The Freud Files
Page 13
Consequently, the first section of the work was dedicated to establishing Freud’s claim over his invention in a quasi-obsessional manner. Going back over what he had said five years earlier at the Clark conference, Freud now denied Breuer any role in the conception of psychoanalysis, properly speaking. He recounted, publicly for the first time, how Breuer had reacted when faced with the ‘untoward event’ of Anna O.’s sexuality.
Freud: It will be remembered that Breuer said of his famous first patient that the element of sexuality was astonishingly undeveloped in her and had contributed nothing to the very rich clinical picture of the case . . . Now I have strong reasons for suspecting that after all her symptoms had been relieved Breuer must have discovered from further indications the sexual motivation of this transference, but that the universal nature of this unexpected phenomenon escaped him, with the result that, as though confronted by an untoward event, he broke off all further investigation. He never said this to me in so many words, but he told me enough at different times to justify this conjecture of what happened.258
Translation: Through cowardice, Breuer had recoiled where Freud had the courage to continue. In the same spirit, Freud recounted how Breuer, Jean-Martin Charcot and Rudolf Chrobak had made cryptic remarks in passing concerning the role of sexuality in the neuroses.
Freud: These three men had all communicated to me a piece of knowledge which, strictly speaking, they themselves did not possess. Two of them later denied having done so when I reminded them of the fact; the third (the great Charcot) would probably have done the same if it had been granted me to see him again.259
Translation: No one before Freud had established an explicit link between sexuality and the neuroses. Better still, when he presented his views on the sexual aetiology of the neuroses, his colleagues (notably Krafft-Ebing, but also Breuer) unanimously rejected them.
Freud: But the silence which my communications met with, the void which formed itself about me, the hints that were conveyed to me, gradually made me realize that assertions on the part played by sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses cannot count upon meeting with the same kind of treatment as other communications . . . Meanwhile, like Robinson Crusoe, I settled down as comfortably as possible on my desert island. When I look back to those lonely years, away from the pressures and confusions of to-day, it seems like a glorious heroic age. My splendid isolation was not without its advantages and charms. I did not have to read any publications, nor listen to any ill-informed opponents; I was not subject to influence from any quarter; there was nothing to hustle me . . . Meanwhile my writings were not reviewed in the medical journals, or, if as an exception they were reviewed, they were dismissed with expressions of scornful or pitying superiority.260
Freud: For more than ten years after my separation from Breuer I had no followers. I was completely isolated. In Vienna I was shunned; abroad no notice was taken of me. My Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, was scarcely reviewed in the technical journals.261
Isolated, rejected, misunderstood, Freud owed nothing to anyone. Besides, he didn’t even read what others wrote.
Freud: The theory of repression quite certainly came to me independently of any other source; I know of no outside impression which might have suggested it to me, and for a long time I imagined it to be entirely original, until Otto Rank showed us a passage in Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea in which the philosopher seeks to give an explanation of insanity. What he says there . . . coincides with my concept of repression so completely that once again I owe the chance of making a discovery to my not being well-read . . . In later years I have denied myself the very great pleasure of reading the works of Nietzsche, with the deliberate object of not being hampered in working out the impressions received in psycho-analysis by any sort of anticipatory ideas.262
Freud: I read Schopenhauer very late in my life. Nietzsche, another philosopher whose guesses and intuitions often agree in the most astonishing way with the laborious findings of psycho-analysis, was for a long time avoided by me on that very account; I was less concerned with the question of priority than with keeping my mind unembarrassed.263
Freud: I do not know of any outside influence which drew my interest to them or inspired me with any helpful expectations . . . I have held fast to the habit of always studying things themselves before looking for information about them in books, and therefore I was able to establish the symbolism of dreams for myself before I was led to it by Scherner’s work on the subject . . .264 Later on I found again the essential characteristic and most important part of my dream theory – the derivation of dream-distortion from an internal conflict, a kind of inner dishonesty – in . . . the famous engineer J. Popper, who published his Phantasien eines Realisten [Fantasies of a Realist]265 under the name of Lynkeus.266
This enumeration of the claims to theoretical virginity could simply appear to be vain or pretentious, but it actually served a precise goal: to affirm Freud’s exclusive rights over his creation. If Freud started from zero, if he submitted to no outside influence, if he made his discoveries in complete isolation and even despite his colleagues, psychoanalysis belonged to him alone, like a patented invention. Thus he could do what he liked with it, decide who could utilise it, denounce unauthorised copies and piracy. The aim of Freud’s history was to establish this autocratic political authority through affirming the absolute originality of the theory.
The problem is that this history is a fable, a scientific fairytale. As numerous Freud scholars have shown, there is hardly a single element of this narrative that holds up under careful scrutiny. The ‘splendid isolation’, for example? Freud was never as isolated as he subsequently claimed in the years following the publication of Studies on Hysteria. On the contrary, this work gave him a certain local and international notoriety, and the Breuer–Freud method was frequently discussed and practised by those interested in psychotherapeutics, as we have seen.
Janet, 1894: We are happy that Breuer and Freud have recently verified our already ancient interpretation of fixed ideas in hysterics.267
William James, 1902: In the wonderful explorations by Binet, Janet, Breuer, Freud, Mason, Prince, and others, of the subliminal consciousness of patients with hysteria, we have revealed to us whole systems of underground life, in the shape of memories of a painful sort which lead a parasitic experience, buried outside of the primary fields of consciousness.268
Havelock Ellis, 1898: I agree with Breuer and Freud, the distinguished Viennese investigators of hysteria, who seem to me to have thrown more light on its psychic characters than any other recent investigators, that the sexual needs of the hysterical are just as individual and various as those of normal women, but that they suffer from them more largely through a moral struggle with their own instincts and the attempt to put them into the background of consciousness.269
Ellis, 1898: Charcot had established the psychic character of [hysteria] . . . The nature and mechanism of this psychic process he had left wholly unexplained. This step was left to others, in part to Charcot’s successor, Janet, and in a very large measure, I am inclined to think, to the Viennese investigators, Breuer and Freud, and by taking it they have, I venture to say, not only made the first really important contribution to our knowledge of hysteria since Charcot’s investigations, but have opened the way to the only field in which the study of hysteria can now perhaps be fruitful . . . The investigations of Breuer and Freud . . . have further served to show that hysteria may be definitely regarded as, in very many cases at least, a manifestation of the sexual emotions and their lesions, in other words, as a transformation of auto-erotism.270
Bleuler, 1896 (regarding Studies on Hysteria): In any event, the fact that this book gives a completely new way of tackling the manner in which the psychism functions is one of the most important additions of these last years to the field of normal or pathological psychology.271
Moreover, Freud was respected and professionally supported by important figures such a
s Kraft-Ebbing and Hermann Nothnagel, who backed up his candidacy for the post of professor extraordinarius (after he had made public his claims on the sexual aetiology of the neuroses). He had a close intellectual collaboration with Wilhelm Fliess, to the point where Freud proposed that the latter co-sign the work which became The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,272 and he corresponded with eminent figures such as Havelock Ellis and Leopold Löwenfeld.273 He rapidly gained disciples (even if they ultimately didn’t remain so) – Felix Gattel and the future winner of the Nobel prize for medicine, Robert Bárány, in 1897–8, Hermann Swoboda in 1900, Stekel in 1901, Adler, Kahane and Reitler in 1902.274 The initial reviews of his books were neither as rare nor as negative as he later claimed.275
Freud was by no means the first to interest himself in sexuality and its relations with the neuroses. The connection between neurasthenia and masturbation, which formed an essential part of his theory of the actual neuroses, directly followed from George Beard’s Sexual Neurasthenia,276 and one finds it in many figures in medicine at that time, such as Krafft-Ebing, Löwenfeld, Erb, Strümpel, Peyer or Breuer.277 Furthermore, whilst Charcot, following Briquet, had rejected the ancient uterine theory of hysteria,278 hysteria continued to be associated with female sexuality by many practitioners, including Breuer.279
H. B. Donkin: Among the activities artificially repressed in girls, it must be recognized that the sexual play an important part and, indeed, the frequent evidence given of dammed up sexual emotions . . . have led many to regard unsatisfied sexual desire as one of the leading causes of hysteria . . . forced abstinence from the gratification of any of the inherent and primitive desires must have untoward results.280
F. A. King: [Hysteria] occurs most often in single women, or rather in those, whether single or married, whose sexual wants remain ungratified. ‘It is sometimes cured by marriage’ (‘Watson’s Practice,’ p. 455) . . . ‘Carter on Hysteria’ (pp. 35, 36) observes: ‘The sexual passion is more concerned than any other single emotion, and perhaps as much as all others put together, in the production of the hysteric paroxysm.’281
J. Michell Clarke (concerning Studies on Hysteria): It is interesting to note a return, in part at least, to the old theory of the origin of hysteria in sexual disorders, especially as the tendency of late years has been to attach very much less importance to them.282
Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon: [Freud and Breuer] have been led to take up again the old idea that hysteria merits its name, when one takes the uterus as a starting point; it is one of the most singular backward moves that one knows of. 283
Konrad Alt: Many hysterics had suffered severely from the prejudice of their relatives that hysteria can only arise on a sexual foundation. This widely spread prejudice we German neurologists have taken endless trouble to destroy. Now if the Freudian opinion concerning the genesis of hysteria should gain ground the poor hysterics will again be condemned as before. This retrograde step would do the greatest harm.284
Breuer: I do not think I am exaggerating when I assert that the great majority of severe neuroses in women have their origin in the marriage bed . . . It is perhaps worth while insisting again and again that the sexual factor is by far the most important and the most productive of pathological results. The unsophisticated observations of our predecessors, the residue of which is preserved in the term hysteria, came nearer the truth than the more recent view which puts sexuality almost last, in order to save the patients from moral reproaches.285
Breuer to Fliess, 16 October 1895: As regards the sexual basis of the disease, my examination of Selma B. has been serious and thorough. She says that she sometimes masturbated as a child of about 10 or 12 years of age, and presumably thereafter. She can say nothing about duration or intensity, but since at the age of 16 or 17 she experienced a severe neurasthenic condition it may be assumed that both were considerable. Though she may quite easily have been one of those people for whom a little harm produces serious consequences.286
Breuer: A third objection [to Freud’s theories] concerns the overvaluation of sexuality. One can perhaps say in this connection that, to be sure, not every symptom of hysteria is sexual, but that the original root of the same probably is. Neurasthenia is certainly an illness that is sexual in root.287
Contrary to what Freud claimed, Breuer’s disagreement with his young colleague after the publication of Studies on Hysteria was not to do with the role of sexuality in the neuroses, but only with what seemed to him to be an excessively exclusive claim concerning the role of sexuality in hysteria and neurasthenia.288 The ideas of the libido, infantile sexuality, erogenous zones and bisexuality to which Freud turned after his abandonment of his seduction theory were all part of the Darwinian heritage which he shared with his sexological colleagues, and notably with Fliess (whom Freud systematically omitted from his historical accounts).289
Sanford Bell: The emotion of sex-love . . . does not make its appearance for the first time at the period of adolescence, as has been thought . . .The unprejudiced mind in observing these manifestations in hundreds of couples of children cannot escape referring them to sex origin.290
In short, if one resituates Freud’s theories on sexuality in their context, one sees that they were neither as revolutionary nor as scandalous as he claimed.
Likewise, it is difficult to imagine that Freud’s interest in dreams owed nothing to the voluminous psychological literature on the subject by figures such as Scherner, Hervey de Saint-Denys, Maury, Strümpell, Wundt, Volkelt, Hildebrandt or Delbœuf (selectively cited by him in the first chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams) or by Charcot, Janet and Krafft-Ebing (strangely passed over in silence).291 To claim as Freud did in his autobiographical study that the science of his time had pronounced an ‘excommunication’292 on the subject of dreams is simply false. In this respect, one may well ask why he insisted so much on the fact that he arrived at the theory of dream symbolism293 (which was absent from the first edition of The Interpretation of Dreams) independently of Scherner, when the latter anticipated other more important parts of his theory, such as dreams being the disguised fulfilment of sexual wishes. As Irving Massey and Stephen Kern have both noted, Freud, in his historical review of the literature on dreams, seems systematically to have avoided citing the passages in the works of his predecessors which came closest to his own theories.
Karl Albert Scherner: Sexual impulses that arise during sleep, and their representation in dreams, are totally indifferent to morality; the fantasy simply takes as its motif the sexual vitality that is given in the physical organism and presents it symbolically; the chastest virgin and the respectable matron, the priest who has renounced earthly things, and the philosopher, who grants to the sexual drive only the measure and purpose decreed by morality, are equally, willy-nilly, dreamers of sexual arousal.294
F. W. Hildebrandt: The dream provides us with such fine aperçus of self-knowledge, such instructive allusions to our weaknesses, such clarifying revelations of half unconscious dispositions of feelings and powers, that on awaking we are entitled to be astonished at the demon who with true hawk eyes has looked into the cards. But if it is so, what rational grounds could keep us from individual questions of self inquiry, and especially with the one great main question: who is the real master in our house?295 The hints of dream life should certainly be heeded!296
Similarly, whether Freud had actually read Schopenhauer – and there are many reasons for thinking that this was the case297 – he most certainly would have been aware that the term and concept of repression played an important role in the work of his teacher Meynert, who had taken it from Herbart,298 and that in his initial formulations, the psychic mechanism which this designated was very close to the dissociation of Charcot, Binet and Janet. As for his claims to have avoided reading Nietzsche, William McGrath established that it would have been nearly impossible for him not to have read him when he was a young student, and a member of the Leseverein der deutschen Studenten Wiens, a pan-Germanic readi
ng group which avidly studied the works of Schopenhauer, Wagner and Nietzsche.299 Besides, one learns from a letter to Fliess that Freud had ‘acquired Nietzsche’ (most probably the Naumann edition of Nietzsche’s works which were being published then).300
Freud to Fliess, 1 February 1900: I have just acquired Nietzsche, in whom I hope to find words for much that remains mute in me, but have not opened him yet. Too lazy for the time being.301
Far from being born through the presuppositionless chance encounter of Freud and the unconscious, psychoanalysis was the product of the intersection of multiple readings, debates and discussions. Even the bibliographies of his early works show that Freud was a voracious multilingual reader of the scientific and philosophical literature of his time, constantly on the look out for what was new in fields as diverse as evolutionary biology (Darwin, Haeckel), sexology (Krafft-Ebing, Moll, Ellis, Iwan Bloch, Magnus Hirschfeld), German neurology and cerebral anatomy (Wernicke, Meynert), British psychophysiology (Maudsley, Bain), French abnormal psychology (Taine, Ribot, Binet, Janet), experimental and therapeutic hypnotism (Charcot, Bernheim, Delbœuf, Forel), the philosophy of the unconscious (von Hartmann), aesthetics (Lipps, Fischer), etc. Like many leading researchers, Freud keenly followed developments in related fields, mindful of priority vis-à-vis his colleagues and rivals, in the quest to establish the one true scientific psychology. In this regard, Jones’ claim that Freud ‘was never interested in questions of priority, which he found merely boring’,302 is clearly false. The renowned sociologist of science Robert K. Merton counted no less than 150 priority disputes in Freud’s works, which on average comes out to over three per year – and this was before the major exchanges of correspondence had been published.303