The Freud Files

by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen

  5. Schafer (1980), 36; our emphasis.

  6. Ibid., 35; our emphasis.

  7. Saussure (1957), 138–9. Raymond de Saussure had been analysed by Freud.

  8. Roazen (1985), 193.

  9. Joan Riviere’s typed interview with Kurt Eissler, 1953, 9–10, Sigmund Freud Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; the document was initially classified until 2020, but has recently been made accessible to researchers.

  10. Freud (1907–8b), 76 and 84; Freud’s emphasis. We refer to Hawelka’s complete French–German edition of Freud’s notes whenever the passage is not to be found in Strachey’s truncated edition of the ‘Original Record’.

  11. See above, p. 120.

  12. ‘Interview with Professor Freud’, André Breton (1990 [1924]), 94–5.

  13. Freud (1912), 114.

  14. Eissler (1965), 395.

  15. Freud (1909a), 5: ‘The case history [of ‘Little Hans’] is not, strictly speaking, derived from my own observation.’

  16. 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.

  17. Freud (1905c), 13. It is true that to this Freud added: ‘He would do better to suspend his judgement until his own work has earned him the right to a conviction.’

  18. Sherwood (1969), 70.

  19. Hacking (1983), 174.

  20. See Shapin’s classic article (1984), and Shapin and Schaffer (1986).

  21. Delbœuf’s first chapter (1993a) describes a visit to the Salpêtrière, the second a visit to ‘Liébeault’s clinic’, the third a visit to ‘Bernheim’s clinic’.

  22. Bernheim (1980), ix.

  23. Bleuler (1910), 660. For more on this, see also the recollections of Brill (1944), 42, and Hilda Abraham (1976), 62; as well as Falzeder (1994b) and Shamdasani (2002).

  24. ‘Verzeichnis der Vorlesungen an der Hochschule Zürich’, Staatsarchiv, Zurich.

  25. See Breuer’s report quoted in Hirschmüller (1989), 285. Krafft-Ebing’s visit isn’t mentioned in the case of ‘Anna O.’ in Studies on Hysteria.

  26. Jones (1955), 29.

  27. Freud and Ferenczi (1993), 143.

  28. Hesnard (1925), quoted in Ohayon (1999), 101.

  29. This is indeed true for Ida Bauer (‘Dora’), who had fled from the treatment, but not for Ernst Lanzer (the ‘Rat Man’) or for Sergius Pankejeff (the ‘Wolf Man’), who, if we are to believe a note added by Freud in 1923, had both given their formal consent to the publication of their case histories (Freud 1905c, 14).

  30. Freud (1905c), 7–9. One will note that Freud’s ‘assurances of secrecy’ were not sufficient to prevent historians from identifying most of his patients. We now know the names of Cäcilie M. (Anna von Lieben), Emmy von N. (Fanny Moser), Elisabeth von R. (Ilona Weiss), Katharina (Aurelia Kronich), Emma (Emma Eckstein), Mr E (Oscar Fellner), Dora (Ida Bauer), the Rat Man (Ernst Lanzer), Little Hans (Herbert Graf) and the Wolf Man (Sergius Pankejeff).

  31. As well as regularly transgress – Lynn and Vaillant (1998) have shown that on the basis of data available to them on the subject of Freud’s analyses, he had kept third parties informed on the progress of the treatment in more than half the cases. 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, 64, n. 2). 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, xxix–xxx). 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!’ (Freud and Abraham 2002, 258). 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: ‘He [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; Riviere’s emphasis).

  32. Freud (1905c), 12–13; our emphasis.

  33. Strachey (1958), 87.

  34. Stadlen (2003), 144–5.

  35. Sulloway (1992b), 172–4.

  36. On this subject, see Collins’ edifying elaboration (1985).

  37. Friedländer (1911), 309. See also Friedländer (1907).

  38. Janet (1913), 38; included in Janet (1925), vol. 1, 627.

  39. Forel (1919), 227.

  40. Cioffi (1998b), 182.

  41. Jones (1955), 433; Jones (1953), 327.

  42. Jones (1953), 315.

  43. Once again, psychoanalysis comes back to a pre-modern system of knowledge: ‘English “moderns” – repeatedly insisted upon the epistemic inadequacy of testimony and authority. Truth could be guaranteed by going on individual direct experience and individual reason; reliance upon others’ testimony was a sure way to error’ (Shapin 1994, xxix).

  44. See, for example: Swales (1982b); Kuhn (1999); Skues (2001). 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’.

  45. Lacan (1981), 9; Lacan’s emphasis.

  46. Cioffi (1974).

  47. Mink (1965).

  48. Danto (1965), ch. 8; Veyne (1971), ch. 8.

  49. Robert Boyle, ‘Some considerations about the reconcileableness of reason and religion’, quoted in Shapin (1984), 488.

  50. Breuer and Freud (1895), 160–1.

  51. Aristotle, Poetics 1450b.

  52. Freud (1905c), 10; our emphasis.

  53. Freud (1912), 113–14; our emphasis.

  54. See the Preface to Freud (1933), 5: ‘At that time I still possessed the gift of a phonographic memory.’

  55. Jones Papers, Archives of the British Psycho-Analytical Society.

  56. Allusion to the handwritten notes related to a ‘third case’ that Freud initially intended to append to his text on ‘Psychoanalysis and telepathy’ (Freud 1921), but which ended up forming the basis for his lecture on the case of Dr Forsyth in ‘Dreams and occultism’ (Freud 1933). We should note what Strachey wrote about this in his ‘Editorial note’ to his translation of ‘Psychoanalysis and telepathy’ in the 18th volume of the Standard Edition: ‘The two versions of the [Forsyth] case agree very closely, with scarcely more than verbal differences; a
nd it has therefore not seemed necessary to include it [the manuscript version] here.’ In reality, a comparison between the published version and the original manuscript deposited at the Library of Congress shows that Freud, for no apparent reason, changed the chronology of certain events mentioned in his notes.

  57. Jones Papers, Archives of the British Psycho-Analytical Society.

  58. Freud (1912), 115–16.

  59. Freud (1915a), 166.

  60. Freud (1915a), 166.

  61. Binswanger (1957), 7–8; Binswanger’s emphasis.

  62. Freud (1937b), 259–60.

  63. Freud (1905c), 37. We know that Ida Bauer terminated the treatment after Freud had tried once again to convince her of her love for Mr K.

  64. Freud (1905c), 61; our emphasis.

  65. An example pointed out by Scharnberg (1993), vol. 1, 27.

  66. On this subject, see Makari’s interesting article (1998b), which reconstructs this theory strangely ignored by the majority of Freud’s commentators.

  67. Freud (1905c), 79–80; our emphasis.

  68. Ibid., 80; our emphasis.

  69. Ibid., 76.

  70. Ibid., 57.

  71. Freud (1918), 36.

  72. One will note that Freud, according to Pankejeff’s account, had asked him exactly the same thing at the beginning of the treatment. ‘When he had explained everything to me, I said to him, “All right then, I agree, but I am going to check whether it is correct.” And he said: “Don’t start that. Because the moment you try to view things critically, your treatment will get nowhere.” So I naturally gave up the idea of any further criticism’ (Obholzer 1982, 31).

  73. Freud (1918), 38–9.

  74. Ibid., 39.

  75. Ibid., 39.

  76. Ibid., 41.

  77. Ibid., 70.

  78. Ibid., 45.

  79. Ibid., 88.

  80. For the highly conjectural character of this second ‘scene’ constructed from one of Pankejeff’s vague memories, see Viderman (1970), 109–11; Jacobsen and Steele (1979), 357–8; Spence (1982), 117–20; Esterson (1993), ch. 5.

  81. Freud (1918), 92.

  82. Ibid., 12.

  83. Obholzer (1982), 35–6.

  84. Hamburger (1973), 83: ‘Epic fiction is the sole epistemological instance where the I-originarity (or subjectivity) of a third-person qua third person can be portrayed’ (quoted in Cohn 1978, 7).

  85. Freud (1908a), 153.

  86. ‘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, 48; our emphasis). The preceding lines established on the contrary that Ida Bauer, far from having accepted Freud’s interpretation, had explicitly rejected it: ‘she would not hear of going so far as this in recognizing her own thoughts’ (ibid.).

  87. On free indirect style, first discussed by Bally (1912), see Lips (1926) and Pascal (1977).

  88. Spitzer (1928).

  89. Cohn (1978), 99–140.

  90. Genette (1972), 194.

  91. Cohn (1978), 105. Pascal (1977) speaks in this regard of ‘dual voice’.

  92. Concerning Ida Bauer’s hypothetical ‘primal scene’, Scharnberg thus writes: ‘the spying event . . . has been transmuted into an observed datum. Dora herself had recounted her recollection of having spied’ (Scharnberg 1993, vol. 1, 27; Scharnberg’s emphasis). But Freud, as we have seen, at no point says that it concerns a memory that Ida Bauer would have told to him.

  93. Esterson: ‘The Wolf Man himself confirmed that he had not recalled the supposed event [the “primal scene”]. Yet on two occasions Freud reports alleged statements made by his patient in which he describes specific details of the primal scene. Since the Wolf Man is hardly likely to have given descriptions of an occurrence he did not remember, it would seem that Freud misleadingly embellished his account in order to give more credence to his vital interpretation of the wolf-dream’ (1993, 69). Here again, Freud’s formulations turn out to be much more ambiguous when we examine these passages closely: Pankejeff at most had vague ‘auto-perceptions’ and it was the ‘analysis’ – or the analyst? – that made him ‘make an assertion’ about the primal scene.

  94. Lerch (1930), 132–3; Jauss (1970), 203–6 (quoted in Cohn 1978, 106–7).

  95. We do not know how these notes escaped destruction, unlike all the others (see Strachey’s ‘Editorial note’, in volume 10 of the Standard Edition).

  96. As Billig remarks, ‘it only takes five minutes to read aloud the longest of Freud’s reports of these fifty-minute sessions. Thus, the bulk of the dialogue must be treated as being lost’ (1999, 58).

  97. Reprinted in Nunberg and Federn (1962), 227–37.

  98. Jones (1955), 230.

  99. Freud (1907–8b), 76.

  100. In the quotations that follow, the italicised and bold-face passages are emphasised by Freud. In Hawelka’s edition the italics correspond to passages underlined in ink in the manuscript and the bold characters to passages underlined in crayon. Hawelka explains that ‘one can suppose that the author underlined in ink at the moment when he wrote these notes. The lines traced in crayon were added to mark what interested Freud when he read them with a view to editing for publication’ (Freud 1907–8b, 14). We have added Hawelka’s italics and bold characters whenever we cite from Strachey’s editions of the notes. Those that are underlined indicate our emphasis.

  101. Ibid., 178 and 180.

  102. Freud (1909b), 195–9.

  103. The chronological distortion is pointed out by Mahony (1986), 72–4, and the transformation of the patient’s refusal into acceptation by Kanzer: ‘In the supplementary notes, however, we find no evidence that the patient was really overwhelmed or even influenced by the interpretation’ (1952, 234).

  104. 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.

  105. Lacan (2005), 177 and 178, and more generally 176–85.

  106. Ibid., 178–80.

  107. On the interpretation of psychoanalysis in terms of self-reflection, see Habermas (1971), ch. 10.

  108. Freud (1907–8b), 50. One will note that the idea of the torture of the father only comes to Lanzer when he meets Lieutenant David, and not when Captain Nemeczek tells him about the rat torture, as Freud asserts in the case history. Freud’s chronological revision can be explained by his desire to attribute the ‘rat idea’ to a revolt against the father who is represented by the ‘cruel captain’ (see Freud 1909b, 217–18). Lieutenant David, on the other hand, had no reason to awaken Lanzer’s ‘paternal complex’, nor to elicit the obsessive idea.

  109. Freud (1907–8b), 54–6.

  110. Ibid., 60: ‘The next morning they [Lanzer and his friend Galatzer] go together to the post office to send the 3.80 crowns to the post office in Galicia.’

  111. Freud (1909b), 172.

  112. Ibid., 211.

  113. In this scenario, the young woman at the post office obviously corresponds to the poor girl, and the innkeeper’s daughter to the rich girl. Compare the version proposed by Lacan, for whom the object of the Rat Man’s fantasy is to ‘repay the debt to the poor girl’: ‘the true object of the subject’s tantalizing desire to return to the place where the woman at the post office is
, it’s not at all this woman; it’s a character who, in recent history, stands in for the character of the poor woman. She is a servant from the inn whom he met during maneuvers, in the atmosphere of heroic ardor characteristic of historical fraternity, and with whom he indulged in the hanky-panky characteristic of this generous fraternity. It’s a question, in some way, of repaying the debt to the poor girl’ (Lacan 1953, 19; our emphasis). 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.

  114. Freud (1907–8a), 290.