The Freud Files

by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

  Example 3: Sergius Pankejeff (a.k.a. the ‘Wolf Man’) had a nightmare at the age of four, in which he saw white wolves seated on the branches of a tree. After a long and acrobatic deciphering, involving all sorts of tentative hypotheses, Freud is about to reveal its secret.

  Freud: I have now reached the point at which I must abandon the support I have hitherto had from the course of the analysis. I am afraid it will also be the point at which the reader’s belief will abandon me.71

  What follows is an exposition of the famous ‘primal scene’: the infant, at the age of one and a half, observes with interest his parents engaged in coitus a tergo; it is repeated three times and he greets the event with a jubilatory defecation. Having arrived at this point, Freud recognises that he is asking a lot of the reader; but he doesn’t let this hinder him. On the contrary, he asks the reader to suspend his critical faculties, just as one would do with a book of fiction.72

  Freud: I can assure the reader that I am no less critically inclined than he towards an acceptance of this observation of the child’s, and I will only ask him to join me in adopting a provisional belief in the reality of the scene.73

  Fortified by the indulgence he has extorted from his reader, Freud then proceeds as if the reality of this ‘constructed primal scene’74 (constructed by him) had been definitively established, blackboxed: ‘the postures which he saw his parents adopt’;75 ‘the picture of sexual satisfaction afforded through his father’s agency, just as he had seen it in the primal scene’;76 ‘the patient was longing for some one who should give him the last pieces of information that were still missing upon the riddle of sexual intercourse, just as his father had given him the first in the primal scene long before’,77 etc. In two places, the reader is even asked to believe that the primal scene is an authentic memory of Pankejeff himself.

  Freud: When the patient entered more deeply into the situation of the primal scene, he brought to light the following pieces of self-perception. He assumed to begin with, he said, that the event of which he was a witness was an act of violence, but the expression of enjoyment which he saw on his mother’s face did not fit in with this; he was obliged to recognize that the experience was one of gratification.78

  Freud: Then suddenly, in connection with a dream, the analysis plunged back into the prehistoric period, and led him to assert that during the copulation in the primal scene he had observed the penis disappear, that he had felt compassion for his father on that account, and had rejoiced at the reappearance of what he thought had been lost.79

  One chapter later, the reality of the primal scene is so well established that it is used to explain another scene the analyst has constructed – this time with the maid Grusha.80

  Freud: When he saw the girl on the floor engaged in scrubbing it, and kneeling down, with her buttocks projecting and her back horizontal, he was faced once again with the posture which his mother had assumed in the copulation scene.81

  Accepting that Freud’s construction was hypothetical at first, one could argue that what is critical is that the patient eventually corroborated it: even if we assume that the patient’s assent was the product of transference and/or suggestion and that his ‘self-perceptions’ and ‘assertions’ were retrospective illusions, Freud did not invent everything. On the contrary, he seems to have taken great care not to put anything forward that hadn’t first been confirmed by the patient himself.

  Freud: Many details, however, seemed to me myself to be so extraordinary and incredible that I felt some hesitation in asking other people to believe them. I requested the patient to make the strictest criticism of his recollections, but he found nothing improbable in his statements and adhered closely to them. Readers may at all events rest assured that I myself am only reporting what I came upon as an independent experience, uninfluenced by my expectation.82

  It’s certainly plausible that many of Freud’s patients didn’t raise any objections to his interpretations – even his most daring and racy ones – and indeed, we have many examples attesting to this. Pankejeff’s case, however, is quite a different matter. As it happens, we have his own testimony which plainly contradicts Freud’s version of events. Sixty years later, he confided to the Austrian journalist Karin Obholzer that he had never been able to recall the scene imagined by Freud, in spite of the latter’s assurances that the memory would reappear after a certain period of time. How, then, do we reconcile this with the ‘self-perceptions’ of the scene, the ‘memories’ and the ‘statements’ and the ‘assertions’ that Freud so freely attributed to him?

  Sergius Pankejeff: That scene in the dream where the windows open and so on and the wolves are sitting there, and his interpretation, I don’t know, those things are miles apart. It’s terribly farfetched . . . But that primal scene is no more than a construct . . . The whole thing is improbable because in Russia, children sleep in the nanny’s bedroom, not in the parents’. It’s possible, of course, that there was an exception, how do I know? But I have never been able to remember anything of that sort . . . He [Freud] maintains that I saw it, but who will guarantee that it is so? That it is not a fantasy of his? . . . Well, I also have to look at psychoanalysis critically, I cannot believe everything Freud said, after all. I have always thought that the memory would come. But it never did.

  Karin Obholzer: One might say that your resistance up to the present day is so strong that you didn’t want to remember.

  Pankejeff: Well, that would also be a supposition, wouldn’t it? But it is no proof.83

  Free indirect style

  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. This last trait is what brings his case histories closer to fictional narration, and further distances them from the ‘psychiatric observations’ they claim to be. Indeed, as Käte Hamburger points out,84 only in fictional narrative can the intimate thoughts and feelings of someone other than the one who speaks be described as if they were said out loud. Neither non-fictional narrative nor non-narrative fiction allows for such a transgression of the ‘barriers that rise between each single ego and the others’,85 and undoubtedly this is what makes this literary genre so charming – and, let us add, psychoanalysis so seductive.

  In his case histories, Freud acts exactly like the omniscient narrator of novels and short stories who enters into the minds of his characters at will and reveals their most intimate thoughts to 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). Thus, instead of writing: ‘Our hero, entangled in his contradictions, didn’t yet dare to admit that he had been a witness to the coupling of his parents’, he writes more plainly: ‘the expression of enjoyment which he saw on his mother’s face . . .’. Instead of writing: ‘Shaken, Dora said nothing, but inside she was ready to give her belief to the interpretation of her cough that the doctor had proposed’, he writes: ‘this tacitly accepted explanation’,86 etc. Certainly there is a narrator, no less omniscient than before, but he makes himself increasingly discreet and transparent as he penetrates deeper into his characters’ intimate thoughts, thus creating a marked ‘reality effect’. The reader, who is ask
ed to suspend his disbelief, now has the impression of directly witnessing the patient’s inner life.

  The problem, of course, is that Freud’s case histories are not fictional stories. His patients are people in flesh and bone, not imaginary creatures whose minds he could enter into at will. Reading sentences of this type: ‘[in Grusha] he was faced once again with the posture which his mother had assumed in the copulation scene’, we are therefore made to think that Freud is narrating thoughts reported to him by the patient, while, in reality, he is doing nothing of the sort (as we have seen, Freud narrates his own thoughts). There is, therefore, a particularly subtle abuse of narrative confidence here, for by granting himself licence to enter into other people’s minds while claiming not to be doing so, Freud hedges his bets, simultaneously working in two genres at once: fictional narrative and non-fictional narrative.

  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.87 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.’

  Obviously the advantage of this last formulation is that we don’t know who is speaking. Is it the analyst-narrator, reporting in the third person how the memory came to Ida Bauer? Or is it Ida, who uses the deictic ‘Mummy’, which is characteristic of first-person direct discourse? As noted by all people who have studied it, free indirect style (also called erlebte Rede88 or narrated monologue89) is fundamentally equivocal in that it merges the voice of the narrator and that of the character.

  Gérard Genette: We see here the key difference between first-person monologue and free indirect style, which are sometimes mistaken for each other, or inappropriately equated: in free indirect discourse, the narrator assumes the character’s speech, or, if we prefer, the character speaks through the narrator’s voice, and thus the two voices are confounded; in immediate discourse, the narrator effaces himself and the character takes his place.90

  Dorrit Cohn: The narrated monologue holds a mid-position between quoted monologue (restitution of the person’s thought in the mode of direct discourse) and psycho-narration (restitution in the mode of indirect discourse) . . . Imitating the language a character uses when he talks to himself, it casts that language in the grammar a narrator uses in talking about him, thus superimposing two voices that are kept distinct in the other two forms.91

  It is of course this ambiguity which makes free indirect style so attractive to the novelist, as it allows the narrator surreptitiously to slide into the characters’ skins and to reconstruct their intimate or subliminal thoughts as though they had expressed them themselves. This is the same for Freud, since this form allows him to ventriloquise his patients, and to suggest that the thoughts he attributes to them are in fact their own, without quoting in direct discourse (which would have been impossible). The last point is very important: all this continues to be narrated in the third person and the narrator, as Genette aptly remarks, doesn’t entirely disappear into the character, even if he does all he can to create the illusion of doing so. It is thus difficult to catch Freud making things up, since he rarely declares explicitly that he reproduces words spoken by his patients. To those, like Max Scharnberg92 or Allen Esterson,93 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,94 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.

  All the same, this is inevitably the reader’s impression; and, grammatical defence aside, it is obviously the reason Freud makes use of this very special form. By virtue of its indeterminacy, free indirect style allows him simultaneously to concretise his theoretical hypotheses, by creating the illusion that he is reproducing his patients’ thoughts, and to protect himself in case he was to be accused of fabricating ‘observations’ when there was nothing to be observed: is it his fault if his readers take at face value what he, the conscientious scientist, was merely suggesting? The argument is clearly specious, but it is enough to counter accusations of fabrication. It does not, however, immunise such a scientist from the inevitable conclusion to be drawn from it: if everything we read in Freud’s case histories can be reduced to a simple suggestion, then the famous ‘experience’ on which psychoanalysis rests turns out to be a pure stylistic effect.

  Who speaks?

  In the examples we have considered up to this point, narrative interprefaction left traces in the Freudian text, even if the effect it produced on readers was to make them forget these traces. With a little investigation we were still able to see the narrator’s projection into his character, and to follow the path leading from the analyst’s interpretations to the thoughts he attributed to his patients. But is this always how it works? Let’s suppose for a moment that Freud had succeeded in completely erasing these traces. In this hypothesis, there would be nothing besides the indeterminacy of the free indirect style. Severed from its source, the statement would, so to speak, float in the air, without anyone knowing exactly who is speaking in the text – the patient, or the analyst? Confronted with such an ambiguous passage, we would be justified in asking ourselves if it isn’t Freud who gives us his own interpretations, while passing them off as associations or declarations made by the patient herself. But since we weren’t present in his office and are reluctant to grant ourselves the same omniscience he grants to himself, we would only be making unverifiable hypotheses. If Freud did efface the traces of the work of interprefaction from his text, we can’t, by definition, know anything about it.

  At least most of the time. It just so happens that we have, by a fortuitous coincidence, notes taken by Freud during the first four months of the Rat Man’s analysis.95 Admittedly, these notes, composed from memory in the evening after each session, don’t constitute a verbatim account of his analysis,96 and we do have every reason to believe that Freud included only those points specifically concerned with the story he was in the process of constructing. Indeed, the notes from the first seven sessions seem to have been written with an eye towards a presentation to be made three weeks later at the Psychoanalytic Society of Vienna on the ‘Beginning of a patient history’.97 In no way, then, can we consider these notes to be a pure and unmediated record of how the analysis unfolded akin to a legal transcript, and we may be justified in having doubts about their reliability. Nevertheless, as they are, they represent a less developed and less refined version than the one that was published, and consequently, they provide us with a more precise understanding of the narrative reworking employed by Freud in this case history – and presumably in others.

  Ernest Jones: It was Freud’s custom to destroy both his manuscript and the notes on which it was based, of any paper he published. By some odd chance, however, the day-to-day notes of this case, written every evening, were preserved, at least those for the best part of the first four months of the treatment . . . This material is invaluable as affording a unique opportunity for watching Freud at his daily work so to speak: his timing of interpretations, his characteristic u
se of analogies to illustrate a point he was making, the preliminary guesses he would make privately which might subsequently be either confirmed or disproved, and altogether the tentative manner in which such piecemeal work proceeded.98

  Let’s take a look at this process, then.

  Example 4: The patient Ernst Lanzer (a.k.a. the ‘Rat Man’) is deeply in love with his cousin Gisela (the ‘woman’ or ‘friend’ of Freud’s published case history), but, as the notes from the session of 8 October 1907 inform us, ‘it wasn’t possible to consider a union between them due to material difficulties’99 – apparently his cousin wasn’t wealthy enough. On 8 December, Lanzer mentions in passing how his mother, six years earlier, had planned to have him married to a rich distant relative. Here, first of all, are the notes taken by Freud.100

  Freud, analysis notes of 8 December 1907: By all sorts of detours, under the cure’s transference, story of a temptation whose significance seems to escape him . . . It was related to his mother’s old plan, according to which he was supposed to marry one of the Saborskys’ daughters, a charming girl now 17 years old. He doesn’t suspect that to avoid this conflict [between his mother’s plan and his love for Gisela], he took refuge in the illness, the path towards which had been paved by the childhood choice between an elder sister and a younger one, as well as by the return to the story of the father’s marriage. The father was in the habit of humorously describing himself as a young suitor; the mother sometimes mocked him by saying that he had once courted a butcher’s daughter. He found the idea [implied: suggested by Freud] intolerable that his father was willing to abandon his love to protect his material interests by the alliance with the Saborskys. He becomes very irritated with me; this manifests itself through insults that are only expressed with great difficulty . . . He visibly resists the temptation to fantasize about marrying my daughter instead of his cousin, and about insulting my wife and my daughter. A transference crudely expressed [implied: can be translated] as follows: Mrs. F[reud] can lick his ass (revolt against the more respected family). Another time he sees [implied: fantasises] my daughter who, in place of her eyes, has two patches of dung, which means that he has fallen in love not with her eyes, but her money.101