The Freud Files

by Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel; Shamdasani, Sonu;

  74. Mach (1976), 120.

  75. Freud (1985), 264; (1895), 325–8.

  76. Mach (1976), 120: ‘Observation and theory too are not sharply separable, since almost any observation is already influenced by theory and, if important enough, in turn reacts on theory.’

  77. MacCurdy (1923), 132.

  78. Jastrow (1932), 261.

  79. Freud (1985), 264.

  80. Freud (1925a), 34.

  81. Grünbaum (1985), 128.

  82. Woodworth (1917), 194.

  83. Hart (1929), 79 and 81.

  84. Wohlgemuth (1923), 162–3; Wohlgemuth’s capitalisation.

  85. Huxley (1925), 319.

  86. Hollingworth (1930), 322.

  87. Freud (1910a), 42. Freud refers here to Bell’s study of infantile sexuality (1902), which was based on ‘no fewer than 2,500 positive observations in the course of fifteen years’.

  88. Gattel (1898) had tried to verify Freud’s hypotheses on the subject of ‘actual neuroses’ on a cohort of 100 patients in Krafft-Ebing’s psychiatric clinic. As we have also seen, Jung’s association experiments were presented as an experimental verification of Freud’s theory of repression.

  89. See Borch-Jacobsen (2009), ch. 6.

  90. Cited in Rosenzweig (1986), 38. Rosenzweig had sent Freud offprints of two of his articles, one of which was devoted to an experimental study of repression. According to Roy Grinker, who was present when Freud read Rosenzweig’s articles, ‘Freud threw the reprints across the table in a gesture of impatient rejection’ (ibid.).

  91. Freud (1933), 322.

  92. Wohlgemuth (1923), 245.

  93. Hart (1929), 77.

  94. Freud (1925a), 49–50.

  95. Freud (1896b), 199.

  96. Freud (1925a), 23–4.

  97. Sigmund Freud Copyrights, Wivenhoe; cited in Gay (1988), 46.

  98. Freud (1925a), 59.

  99. Freud (1914a), 16–17.

  100. Freud (1913a), 182.

  101. Freud (1913a), 182; our emphasis.

  102. Freud and Abraham (2002), 229.

  103. Freud (1905a), 131.

  104. Freud (1913a), 181–2.

  105. Wohlgemuth (1923), 237.

  106. Huxley (1925), 319.

  107. Jastrow (1932), 227 and 229–30.

  108. Laplanche and Pontalis (1974), 405.

  109. Freud (1914a), 17–18.

  110. Freud (1925a), 33–4.

  111. Freud (1933), 120.

  112. Chodoff (1966), 508.

  113. Cioffi (1974).

  114. Freud (1896a), 153.

  115. Freud (1896b), 204.

  116. Freud (1985), 220–1.

  117. Freud (1913b), 141; our emphasis.

  118. Freud (1896b), 204.

  119. Löwenfeld (1899), 195–6.

  120. See for example Freud (1985), 227–8, 288–9.

  121. Freud (1985), 213.

  122. Freud (1985), 218, 223–4.

  123. An allusion to the ninth edition of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia sexualis (1894), which Freud was reading at the time (see Swales 1982a and 1983).

  124. Freud (1985), 219.

  125. Freud (1916–17), 367–8; Freud’s emphasis.

  126. Ibid., 370–1; Freud’s emphasis.

  127. Freud (1985), 226.

  128. For a critique of the debunking of belief, see Latour (1996), which intersects with the argument here.

  129. Chesterton (1923), 34–5.

  130. Alias Mr E in the letters to Fliess; the identity of this important patient was established by Swales (1996).

  131. Freud (1925), 32.

  132. Schimek (1987), 940–4.

  133. Freud (1985), 226.

  134. One should note that this ‘confirmation’ of the theory of seduction occurs two months after Freud’s letter to Fliess in which he announced that he no longer believed in his ‘neurotica’.

  135. Freud (1985), 288–9; Freud’s emphasis.

  136. 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).

  137. See Borch-Jacobsen (2009), ch. 2.

  138. Delbœuf (1886), 169; our emphasis.

  139. Wohlgemuth (1924), 499; cited by Cioffi (1998a), 18–19.

  140. Hart (1929), 74; cited by Cioffi (1998a), 18.

  141. Marmor (1926), 289.

  142. Ellenberger (1973), 56.

  143. 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). On this question and on the issue of ‘optional ontologies’, see Shamdasani (2004).

  144. Jastrow (1932), 202.

  145. Wohlgemuth (1923), 165; Wohlgemuth’s emphasis.

  146. See above, chapter 1, p. 85.

  147. Freud and Jung (1974), 18.

  148. Freud and Ferenczi (2000), 192.

  149. Freud and Jones (1993), 3721.

  150. Freud to Ferenczi, 9 December 1912: ‘Jung is crazy (meschugge)’ (Freud and Ferenczi 1993, 460); Freud to Abraham, 1 June 1913: ‘Jung is crazy’ (Freud and Abraham 2002, 186). 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’ (Freud and Jones 1993, 199). Brome (1984), 140–1: ‘Jung said that the Freudians circulated rumours about his possible schizophrenia, and so adept and sustained were these rumours that it caused him some damage to his practice and “lost me some of my students”.’ On the continuation of the myth of Jung’s madness by his biographers, see Shamdasani (2005a), 72ff.

  151. Freud to Ferenczi, 21 December 1924 (Freud and Ferenczi 2000, 195).

  152. Wohlgemuth (1923), 69 and 238. It seems that Wohlgemuth was the anonymous ‘certain well-known man of science’ whom Freud alluded to in 1937: ‘He said that in giving interpretations to a patient we treat him upon the famous principle of “Heads I win, tails you lose.” That is to say, if the patient agrees with us, then the interpretation is right; but if he contradicts us, that is only a sign of his resistance, which again shows that we are right. In this way we are always in the right’ (Freud 1937b, 257).

  153. Freud (1925b), 221.

  154. Jung (1956), CW 14, § 695.

  155. Transcription of Eissler’s interview with Jung of 29 August 1953, 19–20; Sigmund Freud Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  156. Jung (1975), 176.

  157. Charteris (1960).

  158. Jones (1957), 45.

  159. Gay (1988), 470–1.

  160. Freud (1910a), 9.

  161. Freud (1914a), 8.

  162. Breuer and Freud (1895), 21–2: ‘The element of sexuality was astonishingly undeveloped in her. The patient, whose life became known to me to an extent to which one person’s life is seldom known to another, had never been in love; and in all the enormous number of hallucinations which occurred during her illness that element of mental life never emerged.’ In the report which he sent to Robert Binswanger at the admission of Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.) to Bellevue Sanatorium, Breuer wrote: ‘The sexual element is astonishingly undeveloped; I have never once found it represented even amongst her numerous hallucinations’ (Hirschmüller 1989, 277).

  163. One may compare this with what Breuer and Freud wrote in Studies on Hysteria: ‘It is plausi
ble to suppose that it is a question here of unconscious suggestion: the patient expects to be relieved of his sufferings by this procedure, and it is this expectation, and not the verbal utterance, which is the operative factor. This, however, is not so. The first case of this kind that came under observation dates back to the year 1881, that is to say to the “pre-suggestion” era’ (Breuer and Freud, 1895, 7).

  164. Freud (1914a), 11–12.

  165. Among the participants in the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Clark University were Franz Boas, William James, Adolf Meyer, James Jackson Putnam, William Stern and E. B. Titchener.

  166. On the initial reception of Freud in the United States, see Hale (1971), ch. 8, and Burnham (1967).

  167. Personal communication.

  168. Forel (1899), 412–13.

  169. As his letter to Jones of 1 June 1909 demonstrates, Freud was familiar with the text which Forel delivered at Clark University: ‘I got the University’s publication at the former celebration ten years ago and could see that none of the five foreigners (Forel, Picard, Boltzmann, Mosso, Ramon y Cajal) had lectured in English’ (Freud and Jones 1993, 25).

  170. For more details on this affair, see Borch-Jacobsen (1996), chs. 3 and 4. Since the publication of the French edition of this book (2006), Richard Skues has published a critical reconsideration of the historical literature on the subject. The points raised are too detailed to go into here and have not led us to revise our argument (Skues 2006).

  171. Breuer and Freud (1895), 40.

  172. Hirschmüller (1989), 293.

  173. Breuer and Freud (1895), 4.

  174. Hirschmüller (1989), 114.

  175. To those who would object to Borch-Jacobsen (1996) that this was a ‘delayed’ cure (Green 1995; Talbot 1998, 60), one may ask why one should attribute Bertha Pappenheim’s recovery to her treatment by Breuer, rather than to her subsequent hospitalisations, which seems more likely. As for exonerating Breuer on the grounds that he and Freud never proposed a ‘causal’ therapy but simply a method to suppress symptoms (Hale 1999, 246), one may note that they wrote in their ‘Preliminary Communication’ that ‘each individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was provoked’ (Breuer and Freud 1895, 6). Moreover, it is clear that Breuer went beyond the assertion of a purely symptomatic treatment when he wrote in his case history: ‘In this way, too, the whole hysteria was brought to a close’ (ibid., 40), or when he talks about ‘the end of the illness’ and ‘the final cure of the hysteria’ (46–7).

  176. Hirschmüller (1989), 106–7.

  177. Bjerre (1920), 86.

  178. Nothing has come to light which would corroborate this element of Freud’s account, which is somewhat improbable, as he was a medical student at the time.

  179. Jung (1925), 16.

  180. Transcription of Eissler’s interview with Jung of 29 August 1953, 18, Sigmund Freud Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  181. Ferenczi (1988), 93.

  182. Cited in Forrester and Cameron (1999), 930. Bertha Pappenheim was interned for just over three months at the Bellevue clinic.

  183. On the contrary: in 1917, Freud recalled how ‘Breuer did in fact restore his hysterical patient – that is, freed her from her symptoms . . . This discovery of Breuer’s is still the foundation of psycho-analytic therapy’ (Freud 1916–17, 279–80). In 1923, Freud again stated that Breuer ‘succeeded in freeing her [Anna O.] from all her inhibitions and paralyses, so that in the end he found his trouble rewarded by a great therapeutic success’ (Freud 1923, 235; the same assertion occurs in Freud 1925a, 20, and again in Freud 1926b, 263).

  184. Freud (1914a), 12.

  185. Freud (1925c), 280.

  186. At least publicly. In private, as we have seen (p. 70), Breuer didn’t hesitate to state that the case of Anna O. refuted Freud’s theory.

  187. Freud (1925a), 20–1 and 26.

  188. Our emphasis. On the provenance of this document, see Borch-Jacobsen (1996), 39–42. The German original has been accessible in the Library of Congress since 2000, and is reproduced in Borch-Jacobsen (1997), 51.

  189. Freud (1925c), 279.

  190. See Borch-Jacobsen (1996), 33–4; Eissler (2001), 174–5.

  191. Forrester and Cameron (1999), 931.

  192. Cited in Forrester and Cameron (1999), 930.

  193. Freud (1916–17), 274.

  194. See above, note 70.

  195. Cited by Élisabeth Roudinesco in Ellenberger (1995), 15. In the absence of context, it is not clear when this ‘confession’ took place.

  196. Document supplied by Élisabeth Roudinesco, see Borch-Jacobsen (1996), 100.

  197. False: Dora Breuer was born on 11 March 1882, which was three months before the end of the treatment (7 June 1882).

  198. Freud (1960), 413; our emphasis. Peter Gay introduced the fragments of this letter to Zweig as follows: ‘This, [Freud] reported, is what Breuer told him long ago’ (Gay 1988, 67).

  199. Cited in Forrester and Cameron (1999), 930; Freud’s emphasis.

  200. See Hirschmüller (1989), 127, who refers to Fichtner (1988).

  201. Breuer was still alive at this time.

  202. Rank (1996), 50 and 52.

  203. Brill (1948), 38. We thank Richard Skues for signalling this passage.

  204. Document communicated by Élisabeth Roudinesco.

  205. Goethe, Faust, part 2, act 1. As Eissler notes (2001, 176), Breuer himself had cited the same passage in Studies on Hysteria: ‘I must ask to be forgiven for taking the reader back to the basic problems of the nervous system. A feeling of oppression is bound to accompany any such descent to the “Mothers”’ (Breuer and Freud 1895, 192).

  206. Freud (1960), 413.

  207. Transcription of Eissler’s interview with Jung of 29 August 1953, 18.

  208. Freud’s letter of 26 June 1925 to Robert Breuer, reproduced in Hirschmüller (1989), 322.

  209. On 13 May, Freud wrote to Mathilde Breuer, who had sent greetings on his 70th birthday (Freud 1960, 222–3). Hirschmüller reproduces a letter of Freud of 14 December 1928 to Robert Breuer to thank him and his sister for sending a biographical note on their father (Hirschmüller 1989, 322–3).

  210. See for example Hannah Breuer’s letter to Jones, reproduced in Borch-Jacobsen (1996), Appendix 2.

  211. Freud and Eitingon (2004).

  212. Eitingon (1998).

  213. Hirschmüller (1998).

  214. Eitingon (1998), 20.

  215. Ibid., 27.

  216. Eissler (2001), 174.

  217. Ibid., 174–7.

  218. Jones (1953), 224. Jones wasn’t the first, as Brill had published a less elaborate version of the hysterical pregnancy in his Lectures on Psychiatric Psychoanalysis in 1948.

  219. Homburger (1954).

  3 CASE HISTORIES

  1. For a good exposition of this point of view, see Spence (1982).

  2. Lacan (2005), 213.

  3. Lacan (1988), 13–14.

  4. Habermas (1971), 260; our emphasis. Also see Loch (1977), 238.