Sigmund Freud

Pamela Thurschwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134027057
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

The work of Sigmund Freud has penetrated almost every area of literary theory and cultural studies, as well as contemporary culture. Pamela Thurschwell explains and contextualises psychoanalytic theory and its meaning for modern thinking. This updated second edition explores developments and responses to Freud's work, including:

• 
  
  

• tracing contexts and developments of Freud's work over the course of his career
• exploring paradoxes and contradictions in his writing
• focusing on psychoanalysis as an interpretative strategy, paying special attention to its impact on literary and cultural theory
• examining the recent backlash against Freud and arguing for the continued relevance of psychoanalysis.

Encouraging and preparing readers to approach Freud's original texts, this guide ensures that readers of all levels will find Freud accessible, challenging and of continued relevance.

KEY IDEAS

1
EARLY THEORIES

Freud’s earliest patients were drawn from Viennese middle-class and upper-class women (and some men as well) suffering from diseases of the nerves. These difficult-to-diagnose diseases, prevalent in both Europe and America at the time, were often connected with, on the one hand, the female sex and, on the other, the stresses of modern urban life. As one British commentator noted of the apparent rise in the level of neurosis, ‘the stir in neurotic problems first began with the womankind’; by the 1890s ‘daily we see neurotics, neurasthenics, hysterics and the like … every large city [is] filled with nerve-specialists and their chambers with patients’ (Showalter 1985:121). Neurosis was a slippery category throughout the nineteenth century. Labelling an illness a disease of the nerves often simply meant that a physical cause was not forthcoming.

In 1885 Freud went to study for a short period with the famous French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–93) at the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris. By the nineteenth century the Salpêtrière was an asylum for women patients with mental illnesses – mostly hysterics. Interestingly, when the Salpêtrière was originally founded in the late seventeenth century it was a prison for confining prostitutes, ‘debauched’ girls and female adulterers. An unruly, out-of-control sexuality, and the need to confine or punish that sexuality, link the women prisoners of the seventeenth century with the hysterical women patients of the nineteenth century, as we shall see when we examine the changes brought about by Freud’s ideas of the causes of hysteria.

THE QUESTION OF HYSTERIA

Freud’s development of psychoanalysis’s founding concepts, such as the unconscious and repression, are intimately connected with his experiences of treating his first hysterical female patients. But what precisely is hysteria?

HYSTERIA

Hysteria’s symptoms vary: they can include amnesia, paralysis, unexplained pains, nervous tics, loss of speech, loss of feeling in the limbs, sleepwalking, hallucinations and convulsions. Its diagnoses have changed over the centuries, but some beliefs about hysteria remained firmly lodged in place until the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. The word hysteria comes etymologically from the Greek word for ‘womb’, hysteron. Hysteria was initially known as the disease of the wandering womb, and it was believed that only women suffered from it. References to hysterical illness date as far back as an Egyptian medical papyrus from 1900 BC. From the ancient Egyptians onwards, female anatomy was considered an important factor in hysteria: one cause of hysterical behaviour was believed to be women’s mobile uteruses that wandered up their bodies away from their proper resting point. Freud’s work helped sever the definition of hysteria from its attachment to female anatomy and redefine it as a psychological disease.

Most late nineteenth-century medical practitioners subscribed to one of two conflicting ideas about the causes of hysteria. Some doctors believed that all hysterics were really just attention-seeking fakers. Other, more sympathetic medical commentators assumed that hysteria did exist but that it was a disease suffered only by women. It was no longer believed to be caused by the unlikely wanderings of the womb, but it was still connected with disturbances in the female reproductive organs.

With his work at the Salpêtrière, Jean-Martin Charcot discarded both of these beliefs about hysteria: through his hypnotic experiments he showed that hysterics were not malingering (faking their illnesses); neither was hysteria specifically related to female biology, since some men also manifested symptoms of hysteria. Yet Charcot finally subscribed to strictly physical explanations for hysteria. He maintained the long-standing belief that hysteria could develop only when there was inherited degeneration of the brain. Freud found these explanations for hysteria unsatisfactory, suggesting that, rather than physical causes, the disease might have psychological origins in sexual disturbances from early childhood. Thus, when compared with earlier theorisers of neurotic illnesses, Freud made a significant change: he moved from biological explanations to narrative explanations, from diseased bodies to diseased memories.

In the 1880s and 1890s, when Freud began practising medicine, hysterical illnesses were seen as inherited degenerative diseases caused by a weak constitution – diseased, alcoholic or syphilitic parents, bad blood. One of the key changes that psychoanalysis made in thinking about mental illness was to shift it from a physical to a psychological model. Freud suggested that people could fall ill because of their past history – a traumatic event which happened under stressful circumstances would then be strategically forgotten because it was too painful to recall. Freud and his colleague Joseph Breuer compiled a series of case histories called Studies on Hysteria that they published in 1895, in which they unearthed again and again in their patients these traumatic founding moments of mental illness.

Looking at Studies on Hysteria one notices first that all the case histories presented are of women. Freud and Breuer’s work, by stressing the life stories these women had to tell, shifted the focus of the search for the causes of hysteria from biological sources to narrative sources: the lives the women led, and the stories they told themselves, and refused to tell themselves, about their lives made them susceptible to diseases of the nerves. Recent historians of nineteenth-century hysteria have seen hysteria as a disease that was inseparable from the social position of women at the time. Hysteria has been viewed as a passive form of resistance to the social expectations that surrounded the nineteenth-century bourgeois woman. In an increasingly industrialised society, the middle-class woman was looked up to as a representative of the purity, order and serenity of an earlier time – the guardian of the home fire, the angel at the hearth. A victim of demands that were seemingly at odds with themselves, the nineteenth-century woman was supposed to be gentle, submissive and naive, while also expected to be strong and skilled in her domestic management – a pillar for men to lean on. Hysteria signalled an unconscious protest against these conflicting expectations as well as against the lack of career and educational opportunities available to women. For instance, in Studies on Hysteria Joseph Breuer describes his patient Anna O. as unusually intelligent, with a quick grasp of ideas and penetrating intuition. He points out the limited possibilities of her life, considering her immense potential: ‘She possessed a powerful intellect which would have been capable of digesting solid mental pabulum and which stood in need of it – though without receiving it after she had left school … This girl, who was bubbling over with intellectual vitality, led an extremely monotonous existence in her puritanically-minded family’ (Freud and Breuer 1895:73–4).

The hysterical woman was frustrated by the tasks expected of nineteenth-century womanhood. She found herself at odds with an image of the maternal figure who nursed the sick and tended to domestic duties. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg describes her, the hysterical woman began to see what it was like to have her own way:

No longer did she devote herself to the needs of others, acting as a self-sacrificing wife, mother or daughter: through her hysteria she could and in fact did force others to assume those functions. Household activities were reoriented to answer the hysterical woman’s importunate needs. Children were hushed, rooms darkened, entertaining suspended. Fortunes might be spent on medical bills or for drugs and operations. Worry and concern bowed the husband’s shoulders; his home had suddenly become a hospital and he the nurse. Through her illness, the bedridden woman came to dominate her family to an extent that would have been considered inappropriate – indeed, shrewish – in a healthy woman.

(Smith-Rosenberg 1985:208)

Hysteria was a double-edged sword for the nineteenth-century woman patient; on the one hand, illness promised both freedom and attention that was not usually hers for the asking. On the other hand, it increased her dependence, made her a slave to doctors and cures, and made her suspect as a malingerer.

TALKING AND LISTENING CURE

Freud’s and Breuer’s attempts to cure hysteria must seem humane to us if we look at them in the context of the treatments that were being recommended for neurotic illness at the time. By the 1890s neurosis was seen as a woman’s problem that needed firm-handed cures. The assumption that the patient was, at least in part, faking her illness often dictated the term of the cures for hysteria. Throwing water on patients, slapping patients’ faces or stopping their breathing were some of the recommended methods for putting an end to hysterical fits (Showalter 1985:138). In 1873 the American physician Silas Weir Mitchell developed his ‘rest cure’ for the treatment of neurasthenia, a slightly less violent version of hysteria. Mitchell’s rest cure depended upon isolation from family and friends, immobility, no intellectual stimulation of any kind, and an over-inflated diet in which the patient was expected to gain as much as 50 lb. Regaining health often depended upon the fact that the patient would be so happy when the mind-numbing, bodily debilitating cure was finally over that she would take up the burden of her neglected domestic duties with renewed energy.

From this set of recommended cures Freud’s and Breuer’s experiments with what eventually became the psychoanalytic method made a radical break. They not only believed that their patients’ illnesses were real, they also listened to what they had to say. Psychoanalysis relied on the idea that the material of the cure could come only from the patient him or herself. Instead of looking for physical reasons for why someone had a nervous disease, Freud and Breuer listened to their patients’ stories, believing that it was in these stories that a cure would be found. Buried in the unconscious were the associations and connections which could make the patient’s past and childhood memories make sense. The psychoanalyst’s job, like the archaeologist’s (one of Freud’s favourite comparisons), was to enable the excavation.

When Charcot began studying hysteria in the Salpêtrière in the 1880s, one of his explicit goals was to make the study of hysteria into a respected scientific endeavour. He brought to his efforts a passion for careful observation and classification, and he diagnosed his patients’ symptoms in detail. However, looking at the records from the Salpêtrière (especially the photographic evidence of the hysterics in their various poses), one gets the disturbing sense that Charcot was not terribly interested in curing the women under his care. More interested in classification and study than in therapy, he became famous for his public medical displays in which the patients of the Salpêtrière would perform under hypnosis the symptoms of their diseases – arching their backs, frothing at the mouth, showing an incredible tolerance of pain when pins and needles were stuck into their bodies when they were anaesthetised by hypnotic suggestion. Freud and Breuer used Charcot’s discoveries about hysteria but took them out of the medical theatre, into the private space of the consulting room. If Charcot’s classifications of hysteria depended upon looking, Freud’s and Breuer’s attempts to cure changed the emphasis to listening.

HYPNOSIS AND ITS REJECTION

Freud followed many of Charcot’s leads in his analyses of hysteria, but he also broke away from some of his central ideas. Initially, like Charcot, Freud employed hypnosis to get through to the root causes of his patients’ illnesses. Charcot used hypnosis as a method of understanding hysterical illness, but he also believed that only hysterics were capable of being hypnotised. Hypnotisability for Charcot was a symptom of mental illness. Charcot’s theories were challenged, however, by researchers working with hypnotism in Nancy, France. Through carrying out enormous numbers of hypnotic experiments, the Nancy researchers (including Hippolyte Bernheim (1840–1919) and Ambroise Liébeault (1823–1904)) showed that most people were at least potentially hypnotisable. Eventually the Nancy school’s beliefs came to be more generally accepted than Charcot’s. It is impossible to say accurately what percentage of people are suggestible enough to be hypnotised, but almost all people have some degree of suggestibility that seems to be unrelated to factors such as intelligence or the potential for mental illness.

In the wake of Charcot’s and the Nancy school’s discoveries, and following on Joseph Breuer’s lead, Freud began working with hypnosis in the treatment of his neurotic patients. Initially he used hypnosis to suggest ideas to patients that could help them overcome their illnesses. For instance if someone was unable to move their arm because of a hysterical paralysis, under hypnosis Freud would tell them that they could. But Freud quickly found that these suggestions rarely had the power to alter patients’ state of mind permanently. Instead Freud turned again to his colleague Breuer’s experiences with his patient Anna O., to discover another, more fruitful use of hypnosis. Breuer discovered that he could hypnotise Anna O. into remembering the origins of a specific hysterical symptom. If she could then, still under hypnosis, relive the initial experience along with the emotions she had felt at the time, the symptom would disappear. This method of cure Breuer named the cathartic method.

THE CATHARTIC METHOD

Catharsis is a Greek word which means purification through purging. Breuer originally adopted this term from Greek tragedy to describe the psychotherapeutic method in which an upsetting event that has caused a hysterical reaction is re-experienced under hypnosis and thereby purged from the system of the person who relives it.

In Studies on Hysteria Freud and Breuer stated categorically that ‘Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences’ (Freud and Breuer 1895:58). Memory, not physiology, was at issue from now on.

Freud eventually extracted two central points from his and Breuer’s work with their patients. One point was that unpleasant or traumatic recollections inevitably returned to haunt the memory of the patient. These unpleasant memories were then repressed from the patient’s conscious knowledge.

REPRESSION

An operation whereby the subject repels, or confines to the unconscious, a desire that cannot be satisfied because of the requirements of reality or of the conscience . For instance, in one of Freud’s cases in Studies on Hysteria (Elizabeth von R.) the patient refused to admit to herself that she was in love with her brother-in-law. When her sister died, an upsetting thought entered her mind: ‘Now he is free to marry me.’ This unwelcome wish had to be immediately repressed – her conscious mind could not allow it in because of the guilt she immediately felt for thinking it. Because it was repressed from her mind it returned, acted out on her body, as a hysterical symptom .

But it was not just any material that was repressed by the unconscious. After writing Studies on in Hysteria, Freud came to believe that there was always a sexual content to the repressed unpleasant memory that led to the hysterical illness. If hysterics suffered from reminiscences, they suffered from a specific type of reminiscence: sexual ones. Perhaps, to be more accurate, they suffered from not reminiscing enough; they fell ill from not being able to consciously recall and work through the trauma or traumas of their past.

THE SEDUCTION THEORY AND ITS REJECTION

Freud discovered that, as his patients spoke to him of their pasts, they all brought up surprisingly similar childhood experiences. In their stories their hysterical illnesses inevitably referred back to a scene of sexual abuse by an older figure, usually the father but sometimes another authority figure, or a brother or sister. Interestingly, these sorts of repressed memories were shared by all his patients. Therefore Freud postulated that premature sexual contact or a traumatic sexual attack must have taken place if hysterical illness developed later in life. Although he later revised these ideas, this became his first fully developed theory of the origins of hysteria and neurosis (Freud 1896), the seduction theory.

THE SEDUCTION THEORY

Sometimes also known in psychoanalytic terminology as the ‘Real Event’, Freud’s seduction theory stated that repressed memories of neurotics and hysterics inevitably revealed seduction or molestation by an older figure, usually a parent: most often the father. The traumatic event which happened in childhood, however, would not be recognised as traumatic at the time. Instead a delayed reaction set in – an event later in life, when the child reached puberty, would set off a series of recollections in the child’s mind, and this delayed recognition would become a pathogenic or poisonous idea that would cause hysterical symptoms later in life. It’s interesting to note that Freud calls the seduction theory, the seduction theory, rather than the child-abuse theory or the rape theory. Already implied in the word seduction is the possibility of a willing capitulation.

Seduction is a two-way street, involving the victim’s desires as well as the aggressor’s. Later, when Freud changes his mind about the meaning of this theory and postulates infantile sexual desires, the question of who seduces whom becomes key (see Gallop 1982).

Freud introduced the seduction theory in his essay ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’: ‘Whatever case and whatever symptom we take as our point of departure, in the end we infallibly come to the field of sexual experience’ (Freud 1896:203). But what, precisely, is the field of sexual experience? When Freud wrote those words, in 1896, he was referring to actual bodily contact, but his ideas about that shortly began to change. As Freud continued his work with his patients he began to doubt the status of that repeated scene he had uncovered of a sexual assault by an adult towards a child. In a letter of 21 September 1897 he wrote to his close friend and scientific colleague Wilhelm Fliess that ‘I no longer believe in my neurotica’ (Masson 1985:264). This did not mean that he thought they were lying to him – rather, he meant that these events that they recalled as having taken place in reality might have actually taken place in fantasy.

The re-emergence of forgotten memories is a key concept for understanding the development of Freud’s early opinions about hysteria. But memory itself was not a self-explanatory concept. Is memory always true? Can it be false? When Freud started doubting the literal truth of the stories told by his patients he changed his theory. He began to believe that infantile sexual desire alone might be formative of later neurotic symptoms. The scenes of sexual seduction changed direction – it was now the child who desired the parent, not the parent who seduced the child, and the child’s seduction of the parent happened in fantasy, not in reality. Freud’s concept of fantasy became one of the cornerstones of psychoanalysis.

FANTASY

Also spelled Phantasy when used in technical psychoanalytic terminology, this concept involves an imaginary scene in which the subject who is fantasising is usually the protagonist. It represents the fulfilment of a wish in a distorted way, because consciousness cannot allow that wish to be fulfilled in reality, or even straightforwardly in the mind, because of inhibiting factors . Fantasy takes numerous forms in order to distort the wish. Fantasies can occur consciously, as in daydreams or conscious desires, but they also can reveal themselves unconsciously through dreams or in primal fantasies (see Chapter 6).

In 1896–97, at the same time that he was changing his ideas about sexual seduction, Freud was also changing his technique. Hypnotising patients in order to get them to speak was difficult for Freud. First, hypnosis was a hit-or-miss affair. Sometimes the patient was not easily hypnotisable, in which case the doctor who was attempting to hypnotise her was made to feel foolish, to lose his sense of control over the situation. You can see how the sense of the doctor’s mastery could be lost if you imagine a doctor saying to a patient as he tries to hypnotise her, ‘You are fast asleep,’ and the patient replying, ‘No I’m not.’ Freud himself never felt that he was adept at putting his patie...