On the early history of male hysteria and psychic trauma

This paper discusses the influence of Jean-Martin Charcot's views on Sigmund Freud's early theory of hysteria and the notion of psychical trauma. We consider the early history of both psychical trauma and male hysteria, for in Charcot's view traumatic hysteria and male hysteria are identical. Freud's two 1886 lectures on male hysteria, delivered after his return from Paris, are crucial to the subject because they present Freud's first impressions of Charcot and his teaching. Some of the ideas presented in the two lectures foreshadow Freud's later generalization of the etiological role of trauma and his theory of the role of psychical trauma in the genesis of hysteria; that is, each hysterical symptom is due to a psychical trauma reviving an earlier traumatic event—the so-called principle of deferred action (Nachtraglichkeit). Several arguments substantiate the thesis that Freud's notion of psychical (sexual) trauma was developed in reference to Charcot's notion of traumatic hysteria, and that the early psychoanalytic theory of psychical trauma is clearly indebted to Freud's encounter with Charcot's male traumatic hysterical patients. The discussed Freudian development points out the major role of (physical) traumata in eliciting psychopathological pictures and in this way is of definite historical relevance for the present-day discussion on the traumatic nature of the so-called multiple personality syndrome and other dissociative disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorders.     

FREUD'S LETTERS TO FLIESS: FROM SEDUCTION TO SEXUAL BIOLOGY, FROM PSYCHOPATHOLOGY TO A CLINICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

The author describes the development of Freud's theory of neurosis from 1892 onwards, starting with his distinction between the actual neuroses and the psychoneuroses and his discovery of a specific, sexual aetiology for both, until which point it remained limited to pathology. The problem of the aetiology of perversion, however, confronted him with a paradox within the theory of seduction: how can an infantile sexual pleasure produce unpleasure when it is remembered at the time of puberty? This problem could not be solved within the framework of the seduction theory because the asexuality of childhood was essential to this theory. For an answer Freud had to turn to biology. He considered that the transformation of an infantile pleasure into unpleasure presupposed an organic repression of non‐genital sexual pleasure. This hypothesis of organic repression radically changed the anthropological claim of Freud's theory. As long as he was looking for a specific aetiology of neurosis and perversion, Freud's theory remained restricted to pathology. However, when he introduced infantile sexuality and its organic repression as universal organic processes, the strict distinction between normality and pathology could not be maintained. The author concludes that by turning to sexual biology, Freud transformed psychopathology into a clinical anthropology.     

TEN SHORT ESSAYS ON HOW TRAUMA IS INEXTRICABLY WOVEN INTO PSYCHIC LIFE

The author contends that it is possible to reconcile trauma and drive theories of psychopathology if we carefully examine the general notion of trauma and reexamine Freud's ( 1919 ) theory of war neurosis and of repression itself as an elementary form of traumatic neurosis. The logic of these views follows Laplanche's reintroduction and generalization of the seduction theory in contemporary psychoanalysis.     

A practitioner's notes on the free-associative method as existential praxis

Freud's pre-1914 texts demonstrate why he consistently asserted that his free-associative method was the sine qua non of his discipline. Prior to 1914, Freud's theorizing was intimately and inextricably connected to his lived experience with the discovery of this method. After 1914, he became more speculative in this thinking and writing; his models of the “mental apparatus” and its functioning drew increasingly on conceptual sources other than his experience with free association. The four fundamental coordinates of his discipline (the methodical disclosure that self-consciousness is repressive, the nonlinear “time of the mind,” the significance of our sensual embodiment or libidinality, and the formation of the repression barrier by the incest taboo) are all closely tied to free-associative experience. By contrast, post-1914 theoretical preoccupations (from object relations to the structural-functional model, and other formulations generated after Freud's life) are comparatively divorced from such experience. These conceptual edifices imply a conventional depiction of the theory–practice relationship, which is radically challenged by free-associative discourse. The notion of praxis is introduced as contesting the prevailing depiction of practice as an application of theory, and as serving to rescue psychoanalysis from the somewhat “sterile debates” over its scientific status and over the relevance of metapsychological speculation to clinical treatment. Against the normative ideology of theory and practice, the lived experience of free-associative discourse, with its potential for change and healing, can only be understood in terms of this notion of praxis, and this justifies Freud's claim to have initiated “a critical new direction in science.”     

Reflections on Freud's Dora Case After 48 Years

I revisit Freud's case of Dora from the vantage point of current literary and psychoanalytic perspectives. Mahony (this issue) argues that Freud's understanding of Dora is unconvincing to the modern reader because Dora is a victim of trauma rather than sexual repression. I extend Mahony's ideas in terms of the development of psychoanalytic ideas, place Freud's view in the context of my psychoanalytic education in the mid-20th century, and suggest that modern contributions to trauma theory and memory further support the thesis that Dora was a victim of trauma rather than of conflicted libidinal desires.     

“sexuality and death” in freud's discovery of sexual aetiology

Abstract

The present study focuses on Freud's discovery of sexual aetiology in the period from his studies in Paris and Berlin (1885–86) to self-analysis (1897). The study gives a reassessment of both the link and the break between Freud's early works and the contemporary medical views and splits concerning sexual aetiology, which is relevant for the understanding of Freud's later developments. Freud's initial aversion toward sexual aetiology is investigated, and a significant connection between sexuality and death is found in the medical practice of female circumcision and castration in the treatment of hysteria. Finally, the relevance of the tabooed surgical operations is discussed in relation to a series of important moments for the birth of psychoanalysis (the collaboration with Fliess and the operation on Emma Eckstein, the Irma dream, the seduction theory and its abandonment, and the emergence in Freud of the memory of the death of little Julius as the “germ of guilt”).     

Back to a crossroad: Nietzsche,Freud, and the east

Nietzsche's work reveals a gradual reversal of his initial antipathy to Buddhism, coming to view the latter no longer as an anaesthetising religious neurosis, but as a methodology for negation that inspires a conquest over ressentiment, a healing of internalized division, and a celebrative existence. This trend was influenced by his relationship to Schopenhauer and Deussen, and his own personal maturation. Both the source of this philosophy and the reasons for Nietzsche's failure to realise it in his own life are traced to conflictual intrapsychic oppositions in his own parental internalizations. Freud's central concepts (the unconscious, instinctual repression, neurosis, internalized good and bad parental objects, and the discontents of civilization) were modeled on Nietzsche's thinking. Yet Freud rejected oriental mysticism and its somatic focus as regressive. His failure to take up Nietzsche's eventual insight into Buddhism, and his consequent pessimism, are attributable to his personal and theoretical resistance to the issue of the early symbiotic union of mother and infant.     

Diagnosing a male hysteric: Don Juan-type

The aim of this paper is to provide a clinical account of a male hysteric, Don Juan-type, taken from the early stages of treatment. The patient presented with a relationship problem but there soon emerged a form of compulsive sexuality or hypersexuality in his love relations that became a central feature of the clinical picture. This hypersexuality expressed itself in a compulsive need to stage, or to stage-manage, interpersonal scenaria of a sexual or sexualised nature. These scenaria, which were repeated in different variations and with different personnel, are seen by the author as a dramatisation of the primal scene with the patient taking up the position of the oedipal father. Explanations for the disappearance of male hysteria are given, including a new theory which claims that an imbalance in psychoanalytic theory itself led to the feminisation of hysteria. This critique allows certain forms of hypersexuality in men to be promoted as a form of hysteria, the most common example being Don Juanism-a form of compulsive sexuality that encompasses normative, conversion and character features. The paper also examines the male hysteric's developmental agenda. What the patient's compulsive sexual tableaux exposed was that he had never faced a separation that was not a triangular experience. This meant that his separations were experienced as two developmental agonies telescoped into one-separation (pre-oedipal) and exclusion (early oedipal). This combination, the author suggests, is so frightening in a particular group of men as to explain the choice of hysteria as opposed to some other choice of neurosis.     

Women on the Couch: Genital Stimulation and the Birth of Psychoanalysis

Following Freud's emphasis on his rejection of hypnosis as leading up to the development of psychoanalysis, there has been little mention in the psychoanalytic literature of the larger context of the somatic medical treatment of hysteria within which Freud treated his hysterical patients, and which Freud himself practiced. We contend that Freud's emphasis obscured his association with massage, electrotherapy, and the procedure of genital stimulation practiced by his medical colleagues in the treatment of hysteria. We show that the history of genital stimulation—including its obfuscation, desexualization, medicalization, and co-option from traditional women healers by an exclusively male medical establishment—provides us with the background for a more sophisticated understanding of the context in which Freud developed his theories. Specifically, we examine the contribution of this understanding to Freud's theoretical emphases on autonomy and individuality, abstinence and the renunciation of gratification, penis envy, clitoral versus vaginal orgasm, mature genital sexuality, and the “repudiation of femininity” as the “bedrock” of psychoanalysis. We demonstrate that Freud's position as a Jew in an anti-Semitic milieu fueled his efforts to distance his psychoanalytic method from the more prurient practices of his day, including one his society associated with Jewish doctors and patients.     

Hidden in Plain Sight: Freud's Jewish Identity Revisited

Using a contextualizing, integrative approach, the author looks at aspects of Freud's life and the multiple levels of influence in terms of his theories. While keeping a broad overview of the historical and cultural life for Jews in 19th-century Europe, including the effects of anti-Semitism, emancipation, and the enlightenment movement, the author intertwines Freud's parents' lives and personalities as they played out in Freud's own development and in his theories. The author believes that Freud formed a particular repression linking Jewishness, passivity, femininity, and religion while elevating in his theories masculinity, activity, science, and atheism. The author specifically focuses on Freud's theories of the Unconscious and the oedipal complex as particularly representative of a split between his own Jewish home and the German high culture he was educated within. Drawing on literature within psychoanalysis and the disciplines of Jewish studies and broad cultural history, the author concludes that Freud's rejection of certain parts of his own life are embedded within his theory when considered from a multiply-layered point of view.     

The possessions at Loudun: tracking the discourse of dissociation

Embedded in the history of dissociation is the best known case of possession in European history, the 17^th century possessions at Loudun, France (1632‐1638). The exorcisms and the trial drew crowds from all over Europe, the outcome prefiguring the direction in which the Western science of mind would be carried. The published debate about the possessed and obsessed Ursuline nuns of Loudun spans four centuries. One can track how theorizing about dissociation changed over time, with psychological contributions by Jean Martin Charcot, Georges Gilles de la Tourette, Pierre Janet, Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau. Freud's psychoanalytic notion of demonological neurosis emphasized defensive strategies and a diabolic parody of adulthood. Jung's concepts of demonism and possession highlighted dissociated complexes that assimilate the ego and unseat the self, rendering a life ‘provisional’. Dissociation as possession provides a through‐line in Jung's Collected Works, from his 1902 dissertation to one of the last essays he wrote, in 1961. Within the context of psychotherapy, therapists and patients work towards psychological containment, consciously reorienting themselves to the presence of unconscious factors, personifying, embodying and thereby incorporating images of dissociated Otherness into the experience of selfhood.     

Freud,the Serpent and the Sexual Enlightenment of Children

Abstract

This paper examines Freud's interpretation of the myth of the Fall, which he sent to Jung in December of 1911. After a textual-historical exegesis of the Genesis narrative, I argue that many features of the myth, which Freud construed in Oedipal terms, are more intelligible in light of his theories of infantile sexual researches, which he abandoned in 1910. The etiological shift away from infantile sexual researches (and the consequent Oedipalization of analytic theory) were 1) not prompted solely by clinical considerations, and 2) heralded dramatic changes in attitudes toward children and the rejection of paternal authority in Freud and his circle, and 3) corresponding changes in the structure and organization of the psychoanalytic movement itself, creating an orthodoxy or “party line”.

The term “orthodoxy” means “uniformity of belief”, and is usually applied to religious groups, whose dogmatic emphasis on a specific body of doctrine serves to define the group's membership and boundaries, and to exclude “unbelievers” from its midst. In this sense, Freud's style of leadership was distinctly “religious”. Due to deep seated resistances in the analytic world, it is possible that disparities between Freud's earlier and later attitudes toward children will never be thematized and explored with the attention and seriousness they deserve. But the attempt must be made, and by exploring the Genesis narrative, we can grasp the personal and political motives that molded Freud's theory of religion, and glimpse the outlines of paths not taken in the clinical theory.     

Freud's philosophy of the uncanny

This paper is an attempt to uncover and bring to a coherent interpretation Freud's thoughts on the phenomenon of uncanniness. Starting out with the essay “The uncanny” the author wants to show that uncanniness plays an important rôle in the turn that Freud's thinking goes through at this time, and that the concept can serve as a springboard for a critical, phenomeno- logical reading of Freud's thoughts on the development of the ego. The analysis of the phenomenon of uncanniness itself tends to disrupt the coherence of Freud's earlier views and pushes him towards his later thinking. “Unheimlich” in German has the double meaning of uncanny and unhome-like, and what is not at home in itself in an uncanny sense, according to Freud, is precisely the human ego. Freud in “The uncanny” links the interpretation of uncanniness to compulsive repetition and thus makes the connection to trauma and birth anxiety discussed in later works such as “Beyond the pleasure principle” and “Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety”. The origin of our general sensitivity to the uncanny is thus, according to Freud, the loss of the mother suffered by the child as a kind of a priori traumatic experience, which is also the very event that makes the child into an ego. The understanding of traumatic neurosis and other forms of mental illness is consequently linked to an analysis of this primal uncanniness of life.     

The Freud–Ferenczi controversy in light of Emma Eckstein's circumcisio

Abstract

Emma Eckstein's circumcision trauma has been powerfully suppressed, denied, and dissociated from the history of the origins of psychoanalysis. Even though Freud did not categorize it as a trauma, he was deeply impacted by it in the period when he provided psychoanalysis with his foundation. Despite Freud's intellectual erasure of the trauma that Emma experienced, her “cut” never ceased to unconsciously break through Freud's fantasies and discourse, haunting the psychoanalytic building as a veritable ghost. Sándor Ferenczi became the recipient of what Freud could not consider in his own mind, and his revision of the “Bausteine” (building blocks) of psychoanalysis featured an attempt to heal the split embedded in the foundation of psychoanalysis.     

Freud’s Three Theories of Neurosis: Towards a Contemporary Theory of Trauma and Defense

This paper explores the development of Freud’s thinking on the aetiology of the neurosis. It is shown that Freud in the years 1893 to 1897 formulated three distinct and mutually incompatible theories of neurosis centred respectively on (a) psychic trauma and defence, (b) sexual trauma (seduction), and (c) repressed sexuality (libido). For Freud the decisive step was the shift from the first to the second theory, not from the second to the third. It is examined how Freud gave priority to the libido/fantasy theory until he returned in 1926 to a general trauma theory with his second theory of anxiety. The fate of Freud’s theory of neurosis in later psychoanalytic thinking is described as a process of dilution rather than an exploration of what is right and what is wrong in the theory. It is argued that the basic fault common to Freud’s second and third theories is the insistence on an exclusive sexual aetiology of the neurosis. On the other hand, it is argued that Freud’s first theory, centred on emotional trauma and defence, has turned out to be basically right and is therefore well suited to constitute a basis for a contemporary theory of neurosis (non-neurological mental disorders).     

Gender and Transference

Despite an early interest, Freud explicitly rejected philosophy, because of its “speculative” character. He struggled with balancing the intellectual appeal of philosophy with the certainty he hoped to find in positivist science. Putting aside the scientific status of Freud's work, the author re-examines Freud's attitude towards philosophy. Failing to recognize the assumptions of his investigations, Freud segregated psychoanalysis from philosophy on the charge that philosophers equated mind with consciousness, putatively propounded unfounded speculations, and assumed false conclusions about comprehensiveness. However, Freud never completely abandoned his initial philosophical proclivities. His own contributions to cultural history, social philosophy, notions of personal identity, and the humanistic thrust of psychoanalysis, demonstrate that he continued to address his earliest interests in philosophical questions. The author elucidates the philosophical complexity of psychoanalysis and concludes that a reconsideration of Freud's self-appraisal of his intellectual commitments is warranted.     

Übertragung und Übertragungsneurose

The authors investigate Freud's concepts of transference, transference neurosis and their mutual relationship. They discuss the current criticism made on the concept of transference neurosis and raise the question, why patients accept the analyst's interpretations? They suggest understanding transference neurosis as conscious manifestations of transference referring to the analyst which are the outcome of successive interpretations of the type "just-like" followed, changed, and removed again by "just-like-it-was"-interpretations. They conclude that the patient does accept these interpretations not for reasons that are rational, but for reasons pertaining the transference situation.     

Navigating Trauma in Joseph Conrad's Victory: A Voyage From Sigmund Freud to Philip M. Bromberg

In Victory, Joseph Conrad (1915/1924) revises his earlier treatment of trauma as a singular cataclysmic event in the life of a potentially heroic adult, usually male (as depicted in Heart of Darkness [1898], Lord Jim [1900], and Under Western Eyes [1911]), to a conception of trauma as the corrosive effect of a child's repeated exposures to emotionally invalidating caregivers. Abandoning a view of trauma that would accord with Freud's account of a single shocking incident, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Conrad adopts instead a view that parallels Philip Bromberg's account of trauma as a series of toxic childhood occurrences. Thus Conrad's novel Victory presciently anticipates the corrective vision of contemporary relational psychoanalytic theory, which has largely supplanted Freud's more dramatic narratives with a subtle and nuanced understanding of trauma as a long-term lack of validation in childhood that forecloses adult possibilities. In Victory's portraits of two characters whose lives are constricted by pathological dissociation, Conrad presents literary examples that confirm and illumine Bromberg's clinical and theoretical explications of this pervasive psychological phenomenon.     

Variations on the concept of traumatism: Traumatism,traumatic, trauma1

In this paper, the author outlines Freud's fundamental hypotheses concerning the concept of traumatism, then goes on to differentiate three notions (French being a particularly apposite language for such a venture): ‘traumatism’, ‘traumatic’ (in a substantive sense) and ‘trauma’. These three terms correspond to the three turning points in Freud's theory with respect to the concept of traumatism (1895‐97, 1920, 1938). The author evokes also the developments that are due to Ferenczi, particularly in his later writings (1928‐33), where he defi ned and discussed the question of ‘trauma’ in contemporary clinical practice; the author goes on to explore the different variations on this theme as regards mental functioning. He then defi nes, from a metapsychological point of view, the differences between ‘traumatisms’ that have been ‘worked over by secondary processes’, organised and governed by the pleasure‐unpleasure principle (‘traumatism’) and ‘early’ or ‘primary traumatisms’, which interfere with the process of binding the instinctual drives (‘trauma’); states of mind infl uenced by a traumatic imprint (‘traumatic’) are looked upon as belonging to both categories of the above mentioned traumatisms. The author illustrates his hypotheses with a clinical example.