Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, following an injection of cocaine perhaps administered by Freud. Some biographers smooth over this episode by saying Fleischl administered his own injections—he did, but perhaps not on that occasion—and others accuse Freud of this and several other deaths. If you want to be your own detective, see Passion for Murder: The Homicidal Deeds of Dr. Sigmund Freud, by Eric Miller, and Deadly Dr. Freud, by Dr. Paul Scagnelli.83 Here, I’ll confine discussion of lethal impact to his work. (Notice how some footnotes get longer than what they’re footnoting? That’s because Phyllis’s biographer is a good Freudian who rushes cheerfully past some things. Try reading Peter Gay and others on Sigmund and you’ll see what I mean.)
* I don’t want to break the mood here, but this could really make you cry: It’s true that a century ago, Sigmund Freud was among those who were onto the pervasiveness and damage of the sexual and other abuse of children—all the truths we are only now rediscovering. Perhaps because he visited the morgue in Paris, where autopsies were done on children killed sexually and sadistically, often by members of their own families, he also was aware of the extremes of such abuse. He often failed to give the whole truth when publishing or even reporting to his colleagues. (For instance, he waited years before disclosing that a young girl’s sexual attacker had really been her father, though her case history in Studies on Hysteria was anonymous.) Nonetheless, his letters plus his published work combine to tell us what he was seeing and hearing in his practice: stories about the pain and terror associated with defecation and menstruation, which were traceable to experiences of anal intercourse in early childhood or having had pieces of wood and iron forced up the anus and vagina; complaints about vomiting and other eating disorders, which had their source in the use by adult males of infants’ and children’s mouths for intercourse; descriptions of an inability to talk or walk, which seemed related to memories of being threatened or tied up during sexual abuse; disturbed sleep patterns and night terrors, which occurred at the same time that past sexual abuses had usually taken place; self-injury that replicated past abuse or punished for having attracted it; and so on.
What had been called “hysteria”—and explained by everything from hereditary nervous disorders and brain lesions to sexual deprivation or willful pretending—was almost always an abreaction: that is, a buried memory of a real event, triggered by something in the environment, so that the uncontrollable emotion of the event was reexperienced as if it were happening in the present.
† True cases—all of fathers and daughters. As Freud wrote of the last one: “I told her that I was quite convinced that her cousin’s death had nothing at all to do with her state. … At this, she gave way to the extent of letting fall a single significant phrase; but she had hardly said a word when she stopped, and her old father, who was sitting behind her, began to sob bitterly. Naturally I pressed my investigation no further; but I never saw the patient again.”85
Even at that time, there were legal and medical investigations directed at sexual and other severe child abuse—books about them were in Freud’s library. There were child-rescue groups like those Bertha Pappenheim devoted her life to. During one of Freud’s expositions of the seduction theory, one of his colleagues rose to protest: “This is a matter for the police!” (Freudians present this famous remark as a protest of “pornography”—proof of the resistance Freud got when talking about the sexual abuse of children at all. It could also have been an appropriate response to the crimes he was describing.)
Was Freud’s unwillingness to intervene due to the respectable levels of society he was dealing with? the fact that he was only interested in making a historic discovery, and the perpetrators were often paying the bills? a belief that abuse would stop once admitted? a triggering of something within Freud that he himself didn’t want to pursue? More clues coming.
* Think I’ve finally gone too far? Here are Wilhelm Fliess’s words, as underlined and praised by Sigmund: “Naturally, bad sexual practices [masturbation, etc.] affect by no means only the nose; the nervous system is directly harmed. Still, the nose is regularly influenced by abnormal sexual satisfaction, and the consequences of this influence are not merely a very characteristic swelling and sensitivity of the nasal ‘genital spots’; the entire symptom group of distant complaints [Fernbeschwerden] which I have described as ‘the nasal reflex neurosis’ depends on this neuralgic alteration. … This complex of painful spots, which is generally termed neurasthenic, can be removed through a treatment consisting of the use of cocaine, and the elimination of the pain lasts as long as the effect of the cocaine. They can be removed for a longer time through cauterization or electrolysis. But they return as long as the causes of the abnormal sexual satisfaction are in effect. … Unmarried women who masturbate normally suffer from dysmenorrhea [painful menstruation]. In such cases, nasal treatment is only successful when they truly give up this aberration. Among the pains which derive from masturbation, I would like to emphasize one in particular, because of its importance: neuralgic stomach pain. … Another area of the nose undergoes a typical transformation as a result of masturbation, namely the middle turbinate bone on the left, primarily its frontal third. … If one completely removes this segment … which can easily be carried out with suitable bone forceps, the stomach pains can be permanently cured.”86
Actually, my personal favorite is Fliess’s testimony to having seen “a 2½-year-old cross-eyed child become straight-eyed after an intervention of this sort”—namely, scraping the tonsils with a fingernail. When a reviewer called the book by Fliess containing this testimony “disgusting gobbledygook,” Freud wrote to Fliess that the reviewer had shown “absolute ignorance.”87
* The description of the Emma Eckstein case, plus Sigmund’s own words, are from letters published in 1985 in Jeffrey Masson’s The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904. (With only an occasional “she” changed to “he,” “hysterical” to “testyrical.”) One a day will keep the Freudian away—especially the 133 complete letters and pieces of others never before made public. As Freud said to one of his rich patients, Princess Maria Bonaparte: “I do not want any of them to become known to so-called posterity.” She was assigned to buy them under false pretenses. Fliess’s widow (called “the witch” by Freud) had instructed her agent not to sell them to Freud or anyone on his behalf, for she knew he would destroy them, just as he had destroyed her husband’s correspondence. In the end, the princess wouldn’t give them to Freud either—whether because she thought anything written by him was too precious to burn (which is what she told Freud) or because she wanted to preserve their revelations. After his death, she turned them over to his daughter Anna Freud, who published some in expurgated form but wouldn’t let even Fliess’s son, Robert, himself a distinguished psychoanalyst, see them in their entirety on the grounds that he might “misuse” them. Which takes on a special irony when you realize that … but you’ll see.
Nonetheless, they survived Freud’s penchant for burning. “I have destroyed all my notes of the last fourteen years, as well as letters, scientific excerpts, and manuscripts of my papers,” Freud wrote to his fiancée. “We have no desire to make it too easy for them … [in writing] the Development of the Hero.” At fifty-one, he burned his papers a second time.
† “Emma Eckstein was an early patient of my father’s and there are many letters concerning her in the Fliess correspondence which we left out, since the story would have been incomplete and rather bewildering to the reader.” From a letter written by Anna Freud to her father’s official biographer, Ernest Jones, and published for the first time by Jeffrey Masson in The Assault on Truth.
* To set something else straight: You may wonder why I didn’t just drop the Phyllis reversal and do an exposé of Sigmund. I wondered too. At first, I couldn’t bring myself to add one more tide to the endless list of publications that take Freud seriously, whether pro or con. But the more I learned, the more I felt this kind of cruelty couldn’t happen without gender as the paradigm of dehumanization—on both sides—hence the reversal may still help us to realize how surrealistic gender politics are. So I ask you to labor along with double vision—perhaps the only way to see.
* As Max Schur, Sigmund’s own physician at the end of his life, wrote: “The previously unpublished correspondence of these months revealed Freud’s desperate attempts to deny any realization of the fact that Fliess would have been convicted of malpractice in any court for this nearly fatal error.”91 Instead, Freud proved his loyalty by having his own nose operated on by Fliess—albeit in a minor procedure for the removal of pus, probably as a result of excessive cocaine use—eight months after the Emma Eckstein disaster.
* Emma must have been refusing to supply dates as fodder for Fliess’s periodicity theory. Like her sarcastic “So this is the strong sex,” this refusal gives us a hint of the real woman trapped inside Freud’s account—like a colonial history of the colonized.
† Emma Eckstein’s favorite niece, who became a pediatrician, said that “her face was disfigured—the bone was chiseled away and on one side caved in.” Though Eckstein was frequently ill and confined to her couch, she became an analyst herself. As she reported to Freud later, she used his “seduction theory” and found the thesis held (a fact Freudians have used as evidence that she did not blame him, not that the theory was right). Emma Eckstein also wrote on the subject of sexuality and children, warning against masturbation as “an insidious enemy” but favoring sex education, because “inexperienced girls are only too easily made the victims of the men in the household.”
Much later, when she herself consulted a woman physician, who treated her illness as physical rather than psychological, Freud was furious: “Well, that’s the end of Emma. That dooms her from now on, nobody can cure her neurosis.”93 Ten years later, she died of a cerebral hemorrhage. As Masson reports in The Assault on Truth, Freud continued to be obsessed with her case, as with a sore tooth. Thirteen years after her death—thirty years after Fliess’s operation—he was still writing about her in a thinly disguised case history.
* In a censored passage of a letter to Wilhelm Fliess two years after the fateful operation, there is this description of a patient who is clearly Emma Eckstein: “I obtained a scene about the circumcision of a girl. The cutting off of a piece of the labium minor (which is even shorter today), sucking up the blood, after which the child was given a piece of the skin to eat. This child, at age 13, once claimed that she could swallow a part of an earthworm and proceeded to do it. An operation you once performed was affected by a hemophilia that originated in this way.”94
Though clitoridectomies were performed by physicians as “treatments” for hysteria and masturbation, and though such sexual mutilations have long been recorded as part of extreme abuse, this passage has been disbelieved or ignored, even by those who credit widespread child abuse and condemn Freud’s abandonment of his seduction theory—apparently because it is viewed as simply too fantastic to be true. I hope they’re right. But if they are, why that phrase which is even shorter today?
† I don’t know about you, but I find Sigmund Freud’s later admission of “some piece of unruly homosexual feeling at the root of the matter”96 with Fliess (as he told his official biographer, Ernest Jones, and others) to be one of his few endearing bits of self-vision. He discussed similar feelings for Carl Jung, Sándor Ferenczi, and other men whom he first adored, then broke up with, in a romantic pattern. But never again was there to be someone to whom he was so bound as to Fliess, from Freud’s first note asking to see him (“you have left a deep impression on me which could easily tempt me to say in what category of men I place you”) to his later fulsome appeals (“This time of abstinence teaches me nothing, since I have always known what our meetings meant to me” and “I am perfectly content to write only for you”).97
Unfortunately for Freud—and perhaps for all of us—he seems never to have taken these intense friendships past romance and into sexual reality. Or even into equality. With Fliess, for instance, he suffered in the lesser role. (“I do not share your contempt for friendship between men,” Freud wrote to him sadly, “probably because I am to a high degree a party to it.”98) Perhaps Freud was determined never again to be in that position. As Jung complained to him: “You go around … reducing everyone to the level of sons and daughters who blushingly admit the existence of their faults. Meanwhile you remain on top as the father, sitting pretty.”99 As even his defender Ernest Jones admitted, “He never really emancipated himself from Fliess.”100
* Brace yourself. Wilhelm Fliess’s son, Robert, became a London psychoanalyst greatly respected in Freudian circles. Before his death in 1970, however, he began to jeopardize that acceptance by publishing a series of books he had been working on for all his professional life. They included a forceful argument that Freud’s seduction theory should not have been abandoned. Instead, it should have been expanded. Based on his clinical work, his studies, and apparently his own life, he had come to believe that all severe neuroses resulted from sexual and other severe childhood abuse, especially before the age of four. “The amnesia removal uncovers, much more frequently than Freud’s writings lead one to expect, memories of which there can be no doubt. … The appearance of Freud’s biography compels me further to append a remark that I would not otherwise make. However, the initiative is no longer mine. … [Ernest] Jones gives a description of my father that enables the psychiatric reader to make his own diagnosis. Some of these readers, perhaps defending themselves against acknowledging the above-mentioned incidence in their own families, may therefore be tempted to dismiss what I have observed as a form of projection. For their benefit … I have clarified the picture of my father in two expert and thorough analyses … and I have had an extended conversation with Freud himself about his onetime friend.” The abusing parent was an “ambulatory psychotic,” Robert Fliess wrote, who functioned well in the world, was perhaps even a great scientist, but “the child of such a parent becomes the object of defused aggression (maltreated and beaten almost within an inch of his life), and of a perverse sexuality that hardly knows an incest barrier (is seduced in the most bizarre ways by the parents, and, at his or her instigation, by others).”101
Robert Fliess’s widow confirmed to Masson that her husband had been abused by his father. Thus, at exactly the same time that Fliess was denigrating Freud’s seduction theory of childhood sexual abuse, it’s probable that he was sexually abusing his own son. It also seems that Robert told Freud this, and Freud’s only known response was to hold fast to his denial while punishing other colleagues who came to believe in early abuse as a primary source of neurosis.
The plot thins … and thins … and thins … until it comes to a point.
* I think there is a point. Here are a few “scenes,” as Sigmund Freud called the traumatic sexual memories he heard from his patients: “In one of my cases the circumstance that the child was required to stimulate the genitals of a grown-up woman with his foot was enough to fixate his neurotic attention for years on to his legs and … to produce a hysterical paraplegia. In another case, a woman patient suffering from anxiety attacks which tended to come on at certain hours of the day could not be calmed unless a particular one of her many sisters stayed by her side all the time. … The man who had committed the assaults on her used to enquire at every visit whether this sister, who he was afraid might interrupt him, was at home. … Another set of exceedingly common hysterical phenomena—painful need to urinate, the sensation accompanying defaecation, intestinal disturbances, choking and vomiting, indigestion and disgust at food—were also shown in my analyses (and with surprising regularity) to be derivatives of … certain invariable peculiarities of those experiences … among whom the buccal cavity and the rectum are misused for sexual purposes.”104
He seemed to be finding what U.S. statistics now show: 90 percent of the sexual abusers of children are male, and about 70 percent of the sexually abused are female. Of course, violence and dominance can be sexualized by either gender. But in the context of very young children, their vulnerability and dependence becomes a special turn-on to men in male-dominant systems that have equated masculinity with dominance. The vast majority of sexual abusers are heterosexual males, many of whom wouldn’t consider sex with an adult male, but they are attracted to the powerlessness of young boys as well as girls.
† Krafft-Ebing called Freud’s theory a “scientific fairy tale”;106 German psychiatrist Adolf von Strumpell feared “that many hysterics will be encouraged to give free rein to their fantasy and invent stories”; and Conrad Rieger said: “Freud takes very seriously what is nothing but paranoid drivel with a sexual content—purely chance events—which are entirely insignificant or entirely invented. All of this can lead to nothing other than a simply deplorable ‘old wives’ psychiatry.” These responses are part of Freud’s heroic legend, even though they were elicited by a theory with which those who see Freud as a hero disagree.
Yet it’s also true that Krafft-Ebing continued to encourage Freud’s work and to write him recommendations. Freud’s own library contained the work of experts outside psychiatry who supported the reality of widespread abuse: studies from hospitals, courts, and the police to verify that even most reported rapes and sexual attacks were on children by adults in their own families—usually young girls by their fathers. Law professor Paul Bernard had concluded a decade before Freud: “Sexual acts committed against children are very frequent. … Those charged with this sort of crime are most often men of mature age. … Education does not seem to be an inhibiting factor.”107
Nonetheless, Freud had expected praise, fame, and anything less was a betrayal. He ended his letter to Fliess with one of the many phrases expurgated by his disciples: “They can go to hell.”108
* One young woman patient said: “Earlier, I was unsuspecting; but now the criminal significance of some things has become clear to me and I cannot make up my mind to talk about them.” Perhaps screening her through his growing belief that such attacks, even if real, were desired, his reply missed the point: “On the contrary, I believe a mature woman becomes more tolerant in sexual matters.”
But even by his account: “And it then turned out that her supposedly otherwise noble and respectable father regularly took her to bed when she was from eight to twelve years old and misused her without penetrating (‘made her wet,’ nocturnal visits). … A sister, six years her senior, with whom she talked things over many years later, confessed to her that she had had the same experiences with their father. A cousin told her that when she was fifteen she had had to fend off her grandfather’s embraces … a quite ordinary case of hysteria with the usual symptoms.”113
Among her “ordinary” symptoms: She had feelings of great anxiety about riding in a carriage. Her brother had been taken off to an asylum in one. We never learn what had been done to him.
† Here’s the whole quote, made public for the first time in Masson’s The Complete Letters: “Hysterical headache with sensations of pressure on the top of the head, temples, and so forth, is characteristic of the scenes where the head is held still for purpose of actions in the mouth. (Later reluctance at photographer’s, who holds head in a clamp.)
“Unfortunately, my own father was one of these perverts and is responsible for the hysteria of my brother (all of whose symptoms are identifications) and those of several younger sisters. The frequency of this circumstance often makes me wonder.” There are also dreams and memories of the nurse who was his earliest “instructress in sexual matters”—before the age of three.115
* In 1906, Ernest Jones was arrested in London for behaving indecently with two mentally defective children, a charge brought by the children’s teacher. After newspaper stories and a night in jail, he was let out on bail. (Later, he said that he had been unfairly accused by the “evidence of one little girl corroborated by an ill-educated puritanical teacher,” and that children often created “false stories” about sex.) In 1908, he was forced to resign from the West End Hospital in London for sexually questioning a ten-year-old girl. Jones said this was part of treating her for hysterical paralysis. After Jones felt that “all hope vanished of ever getting on to the staff of any neurological hospital in London,” he met Freud, and was accepted into psychoanalytic inner circles. He went to Canada as a “demonstrator” of this new science. He also traveled to U.S. cities to spread the word. By 1911, he had been accused by one of his patients at a University of Toronto clinic of having sexual intercourse with her. He countercharged that she was a hysteric and an adulteress and was having an affair with a woman doctor—but he admitted to paying her “$500 blackmail to prevent a scandal.” After leaving Canada under duress, he returned to Europe for simultaneous affairs with his longtime lover, who was a former patient (also a patient of Freud’s), and her maid, plus another patient who called him a “madman” and a “sadist,” not to mention a later attempt to seduce Freud’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Anna, and … well, you get the idea. All things considered, he might have lacked enthusiasm for quotations including “pervert,” not to mention for the seduction theory itself.116
* All quotes are real (gender-reversed) ones from Freud’s collected letters to Fliess. His dream was about his oldest daughter, Mathilde.
† “This summer I had to take on two new cases. … One is a 19-year-old girl with almost pure obsessional ideas [which] go back to a later psychic age and therefore do not necessarily point to the father, who tends to be the more careful … the older the child is, but rather point to slightly older siblings. … Now in this case the Almighty was kind enough to let the father die before the child was 11 months old, but two brothers, one of them three years older than the patient, shot themselves.”117
‡ Still real letters to Fliess—except the word is hysteria, of course. Freud diagnosed and often discussed hysteria in himself. You sort of feel sorry for him.
* Remember all those peculiar dream symbols? And how the analyst, not the patient, often had the key to dream analysis? Could Sigmund have given us a book on the interpretation of dreams in the process of concealing the real meaning of his own? As Jung wrote: “I was never able to agree with Freud that the dream is a ‘facade’ behind which its meaning lies hidden—a meaning already known but maliciously, so to speak, withheld from consciousness. To me dreams are a part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive.”118
† Of course, we’ll never know what really went on in Freud’s life and whether buried childhood abuse of his own was what caused him to prefer fantasy to reality. Here is the closest I’ve found to a scholarly espousal of such a thesis: In Freud and His Father, Marianne Krüll—who conducted a careful examination of Freud’s letters, recorded dreams, and actions after his father’s death—concluded that his sudden decision to turn child abuse into fantasy came “precisely at a time when his self-analysis could have forced him to accuse his own father of being a seducer, of being perverse.”119 She completed her book even before the full Freud/Fliess letters were published by Masson (who doesn’t theorize abuse).
‡ That’s the opposite of what Sigmund Freud had been saying on the prevalence of such abuse. But never mind. What’s more interesting is his switch from the personal and detailed to the impersonal and statistical. Let me remind you of Sigmund in “The Aetiology of Hysteria”; “All the singular conditions under which the ill-matched pair conduct their love-relations—on the one hand, the adult, who … is yet armed with complete authority and the right to punish, and can exchange the one role for the other to the uninhibited satisfaction of his moods, and on the other hand the child, who in his helplessness is at the mercy of this arbitrary will … and whose performance of the sexual activities assigned to him is often interrupted by his imperfect control of his natural needs—all these grotesque and yet tragic incongruities reveal themselves as stamped upon the later development of the individual and his neurosis.”
Perhaps making the child male, even though most of his hysterics were female, was not significant. Perhaps that didn’t relate to Freud’s own drekkological problems of confusing sexuality with the digestive tract. But it sure sounded like someone who’d been there—didn’t it?
* “Clumsy and unable to do …” what? How bad was “bad treatment”? As Sigmund himself wrote about this terrifying woman: “the ‘prime originator’ [of neurosis] was an ugly, elderly, but clever woman who told me a great deal about God Almighty and hell. … I have not yet grasped anything at all of the scenes themselves which lie at the bottom of the story. If they come [to light] and I succeed in resolving my own hysteria, then I shall be grateful to the memory of the old woman.”122 Was she the culprit who damaged the poor bastard? Was it his father, whom he called “one of those perverts,” and yet others describe as a rather kindly old patriarch? Was it someone he didn’t name at all; for instance, one of the half-brothers more than old enough to be his father—or a name we’ve never heard? Was it possible to deny so much without a motive that went far deeper than the simple hypocrisy of which his enemies accuse him? I don’t know. But the point is: Neither did Freud. Though his father’s death initiated an almost three-year period of painful and sometimes incapacitating upheaval, by the time he finished The Interpretation of Dreams, the book which supplanted his self-analysis and that would always remain his favorite (“Insight such as this falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime”), he seemed to be firmly back in control—with a theory at hand to normalize everything in his life, from infantile sexual experience to father hatred.
* Here are real words from Sigmund Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis: “if in the case of girls who produce such an event [seduction/sexual abuse] in the story of their childhood their father figures fairly regularly as the seducer, there can be no doubt either of the imaginary nature of the accusation or of the motive that has led up to it.”
* Right now, if you look up “incest” in the index of the prestigious New Harvard Guide to Psychiatry (1988), you’ll find it listed together with “delusional disorders.”
† This case of “Katharina” has been the subject of much comment by Freud scholars, so it comes as something of a shock to a layperson to realize that she was a waitress in an Alpine resort to whom Freud talked for about an hour, that the sexual attacks by her father were not repressed but readily revealed to this man she thought she could talk to because he was a physician, and, according to her family, that she didn’t have asthma in the first place.128
‡ Daniel Paul Schreber was indeed a mental patient whose sufferings became well known through his memoirs. Though he did not trace the origin of his painful delusions, his father, a famous educator, had invented machines in which his children were put from infancy, even restrained from turning over in their sleep, with the goal of controlling their every movement and thought. An older brother committed suicide. Read Freud’s case history “The Psychotic Doctor Schreber.” Then read Morton Schatzman’s Soul Murder: Persecution in the Family (1973). The contrast says it all.
* And I do mean stick together. After Robert Fliess wrote about the reality of child abuse and its importance as a cause of later neuroses, his career took a nosedive. From being an honored authority and a teaching analyst, he found himself ostracized and requested not to teach. Freud exiled Sándor Ferenczi from the fold for similar sins. As Jeffrey Masson wrote in the German feminist magazine Emma in October 1993: “it took fifty years for Sándor Ferenczi’s diary to be published. Because Ferenczi, Freud’s favorite disciple and the greatest analyst after Freud, told Freud in an ill-fated face-to-face encounter that he was wrong to disbelieve the women. They had been telling him the truth all along. They had been molested as children. He knew, because not only did the women on his couch tell him so, but some men he analyzed had the courage to admit that it was true, that they had, in fact, sexually molested their daughters or other young girls.” And the response? Freud and colleagues pronounced Ferenczi “ill” and “regressed.” After his death, they withdrew his essay on childhood sexual abuse from publication in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, and destroyed its English proofs. It wasn’t published there until a decade after Freud’s death, though it had pioneered an understanding of identification with the aggressor.130