Sierra Prasada

Sigmund Freud’s sixteen-year-old “Dora” had all the makings of a reality TV star.

Editor Philip Rieff might well have been composing a pitch letter when he wrote in the 1962 introduction to Dora, An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria that the “sick daughter has a sick father, who has a sick mistress, who has a sick husband, who proposes himself to the sick daughter as her lover.”

It is the sick father who, in the fall of 1900, delivered his daughter to the good doctor Freud and begged his help. The sick daughter herself elected to discontinue treatment only a few months later on the last day of that year. The record of that brief therapy – held back from publication for more than four years after Freud finished writing up the case history – offers a keyhole view of a time at once utterly familiar to our strictest moral sensibilities and radically alien to our most progressive humanistic tendencies.

The following excerpt acquaints the reader with one of the more sinister elements of Dora’s quandary and captures the penetrating (though not necessarily fact-based) nuance that have made Freud an essential companion to anyone who would grasp the unfulfilled wishes of the 20th century:

I could not in general dispute Dora’s characterization of her father; and there was one particular respect in which it was easy to see that her reproaches were justified. When she was feeling embittered she used to be overcome by the idea that she had been handed over to Herr K. as the price of his tolerating the relations between her father and his wife; and her rage at her father’s making such a use of her was visible behind her affection for him.

At other times she was quite well aware that she had been guilty of exaggeration in talking like this. The two men has of course never made formal agreement in which she was treated as an object for barter; her father in particular would have been horrified at any such suggestion. But he was one of those men who know how to evade a dilemma by falsifying their judgement upon one of the conflicting alternatives. If it had been pointed out to him that there might be danger for a growing girl in the constant and uncontrolled companionship of a man who had no satisfaction from his own wife, he would have been certain to answer that he could rely upon his daughter, that a man like K. could never be dangerous to her, and that his friend was himself incapable of such intentions, or that Dora was still a child and was treated as a child by K. But as a matter of fact things were in a position in which each of the two men avoided drawing any conclusions from the other’s behavior which would have been awkward for his own plans.

It was possible for Herr K. to send Dora flowers every day for a whole year while he was in the neighbourhood, to take every opportunity of giving her valuable presents,a nd to spend all his spare time in her company, without her parents noticing anything in his behaviour that was characteristic of love-making.

It seemed to me almost indecent in a country which is devoted to practical aims to make my appearance as a ‘dream-interpreter,’ before you could possibly know the importance that can attach to this antiquated and derided art. The interpretation of dreams is in fact the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious.

Only in the third of his five 1909 lectures on psychoanalysis, delivered at Clark University during what would turn out to be his sole U.S. visit, did Sigmund Freud feel comfortable enough to raise the topic of dreams, but when he did, he allowed for no resistance to their gravity. He declaimed:

If I am asked how one can become a psycho-analyst, I reply: ‘By studying one’s own dreams.’

He once described himself as seeking “to agitate the sleep of mankind,” or, as we might now say, to waken us from the dream of our pre-20th century existence. Dreams offered Freud a doorway into an otherwise unreachable internal labyrinth, a glimpse of an infinite galaxy within, and an undertaking that would initiate a big bang in the history of ideas: mapping the unconscious mind.

The map remains unfinished and Freud can take credit neither for discovering the unconscious nor for coining the term, but his work made this axial idea so prominent that it could not be forced back into obscurity.

It seems helpful to read Dora alongside both the earlier Interpretation of Dreams (full text) and the later Five Lectures on Psycho-analysis, because the lectures offer one of the clearer explications of Freud’s then-new “science.” On top of that, his Dora case analysis arguably rests on his interpretation of two of his patient’s dreams. It does not rest easy.

In his introduction to a 2010 illustrated edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, editor, trained psychoanalyst and Freud critic Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson touches on some of the challenges to Freud’s treatment of dreams:

We will forever be in Freud’s debt for his recognition of the importance of dreams, but we are less bound by his insistence on the one and only way to interpret them or indeed even accord them importance for the personal life of the dreamer.

6 May 1856: Sigismund Shlomo Freud born in Freiberg (now Příbor) to Jewish Galician parents

1860:                … The family moves to Vienna following anti-semitic riots in Freiberg

1880:                … begins a life-long relationship with tobacco, soon taking up cigars

1881:                … graduates from the University of Vienna after 8 years of rapturous laboratory study

1884:                … tests the potential of cocaine to help with morphine withdrawal

1885:                … briefly trains in Paris with Jean-Martin Charcot, using hypnosis to treat hysteria

1886:                … resigns post at Vienna General Hospital, marries, goes into private practice

1895:                … the last of the couple’s six children, Anna, is born

1896:                … abandons hypnosis and begins using the term “psycho-analysis”

1899:                … publishes The Interpretation of Dreams, the first of many major works

1902:                … forms the Wednesday Psychological Society, an influential discussion group

1905:                … publishes Three Essays on a Theory of Sexuality

1905:                … allows publication of Dora, An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria

1906:                … begins famed correspondence with C.G. Jung

1909:                … lectures at Clark University, receives honorary doctorate, media attention

1912:                … friendship with Jung crumbles, leading to a permanent break

1923:                … has cancerous growth removed from his mouth

1933:                … books burned by the Nazis

1938:                … agrees to flee Vienna and goes to London

1939:                … in great pain from cancer of the jaw, requests a lethal dose of morphine

In 1909, Sigmund Freud made his sole journey to the U.S., having been invited, along with colleague (and then-annointed son and heir) C.G. Jung, to lecture at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. According to the book’s editor, Freud biographer Peter Gay, the lectures found an appreciative audience at the time, and they have endured as a “lucid general introduction to what is, after all, a difficult discipline.”

The unidentified editor of what appears to have been the 1961 edition of the lectures (which formed the basis for this more recent edition), noted that they “give an excellent idea of the ease and clarity of style and the unconstrained sense of form which made Freud such a remarkable expository lecturer.”

Is it any surprise, then, that creativity fascinated Freud? In one of his five lectures, he explains that the roots of both human neuroses and creativity lie in the natural conflict between the obligations of reality and the temptations of fantasy. In creativity, Freud recognized a possible escape from the enduring problem of neuroses, a doorway drawn with chalk (or perhaps a crayon) in an otherwise blankly solid wall:

The deeper you penetrate into the pathogenesis of nervous illness, the more you will find revealed the connection between the neuroses and other productions of the human mind, including the most valuable.

You will be taught that we humans, with the high standards of our civilization and under the pressure of our internal repressions, find reality unsatisfying quite generally, and for that reason entertain a life of phantasy in which we like to make up for the insufficiencies of reality by the production of wish-fulfillments…

The energetic and successful man is one who succeeds by his efforts in turning his wishful phantasies into reality. Where this fails, as a result of the resistances of the external world and of the subject’s own weakness, he begins to turn away from reality and withdraws into his more satisfying world of phantasy, the content of which is transformed into symptoms should he fall ill. In certain favorable circumstances, it still remains possible for him to find another path leading from these phantasies to reality, instead of becoming permanently estranged from it by regressing to infancy. If a person who is at loggerheads with reality possesses an artistic gift (a thing that is still a psychological mystery to us), he can transform his phantasies into artistic creations instead of into symptoms. In this matter, he can escape the doom of neurosis and by this roundabout path regain his contact with reality.

If there is persistent rebellion against the real world and if this precious gift is absent or insufficient, it is almost inevitable that the libido, keeping to the sources of the phantasies, will follow the path of regression and will revive infantile wishes and end in neurosis. To-day, neurosis takes the place of the monasteries which used to be the refuge of all whom life had disappointed or who felt too weak to face it.

From Freud’s Couch, Scott’s Buttocks, Bronte’s Grave (University of Chicago, 2011):

The couch is covered with the most luxurious looking Persian rugs, textiles woven by the women of a nomadic Qashqai tribe of southern Iran, with deep, warm reds and ochers, intricately patterned and exquisitely textured.

My wife, the psychoanalyst’s daughter, captured the seduction of the stage set perfectly: “It’s like a cocoon,” she said wonderingly, wishing she could have had Sigi as her analyst, and then added, “a cross between an office and a bordello.” It is certainly not like my mother-in-law’s austere couch on the upper East side in New York, all bare lines and free from distractions – or any other analyst’s office I have seen. . .

Image: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

In some “prefatory” remarks to his case study on Dora, even before the title character has made her first appearance on the page, Sigmund Freud openly frets that his work will be mistaken for a roman à clef aimed not at treatment but at titillation:

Now in this case history . . . sexual questions will be discussed with all possible frankness, the organs and functions of sexual life will be called by their proper names, and the pure-minded reader can convince himself from my description that I have not hesitated to converse upon such subjects in such language even with a young woman. Am I, then, to defend myself upon this score as well? I will simply claim for myself the rights of the gynaecologist – or rather much more modest ones – and add that it would be the mark of a singular and perverse prurience to suppose that conversations of this kind are a good means of exciting or of gratifying sexual desires.

It is hardly astonishing that mere mention of sex might have agitated straitlaced Victorians, but the radical nature of the “talking cure” appears in a more bizarre light when one realizes that medical doctors had long practiced a far more effective means of “exciting” and “gratifying sexual desires” i.e. treating hysteria, a female disorder named as early as the 4th century BCE by Hippocrates.

Beginning in ancient times and continuing up until the 1920s, doctors routinely performed what they called “vulvular massage” ultimately producing “nervous paroxysm” which (temporarily) relieved their patients of symptoms that strongly resembled prolonged sexual frustration, according to Christopher Ryan’s and Cacilda Jetha’s Sex at Dawn. If this wildly popular treatment (undertaken at least once by as many as 75 percent of American women according to an 1873 publication) fell out of favor by the roaring 20s, it may be because vibrators, first introduced for home-use in 1902, had become more common than toasters in American homes by 1917.

That vibrators became so popular despite widespread condemnation of auto-eroticism testifies to the pervasive (and persisting) hypocrisy of social attitudes toward sex, attitudes that dermatologist Iwan Bloch, the acknowledged father of sexology, strived to change with his 766-page tome The Sexual Life of Our Times in Its Relations to Modern Civilization.

Published in German in late 1906 and in English in 1909, Bloch’s polemical, anthropological tract made an impassioned case for free love as compatible with moral life. John Kerr included an excerpt from Bloch’s work in his 1998 biography of Jung’s and Freud’s friendship, A Most Dangerous Method:

. . . modern European society . . . simultaneously makes fun of the “old maid” and condemns the unmarried mother to infamy. This double-faced, putrescent “morality” is profoundly immoral, it is radically evil. it is moral and good to contest it with all our energy, to enter the lists on behalf of the right to free love, to “unmarried” motherhood . . . Two million women [in Germany] in a condition of compulsory celibacy and – coercive marriage morality. it is merely necessary to place these two facts side by side, in order to display the complete ethical bankruptcy of our time in the province of sexual morality.

Another later volume, The Birth of Sexology – appearing in summary on The Kinsey Institute’s website – offers a clue as to what would be one of the more transformative if glacially slow-developing aspect of Bloch’s approach:

Bloch, a man of enormous erudition, who spoke several languages and possessed a personal library of 40,000 volumes, knew from his readings that many supposedly pathological and degenerate sexual behaviors had always existed in many parts of the globe and among both “primitive” and civilized peoples. Therefore, he gradually came to the conclusion that the medical view of sexual behavior was shortsighted and needed to be corrected by historical and anthropological research. He began to see the “sexual psychopathies” as timeless and universal manifestations of the human condition and finally, in the first years of our century, attacked the notion of sexual degeneration in a seminal study.

To be continued…

. . . continued from Monday’s post:

Freud’s anxieties concerning Dora‘s reception may seem strange given some of the prevailing medical treatments of the age, but sexologist Iwan Bloch’s provocative writings undermining the very concept of sexual degeneration were no more likely to please.

More importantly, for decades, Bloch’s findings fell mostly on deaf ears. As reported in Sex at Dawn, hysteria would only be excised from the list of medically recognized diagnoses in 1952, homosexuality not until 1973.

As for the present day, according to The Kinsey Institute, “the goal envisioned by Ellis, Freud, Bloch, Hirschfeld, Moll, Marcuse and other sexological pioneers has not nearly been approached, much less reached everywhere.”

Bloch’s research-supported campaign, not to mention Freud’s own body of work, seems to suggest a more general principle: When it comes to sexuality, history does not so much chronicle dramatic changes in human behavior as it does a gradual and still ongoing, erosion of hypocrisy and an expansion of awareness as to what’s normal for our own mystifying selves i.e. far more than we’re yet willing to accept as a global community.

In other words, we’ve all been doing it since the beginning of time; we just haven’t been openly talking about it or feeling very good about it.

The strong connection drawn at the time between sexual deviancy and hereditary degeneration does much to illumine the agonizing transition between 19th and 20th century ways of thinking – a struggle nicely summarized by Sir Ken Robinson in a recent TED talk.

Diagnoses of “nervous” disorders in women and men had become so common at the turn of the century that, as John Kerr writes in A Most Dangerous Method, “it was generally conceded, even if the specific causes were disputed, that there was something about the pace of modern civilization that regularly resulted in a pathologically overtaxed nervous system.”

Shortly after, Kerr puts the theory of hereditary degeneration in context:

The theory of hereditary degeneration was a kind of speculative psychiatric attempt to align the discipline with the new concepts of Darwinian evolution. Specifically, it was contended that in certain families hereditary taint would manifest itself in progressively more severe conditions over successive generations. Thus, in the first generation, one might find only such mild disorders as nervousness and a general psychological eccentricity (perhaps manifest in unusual religious ideas or else in an artistic bent). In the next generation, more severe illnesses would emerge, such as epilepsy or severe hysteria. In the third generation, these in turn would be replaced by psychosis and overt criminality. And so on, until the line died out.

The theory strikes the modern reader as quite odd, even if upon a moment’s reflection he or she will realize that it is based on a true-enough observation, namely that mental illness does indeed seem to run in families, with increasing pathology seen at least in some of them.

Where we differ in the nineteenth-century view is to our predilection for attributing any progressive deterioration to psychological causes, and for seeing in bad parenting the causes of pathology in the next generation. At the turn of the century, however, it seemed equally reasonable to assume that such psychological causes were supplemented by physical ones, that the familial protoplasm was deteriorating along with its mental health. And though sharper minds were beginning to object to this theory, too, its day was not yet done.

Kerr goes on to attest that ideas about hereditary degeneration played the role of handmaiden to rife theories of racial inferiority. In and after the publication of Bloch’s sexology tome in late 1906, just across the Atlantic, Booker T. Washington tirelessly campaigned for the advancement of his race; the string of political defeats that would define his career came at the time when blacks represented the ground floor in the school of inevitable hereditary degeneration.

In Up from History, biographer Robert Norrell delineates whites’ presumption that differences in pigment spelled doom:

By the 1890s Darwinian thought fostered the widespread belief that competition among races would inevitably bring the demise of blacks. Most white intellectuals were certain that the black population was on the road to extinction. Joseph Le Conte, a nationally respected scientist, insisted that blacks’ fate was either disappearance or mixture, and he quickly added that mixing races yielded offspring who were weak physically and mentally and therefore doomed demographically…The predictions of disappearance were bolstered by the widespread belief that blacks were degenerating into beasts. “The Negro has not progressed,” [Virginia novelist Thomas Nelson] Page wrote in 1892, “not because he was a slave, but because he does not possess the faculties to raise himself above slavery.”

In order to transcend the preceding theories, we’ve needed the tools that Freud and his colleagues passed down to us. Primitive as they still are, they offer a starting point if not a guide book to the vast microcosm within, a vehicle with which we’ve been burning the rubber of the mind’s intercontinental highway for more than 100 years.

Image: Kiera Knightly portraying Sabina Spielrein in the 2011 film A Dangerous Method.

From Dorothy Parker’s poem, originally published in Life magazine on 28 April 1921:

Only name the day, and we’ll fly away
In the face of old traditions,
To a sheltered spot, by the world forgot,
Where we’ll park our inhibitions.
Come and gaze in eyes where the lovelight lies
As it psychoanalyzes,
And when once you glean what your fantasies mean
Life will hold no more surprises.
When you’ve told your love what you’re thinking of
Things will be much more informal;
Through a sunlit land we’ll go hand-in-hand,
Drifting gently back to normal.

Read on.