“We wanted to study the history of the history of psychoanalysis and to understand better the basic issues of this fascinating and conflictual field – fascinating because of the conflict. We wanted, in the end, to draw consequences from historical criticism for the understanding of this strange movement. For any reckoning with the status of psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy in today’s societies at some point requires coming to terms with Freud and his legacy.
We would like to thank all those who accompanied us in this task and above all the historians who agreed to be interviewed. Many became friends (when they were not already) and guides in the minefields of Freud studies: Ernst Falzeder, Didier Gille, Han Israëls, Mark S. Micale, Karin Obholzer, Paul Roazen, François Roustang, Élisabeth Roudinesco, Richard Skues, Anthony Stadlen, Isabelle Stengers, Frank J. Sulloway, Peter J. Swales.”
INTRODUCTION: THE PAST OF AN ILLUSION
“Copernicus, Darwin, Freud: this genealogy of the de-centred man of modernity is by now so familiar to us that we no longer note its profoundly arbitrary character.” “As Bernard I. Cohen and Roy Porter have shown, the motif of the ‘revolutions’ effected by Copernicus, Galileo and Newton is a commonplace in the history of science since Fontenelle and the encyclopédistes, and Freud was certainly not the first, nor will he be the last, to recycle it to his advantage. However, he was by no means the only figure in psychology to do this, which immediately relativises his version of the evolution of the sciences. At the end of the nineteenth century, there was a veritable plethora of candidates vying for the title of the Darwin, Galileo or Newton of psychology. But how did Freud’s audience, and indeed so many others, come to believe in Freud’s entitlement, rather than that of one of his rivals?” “this ambition was one shared by many psychologists at the end of the nineteenth century, from Wundt to Brentano, from Ebbinghaus to William James.” “When the Swiss psychologist Théodore Flournoy obtained his chair in psychology, he insisted that it be placed in the faculty of sciences.” Coitado.
“In placing this chair in the faculty of sciences, rather than in that of letters where all the courses of philosophy are found, the Genevan government has implicitly recognized (perhaps without knowing it) the existence of psychology as a particular science, independent of all philosophical systems, with the same claims as physics, botany, astronomy”
Flournoy – Esprits et médiums
“Until then, knowledge of Man had been scattered between the stories of myth and religion, the speculations of philosophy, the maxims of morality, and the intuitions of art and literature. Psychology would replace these incomplete and partial knowledges by a true science of Man, with laws as universal as physics and methods as certain as those of chemistry.”
“Freud’s teaching has been compared with the puerperal fever theory of Semmelweiss, which was initially ridiculed and then brilliantly recognised. If we certainly also revolt against this, it would still be cruel to compare Freud with Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy. It is perhaps closer to think of Franz Joseph Gall, whose theories, despite some striking points of view and findings, fell into rejection immediately due to their uncritical exaggeration and utilisation, including good and bad components.”
Wilhelm Weygandt
“Legenda is a story meant to be repeated mechanically, almost unknowingly, like the lives of the saints that were daily recited at matins in the convents of the Middle Ages. Just as the removal of these legendae from history facilitated their vast transcultural diffusion, so the legendary de-historicisation of psychoanalysis has allowed it to adapt to all sorts of contexts which on the face of it ought to have been inhospitable to it, and to constantly reinvent itself in a brand-new guise.
Each has his own version of the legend – positivist, existentialist, hermeneutic, Freudo-Marxist, narrativist, cognitivist, structuralist, deconstructivist and now even neuroscientific. These versions are as different as can be, but they have this in common: they all celebrate the exceptionalism of psychoanalysis, removed from context, history and verification.” “In this sense, it is not simply a question of reducing the Freud legend to a fixed narrative, which would simply require a point-by-point refutation, as Sulloway attempted. Rather, the legend has an open structure, capable at any moment of integrating new elements and discarding others whilst maintaining its underlying form, which remains recognisable. The elements can change, particular theories or conceptions of Freud can be abandoned or remodelled to the point where they become completely unrecognisable, but the legend survives.” “That even a philosopher of science of the caliber of Kuhn repeats the Freud–Copernicus comparison illustrates the extraordinary cultural success of the Freudian legend”
“In many circles, calling into question the existence of the unconscious, the Oedipus complex or infantile sexuality could provoke the same response as to creationists or members of the Flat Earth Society.” “It was ‘blackboxed’, to use the language of sociologists of science (Merton, Latour), that is to say, it was accepted as a given that it would be simply futile to question.”
“One finds the same problem and the same evolution in the history of psychoanalysis. This was started by Freud himself in 1914, in the heat of the dissensions and controversies which threatened to shipwreck the movement, and with obvious polemical intent. It was subsequently taken up by followers and fellow travellers such as Fritz Wittels, Siegfried Bernfeld, Ernest Jones [o Arcanjo Negro de Jeová-Freud], Marthe Robert, Max Schur, Ola Anderson and, closer to us, figures such as Peter Gay, Élisabeth Roudinesco and Joseph Schwartz.¹ Whatever the respective merits and the sometimes considerable erudition of their works, it is not unfair to remark that their historiography remains profoundly Freudian, and does not put into question the general schema of the narrative proposed by the founder, even when their research forces them to abandon or revise this or that element of the legend.” “Thus one had to wait for historians who were independent of psychoanalytic institutions for Freudian theory to be envisaged for the first time as a problematic construction, in need of explication, rather than an intangible a priori.”
¹ “It seems that, for Schwartz, the history of humanity before Freud was one long aphasia.”
“there were a number of alternative histories of psychology and psychotherapy, such as Pierre Janet’s admirable 3-volume Psychological Medications. (…) [But] only historians not party to a particular psychological school could attempt to give non-partisan accounts of these controversies, without prejudging the results and the respective validity of the theories in question. The first who set out to correct this situation was the historian of dynamic psychiatry Henri Ellenberger.”
“In the second volume of his biography, there is a famous chapter enumerating the so-called persecutions that befell certain psychoanalysts. I drew up a list of the incidents, and checked each one of them with primary sources. Among the cases on which I was able to gather dependable information, I found 80% of Jones’ facts to be either completely false or greatly exaggerated.”
“To remedy this situation, Ellenberger followed several simple methodological rules which he enumerated at the beginning of his monumental work of 1970, The Discovery of the Unconscious. The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry [em breve no Seclusão]. On the one hand, never take anything as given; verify everything (even if Rorschach’s sister swears that his eyes are blue, ask for his passport). Always use original documents and, whenever possible, first-hand witnesses; read texts in their original language; identify the patients in this observation or that case history; establish the facts through mercilessly separating them from interpretations, rumours and legends; on the other hand, resist the theoreticism and spontaneous iatrocentrism of psychiatrists by replacing their theories in their multiple biographical, professional, intellectual, economic, social and political contexts, and by taking account of the role played in their elaboration by the patients themselves.”
“The legend becomes the property of a closed group, of a school, a family (Nietzsche), of a corporation and a family (Pinel). A closed school (cf. the Epicurians). Continual selection of documents: destruction, guarding, diffusion. Role of publishers, editors, readers. Later, relative deformations, through the change of perspective, through the disappearance of the context, which render the works of the author unintelligible.”
“Ellenberger noted that the Freudian legend, which is clearly the major target of The Discovery of the Unconscious, essentially turns around two themes: that of the solitary hero surmounting the obstacles placed across his route by malicious adversaries and that of the absolute originality of the founder – two ways of negating the friendships, the networks, influences, legacies, readings and intellectual debts – in short, everything which would link Freud to his historical epoch. Ellenberger’s book, with its 932 pages and 2,611 footnotes, is by itself a striking demonstration of the absurdity of this presentation of psychoanalysis. Ellenberger unearthed a century and a half of researches conducted by hundreds of magnetisers, hypnotisers, philosophers, novelists, psychologists and psychiatrists, without which psychoanalysis would have been unthinkable. And for good measure, he flanked his chapter on Freud by 3 others dedicated to his great rivals, Janet (placed first), Jung and Adler, so as to stress that this history of dynamic psychiatry neither commenced nor terminated with psychoanalysis, contrary to what the contemporaneous teleologically inclined histories of Gregory Zilboorg, Dieter Wyss or Ilza Veith contended.”
“The current legend . . . attributes to Freud much of what belongs, notably, to Herbart, Fechner, Nietzsche, Meynert, Benedikt, and Janet, and overlooks the work of previous explorers of the unconscious, dreams, and sexual pathology. Much of what is credited to Freud was diffuse current lore, and his role was to crystallize these ideas and give them an original shape.”
“It is clear from the unpublished notebooks left by him after his death that in the course of his research Ellenberger became extremely critical with regard to psychoanalysis – more so than one would suspect from his published writings.”
“In his book with an Ellenbergian subtitle, Freud, Biologist of the Mind. Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend, Sulloway showed in a very convincing manner how the principal ‘discoveries’ were actually deeply rooted in the biological hypotheses and speculations of his Darwinian era. Behind libido, infantile sexuality, polymorphous perversity, erotogenous zones, bisexuality, regression, primary repression, the murder of the primary father, originary fantasies and the death drive, he unearthed the forgotten ‘sexual theories’ of Krafft-Ebing, Albert Moll and Havelock Ellis, Haeckel’s vast biogenetic frescoes, Wilhelm Fliess and Darwin’s speculations on biorhythms, or again the theory of the transmission of acquired characteristics of Lamarck. In so doing, Sulloway intellectually rehabilitated Freud’s friend, confidant and collaborator Wilhelm Fliess, generally presented in Freud biographies as a dangerous paranoiac and crank with grandiose and extravagant theories. Not only were Fliess’ theories perfectly plausible in the context of the biogenetic speculations then in vogue, but they were favourably received by a not inconsiderable number of his contemporaries (beginning with Breuer). Thus there is no need, as some have proposed, to imagine an irrational transference on the part of Freud towards his friend to explain how he could have chosen him as a privileged interlocuter for so many years: they simply shared the same colleagues, the same ideas and the same readings.”
“How is it possible, in a self analysis, not to be conditioned by all the scientific knowledge, reading and diverse evidence that you have gathered from half a dozen other disciplines? How could you prevent those relevant sources of information from steering your self analysis in a certain direction? If you begin to read in the literature that the infant is much more sexually spontaneous than you had ever thought, how could you not probe that issue in your own self analysis? So it shouldn’t come as a big surprise if you then uncover a memory of having seen your mother naked at age 2. If every book you are reading is telling you that and you then discover it in your own life, well, big news! It is obvious, not even profound.
The self analysis has been made into a causal agent of Freud’s originality in traditional Freud scholarship, but that simply is not true. It is like an uncontrolled experiment: things that are going on in self analysis get credited for all of Freud’s intellectual changes, but those things themselves are coming in from somewhere else. The self analysis is one of the great legendary stories in the history of science and although Freud himself really didn’t spawn that aspect of the myth, he did nothing to prevent it from spreading.”
“On the one hand, through presenting the image of an isolated Freud, it allowed one to assert the radicality of the new science of the mind whilst clandestinely recuperating the contributions of Darwin, Haeckel, Fliess, Krafft-Ebing, the sexologists, and other figures. On the other hand, and more profoundly, it effectively protected psychoanalysis against the vicissitudes of scientific research. Once transmuted into psychological discoveries, the evolutionary hypotheses which underlay psychoanalytic theory could be maintained in spite of everything, even when they were refuted in their original fields. Deracinated, psychoanalysis became a discipline apart, cordoned off and protected from the refutation of some of its founding presuppositions.”
“Following Sulloway, the Freudian legend is not an anecdotal or propagandist supplement to psychoanalytic theory (which it remains to some extent for Ellenberger). On the contrary, it is the theory itself. Questioning the Freudian legend leads to questioning the status of psychoanalysis itself. Ellenberger, with Swiss prudence, characterised psychoanalysis as a half-science (‘demi-science’). Sulloway, on the other hand, does not hesitate to describe psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience immunised against criticism by a very efficient propaganda machine and by historical disinformation.”
“The appearance of works by Ellenberger and Sulloway was followed by a veritable avalanche of ‘revisionist’ works,¹ each more critical than the last of the Freudian legend. Whilst, in the main, the works of Ellenberger and Sulloway were focused on intellectual history, Paul Roazen² launched a social history of the psychoanalytic movement, through conducting oral histories, not unlike the anthropologists of science, who have attempted to study and distinguish what scientists actually do in contrast to their public statements about their work. Roazen’s interviewees presented recollections of Freud which were radically discrepant from the image of Freud prepared by his biographer-disciple, Ernest Jones. Likewise, Peter Swales³ embarked upon a vast and meticulous archival investigation, only partially published, which reconstructed Freud’s social and intellectual world in turn of the century Vienna, and presented a comprehensive account of the origins of psychoanalysis which was completely at variance with the Freudian legend.”
¹ “This term seems to have been used for the first time in Freud studies by Sulloway (1992a). It is important not to confound it with ‘revisionism’ in the Marxist sense, or even less with the ‘revisionism’ of Holocaust deniers.”
² Ainda muito timorato. Apesar do prefácio honesto, eu mesmo achei que ele era ainda um freudiano por todas as contemporizações que fez ao longo da “biografia reflexa” (o livro parece ser um compêndio de mini-biografias de seus discípulos mais diretos – sempre faltando Reich! – mas revela-se uma biografia de Freud contada por divisões em segmentos com um foco dividido entre Sigmund e um de seus ‘fiéis’/ex-fiéis).
³ A esse respeito, indico também Vienna fin de siècle de Carl Schorske (trad. de Denise Bottmann para o português), outra preciosidade que tenho a meta de incluir aqui. Este livro não é centrado na psicanálise, mas é igualmente epistemologicamente interessante!
“The ‘Freud wars’ raged. Journal covers were titled ‘Is Freud dead?’. Works were published with titles such as Why Freud Was Wrong, The Freud Case. The Birth of Psychoanalysis from the Lie, Despatches from the Freud Wars or again The Black Book of Psychoanalysis, and articles on Freud in magazines regularly sparked off an avalanche of indignant letters of protestation from the adversarial camp, followed by responses.”
“Roazen’s book Brother Animal is trivial and slight. Its scholarship, like that of many other works of pop history, does not hold up under any sort of close scrutiny.”
Janet Malcolm
DESAFETO DE DERRIDA DETECTADO!
“If he sticks to the archive and believes that it has no exteriority which permits it to be read or stops it from being ‘anarchived’ (sic) itself, he is prey to spasmodic convulsions worthy of Grand Mal. The Grand Mal of the archive. This illness is also of a sexual nature.”
René Major, concernindo Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen
“As for the new historians, they denounced Freudian dominance of the media, the press campaigns waged against dissidents, and the restriction of Freudian archives. How did it come about that so many documents deposited in public institutions such as the Library of Congress in Washington were officially inaccessible to researchers, and some documents until 2113 (or now indefinitely)? And why were these access restrictions, implacably applied when it came to independent researchers, suddenly lifted when it came to insiders of the psychoanalytic movement?
In 1994, a large international exhibition under the auspices of the Freud Archives and the Library of Congress in Washington was announced. None of the new Freud scholars figured in the organising committee. In protest, 42 of them (including the authors of this book) sent an open letter to the Library of Congress to express their wish that the exhibition reflect ‘the present state of Freud research’ and requested that someone representing their views be added to the organising committee. The request was not considered. Then, for apparently completely independent reasons, the Library of Congress announced that the exhibition would be postponed to enable the organisers to raise the necessary funds. This inflamed the controversy. The letter, which would otherwise have sunk without a trace, was taken to be responsible for the postponement. The organisers attributed the Library of Congress’ decision to the petitioners’ political and media pressure and protested, claiming that they were defending ‘freedom of expression’. The news was immediately reported in the international press: once more, Freud was the butt of censure! A counter-petition was organised in France by Élisabeth Roudinesco [velha conhecida, a tola!] and Philippe Garnier. This gathered together more than 180 signatures, some of them prestigious, to denounce the ‘blackmail to fear’, the ‘puritan manifestations’, the ‘witch hunt’ and the ‘dictatorship of several intellectuals turned into inquisitors’. The so-called inquisitors retorted by a press release, read by practically no one, in which they protested against the manipulation of the media by their adversaries. At that point, the Library of Congress announced that the organisers had found the necessary funds to mount the exhibition and that it could take place as initially intended. In the meantime, the latest Freud war had taken place. Once more, historians and critics had been misrepresented and slandered, and the media manipulated to present a heroic image of an embattled revolutionary science of psychoanalysis.
This book is about the Freud wars, old and new. It reopens the controversies which surrounded the inception of psychoanalysis and shows what we may learn from them about the fate of a once fashionable would-be science.”
“It is well known that, from 1906, Freud’s theories were the subject of a fierce international controversy, in which the leading contemporary figures of psychiatry and psychology participated: Pierre Janet, Emil Kraepelin, William Stern, Eugen Bleuler, Gustav Aschaffenburg, Alfred Hoche, Morton Prince and many others. What is less known is the fact that this controversy came to a close with the defeat of psychoanalysis at the congress of the German psychiatric association, held in Breslau in 1913, where speaker after speaker rose up to denounce psychoanalysis in an unequivocal manner. The reason for this ‘induced amnesia’ is the fact that Freud and his followers acted as if the controversy ended in their favour.”
“Given how hard to retrieve much of this material is, we have deliberately chosen to cite excerpts in extenso, letting the historical actors speak in their own voices and creating a polyphonic text, rather than filter through paraphrases. Taken together, they show a history which has every little in common with that which one finds in the works of Freud and his biographers, and which was taken at face value for so long.”
1. PRIVATISING SCIENCE
“Psychoanalysis was reproached by Karl Jaspers for mixing up hermeneutic understanding (Verstehen) and the explanation (Erklären) of the natural sciences, by Jean-Paul Sartre for confounding repression and ‘bad faith’, by Ludwig Wittgenstein for confusing causes and reasons, by Karl Popper for avoiding all scientific falsification, by Adolf Grünbaum for proposing an epistemically inconsistent clinical validation and by Michel Foucault for producing sexuality under the cover of unmasking it.” Foucault e Popper: NUNCA CRITIQUEI!
“None of this affected psychoanalysts. Even the provocations and magnificent rhetorical violence of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus did not lead them to lose their composure.” “The more Freud is debated, it is often said, the more it confirms his significance.”
“Why then such sudden susceptibility concerning historical details, some of which on first sight appear to be quite trivial? Why is it so important for psychoanalysts to maintain the version of events given by Freud and his authorised biographers? Is it simply a question of a dispute between experts, a controversy between historians such as we often see? Not in this case, because the dispute here is not simply one between factions of historians, or of ways of interpreting the historical record. More deeply, it pits historians against a radically dehistoricised version of psychoanalysis, disguised as a ‘history of psychoanalysis’. From this perspective, similarities abound between the ‘Freud wars’ and the ‘science wars’, which rage elsewhere between historians, sociologists and anthropologists of science on the one side and scientistic ideologues on the other. In both cases, what is at stake is the historicisation, and correspondingly the relativisation, of ‘facts’, ‘discoveries’ and ‘truths’ ordinarily presented as atemporal and universal and shielded from the variations and contingencies of history (it is of little importance here whether psychoanalysis styles itself as a science or not, as it still nevertheless presents itself as a universal theory, a general ontology valid for all). These debates are not external to the science or the theory, because they bear on this demarcation itself: can one or should one separate the science or the theory from its history? To take up the famous Mertonian distinction, can one separate what is ‘internal’ from what is ‘external’? Can one, as Reichenbach would have it, trace a limit between the context of discovery (the anecdotal account of the emergence of concepts) and the context of justification (the properly scientific work of proof)?”
“Even if some scientists feel attacked in their most intimate convictions by the historicisation of science practised by ‘science studies’, those who are really threatened by this are rare. On the contrary, many scientists don’t mind opening their notebooks and laboratories to historians and anthropologists when asked, and some do not hesitate to recognise how they are portrayed, even if they draw different conclusions from those of their observers. This is a sign that they feel themselves sufficiently strong to bear the test of historical and anthropological inquiry. The same is not the case for psychoanalysis, where intrusions of historians into the Freudian ‘laboratory’ are generally perceived as unacceptable transgressions which should be denounced. For a discipline concerned with the past, psychoanalysis is strangely allergic to its own history, and for good reason: for it is precisely here that it is vulnerable.”
“One knows today that Churchill decided to let Coventry be bombed rather than reveal to the Germans that the British had deciphered their code. But one can still not have access to this or that correspondence with Freud which could inform us about this or that detail of his private life! It seems that there is something there that is too explosive for one to dream of divulging. This is perfectly absurd. In terms of what concerns me, I see here the sign that psychoanalysis has failed to adopt the normal regime of scientific production.”
Isabelle Stengers
“At least on two instances, in 1885 and in 1907, he destroyed most of his notes, intimate diaries and personal papers, veritable holocausts in which correspondences as precious for the comprehension of the origins of psychoanalysis as those with Bernheim, Breuer, Fliess, August Forel, Havelock Ellis and Leopold Löwenfeld probably perished. The same thing happened in 1938 and again in 1939, and one knows that he would have destroyed his letters to Wilhelm Fliess were it not for the refusal of Marie Bonaparte, who had acquired this correspondence on the express condition that he could not regain possession of them”
“It is not so much the autobiographical form as such which is a problem, for Freud was not the first pioneer of psychology and of psychotherapy to have adopted it – one thinks of the memoirs of Wundt, Stanley Hall, August Forel, Emil Kraepelin, Albert Moll, Havelock Ellis and later Jung. There was also, from the 1930s, a systematic collection of autobiographical accounts from the principal figures in psychology, such as Pierre Janet, William McDougall, James Mark Baldwin, J.B. Watson, William Stern, Édouard Claparède, Jean Piaget and Kurt Goldstein. One need only peruse the volumes of this monumental History of Psychology in Autobiography, initially published under the editorship of Carl Murchison, to see that a number of the autobiographies of Freud’s contemporaries were no less ‘subjective’, tendentious and lacunary than his. That of Watson in particular cedes nothing to Freud in terms of aggressive invective. However, none of Freud’s contemporaries appear to have linked their theories to their own person, and for a good reason: that would have meant putting into doubt the objectivity of the theory, in making it an expression of the theorist’s subjectivity.”
“For psycho-analysis is my creation . . . I consider myself justified in maintaining that even to-day no one can know better than I do what psycho-analysis is, how it differs from other ways of investigating the life of the mind, and precisely what should be called psycho-analysis and what would better be described by some other name.”
F.
“Freud, we are told, was the first in the history of humanity who analysed himself and it was thus that he could lift the repressions which prevented his predecessors and contemporaries, indeed all of humanity, from seeing the truth.” “The indissoluble linkage which Freud established between his object and his own person now becomes clear: he himself was the ‘royal road’ to the unconscious. Henceforth, there would be no other route to it.”
“In the summer of 1897 . . . Freud undertook his most heroic feat – a psychoanalysis of his own unconscious . . . Yet the uniqueness of the feat remains. Once done it is done forever. For no one ever again can be the first to explore those depths . . . What indomitable courage, both intellectual and moral, must have been needed!”
Jones
“Here we return to the enigma of Freud’s personality . . . His findings had to be wrested in the face of his own extreme resistances – the self-analysis being comparable, in terms of the danger involved, to Benjamin Franklin’s flying a kite in a thunderstorm in 1752, in order to investigate the laws of electricity. The next two persons who tried to repeat his experiments were both killed.”
Eissler. Bom, estou ansioso pela invenção do pára-raio do inconsciente!
“The wish to play the spy upon one’s self . . . is to reverse the natural order of cognitive powers . . . The desire for self-investigation is either already a disease of the mind (hypochondria) or will lead to such a disease and ultimately to the madhouse.”
Kant
“The thinker cannot divide himself into two, of whom one reasons whilst the other observes him reason. The organ observed and the organ observing being, in this case, identical, how could observation take place? This pretended psychological method is then radically null and void.” Comte
“It is important to recall that throughout the nineteenth century, despite the strictures against it expressed by figures such as Kant and Auguste Comte, introspection continued to be the main method of philosophical psychology. Initially, this hardly changed with the advent of the new ‘scientific’ psychology. Franz Brentano maintained that psychology, like any other natural science, had to be based on perception and experience, straightforwardly including self-perception in this.”
“The identically titled works of Alfred Maury and Joseph Delboeuf, Sleep and Dreams, are good examples of this introspective genre. At the same time, which seems strange to us today, the first ‘subjects’ of the new experimental psychology were the experimenters themselves – Fechner, Hering, Helmholtz and Ebbinghaus. Even in Wundt’s laboratory, where the experimenters also acted as subjects, the experimental procedures were essentially intended to render introspection more reliable and replicable, and in no respect to eliminate it. It was only later, with the famous debate on ‘imageless thought’, that introspection was gradually abandoned as a method in psychology, notably in favour of the third-person experimentation promoted by behaviourism, with its methodological rejection of all private mental states.”
“Taken in the narrow sense of systematic therapeutic analysis, centred on the recollection of childhood memories, the self-analysis appears to have been extremely brief, and, in Freud’s own view, disappointing (a point rarely mentioned by his biographers). Actively pursued from the beginning of October 1897 (two weeks after the abandonment of the seduction theory), it was finished 6 weeks later in a lucid assessment of failure.”
“As for the rest, everything is still in a state of latency. My self-analysis is at rest in favor of the dream book.”
F. a Fl., fevereiro de 1898.
“Delboeuf’s analysis of the ‘dream of lizards and of the asplenium ruta muraria’ seems to have served as the model of the analysis of the ‘dream of Irma’s injection in The Interpretation of Dreams’.”
“To be a psychoanalyst, one had to cure oneself, or in other words, psychoanalyse oneself. In 1909, to the question of how one became a psychoanalyst, Freud replied: ‘by studying one’s own dreams’. The following year, he noted that would-be psychoanalysts had to devote themselves to a self-analysis in order to overcome their resistances.” Onde eu pego minha grana?!
“Ernest Jones and Sándor Ferenczi, for example, sent detailed accounts of their self-analyses to Freud, who responded with interpretations, suggestions and directives. These mimetic ‘self’-analyses could with much justice be regarded simply as analyses by correspondence. Furthermore, they were hardly examples of open-ended inquiry, as what was to be found was already known in advance, and scripted by psychoanalytic theory.”
“There where Freud found Oedipus, others found Electra. Where he insisted on the paternal complex, others insisted on the maternal complex. Where he ‘discovered’ infantile sexuality, others discovered ‘organ inferiority’. Where he saw the workings of the ‘libido’, others saw the ‘aggressive drive’. It is not a coincidence that the epoch when Freud placed his trust in the practice of self-analysis was also that of the monumental disputes between Freud, Adler, Stekel and Jung. Insofar as the ultimate criterion for the validity of psychoanalytic interpretations was self-analysis, each could invoke his own to delegitimate the interpretations and theories of others and accuse them of projecting their own unanalysed complexes into their theories or of having succumbed to neurotic resistances. Nothing enabled one to settle the symmetric conflicts of interpretations which were tearing apart the psychoanalytic community.”
“In one session that took place after Adler had seceded, Freud claimed that Adler suffered from paranoia. That was one of Freud’s favorite diagnoses; he had applied it to another important friend of his from whom he had separated. Immediately in his slavish choir, voices resounded which enthusiastically confirmed this ridiculous diagnosis.”
Stekel
“It is not enough . . . that the physician himself should be an approximately normal person. It may be insisted, rather, that he should have undergone a psycho-analytic purification and have become aware of those complexes of his own which would be apt to interfere with his grasp of what the patient tells him . . . I count it as one of the many merits of the Zurich school of analysis that they have laid increased emphasis on this requirement, and have embodied it in the demand that everyone who wishes to carry out analyses on other people shall first himself undergo an analysis by someone with expert knowledge . . . But anyone who has scorned to take the precaution of being analysed himself . . . will easily fall into the temptation of projecting outwards some of the peculiarities of his own personality, which he has dimly perceived, into the field of science, as a theory having universal validity; he will bring the psycho-analytic method into discredit, and lead the inexperienced astray.”
F. Mau começo, grande conclusão!
“Whilst self-experimentation was still common, it would have been unthinkable to require that a would-be practitioner of hypnosis undergo hypnosis, or a would-be surgeon undergo surgery.”
“Thus the ‘psychoanalytic purification’ coincided with an institutional purging and a hermeneutical standardisation. Gone was the anarchy of uncontrolled and uncontrollable self-analyses, and the infernal cycle of diagnoses and counter-diagnoses. The recapturing of the psychoanalytic movement had begun. From now on, Freud and his lieutenants would have the final word.”
“If a patient rejected an analyst’s interpretations, the latter could always claim that he knew more because he had submitted to a personal analysis. But what if it was another analyst who objected to his interpretation? What if the patient refused the asymmetry of the analytic situation and set out to analyse the analyst? Whatever way one looks at the question, nothing authorises the analyst to declare that his interpretation is necessarily superior to that of his colleague or of his patient except the institutional arrangement which underwrote his interpretation.”
“However, this ‘solution’ immediately raised another difficulty: what of Freud? If every analyst derived their authority from their training analysis, from where did Freud derive his? As long as psychoanalysts trained themselves through self-analysis, Freud’s self-analysis did not pose any problems (on the contrary, it was regarded as the prototype). But now the rules of the game had changed, and the status of Freud’s self-analysis was exposed. Who could guarantee that Freud’s analysis had been complete? On the one hand, Jung’s proposition enabled the closure of the controversy with Adler and Stekel, and on the other, it opened a new one, this time between Freud and himself. For how could Freud impose his interpretations on Jung if he had, by his own terms, not been analysed?”
“May I draw your attention to the fact that you open The Interpretation of Dreams with the mournful admission of your own neurosis the dream of Irma’s injection identification with the neurotic in need of treatment. Very significant. Our analysis, you may remember, came to a stop with your remark that you ‘could not submit to analysis without losing your authority.’ These words are engraved on my memory as a symbol of everything to come.”
Jung a F. nos confins de 1912…
O carequinha puxa-saco: “But what is valid for you is not valid for the rest of us. Jung has not achieved the same self-mastery as you. He got the results ready-made and accepted them lock, stock and barrel, without testing them out on himself.” Ferenczi
“Ferenczi, more lucidly than Freud, saw well that to reproach Jung in the manner in which he had reproached Freud would not serve anything. Since mutual analysis would not resolve the problem of conflicts of interpretation, Ferenczi proposed to re-establish the asymmetry (i.e., the principle of authority) through affirming the exceptional character of Freud’s self-analysis. Instead of letting himself be drawn by Jung into a conflict of equals from which no one could escape unharmed, it was necessary to refuse the very terms of the debate and regain the ‘meta’ level. And what better way to do this than substituting a theory of the great man, of the singular and inimitable genius, for ordinary scientific and scholarly debate?”
“Now, it is quite certain, as everyone knows, that no psychoanalyst can claim to represent, in however slight a way, an absolute knowledge. That is why, in a sense, it can be said that if there is someone to whom one can apply there can be only one such person. This one was Freud, while he was still alive. The fact that Freud, on the subject of the unconscious, was legitimately the subject that one could presume to know, sets anything that had to do with the analytic relation, when it was initiated, by his patients, with him.”
O ingênuo Lacan
“In 1919, Karl Abraham published an article in which he described self-analysis as a particular form of the resistance to psychoanalysis:
One element in such a ‘self-analysis’ is a narcissistic enjoyment of oneself; another is a revolt against the father. The unrestrained occupation with his own ego and the feeling of superiority already described offers the person’s narcissism a rich store of pleasure. The necessity of being alone during the process brings it extraordinarily near to onanism and its equivalent, neurotic day-dreaming, both of which were earlier present to a marked degree in all the patients under consideration.” Reciclou as conferências introdutórias direitinho!
“To Paul Schilder (who had not been analysed), Freud wrote in 1935 that those of the first psychoanalysts who had not been analysed ‘were never proud of it’. As for himself, he added, ‘one might perhaps assert the right to an exceptional position’.”
“At the end of his large volume on Freud’s self-analysis, Didier Anzieu [ex-esquizofrênico?] enumerated no less than 116 psychoanalytic notions or concepts which were elaborated by Freud in the course of his self-analysis, which he dated between 1895 and 1901.” Essa é muito boa!
“Freud’s self-analysis thus becomes the mythical origin of psychoanalysis, the historical event which places it outside history. Others, like Schur, did not hesitate to identify psychoanalysis with Freud’s interminable self-analysis (1895–1939).” RIP!
“It followed that there couldn’t be progress in psychoanalysis which was not a post-mortem deepening of the self-analysis of the founder (1895–). Every new development in psychoanalysis had to be backdated to the inaugural event itself. The mythification and the dehistoricisation of psychoanalysis were now complete.” A Psicanálise foi pioneira: precedeu até mesmo Stalin no apagamento da História (isso se supusermos que nos 12 primeiros anos Josef Dugashvilli não havia terminado ainda de subverter o leninismo remanescente)!
“Freud often described the foundation of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) as a necessary recourse, given the unanimous rejection of his theories by psychiatry and university psychology. However, the history of Freud’s relations with his peers was actually much more complex. Far from psychoanalysis simply being excluded from institutions and academic exchanges, it deliberately withdrew from them, rather than attempting to create a consensus around its theories in an open manner. From this perspective, the ostracism of psychoanalysis is no less legendary than Freud’s self-analysis.”
“Initially, Freud did attempt to get his theories recognised by his peers. At the turn of the century, he had already gained a certain notoriety, but his theories were far from being at the centre of discussions between German-language psychiatrists (one of the reasons being that he was viewed as a neurologist without much psychiatric experience). As a Privatdozent, he was entitled to give lectures at the University of Vienna, but his audience was so small that he sometimes had trouble getting the minimum requirement of 3 attendees. Those interested in psychoanalysis were generally either colleagues who became patients (such as Wilhelm Stekel) or patients who became colleagues (such as Emma Eckstein). Freud was clearly not faring well at promoting his theories. The situation changed somewhat in 1902. At the instigation of Stekel, he gathered together a group of doctors for weekly meetings. The other initial members were Alfred Adler, Max Kahane and Rudolf Reitler, soon followed by others. The proceedings were not harmonious.”
“I could not succeed in establishing among its members the friendly relations that ought to obtain between men who are all engaged upon the same difficult work; nor was I able to stifle the disputes about priority for which there were so many opportunities under these conditions of work in common.”
F.
“The structure of these discussions did not follow that of other psychological and psychiatric associations, as Fritz Wittels subsequently recalled:
Freud’s design in the promotion of these gatherings was to have his own thoughts passed through the filter of other trained intelligences. It did not matter if the intelligences were mediocre. Indeed, he had little desire that these associates should be persons of strong individuality, that they should be critical and ambitious collaborators. The realm of psychoanalysis was his idea and his will, and he welcomed anyone who accepted his views. What he wanted was to look into a kaleidoscope lined with mirrors that would multiply the images he introduced into it.
All this changed in 1904, when Eugen Bleuler, the director of the famous Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zurich, came into Freud’s view.”
Löwenfeld, Psychical Obsessional Phenomena
Bernheim, New Studies on Hypnosis, Suggestion and Psychotherapy
“This was no accident, for Bleuler had been a pupil of August Forel, one of the great figures of European neurology and psychiatry and the promoter of a psychotherapy of Bernheimian inspiration.
Forel, another important figure in this story, was also interested in Freud’s work. In 1889, Freud started a correspondence with him, and wrote a very positive review of his book on hypnotism. Forel recommended Freud to Bernheim when he went to Nancy, and invited him to the editorial committee of the Zeitschrift für Hypnotismus, a journal which he had founded in 1892 to draw together the Bernheimian movement. He cited Freud in the second edition of his book on hypnotism among doctors who had taken up the issue of therapeutic suggestion following the work of the Nancy school. A little later, he followed the works of Breuer and Freud with interest, going as far as introducing them to his American colleagues in a lecture he gave in 1899 at the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the founding of Clark University. In 1903, he again cited favourably Freud’s method of treatment, apparently not realizing that the latter had given up cathartic hypnosis in the interim.”
“It is possible that one reason why Bleuler introduced psychoanalysis into the Burghölzli was to experiment with its potential therapeutic value with psychotics. (…) The institutional set-up at the Burghölzli permitted such an experimental utilisation.”
“Bleuler’s letters to Freud are on open access at the Library of Congress, but aside from a few excerpts which have been cited, Freud’s letters are not accessible.”
“On 28 November 1905, Bleuler narrated to Freud how he had had diarrhoea at night from time to time, since puberty. He had long had a presentiment that this was connected to sexuality, but did not know how. The prospect for Freud was tantalising. Through Bleuler’s interest, psychoanalysis had found a crucial beachhead from which to launch itself on the German-language psychiatric world. All he had to do was to get Bleuler to assent to his interpretations (and hope for some alleviation in his bowel movements). Unfortunately, Bleuler’s intestines remained resistant to Freud’s interpretations.” HAHAHA!
“In the meantime, other experiments were taking place at the Burghölzli in the field of experimental psychopathology on associations. These were inscribed in a more general tendency to utilise the methods of the new scientific psychology in psychiatry. The psychiatrist Gustav Aschaffenburg, a student of Wundt, had applied the latter’s work on verbal associations to psychopathological research. This drew the interest of the Burghölzli psychiatrists, notably Jung and Franz Riklin. It was hoped that the association experiment could provide a quick and reliable means of differential diagnosis. Despite grand promissory claims in print by Bleuler, this project was an abject failure. Experimenters failed to differentiate sexes, let alone make fine diagnostic discriminations. Jung and Riklin salvaged the operation by linking failures to respond and failed reaction times to Freud’s account of repression. The stimulus words, they claimed, could be regarded as indicators of affectively stressed complexes.
The linkage was fateful. Jung claimed that psychoanalysis was a difficult art, and that what was lacking was a basic framework. This could be provided by the association experiment, which could facilitate and shorten psychoanalysis. However, what was described as psychoanalysis strictly along Freud’s lines included hypnosis and the recollection of traumatic sexual memories, from the time of the Studies on Hysteria and the defunct seduction theory. Visibly, news of changes in Freud’s theories were slow to reach the Burghölzli. Jung, together with Forel and most contemporaries, did not realise that Freud’s method had radically changed – and for good reason, since Freud had not clearly indicated his rupture with Breuer and his abandonment of the seduction theory.” “In other words, the Burghölzli psychiatrists were replicating and providing proof for theories which Freud had already abandoned. The situation was paradoxical. Freud had finally found an echo in mainstream psychiatry, but it was for theories which he had given up. Scientific replication, which was supposedly the source of reliable consensus, had led to the uncontrollable proliferation of simulacras. Freud, as one sees in his first exchanges with Jung and Abraham, had a delicate damage limitation exercise on his hands.”
“The Burghölzli became the hotbed of psychoanalysis, and foreign visitors, such as Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi and Abraham Brill, streamed to it, as it was the only institution where one could learn how to practise psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was treated not as a separate discipline, requiring specific training or authorisation to practise, but as an auxiliary technique in medicine and psychiatry. Visitors to the Burghölzli were able to hear lectures on the subject, attend staff meetings where patients were subjected to analytical questioning, and have some sessions of analysis with figures such as Jung, Riklin and Maeder. The Burghölzli utilised an open model of instruction, similar to the one that Bernheim had established at Nancy for the teaching of hypnosis.”
“It was publicly demonstrable, complete with statistics, measurements down to the millisecond and sophisticated laboratory equipment such as the pneumograph. The association experiment had thus all the paraphernalia and trappings that were being increasingly taken as the hallmarks of science in psychology. Compared with this, Freud’s sole apparatus of the couch seemed a relic of the hypnotic era. If one wanted to find out about psychoanalysis, the first destination of choice was therefore not Vienna, but Zurich.”
“When a theory achieves greater visibility, it inevitably attracts discussion and contradiction. From 1906 onward, a series of debates about psychoanalysis took place in psychiatric congresses, which lasted until 1913. It is striking that, despite invitations, Freud himself did not take part. Aloof disengagement and deputised representation were to be Freud’s style. He delegated the task of defending his theories to his followers and, withdrawing behind a haughty silence, which his contemporaries viewed as a refusal of debate.”
“He never risked himself in a congress and never defended his cause in public! . . . This always made him afraid! America was the first and only time! . . . He was too touchy!”
Jung, 29 August 1953
“Freud lets the person whom he examines associate freely and this continues until, from time to time, he thinks that he has discovered a precise index, and then he draws his patient’s attention to this and gets him to associate further starting from this new point of departure. But most patients who go to see Freud already know in advance where he wants to go and this thought immediately evokes complexes of representations connected to the sexual life . . . But if the sexual trauma always appears with him as the final result of his psychoanalyses, there is in my view only one possible explanation: that Freud as much as his patients is a victim of an auto-suggestion. (…) Freud’s method is incorrect for most cases, dubious for many, and unnecessary for all”
Gustav Aschaffenburg
“Freud’s first use of the word psychoanalysis was in a paper published in French in the Revue neurologique. His French neologism, psychoanalyse, appears to have been directly modelled on the word psychotherapy.
Curiously, Freud provided no definition, justification or extended description of the term, but simply retroactively applied it to what he had been content to describe in the previous year as a method of psychotherapy. Pierre Janet was later to complain that Freud had simply appropriated his work and that his psychoanalysis was nothing but a copycat name for his own psychological analysis (analyse psychologique).”
“They invented the name complex, whereas I had used the term psychological system . . . They spoke of catharsis where I had spoken of the dissociation of fixed ideas or of moral disinfection. The names differed, but the essential ideas I had put forward . . . were accepted without modification.”
Pierre Janet
“Forel and his students, on the other hand, noted that Freud’s term was a barbarism which indicated an ignorance concerning the correct formation of words from Greek roots.”
“One speaks of psychoanalysis, as if the apostrophising was not as appropriate as with other compounds. Who says psychoiatry, psychoasthenia, etc.?”
Dumeng Bezzola
“I write ‘psychanalysis’ like Bezzola, Frank and Bleuler, and not ‘psychoanalysis’ as Freud does, according to the rational and euphonic derivation of the word. On this subject, Bezzola remarks for good reason that one writes ‘psychiatry’ and not ‘psychoiatry’.”
Forel
Nesse sentido, o Português é uma evolução!
In addition, this psychanalysis relieved of its ‘o’ [praticada por discípulos de Forel] was a Breuerian psychanalysis. Frank and Bezzola reproached Freud for having abandoned the essential element of the cathartic method – hypnosis – without a convincing explanation. Hence, Frank recommended a type of hypnoanalysis combining interpretation and the induction of a hypnoid state. (Thus, before Lacan’s return to Freud, there had already been a return to Breuer in the history of psychoanalysis.)”
“Bezzola likewise proposed a ‘modification of the Breuer–Freud procedure’, which he called ‘psychosynthesis’. He placed the patient in a relaxed position with closed eyes and, instead of Freudian associations, collected direct sensory impressions. In this regard, he found Jung’s association complexes of great heuristic value. Introductory hypnosis as well as Freud’s procedure of interpretation was unnecessary, since the self-observation of neurotic sensations could by itself bring about the experience corresponding to the hypnoid state.”
“His new method of treatment through interpretation and the limitless enlargement of his concept of sexuality have provoked in the discussion such a violent opposition to everything promoted and accomplished by Freud that there is a danger that also Breuer’s method of treatment and valuable developments by Freud [an allusion to the pressure method described by Freud in the Studies on Hysteria] will become forgotten and overlooked . . . It seems to me that Freud no longer takes account in his method of interpretation, at least in a great number of cases, of the important role of the hypnoid state in their genesis, to which he himself had drawn attention.”
Bezzola
“Clearly, the psychanalysis and psychosynthesis that Frank and Bezzola advocated against Aschaffenburg were rivals to Freud’s psychoanalysis. These new allies were in fact competitors.”
“He who reads the Freudian ‘Fragment of a hysteria-analysis’ without prejudice will only put it down shaking his head. For my part, I must confess that it is for me wholly incomprehensible how anyone can take the train of thought produced there seriously. (…) It therefore borders on comic relief when the opposition to Freudian ideas is set in parallel with the resistance of contemporaries to Copernican views, as happened in private discussions.”
Alfred Hoche
“I let it be directly experienced. With Freud the doctor works under the control of the patient, with me the patient works under the control of the doctor. With me the danger of false interpretation is excluded, because I avoid every suggestion, except those for relaxation.”
Bezzola
“Frank and Bezzola’s project, to dissociate themselves from Freud and to propose a non-Freudian psychanalysis or psychosynthesis, had the complete support of Forel. From the moment when he realised how far Freud had departed from his original method, Forel became very critical of him. Just like Aschaffenburg and Hoche, he was disturbed by the arbitrariness of Freud’s interpretations, as well as by his increasing influence in Forel’s former institution, the Burghölzli. As his correspondence between 1907 and 1910 shows, he urged his disciples to take strong positions against the Freudian deviation, so as to be able to separate ‘the true wheat from the chaff’.”
“This Freud cult disgusts me, just as it disgusts Bezzola. I leave open the question if the famous discovery of Freud is really his and doesn’t rather belong to Breuer, but it is certain that in Vienna, where people aren’t prudish, Freud has a very bad reputation which is not unfounded . . . It appears to me as if Bleuler is no longer the director of the Burghölzli, but Jung, and I am sorry.”
Forel
“For that reason you do not need to join any Freud club, by any means. For me, Freud himself is highly unsympathetic, but I think you will achieve more in your position if you confront Frank peacefully and frankly and if you sometime fight a battle with the Freud fools, than if you make way for them.”
Forel a Bezzola
“I have now a case in treatment (through hypnosis) that had been completely shattered through psychoanalysis of Freud & his school. The person became half crazy from outspoken ‘sexual’ interpretations of the most harmless things. I think there is a type of psychoanalysis that produces more complexes than it eliminates!”
Forel a Bezzola, coisa de 1 ano depois
“It worries me that you haven’t written your book about your experiences. This is an urgent necessity. The whole question is completely corrupted and discredited by Freud and his clique. It is high time that the reasonable and scientific psychanalysts intervene with a serious and important work.”
Forel a Bezzola, 1 ano e meio depois da carta acima, sobre um livro que nunca viria a existir
“Not content with anti-Freudian agitation in the background, Forel wrote to Breuer, whom he had known since his student days in Vienna, to ask him to indicate precisely ‘which part of psychoanalysis went back to him, what role he had in psychoanalysis’. Breuer obliged. He himself was responsible for ‘everything which directly followed from the case of Anna O.’ – the theory of hypnoid states and non-abreacted affective representations, the notion of retention hysteria and analytic therapy (Breuer first wrote ‘psychanalytic’). Freud was responsible for the notions of conversion, defence neuroses, and the accent placed on defence to the detriment of hypnoid states (hardly ‘to the benefit of his theory’, Breuer added). To both of them belonged the emphasis on ‘the prominent place assumed by sexuality’. Thus Breuer did not hesitate to claim his part in the discovery of the role of sexuality in hysteria. At the same time, just as he had done in Studies on Hysteria, he stressed the asexual character of Anna O.”
“In this respect the new Freudian method has a great similarity with Dubois’ method of education . . . Bezzola’s method of psychosynthesis on the other hand is a direct, very interesting further development of the Breuer–Freud cathartic method of abreaction. The theoretical basis of Freudian psychanalytic method, which has grown entirely through practical empiricism, is still covered in a deep darkness. Through my association research I think that I have at least made a few points accessible to experimental investigation, though all theoretical difficulties have still not yet been overcome.”
Jung
“In Jung’s history the basic presuppositions of his own research lay principally in Janet’s work on dissociation and automatisms, coupled with the work of Otto Binswanger, suggestion theory (i.e., Bernheim and Forel) and the generally recognised notion of hysteria as a psychogenic neurosis. In addition, Freud’s new method was linked with Dubois and placed alongside Bezzola’s. Jung was clearly attempting to recruit allies and was casting his net as widely as possible. However, this had the effect of completely diluting the specificity of psychoanalysis as Freud understood it. What is worse, Jung suggested that the deep darkness which lay over the theoretical basis of Freud’s method was being clarified through the light shed by Jung’s own association experiments. Freud could not have failed to notice the similarities with Frank and Bezzola. Freud was in danger of becoming a bystander, a footnote in the history of the psychanalytic movement.”
“This is perfectly exact: one notes fixed ideas of an erotic order with some hysterics, insufficiency of the sexual sense, or more or less light perversions of the genital instincts. This is incontestable and this has been described many times with a great depth of pathological analysis. But why generalise these true observations in a completely excessive manner, why declare that all hysteria consists in this genital perturbation of several patients?”
Janet
“In other words, what was good in psychoanalysis was not new, and stemmed from Janet’s own work. What was new was not good, and could safely be left to Freud.”
“So a new plan of action took shape. On 30 November 1907, Jung informed Freud that a new arrival, Dr. Jones from London, together with Jung’s friends from Budapest had suggested a congress of Freudian followers. On 30 January 1908, Jung informed Karl Abraham that he was not going to invite Bezzola, and asked Abraham to find more participants, ‘provided that they are people with pro-Freudian interests. Please would you stress in each case the private nature of the project.’ The ‘First Congress for Freudian Psychology’, which took place at the end of April in Salzburg, was to be a secret admittance by invitation only event, with no criticism allowed. This private meeting, which set the tone for future psychoanalytic congresses across the world, represented a return to Freud’s weekly meetings with his disciples in Vienna. Once again, Freud could see his ideas replicated by the kaleidoscope which Wittels referred to.
However, what Bleuler would later call the politics of the closed door did not entirely solve the situation; far from it. In accordance with a pattern which would be constantly repeated, the controversies which the Freudians attempted to evade externally soon resurfaced internally. Ultimately, there was little difference between the external debates and the internal dissensions.”
“whilst Abraham attempted to apply Freud’s libido theory to its elucidation, Jung presented his view that the loss of reality in dementia praecox could not be explained on the basis of the libido theory, and indeed, that the condition could not be explained purely psychogenically, and invoked an unknown toxin as a possible aetiological factor. Whilst Abraham did not mention his former superiors at the Burghölzli, aside from a few gestures of praise, Jung’s paper was basically independent of Freud’s work. Freud interpreted this doctrinal dispute between Jung and himself as a priority dispute between Abraham and Jung.”
“Freud had actively encouraged Abraham to present his paper and even assured him that it would not bring him into conflict with Jung . . . Thus it seems that Freud had brought about the very conflict he then deplored. He then tried to obfuscate that fact and to put the blame on Abraham and Jung. In the aftermath of the Congress, Freud reinterpreted the conflict as a priority dispute between Abraham and Jung; a conflict over the priority of being the first to solve the riddle of schizophrenia with the help of psychoanalysis.”
Ernst Falzeder
“In reframing his horizontal conflict with Jung into one between his disciples, Freud was arrogating the right to intervene in the debate vertically, from a position of uncontested authority. This strategy furnished the model which Freud would follow in subsequent internal conflicts: each time one of his collaborators attempted to have an open discussion with him as between equals, as his psychiatric colleagues had attempted to do from the exterior, he reduced him to the status of a pupil, leaving him no choice but to toe the line or quit the movement and join the growing crowd of his critics. Hence, the boundary between the interior and the exterior of the movement was extremely fluid and was constantly being redrawn as a result of expulsions. The closed door began to resemble a revolving door.”
“In August 1909, Forel sent a circular letter to the main representatives of European psychotherapy, including Freud and Jung, to invite them to join the International Society of Medical Psychology and Psychotherapy, which he proposed to establish with Oskar Vogt and Ludwig Frank. Forel felt that the lack of coordination between the different orientations of psychotherapy was a critical problem. He wanted to create order in this ‘tower of Babel’ by facilitating scientific exchanges and through establishing ‘a clear international terminology, capable of being accepted in a general manner by different people’.”
“scorned and neglected in general by the faculties of medicine, psychology and psychiatry have been studied above all by autodidacts who have formed special or local schools, such as at Paris, Nancy, Vienna, etc., schools which have each developed according to their special ideas, without contact with the others, without in-depth scientific discussions, without agreement on terms.
As a result of this situation, it seems to me that many things are highly necessary.
1. Obtain an international agreement to help the scientific discussions in the domain which occupies us – agreement on the facts and on the terms.
2. Unify neurological science and make it known in all its branches by the faculties of medicine.”
Forel
“Freud and Jung had already left to attend the Clark Conference and to conquer America. They found Forel’s circular on their return at the beginning of October. By that time, the Society had already been founded. The formation of this society placed them in an unexpectedly awkward position. Forel proposed to draw together the diverse psychotherapies, without according a special status to psychoanalysis. Forel and Frank were taking the reins, under the banner of a true scientific psychology, and were offering Freud and Jung a back seat in the new organisation. After a long hesitation, Freud and Jung nevertheless decided to accept Forel’s invitation in mid November, so as not to leave the field to their rivals. The same month, at a professional meeting of Swiss psychiatrists, Forel and Jung made an alliance to isolate Constantin von Monakow, co-founder with Paul Dubois of a 3rd association of psychotherapists, the Society of Neurologists. In December, Forel sent Freud a dedicated copy of the 11th edition of his book Brain and Soul. More surprising yet, Freud briefly envisaged infiltrating the International Order for Ethics and Culture of Pastor Kneipp, an organisation in which Forel actively participated, before abandoning the idea on Jung’s advice.
In the meantime, the idea of an International Association of Psychoanalysis had germinated, formally grouping together adherents to Freud’s doctrine. The timing was clearly not accidental.”
“I find your suggestion (tighter organization) extremely useful. The acceptance of members, however, would be just as strictly managed as it is in the Vienna Society; that would be a way of keeping out undesirable elements.”
Ferenczi a Freud
“Embden warned against referring patients to asylums where psychoanalysis was practised (in
all likelihood, his main target was the Burghölzli). In the discussion, Trömner argued that the basic elements of Freud’s theory of hysteria were fine (i.e., the conversion of non-abreacted affects), but that Freud had erected monstrous theories from Breuer’s correct starting point. As for Freud’s interpretations of dreams, he notes that they were nearly identical to those which had been proposed long ago by Scherner.”
“If Freud was Columbus, it followed that other psychologists and psychiatrists had to take the role of the American Indians.”
“We have become so used to considering psychoanalysis as Freudian that we do not even consider that there could have been non-Freudian psychanalysts. But this is a retrospective (asymmetric) illusion, which grants victory to the IPA over rival organisations.”
“Which one was to conquer the new continent of psychotherapy: psychanalysis according to Breuer, Forel and Frank, or psychoanalysis according to Freud and his followers? Without much exaggeration, one could say that before splitting into rival schools, the IPA itself was the product of a schism within the psych(o)analytic movement. Around the same time, Frank published a book titled Psychanalysis, in which he openly advocated return of psychanalysis to Breuer, critiquing the Freudian deviation. Unsurprisingly, Freud did not appreciate this.”
“What is common with all the members of the sect is the high degree of veneration for the Master, which only perhaps finds its analogue in the personality cult of the circle of Bayreuth around Wagner . . . The Freudian movement is in fact a return, under a modern form, of a medicina magica, a secret doctrine which can only be practised by qualified interpreters of signs.”
Hoche
“It is getting really bad with Adler. You see a resemblance to Bleuler; in me he awakens the memory of Fliess; but an octave lower. The same paranoia.”
F. a Jung (ironicamente…)
“This pathologisation of dissent not only enabled the delegitimation of Adler’s theoretical innovations, it also mitigated a predictable rejoinder by Freud’s critics: ‘even your own psycho-analysts don’t agree with you!’ Indeed, if Adler remained a psychoanalyst – and one with a prominent institutional position and in a powerful position with regard to psychoanalytic literature – Freud’s defences against his critics would simply backfire. The simple rejoinder that the views of critics were nullified because they hadn’t practised psychoanalysis now posed a serious problem when someone such as Adler, one of the founding members of Freud’s Wednesday psychological society from 1902, presented views which in critical respects coincided with those of Freud’s critics.
Adler’s innovations opened the possibility of a proliferation of concurrent psychoanalyses, which was precisely what the founding of the IPA had attempted to stop. Thus simple theoretical disagreement would have been insufficient – it was necessary that Adler lose all credibility. In January and February 1911, a series of four meetings was convened in Vienna to discuss the theoretical differences between Freud and Adler.”
“After these meetings, Adler and other associates resigned and formed a Society for Free Psychoanalytic Research, a pointed rejoinder to Freud’s authoritarian tactics.”
“One year after the Isserlin episode, Hans Maier, who had succeeded Jung at the Burghölzli, was excluded from attending the Zurich Psychoanalytic Society. Freud had previously asked Bleuler to break off his relations with the psychiatrists Alfred Hoche and Theodore Ziehen under the rationale that they were critical of psychoanalysis. After the Maier episode, Bleuler decided that he had had enough and left the IPA.”
“Rather than to strive to have many points of contact with the rest of science and other scientists, the Association isolated itself with barbed wires from the external world, which hurts both foe and friend . . . The psychoanalysts themselves have validated the malicious words of Hoche about sectarianism, which at that time was unjustified.”
Bleuler
“After recalling that the roots of psychoanalysis were to be found in Liébeault’s theory of suggestion, Forel enumerated the authors who had developed the psychanalytic method: Freud, Vogt, Graeter, Frank, Bezzola, Du Montet, Loÿ, etc. One can imagine Freud’s reaction to see himself cited as one continuer amongst others of Breuer’s work.”
“Eight months later, the dispute between the two psych(o)analytic factions broke out in a series of exchanges in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the main Zurich newspaper. This important controversy, which was first reconstructed by Ellenberger, has been passed over by Freudian historiography. It forms the first example of the numerous polemical Freud wars played out in newspapers and popular periodicals.”
“From the side of the Freudian school, much too much exegesis, interpretation of dreams, and belleletristic studies of literary antiquity have been brought in, and thus the scientific method has been abandoned. In public the matter has then become dilettantish playing around.”
Forel
“Stuck between Freud and his colleagues (between the inside and the outside), Jung’s position became more and more untenable. As we have seen, it was in the same year [1912] that conflict between Freud and Jung broke out into the open. This was potentially disastrous. Freud was not only on the point of losing his most precious ally, who had led the war of which Ferenczi spoke (and taken the blows in his place), but also the whole Zurich school, and with it the hope of internationalising the psychoanalytic movement and colonising psychiatry. Psychoanalysis was in danger of returning to becoming a local, Viennese affair.”
“Bleuler could not have been clearer: far from being external, his critique was based on the results of his self-analysis, but also of his course of analysis by correspondence with Freud. Bleuler noted that his 1911 paper on psychanalysis had stressed the positive side; this one would represent the negative, with the advantage of further experience. Bleuler’s tactic was to identify and single out each aspect of Freud’s theories, and those of some of his followers, and to indicate what he accepted and what he rejected, in a meticulous and detailed fashion. Such an itemised view was precisely what Freud was militating against. Bleuler’s paper represented the most detailed examination of psychoanalytic concepts which had yet been undertaken.”
“Being unverifiable, psychoanalytic interpretations were thus completely arbitrary. In this respect, the study of the literary products of the sect enabled a specific methodology to be identified.”
“What occurs to one person today will on the next day already become a proven fact and be used as the basis for further inferences.”
Hoche
“It was not surprising that hysterics were receptive to it, as this was the case with all new methods which surrounded themselves with mysteries. The believing doctor and patient were both under the suggestive effect of the same circle of ideas. Another category of patients was those in conditions where spontaneous remissions were common, such as neurasthenia and depression.”
“The correspondences between Freud, Jones, Abraham and Ferenczi, only published in their entirety over the last few years, show that Freud was fully aware of this danger and sought to take evasive action. Should he dissolve the IPA and form a new organisation? Or should he resign before being ejected by Jung? None of these solutions appeared to be viable. There were not enough numbers to impose the dissolution of the IPA on the Zurich contingent. As for leaving the IPA, one could imagine the pleasure that it would give to Forel, Bleuler, Kraepelin, Hoche, Frank, Bezzola and their colleagues to see Freud leave his own organisation.”
“In response to this situation, Freud decided to stake his all. Abraham, Jones, Ferenczi and Eitington were directed to publish conjoint attacks against Jung, in a carefully orchestrated campaign. Freud himself turned to writing his ‘bomb’, the ‘History of the psychoanalytic movement’. From the opening lines, it was quite clear that one was no longer dealing with even a pretence of open scientific discussion. As we have seen, Freud peremptorily declared that he alone was authorised to decide what was psychoanalysis, his creation. This argument from authority was clearly a response to the proliferation of Breuerian, Forelian, Adlerian and Jungian deviations. The vehemence with which Freud denounced Breuer, Jung, Adler and official science indicated his failure to resolve the question on the theoretical level, to persuade his colleagues of his definition of psychoanalysis. The extraordinary polemical tone of Freud’s ‘History’ reflects this defeat. Giving up all pretension at objectivity, Freud accused his adversaries of shameful motives, duplicity, incompetence, mental pathology, and in the case of Jung, racism.”
“In terms of posterity, Freud’s strategy was a masterstroke. In the absence of prominent alternative accounts by Adler and Jung, Freud’s so-called ‘History’ became a founding document of the psychoanalytic movement and the basis of its official history, subsequently elaborated in numerous articles, books and biographies. Freud had managed to snatch victory out of defeat, passing in silence over embarrassing episodes (Forel, the Breslau congress), and transforming disagreements concerning psychoanalysis into irrational resistances. It is no exaggeration to say that without this tendentious rescripting of history, psychoanalysis would not have been able to propagate itself and attain the prominence which it had in the twentieth century.” “Between 1905 and 1914, Freud had sought to internationalise the psychoanalytic movement through seeking allies, initially through Bleuler and Jung. Henceforth, psychoanalysis came to be propagated from the interior, through producing more psychoanalysts in the form of patients turned into disciples. In this regard, the success which psychoanalysis came to have was due not to its capacity to convince its opponents (who remained sceptical), but to the unique form of transmission which it inaugurated.”
“Separated from the university and the school of medicine (Freud formally stopped teaching in 1917), psychoanalysis became a private enterprise, recruiting clients (and hence potential followers) in an unregulated market, independent of all university or governmental authority. Psychoanalysis effectively became Freud’s firm, organised like an international company based on franchises. All sorts of subsidiaries could be formed across the world, on the condition that they faithfully reproduced the proprietary mode for forming analysts.”
“It was as if Freud had patented Coca Cola. He did not really care whether Pepsi Cola or Royal Cola or Crown Cola were better. He merely wanted to make sure that only his products carried the original label.”
Thomas Szasz
“As Ellenberger notes, Freud took over Adler’s conceptions of an autonomous aggressive drive, of the confluence and displacement of the drives and the internalisation of external demands.”
“Everything I discovered was considered common property or was attributed to Freud. I could give countless examples of that.”
Stekel, que alega ter descoberto o instinto de morte. F. plagiava, mas plagiava muito mal…
“Freud later started to work on concepts that were no longer Freudian in the original sense . . . He found himself constrained to take my line, but this he could not admit to himself.”
Jung
“This tacit recuperation of the theories of dissidents or of external critics became one of the most striking traits of the psychoanalytic movement, and it demonstrates that what was at stake in the formidable disputes between Freud and his adversaries was not the intrinsic value of particular ideas, but of who could lay claim to them.”
“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, and one finds it in many figures in medicine at that time, such as Krafft-Ebing, Löwenfeld, Erb, Strümpel, Peyer or Breuer.”
“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.”
Michell Clarke, sobre Studies on Hysteria
“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.”
Konrad Alt
“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.”
Breuer a Fliess, 1895
“Neurasthenia is certainly an illness that is sexual in root.”
Breuer
“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).”
“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.”
“To claim as Freud did in his autobiographical study that the science of his time had pronounced an ‘excommunication’ 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 symbolism (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.”
“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.”
Scherner
WHO IS THE DREAMER?
“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? The hints of dream life should certainly be heeded!”
Hildebrandt
“Similarly, whether Freud had actually read Schopenhauer – and there are many reasons for thinking that this was the case – 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, 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 reading group which avidly studied the works of Schopenhauer, Wagner and Nietzsche. Thus, one wonders how Freud could have known that he would have had great pleasure from Nietzsche without having read him!”
“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.”
“Wernicke’s pupils, Sachs and C.S. Freund, have produced a piece of nonsense on hysteria (on
psychic paralyses), which by the way is almost a plagiarism of my ‘Considerations, etc.’ in the Archives de neurologie. Sachs’s postulation of the constancy of psychic energy is more painful.”
F. a Fl., 1895, antes de se encontrar com Sachs e tê-lo como bajulador pelo resto de sua existência.
“I found the substance of my insight stated quite clearly in Lipps, perhaps rather more so than I would like.”
F. a Fl.
2. THE INTERPREFACTION OF DREAMS
“When Freud strongly overestimates himself and the significance of his theory, and with sharp words presents the psychiatrists from whom he has much to learn, even concerning elementary knowledge, as incapable, then one must regard him as having been spoilt by the blind admiration of his disciples.”
Aschaffenburg
“According to Hitschmann’s book Freud’s Theory of Neuroses, one would believe that Freud discovered the unconscious! We need only refer to the numerous works of modern psychology, as well as to Dessoir’s more strictly defined concept of the ‘underconscious’ (Unterbewussten) . . . to show how incorrect such a view is”
Forel
“I object that a man like myself who has collected his own dreams since the age of 16 and investigated the problems under discussion here since 1894 – almost as long as Freud and longer than any of his disciples – should be refused the right to discuss these questions by any Freudian!”
Vogt
“It is much as if a bacteriologist had confined his studies to the investigation of a single bacillus and had neglected the great storehouse of knowledge acquired in the whole bacteriological field.”
Morton Prince
“To invoke Freud’s ‘megalomania’ or ‘desire for grandeur’ (openly avowed in The Interpretation of Dreams) or his ‘paranoia’ (the myth of the hostile irrationality of his colleagues, the invocation of ‘resistances to psychoanalysis’, the pathologising of adversaries, etc.) is insufficient and comes down to utilising the same sort of reductive psychopathological interpretations which Freud liberally applied to others. What such explanations leave out of account is that Freud’s histories were primarily directed towards a particular public: from ‘The history of the psychoanalytic movement’, Freud was principally preaching to the converted and was no longer preoccupied with the objections of his peers. (…) From this perspective, the legend of the isolated and persecuted scientist is less the expression of Freud’s megalomania or mythomania, than the reflection of the institutional isolation of psychoanalysis.”
“Nowhere in the whole of Freud’s writings is there a shred of proof, only assertions, assertions of having proved something before, but which was never done, and mysterious reference to inaccessible and unpublished results of psycho-analyses.”
Wohlgemuth
“In other words, the ‘psychoanalogy’ (term he expressly gives to psychoanalysis) is all in the explanation, in the theory of the analyst, not in the material of the case. This indeed is quite opposed to the assumptions and quite explicable without them.”
Hollingworth
PIOR QUE A MAÇONARIA: “Moreover, from being impartial witnesses of therapeutic efficacy, the psychoanalytic method often transformed such patients into disciples, hence into active protagonists on one side of the controversy.”
“Moreover, I believe that the cures effected by Freud (as to the permanence of which, in view of the insufficiency of the published materials, no decisive opinion can as yet be given) are explicable in another way. A large proportion of the good results are certainly fully explicable as the results of suggestion. The patient’s confidence in his physician, and the fact that the treatment requires much time and patience, are two such powerful factors of suggestion, that provisionally it is necessary to regard it as possible that suggestion explains the whole matter.”
Moll
SÍNTESE DO PROBLEMA QUE É SER CÉTICO DEMAIS: “By the 1890s, psychiatrists and psychologists were acutely aware of the demise of Charcot’s theories through the criticism of the Nancy school, and of the ease with which one could take one’s theories to be real through suggesting them to patients or to subjects of psychological experimentation. Despite (or rather because of) their positivism, they didn’t trust many of the clinical ‘confirmations’ which Freud invoked in support of his theories. In the 1920s, the young Karl Popper recalled this whilst elaborating his famous critique of the non-falsifiable nature of psychoanalytic theory:
Years ago I introduced the term ‘Oedipus effect’ to describe the influence of a theory or expectation or prediction upon the event which it predicts or describes: it will be remembered that the causal chain leading to Oedipus’ parricide was started by the oracle’s prediction of this event. This is a characteristic and recurrent theme of such myths, but one which seems to have failed to attract the interest of the analysts, perhaps not accidentally.”
“When one has seen how suggestible hysterics are, even during their fit, how much they easily realise the phenomena which one expects or that they have seen produced in others, one cannot stop oneself from thinking that imitation, working by autosuggestion, plays a great role in the genesis of these manifestations . . . I thus believe that the grand hysteria which the Salpêtrière presents as classical, unfolding in clear and distinct phases like a chain hysteria, is cultivated hysteria.”
Bernheim
“Freud’s peers, thanks to their familiarity with the work of the Nancy school, saw clearly that the replacement of direct hypnotic suggestion with the method of so-called free association by no means settled the problem of suggestion understood as creation of artefacts.” “nothing guaranteed the fact that Freud’s method of free association would be any less suggestive than other psychotherapeutic methods, or that his theories would be more objective than his master Charcot’s.”
“A lengthy investigation of a patient’s mind means that one is no longer examining at the end of the investigation the object one set out to observe, but an object which has progressively altered during the course of the investigation, and altered in a way which may have been largely determined by the investigation itself. This was the circumstance which vitiated absolutely and completely the painstaking conclusions drawn by Charcot and his school of the Salpêtrière. A perusal of the literature of double personality suggests strongly the existence of a similar vitiating factor”
Hart
“Psychological experimenters (as Messer and Koffka) have frequently observed that it is very difficult to secure a really free association . . . It is rather strange that the Freudians . . . should assume that the subject is really passive in the process of the analysis, and should omit to inquire what sort of tendency or control may be exerted on the movement of thought. If we ask ourselves this question, we notice that the psychoanalyst instructs his subject to be passive and uncritical, and to give expression to every thought that comes up, no matter how trivial or embarrassing it may be. The subject is warned time and time again that he must keep back nothing if he wishes the treatment to succeed. It is easy to see that such instructions tend to arouse a definite set of mind towards that which is private and embarrassing; and this easily suggests the sexual.”
R.S. Woodworth
“As Aschaffenburg and Hoche argued, patients knew in advance what was expected of them. Hence it would be no surprise if patients exhibited all the manifestations of resistance or negative transference as portrayed in psychoanalytic theory.” E olha que estamos falando de 100 anos atrás…
“From an epistemological perspective, Freud was a classical positivist, for whom the fundamental basis of knowledge was observation (…) Like all good positivists, such as Ernst Mach, who seems to have been his principal reference in epistemological matters, he firmly distinguished between observation and theory. In general, positivists were wary of theories, which brought with them the risk of mistaking the idea for the thing and tipping over into fruitless metaphysical speculation. Thus they attempted to delimit the sphere of theory, clearly demarcating it from observation. For the most part, they knew that science wasn’t only a matter of inductive generalisation from observations, and that one could not avoid heuristic hypotheses. But they insisted that such hypotheses be perceived as such, i.e., as nothing other than theories. In a paradoxical and yet logical manner, the accent which positivists placed on observation often led to conventionalism or ludic theories: one could speculate, imagine and play with ideas, as long as it was clear that these were only ideas which could ultimately be corrected by experience. For positivists, concepts were disposable. As Mach explained, they were ‘provisional fictions’ which were necessary as one had to begin somewhere, but one shouldn’t hesitate to dispense with them when one came up with better ones. For Freud, the ‘basic concepts’ of his metapsychology were only ‘fictions’, ‘mythical entities’, ‘speculative superstructure(s)’, ‘scientific constructions’ or ‘working hypothes(es)’ destined to be replaced if they came into conflict with observation.”
“Huygens’ wave hypothesis was not a perfect fit and its justification left much to be desired, causing not a little trouble even to much later followers; but had he dropped it, much of the ground would have been unprepared for Young and Fresnel who would probably have had to confine themselves to the preliminary run-up. The hypothesis of the emission was adapted little by little to the new experiences . . . Hence experience worked continually to transform and complete our representations, enabling a better fit with our hypotheses.”
Ernst Mach
MORRER ABRAÇADO NO TRIÂNGULO… “Without metapsychological speculation and theorizing – I had almost said ‘phantasising’ – we shall not get another step forward. Unfortunately, here as elsewhere, what our Witch reveals is neither very clear nor very detailed.” F.
“Psycho-analysis an Empirical Science. – Psycho-analysis is not, like philosophies, a system starting out from a few sharply defined basic concepts, seeking to grasp the whole universe with the help of these and, once it is completed, having no room for fresh discoveries or better understanding. On the contrary, it keeps close to the facts in its field of study, seeks to solve the immediate problems of observation, gropes its way forward by the help of experience, is always incomplete and always ready to correct or modify its theories. There is no incongruity (any more than in the case of physics or chemistry) if its most general concepts lack clarity and if its postulates are provisional; it leaves their more precise definition to the results of future work.”
F.
“The Freudian theme of theoretical fiction, which has often been seen as an oppositional counterpoint to ‘positivism and to the substantialisation of metaphysical and metapsychological instances’, is in fact a typically positivist trait.”
“Hence there is nothing to guarantee that psychoanalysis is not an a priori system, a celibate theoretical machine which produces its own evidence – a positivist’s nightmare.”
COM O TEMPO, FOI DEIXANDO DE SE CORRIGIR: “When, however, I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only phantasies which my patients had made up or which I myself had perhaps forced on them, I was for some time completely at a loss . . . When I had pulled myself together, I was able to draw the right conclusions from my discovery: namely, that the neurotic symptoms were not related directly to actual events but to wishful phantasies, and that as far as the neurosis was concerned psychical reality was of more importance than material reality. I do not believe even now that I forced the seduction-phantasies on my patients, that I ‘suggested’ them.” F. – Nem mesmo as fantasias de realização eram reais…
“The ‘pragmatic argument’ will not work in this case. We have a number of other treatments, all more or less successful in treating neurotic cases, and each one purporting to be based on a different theory.”
Woodworth
“Psycho-analysts defend their theory by pointing to its practical therapeutic successes. People are cured by psycho-analysis, they say; therefore psycho-analysis must be correct as a theory. This argument would be more convincing than it is, if it could be shown: first, that people have been cured by psycho-analysis after all methods had failed; and secondly, that they have really been cured by psychoanalysis and not by suggestion somewhat circuitously applied through psycho-analytic ritual.”
Aldous Huxley
“‘Suggestion’ is to the psychologist what bacteria are to the surgeon. The psychologist aims, as it were, at an aseptic treatment, whilst the psychoanalyst indulges in deliberate infection. After having waded through the psycho-analysis of little Hans, which is reeking and teeming with suggestion, to read Freud’s remarks upon it and upon its critics simply takes one’s breath away.”
Wohlgemuth
“To those who suspected him of projecting theories drawn from elsewhere onto clinical material, he replied that he was much too uncultivated to be capable of doing so. To those who accused him of imposing his ideas onto patients, he retorted that he only listened to what they had told him. The Freudian legend was a very effective means of returning critiques to their sender and of inverting the order of research. Hence what was subjective suddenly became objective. What was contingent and historical became atemporal. Interpretation became ‘psychic reality’. Constructions became ‘historical truth’ which emerged from a black box to which only the analyst had the key.”
“We propose to call this process of the transmutation of interpretations and constructions into positive facts interprefaction. Interprefaction forms the basic element of Freud’s scientistic rhetoric and the diverse historical legends which he wove around his so-called ‘discoveries’.”
PERRRVERRRTIIIDO: “Why did Freud feel the need to rewrite history so as to imply that his patients had spontaneously volunteered their memories? Paradoxically, the fact that they didn’t recall the events in question would have fitted in better with his subsequent theory of repression. But not to have done so would have laid himself completely open to the charge of suggestion. To concede this here would be to raise the question whether the same was not true of his later theories of neurosis, obtained through the same ‘analytic’ method? Hence it was critical for Freud to conceal the fact that it was he who had speculated, imagined these scenes of sodomy, sadism, fetishism, analingus and fellatio, and taken them to be real, under the influence of his theoretical presuppositions of the moment.
At the same time, through transforming his own hypotheses and conjectures into the ‘communications’ of his patients, Freud was able to wash his hands of this whole affair, as the onus of responsibility lay with his patients. His error had simply been one of having trusted their bona fides too much and hence having allowed himself to have been led astray by them. It also enabled him to give body and reality to his speculations, despite their erroneous character. With the seduction theory, Freud had put his scientific reputation on the line, and had failed.”
“Should we then reduce the Freudian interprefaction of fantasies to a deception, to an effect of pure rhetoric? This is the perspective of a number of ‘revisionist’ scholars, such as Frank Cioffi, Han Israëls, Allen Esterson and Frederick Crews, for whom the account of the discovery of unconscious fantasies is a historical mystification which rests on nothing. From this perspective, the Freudian legend took hold because of our belief in the unconscious, which itself was a ruse of the great sophist. Hence the task of the historian should be one of unmasking the vacuity of Freud’s accounts, and with this of psychoanalysis itself. However, such a perspective, whilst unmasking Freud’s theories, still partakes of a similar positivism.”
“Individuals continue to confess their fantasies, to rescript their lives in terms of Oedipal conflicts, or to recover repressed memories of infantile sexual abuse, and practitioners continue to conduct their trade in good faith. Is this simply due to human, all too human credulity (‘mundus vultus decepit’)?”
“Or because psychoanalysts have maintained a still powerful authoritative position in the media, health services and human sciences? Such a perspective would be too simple, and would also fail to account for the success of other psychological theories and other psychotherapeutic systems which have also flourished.”
“Psychoanalysis can no longer be dismissed as a fad; it has risen to the dignity of a fashion, and possesses all that moral authority and intellectual finality which we associate with a particular pattern of hats or whiskers . . . But in any case, a theory is only a thought, while a fashion is a fact. If certain things have really taken hold of the centres of civilization, they play quite as much a part in history whether their ultimate origin is a misapprehension or not.”
Chesterton
“Individuals respond to the interpretations of their analysts and suggestive effects of cultural milieux, and many have rescripted their lives on this basis. As a result, new realities have been fashioned. In other words, there is a becoming-fact of fiction or legend becoming a fact, which escapes the simple opposition of true or false, of the given or constructed, of the real and illusory.”
“Suddenly, the past was no longer the same; innocent memories of childhood were transformed into ‘screen-memories’ for more embarrassing or sinister events. Dreams could become confirmations of new realities, and symptoms could take on new significations. Patients themselves could take on the task of reinterpreting their lives through a previously unremembered traumatic event which seemed to offer the hope of explanation and liberation. Hence it is not surprising that scenes of seduction would emerge, just as Freud predicted.”
ATINGIMOS PERIGOSOS CONTORNOS BAUDRILLARDIANOS! “The patients reproduced traumatic ‘reminiscences’ between 1889 and 1895, then scenes of infantile sexual abuse between 1896 and 1897, and then they stopped, once Freud asked them instead to produce Oedipal fantasies or memories of ‘primal scenes’. Each time, a new reality was produced, with its own rules and characteristics. Had other hypotheses and theoretical demands been given, other psychological realities and therapeutic worlds may have resulted – which was exactly what took place at the turn of the century in the myriad other schools. Like many other psychotherapies and psychologies, psychoanalysis was an ontology-making practice, which recreated the world in its image.”
ONDE ESTÁ O SEU COMPLEXO? ESTARIA NO MESMO LUGAR QUE O MEU? “If a dream of mine were analysed by Freud he would doubtless unearth some sexual complex, whilst Jung, with the same dream, would discover some ‘prospective and teleological function,’ and Adler would find the ‘will to power, the masculine protest.’ This I think is sufficient proof that the result is due to the psychoanalyst and that the dream-interpretation is the via regia to the analyst’s unconscious.” Wohlgemuth
“Depending upon the point of view of the analyst, the patients of each school seem to bring up precisely the kind of phenomenological data which confirm the theories and interpretations of their analysts! Thus each theory tends to be self-validating. Freudians elicit material about the Oedipus Complex and castration anxiety, Jungians about archetypes, Rankian about separation anxiety, Adlerians about masculine strivings and feelings of inferiority, Horneyites about idealized images, Sullivanians about disturbed relationships, etc.”
Judd Marmor
“It is as if Descartes’ famous ‘evil genius’ really existed and self-confirmed all the theories of dynamic psychiatry.”
Ellenberger
“As the participants agree to play the game and respect the rules and the contract, they make it real. At a structural level, the same holds true for psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy. These consensual practices do not reflect the world, they recreate a segment of it. There is nothing wrong with that as long as protagonists do not seek to impose their world on those who never signed up for it and who don’t accept it.”
“The examples which we have considered so far concern cases where both parties have taken on board the constructions and interpretations of the analyst, and have remade the world and rewritten personal history on this basis. But what of cases in which one of the parties rejects the interpretations and even refuses to join in the further game of ‘transference resistance’?”
“If colleagues did not accept his theories, it was because they repressed sexuality (Breuer, and German psychiatry as a whole), because they were perverse (Stekel), neurotic (Rank), paranoiac (Fliess, Adler, Ferenczi), on the edge of psychosis (Jung) or in a psychiatric condition (Rank again).”
“Breuer hadn’t mentioned his patient’s very painful neuralgia in his 1895 case history, nor the morphine addiction that had resulted from his efforts to calm her convulsions. Nevertheless, the neuralgias figured prominently among the symptoms that he and Freud, in their ‘Preliminary communication’, claimed to have been able to trace back to traumas.”
“There is then a certain untrustworthiness about all these earlier cases of Freud. Thus again, the famous first case that he had with Breuer, which has been so much spoken about as an example of a brilliant therapeutic success, was in reality nothing of the kind. Freud told me that he was called in to see the woman the same night that Breuer had seen her for the last time, and that she was in a bad hysterical attack, due to the breaking off of the transference.”
Jung
“To Jung, to Marie Bonaparte, to Stefan Zweig and, it seems, to many other colleagues, Freud appears to have related an even more fabulous and explosive story than that of Anna O.’s supposed ‘transferential love’ for Breuer.”
“Eitingon [talvez o maior verme da burocracia da IPA] provided a critical revision of Breuer’s case history in which he emphasised its pre-psychoanalytic character, that is to say its incompleteness. Breuer had insisted on the ‘asexual’ character of Anna O.’s symptomology; Eitingon, though, retranslating Breuer’s report in the ‘language of psychoanalysis’, had no difficulty recognising the sexuality within it: Anna O., at the bedside of her ailing father, had nourished incestuous fantasies, as well as a fantasy of pregnancy which she subsequently repressed and transferred onto Breuer, who was transformed into a substitute for her dead father.”
“Even Kurt Eissler, at the end of a life dedicated to defending Freud’s probity and moral rectitude against his detractors, was forced to recognise this fact, speaking in this regard of a ‘hardly believable derailment’ by his hero.” Depois de tantas entrevistas nos anos 50, qualquer um arregraria de seu cargo na fascistolândia.
“Freud acted here in a way that is in contrast to his usual fidelity of character: he was ungrateful, indiscreet, and slanderous.”
K.E., bancando o ingênuo.
“I am one of the rare members of Bertha Pappenheim’s close family circle who is still living and I have the duty as her executor to speak in the name of the family and to establish that the family is not capable of an inexcusable lack of piety to authorise the lifting of a medical secret which Bertha had guarded during her life. But much worse than the revelation of her name as such is the fact that Dr. Jones on p. 225 adds on his own account a completely superficial and misleading version of Bertha’s life after the conclusion of Dr. Breuer’s treatment. Instead of informing us how Bertha was finally cured and how, completely mentally reestablished, she led a new life of active social work, he gives the impression that she was never cured and that her social activity and even her piety were another phase of the development of her illness . . . Anyone who has known Bertha Pappenheim during the decades which followed will regard this attempt at interpretation on the part of a man who never knew her personally as defamation.”
Paul Homburger
3. CASE HISTORIES
“In this sense, we can well say that Freud’s ‘case histories’ (Krankengeschichten) are no less mythical than the fabulous ‘history of the psychoanalytic movement’ narrated in his autobiographical writings or the history of humanity described in his phylogenetic and anthropological fictions. No matter where we look, we find the same rewriting of history, the same narrativising of arbitrary interpretations, the same transformation of hypotheses into facts.”
“If the final criterion for the fiction proposed by the therapist is that the patient accept (veri-fy) it, why insist on perpetrating Freudian fictions in accordance with psychoanalytic theory as opposed to any others? Why the inevitable interpretation of the patient’s biography in terms of desire, repression, resistance or transference – and not, let’s say, in terms of class struggle, astrological constellations, the evil eye, diet or psychopharmacology?”
“There is nothing inherently wrong with this (after all, the therapist has to start from somewhere), but we at least need to recognise that little has fundamentally changed since Freud’s more authoritarian and ‘suggestive’ psychoanalysis, in which the patient was indoctrinated.”
“Freud was not an excellent psychoanalytic technician . . . First of all, he had practised suggestion for too long not to have retained certain reflexes. When he was persuaded of a truth, he wasted little time in awakening it in his patient’s mind; he wanted to quickly convince him, and because of this, he talked too much. Secondly, one rapidly sensed the theoretical question with which he was preoccupied, because he often developed at length new points of view that he was in the process of clarifying in his own mind. It was beneficial for the mind, but not always to the treatment.”
Raymond de Saussure, um dos analisandos de Freud!
“He was much more interested in the work in general, than in me, as a person. He was interested in the translations (for the Collected Papers). He was interested in the Verlag (blotted out) and he would as soon as one came in be quite prepared to show me a German letter and discuss it with me, you see, and argue, and that sort of thing. Well, from my point of view now it is completely impossible to see it as an analysis! . . . I was also frustrated and deprived because he practically devoted the whole session to business.”
Joan Riviere
“Whether the patient chooses to collaborate with the analyst or, on the contrary, resist his interpretations, the fact remains that everything originates from the theory informing these interpretations – no matter if it be the ‘ready-made’ theory inherited by Freud’s successors or else, as in the case of the founder himself, hypotheses and speculations tried out on patients. We thus have the right to wonder, as Albert Moll was already doing in 1909, if the case histories are actually at the core of the theory or if it isn’t rather the inverse.”
“The Freudian legend, as we have seen, exists to bolster and give credibility to this constantly reaffirmed, positivistic thesis: the theory (the meta-psychology) comes after the observation or, at the least, it never interferes with it. (…) It is this impartial observation, the fundamental cornerstone of psychoanalysis, that case histories are supposed to represent for those not present at the analysis, just like, say, the Royal Society’s seventeenth century Philosophical Transactions or the modern reports we make of experiments today. These documents take the place of what happened in the analyst’s office; they report to the public the psychical ‘events’ brought to light during analysis – and the theory subsequently attempts, somehow or other, to make sense of these events. We immediately see the enormous role these case histories play in the official epistemology of Freudianism, inasmuch as they are equated with the analytical experience itself. They are, as Kurt Eissler proudly declared, ‘the pillars on which psychoanalysis as an empirical science rests’. To take this declaration seriously, though, is to admit that the entire metapsychological edifice rests on a handful of cases that were observed and described by Freud himself: Dora, the Rat Man, the Wolf Man, the Homosexual (we hesitate to add Little Hans to this extremely short list, because, with the exception of one session with Freud, his analysis was conducted entirely by his father).”
“This situation is almost unique: in perhaps no other field has so great a body of theory been built upon such a small public record of raw data.”
Michael Sherwood
“What is problematic about Freud’s observations is the fact that he was the only one who had access to them, contrary to the demands of publicity which have characterised science since the seventeenth century. As Steven Shapin has shown, this demand is an entirely integral aspect of the ‘Scientific Revolution’, not to mention the modern sciences among which psychoanalysis is supposedly situated.”
“Thus, even during Freud’s time, any doctor or researcher could attend Charcot’s patient demonstrations or Bernheim’s hypnosis sessions, both to verify the authenticity of the phenomena they described, and to train in their techniques. It was after a visit to the Salpêtrière, for example, that Delboeuf became convinced of the artefactual nature of Charcot’s grande hystérie and grand hypnotisme. Likewise, it was after their return from a visit to Bernheim’s clinic in Nancy that Forel, Freud and several others began practising ‘suggestive psychotherapy’ in their clinics or private offices.”
“This is especially true at the Burghölzli clinic, where psychoanalysis, as we have seen, was taught just like any other medical technique. Researchers who came there for an internship could have on-the-job training in the new techniques by witnessing analytic interviews with patients, by undergoing analysis with Jung, Riklin or Maeder, or again by collectively analysing their dreams and slips of the tongue during the meals they took together.” “Again: in 1909 the title of Jung’s lectures for the summer semester was ‘Course in Psychotherapy with Demonstrations’, making clear the open nature of the teaching being done in Zurich.”
“He was my first instructor in the practice of psychoanalysis and I used to be present during his treatment of a case.”
Jones sobre Otto Gross
“It will be remarked that here Freud speaks of the necessity of hiding his patients’ identities from the public, which is an entirely legitimate concern. But why expand this embargo to include those colleagues bound by professional secrecy? It’s one thing to protect a patient’s privacy from the public; it’s something else to shield their analyses from any peer evaluation or ‘case presentation’. No one, in fact, would push the principle of medical confidentiality to such an extreme, and apply it in such a rigid manner, as Freud and his successors did. Psychoanalysis is a strange, confidential science, in the sense that the direct and public presentation of the matter of fact is quite literally forbidden, tabooed and scandalised. From this point of view, Freud’s private office was indeed closer to the laboratory of the ancient alchemists, where a ‘secret art’ was practised, than to the open and transparent space of the modern laboratory.”
“An examination of the list of Freud’s technical writings . . . will show that after the publication of the Studies on Hysteria in 1895, apart from two very sketchy accounts dating from 1903 and 1904, he published no general description of his technique for more than 15 years . . . The relative paucity of Freud’s writings on technique, as well as his hesitations and delays over their production, suggests that there was some feeling of reluctance on his part to publish this kind of material. And this, indeed, seems to have been the case, for a variety of reasons . . . Behind all his discussions of technique, however, Freud never ceased to insist that a proper mastery of the subject could only be acquired from clinical experience and not from books. Clinical experience with patients, no doubt, but, above all, clinical experience from the analyst’s own analysis.”
Strachey
“Even today, analysts in training learn psychoanalysis not by observing a senior practitioner’s analyses, but by studying Freud’s case studies, and by making a didactic analysis with an analyst who learned the same way. As a result, climbing back up the chain we always find ourselves with Freud and his canonical case histories – endlessly copied and ‘confirmed’ by successive generations of analysands/analysts.”
“Freud, Jones thus tells us, was a man of ‘absolute honesty’ and ‘flawless integrity’; a man who was ready to sacrifice friendships and theories upon the altar of Science. (Jones, with some difficulty, concedes that the murky Swoboda–Weininger scandal, in which Fliess caught Freud red-handed in a lie, was the exception which proved the rule: ‘It was perhaps the only occasion in Freud’s life when he was for a moment not completely straightforward.’)”
“As Lacan might have said: the Freudian field is structured by a symbolic pact with the founding Father, whose Word, which his sons constantly return to, is the sole guarantor of their practice. This is what explains, for example, why the question of knowing whether Freud cheated on his wife with his sister-in-law is so significant for psychoanalysts.¹”
¹ “See Maciejewski (2006) for the reportage of Freud’s signing into a room at Hotel Schweizerhaus in Maloja, Switzerland, in August 1898 with his sister-in-law as ‘Mr and Mrs Freud’.”
“Freud’s case studies are long, complex and, above all, well written. While the ‘observations’ of a Bernheim or even a Janet limit themselves to transmitting events in a quasi-telegraphic style, Freud tells us actual stories, using all the narrative resources available to the fiction writer (some of which we will take a look at later on).”
“Freud was quite extraordinarily inaccurate about details. He seems to have had a delusion that he possessed a ‘photographic memory’. Actually . . . he constantly contradicts himself over details of fact. When we did the case histories (for the Collected Papers) we sent him a long list of these – most of which he then put right in the Gesammelte Schriften and later editions.”
Strachey a Jones
“It is a theory supported by itself: a celibate speculative machine producing, with its hypotheses and ‘constructions’, its own reality. Whatever he might claim, Freud never ‘observed’ the unconscious or repression anymore than he ‘discovered’ the Oedipus complex, infantile sexuality or the meaning of dreams. He only wagered that they existed, acting ‘as if ’ these conjectures were real and then asking his patients to confirm them.”
“He thought that just as Kant postulated the thing in itself behind the phenomenal world, so he himself postulated the unconscious behind the conscious that is accessible to our experience, but that can never be directly experienced.” Binswanger, elogiando Freud, ao meu ver, já que pelo menos ele entendeu algo de Kant!
“who ever said that Ida loved Mr K.? Only Freud. It is obvious that Freud’s interesting ‘psychological problem’ would instantly vanish if he consented to abandon his hypothesis instead of projecting it onto Ida’s unconscious – in spite of her protests.”
“It is important to note the great pains taken by Freud not to specify the extent to which he has ‘supplemented’ the material provided by Ida – and for good reason: not only is the ‘primal scene’ his own supposition, but furthermore Ida ‘denied flatly’ having the slightest memory of masturbating before the age of 8, or having been in love with her father. Even if we keep her memories of the mountain excursion in mind, we are nonetheless led to the conclusion that Ida’s contribution to Freud’s case history was quite minimal. The rest is pure speculation on Freud’s part; however, he narrates all of this as if the events had actually occurred in Ida’s mind. So how, under these conditions, is the reader to know the difference?”
“The examples we have cited to this point all have one thing in common: they systematically confuse the limits between the analyst’s heuristic hypotheses and the ‘psychical reality’ of the person on the couch. What was initially an idea of Freud’s is, in the end, presented as the patient’s unconscious or latent thought, in such a manner that we no longer know who thinks what. Everything, in fact, proceeds as if Freud were reading into the thoughts of others; or, more precisely, as if he were reading them for us.”
“Just like Balzac or Stendhal, he knows the hidden motives behind their actions, and he even has access to thoughts and feelings that they themselves are hardly aware of, or else refuse to acknowledge. But while the omniscient narrator of classic novels takes centre stage, often intervening with conspicuous commentary or irony, Freud constantly tries to efface himself as narrator in order better to create the illusion of having immediate access to the thoughts of his ‘characters’ (which, literarily speaking, actually places him in the company of such realist novelists as Flaubert, Zola and Henry James).” “The reader, who is asked to suspend his disbelief, now has the impression of directly witnessing the patient’s inner life.”
“Most of the time, Freud carefully avoids stating explicitly that he cites statements made by the patient. More prudently, he prefers to remain in the ambiguous zone of ‘free indirect style’ so dear to realist novelists, which has the precise effect of confounding quotation and narration, direct discourse and indirect discourse. Instead of writing in the mode of oratio recta: (Dora said:) ‘I remember how much Papa had exerted himself that night with mother’, or else in the mode of oratio obliqua: ‘Dora remembered that her father had exerted himself a great deal that night with her mother’, he writes, like a novelist narrating the inner thoughts of a character: ‘Then came the recollection of how much he had exerted himself with Mummy that night.’”
“To those, like Max Scharnberg or Allen Esterson, who would accuse him of deceitfully presenting his interpretations as if they were the actual accounts given by his patients, he could always reply that he did nothing of the sort: these critics were adopting an extremely literal and legalistic reading of what is, in fact, only literary licence. Flaubert’s trial, it has been said, would never have taken place if the authorities had had enough literary sense to understand that Madame Bovary’s immorality was that of his character Emma’s thoughts, narrated in free indirect style, and not those of the author-narrator Flaubert. Likewise and conversely, Freud would be right to argue, from a strictly grammatical point of view, that he never explicitly attributed his own thoughts to his patients.”
“is it his fault if his readers take at face value what he, the conscientious scientist, was merely suggesting?”
“Why did Freud engage in this retelling? And why did he so forcefully maintain that Lanzer owed the money to the imaginary young woman at the post office, rather than to Lieutenant Engel? We needn’t look very far to find the answer. In the section titled ‘The paternal complex and the solution to the rat idea’, Freud explains that the story of the anonymous Captain had revived in Lanzer’s unconscious his identification with his father.”
Já estou de saco cheio dessa história do Homem dos Ratos. Os psicanalistas podem enfiá-la dolorosamente no cu se quiserem!
“Jung, clearly, was hoping that Freud would finally provide the detailed description of a completed analysis that everyone had been waiting for. Freud, who, surprisingly, seems to have been short on completed analyses (in 1908!), decided at the last moment to give a lecture on Lanzer, despite the fact that this latest analysis wasn’t ‘finished’.”
“This case also provided Freud with a felicitous opportunity to present a ‘defence and illustration’ of his theory of obsessional neurosis, which Janet had criticised in his monumental work Obsessions and Psychasthenia. Thus, given the stakes, it was urgent that Freud ‘finish’ Lanzer’s analysis.”
“Sergius Constantinovitch Pankejeff, who received money from the Sigmund Freud Archives, and around whom Kurt Eissler and Muriel Gardiner had established a tight sanitary cordon, seems to have been rather excited to be discovered by someone outside the International Psychoanalytic Association. Having gained his confidence, Obholzer succeeded in convincing him to agree to a series of interviews, despite pressure exerted on him by Eissler and Gardiner to deny her request.”
“Not so, Pankejeff retorted. Sixty years after his first analysis with Freud, he was still suffering from obsessional ruminations and bouts of deep depression, despite the subsequent and almost constant analytic treatment he had received since then (after the war, he had been in successive analyses with Alfred von Winterstein, an unidentified female analyst (Eva Laible?) and Wilhelm Solms; to this ought to be added a stay at a psychoanalytic counselling clinic in 1955, as well as daily ‘analytically directed conversations’ with Kurt Eissler when the latter returned to Vienna during the summer).”
“OBHOLZER: To get back to sexuality: Freud says somewhere that you preferred a certain position during intercourse, the one from behind…
PANKEJEFF: Well, that was no absolute, you know…
OBHOLZER: …that you enjoyed it less in other positions.
PANKEJEFF: But that also depends on the woman, how she is built. There are women where it is only possible from the front. That’s happened to me… It depends on whether the vagina is more toward the front or toward the rear.
OBHOLZER: I see. In any event, Freud writes, ‘He was walking through the village which formed part of their estate, when he saw a peasant girl kneeling by the pond and employed in washing clothes in it…’ He thought that you involuntarily fall in love when you come across something like that. And ‘even his final choice of object, which played such an important part in his life, is shown by its details (though they cannot be adduced here) to have been dependent upon the same condition…’
PANKEJEFF: That’s incorrect.
(…)
PANKEJEFF: With Therese, if you insist on details, the first coitus was that she sat on top of me.
OBHOLZER: That would be the exact opposite…”
“Here again, protests from Pankejeff. Not only had his constipation never been cured, but it wasn’t even the reason he went to see Freud. It was actually Freud who had insisted that he undergo a second period of analysis, despite his desire to return to Odessa to save his fortune which was threatened by the Bolshevik Revolution.”
“Pankejeff often told me that his first 4 years of analysis with Freud had helped him . . . The mistake he did was to go and see Freud again in 1919, because he agreed to resume the analysis in spite of the fact that he didn’t want to. He had paid a visit to Freud on his way to Freiburg, where his wife Theresa was staying with her dying daughter, and Freud persuaded him to come back from Freiburg to Vienna for a reanalysis. This was the ‘catastrophe’. The Wolfman always reproached Freud for this.”
Obholzer
“In an academy filled with scepticism concerning the scientificity of psychology, and populated with semiotic, hermeneutic, post-structural and deconstructive literary theories, one can imagine the following retort:
So, you’ve picked apart some of the narrative strategies Freud uses in his case histories to support his positivistic rhetoric and create the illusion of an empirical science. But we’ve known for ages that Freud wasn’t a scientist, but a phenomenal man of letters, one of these writers who change the world by giving us a new language to describe it . . . Of course his case histories were novels! If not, how could he have worked out the incredible complexity of our deepest thoughts, their overdetermination, their signifying absurdity? We don’t go to the laboratory to provide an account of the ambiguity and ambivalence of desire – the desire that turns against itself or loses itself in the other – we do so with the pen of the great writer. Do we reproach Stendhal, Dostoievsky or Proust for not being scientists? Freud shouldn’t be measured against Copernicus or Darwin; rather, he should be measured against Dante, Shakespeare, and all these great narrators of the human soul. Come to speak of it, didn’t Freud receive the Goethe Prize?
This hermeneutical-narrativistic defence of Freud and psychoanalysis has become commonplace today, but it does come up against a stubborn fact: nothing irritated Freud so much as to be compared to a novelist.
A recent book by Havelock Ellis . . . includes an essay on ‘Psycho-Analysis in relation to sex.’ The aim of this essay is to show that the writings of the creator of analysis should be judged not as a piece of scientific work but as an artistic production. We cannot but regard this view as a fresh turn taken by resistance and as a repudiation of analysis, even though it is disguised in a friendly, indeed in too flattering a manner. We are inclined to meet it with a most decided contradiction.
F.”
“In literature, psychoanalysis ran into a mirror: a strange and unnerving double.”
“We have the right to analyze a poet’s work, but it is not right for the poet to make poetry out of our analyses.”
“We must not confuse the darkness I am speaking of and that into which Freud asks his patients to descend. Freud burglarized some shabby apartments. He removed some mediocre pieces of furniture and erotic photographs. He never sanctified the abnormal as transcendence. He never paid tribute to the great disorders. He provided a confessional for the unfortunate . . . Freud’s key to dreams is incredibly naïve. Here, the simple christens itself as the complex. His sexual obsession was destined to seduce an idle society for which sex is its axis . . . Sexuality is not, we infer, without some role in it. Da Vinci and Michaelangelo proved it, but their secrets have nothing to do with Freud’s removals . . . Freud’s mistake was to have made our darkness into a storage unit that brings it into disrepute, and for having opened it when it is fathomless and can’t even be opened part way.”
Jean Cocteau
4. POLICING THE PAST
“After Freud’s death on 23 September 1939, his heirs had to confront the question of how to deal with his literary remains. In keeping with his style, Freud had requested that all his papers be burnt after his death, but his widow could not bring herself to do this. What should one do with all these documents – leave them in an attic, place them in an archive or publish them? This question had already arisen when Freud’s letters to Fliess re-emerged and were purchased by Marie Bonaparte. As we have seen, she had acquired them on the express condition that they would not enter Freud’s possession and she had kept this promise, resisting Freud’s pressure to have them burnt.
Freud, when I wrote to him from Paris that Ida Fliess had sold his letters and that I acquired them from Reinhold Stahl, was very moved. He judged this act to be highly inimical on the part of Fliess’s widow. He was happy to know that at least the letters were in my hands, and not sent off to someplace in America where they would no doubt have been published immediately . . . Ida Fliess was determined that the letters not reach the hands of Freud.
Bonaparte
Whilst the letters did not fall into Freud’s hands, his family got hold of them and could decide what to do with them. As Freud had destroyed Fliess’ letters, there was no need for negotiations between two literary estates, as later happened with the Freud–Jung letters.”
“It was finally decided to have Kris prepare an edition under the joint supervision of Anna Freud and Marie Bonaparte. Kris seemed well placed for this task, as a historian of art and a psychoanalyst trained by Anna Freud. Furthermore, he was married to the child analyst Marianne Rie, who had also been analysed by Anna Freud, and was the daughter of Freud’s old friend Oscar Rie and Melanie Bondy, the sister of Ida Fliess. Kris was clearly ‘one of the family’.”
“Let’s just take . . . for instance the notion that life is regulated by rhythms, biorhythms and so on. Well, you can go right back to Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man and find an elaborate discussion about why the gestation cycles of all higher vertebrates follow periods of either weeks or a month and always multiples of 7, 14 and 28 days. Darwin argued that this is simply an evolutionary consequence of our having evolved from some kind of invertebrate progenitor which lived in tidal zones, for in tidal zones the food cycles and therefore the reproductive cycles are dependent on the phases of the tides and therefore of the moon. Now, if Charles Darwin is taking this stuff seriously, why shouldn’t all of Fliess’s contemporaries?”
Sulloway
“Ernst Kris was confronted with the problem of how to square the content of Freud’s letters to Fliess with the legend of the immaculate conception proposed by Freud in his public works. The simplest manner was to employ Freud’s private strategy of pathologising Fliess, and hence portraying his theories as the expression of his paranoia. How could Freud have possibly been influenced by such manifestly delirious speculations? (…) Kris even did some family research to try to get an authorised corroboration of his diagnoses from Fliess’ son Robert, who was his wife’s cousin. This did not prove to be difficult. Robert Fliess had turned against his father, notably after a ‘long conversation’ with Freud in 1929. He had been trained by Karl Abraham, and was now installed as a psychoanalyst in New York.”
“It was only in 1985 when the complete letters were published that the scale of the censorship became fully apparent: of the 284 letters which Kris had at his disposal, only 168 escaped being totally eliminated, and of these only 29 were published intact. The others (including some of the accompanying manuscripts, such as ‘Manuscript C’) were shortened in differing proportions, often without indication. Nearly 2/3 of the letters were discarded. As James Strachey later confided to Max Schur with British understatement, ‘the censorship of Freud’s letters in the Anfänge was rather extreme’.”
“One more: From the beginning I had the greatest pleasure in omitting the Eckstein case history. I do not believe that it will be missed by the reader and it seems to me that there is a long series of considerations against it.”
Anna
“To Fliess, Freud described what transpired in his office in a raw manner. This makes the correspondence indispensable for reconstructing Freud’s practice at this time, notably during the period of the ‘seduction theory’. One can see how he threw ideas in the air and then ‘tested’ them on his patients, through insisting upon them until he had obtained the desired confirmation, and how he treated the slightest refusal as a ‘resistance’ to be conquered by all means possible.”
“It was my intention to leave out everything which could give an impression of excessive intimacy, everything which the details and the extent of the nose and heart complaints draws out before the death of his father . . . Further, I have left out what gives the impression of wildness in the case histories . . . and what here and there is too intimate in connection with these abridgements . . . I also think that the abridgement must go further . . . I have no bad conscience with the abridgements which I now recommend to you. On the contrary, perhaps we will decide to be still more radical.”
Kris
“Thus passages where Freud appeared to credit the possibility of a satanic sexual cult were omitted. Freud had been intrigued by the resemblance of the ‘scenes’ of perversion which he provoked in his patients and the accounts of diabolic debauchery extorted under torture by the judges in the Inquisition. Rather than being more circumspect concerning the ‘scenes’ of his patients, he ended by believing the veracity of the accounts of the poor ‘witches’, effectively taking sides with their torturers. Furthermore, he floated the hypothesis that the perverse acts which his patients had allegedly submitted to were part of a ritual practised by a secret satanic sect still active. Fliess was sceptical. As for Kris and Anna Freud, it was clear that the striking similarity between Freud’s therapy and the Inquisition would not go down well before the public.”
“But why did the devil who took possession of the poor things invariably abuse them sexually and in a loathsome manner? Why are their confessions under torture so like the communications made by my patients in psychic treatment? . . . Eckstein has a scene where the diabolus sticks needles into her fingers and then places a candy on each drop of blood. As far as blood is concerned, you are completely without blame!”
F.
“I am beginning to grasp an idea: it is as though in the perversions, of which hysteria is the negative, we have before us a remnant of a primeval sexual cult, which once was – perhaps still is – a religion in the Semitic East (Moloch, Astarte). Imagine, 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 . . . I dream, therefore, of a primeval devil religion with rites that continue to be carried on secretly, and understand the harsh therapy of the witches’ judges. Connecting links abound.”
F.
“However, despite all the efforts of the censors, Freud’s letters to Fliess remained explosive. One could not conceal the fact that Freud had had an extremely intense friendship with Fliess. Furthermore, this relation appears more strange if one simultaneously depicts Fliess as a dangerous paranoiac: the further one tried to separate Freud from Fliess, the more pathological their intimacy appeared.”
“It’s really a complete instance of folie à deux, with Freud in the unexpected role of hysterical partner to a paranoia.”
Strachey
“The so-called Freudian ‘epistemological break’ was, quite literally, the product of the censors’ scissors.”
“Anna Freud and Marie Bonaparte were strongly against any mention of a ‘neurosis’ of the founder, which risked giving weapons to the adversaries of psychoanalysis. So the official diagnosis remained one of organic cardiac symptoms.”
“Even Schur had changed his opinion, as, after reading the letters, he ‘suddenly felt that he never really believed in the thrombosis of the 1890s’.” Outro médico merda e inepto!
“The censor was now censored, and Kris removed references to Freud’s ‘feminine tendency’ and his various ‘neurotic’ symptoms, and only left a vague reference to his mood swings and the alternation of progress and resistance. Consequently, the reader remains in the dark as to precisely what Freud was cured of. The self-analysis, which Kris had brought to centre stage to provide a therapy for the errancy of the letters, now became a cure without an illness nor much in the way of discernable symptoms. The mystification of the origins of psychoanalysis was complete. It was only in 1966 that Max Schur discretely revealed some fragments from the unpublished parts of the correspondence (…) However, the myth of the immaculate self-analysis had already taken root and become embedded and enshrined in the literature of psychoanalysis and spread to other disciplines, including in figures as sophisticated as Derrida and Ricoeur. The censors had won. To this day, how many people bother to read the complete edition of the letters to Fliess?”
“As we have seen, Freud had been profoundly allergic to any intrusion in his private life and his heirs shared this attitude, systematically refusing all cooperation with projects such as the fictional biography of Irving Stone, a Hollywood film planned by Anatole Litvak or the historical researches of Dr von Hattingberg of Baden-Baden.”
“I do not see how a complete stranger like Hattingberg has the right to write a biography, how he can have the knowledge to do so. It seems to me that he had much better be left to his own devices, and perhaps he will [illegible] so little that he will drop his plan.”
Anna
“However, this rigorously obstructionist attitude became untenable when unauthorised biographies and memoirs began to appear. These threatened to diminish Freud’s public image. In 1946 and 1947, two critical biographies of Freud appeared, from Emil Ludwig¹ and Helen Puner,² soon followed by other incursions into Freud’s private life. Anna Freud was outraged by these. She described Ludwig’s work as ‘labour of hate’, while that of Puner was ‘horrible’; Erik Erikson’s article on the Irma dream in The Interpretation of Dreams ‘literally turned her stomach’; Leslie Adams, a New York psychiatrist who had done researches on Freud’s youth, was a ‘full-time crank’; Joseph Wortis³ deserved being taken to court for having published his memoirs of his analysis with Freud, and so on.”
¹ “Emil Ludwig, who was known for his novelistic biographies and whose works were burned by the Nazis along with those of Freud, had been critiqued by the later in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, because he had the misfortune of interpreting the personality of Emperor William II with Adler’s theories. Ludwig conceived of his book on Freud as a response to Freud’s critique.”
² “Oliver Freud, Anna Freud’s brother, thought that Puner’s book wasn’t that bad and that the errors which it contained were attributable to the fact that she cited accounts by Jung, Stekel and Wittels (Oliver Freud to Ernest Jones, 4 December 1952).”
³ ‘I think Wortis perpetrated almost a crime, and since at least one letter by Freud was published in facsimile, The Sigmund Freud Copyrights, Ltd. may have a legal angle . . . it is my feeling that the President of the New York Society, or of the American Psychoanalytic Association, or of the International Psychoanalytic Association should do something . . . I think it is the duty of the psychoanalytic organizations to take a very strong stand . . .
P.S. Of course, people who understand such matters should decide here, in the United States, whether such a stand against the book may not give it additional publicity, and thus increase the harm’
(Kurt Eissler to Anna Freud, 7 February 1955, Anna Freud Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC).
“But who should write the true life of Freud? On October 1946, Jones was contacted by Leon Shimkin, the director of Simon & Schuster, who wanted to know if he was interested in writing a biography of Freud. Jones immediately contacted Anna Freud, who was ambivalent about this prospect. Jones had recently taken sides against her in the conflict with Melanie Klein. He had never truly been part of the ‘family’ and she was not sure how much she could trust him. So she suggested that Jones collaborated with Siegfried Bernfeld, an old friend of her youth in Vienna, thinking that Bernfeld could direct the project or at least control his collaborator. Moreover, Bernfeld was particularly qualified for this task, as, following his emigration to the United States, he had begun to undertake very detailed investigations with his wife Suzanne of Freud’s youth and the intellectual context of his early work.”
“Confidentially: I am concerned about Jones’ contribution. In England – back in 1937 – Jones
made some remarks on Freud’s personality and life which shocked me, not only because they were made in a hostile and careless way at the dinner table but mainly because they reveal that Jones, at that time, lacked the kind of sympathy and reverence for Freud which is essential for an objective historian. I know that he doesn’t like me a bit and I doubt therefore whether he would be able to cooperate with me. I don’t like him either but I have sufficient appreciation of his contributions to psychoanalysis to be willing to try.”
Bernfeld
“Several months later, however, Jones wrote a preface for Freud’s study The Question of Lay Analysis which did not please Anna Freud. The issue was one where Jones had disagreed with Freud, and he referred to Freud’s anti-medical prejudices. On 16 May, she asked Kris to inform Shimkin that she was considering withdrawing her agreement to Jones as Freud’s biographer. In reply, Shimkin proposed entrusting Bernfeld with the role, aided by Anna Freud herself. As she did not want to participate directly in it, she proposed instead a collaboration between Bernfeld and Kris, with Jones reduced to being an informer. Finally, in September, the publisher decided to offer Jones a contract for a volume of 300,000 words. The project appears to have lain fallow for two and a half years, until Jones wrote to Bernfeld on 23 March 1950 to ask for his collaboration, in line with the original project. Jones wondered how he could integrate the work in Bernfeld’s already published articles into his biography. Bernfeld, faithful to the promise which he had made to Anna Freud, reassured him on this point and offered to place his published and unpublished researches at Jones’ disposal.”
“Bernfeld, obviously basing his work on the passage in The Interpretation of Dreams, succeeded in identifying the anonymous morphinomanic whom Freud claimed to have cured. It was Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, a colleague and a friend of Freud who had used morphine to combat the extreme pain following the amputation of a finger. Exactly as Erlenmeyer had found in his own patients, Fleischl-Marxow developed a cocaine addiction thanks to Freud’s treatment. He died 6 years later, addicted to both morphine and cocaine. Bernfeld asked Jones if the Betrothal Letters shed further light on this episode. Jones confirmed that the letters contained ‘valuable and unexpected’ information on this subject, and added that he would plead Bernfeld’s case with Anna Freud, to enable him to consult at least this part of the correspondence.”
“What a company they were. Meynert drank. Fleischl was a bad morphinomanic and I am afraid that Freud took more cocaine than he should though I am not mentioning that.”
Jones
“The way Freud thrust the cocaine on everybody must have made him quite a menace; even Martha had to take it to bring some bloom into her cheeks! . . . He was only interested in the magical internal effects of the drug, of which he took too much himself. Even years later he and Fliess were always cocainising each other’s nose.”
“Ironically, it was Jones, whom Anna Freud had considered too frail for the task, who survived Bernfeld, and who profited from Bernfeld’s research¹ in writing the official Freud biography.”
¹ “Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, who notes that the 1st volume of Jones’ biography is largely a rewriting of Bernfeld’s articles. She noted passages which Jones copied without attribution, and Bernfeld’s 2 letters of 1952 expressing his irritation in this regard”
“From her house in Hampstead (now the location of the Freud Museum), she decided in a sovereign manner who could have access to what, which documents could be published or cited, and which events of her father’s life could be mentioned or rather should be omitted. Thus Jones was able to read complete correspondences and documents which were restricted for other researchers, in part or completely, for decades, and in some cases remain so: the complete letters to Fliess (published in 1985), the Betrothal Letters, the Secret Chronicle (accessible to researchers since 2000), the correspondences with Minna Bernays, Karl Abraham, Oskar Pfister [O PASTOR], Sándor Ferenczi, C.G. Jung, Max Eitingon and Abraham Brill, as well as the journals of Marie Bonaparte. Just like Kris with the Fliess letters, Jones submitted the chapters of his biography to Anna Freud for her approval and critique. Her censure sometimes concerned trivial as well as significant points. For example, Jones was instructed not to mention Freud’s chronic constipation. This was one of the rare points on which he disobeyed. He was interdicted from mentioning that Martha’s brother, Eli Bernays, had illegitimate children (his legitimate son, the famous publicist Eli Bernays [II.], threatened a law suit). In other letters, Anna Freud demanded that Jones should remove or modify passages on Abraham, and Pfister, and complained that Ferenczi ‘comes off badly’. However, in the main, she didn’t have to censor much, as Jones had already done the bulk of this. Much smarter in this regard than Bernfeld, he knew how to anticipate her desires and to avoid contentious issues or at least present them from the most favourable angle.
Jones’ biography was a brilliant dramatisation of the Freudian legend. As we have seen with his treatment of Bernfeld’s article on cocaine, Jones was past master in the art of utilising documents and accounts to which he alone had access to flesh out and confirm Freud’s accounts whilst eliding the contradictions. When Kris abridged the letters to Fliess, he deliberately cut their anecdotal aspects, rendering them ‘more arid’ and ‘austere’ than they actually were. By contrast, Jones did not hesitate to be a raconteur, embroidering the anecdotes narrated by Freud and adding more striking details. These embellishments never contradicted the master-narrative proposed by Freud and the troika of Ernst Kris, Anna Freud and Marie Bonaparte.”
“In his edition of the letters to Fliess, Kris had systematically eliminated all the passages in which Freud rather viciously maligned Breuer, despite all the professional and financial assistance that his ex-friend had given him over the years. Jones, on the other hand, didn’t hesitate to point out the ingratitude and ‘bitterness’ of Freud’s comments – something he found difficult to explain. Better yet, he scrupulously quoted all the passages in which Breuer insisted on the role of sexuality in the neuroses, thereby contradicting what Freud had written about the resistance of his collaborator. But Jones also cited the less than flattering descriptions of Breuer in Freud’s letters: that of a ‘weak’ and indecisive man whose ‘pettifogging kind of censoriousness’ prevented him from fully assenting to the revolutionary theories of his young colleague. And above all, the major ‘leak’: Jones made public the fable of Anna O.’s hysterical childbirth which Freud, as we have seen, had been spreading in private to discredit Breuer and counter his objections to the exclusively sexual aetiology of the neuroses. Jones even gave the real name of Breuer’s patient, which he had discovered in the Betrothal Letters, and he claimed that one of these letters ‘contain substantially the same story’ that Freud had told him – which was false. For good measure, he added his own embellishments, claiming that Breuer, after fleeing the hysterical childbirth ‘in a cold sweat’, had departed the next day with his wife for Venice where they conceived a daughter who, ‘born in these curious circumstances’, was fated to commit suicide 60 years later in New York (absolutely nothing in this sensational story is true).
Just as with Bernfeld, Jones regularly sent drafts of his chapters to James Strachey, who was working on the volumes of the Standard Edition (this project, begun immediately after Freud’s death, can be considered the third pillar of psychoanalysis’ official history, after The Origins of Psychoanalysis and Jones’ biography).”
“Breuer’s adventure. Freud told me the same story with a good deal of dramatic business. I remember very well his saying: ‘So he took up his hat and rushed from the house.’ – But I’ve always been in some doubt of whether this was a story that Breuer told Freud or whether it was what he inferred – a ‘construction’ in fact.”
Strachey a Jones, outubro de 1951 – sujeito esperto!
“Strachey, quite perceptively, puts his finger on the oddities that we have already encountered: if Freud heard the story directly from Breuer, why would he have needed to ‘reconstruct’ it? Obviously, Strachey suspected Freud of having improperly presented, under the guise of historical fact, what was merely an interpretation. Jones, who knew perfectly well that this was the case – since he was able to use the letter to Martha as a means of comparison – nevertheless decided to stay the course.”
“The nasty rumour started by Freud now became the official public version. Strachey, in a note appended to his translation of the Anna O. case, aligned himself with Jones, an example of the synchronisation between the biography and the ‘standard’ edition.”
“In the same way, Jones also took up the theme of Freud’s ‘splendid isolation’ and the ‘boycotting’ of his work by his colleagues, systematically blowing out of proportion the negative reviews of his works, while treating the several positive reviews that he cited as courageous ‘exceptions’: Studies on Hysteria hadn’t been well received by the medical community, The Interpretation of Dreams had been greeted with ‘a most stupid and contemptuous review’ by Burckhardt, who had halted outright its sales in Vienna, and the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality along with the case history of ‘Dora’ had caused their author to be ostracised from his profession.
Quite strangely, this rehashing of the puritanism which supposedly confronted the nascent psychoanalysis went hand in hand with Jones’ launching of a new myth, that of Freud’s puritanism.” “The creation of psychoanalysis had thus been literally immaculate and asexualised. As Bruno Bettelheim noted in regard to the first 2 volumes of the biography, Jones paradoxically ended up shielding Freud from all psychoanalysis.”
“Speaking of Freud’s sister-in-law, who, for 42 years, was part of his household circle, Jones simply says, ‘There was no sexual attraction on either side.’ One must wonder about the ‘man Freud’, who traveled for long periods alone with this mature woman, roomed in hotels with her, but did not find her sexually attractive; one wonders even more how it was possible for this woman not to become sexually attractive to Freud.”
B.B.
“Any person who had ever had the misfortune of being opposed to Freud at one point or another was systematically presented as a ‘case’, or else as having a personality deficiency”
“Jones received the assistance of Lilla Veszy-Wagner – an analyst in training being analysed by Balint – who compiled and catalogued the contemporary literature of the period on psychoanalysis. It is clear, to judge from the abstracts which she had prepared for him, that he systematically discarded all the nuanced assessments of Freudian theory (Warda, Gaupp, Möbius, Binswanger, Näcke, Stern), while holding onto only the most negative formulations – which were made even more so by detaching them from any context: Spielmeyer described psychoanalysis as ‘mental masturbation’, Hoche claimed that it was ‘an evil method born of mystical tendencies’, Rieger saw a ‘simply gruesome old-wives’ psychiatry’, etc. Thus reduced to an exchange of epithets, the intense scientific controversy that had taken place around psychoanalysis was trivialised to the point of sinking into total insignificance.”
“In January 1955, just as the 2nd volume was going to print, one of the lawyers for Hogarth Press, Macfarlane, sent Jones a list of around 60 ‘defamatory passages’ that he insisted be removed or modified in order to protect the publishing house against future lawsuits. Since British libel law did not protect the dead, Jones could keep these passages as they were if he succeeded in establishing that the persons concerned were deceased. Adler, Rank, Ferenczi were no longer alive, but what about Oppenheim, Ziehen, Collins, Vogt, etc.? Jones had already asked Lilla Veszy-Wagner to research Freud’s former adversaries.”
“I don’t care when he died so long as I can be sure he is thoroughly dead now, since I am libeling him severely.”
J., o Arcanjo do Fraude
“To Jones’ delight, most of the slandered parties turned out to be dead and buried. Those who remained were spoilsports. With regret, Jones was forced to remove a note on Gezá Roheim, which was ‘capable’, said the lawyer, ‘of an extremely uncomplimentary interpretation’. It was also necessary to tone down certain passages on Helen Puner and Adler’s biographer, Phyllis Bottome. Then there was Jung, about whom Jones had a long series of discussions with Peter Calvocoressi, one of the Hogarth Press directors.”
“We now come to the much more tricky subject of Jung. Broadly speaking, there are 2 serious allegations against Jung which cannot stand: that he was anti-Semitic and that when he and Freud parted company there was not merely a parting of the ways but also an element of disloyalty or turpitude in Jung’s action”
Calvocoressi, carta
“The expression: ‘Jung is crazy’ must come out. As I have already explained, the fact that this is Freud’s remark does not make it less defamatory or make us less liable to an action.”
Ele deve ter ficado calvo de preocupação com a verborréia do Arcanjo.
OS FÃS DE ANTIGAMENTE ERAM AINDA MAIS IMBECIS: “Jones, though, wasn’t ready to sacrifice these passages which he held particularly dear, and he thus negotiated tooth and nail. And if ‘Jung is cracked’ was used in place of ‘Jung is crazy’, would this be more acceptable? ‘National prejudice’, instead of ‘racial prejudice’? ‘Disagreeable look’, instead of ‘sour look’? Finally, Jones offered to accept all financial responsibility for the costs of a future lawsuit.” “In the end, Hogarth Press accepted this proposal, which allowed Jones to keep certain contentious passages. As Jones had predicted, Jung did not pursue any legal action, and thus the claims about him entered the public domain without the slightest protest.”
“When Jones was writing his book on Freud, he never asked him (C.G.) anything about the early years when he and Freud were working together. As Freud and Ferenczi were dead C.G. was the only person who could have given him accurate information, and he could easily have done so. Jones was not there, and there were a number of errors in his book.”
Bennet, 1959
“Jung was still alive, but this was not the case for Rank and Ferenczi, who could be easily assassinated post-mortem. Rank and Ferenczi, Jones recalled in the last volume of his biography, were both members of the famous Secret Committee created to defend psychoanalysis against doctrinal deviations (it was Ferenczi who had had the idea, even if Jones happily credited himself with its founding).”
“On what basis did Jones make this impressive diagnosis? Had Rank and Ferenczi sunken into delirium? Had they been committed? Had they been hearing voices? Not at all: Ferenczi had died in 1933 of pernicious anaemia, while he was testing a new psychoanalytic technique (‘neo-catharsis’), and Rank, after his break with Freud, had become a prolific author, while also developing a form of short therapy (‘will therapy’).”
“I saw Ferenczi during the last months of his life on many occasions, once or twice every week, and I never found him deluded, paranoid or homicidal. On the contrary, though he was physically incapacitated by his ataxia, mentally most of the time he was quite fresh and often discussed with me the various details of his controversy with Freud and his plan to revise some of his ideas published in his last papers . . . I saw him on the Sunday before his death and though he was very weak, his mind even then was completely clear.”
Balint
“As mentioned, I have received several letters from all over the world urging me to do something; the last being from Elma and Magda, Ferenczi’s step-daughters, who are, as you know, the legal owners of the Freud–Ferenczi correspondence, asking me to get either a rectification by you or to withdraw the permission to use his correspondence.”
“Freud had thought so, therefore it was true. The Biography, as we see, was history as seen through the eyes of Freud, the ‘eyewitness’ of the unconscious”
“This is a typically Stalinist type of re-writing history, whereby Stalinists assassinate the character of opponents by calling them spies and traitors. The Freudians do it by calling them ‘insane’.”
Erich Fromm
“Publicly, Balint expressed his disagreement with Jones much more mutedly and prudently in a letter that was published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis with a response from Jones (Balint 1958). Commenting on this exchange, Erich Fromm remarked that ‘if such a tortuous and submissive letter had been written by a personality of less stature than Balint or else to avoid serious consequences relating to life or liberty in a dictatorial system, that would be understandable. But . . . this only shows the intensity of the pressure that forbids any criticism, if not extremely mild, from a member of the organisation’ (Fromm 1970, 22).”
“It is all there: the miraculous purity of the Founding Personage, the preordained diabolism of Judas (Jung), dazzling vistas of humanity redeemed with apocalyptic visions of perdition and death . . . The steadfast centre (Jones) fighting against the left deviationists (Glover), the right deviationists (Horney, Fromm), and against the unspeakable renegades whose deviations have led them on and on along the slippery path of treachery, until they ended up in the camp of the enemy (Adler, Jung). Yet somehow, nobody gets killed in all this – only character-assassinated. The psychoanalytic game seems to be a sort of unpolitical bolshevism without teeth.”
Perspicaz definição de Frank Knopfelmacher
“No mention of the unbelievable erotic-analytic triangle of Ferenczi, Gizella Pálos¹ and her daughter Elma, to which Freud had played the role of family therapist. Nothing about the analysis of Anna Freud by her own father. Nothing about the suicides of Viktor Tausk and Herbert Silberer, which the analytic rumour attributed to their relationships with Freud. Nothing about the murder of Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth, the pioneer of child psychoanalysis, by her nephew-patient; and nothing either about the fact that the so-called A Young Girl’s Diary, which she had edited and Freud had glowingly prefaced, was in reality a complete fabrication.”
¹ Jones: “Balint makes life as complicated as he can. Now he has discovered a promise to Gisella Ferenczi that no one is to use the allusions to her for 50 years (as if I wanted to, or as if I didn’t know all about their problems!)”
“In New York City alone, 15,000 copies were sold in the first two weeks. Everywhere, Jones’ work was acclaimed, and the glory of Sigmund Freud immediately spread throughout the world: from London to Sydney, passing through Paris and Frankfurt. The Freudian legend had finally penetrated the masses.”
“What a splendid history of this great man could now be written if official psychoanalysis had not sealed the Freud archives with 2.500 of his letters for 50 years!”
Bettelheim
“Thanks to the policy of retention practised by Anna Freud and the administrators of the Freud Archives, the Holy Scripture was, very literally, incontestable and irrefutable.”
“I look forward to your book stopping all the impossible attempts at biography of my father which are in the air (and on paper) now.”
Anna Freud a Jones, 1952
“The idea of an archive that brought together all the documents of the Freudian family seems to have taken shape in July 1950, in close connection with the abridged edition of the letters to Fliess and the preparations for the ‘true biography’.”
“The idea rapidly took hold, because, in November of the same year, Kurt Eissler, in the name of Anna Freud, contacted Luther Evans, the Librarian of Congress, to inquire about the possibility of depositing the Freudian Archives at the American Library of Congress. One month later, Eissler informed Anna Freud that the articles of incorporation for the ‘Sigmund Freud Archives’, signed by Heinz Hartmann, Bertram Lewin, Ernst Kris, Herman Nunberg and himself, had been registered in the state of New York.”
“We have submitted the statutes in preparation for setting up the Archives as a registered company in the state of New York, and a contract is going to be signed with the Library of Congress that will allow the Archives to deposit all the assembled documents in the Library’s vaults. The board of directors will have the right to determine who can access the documents and at what date. Consequently, any possibility of indiscretion has been ruled out”
Primeiro secretário das Vontades dos Fraudadores (família dos), sr. Eissler.
“Bernfeld, disappointed that his proposition had not been accepted, warned against the dangers of not processing the documents before depositing them at the Library of Congress.”
(LEEENTAMENTE) PAGANDO TODO O DÉBITO QUE DEVE AO MUNDO
“The plan you describe in your letter of 13 January naturally has my approval, since it conforms to one of the alternatives I suggested . . . I don’t like the idea of assembling letters and sending them unprocessed to the Library of Congress. I understand the advantages of this procedure. But I think that it should only be used as a last resort and it would be better not to make things easy for donors wishing to lock them up and bury them in Washington. I know enough about Freud as a letter writer to understand that many of his correspondents would prefer to keep secret some of his blunt remarks regarding them and their colleagues. It’s mostly excessive sensitivity, but at times there is, in fact, food for devastating gossip . . . If the Archives come to fruition, they are probably going to suck up all these documents and keep them sealed for an undetermined duration. And this is a point, in my opinion, that deserves serious reflection by the Directors of the Archives; they shouldn’t begin to assemble the documents before deciding on a policy that reduces this danger.”
“Eissler, a young analyst trained by August Aichhorn, was simply an executor of Miss Freud’s wishes – he had sent her a copy of Bernfeld’s first letter and was awaiting her instructions.”
“Following up on my indiscretion, I am sending you a copy of another letter from Bernfeld . . .” Tão caladinho na entrevista ao Reich, ninguém podia imaginar… Aliás, imaginar todos podem, desde que se trata de um psicanalista – e da alta cúpula da IPA, ainda por cima!
“Broadly speaking, the board of directors will stipulate a longer duration than the donor has intended, in order to prevent any possibility of an embarrassing situation in the future.”
Porém, existe vida no século XXI, seus bastardos!
“On 28 March, Eissler, somewhat ashamed, told Anna Freud that he had met Bernfeld in New York and that the latter had expressed his surprise that Anna, as she had formerly done, no longer responded to his letters and requests for information.”
“The goal of the Freud Archives had never been to make the documents of Freudianism available to the public, as Luther Evans, the Librarian of Congress, undoubtedly believed when Eissler approached him. In reality, the Library of Congress and the American people had been duped. What Anna Freud and the Freudian Family sought, quite simply, was a safety deposit box where they could lock up the archives, their archives, and protect them from the curiosity of outsiders. If their choice was the Library of Congress, it was because the American government and its legendary bureaucracy presented, in this respect, extremely solid guarantees of reliability and security. Not to mention the fact that the costs of archiving and safekeeping the materials were entirely thrust upon the American taxpayers (…) Better yet, donations to the Library of Congress were tax-deductible, making for an excellent business, insofar as the ‘expert’ designated to appraise their value for the American Internal Revenue Service was none other than… Kurt Eissler.”
“But it wasn’t simply the American taxpayers who were taken advantage of, but also, in many cases, the donors themselves. Even though certain donors were obviously in on the secret, many others undoubtedly believed that they were making a gift of their archives to a public entity, the Library of Congress, considering that the Library’s current ‘Freud Collection’ was initially called ‘The Sigmund Freud Archives’. As article 2 of the contract signed on 5 July 1951 between the Sigmund Freud Archives, Inc. and the Library of Congress,¹ the latter promised to ‘protect the identity of the donations by marking the name The Sigmund Freud Archives on all the publications and on the cartons containing other documents, and to administer these donations under the title The Sigmund Freud Archives’. It must have been difficult, therefore, for the donors to distinguish between the ‘Sigmund Freud Archives’ of the Library of Congress and the ‘Sigmund Freud Archives, Inc.’ – all the more so since the paper in front of them proudly stated: ‘Conservator of the Archives: the Library of Congress’ (later changed to ‘Guardian and Proprietor of the Sigmund Freud Collection: the Library of Congress’).
¹ “Agreement between The Library of Congress and The Sigmund Freud Archives, Inc., 5 July 1951. We thank the Library of Congress for allowing us to consult this internal document pursuant to article 1917–3 of the Library of Congress Regulations.”
In reality, the donations were being made to the Sigmund Freud Archives, Inc., a private organisation which then became their legal owner and could thus impose any restrictions on access that it wished from the moment they were deposited at the Library of Congress (in the catalogues, we still read: ‘Donor: Sigmund Freud Archives’ or ‘Donor: Kurt Eissler’).”
“To the British psychiatrist E.A. Bennet, who in 1972 asked if the Freud Archives would be interested in two letters that Freud had addressed to him, Eissler nonchalantly [sossegadamente] responded that it depended on the Library of Congress.” “These two letters, for which Bennet had not demanded any restrictions on access, were only made available to researchers in the year 2000.” Curiosamente porque a múmia aí (Eissler) morreu em 1999…
“To the donors, then, the Archives passed themselves off as representatives of the Library of Congress and of the American people, in order, as Bernfeld said, to ‘suck up’ the documents and testimonials. To the Library of Congress, on the other hand, they passed themselves off as the representatives of donors and medical confidentiality, imposing restrictions on access, as well as arbitrary declassification dates, which the donors themselves had not often demanded.”
“Eissler, Notes on His First Interview with Sergius Pankejeff in Vienna, 1952: He always has the idea that his Memoirs could be published and is rather disappointed, that this material will first be read by others in 200 years.” Em 2152 felizmente ninguém saberá o que foi a pseud(o)análise nem quem foi S. Fraude. Aos de nossa geração, que gostariam de ver seus descendentes devolverem o dinheiro que tiraram de vítimas inocentes sem praticar nenhuma terapia em troca, só resta assaltar esse maldito cofre!
“Eissler to the Pastor Oskar Pfister, 20 December 1951: When your report is opened in 150 years, I believe that it will no longer be able to cause even the slightest indiscretion.”
“Eissler, Interview with Carl Gustav Jung, 29 August 1953: I believe that the historical development of depth psychology will at one time have a great interest, and your relation to Freud, your observations of Freud whom you knew in such an important phase, in such an important epoch, will very much interest historians, if there are still historians in 200 years /laughs/.”
“Eissler to Bonaparte, 1 April 1960:¹ At The Library of Congress you would only see a row of boxes which concern The Sigmund Freud Archives. The boxes are filled with sealed envelopes and, since we have an agreement with The Library of Congress that the envelopes may be opened only after many years they would not be permitted to show you anything of their contents . . . if you plan to visit The Library of Congress solely out of your desire to see The Sigmund Freud Archives, I would strongly advise against it because, as I have said before, there is nothing to see other than a row of boxes.”
¹ Ótima data realmente…
MAIS OBSCUROS QUE OS ARQUIVOS X
“Yes, the Freud Archives were very much a tomb, a crypt, where, as Bernfeld said, the radioactive waste of psychoanalysis’ history could be ‘buried’. Therefore, as we see with the X (formerly Z) series of the Sigmund Freud Collection, the slow process of declassification (we are almost tempted to say: of decontamination) only began in 1995, with the correspondence between Freud and Max Eitingon [crápula burocrata-mor], and will continue for the most part until 2057, when Eissler’s inteviews with Elsa Foges, Harry Freud, Oliver Freud, Judith Bernays Heller,¹ Clarence Oberndorf, Edoardo Weiss and the mysterious ‘Interviewee B’ are due to be released. In the 1990s one letter to Freud from an unidentified correspondent was restricted till 2113 (and not 2102, as the 1985 catalogue anticipated). Now, many such items do not even have a stipulated derestriction date, and are listed simply as ‘closed’.”
¹ “Eissler interviewed her three times – twice in 1952 and once in 1953. The respective derestriction dates are 2010, 2017 and 2057.”
“Just think of the secrecy associated with the documents of the Freud Archives at the Library of Congress and the oddity of their dates of release. Some documents are sealed away until 2013, others until 2032, others until 2102, 2103, etc., and you wonder how they came up with these strange dates. If you look up the birth and death dates of the persons concerned, you are almost tempted to apply Fliessian periodicities of 23 and 28 to see what these numbers mean, because it is not 100 or 150 years from anybody’s death, it’s not 150 or 200 years from anybody’s birth – it’s just some weird number that someone thought up! It is totally arbitrary, but that is how censorship has always worked.”
Sulloway
“In certain cases, the restrictions on access have been imposed despite the wishes expressed by the donors. As Peter Swales has noted, Eissler’s interview with Freud’s granddaughter, Sophie Freud, will not be available until the year 2017, even though she has declared herself, on several occasions, in favour of a complete and immediate opening of the Archives. Paul Roazen, likewise, relates how Eissler refused to let the psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch take a look at her own donation when she had wished to show it to Roazen.”
“During my own research on Freud and his circle, I met numerous donors who were not only completely unaware that their donation was now locked away, but who also clearly disapproved of the secrecy Eissler was determined to maintain around Freud in order to protect him from the curiosity of independent historians.”
Roazen
“Eissler executed the orders of Anna Freud, and Anna Freud continued a policy of dehistoricisation and narrative decontextualisation which had been her father’s – as, for example, when he burned his correspondences or destroyed his analysis notes. The important thing was to keep everyone else’s hands off the Freudian narrative and to rid it of all the parasitic ‘noises’ liable to cloud its message, in order to immunise Freud’s testimony – which is to say psychoanalytic theory – against all doubts and questions. Without this excessive dehistoricisation, psychoanalysis would never have succeeded in establishing itself as the Holy Scripture of psychotherapy, nor Freud as the Solitary Hero of the unconscious. The Archives’ censorship, so absurd at first glance, is absolutely essential to the system it and psychoanalysis’ legendary epistemology together constitute.”
CODA
“Texts available to researchers and the general public had been carefully filtered and reformatted to present the image of Freud and psychoanalysis that the Freudian establishment wanted to promote.”
“Even when Freud’s works were reread and reinterpreted in heterodox ways, it was always on the basis of the sanitised and dehistoricised version propagated by Anna Freud, Ernst Kris, Ernest Jones, James Strachey and Kurt Eissler. Lacan’s famous ‘return to Freud’ was simply a return to the version of Freud that they had canonised. The same goes for all the more recent hermeneutic, structuralist, narrativist, deconstructivist, feminist and post-modern reformulations of psychoanalysis. Despite their sophistication and their refusal of Freud’s positivism, the Freud which they interpreted/deconstructed/narritivised/fictionalised was always the same legendary Freud, dressed up in the new garments of the latest intellectual fashion.”
“cuts in letters weren’t indicated, inconvenient facts were omitted, skeletons were hidden in closets, critics were silenced, the names of patients were disguised, recollections were sequestered, tendentious interpretations were presented as real events, calumnies and rumours were taken as facts. The mythification of the history of psychoanalysis gave it a simplicity which rendered it suitable for mass dissemination. At the same time, the formidable obstacles which confronted historians rendered a wholesale challenge of the legend impossible.”
“To the extent to which psychoanalysis was placed at the centre and the origin of the critical developments in depth psychology, dynamic psychiatry and psychotherapy, psychoanalysis became everything – and at the same time nothing.” “Ninety years later, the situation has hardly changed: ‘any kind of popular or intuitive psychology’ is precisely what passes for psychoanalysis, whether it be in university seminars, specialist journals and magazines, or on television or the radio. However, it is precisely this confusion and the manner in which Freudians successfully exploited it to promote ‘psychoanalysis’ that significantly contributed to the success of the brand. If it appears to be everywhere, it is because so much has been arbitrarily Freudianised, franchised by psychoanalysis: slips, dreams, sex, mental illness, neurosis, psychotherapy, memory, biography, history, language, pedagogy and teaching, marital relations, politics.”
“But if psychoanalysis is everything and nothing at the same time, what are we ultimately speaking about? Nothing – or nearly nothing: it is precisely because it has always been vague and floating, perfectly inconsistent, that psychoanalysis could propagate as it did and embed itself in a variety of ‘ecological niches’, to use Ian Hacking’s expression, in the most diverse array of environments. Being nothing in particular, psychoanalysis has functioned like Lévi-Strauss’ famous ‘floating signifier’: it is a ‘machine’, a ‘whatsit’, a ‘thingumajig’ which can serve to designate anything, an empty theory in which one can cram whatever one likes.”
“The traumatic neuroses of the First World War appeared to have conclusively demonstrated that one could suffer from hysterical symptoms for non-sexual reasons. Freud then came up with the theories of the repetition compulsion and the death drive from the ever ready unconscious. Such radical theoretical shifts have often been cited in praise of Freud’s conscientious empiricism, but this is to confound falsificationist rigour with damage limitation. No ‘fact’ was likely to refute Freud’s theories, as he could adapt them to objections made to him, according to the exigencies of the moment, in continual shadow-boxing with his critics.”
“Psychoanalysis has sprung many surprises on us, performed more than one volte-face before our indignant eyes. No sooner had we got used to the psychiatric quack who vehemently demonstrated the serpent of sex coiled round the root of all our actions, no sooner had we begun to feel honestly uneasy about our lurking complexes, than lo and behold the psychoanalytic gentlemen reappeared on the stage with a theory of pure psychology. The medical faculty, which was on hot bricks over the therapeutic innovations, heaved a sigh of relief as it watched the ground warming under the feet of the professional psychologists.”
D.H. Lawrence
“In reality, as we have seen, psychoanalysis was riven from its inception by contradictory interpretations as to what psychological analysis/psychoanalysis/psychanalysis/psychosynthesis/free-psychoanalysis/individual-psychology/analytical-psychology were, and to wherein they differed. This situation has not ceased. (…) Under such conditions, how can one continue to speak of ‘psychoanalysis’, as if it were a matter of a coherent doctrine, organised around a series of clearly articulated theses, principles or methods? Psychoanalysis in the singular never existed. What is there in common between Freud’s theories and those of Rank, Ferenczi, Reich, Klein, Horney, Winnicott, Bion, Bowlby, Kohut, Kernberg, Lacan, Laplanche, Zizek or Kristeva?”
“Whilst conceding that the theories of psychoanalytic metapsychology were finally nothing other than ‘articles of psychoanalytic faith’, Wallerstein [ex-presidente da IPA] nevertheless claimed that the Freudian field continued to present a unity at the level of clinical theory and the givens of the consulting room. However, his definition of the psychoanalytic clinic was so expansive and vague that it could be applied to many other forms of dynamic psychotherapy.”
“Little by little, the puzzle is being reconstituted, forming portraits quite different from that fashioned by the censors and hagiographers. This is not to say that there is a consensus among historians – it is simply to note that the cumulative effect of their work has been to dismantle the monomyth. Today defenders of the legend have vigorously protested this, at times resorting to the old tactics which once served so well in the first Freudian wars (the pathologisation of adversaries, ad hominem attacks, etc.), but without the same success. Readers approaching Freud simply have a wealth of documentation and critical historical studies which simply wasn’t available in the 1970s and 1980s, together with an increasing number of studies which have demonstrated that Freud’s professional rivals, adversaries and former colleagues weren’t all the fools they were painted to be.”
EPÍLOGO BAUDRILLARDIANO: “The Freudian legend is being effaced before our eyes, and with it, psychoanalysis, to make way for other cultural fashions, other modes of therapeutic interaction, continuing and renewing the ancient ritual of patient–doctor encounter. We should hurry to study Psychoanalysis whilst we can, for we will soon no longer be able to discern its features – and for good reason: because it never was.”
NOTES
“France has since witnessed no less than two other ‘guerres des psys’ on the occasion of the publication of The Black Book of Psychoanalysis (Meyer 2005) [breve no Seclusão], and of Michel Onfray’s The Twilight of an Idol. The Freudian Fabrication (Onfray 2010).”
“on the unreliability of Jung’s ‘memories’ recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé, see Elms (1994)”
“Jones mentions that Freud had noted his dreams since his youth – none of the notebooks containing these survived Freud’s periodic destruction of his papers (Jones 1953, 351–3).”
“Ernst Falzeder notes that Freud, irritated by Rank’s The Trauma of Birth, insinuated that he wouldn’t have written it if he had been analysed. Rank replied: ‘I have felt curiously touched by the fact that you, of all persons, suggest that I would not have adopted this concept had I been analyzed. This might well be so. But the question is whether this is a cause for regret. I, for one, can only consider myself lucky, after all the results I have seen with analyzed analysts’ (Rank to the former secret committee members, 20 December 1924, cited by Falzeder 1998, 147).” HAHAHA
“The mythologisation of the relation between Freud and Jung has quite eclipsed that between Bleuler and Freud on the one hand and Bleuler and Jung on the other, with deleterious effects. In many crucial respects, the relationship and subsequent separation between Bleuler and Freud was more consequential for the subsequent history of psychoanalysis, and its separations from psychiatry, than that between Freud and Jung; second, the relationship and subsequent separation between Bleuler and Jung was more important for Jung than his relation with Freud; third, no account of the relation between Freud and Jung is complete without grasping the complex triangulations between them and Bleuler.”
“Forel was French-Swiss, and wrote in French and German. His research was many-faceted, and he was well known for playing a key role in the formulation of the concept of the neurone, for his research on ants and on the sexual question, and for his militant anti-alcoholism. On Forel, see Shamdasani (2006).”
“‘Manfred Bleuler when I interviewed him told me that he hesitates to give copies to the Archives since he fears for Freud’s reputation in view of what Freud wrote to his father about Jung’ (Kurt Eissler, manuscript notes in the margin of the translation of a letter from Freud to Bleuler of 17 November 1912, Sigmund Freud Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC).” Ora, se esse era o caso, ele devia justamente se apressar em enviar para o Arquivo!
“For example, I read his article on the 13 cases of so-called traumatic hysteria and I asked him, tell me, Professor, are you sure that these people really told you the truth? How do you know that these traumas took place? He said to me (laughs): But these were good people! And I: Excuse me, but they are hysterics! . . . I was a psychiatrist . . . and I know what hysterics were capable of in this regard! But he denied this . . . He admitted nothing, nothing! Corrected nothing.
Jung, interview typescript of 29 August 1953 with Kurt Eissler, Sigmund Freud Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 17.”
“Contrary to general opinion, the word psycho-analytical had been employed prior to Freud. In 1979, Kathleen Coburn noted that the term had been used by Coleridge in his notebooks (cited in Eng 1984, 463). Coleridge had written about the need for a psycho-analytical understanding. As Erling Eng noted, Coleridge understood this as what was ‘needed to recover the presence of Greek myth hidden with Renaissance epic verse, this for the sake of realizing a purified Christian Faith’ (ibid., 465). Whilst Coleridge’s diaries were not published till the twentieth century, the OED also notes a published use of the word in 1857 in Russell’s Magazine: ‘Poe chose . . . the psycho-analytical. His heroes are monstrous reflections of his own heart in its despair, not in its peace.’ Whether the word may have been in wider circulation has not yet been established.”
“I do not recall Breuer’s exact words, but I do remember the vivid gestures and facial expressions with which he responded to my naive question of what his position was regarding Freud since the Studies. His look of downright pity and superiority, as well as the wave of his hand, a dismissal in the full sense of the word, left not the slightest doubt that in his opinion Freud had gone scientifically astray to such an extent that he could no longer be taken seriously, and hence it was better not to talk about him”
Binswanger 1957, 4.
“Since the publication of the French edition of this book (Freud Inc., 2006), George Makari’s Revolution in Mind. The Creation of Psychoanalysis (2008) has appeared. This work is the most significant history of psychoanalysis to date and his analysis converges at a number of points with that developed here, particularly in this section [ch. 1] and chapters 6 and 7 of his book. Our main point of difference is with Makari’s argument that, after the first schisms, Freud did a volte-face from his prior authoritarian position, and thereafter maintained a relatively loose hold on the psychoanalytic movement [mito do velhinho cansado de tretas]. We would rather emphasize the fact that greater latitude developed regarding the range of permissible divergence on aspects of theory (in part necessitated by the damage limitation exercise vis-à-vis the work of figures such as Adler and Jung) only as long as the Freud legend and Freud’s fundamental authority remained unchallenged.”
“Forel’s The Sexual Question (1905) appeared the same year as Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and received far more attention and was widely translated. Forel also published a book on Ethical and Legal Conflicts of the Sexual Life Inside and Outside of Marriage (1909). Jung reviewed it favourably, noting: ‘The author introduces his book with the following words: The following pages are for the most part an attack, based on documentary material, on the hypocrisy, the dishonesty and cruelty of our present-day morality and our almost non-existent rights in matters of sexual life. From which it is apparent that this work is another contribution to the great social task to which Forel has already rendered such signal service’ (Jung 1909, CW 18, § 921).”
“on the embeddedness of Freud’s work on dream in the history of the study of dreams, see the remarkable neglected study of Raymond de Saussure (1926), and Ellenberger (1970), 303–11; Kern (1975); and Shamdasani (2003a), section 2.”
“Already in 1930 H.L. Hollingworth noted: ‘The modern psychoanalytic movement, and what is often referred to as the Freudian psychology, consists chiefly in an elaboration and application of Herbart’s doctrines, and their amplification with a wealth of clinical detail’ (Hollingworth, 1930, 48).”
“See also Siegfried Bernfeld to Hans Ansbacher, 26 May 1952: ‘Freud belonged to the group of physicists and physiologists around Brücke, who prepared the way for the positivism of Mach and Avenarius.¹ He certainly knew the Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie. In the 1890s, Mach struck him . . . In one form or another positivism was unquestionably his natural mode of thinking’ (…) Freud mentions his reading of Mach’s The Analysis of Sensations in his letter to Fliess of 12 June 1900 (Freud 1985, 417).”
¹ “The philosopher Richard Avenarius was, along with Ernst Mach, one of the originators of empirico-criticism.”
“It seems that Derrida confounded the positivistic critique of metaphysics (evinced in Freud) with its Heideggerian deconstruction.”
“This only makes his abandonment of the seduction theory more enigmatic. Since he obtained ‘confirmations’ from his patients and could attribute the instances where he didn’t do so to resistance, what led him to repudiate his theory? Certainly not ‘adverse evidence’, as Grünbaum contends (1985, 117), because he couldn’t have had any (see Cioffi’s refutation of Grünbaum’s argument, 1988, 240–8). Neither the seduction theory nor its abandonment corresponded to the positivist model of ‘adaptation to facts’ (Mach).”
“One could say of psychotherapeutic practices what William James said of religious experience in general, which he described as self-validating states of transformation: ‘No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically’ (James 1929 [1902], 327).”
“Jones to Freud, 25 April 1913: ‘Jung’s recent conduct in America makes me think more than ever that he does not react like a normal man, and that he is mentally deranged to a serious extent; he produced quite a paranoiac impression on some of the Psa psychiatrists in Ward’s Island’”
“To take only a few examples from the era, Bernheim’s work (1980 [1891]) included 103 observations; the second volume of Janet’s book on psychasthenia (1903) had 236.”
O INDISCRETO
“Indeed, one need only look at almost any correspondence between Freud and his disciples to be struck by the continual stream of indiscretions about his patients, as well as by his polemical use of confidences learned during analysis. Freud even publicised disparaging comments by one of his patients (Pastor Oskar Pfister) concerning Jung, his previous analyst: ‘The patient gave me this information quite spontaneously and I make use of his communication without asking his consent, since I cannot allow that a psycho-analytic technique has any right to claim the protection of medical discretion’ (Freud 1914a). To Poul Bjerre, Jung wrote: ‘In a breach of medical discretion, Freud has even made hostile use of a patient’s letter – a letter which the person concerned, whom I know very well, wrote in a moment of resistance against me’ (17 July 1914, Jung 1975). For the identification of Pfister, see the letter from Abraham to Freud of 16 July 1914 in the new, unexpurgated edition of their correspondence, which shows at which point the medical secret was shared among insiders: ‘I think Pf is completely unreliable. His letter quoted in History was written in opposition to Jung; with a change of attitude he goes back to Jung, and now back to you again!’ Even a loyal supporter like Jones complained in private of several analytic ‘indiscretions’ by Freud: ‘Here are a few more examples. Not to mention the Swoboda case which is different, there was an occasion when he related to Jekels (when in his analysis) the work on Napoleon on which I had been engaged for two years. Jekels immediately published it in such a good essay that I never wrote anything on the subject. Then Freud told me the nature of Stekel’s sexual perversion, which he should not have and which I have never repeated to anyone’ (Ernest Jones to Max Schur, 6 October 1955; Jones Papers, Archives of the British Psycho-Analytical Society). We wonder what Jones’ reaction would have been had he known of the 1953 interview granted by Joan Riviere to Kurt Eissler about her analysis with Freud – carefully kept under lock and key at the Library of Congress until its recent declassification: ‘Freud wanted to get out the emotional reaction to Jones . . . He then read me a letter from Jones which made some uncomplimentary remarks about me. And he expected me to get very angry. And I was merely hurt that Freud should take the attitude of [censored word]’ (Sigmund Freud Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC).”
“We know that Ida Bauer [caso Dora] terminated the treatment after Freud had tried once again to convince her of her love for Mr K.”
“‘With her spasmodic cough, which, as is usual, was referred for its exciting stimulus to a tickling in her throat, she pictured to herself a scene of sexual gratification per os between the two people whose love-affair occupied her mind so incessantly. Her cough vanished a very short time after this tacitly accepted explanation – which fitted in very well with my view’ (Freud 1905c). The preceding lines established that Ida Bauer, far from having accepted Freud’s interpretation, had explicitly rejected it”
“As Billig remarks, ‘it only takes 5 minutes to read aloud the longest of Freud’s reports of these 50-minute sessions. Thus, the bulk of the dialogue must be treated as being lost’ (1999, 58).”
“Freud’s interpretation is in fact based on his theory of symbolic equivalence: money–excrement (Freud 1908b, 172–4; 1917b), which theory itself goes back to a series of associations elicited during the treatment of Oscar Fellner (‘Mr E’), in January 1897: ‘I read one day that the gold the devil gives his victims regularly turns into excrement; and the next day Mr E, who reports that his nurse had money deliria, suddenly told me (by way of Cagliostro – alchemist – Dukatenscheißer –one who defecates ducats–) that Louise’s money always was excrement’ (Freud 1985, 227). Here again, it’s unclear if these associations are Freud’s or Fellner’s.”
“We see that Lacan’s structural interpretation takes no fewer liberties with Freud’s case history than Freud does with Lanzer’s account. In the end, we are left to wonder what exactly we are talking about.” Realmente o artigo O mito individual do neurótico é um negócio ATROZ! Confira passagens em: https://seclusao.art.blog/2020/12/23/el-mito-individual-del-neurotico-lacan/
“Once again, we observe that Lacan’s narrative revisions are no less blatant than Freud’s: where exactly does Lacan find it that Lanzer’s father had been dismissed from the Army and that this was the reason for his marriage?”
“According to recently declassified documents at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, Kraepelin, with whom Pankejeff had been in treatment before going to see Freud, had diagnosed him as suffering from a manic-depressive state which was hereditary in nature (…) Pankejeff, after decades of analysis, came to the conclusion that it was Kraepelin and not Freud who correctly saw his case for what it was: ‘Ah, Kraepelin, he’s the only one who understood something about it!’ (typed interview with Kurt Eissler from 30 July 1954).”
Freud sem dúvida foi o melhor atrapalhapeuta/encosto de todos os tempos: “At the beginning of the analysis, Odessa was still under English control. This was not the only time that Freud put the analysis before Pankejeff’s personal wishes and plans: ‘But I remember, one time I wanted to go to Budapest for one or two days, but Freud didn’t let me go: There are many beautiful women in Budapest! you could fall in love with one of them while you’re there!’” “Freud had also forbidden Pankejeff from getting married and having children”
“For an early and penetrating critique of the reductive confusion Freud implemented between hermeneutical understanding and the causal explanation proper to the natural sciences, see Jaspers (1973).”
“My father maintained that he was born on the same day as Bismark (sic) – April 1, 1815. (…) So he died (…) on October 23/24, 1896; B. on July 30, 1898. B. survived him by 645 days = 23 × 28 + 1. The ‘1’ is no doubt due to my father’s error. Therefore the life difference is 23 × 28.”
F.
“Strachey was the only member of the Freudian circle who disapproved of Anna Freud’s and Kris’ cuts: ‘I’ve just got hold of the Procter-Gregg translation of the Fliess letters into English in typescript. It contains a certain amount that was evidently cut out of the German edition subsequently. I confess that I’m shocked by some of the omissions (…) Unless Anna Freud proposes to burn the originals, they’re bound to come out in the end; and surely it’s better that they should while people are alive who can correct their effect’ (James Strachey to Ernest Jones, 1 October 1951, Jones Papers, Archives of the British Psycho-Analytical Society)”
“In a letter to Strachey of 10/27/51, Jones noted that Freud arrived at Oedipus through accusing his father of incest: ‘And it is odd that he believes his own father seduced only his brother and some younger sisters, thus accounting for their hysteria, at a time when he was suffering from it badly himself ’ (Jones Papers).”
“Immediately after the publication of his article, Schur tried to convince the Freud family to publish an unexpurgated edition of the letters and he seems to have had a favourable response from Anna Freud (Max Schur to James Strachey, 10 April 1967, Archives of the British Psycho-
Analytical Society; Max Schur to Ernst Freud, 5 June 1968, Sigmund Freud Copyrights, Wivenhoe). However, the idea got nowhere.”
ANA COBRINHA, SEU PROBLEMA ERAM AS MULHERES! “I don’t know how far her judgment can be trusted and how we can prevent her from putting the material to a wrong use, if she should want to do so . . . Does Suse Bernfeld really have the right, for example, to publish my father’s correspondence with Wagner-Jauregg?” “Anna Freud’s fears were baseless, as Suzanne Bernfeld continued to respond to Jones’ requests for information.”
“In private, however, Jones didn’t fail to criticize the ‘Kris atrocities’ (Ernest Jones to James Strachey, 6 November 1951, Jones Papers, Archives of the British Psycho-Analytical Society) [Até ele tinha um coração!]. On 24 October 1951, Strachey had sent him a detailed critique of Kris’ argument, according to which the discovery of infantile sexuality was to have coincided with the self-analysis and the abandonment of the seduction theory: ‘My point is that the recognition of infantile sexuality as a normal activity – as distinct from the mere occurrence of abnormal sexual experiences – was only accepted by Freud gradually – over the years between 1897 and 1899’. [Another] response to Jones, 27 October 1951: ‘I have been too complacent about Kris’s pre-vision of the future, although it is a fascinating topic. Many of them [sic] are very nachträglich’ (ibid.).”
“We will compare with the document entitled ‘Freud in Paris’ which Marie Bonaparte sent to Jones and in which she reported what Freud had said to her on 8 April 1928 about his 1885–6 stay in Paris: ‘Then Freud went, with his friend, into a café, and there, the friend invited 5 or 6 ~respectable~ women to their table. One, who had a suspicious efflorescence on her nose, prided herself on undressing in just seconds.’ Freud had added, it is true: ‘Everything with these ladies was limited to a few drinks’ (Jones Papers).”
“‘His wife was assuredly the only woman in Freud’s love life, and she came first before all other mortals.’ (Jones) Here, however, is what Helen Puner, who gained this information from dissidents like Jung and Stekel, had to say: ‘Early in their marriage he came to regard his wife with the same analytic detachment he regarded a neurotic symptom’ (Puner 1947, 136).”
“As to Martha – here I have my doubts whether at the time I knew them she still was the ‘one and only’. As far as I could see it, he spent less and less time with her . . . there was so little left of the great love that I was quite surprised by Volume I” Schur
“To Ferenczi, who had developed the habit of exchanging kisses with his patients, he wrote: ‘Now I am assuredly not one of those who from prudishness or from consideration of bourgeois convention would condemn little erotic gratification of this kind’ (Freud and Ferenczi 2000, 479 [obviamente sendo falso em sua carta]).” Freud odiaria os brasileiros…
“Rumours had circulated in Vienna about a liaison between Freud and Minna Bernays, which Jung later corroborated.
JUNG: This is a fact: the youngest sister made a giant transference and Freud was not insensible.
EISSLER: You mean, there was a liaison with the youngest sister?
JUNG: Oh, a liaison!? I don’t know to what extent!? But, my God, we know very well how it is, don’t we!?
The testimony of Max Graf, father of ‘Little Hans’, is just as ambiguous:
GRAF: I had the impression that there was something strange in the relationship with the sister-in-law . . . But as things weren’t very clear, I didn’t want to speak publicly about it . . .
EISSLER: Did he have sexual relations with her?
GRAF: I don’t believe so
These are the rumours that Jones surreptitiously evoked when he wrote: ‘Freud no doubt appreciated Minna Bernays’ conversation, but to say that she in any way replaced her sister in his affection is sheer nonsense’”
OS PÂNDEGOS
“In the unpublished version of Bennet’s notebooks, Jung told Bennet on 16 September 1959 that Jones never had any original ideas and never liked him. On 19 September, he noted that Jones was mistaken to claim that it was Freud and Ferenczi who had persuaded him to break his vow of abstinence from alcohol (required of all physicians at the Burghölzli) to drink wine in August 1909 (Jones 1955, 61), as he had already left the Burghölzli, and celebrated by going drinking (Bennet Papers, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich). Alphonse Maeder recalled that on occasion, at a meeting of the Swiss Society of Psychiatry, ‘Bleuler made a violent storm of abuse . . . against the assistants who let themselves abandon abstinence (Jung after his trip with Freud in the USA, and myself later); and went so far as to say that if he had seen this in advance, he would not have introduced psychoanalysis into the Burghölzli’ (Maeder to Ellenberger, 1 March 1967, Centre Henri Ellenberger, Hôpital Sainte-Anne, Paris).”
Suprema ironia do destino, o tio de Freud foi condenado por ser moedeiro-falso! Nos F. Archives: “Top secret microfilm of newspaper article. – Not to be opened, except by Dr. K.R. Eissler.”
“In my article on repression and memory . . . I criticised Jung for a statement which I now find in your recent article on repression. This is very sad, isn’t it?”
Jones em carta a F.
“For an anthropological study of (now rapidly declining)¹ psychoanalytic institutes in the USA, see Kirschner (2000).”
¹ Adorei o adendo. Será que ainda dá tempo de reconhecer alguma coisa que tenha sobrevivido para 2021?!
