Thus in March 1876, Carl Claus decided to dispatch one of his young students from the University of Vienna to his research station in Trieste. And that is how at the age of nineteen, Sigmund Freud suddenly found himself in a simple laboratory on the Mediterranean with a knife in one hand and a dead eel in the other.
THE NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD SIGMUND FREUD WAS A YOUNG MAN WITH big plans. The year before, he’d visited Manchester and loved it, even the rain and the climate. He was keen to travel more and was, above all, eager to spend more time on practical scientific work, learning more about everything, making discoveries, describing things, understanding things. He loved the laboratory. What he saw through the microscope was always unequivocally true; there was no room for prejudice or superstition. All human knowledge came from the laboratory. He envisioned a life in the service of science, possibly in England, maybe somewhere else entirely. And he was seriously considering dedicating his life to natural science, to biology or physiology, the tangible and concrete. In a family portrait from 1876, he can be seen standing in the middle with his hand on the chair of his mother, Amalia, the tallest of his siblings, wearing a three-piece suit, with his hair parted to the side and a dark, well-trimmed beard. He’s looking straight into the camera, his gaze steady, as though nothing in the world could perturb him.
It was this nineteen-year-old who in the spring of 1876 arrived in Trieste, with the ambition of solving the mystery of the eel and leaving his mark on the history of science. Trieste, located in the northeast corner of the Adriatic Sea, belonged at this time to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was an important metropolis, home to a naval base and a large port. Since the completion of the Suez Canal in 1867, it had also been a gateway to Asia. Coffee, rice, and spices were unloaded at the city’s docks. Ships came from all over the world, and people gathered there from all over Europe: Italians, Austrians, Slovenes, Germans, and Greeks. As early as Roman times, Trieste had been a meeting point and a site of pilgrimage, a place where all kinds of languages and cultures rubbed shoulders. Compared with Freiberg or Vienna, it was almost certainly a city that made an impression, complex and elusive.
So what did young Sigmund Freud find in Trieste? Quite a bit is known about that, since he wrote several letters to his childhood friend Eduard Silberstein describing his experience. He wrote in Spanish—since the two of them had become close while studying that language—about the city, its restaurants, shops, and residents. On occasion, his word choices are peculiar, possibly on account of Spanish not being his native tongue, but more likely as a kind of code between friends.
In his first brief letter, from March 28, Freud writes that Trieste is a very beautiful city and that “las bestias son muy bellas bestias”; its beasts are very beautiful beasts. By beasts, Freud meant women. During his first few days in Trieste, the city’s women seem to have fascinated him more than anything else. In his letters, he writes about being struck during his first day in town by the fact that every woman he met looked like a “goddess.” He describes their appearance and physical qualities in detail, saying they’re tall and slim with long noses and dark eyebrows, that they’re paler than they should be and have beautiful hairstyles and that some of them leave a lock free to hang down in front of one of their eyes like a tempting hook. He visits the neighboring city of Muggia and writes about how the women there must be particularly fertile since virtually every other woman he saw was pregnant and that the local midwives probably have no trouble finding work. He speculates ironically about whether the women might be affected by “the marine fauna,” making them “bear fruit year-round,” or whether they procreate at certain times all together. “These questions will have to be answered by future biologists.”
He observes and describes the women almost like a scientist, but at the same time, they’re alien to him, like members of a different species. Freud does not, however, seem to have made any close female acquaintances in Trieste, and before long, his mood and attitude toward the city changed. He starts expressing frustration with his situation in his letters to Silberstein: at the women who tempt and attract him, both younger and older ones, but who also confuse him emotionally. He remarks on their overuse of makeup. He writes about how they have a habit of sitting in their windows, looking out, smiling and meeting the eyes of men; he complains, slightly ironically, about having to distance himself from them, on account of his work.
Then, suddenly, he writes that all women in Trieste are “brutta, brutta,” exceedingly ugly. It’s as though he’s uncomfortable with the realization that his feelings won’t conform to the model of the cold, systematic man of science he strives to be. “Since we are not allowed to dissect people, I have nothing to do with them,” he writes, after noting that in Trieste, even young girls use makeup.
As though to steel himself against the distraction of his sexual confusion, Freud instead focuses on his work. He has his own room at the laboratory, which is located a stone’s throw from the Adriatic Sea. “I’m five seconds from the most recent Adriatic wave,” he writes to Silberstein, and then gives a detailed description of his workplace:
My little room has an odd floorplan, one window, in front of which is my worktable, with a great number of drawers and a large top, a second table for books and ancillary implements, three chairs, and several shelves holding some twenty test tubes. Last but not least, there is also a sizeable door, which, if you follow its lead, takes you outside. On the left side of the table, in the corner, stands the microscope, in the right corner the dissection dish, in the center four pencils next to a sheet of paper (my drawings are therefore cartoons, and not without value), in front stands a series of glass vessels, pans, bowls, troughs containing small beasts or bits of larger ones in seawater. In between stand or lie test tubes, instruments, needles, cover slips, microscope slides, so that when I am busy working there is not a spot left on which I can rest my hand. I sit at this table from eight to twelve and from one to six, working quite diligently.”
Every morning, Freud goes to meet the fishermen as they come into port with the catch of the day—baskets full of fat Adriatic eels—then heads straight to the laboratory and sets to work. He explains the object of his assignment to Silberstein, attaching simple drawings:
You know the eel. For a long time, only females of the species were known; even Aristotle didn’t know where the males came from and therefore claimed that eels sprang from mud. Throughout the Middle Ages and even in our modern times, there has been a veritable frenzy to find a male eel. Within zoology, where we don’t have access to birth certificates and where creatures—in accordance with Paneth’s ideals—act without first being observed, we cannot say which is female and which is male unless the animals display external differences. That there are in fact differences between the sexes has to first be proved, and only an anatomist can do so (since the eel is incapable of keeping a diary from which we could draw conclusions regarding its sex); he dissects them and discovers either testicles or ovaries. . . . Recently, a zoologist in Trieste claimed to have found testicles, and thus to have discovered the male eel, but since he apparently didn’t know what a microscope is, he failed to provide an exact description of them.
Day in and day out, Freud sits by his desk in the laboratory, cutting up eels, searching, peering through his microscope and making notes, seeking the answer to the mystery. All answers are bound to appear underneath the microscope—that is the promise of science, and if you can’t trust that, then what is there left to believe in?
But Freud doesn’t find any eel testicles, and he gradually grows more frustrated. Every night at half past six, he takes a walk through the narrow alleyways of Trieste, past shops and restaurants, toward the sea, where the setting sun turns the water into a mirror, hiding all life underneath the surface; he hears dockworkers speaking German, Slovenian, and Italian, smells the spices and coffee, sees the fishermen pack up the last of their catch, sees the women with their made-up eyes moving toward the bars in the square. He sees all that
. . . and thinks about eels.
My hands are stained by the white and red blood of the sea creatures, all I see when I close my eyes is the shimmering dead tissue, which haunts my dreams, and all I can think about are the big questions, the ones that go hand in hand with testicles and ovaries—the universal, pivotal questions.
For close to a month, Freud sits in his simple laboratory, engrossed by his monotonous and fruitless work, but in the end, he has to admit he’s failed. He hasn’t been able to find what he came to seek: the reproductive organ of the male eel and the definitive answer to the eel question. “I’ve tormented myself and the eels in a vain attempt to discover the male eel, but all the eels I’ve dissected have turned out to belong to the fairer sex.”
It was young Sigmund Freud’s first scientific assignment, and failure was his fate. For weeks on end he stood by his desk, doggedly cutting up eels and searching their cold, lifeless bodies for reproductive organs. Long days, reeking of dead fish, covered in sticky eel slime. And not one testicle did he find. Freud examined over four hundred eels and none could be shown to be male. He knew exactly where in the eel to look, and he could describe what the organs ought to look like, but even so, he never found what he was looking for.
In one of his letters to Eduard Silberstein, Freud drew an eel swimming through the text. Its lips are curled in a faintly mocking smile. In the same letter, he spoke of the eels using the word he had previously used to denote a different, but equally enigmatic creature: “las bestias.”
SO WHAT DID SIGMUND FREUD FIND IN TRIESTE? POSSIBLY, IF NOTHING else, an initial insight into how deeply some truths are hidden. In terms of both eels and people. And thus, the eel came to influence modern psychoanalysis.
Nineteen-year-old Freud was an ambitious young scientist. He’d gone to Trieste to write a groundbreaking report that answered, once and for all, the question that had confounded science for centuries: How do eels reproduce? He probably learned a great deal about the importance of patient and systematic observation in research, knowledge he would later apply to his patients on the therapy couch.
He’d also come to Trieste with an unshakable faith in science and in the rewards that await a person who’s willing to work hard for them. But the eel forced him to confront his own, and science’s, limitations. He found no truth under his microscope. The eel question remained unanswered. Completing his report a year later, he had to admit nothing could be proved about the sex and procreation of eels. He concluded with almost self-abnegating matter-of-factness: “My histological examination of the lobe-shaped organs will not permit me definitively to state the opinion that they are the testicles of the eel, nor does it give me substantial reason to reject it.”
The eel eluded Sigmund Freud; perhaps that was one of the reasons he ultimately abandoned the pure natural sciences for the more complex and unquantifiable field of psychoanalysis. The way the eel eluded him was especially ironic, given what Freud would eventually focus on: it concealed its sexuality from him. The man who would come to define twentieth-century thinking about sex and sexuality, and who would delve deeper into the inner workings of humans than anyone before him, could not, where eels were concerned, even locate their sex organs. He had gone to Trieste to find an eel’s testes but discovered only an enduring enigma. He wanted to understand the sexuality of a fish, but found, at best, his own.
It was also ironic because Freud’s relationship with aquatic creatures was already slightly complicated. Much has been written about young Freud’s relationship with a girl named Gisela Fluss. It began in 1871, when the then-fifteen-year-old Freud lived for a time as a lodger with Gisela’s family in Freiberg. Freud was clearly attracted to Gisela, who was then only twelve, and expounded on how beautiful and alluring she was in letters to, among others, Eduard Silberstein. It may have been his initial sexual awakening, but, be that as it may, it ended in frustration and suppression. When Gisela married someone else a few years later, Freud gave her the moniker Ichtyosaura, or “fish lizard,” after the scientific name for the prehistoric aquatic reptiles who were contemporaries of the dinosaurs.
To Freud, it was obviously a form of adolescent wordplay; Fluss means “river” or “flow.” Gisela, as a member of the Fluss family, was a kind of sea monster, representing everything repressed and frustrating, such as sexuality, which moves furtively beneath the surface. That Freud chose a prehistoric water creature for her nickname was perhaps also his way of telling himself that the youthful and uncontrollable passion he’d felt for her would now belong to his past. He wouldn’t let himself be seduced like that by anyone or anything ever again—until las bestias of Trieste appeared like the symbolic offspring of this his first Ichtyosaura.
After his stay in Trieste, it would be years before Sigmund Freud approached the subject of sexuality again, but once he did, it was hidden or repressed sexuality that interested him. His theory about castration anxiety takes as its starting point the assumption that a child will at an early age develop a fear of being castrated, of being maimed and stripped of his or her sex, diminished and rendered harmless. Boys at the age of four or five are filled with unconscious sexual longing for their mother and feel in competition with their father. They perceive a threat, a fear of being punished for their urges, but they also feel shame and inferiority; this makes them realize their own insignificance in the world, which leads to the development of self; in due course, their yearning for their mother is replaced by identification with their father. And the pivotal moment in this process is, according to Freud, when a boy realizes women do not have penises. That is, he sees the woman, sees the absence of a male sex organ, and in that moment becomes aware of himself and his place in the world.
Freud’s theory of penis envy is related to castration anxiety but deals with the psychosexual development of women. Girls are, like boys, at first closely bonded to their mothers, he claimed; it’s when they first discover that they themselves have no penis that they slowly start dissociating from their mother and become drawn instead to their father. Girls see the penis as an attribute that symbolizes power and activity. Learning, in this way, their place in the world, they develop envy and experience guilt, which is projected onto their mothers. They can see what they lack, see the absence of a male sex organ, and in that moment become aware of themselves and their limitations.
These theories have been challenged many times since they were first formulated, and from many different perspectives. Can the male sex organ, or the possession or lack of it, be such a pivotal detail in the psychosexual development of humans? It seems absurd and a little ridiculous. These are theories from a different time, which grew out of a different historical context. They are also theories that dodge the accepted scientific method. They operate within the suppressed and the concealed. They can’t be systematically observed or verified or rejected. They are not the kinds of truths a microscope can reveal.
And yet they must be founded on the basis of some kind of experience. We can picture the young scientist in a cramped laboratory in Trieste. He is far from home in a strange city, and he is wearing a white coat and glasses, with a well-trimmed, dark beard. He is standing by a desk in front of a small window, with a sticky dead eel in his hand. And he’s looking through his microscope, as he’s done four hundred times before, and what he can see through the lens is no longer just an eel, it is also himself.
DESPITE THE CONCERTED EFFORTS OF THE YOUNG FREUD, THE MYSTERY of the eel’s reproduction remained unsolved for a while longer. In 1879, a German marine biologist, Leopold Jacoby, wrote, somewhat dejectedly, in a report for the US Commission of Fish and Fisheries:
“To a person not acquainted with the circumstances of the case, it must seem astonishing, and it is certainly somewhat humiliating to men of science, that a fish which is commoner in many parts of the world than any other fish . . . which is daily seen at the market and on the table, has been able in spite of the powerful aid of modern science, to shroud the manner of its propagation, its birt
h, and its death in darkness, which even to the present day has not been dispelled. There has been an eel question ever since the existence of natural science.”
What neither Freud nor Jacoby knew was, of course, that eels have no visible sex organs until they need them. Its metamorphoses are not just superficial adaptations to new life conditions. They’re existential. An eel becomes what it needs to be when the time is right.
Twenty years after Freud’s failed efforts, a sexually mature male silver eel was finally found off the coast of Messina in Sicily. And thus, the eel had finally become a fish. A creature not so dissimilar from others.
6
Illegal Fishing
At times, we fished illegally. It was above all a matter of convenience. Because while the narrow path might be the right one, sometimes the wide one is so much easier to walk. Since Nana and Grandad’s fields bordered the stream, we were allowed to fish in it, but only on our side, the farm side. Which was also the difficult side, with the tall grass and the steep, muddy banks. On the other side of the stream, everything was different; there, a flat meadow stretched all the way to the water’s edge. The fishing rights on that side were owned by the fishing club in town.
The other side of the stream was the stuff of dreams. Not only because it looked so accessible, but also because it symbolized something we perceived as unjust. On the weekends, the members of the fishing club would stand there on the flat ground in their green sport jackets with multiple pockets, their expensive fly fishing rods and ridiculous little hats, swinging their shiny, thick lines over their heads to try to catch one of the rare salmon that constituted the upper echelon of the stream’s class hierarchy.
We’d never once seen salmon in the stream. At least not live salmon. Dad found an enormous dead salmon once. It was floating belly-up; he brought it home. It was fat and bloated and weighed more than twenty pounds. It also smelled pretty bad. We buried it, after admiring it with our hands over our mouths and noses.
The Book of Eels Page 4