Sigmund Freud's Discovery of the Etiological Significance of Childhood Sexual Traumas

ABSTRACT

Challenging assumptions that Freud's early writings have no place in the current discourse on child sexual abuse, this article reconstructs Freud's early treatment of Emma Eckstein. Setting Emma's account of childhood sexual abuse in the context of Freud's early therapeutic practice reveals how Freud first formulated his radical theory, that his patients' psycho-neuroses were due to their having been sexually traumatised as children. The article concludes by inviting a reevaluation of Freud's work.     

Freud s Sisters A Fantasia on a Photograph

This psychoanalytically based imaginative inquiry into the role of Freud's sisters in shaping the meanings of Femaleness and gender difference for Freud starts from the author's study of a photograph in the Library of Congress Freud exhibit, “Portrait of the Jakob Freud Family ca. 1876,” which shows Sigmund Freud, age 20, with his live then adolescent sisters. Freud's Dream of the Botanical monograph, especially as reconsidered by Didier Anzieu, is used as a window into Freud's early childhood relations with his sisters and the registration of gender difference in his psychic reality. A peculiarity in the photograph in the presentation of Freud's half-brother, Emmanuel, leads the author's reverie to another dream of Freud's, the “nonvixit dream.” especially as reconsidered by Didier Anzieu and by Max Schur. The non-vixit dream is thought to bear traces of Freud's experience of the death of his infant brother Julius. New suggestions are made with regard to Freud's difficulties with depressive-position anxieties in relation to his mother; it is suggested that these difficulties led to his concept of girls' genitals as “castrated” becoming dominant over another stratum of psychic experience in which girls' genitals, and femininity, were viewed with erotic wonder as intact in their own right. This idea is linked with Freud's difficulties in construing woman as subject.     

Dostoevsky and Freud: Autonomy and Addiction in Gambling

In this paper the modern ideal of “autonomous” or “pure” gambling is put forward in an analysis of Dostoevsky's gambling behavior, his novel The Gambler (1866) and Freud's psychoanalysis of Dostoevsky. The significance of The Gambler lies in the way conceptions of gambling are related to the social conditions of gamblers. Furthermore, the author demonstrates that Dostoevsky and Freud express contradictory views on gambling addiction. While Dostoevsky primarily appreciated roulette as a means of making money, Freud mistakenly interpreted this as a “pathological passion”. In different ways, however, both approaches toward excessive gambling presuppose and reinforce “gambling‐for‐its‐own‐sake” – Le jeu pour le jeu.     

The Dog Who Barks and the Noise of the Human: Psychoanalysis After the Animal Turn

What would or could a psychoanalysis beyond the human be? And who—and how—might we who call ourselves human be or become in turn? In the “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,” Freud (1916–1917) famously declared psychoanalysis to be the third great blow to human self-love delivered at the hands of science. First, the Copernican revolution revealed that the earth was not the center of the universe “but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness.” Then Darwin and his contemporaries undermined the ground upon which “the human” had asserted a fundamental difference from “the animal.” And now, psychological research has tripled down, giving “human megalomania” its “third and most wounding blow.” “The ego,” Freud wrote, “is not even master in its own house.” In passages like this, we get a glimpse of a psychoanalysis beyond the human–animal boundary. Nevertheless, the force of anthropocentrism returns again and again in Freud’s body of work, as when he consigned human animality to a prehistoric past or linked it to the baser instincts that human civilization needs to overcome. But what if, instead of running away from the animal in us, we were to dwell with and alongside the nonhuman? Drawing on the work of psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche and cultural theorist Nicholas Ray, this essay traces the sounds and scents of the nonhuman animal in and for psychoanalytic theory.     

Psychoanalysis: A Traveller's Guide for Family Therapists

ROLL UP, ROLL UP! AirFreud is pleased to announce a special and spectacular Around-The-World Package for Down Under Family Therapists. Psychoanalytic ideas are being rediscovered in your field and you may like to encounter these first hand, in the places and spaces where the ideas arose. Visit first Vienna, the city of Freud's love-hate and his adopted home: see Freud's apartment, in a fashionable Viennese suburb, home now to the Sigmund Freud Museum. Then on to Paris, La Rive Gauche and the Sorbonne. Hear the echo of Jacques Lacan's Seminar resound along the famous boulevardes. Experience the stirrings of 1968. Then to London and feel the tension that still exists between the Anna Freud Clinic and the Tavistock, just as in the days of Miss Freud and Mrs Klein. Then whisk across the Atlantic to New York and then on to Los Angeles. Follow the footsteps of the psychoanalytic diaspora from Hitler's Germany to the security and comfort of forward-looking middle-class America. Along the way friendly tour guides will provide you with plenty of information. In the Handy Travel Pack, there are useful summaries of major theoretical writings, a map, and a splendid bound journal is included for your own notes and observations. No prior knowledge is assumed; take an open mind and enjoy the journey.     

Cultural workers,pedagogy and the politics of difference: Beyond cultural conservatism

‘Odor di Femina: Though you may not see her, you can certainly smell her’, articulates the primacy of visualism in the history of psychoanalysis. In the first half of the study Mavor reveals how both the photographs of mentally ill women made under the direction of Freud's teacher Jean-Martin Charcot and the use of the visualist rhetoric in the writings of Charcot and Freud were regarded as proof of an always already diagnosed and conceptualized vision of sexual difference. Charcot's and most emphatically Freud's conception of the senses conventionally marked vision as masculine and the others (touch, hearing and especially smell) as feminine. Mavor then turns to Lacan to undo this historically gendered, power-hungry split between sight and the othered senses through his theory of the gaze as objet petit a, which reticulates the gaze and its conventional singular authority. Taking a cue from Lacan's provocative claim that ‘a wild odour emanates’ from the‘function of seeingness’, Mavor pushes Lacan's theory of the gaze (which, she argues, has often been sorely misrepresented in feminist film theory and art history) towards an expanded constellation of the senses. Her excavation of Lacan loosens the gaze's hold on the site of seer/seen, subject/object and, especially, sight/smell. As a result, sight loses its historical pride of place among the senses.     

Reading and Writing,Talking and Listening Introducing Studies in Gender and Sexuality

This essay offers a brief history of how the stereotype “the female homosexual” was created through three installments of psychoanalytic theorizing, starting with Freud's (1920) case study. A second, brief history presents the various strands of critical theorizing that have identified “the female homosexual” as a stereotype. The essay then makes a contribution to current discussion of female homosexuality by suggesting an instinct theory that features ego instincts and sexual instincts interacting (as Freud' theory did before 1920). Reference is made to Takeo Doi's concept of amae (expectation of affection) and to amae as an ego instinct. This theory then is the framework for a clinical v ignette focused on a female homosexual's ego-instinctual needs.     

Why Dora Left: Freud and the Master Discourse

The question of why Dora left her treatment before it was brought to a satisfactory end and the equally important question of why Freud chose to publish this problematic and fragmentary story have both been dealt with at great length by Freud’s successors. Dora has been read by analysts, literary critics, and not least by feminists.

The aim of this paper is to point out the position Freud took toward his patient. Dora stands out as the one case among Freud’s 5 great case stories that has a female protagonist, and reading the case it becomes clear that Freud stumbled because of an unresolved problem toward femininity, both Dora’s and his own. In Dora, it is argued, Freud took a new stance toward the object of his investigation, speaking from the position of the master. Freud presents himself as the one who knows, in great contrast to the position he takes when unraveling the dream. Here he is the humble scholar giving evidence of a great tolerance for not-knowing. These 2 positions run through Freud’s writings from “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900b) to “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937a). From the Dora case a line can be drawn to Freud’s metaphor of the bedrock of castration, the unsurpassable barrier to both analytical work and the theory of sex and gender.     

Similarities with a (Crucial) Difference: Reply to Commentaries by Shapiro and Marshall

Reviewing Sigmund Freud's essays and correspondence during World War I, we find that for the most part he minimized or denied the impact the war was having on him and his patients. Just as Sandor Ferenczi's emphasis on the impact of “real” childhood events and the “real” relationship between patient and analyst was seen as aberrant, so too was Ferenczi's warning Freud to leave Germany in 1933 Ferenczi , S. ( 1933 ). Confusion of tongues between adults and the child—the language of tenderness and of passion . Contemporary Psychoanalysis , 24 , 196 – 206 . [Google Scholar] treated as paranoia. Freud's later works apply his psychoanalytic theories to society as a whole but do not consider ways to “cure” social ills, so it is not surprising that Freud didn't hear Albert Einstein's famous question, Why War? as a plea for insight into how to end war. The author suggests a reconsideration of Einstein's question from the perspective of Buddhist psychology and finds a more optimistic albeit difficult answer.     

“Who Wears the Pants Here?”: Gender as Protest

Psychoanalysis has, from Freud's earliest ideas, been drawn to comprehending and defining gender—decoding what is masculine and what is feminine. Although Freud believed that masculinity and femininity would normatively fall along biological lines, gender, as a category, very quickly became destabilized by theorists who contested Freud's view. This article looks at a case in which the analyst came to view the patient's gender performance as a form of protest as it became transacted within the transference-countertransference relationship. In drawing upon contemporary gender and relational psychoanalytic theories, the author considers the multiple layers of gender meanings held within the patient and within the analyst and concludes that gender is never fully resolved and will continue to carry shifting relational meanings.     

Henry Abelove’s “Freud,Male Homosexuality,and the Americans”

This is the first in a set of papers to revisit Henry Abelove’s “Freud, Male Homosexuality, and the Americans” (1985–1986) 30 years after initial publication. By way of introduction I describe the social and academic context of the early 1980s and Dr. Abelove’s search to find a receptive audience. For those unfamiliar with the work I briefly outline some important arguments made by Dr. Abelove and reflect on the changing social environment—politically, socially, and within psychoanalytic thought—since initial publication. With my colleagues Dr. Cushman and Dr. Layton, we reflect on Dr. Abelove’s scholarship and prescience and pause to give it the belated recognition from psychoanalysis that it has long deserved.     

Queering the Palimpsest: Affective Entanglement Beyond Dichotomization

In Cultural Studies, the affective turn is a response to the so-called crisis of representation. Insisting on a crucial difference, some theorists separate representation as it is addressed in psychoanalytic accounts of the subject, from pre-individual bodily capacities, as they are developed in affect theory. In our article, we are revisiting Freud’s model of the mystic writing pad and present a metaphor enhancing an inclusive approach to both: the palimpsest. Following Ahmed and Butler, we understand subjectivity as a constant process of affective surfacing, in which intrapersonal and interpersonal dimensions constitute each other. The metaphor of the palimpsest offers a way to theorize subjectivity as structured by power relations yet open to potentiality, paying attention to the intrapsychic as affective force within encounters between subjects. “Queering the palimpsest” disrupts the dichotomization of ontology versus epistemology, the dichotomous ways of gendering the subject and the “either-or-option” of affect theory and psychoanalysis.     

Toward Less Fixed Internal Transformations of Gender Commentary on: Melancholy Femininity and Obsessive—Compulsive Masculinity: Sex Differences in Melancholy Gender by Meg Jay,Ph.D.

While highly commending this cross-disciplinary exercise and agreeing with Jay and Butler that children may indeed mourn the loss of erotics with same-sex parents as they identify and develop in a gendered fashion, this author highlights, in both Butler and Jay's interesting further refinements of Butler's position in their use of Freud's 1917 paper on “Mourning and Melancholia,” a lack of attention to the significant aggression that Freud also included in this early formulation concerning the lost object. A consideration of such affects is well taken, but this author prefers a less sparse and monolithic linear clarity about how girls grow into sexed and gendered women. She feels the limitation here of the use of later analytic theory such as Loewald's rich account of internalization.     

On Moralism and Ethics: Associations to Henry Abelove’s “Freud,Male Homosexuality,and the Americans”

Henry Abelove (1986) writes that Freud was troubled by what he saw as moralistic leanings pervading the theory and practice of early American psychoanalysis. Drawing on Erikson’s (1976) distinction between moralism and ethics, my associations to Abelove’s still very timely paper explore the psychological “deals” we all tend to make between moralism and ethics. I begin with Freud’s less than progressive views of female homosexuality. I then focus on the way that what I have called normative unconscious processes enter contemporary theory and practice. I draw attention to a continued presence in our theories of a straight/gay binary (which, according to Abelove, Freud contested), and I give an example of the effects of an unconscious adherence to neoliberal cultural norms. I conclude with the suggestion that, although fraught, it is nonetheless crucial to think about what is “the good.”     

“I Will Have Lacked”: Rethinking Sexual Difference and Sexed Subjectivity Through Psychoanalytic Temporal Relationality

ABSTRACT

Sexual difference, as understood by contemporary Lacanian scholars, is the Real that marks a constitutive gap or discord beneath the construction of sexual identity, but in what way does the Real relate to the Symbolic in a process of becoming a sexed subject? This article explores the possibility of sexual differentiation through a psychoanalytic conceptualization of temporal organization and rearrangement. Taking the moment of the “primal view” in Freud’s text as its point of departure, this article demonstrates that the origin of sexual difference in psychoanalysis is actually a temporal difference between two processes of becoming, explained by Freud’s Nachträglichkeit and Lacan’s future anterior, respectively. In comparison with women’s time, it is argued that the Lacanian temporal relationality promotes a new epistemology of sexed subjectivity that permits an expanded understanding of the lived experience of being sexed.     

Animal Unconscious: Three Questions

“Animal Unconscious” begins with Freud’s claim, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1965), that psychoanalysis proposes “nothing animal is alien to us.” By drawing on recent scholarship in feminist, queer, new materialist, and posthumanist theory, the essay posits that the unconscious is something “animal,” not something uniquely human in order to inquire what this postulate would mean for thinking about 3 problems: the place of animality in institutions of analysis and (higher) learning, the animality of language, and the invention of new modes of kinship. Throughout, the essay speculates on what it means to recast “human” psychoanalysis as an animal practice while simultaneously opening it toward including nonhuman animals in its purview.     

Coming Out as Queen: Jewish Identity,Queer Theory,and the Book of Esther

Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho (1960) is a significant work on many levels—to Hitchcock’s career, to film history, to the horror genre. I propose that a crucial aspect of Psycho’s design, one that relates to Hitchcock films as a whole, is its thematization of a concept that I call the “death-mother.” A distinction between Mrs. Bates/“Mother,” on the one hand, and the death-mother, on the other hand, impels this discussion. The death-mother—which relates to the varieties of femininity on display but exceeds their specific aspects and implications—is an effect produced by the film text and can only be understood through an analysis of the work as a whole. Exceeding the specifications of the Mrs. Bates character, the death-mother maps onto tropes and preoccupations in Hitchcock’s oeuvre but, more importantly, indicates the aesthetic implications, for the male artist most commonly, of the dread of femininity. I develop the concept of the death-mother from the writings of Freud, Nietzsche, and André Green and from feminist psychoanalytic theory: Barbara Creed, in her reworking of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, and Diane Jonte-Pace, in her analysis of Freud’s work. My analysis focuses on the relevance of the death-mother to issues of femininity and queer sexuality crucial to and enduringly controversial within Psycho.     

The Ideology of Transference: Laplanche and Affect Theory

The growing interest in the work of Laplanche testifies to the many ways contemporary clinicians and theoreticians are attempting to circumvent some of psychoanalysis’ most abstract, rigid, and conservative formulations. An exemplary occasion of this effort, Avgi Saketopoulou’s essay, “To Suffer Pleasure: The Shattering of the Ego as the Psychic Labor of Perverse Sexuality” (2014) attempts to rethink “perversion” by offering a timely critique of psychoanalytic doxa. In my engagement with Saketopoulou’s essay, I focus on the use of Laplanche as indicative of the ways Laplanche’s radical challenge to traditional psychoanalysis can be recuperated by psychoanalytic conventions without forcing the critique that Laplanche enabled. My introduction of Affect Theory to Laplanche’s radical paradigm works to establish the foundations for a less erotophobic psychoanalysis and demonstrates why rereading Laplanche through cutting-edge theorizations of Affect Theory goes some way toward sustaining the “exigency” of Laplanche’s radical project.     

“Romancing with a Wealth or Detail” Narratives or Ernest Jones's 1906 Trial for Indecent Assault

In March 1906 Dr. (Alfred) Ernest Jones was put on trial for indecently assaulting two young “mentally defective” girls at a special school in South East London. Jones claimed it was “the most disagreeable experience in [his] life.” A detailed reconstruction of the trial, drawn from contemporaneous records, reveals significant flaws in Jones's autobiographical account. Reading those records in the light of early psychoanalytic theory and recent British “political” texts on child sexual abuse—from “Cleveland,” “Orkney,” and “Jason Dabbs” through to “Lost in Care”—helps illuminate the dominant medicolegal ideologies that informed Jones's trial. Adapting Leo Strauss's concept of persecution reveals how details of the children's allegations were occluded from the trial reports. A jigsaw reconstruction of these silences offers a restitutive narrative of the children's persecuted speech.     

Inside the Revolution: Power,Sex, and Technique in Freud’s “‘Wild’ Analysis”

ABSTRACT

This essay situates Freud’s “‘Wild’ Analysis” in its local and global histories, even while reading it for what it can tell us about psychoanalysis now. Even as it is taken on its own terms, this essay serves also as a means to consider psychoanalysis as host to crucial tensions, its ideas and their relation to technique, its traffic in power, and sexuality and the primal crime. Using a clinical vignette, the essay argues the heterogeneity and multiplicity inherent to psychoanalysis are a gift to later generations, even if they made trouble for Freud. In celebration and critique, it examines, in effect, where Freud was and where psychoanalysis is now.