The Freud Files

by Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel; Shamdasani, Sonu;

  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 . . .’154 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 . . .’155

  Pankejeff That’s incorrect.

  Obholzer How so?

  Pankejeff No, it’s incorrect.

  Obholzer Then why does Freud write it?

  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 . . .156

  Likewise, Freud reduced Pankejeff’s intestinal problems and persistent constipation to his desire to be penetrated by his father, as his mother had been during the primal scene, and to the castration anxiety that this feminine fantasy had elicited in him. As for Pankejeff, he had a much more prosaic explanation, which he couldn’t have neglected to share with Freud at the time.

  Pankejeff I once [before the analysis] had diarrhea, and Dr. Drosnes came to the estate . . . He takes a little bottle wrapped in paper from his pocket and says, ‘This is calomel.’ He pours some into a cup and says, ‘Take it.’ The result was that it got worse . . . The next time, I tell him that it didn’t help, it just got worse. And he says, ‘I didn’t give you enough’ . . . Later, a general practitioner told me that it [calomel] is only given to horses, not humans. I am telling you that what happened was that I couldn’t eat anything all winter long . . .. It was terrible. All the mucous membranes were torn. And what happened as a consequence?. . .

  Obholzer Constipation, I imagine?

  Pankejeff Yes, a constipation that nothing could be done with . . . And that has stayed with me to the present day: My intestines don’t work by themselves. I have to take something twice a week. At times, I take it only twice a week, but then I have pains. It’s terrible what this man did.

  Obholzer You had no intestinal difficulties before that?

  Pankejeff Before that, everything functioned perfectly.157

  Freud, however, claimed to have definitively succeeded in eliminating this symptom during Pankejeff’s second analysis. Indeed, in a note appended to his case history in 1923, he wrote that Pankejeff had come back to see him in Vienna to work through a remainder of the transference that hadn’t been resolved. Freud: He then came to Vienna and reported that immediately after the end of the treatment he had been seized with a longing to tear himself free from my influence. After a few months’ work, a piece of the transference which had not hitherto been overcome was successfully dealt with.158

  Freud doesn’t say anything else about this ‘piece of transference’, but Ruth Mack Brunswick tells us in her ‘Supplement to Freud’s “History of infantile neurosis”’ that this referred to his constipation, which Freud seems to have considered a transferential identification with his own chronic constipation.159

  Mack Brunswick: He [Pankejeff] returned to Freud for a few months of analysis, with the purpose, successfully accomplished, of clearing up his hysterical constipation.160

  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.161

  Pankejeff: When I visited Professor Freud in the spring of 1919, on my way to Freiburg, I was so thoroughly satisfied with my mental and emotional condition that I never thought of the possibility of needing more psychoanalytic treatment.162

  Pankejeff to Gardiner, 14 September 1970: My reanalysis in 1919 took place not at my request, but at the wish of Professor Freud himself.163

  Obholzer [Pankejeff] often told me that his first four years of analysis with Freud had helped him . . . The mistake he did was to go and see Freud again in 1919.

  M. B-J Why do you say the second analysis was a mistake?

  Obholzer 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.164

  Pankejeff That intestinal thing was really the reason I stayed with Freud at that time. He said, ‘That’s something we still have to deal with’ . . .

  Obholzer And what became of your intestinal disorders?

  Pankejeff I somehow got it to come by itself, a few times. And he wrote, ‘We’ve been successful!’ No such thing! . . . And I said to him [Freud], ‘I would like to go because of my financial affairs.’ And he answered, ‘No, stay here. There is this and that still to be resolved.’ And so I stayed. And that’s why it became too late.165

  In the end, what remains of Freud’s psychoanalytic construction? Not much. Without corroboration from the patient, the primal scene remains a foundationless hypothesis, as does the castration anxiety to which it supposedly gave rise – and just about everything else that followed in Freud’s analysis. Without the scene with Grusha, there is no way to explain the specifics of Pankejeff ’s love life. Without the exclusive preference for coitus from behind, there is no reason to believe that these sexual practices re-enacted the primal scene. Without a cure for the constipation, there is no reason to give credence to Freud’s psychogenetic explanation of it. And without the ‘piece of transference’ to overcome, what, in the end, are we talking about?

  Freud’s case history holds together solely because he invented, at every narrative intersection, what was necessary for him to make Pankejeff ’s life coincide with the theoretical fable he was in the process of spinning. The history of the Wolf Man is not that of Sergius Pankejeff, no more than the histories of the Rat Man and Dora are those of Ernst Lanzer and Ida Bauer. It’s a ‘psycho-analytic novel’166 that gives form to hypotheses, animates theoretical characters and cloaks the analyst’s conjectures in the bright colours of reality. That Pankejeff spent much of his life playing the role of the Wolf Man doesn’t change anything: quite simply, he confounded himself with the character written for him in Freud’s novel – until the moment he decided to get out of the story and speak in his own name.

  Freud the novelist?

  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, Dostoevsky 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-narrativisti
c 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.

  Freud: 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.167

  This rejection of literariness is in no way anecdotal, since it is directly related to the ‘will to science’ (Isabelle Stengers’ formulation) which has historically defined psychoanalysis. A refusal to take this seriously is a refusal to take seriously the project of psychoanalysis as such, banishing it to complete insignificance. As with so many other attempts at the end of the nineteenth century to found a scientific psychology, psychoanalysis claimed to supplant all previous forms of knowledge. Literature, in this respect, presented a unique problem for psychoanalysis. Indeed, what subject could be found that hadn’t already been treated by novelists, poets and dramatists? What recess of the human soul could psychoanalysis illuminate that they hadn’t already explored in great depth? How could one hope to rival – and submit to universal laws – the inexhaustible knowledge of humanity deposited in world literature? In literature, psychoanalysis ran into a mirror: a strange and unnerving double.

  Freud to Arthur Schnitzler, 14 May 1922: I have tormented myself with the question why in all these years I have never attempted to make your acquaintance and to have a talk with you . . . I think I have avoided you from a kind of reluctance to meet my double . . . Whenever I get deeply absorbed in your beautiful creations I invariably seem to find beneath their poetic surface the very presuppositions, interests, and conclusions which I know to be my own. Your determinism as well as your skepticism – what people call pessimism – your preoccupations with the truths of the unconscious and of the instinctual drives in man, your dissection of the cultural conventions of our society, the dwelling of your thoughts on the polarity of love and death; all this moves me with an uncanny feeling of familiarity.168

  In what way, then, were psychoanalysis’ stories and characters so different from those of literature? In what way were they more ‘true’? What could justify the psychoanalyst’s claim to know more about human nature than the writers? Only by dogmatically asserting an ‘epistemic rupture’ between psychoanalysis and literature, thereby re-establishing an asymmetry between Freud and his doubles, could psychoanalysis settle this question to its satisfaction.

  Freud, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday: The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.169

  Freud: Now in this dispute as to the estimation in which dreams should be held, imaginative writers seem to be on the same side as . . . the author of The Interpretation of Dreams. . . creative writers are valuable allies and their evidence is to be prized highly, for they are apt to know a whole host of things between heaven and earth of which our philosophy has not yet let us dream . . . If only this support given by writers in favour of dreams having a meaning were less ambiguous! A strictly critical eye might object that writers take their stand neither for nor against particular dreams having a psychical meaning; they are content to show how the sleeping mind twitches under the excitations which have remained active in it as off-shoots of waking life.170

  In 1909, there was a discussion within the Psychoanalytical Society of Vienna on the subject of Richard Strauss’ Elektra, which had just been performed at the Vienna Opera. The libretto was written by Hugo von Hofmannstahl, who was fairly knowledgeable about psychoanalysis. Freud, however, hadn’t liked it a bit.

  Freud, Minutes of the Psychoanalytic Society of Vienna of 31 March 1909: 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. Yet, this seems to be a sign of our times. The poets dabble in all possible sorts of sciences, and then proceed to a poetic working up of the knowledge they have acquired. The public is fully justified in rejecting such products.171

  The will to assert an asymmetry between psychoanalysis and literature is especially self-evident here: Freud proceeds by diktat, denying the poet the right to use psychoanalysis as a source of inspiration, while granting himself the right to put the poet on his couch. Psychoanalysis affirmed its hegemony over literature by unilaterally subjecting it to its interprefactions. A century of ‘psychoanalytic literary criticism’ followed. It was essential for Freud to make his readers believe in the scientific nature of his interpretations and constructions – this was the only way to establish psychoanalysis’ supremacy over its hermeneutical rivals, and thus to represent psychoanalysis as the only possible way for people to comprehend their own life, and those of others.172 Without these scientific pretensions, psychoanalysis is nothing more than one interpretation among many others in the large market of psychological, philosophical, religious and literary hermeneutics. The question, therefore, is not to know if Freud’s writings allow us to shed some light on the human condition, as indeed any talented writer can. It is, instead, to know why we should attribute a special and incomparable status to his writings, and why so many people did just this during the twentieth century. We might add: if we are to evaluate psychoanalysis on purely hermeneutical or aesthetic criteria, there are grounds for finding it wanting. Simulating science may not be the best way to write great literature. Jean Cocteau: 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.173

  4 Policing the past

  I have a wide experience in what people report as having discussed with my father, or heard him say, and it is always untrue.

  Anna Freud to Kurt Eissler, 27 January 19511

  At the outset of this book, we posed the question as to why psychoanalysis – a discipline apparently dealing with the past – is so allergic to history. The reason has now become clear: historical inquiry, by its very nature, poses a threat to the foundations of psychoanalysis, to its very identity. This is not only because historians have separated Freud’s theory from the plethora of legends which surrounded it, as if it was a question of freeing the rational and empirical kernel of psychoanalysis from its mythical, political and speculative coverings. Through making evident the discrepancies between Freud’s accounts and the material of which he spoke, through demonstrating the process of construction which his legendary narratives were deployed to conceal, through showing the fabrication of psychoanalytic facts prior to their crystallisation into objects of cultural consensus, the work of Freud historians has made it apparent that there never was a kernel.

  This is not to suggest that historians have finally unveiled the truth of Freud’s accounts or of his patients. That Sergius Pankejeff or Ernst Lanzer, for example, may have rejected this or that interpretation of Freud tells us nothing about the validity or utility of the latter. Freud’s patients are not necessarily any more trustworthy than Freud2 and their disagreements with him were part and parcel of the game of an
alysis, of the conflict of interpretations. However, through bringing to light the arbitrariness behind Freud’s narrative interprefactions, historical study relativises and delegitimates the theory of psychoanalysis much more effectively than any epistemological critique. Instead of attempting to demonstrate that Freud could not prove (verify, test, validate) what he proposed – which has never stopped people from being convinced of the persuasive force of his accounts – historical critique calls into question the hermeneutic pact between Freud and his readers through revealing the unreliability of his texts and rendering them suspect. How is one supposed to continue to believe everything he says, when faced with the accumulation of half-lies, misleading assertions, stylistic equivocations and significant omissions? Why should one continue to attribute him a privileged access to the ‘unconscious’, once it has become clear how he continually evokes this to silence those who were not in agreement with him? And why should we continue to have faith in his self-portrayals, rather than the contrary statements of some of his patients and former colleagues and adversaries, once it has transpired that at times he manipulated the clinical givens to make them say what he wanted them to? In sum, Freud can no longer be regarded as an always reliable witness. Or rather, he is one witness amongst others, and one with particular stakes and interests.

  Given this, it is not surprising that Freud’s successors did all they could to impede the work of historians, through censuring documents, blocking access to the archives of the psychoanalytic movement and launching campaigns of denunciation against scholars. It was essential to protect Freud’s narrative monopoly against the alternative accounts proposed by some of his patients, his rivals and historians. Without this, psychoanalysis would have soon returned to being one therapeutic narrative amongst others in the competing and burgeoning private-sector marketplace for psychological wellbeing. Psychoanalysis would have dissolved into a plethora of divergent contested accounts rather than laying claim to being the sole science of the mind and the pre-eminent form of psychotherapy. Thus the proliferation of narratives had be stopped to maintain the sole unquestionable and non-negotiable account. This was not because Freud’s successors necessarily believed all his accounts – but they had to be maintained to continue to sustain and protect psychoanalysis and to make it true. How else to make it true than to declare it to be such – and to play the game of truth, the game of science? The official history of psychoanalysis has been a constant defence of the Freudian legend. As such, it has played an important theoretical and institutional role, protecting the ‘facts’ and ‘observations’ upon which psychoanalysis is supposed to reside. In such a situation, it is evident that historians would be seen as trouble makers who had to be silenced.