Reprinted
from American Imago
31.1 (1974): 1-64.
Mater and Nannie:
Freud’s
Two Mothers and the Discovery of the Oedipus Complex
Jim
Swan
Textual note (2007):
minor errors in the 1974 published text have been silently corrected,
documentation now conforms with current MLA style, and three substantial errors have
also been corrected:
[1] p. 55, middle
of paragraph: “as the psychical representative” (not “physical”);
[2] p. 56, near
end of first paragraph: “a hypothesis that is validated only experientially
(not “experimentally”);
[3] p. 56,
next-to-last line: “as the object represented” (“object” was
omitted). — JS (2/08/07)
Added citations for German text of Freud's letters to Wilhelm Fliess (Origins / Anfängen)
—JS (3/15/07)
With ironic
humor, Freud once remarked to Ernest Jones, “It seems to have been my fate to
discover only the obvious: that children have sexual feelings, which every
nursemaid knows; and that night dreams are just as much wish fulfillment as day
dreams” (Jones 1: 350). He was referring to The Interpretation of Dreams and the Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality, his favorites
among his own writings. The detail about nursemaids—rather than
mothers—typifies his habitual tendency, in describing the nuclear family,
to isolate the mother at a pure distance from the child’s experience of
sexuality (though in his last writings, more and more explicitly, Freud names
her as the child’s first “seducer”). In a way not yet fully appreciated, mother
and nursemaid, mater
and Nannie, share a crucial set of roles in Freud’s discovery of the Oedipus
complex.
1. Text
and Hermeneutic
Freud’s
remark names his two most fundamental discoveries, a theory of sexual
development and a theory of interpretation, a hermeneutic. His discovery of the
Oedipus complex was at the same time the discovery of a hermeneutic of dreams
or, more exactly, the manifest texts of dreams. A hermeneutic, like the texts it is devised to
interpret, is itself an historically determinate text. This essay attempts,
therefore, to spell out a basic hermeneutical issue concerning Freud’s theory
of the Oedipus complex, treating it not only as a set of analytic principles
for interpreting texts, but also dialectically as itself an object of
historical analysis, an historically determinate text, a fin-de-siècle Viennese
family drama, open to the same formal, [End Page
1] social
and psychological questions that we customarily put to the text of, say, a
Shakespearean drama. Thus, Freud’s oedipal drama is in many ways a period
piece. Later periods have brought more discoveries and different dramas. The
oedipal drama focuses on the little boy’s conflict with his imperious father;
later dramas focus on his conflict with a disturbed mother. Freud himself
prepared the way for the later discoveries with his own discovery in 1931 of
the importance of the infant’s deep, primary attachment to the mother, a
discovery so momentous for Freud that he compared it, in a characteristic
archaeological figure, to “the discovery of the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization
behind that of Greece” (“Female Sexuality,” SE 21: 226).
Twenty-five
years later, in 1956, Gregory Bateson and his colleagues in Menlo Park,
California, described the mechanism of the “double bind” as a source of
schizophrenia, and with it they described a new psychic drama. A double bind,
usually suffered by a child at the hands of its mother, results from living
continually under the force of a pair of mutually contradictory demands, for
instance: “I’m your mother, please love me” but—unconsciously—“Don’t touch me.” Bateson’s
paper, still cited today as basic to the field, provides a new text, a new
family drama of the American 1950’s, departing significantly from the Oedipus
complex, with an ineffectual, unimpressive “Pop” substituting for the awesome
Victorian Father, and a very disturbed and disturbing “Mom” in place of the
idealized Victorian Mother. The Doublebind family, one might say, was there all
the time, at least potentially, behind the masks of Freud’s oedipal family. In
late nineteenth-century Europe, the oedipal child could still identify with an
idealized father, largely because the society still articulated the conditions
and the [End page 2]
need for such a male identity. But now, in post-industrial, “democratic”
society, where the idealized father has become less of a possibility, the
deeper, more heavily disguised fantasies of terror in relation to the mother
have been enabled to surface and become, in their turn, the subject of
analysis.
During the
1950’s and 1960’s, in Great Britain as well as the United States, a wide range
of “schizoid phenomena” have been studied and analyzed. The best work has not
only described the paths to madness leading from the earliest mother/infant
relationship, it has also seen through the pathetically grotesque suffering of
the Doublebind family to understand the extraordinary love and desire for each
other’s well-being that keeps this family together. Harold F. Searles has found
during years of treating patients diagnosed as “schizophrenic” that the
pre-schizophrenic child, detecting in his (or her) mother “a tragically
unintegrated and incomplete person, [. . .] responds with an intensity of
compassion, loyalty, solicitude and dedication which goes beyond that which a
child would have reason to feel towards a relatively healthy mother” (“Positive
Feelings” 231).
In the face
of the child’s intense, loving solicitude for his (her) mother, one wants to
ask what is the source of the mother’s tragic disintegration. For, clearly, a
disturbed family is not disturbed in a social vacuum or—more
unlikely—because of some special disturbance originating in the mother
alone. Even if the mother’s history in her own family is an obvious source of
the disturbance, still the husband’s choice of her as his wife means that, at
some level, he also chose her disturbance and that he himself is, without
question, an important factor in the disturbance of his wife and child. One
quite general answer, though, to the question of the source of the mother’s
disturbance is simply to point at the Western tradition of exploiting and
degrading women, a tradition misted over with a romantic idealization conveying
the same message translated into its mirror opposite. Many women and some men
(e.g., Millett, Lederer), writing recently about women and their history, have
developed a powerful critique of male dominance and denial of dependence. This [End
Page 3] does not allow
one to say that Western history is to be explained as just the elaboration of
“male chauvinism,” but it does mean that the conflicts between men and women
articulate in the language of sexual politics the contradictions of Western
society in general and, now, of American, postindustrial capitalism in
particular.
The problem
of dependence and its denial is not, of course, an exclusively male problem.
Dependence and independence are a matter of intense concern in modern society
largely because bourgeois “democratic” ideology has emphasized independence so
heavily that dependence is virtually a taboo. Philip E. Slater describes
American individualism as “the attempt to deny the reality and importance of
human interdependence” and points out the severe training in independence that
American children get relative to the children of other cultures (Pursuit of
Loneliness 19-26).
This is true
of American society even in the common language of its people, a point explored
psycho-historically in an excellent and unaccountably neglected paper by Leo
Stone, “On the Principle Obscene Word of the English Language.” Stone notes
that “fuck” became the principal taboo word for sexual intercourse at about
the time of the English Renaissance. He proposes that it was chosen for taboo
status from among many others, then in polite use, because of its strong,
“unconscious rhyming connection with the word “suck.” Symbolically as well as
sexually, “fucking” often occurs as a defense against disturbing impulses to
“suck,” while at the same time “fucking” often signifies an attack by hands and
mouth suggestive of an angry, frustrated infant at the breast. Thus, a man
“taking” a woman gets himself a “piece of ass;” more aggressively, he may even
“tear (or rip) off a piece.” In its etymology, “rape” also includes the ripping
and tearing of an act of plunder. Calling the proverbial woman-chaser a “wolf”
implies not so much phallic as oral aggression. In the same vein, to “get
fucked” is to be a loser or, what is worse, a “sucker”—though this makes
sense only as a reversal: sucking here implies [End Page 4] not intake but loss. Similarly, the slang
for drinking displays anti-passive, anti-dependent attitudes engrained in the
culture. A drinker takes a “ belt” or “ slug” of “ hard” liquor; or he will
“kill” a bottle of beer.
Smoking is an
important part of Stone’s historical argument. It was introduced into the
English-speaking world in 1586, and its use spread rapidly in England, as it
did also on the Continent, but against sharp moral protest by church and state.
Stone points out the disappearance of “fuck” from polite usage during the
spread of smoking in England, and he proposes that “widespread adult sucking,
with its constant threat to repressions, may have heightened acutely the
conflict about the word whose resemblance (at least) to ‘suck’ was already
unconsciously important” (Stone 40; the contemporary orthographic similarity of
“f” and “s” would be important too). This is a provocative suggestion because
it localizes historically the first cultural manifestations of acute concern
for the issue of dependence and independence at the very moment when the
English were gathering themselves for the first bourgeois revolution in
history. The century between 1560 and 1660, approximately, marks England’s
painful transformation from an economy based on seasonal rhythms, tradition,
and (ideally) communal inter-dependence, into an economy based on uninterrupted,
aggressive competition, exploitation, and “free” enterprise for the sake of
profits. The English Revolution is the first in a series that creates, and
eventually threatens, the society in which Freud discovers the Oedipus complex.
In Freud’s
work, the contradictions of late-nineteenth century bourgeois society appear in
the form of unresolved conflicts about masculine and feminine identification.
For Freud “masculine” invariably means aggressive and independent, while
“feminine” means passive and dependent, and there is always a struggle to
maintain a man’s masculine, independent, aggressive identity. The struggle
appears even in Freud’s therapeutic relationships with his own patients. Harold
Searles has suggested how, in the transference relationship, Freud probably
avoided identifying with the mother projected onto him by patients who needed
to work through their primitive oral con- [End Page 5] flicts (“Sexual Processes” 440).[1]
Evidently, it would have involved too much anxiety for him. What Freud probably
offered these patients instead was something like a clinical, therapeutic
Oedipus complex which they could work through by projecting onto him their
idealized inner fathers. No doubt, this is a solution that “worked” in
pre-World War I, European society in which the mask of the idealized father,
though already badly damaged, was just beginning to disintegrate. Indeed,
Freud’s own work, a work of remarkable power and genius, was at once a sign and
a very effective cause of the disintegration.
2. Theory
and Contradictions
The material
to be treated here in this analysis of Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex is
not primarily the many formal statements of the theory, repeated throughout his
career, though a study of these would produce telling insights. In an immediate
way, they raise the whole problem of Freud’s concept of identification. The
earliest identification, according to Freud, is with the father, not the
mother. The mother exists instead as the pure, nurturing object of a little
boy’s sexual desire, a desire which in earliest childhood is dependent (“On
Narcissism” [SE 14:
87-90]), but still means that the boy perceives the mother as an object he
wants to have, rather
than one he wants to be,
as in identification. In Freud’s view, for a boy to identify with his mother is
pathogenic, leading possibly to homosexuality, a mode of relating that is the
outcome of the “inverted” or “negative” resolution of the Oedipus complex: the
boy identifying with his mother and, like her, desiring to be the passive
object of his father’s love. For Freud, fear of a possible homosexual outcome
appears, and must be denied, even when he is describing a boy’s (normal)
identification with his father, as in this statement from Group Psychology
and the Analysis of the Ego (1921):
[End Page 6]
Identification
is known to psychoanalysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with
another person. It plays a part in the early history of the Oedipus complex. A
little boy will exhibit a special interest in his father; he would like to grow
like him and be like him, and take his place everywhere. We may say simply that
he takes his father as his ideal. This behavior has nothing to do with a
passive or feminine attitude toward his father (and toward males in general); it
is on the contrary typically masculine. It fits in very well with the Oedipus complex, for which it
helps prepare the way. (SE
18: 105, italics added)
Immediately
after this passage, comes a revealing sentence about the boy’s simultaneous
relationship with his mother: “At the same time as this identification with his
father, or a little later, the boy has begun to develop a true object-cathexis
toward his mother according to the attachment [anaclitic] type” (SE 18: 105). That is, the boy’s object
choice is not “narcissistic,” based on regression to a “primary narcissism” and
withdrawal from the world. With the phrase, “or a little later,” Freud at once
uncovers and avoids the problem of the child’s earliest relationship to his
(her) mother. Identification, he says, is “the earliest expression of an
emotional tie with another person,” but apparently Freud is either uninterested
or maybe disturbed by the clear logic of his own words: since an infant’s
earliest relationship is undoubtedly with the mother, then an infant boy
identifies not only with his father but with his mother, too, and in fact with
his mother first.[2]
This is a possibility that Freud does not entertain until 1931 (in the essay,
“Female Sexuality”), but only as it might apply to infant girls, not boys, and
even then he is speaking of a dependent object-relation, not identification.
That is, he speaks of the little girl’s strong “attachment” to her mother, and
of her first “sexual or sexually tinged experiences”—passive in character—at
the hands of her mother who “suckles, feeds, cleans and dresses” her (SE 21: 236). [End Page 7]
In Inhibitions,
Symptoms and Anxiety
(1926), Freud draws analogies between birth-trauma, loss of the breast
(weaning), giving up one’s feces (toilet training), and fantasies of castration
(SE 20: 129-30). But
here, too, his interest is not in a lost mother/infant identification, but in
the infant’s loss of an object who immediately satisfied all his (or her)
needs: “The reason why the infant in arms wants to perceive the presence of its
mother is only because it already knows by experience that she satisfies all
its needs without delay. The situation, which it regards as a danger and
against which it wants to be safeguarded is that of non-satisfaction, of a growing
tension due to need,
against which it is helpless” (SE
20: 137, italics in original). Freud appears to view the mother/infant
relationship only in terms of doing and being done to—the supply of
needs, the satisfaction of hunger. He appears to have no place in his theory
for those moments when mother and infant are simply there with and for one another, neither
feeding nor being fed. This may be a consequence of Freud’s exclusive concern
with a viscerogenic model of “instinct,” a model of need and satisfaction, sexual
excitement and release, hunger and satiety. Out of this, he develops a theory
of growth in which a child moves from early passive helplessness toward
“mature” activity, from being fed to active feeding. Thus, in the 1931 essay,
“Female Sexuality,” he treats the infant’s experience at the breast in terms of
his own preoccupation with active (masculine) and passive (feminine) attitudes:
in the infant’s first step toward independence from the mother, the process of
being suckled at the mother’s breast “gives place to active sucking” (SE 21: 236). Freud thus transforms into a
process of progressive development toward mature independence what mothers
themselves have observed as a rhythm between active sucking by their infants and quiet,
“passive” rest.
In his
statements about identification during the 1920’s and 1930’s, Freud clearly
means to describe a concept akin to “introjection.” In the New Introductory
Lectures (1933), he says
that identification has been” not unsuitably compared with the oral, cannibalistic
incorporation of the other person” (SE 22: 63). (Harold Searles, in fact, speaks of a normal,
healthy “mutual erotic interest” between mother and infant, that is [End
Page 8] “predominately
cannibalistic in quality” [“Sexual Processes” 435].) Object-choice, for Freud,
concerns a person one would like to have; identification concerns a person one would like to be or be like. The two are thus quite
different, but it is possible for them to occur together and for one’s ego to
be modeled on a person whom one loves: this happens “particularly often with
women and is characteristic of femininity.” Thus the loss of ego boundaries,
allowing one’s ego to be “influenced” by another, is characteristically
sex-typed by Freud, with the clear implication that “feminine” passivity and
dependence is inferior to “masculine” activity and independence. Identification
is also a mode to which one “regresses” from mature object-relations,
particularly in the depression (“melancholia”) that follows loss of an object:
“one often compensates oneself by identifying oneself with [the lost object]
and by setting it up once more in one’s ego” (SE 22: 63). This is a process that Freud
first described in “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), and it has become the
principle on which psychoanalysts have since elaborated a theory of
internalized object relations. The super-ego and ego-ideal are said to be
created by identification and, in The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud proposes that the
character of the ego itself is “a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and
[. . .] contains the history of those object-choices” (SE 19: 29). This is a richly suggestive
observation: it points toward a description of personal growth, from earliest
infancy onward, as a continually repeated process of mourning and
reintegration: mourning for a lost, loved object and reintegrating the capacity
for love which might otherwise be lost along with the object. Freud’s
description of identification with a lost object leads thus to a concept of
healthy and creative depression. But Freud speaks instead of “varying degrees
of capacity for resistance” and the ability of a person’s ego to “fend off” the
“influences” of the history of his “erotic object-choices.” Typically, it is
women (presumably less endowed with a capacity for resistance, less able to
fend off influences) in whom Freud discovers “no difficulty in finding vestiges
of their object-cathexes in the traits of their character” (SE 19: 29). Maturity (that is, masculine maturity) means being well defended against
one’s past, [End Page 9] which
amounts to the same thing as having a strong capacity for resisting
identification—since identification is “the earliest expression of an
emotional tie” to which one “regresses.” In effect, Freud’s picture of maturity
is of a man driven to outrun his own personal history—driven, that is, to
outrun identification with his own body, which, historically, originates in identification with the
body of his mother, the original unity of mother and infant.
3. Dreams
and Self-Analysis
But the
concept of an Oedipus complex did not resolve for Freud simply a theoretical
problem in psychology. He proposed it for the first time in the midst of his
own self-analysis, in a letter written to Wilhelm Fliess on October 15, 1897.
As is well known, Freud’s relationship with Fliess was one of intense
idealization, rather like what a patient feels toward a therapist in the
transference. Their correspondence is, in effect, the first Freudian analysis,
Freud’s letters sounding often like transcripts of a patient’s memories, dreams
and associations (Anzieu 60, Buxbaum 199). Freud himself, during 1897, speaks
more than once of his condition as a neurosis (SE 1: 257, 259), and once, he speaks of “my
own hysteria” (262). As far as I know, no one has attempted to understand the
discovery of the Oedipus complex in quite this way: as, in part, Freud’s
attempt to resolve his own neurosis. The rest of this essay will explore this
question with analyses of the dreams Freud had during the months of his self-analysis
leading up to the first statement of the Oedipus complex. This will also mean
an analysis of relevant parts of the dream of Irma’s injection from the summer
of 1895.
The crucial
period of Freud’s self-analysis extends from late May to mid-October, 1897. In
a letter to Fliess on May 31, he reports two dreams. They appear to be from a
group which, later, in The Interpretation of Dreams (hereafter, the “Dreambook”) he will say
were all based on recollections of a nurse who cared for him from earliest infancy
to age two and a half [End Page 10] (SE
1: 247). By mid-June, his wife Martha has joined their six children and her
sister Minna at Aussee, where they spend the summer, and Freud is left to work
alone in Vienna. He feels blocked and writes to Fliess, “I have never yet
imagined anything like my present spell of intellectual paralysis. Every line I
write is torture.” Yet he imagines himself a chrysalis in a cocoon. “And heaven
knows,” he says, “what sort of creature will emerge from it” (Origins 210-11). Writing to Fliess in July, he
is experiencing what he will describe later as resistance: “my writing
paralysis seems to me designed to hinder our communications” (SE 1: 257). Still, he reports his other
work progressing well and, in mid-August, now with his family, he writes from
Aussee that he feels satisfied with his work on a psychology but is “tormented
with grave doubts about my theory of the neuroses” (SE 1: 259). At the end of August, he and
Martha leave on a tour of North Italy. On September 21, the day after their
return to Vienna, Freud writes, feeling cheerful and refreshed, that he no
longer believes in the childhood seduction theory, but he has no idea where
this leaves him. Since May, he has reported no dreams of his own to Fliess.
Then on October 3, he writes that for four days he has been intensely analyzing
his own dreams, and the letter is filled with recollections of his childhood.
It is difficult, in one instance, to piece out what the actual dream is, but he
mentions that it is “full of the most mortifying allusions to my present
powerlessness as a therapist” (SE
1: 262-63). Freud, at this time, is troubled by his inability to achieve a
complete cure for neurosis. He also lacks a secure income with which to care
for his large family. He has very few patients and, writing to Fliess, he says,
ironically, “in an uncanny way, my practice still allows me a great deal of
time” (SE 1: 263). On
October 15, comes a letter reporting one more dream, but it is only one short
item amidst a flow of childhood memories pieced together out of analyzing other
dreams. Then, abruptly, he announces, “I have found, in my own case too,
falling in love with the mother and jealousy of the father, and I now regard it
as a universal event of early childhood” (SE 1: 265). Although Freud does not speak
here of an [End Page 11]
“Oedipus Complex,”[3] he
immediately attributes the powerful appeal of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex to the fact that it enacts, like a
dream-fulfillment, this universal childhood fantasy. Here, too, Freud suggests
that it is Hamlet’s unconscious recognition of his own infantile desire to
supplant his father that entangles him in self-reproach and the fatal
hesitation to kill Claudius and avenge his father’s murder. The letter records
a moment of extraordinary genius and daring, an insight that provides the germ
for virtually all of Freud’s later theories. And yet, we are faced with a
surprising contradiction: it fails to account for Freud’s dreams.
Still, it is
at this moment in his self-analysis that Freud discovers the Oedipus complex,
and the discovery follows directly out of his analysis of the dreams he was
having during the summer and autumn of 1897. A critical re-reading of these
dreams ought to uncover a clearer relationship than Freud himself indicates
between them and his discovery of the Oedipus complex. But there are cautions
to observe. For one, it is fairly arbitrary to include only the dreams reported
between May and October, 1897. There are other significant dreams both before
and after this period. The best known is probably the dream of Irma’s
injection, which Freud dreamed in July, 1895, and in analyzing it, discovered
the principle of psychoanalytic dream interpretation. We will look at the Irma
dream and also at Erik Erikson’s remarkable reinterpretation of it. But the
period between May and October, 1897, especially the latter part of it in
October, has an urgency and coherence that invites treatment of it as the
culminating moment in Freud’s discovery of the Oedipus complex. Another difficulty
is that of the four dreams reported—evidently there were more, and not
all of the letters have been published—only two are actually reported as
dreams, rather than as interpretations and associations. The third dream, the
one leading most directly and richly to memories of Freud’s nurse, is reported
with only one small bit from the manifest dream-text; the rest is recollection
and association. And yet, as we will see, the letter itself has the form of a
manifest dream text arid will be treated as such. [End Page 12]
4. The
“Hella” Dream
The dream to
be considered first, a rather short one, directly concerns the theory of the
Oedipus complex. In Freud’s theory, the appearance of a child fantasizing about
parents who themselves are without fantasies is an outgrowth of Freud’s
abandonment of the childhood seduction theory of neurosis. The dream is one of
two communicated to Fliess in a letter dated May 31, 1897 (Letter 64):
Not
long ago I dreamt of having over-affectionate feelings towards Mathilde
[Freud’s eldest daughter, aged 11 at the time], only she was called Hella and
afterwards I again saw ‘Hella’ before me printed in heavy type. Solution: Hella
is the name of an American niece whose picture we have been sent. Mathilde
could be called Hella because she has recently wept so much over the Greek
defeats [in the Greco-Turkish war, 1896-97]. She is enthusiastic about the
mythology of ancient Hellas and naturally regards all Hellenes as heroes. The
dream of course shows the fulfillment of my wish to catch a father as the
originator of neurosis, and so to put an end to my doubts about this which
still persist. (SE 1:
253-54)
The most
remarkable feature is Freud’s own interpretation of the dream—a clear
instance of a father denying his oedipal feelings for his daughter. The
difference between Freud’s earlier and later views on the origin of neurosis is
the difference between acts and desires, between parental (usually paternal)
seduction of an innocent child and a guilty child’s oedipal desire for a parent. When Freud abandons the
idea of the parent seducing the child he seems to abandon the parent’s desire
for the child along with it. In this dream, which expresses Freud’s explicit
“over-affectionate” feelings for his daughter, he sees instead a wish-fulfilling
argument for the soundness of the seduction theory against the doubts now
rising to challenge it. He says nothing, however, about his desire for his
daughter which, because of this rationalizing evasion, takes on the appearance
of a very severe taboo. It is in such instances that one finds an explanation
for Freud’s silence about the mutuality of the [End Page 13] Oedipus complex. And yet, years later, in the “Three
Caskets” essay (1913), he analyzes at great length the older man’s,
particularly King Lear’s, desire for his daughter as a desire for the mother,
now the Mother Earth who waits to receive him in death (SE 12: 289). Freud remarked in a letter to
Ferenczi that he must have been thinking of his own three daughters when
writing the essay, particularly his youngest daughter, Anna—who,
incidentally, was to nurse him at the end of his own life (Jones 2: 362).
Predictably, this venture into the analysis of myth does not change the
scenario of the Oedipus complex: it is still a guilty little boy longing
sexually for his pure and beautiful mother; only now, the boy has grown up and
aged into the old man who desires a woman young enough to be his mother when he
was small. In the dream, though, Freud seems to take this one step further:
Hella, the mother of Greece weeping for her defeated heroes, appears as the
pre-adolescent Mathilde, a mother who is not only young but sexless too.
5. The
Dream of Going Up the Stairs Undressed
The dream of
going up the stairs undressed, or at least only partly dressed, appears in two
versions, and there is a significant difference between the two. The first
version (Fl) accompanies Freud’s report of the” Hella “ dream to Fliess in the
letter of May 31, 1897. The second version (ID) appears in The
Interpretation of Dreams;
it is the version that was published during Freud’s lifetime:
(Fl): Another time I dreamt that I was going up a staircase with very few clothes on.
I was moving, as the dream emphasized, with great agility (my
heart—reassurance!). Suddenly I noticed, however, that a woman was coming
after me and thereupon the experience set in, so common in dreams, of being
glued to the spot, of being paralyzed. The accompanying feeling was not anxiety
but an erotic excitation. (SE
1: 254; AP: 220)
(ID): I was very incompletely dressed and was going upstairs from a flat on the
ground floor to a higher storey. [End Page 14] I was going up three steps at a time and
was delighted at my agility. Suddenly I saw a maid-servant coming down the
stairs—coming towards me, that is. I felt ashamed and tried to hurry, and
at this point the feelings of being inhibited set in: I was glued to the steps
and unable to budge from the spot. (SE 4/5: 238)
To Fliess,
Freud singles out how paralysis, a characteristic of sleep, is used for “the
fulfillment of an exhibitionistic wish,” and he remembers that he had gone
upstairs that night from his offices on the ground floor to his apartment
upstairs, slightly disheveled—“without a collar at any rate”—and
expecting he might meet a neighbor on the stairs. In the Dreambook, Freud says
that the dream occurred after a day of trying to figure out the meaning of
feelings of being inhibited, a question that he does not find an answer to in
analyzing this dream, though he does say elsewhere in the Dreambook that
inhibition in a dream expresses contradiction—“no”—most likely to a
sexual impulse (SE
4/5: 337-38). In the version communicated to Fliess, the woman comes after (nachkommt), as if to overtake him. There is a hint
of her chasing him up the stairs, maybe pursuing and exciting him, though the
sight of her brings on a sense of being glued to the spot (an der Stelle
Kleben) and paralyzed (Gelähmtsein). In the later, published version in the
Dreambook, it is a maidservant coming down the stairs toward him, as if
confronting and opposing him. This time, he reports feeling ashamed, then
hurrying, and only afterwards feeling inhibited and glued to the spot. The
differences are significant, and there is a slight possibility that these may
be two different dreams, but the rest of the features are so similar as to rule
that out. The Dreambook records a number of dreams about climbing stairs,
calling them typical dreams having to do with sexual intercourse. One such
dream he interprets as a masturbation dream (SE 4/5: 371-72), and this particular
staircase dream of his own appears to be of the same kind. If we take both
versions together, ignoring for a moment the different directions from which
the woman approaches him, we have a series of symbolic gestures very suggestive
of solitary masturbation, discovery, shame and denial—paralysis being the
dream language’s way of saying, “Look, I’m [End Page 15] not masturbating at all; I’m not even
moving.” In the letter to Fliess, the phrasing about being glued to the spot
and paralyzed also suggests completion of the masturbatory act. The German word
which Freud uses for the word” glued” is kleben which—more than the alternative, leimen—suggests moist, clammy stickiness.
And Freud’s word for being paralyzed is Gelähmtsein, a word whose root meaning is lameness,
in both German and English; moreover, the dictionary gives as connotations:
weakness, limpness and impotence. Clearly, the cluster of meanings related to
stickiness, limpness and impotence are relevant both to a man’s experience of
the climax of masturbation, with its aftermath, and also to anxieties about
being caught and punished with castration. Thus the dream has it both ways: the
denial of masturbation also describes its climax and completion; the denial
fulfills the wish or, as Freud says to Fliess, paralysis is used to fulfill the
wish. And yet, there is the puzzling difference between the two versions, the
different roles played by the woman. In a sense, though, her dual action
parallels that of the dream itself. That is, as Christopher Bollas has
suggested, she is at once the seductress and the punisher of the boy’s sexual
impulses (personal communication). Who is this woman? One is tempted to say
that Freud’s associations to the concierge and the maidservant of an old woman
patient, both of them “elderly and surly,” are screen memories for the most
important old woman of his childhood, his old Nannie. And, indeed, Freud
himself says in the Dreambook that this is the case: the dream is “based on a
recollection of a nurse in whose charge I had been from [. . .] my earliest
infancy till I was two and a half” (SE 4/5: 247).
In a letter
to Fliess dated October 3, 1897, foreshadowing his announcement of the Oedipus
complex twelve days later, Freud says he believes his father “played no active
part in my case” (SE
1: 261). Instead, it is his childhood nurse who appears to have played the most
important part, and she receives the greatest amount of attention and energy in
this period of Freud’s self-analysis. “The ‘prime originator’ [of my troubles]
was a woman, ugly, elderly but clever” (261, bracketed phrase is editor’s
addition in original), the old Czech Nannie who took him often to Catholic
services, taught him [End Page 16]
about heaven and hell and, as he recalls, “gave me a high opinion of my own
capacities” (262). In the letter, this description comes immediately before a
clause in which Freud speaks of his libido having been awakened towards his “matrem” during a journey when, spending the
night with her, he probably saw her “nudam” (oddly, Freud does not, or cannot, write about his
mother’s nakedness in his own native German). The whole passage is concerned
with sexual arousal, and its exact wording is very important since Freud at
this point in his thinking remains suspended between abandoning the childhood
seduction theory of neurosis and discovering the role of sexual fantasy and
desire in children. Here it appears that, despite the careful description of
his becoming aroused toward his mother, his nurse is in fact a seductress. The Standard
Edition’s phrase, “the
‘prime originator’ [of my troubles]” translates the German “meine
‘Urheberin’” (AP: 233). The
translator has interpolated—unnecessarily, I believe—the phrase “of
my troubles” as a way of clarifying Freud’s clearly self-conscious use of the
word Urheberin with
quote marks around it. In the passage quoted earlier, in which Freud
rationalizes his sexual feelings toward his daughter in the “Hella” dream as
“fulfillment of my wish to catch a father as the originator of neurosis,” the
German word translated as “originator” is Urheber. According to Freud’s original theory,
the father, who originates a child’s neurosis, is the child’s seducer. In the
phrase about his nurse, “my prime originator” or “my first authoress” would
be a faithful if not quite adequate translation of “meine ‘Urheberin.’” But Freud’s self-conscious use of the
word, in a passage about childhood sexual arousal (with Freud able to speak of
his naked mother only in Latin) suggests that he is in fact describing his
first seductress. A bit further on in the same letter, he says that the nurse
was his “teacher in sexual matters” (SE 1: 262). Moreover the word Urheberin means, literally, “the first woman to
raise up,” that is, arouse him, or in a literal bodily sense, give him an
erection if only as a consequence of bathing and cleaning his genitals.[4]
[End Page 17]
But the
nurse’s implied response to his sexual arousal is very disapproving. The full
sentence about her being his sexual teacher implies strong disapproval: “She
was my teacher in sexual matters and scolded (hat geschimpft—more exactly: “scorned,” or “
shamed”) me for being clumsy and not being able to do anything” (SE 1: 262; AP: 234). The sentence describes the
nurse as having virtually the same dual role as the woman in the two versions
of the staircase dream: arousal and shaming. Immediately after this sentence,
Freud adds, in parenthesis: “This is always how neurotic impotence comes about;
it is thus that fear of incapacity at school obtains its sexual substratum.”
These sentences convey a strong sense of guilt and shame: guilt concerning
sexual aggression and shame over inadequacy, clumsiness, and the inability to
act like a fully mature and sexual man. In Freud’s theories, however, it is a fantasy of sexual
aggression rather than sexual inadequacy, that underlies neurotic impotence.
That is, castration anxiety in a man means fantasies of retaliation for oedipal
aggression, not sexual failure, In other words, what arouses castration anxiety
is the fantasy of being too big (like father) rather than too small (like a
child) in relation to the large, maternal woman. According to Freud, the fear
of castration that resolves the Oedipus complex means castration at the hands
of the father. A woman (the mother or her substitute) may actually make the
threat in order to stop a boy’s masturbating (a common theme with Freud), but
she almost always threatens castration by the father or a (male) doctor—see, for instance, “The
Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex” (1924).
In the
material of Freud’s self-analysis then, there is a set of split perceptions. On
the one hand, there is the nurse who arouses and shames him. On the other hand,
there is the mater nuda
in whose presence his “libido” is aroused” towards” her. The phrasing in German
is important. Freud says he was aroused towards his mother (gegen matrem erwacht ist) not by her (AP: 233). The pure and beautiful mother is
thus the object of the guilty little boy’s aroused libido, while he himself is
the passive and humili- [End Page 18] ated object of seduction by the old nurse. What needs
explaining is how the theory of the Oedipus complex accounts for the boy’s
guilty impulses toward his mother but ignores the boy’s arousal at the hands of
his nurse, especially in view of how much more attention his nurse gets from
Freud than his mother does. The explanation, however, must await additional
materials from Freud’s dreams and self-analysis.
So far, the interpretation of
the staircase dream has gone forward largely in phallic terms. In Freud’s own
interpretation in the Dreambook, he reads the dream as expressing more of an
anal concern for cleanliness and control, though of course no absolute
distinction can be drawn between the two ways of reading the dream. In the
letter to Fliess, he says that the evening before the dream, he went up the
stairs from his office on the first floor to his apartment above. In the
Dreambook, though, we learn that the staircase in the dream is a different one,
which he goes up twice a day to visit an old woman patient and give her
morphine injections. The woman at the head of the stairs is the old woman’s
maidservant. Though Freud ascribes the feeling of shame at being undressed to
sexual impulses, he nevertheless deflects his interpretation from a sexual
reading: “the maidservant whom I dreamt about was older than I am, surly and
far from attractive” (SE
4/5: 239). Freud deliberately offers this as the reason for not pursuing a
sexual interpretation, and one wants to ask if this is in part a public account of his self-analysis, or if this
is another instance of Freud avoiding the possibility of infantile seduction
and holding instead to the oedipal model of the pure, beautiful mother as the
object of her boy’s guilty impulses and fantasies. Rather than considering the
sexual possibilities, Freud remembers that largely because of his heavy smoking
he suffers from pharyngitis and often needs to clear his throat and spit,
particularly on his way up the stairs to visit the old woman, This earns him
the resentment of the concierge. Also, the day before the dream, the
maidservant scolded him for dirtying a red carpet with his boots. Moreover, in
an allusion to his wife Martha and the women servants at home, he says that
because of the frequent spitting, “my reputation for tidiness was not of the
highest with the authorities in my own house” (SE 4/5: 239). This is another way in which
the dream associates his [End Page 19] own house with that of the old woman. And there are still
others. The old woman appears often in Freud’s writing during this period, in The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life
and The Interpretation of Dreams
as well as the letters to Fliess. We last hear of her when Freud tells Fliess
of her death in the summer of 1901. He regrets her passing: for some six years
she has been “a small but sure source of income,” indeed sometimes the only
source (Origins 331).
The first mention of her is an association to the Irma dream of July, 1895.
6. The
Dream of Irma’s Injection
In the Irma
dream, the old woman patient, who received morphine injections, figures as an
association to Irma herself who appears to have contracted an infection from a
dirty hypodermic syringe. During his summer vacation in 1895, Freud had put the
old woman under a colleague’s temporary care, and later he learned from her son
that she had contracted phlebitis. Clearly, it was not his fault, and thus in
the dream it is not his fault that Irma is uncured. Therefore, in the shared
associations to both his wife Martha and the old woman, as well as the analogy
between dirty spitter and dirty squirter (syringe), the Irma dream is a natural
association for the staircase dream. As the dream that broke open for Freud the
whole territory of dreams, it must have continued to fascinate him. In 1900, in
an oft quoted letter to Fliess, Freud asks, pleasurably: “Do you suppose that
some day a marble tablet will be placed on the house, inscribed with these
words: In this house on July 24th, 1895, the Secret of Dreams was revealed to
Dr. Sigmund Freud” (Origins
322). It is a long, complex dream, one that swarms with meaning at every level,
with all the look of the
crucial dream of a lifetime, bearing the dreamer’s most intense concerns into
ranges of form and meaning that he will feed on for the rest of his life. This
has been recognized by many commentators, particularly Erik Erikson, and it
would be redundant to re-interpret entirely a dream that has already received a
great deal of fruitful attention (Erikson; Grinstein; Schur, “Additional ‘Day
Residues’,” Freud:
86-89) It will be useful, however,
to have before us a summary [End Page 20] of the manifest dream and Freud’s interpretation. Beyond
this, there is a special point in the dream which raises the whole issue of
identification in a manner directly significant to the dreams of 1897—it
is the fulcrum of the whole dream, a point that Erikson especially emphasizes.
In large part, it will be questions raised by Erikson’s admirable
re-interpretation of this “specimen dream” that will draw most of our attention in the ensuing discussion.
In the dream,
Freud and his wife are receiving guests in a large hall. Among them is Irma, a
widow, who is Freud’s patient. Freud reproaches her for refusing to accept his
“solution” to her neurosis. She complains of pains in her throat, stomach and
abdomen. Alarmed, Freud looks at her, finds her pale and puffy. Thinking that
he may have missed an organic cause to her neurosis, he takes her aside to look
down her throat. But she resists opening her mouth, and Freud thinks there is
no call for her to “put on such airs” (Erikson’s translation of sie hat es
doch nicht nötig [146]; SE
4/5: 107, GW 2/3: 111). Then, she opens her mouth
“properly.” Inside Freud sees a big white patch and extensive grey scabs on
curly structures similar to the turbinal bones of the nose. At once, he calls
in Dr. M who repeats and confirms his examination. But Dr. M looks unusual: he
is pale, walks with a limp, and his chin is clean-shaven. Freud’s friends, Otto
and Leopold, are there too, Leopold thumping Irma through her bodice and
indicating “a dull area down on the left.” Leopold also indicates that some of
the skin on her left shoulder has been “infiltrated” (infected). Freud says, “I
noticed (spüre) this,
just as he did, in spite of the dress.” Dr. M. then makes a nonsensical
prognosis, although he and Freud are “immediately convinced” of the origin of
Irma’s infection. Otto had given her an injection of, among other compounds,
trimethylamin. [End Page 21] Freud
thinks the injection was administered thoughtlessly and with a dirty syringe (SE 4/5: 107).
Freud’s own
interpretation of the dream uncovers the dream’s wish-fulfillment for revenge
and self-exoneration. In a series of carefully analyzed associations, he
demonstrates how he makes fools out of those in the medical profession who
doubt or oppose his theories, and how he avoids any reproach for failing to
cure Irma. First, it is her own fault because she refuses to accept his
“solution.” But then she is a widow, and it is not up to Freud to give her a
“solution” to solve her sexual frustration. Actually, though, her problem is
organic, an infection, Otto gave her with a dirty syringe and a questionable
“solution” (trimethylamin) and, indeed, her abdominal pains hint at pregnancy.
Freud’s interpretation
uncovers the meaning hidden behind the manifest dream-text, hidden largely
because it is unacceptable to the waking, rational, civilized mind. It is
possible to go a good deal further in this direction: tracing, for instance,
the identities of the actual people associated to the
dream-figures—Breuer and Fliess among them—and thus analyzing in
greater detail some of the hostile, aggressive motives in Freud’s relations to
them at the time. Erik Erikson follows a different approach complementing
Freud’s. He focuses on the manifest dream-text, its form, its particular,
personal style, all in the context of the historical moment in which Freud
stood at the threshold of a discovery of vast importance. In the manifest text
of the Irma dream, he sees the form of a religious rite of conversion or
confirmation, the dreamer moving out of a crowd into doubting isolation and
finally into a community of faith, but this is an interpretation that he
arrives at only after a fairly lengthy analysis.
Erikson singles
out the word “noticed” in the manifest dream. When Dr. M. examines Irma and
discovers an “infiltration” of the skin on her left shoulder, the dreamer
declares that he notices it himself, in spite of Irma’s dress. In his
interpretation, Freud recognizes “at once” that the “infiltration” refers to
the rheumatism in his own shoulder: “Moreover the wording in the dream was
most ambiguous: ‘I noticed this, just as he did . . .’ I noticed [or, rather,
“felt” (spüre)] it in
my own [End Page 22] body, that is” (SE 4/5: 113; GW 2/3: 118; italics added). In his dream,
then, Freud becomes identified, fused with his patient, Irma. Erikson calls the
moment “the very center and nodal point of the dream” (Erikson 135). It means a
reversal of roles, as if unconsciously Freud realized that in order to discover
the secret of dreams, he himself would have to undergo passively—like a
woman—a probing, intrusive examination and analysis by masculine,
scientific authorities. The dream is virtually a prediction and a demand for
the ensuing self-analysis: the discovery of the secret of dreams obliges the
dreamer to analyze his own dreams and the secrets they hold for him. It is a
dream about creative receptivity, an ability to be open to analysis and to the
meaning of one’s dreams as revealed by analysis. Erikson, therefore, points to
the beginning of the Irma dream: “A large hall—numerous guests, whom we
are receiving” (SE
4/5: 107). Freud’s word for “receiving,” empfangen, refers equally as much to “conception”
as it does to “reception” (Erikson 148). It comes as no surprise then that at
the time of the dream, Freud’s wife Martha is pregnant with their sixth child,
and that Freud names Martha as one of a number of women in associations to the
figure of Irma (one connection being Irma’s abdominal pains). Thus, on one
level, when Freud identifies with Irma, he identifies with a pregnant woman.
The dream,
however, does not work on just this one level of meaning alone. It represents a
conflict between an urge to identify with a woman and an equal, but often
stronger, urge to dominate her with “masculine” authority and power. It is also
a conflict between being openly receptive to dreams and defensively closing out
of mind the disturbing impulses they often reveal. In effect, the conflict is
the appropriate and necessary form of Freud’s own self-analysis, since he is
obliged to split himself between aggressive, scientific investigator and
passive, dreaming patient. Thus the important point about the Irma dream is not
that it is built upon a conflict between activity and passivity, skeptical
analysis and open trust. What is important is the style and particular issues
of the conflict—which means, for Freud, the way the conflict describes a
split between masculine and feminine, not metaphorically but literally between
men and [End Page 23] women.
In part, this derives from the actual situation reflected in the dream, of the
scientific, male doctor treating his female, hysterical patients. But this
doctor/patient, male/female relationship is part of the general culture of
nineteenth century European society. In a very fundamental way, Freud is not
personally responsible for the content of his dream. It works on material that
is culturally given, such as the central analogies between submitting to
medical examinations, accepting “solutions,” and possibly welcoming sexual
advances, with the man always in the aggressive, authoritative role and the
woman in the passive, dependent role. In the dream and in Freud’s associations,
the conflict is expressed as a man’s avoiding confusion of roles and resisting
identification with a woman.
A Marxist
might say that this conflict has the form of a class-conflict. The aristocrat,
for instance, reveals his conflict with the bourgeois when he scorns the man’s
enslavement to making profits. In turn, the bourgeois reveals his conflict with
the laborer when he scorns the laborer’s enslavement to his (her) body.
(Inasmuch as aristocratic and bourgeois women identify, respectively, with
their men, they share the same conflicts.) Thus the aristocrat distinguishes
himself from the bourgeois, as the bourgeois distinguishes himself from the
laborer. Each asserts his difference from another whose “inferiority” is
perceived as an attachment to ways of living which he himself has virtuously
transcended or repressed.[5]
But repression and transcendence imply dangerous, hidden realities. The
aristocrat’s presumed “natural” sovereignty and ascendancy over all others is
threatened by the bourgeois reality of sovereign [End Page 24] power based on economic
aggression—the extremes and evils of which “reasonable” men agree to
avoid by creating a social contract. And the bourgeois’ presumed individual and
independent achievement of profits by “free enterprise” is threatened by the laborer’s
reality of profits coming from the exploitation of his own laboring body. In a
very similar and inter-related way then, the rational, independent,
authoritative man distinguishes himself from the irrational, passive, dependent
woman. For him, anything “irrational” or “passive” or “dependent” in himself is
felt as a threatened loss of identity, becoming “like a woman.” Thus the woman,
in a situation like class-conflict, threatens the man with the reality of his
own repressed (and projected) irrationality, passivity and
dependence—particularly his dependence on her.
There is,
actually, nothing remarkable about the presence of such a class-conflict in the
material of Freud’s dreams. What would be remarkable is if the class-conflict
were not present, since it is the natural expression of the culturally “normal”
capitalist, bourgeois (European and American) white, male domination and exploitation of servants,
laborers, blacks, Orientals, “savages” . . . and women, But it would be a mistake to say that
Freud and his work are wholly determined by this culturally given conflict. For
the interpretation of dreams is a powerfully incisive instrument for ferreting
out the hidden, unacknowledged fear, aggression, dependence and exploitation,
to make them stand in the clear light of day where they can, and must, he seen,
acknowledged and possibly changed. Thanks to Freud, the conflict now exists in
the form of an interpreted
dream which, dialectically, changes the status of the conflict from one that is
simply lived over and over again to one that is known and recognized, one that
is thus acknowledged as one’s own and, consequently, with a great deal of work,
perhaps resolved. This, after all, is the significance of Freud’s great
discovery of how the neurotic person “repeats instead of remembering” (SE 12: 151). And yet, Freud, as we are now
in the process of seeing, was much readier to confess his aggression than he
was to acknowledge his passivity and dependence.
The
relationships of doctor and patient, man and woman, sexual aggression and
sexual passivity join as analogies in the [End Page 25] Irma dream to describe an area of anxious
conflict for Freud. To imagine himself as the woman or patient in a passive,
dependent position means to Freud that he might be anything from harmlessly
foolish to terrifyingly defenseless. Irma is a “foolish” and” recalcitrant”
patient, refusing to accept his “ solution” for her symptoms. His wife Martha
is “bashful” toward him and would not be a “good and amenable” patient (though,
in one sense, she has accepted his “solution” and is now pregnant). But, for
the most part, those who were
amenable and trustingly accepted Freud’s solutions have, according to his
associations, fared badly. One woman has died of a toxic dose of sulphanol
which Freud prescribed. A deeply admired friend, who was dying of an incurable
disease, died earlier than he had to because of an addiction to cocaine for
which Freud felt responsible. Freud himself used cocaine to treat swellings in
his nose and, while interpreting the dream, he recognizes his own worry over
having possibly harmed himself. Freud’s close friend Fliess who does accept his
(theoretical) “solutions”—in letter after letter—is an
otolaryngologist (“Otto” is a figure of him in the dream), that is, he is an
ear, nose and throat specialist. Freud, in his associations to the dream,
remarks that Fliess had drawn an analogy between the turbinal hones in the nose
and a woman’s sexual organs. (Fleiss had also theorized that trimethylamin, which in the dream Otto injects into
Irma with a dirty syringe, was “one of the products of sexual metabolism” [SE 4/5: 116].) In the dream, when Freud
peers into Irma’s open mouth, he sees a white patch and turbinal bones with
scabs on them. The analogy is complete. The open mouth is a vagina, and for
Freud, as a man, to submit to examination means submitting to a woman’s passive
sexual role. An indication of Freud’s resistance at this point occurs in a
footnote to his associations to this moment in the dream. He says that it would
take us too far afield to pursue further the analogies between Irma, her more
amenable friend (who “opened her mouth properly”), and Freud’s wife Martha.
Besides, “there is at least one spot in every dream at which it is
unplumbable—a naval, as it were, that is its point of contact with the
unknown” (SE 4/5:
111n). One can understand a self-protective discretion on Freud’s part in not
publishing his most intimate secrets, and yet the manner in which he draws [End
Page 26] the curtains at
this point implies that it is precisely the “unknown” and “unplumbable” in the
form of a woman’s sexuality that arouses his resistance. More precisely, with
the word “naval,” it appears to be symbiotic fusion with the woman that is the object of
resistance. Also, the white patch (a syphilitic chancre?) and the scabs on the
turbinal bones in Irma’s throat suggest a fear of venereal disease, a fear
suggested also by the infection which Irma has contracted from a dirty syringe
(Spritze nicht rein means
a “dirty squirter” [GW
2/3: 113]), and thus it is a fear also that the dreamer himself is a “dirty
squirter” responsible for Irma’s condition, a fear which the dream denies over
and over again.
In his own
interpretation of the dream, Freud tends to back away from a fully sexual
reading, though most of the necessary material is published in the Dreambook
and requires only to be supplemented with some of the materials uncovered by
subsequent biographical and historical research. In the Dreambook, Freud is
satisfied that the principle of wish-fulfillment is demonstrated in the way the
dream exonerates him from accusations of failure and malpractice. Allowing his
readers a potentially embarrassing view of himself, Freud shows how the dream
indulges a wish for revenge by shifting the blame directed at him back onto his
accuser—not he, but Otto used a dirty syringe. That is, Freud is much
more willing to make public his anxieties about being dirty and aggressive than
his anxieties about being weak and passive. But the weakness and passivity are
there in the dream, precisely at the moment when the dreamer becomes fused with
the woman being examined.
Some of
Freud’s anxiety about identifying with a woman has to do with anxiety over
homosexuality. At the time of the dream, he is getting deeper into the
transference relationship with Fliess that is to carry him through the intense,
initial phase of his self-analysis. There are features of their relationship
that makes it remarkably significant for the Irma dream. In the kind of coincidence
that feeds overdetermination in dreams, both Freud and Fliess suffer from
chronic nasal infections, and they often compare noses, as it were. Also,
Fliess, as an ear, nose, and throat surgeon, has already operated once on
Freud’s nose before the Irma dream and will operate again a few months [End
Page 27] later (Schur
74-84, 90). Thus, in a very overdetermined way, Freud is able to fantasize
himself in an intensely dependent, passive, “feminine” relationship to Fliess.
It is a relationship that Freud seeks out and virtually invents in order to
fulfill his needs. Fliess, though, hardly measures up to the extraordinary
admiration that Freud lavishes on him; in fact, Fliess’ belief in an organic
explanation of neurosis increasingly comes into conflict with Freud’s effort to
discover a psychological explanation. When their relationship breaks up some
years later, the break is fierce and ugly.
But anxiety
over homosexuality is only a particular version of a more general anxiety about
weakness and passivity. Erik Erikson’s reading of the dream is, on this point,
somewhat of an idealization. Relying heavily on the instant of fusion between
doctor and patient, Erikson likens the dream to a rite of conversion or
confirmation: “he, the doctor and man, fuses with the patient and woman. This,
of course, amounts to a surrender analogous to a spiritual conversion and a
concomitant sacrifice of the male role” (Erikson 153). In return, the
dreamer—previously isolated and guilty—is now rewarded for renouncing
his aggression by being received (or restored) into a community of “immediate
conviction (faith),” a brotherhood, “a hierarchic group dominated by an
authority [Dr. M] in whom he believes implicitly,” and whose power he can now
wield in the form of “righteous indignation” to drive out an “unclean one,” Dr.
Otto with his dirty syringe (Erikson 153-54). As an analogy, the form of a rite
of conversion and confirmation brings a great deal of clarifying power to the
effort to understand the Irma dream in its historical and personal contexts. It
is a brilliant insight. And yet, the undialectical and culturally regressive
form of the analogy leads us into an idealization of the central act of fusion
in the dream. Erikson’s model is a religious brotherhood, and it is a model
that fits the dream as a significant analogy. But then the question of meaning
is shifted onto the model—what does the model signify? This is a crucial
question, because the religious brotherhood forms and perpetuates itself
through rites in which a group of men assimilate for themselves sym- [End
Page 28] bolically the
powers of feared, envied and excluded women. That is, the model adopted by Erikson is the social
institution which, historically, has offered a patriarchal and homosexual
resolution to masculine anxiety about weakness and passivity. Identifying with
an authoritarian father resolves anxiety about being engulfed and annihilated
by an overwhelming “bad” mother—who is the dialectical mirror-image of
the man’s own overwhelming and frustrated oral needs. It is the issue of the
Oedipus complex all over again, and the resolution simply avoids instead of
confronting the whole problem of weakness and passivity.
From another
point of view, Erikson’s religious model raises questions similar to those raised
by Paul Ricoeur when he asks if positive and negative hermeneutics are mutually
contradictory, incapable of any co-existence at all. The answer here, as with
Ricoeur, is no. But Erikson makes an error similar to Ricoeur’s by implying
that the positive hermeneutic recovers a necessarily religious meaning (Ricoeur 26-32). For the Irma
dream, the negative hermeneutic is represented by Freud’s own interpretation:
the dream fulfills his hidden wish to be revenged upon those who refuse to
trust him and even accuse him of failure and foul play. The positive
hermeneutic, resisted by Freud as an attempt to deny his nasty, aggressive wish
for revenge, is represented by Erikson’s reading of the dream as a religious
rite. One point where the two kinds of hermeneutic collide is the figure of Dr.
M. Is he, according to Freud, a beardless, castrated fool? Or is he, according
to Erikson, a symbolically castrated, priestly authority to whom the dreamer
seeks to submit himself? Erikson resolves the question in terms of the relative
strength of the dreamer’s ego. A dreamer with a weak ego would cling
defensively to a negative hermeneutic, and when that failed him, he would
probably wake up in terror at the mystery staring back at him from the depths
of Irma’s gaping mouth. A dreamer with a strong ego and flexible defenses would
be able to relinquish the isolated, doubting, probing, examining modes of
relating that characterize him in his waking, intellectual life. He would give
in to a “diffusion of [End Page 29] roles,” forfeit his “male initiative,” surrendering like a
woman to examination by superior males, denying his “stubborn autonomy” and
“letting doubt lead him back to the earliest infantile security: childlike
trust” (Erikson 156). Erikson is wise about the paradox that renunciation can
be an act of strength and recovered wholeness. He does resolve, at a fairly
abstract level, the apparent contradiction between positive and negative
hermeneutics. But there is an important problem left untouched. The ego that
renounces its aggressive role allows itself to be led back to childlike trust
in an unmistakably masculine
figure of authority. And yet this represents, in Erikson’s words, “the earliest
infantile security,” which is experienced by infants, however, in primary, oral
relatedness with the mother.
Since Erikson does not treat his interpretive model critically and
historically, he lapses into a paradoxically anti-maternal, anti-feminine
conception of childlike trust. In fact the whole topic of trust in Erikson’s
analysis of the dream remains deeply problematic.
Another way
to see how Erikson idealizes the fusion between doctor and patient in the dream
is to observe how he treats Freud’s associations from Irma to his old woman
patient with her twice-daily morphine injections, and from her to the nurse of
his early childhood. Actually, Erikson does not consider the nurse as part of
Freud’s associations to the dream: she interests Erikson only as an actual
person having an actual effect on Freud’s childhood. In fact, Freud himself
does not mention her in his associations to the Irma dream, though this may
have something to do with the fact that he does not recollect her extraordinary
importance to him until two years after the Irma dream in the summer of 1897.
Still, Erikson does not pick up at all on Freud’s explicit association from
Irma to his old woman patient. But we do know, from the Dreambook, that Freud’s
childhood experience with his nurse is one of the sources of the staircase
dream. We know, too, that the representative of the nurse in the staircase
dream, the old woman with her maidservant and concierge, is one of Freud’s
associations to Irma. The old woman was receiving shots and had contracted an
infection—probably, Freud thinks, from a dirty syringe. So, [End Page
30] the series of
associative images, from shameful masturbator, to dirty spitter, to dirty
squirter (syringe), leads directly from Freud’s relationship with his nurse to
the Irma dream. This is a very important set of associations. But for Erikson,
the nurse is important only as a possible source for memories of Catholic
rituals. These rituals, presumably, find their way as a formal principle into
the Irma dream many years after the nurse disappears. Freud tells Fliess in a
letter in 1897 that, at the time when he was being displaced as the first in
his mother’s affections by the arrival of younger siblings, the nurse was often
taking him to Catholic mass (SE
1: 261, 263). Erikson underscores Freud’s disclosure to Fliess that if he could
find a resolution to his own “hysteria,” he would be “grateful to the memory of
the old woman who provided me at such an early age with the means for living
and going on living” (SE
1: 262). In Erikson’s analysis, this old woman “restored to the little Freud,
in a difficult period, a measure of a sense of trust” (159). It is plausible,
therefore, that the rituals which she took him to see in this difficult period
find expression in the manifest form of the Irma dream. For the Irma dream
occurs at a moment in Freud’s career when, in Erikson’s words, “his wife was
again expecting and when he himself stood before a major emancipation as well
as the ‘germination’ of a major idea” (159), and Freud would very
understandably need to have access to his deepest resources of trust and
security.
This is a
rich, ingenious interpretation, and one hesitates before Erikson’s shrewd
judgment that in our liberated, doubting age, we may quite freely admit to
sexual and aggressive guilt, but stubbornly resist any suggestion that we are
passively “at the mercy of unconscious religious, political [or] ethnic
patterns.” It is an age, too, says Erikson, in which “the simple fact of
dependence on social structure [for] our physical and emotional existence and
well-being seems to be experienced as a reflection on some kind of intellectual
autonomy” (158). The outcome is that, as in the Irma dream and Freud’s
interpretation of it, we can enjoy trust only in the act of denying it. And yet
[End Page 31] again,
in this matter, Erikson falls into the error of making uncritical,
undialectical use of models derived from historically determinate institutions.
The Irma dream is a dream of very special form and circumstance. It is the
dream by which a late nineteenth-century, European man of intensely skeptical
but passionate, scientific genius discovered the principle of a hermeneutic of
dreams. Above all, it is a dream that does not exist apart from Freud’s
analytic reflection upon it. If it appears to have the manifest form of a
religious rite, then it is a form which has already, in the process of dream-work and
analysis, undergone transformation into a wholly new and different form that
can no longer be called religious. Freud distrusted the positive reading
implicit in the Irma dream as a falsification of what he was sure were his
“true” motives, aggression and vengeance. But with a dialectical understanding
of positive and negative hermeneutics, we are enabled to go beyond Freud’s
distrust, without denying it,
to recover a fullness of meaning available in an analysis of the dream. The
recovered fullness of meaning is not “religious” but something new and
different and, strictly speaking, nameless. To call it religious, as Erikson
effectively does, is to falsify the whole dialectical, hermeneutic struggle and
substitute a disguised conservative retreat into archaic and decadent social
institutions—patriarchal, authoritarian and designed to perpetuate the
exploitation of the masses of people by a ruling elite.
7. Mother,
Nurse and Father
In detail
too, Erikson’s interpretation suffers from important errors and omissions
contributing to his idealization of the Irma dream’s moment of fusion and
“childlike trust.” Even though he bases a great deal of his interpretation on
Freud’s childhood relationship to his nurse, Erikson never refers to her as in
fact Freud’s nurse.
She is simply “an old and superstitiously religious Czech woman [who] used to
take him around to various churches in his home town” (158; see
Note 4, below).
This is a surprising omission, and a very serious one because with it
goes all the deep, disturbing conflicts arising from Freud’s relation- [End
Page 32] ship with his
nurse. She appears in Erikson’s analysis as just a kindly old woman whom Freud
remembers gratefully, while nothing is said of his memory of her sharp
discipline and shaming of his sexual impulses. Instead, Erikson explains what
he perceives as Freud’s basic attitude of defiant ambition as a transformation
of “inner humiliation, forever associated with the internalized father image”
(161). Our analysis, however, also points to an internalized mother image.
It has
already been pointed out how a series of associations leads from Freud’s
relationship with his nurse to the staircase dream and the Irma dream: shameful
masturbator, dirty spitter, dirty squirter (syringe). All the developmental
themes are represented: prenatal fusion, oral, anal, urethral, and phallic; the
naval that leads to the unplumbable unknown, breast and mouth (also infected
breast and scabrous mouth), mouth that refuses to open (anus), infected mouth
(vagina) and dirty penis. The predominant themes are phallic and oral, tinged
with anal anxiety about infection and dirt, and there is a remarkable
continuity from earlier to later sets of relationships. The later pattern of
humiliation and defiant ambition in relation to an internalized father is
already well prepared for in the pattern of arousal and shame by an
internalized “bad mother” (nurse). We have already seen how Freud told Fliess
about the nurse who was his “teacher in sexual matters” and shamed him for his
clumsiness and inability to do anything. Freud adds that this is typical of the
origins of neurotic impotence (SE
1: 262).
These
observations draw us toward some interesting conclusions. The later, oedipal
conflict appears to be the development of a conflict already shaped in an
earlier mother/infant (or nurse/infant) relationship. In a relatively
oversimplified manner of speaking, we might say that the early split between
good, pure, nurturing mother and ugly, sexual, humiliating mother gets
redistributed in the later relationship between pure mother and humiliating
father. This, in fact, appears in the drama of the Oedipus complex as the
absence in the mother of any sexuality except inasmuch as she is the attractive
object of sexual desire in father and son. It is possible, of course, that the
view of the earlier relationship given us by Freud has been [End Page 33] distorted by his reading the later
relationship back upon it. But there is still the remarkable circumstance that
Freud had, in effect, two
mothers: his actual mother—whose nakedness he can mention only in
Latin—and his Nannie whom he remembers in association with numerous
disturbing sexual experiences. Having two such mothers, and the luck of having
the “bad,” ugly mother banished from his life when he was only two and a half,
allows Freud to maintain a secure split between the internalized good and bad
mothers. It also allows him to preserve his close relationship with his actual,
very idealized mother who, in turn, idealizes her first-born and only son. The
possibility that, in the course of the boy’s development, an internalized
humiliating father receives the split-off projections of an internalized “bad
mother” seems to be reinforced by the Irma dream. There, the dreamer becomes
the passive, humiliated sexual object of male authorities, with fellatio as the
implied act: the males probing his open mouth—a relationship also
suggested by the dream’s transformations of mouth and vagina, breast and penis,
all on the theme of infection. The mother/infant nursing relationship is thus
remembered in fantasy as a sexual assault. This, I believe, comes closer than
Erikson does, with his idealization of childlike trust, to the dreamer’s vision
of what trust actually means for him: homosexual submission and humiliation
before male authority, a vision resisted stubbornly by Freud’s interpretation
which is, in effect, an elaborate “confession” of his own dirty, vengeful,
sexually aggressive masculinity.
This, I believe, goes a long way toward explaining why Freud went for so many
years before recognizing the primary importance of the mother/infant
relationship: quite possibly, every time he came close to recognizing it, he
encountered it in the disturbing form of a homosexual submission to the father.
And anxiety over the homosexual fantasy would have to be overcome before he
could confidently accept the primacy of the mother/infant relationship in the
course of a child’s development.
The nurse,
then, assumes a position of fundamental importance in Freud’s own development
as well as in the development of his analytic theories. It seems that Freud
himself idealizes her in the statement cited by Erikson: “the old woman [. . .]
[End Page 34] provided
me at such an early age with the means of living and going on living” (SE 1: 212). A more complete assessment
might be that she also provided him equally with a sense of being driven, a
defiant ambition to reverse the inner humiliation that only later becomes associated
with an internalized father. Perhaps it is this later projection of the
humiliating “bad mother” onto an internalized father that allows Freud, forty
years after his nurse’s disappearance, to idealize her as he does. But it is
only in this one passage that he does so: the rest of his recollections imply a
much more disturbing relationship. It is a relationship, moreover, that is part
of the whole white European, bourgeois child-rearing pattern of hiring nurses
to care for infants.
The
possibility that, in relation to his Nannie, Freud internalized a dialectic of
shame and ambition takes on a larger significance when we consider her
socio-economic position as a Czech working-class woman in a German town in
Moravian Austria. From 1849 until 1918 Moravia, originally a Czech territory,
was an Austrian crown land. From the thirteenth century on, Czech Moravia had
been dominated by the German upper and middle classes who had taken over the
towns and left the countryside to the Czechs—a pattern typical of imperialism
from the Greek domination of Egyptian Alexandria to the French and American
domination of Vietnam. The departure of the Freud family from Freiberg (now
Pribor) was due, in large part, to an economic crisis in the town. The crisis
had been caused by a serious inflation from 1852 on, the dislocation of trade
by the new railroad’s bypassing Freiberg, and the failure of local cloth
manufacturing, a victim of industrial progress. Freud’s father was a wool
merchant whose business failed with the rest, but with the added insult that
Czechs and Germans alike tended to blame Jewish merchants for the failure of
the cloth industry. Perhaps most important, the revolution of 1848 had touched
Moravia, and Czech nationalism inspired a more open and militant hatred of the
German ruling class (Bernfeld 113-14). As a German and a Jew, Freud’s father
had sufficient reason to leave a town in which he already had difficulty making
a living. [End Page 35] Freud’s
nurse then was a working-class Czech Catholic employed by a bourgeois, German
Jewish family. Her status implies cultural, social, economic, and ethnic
degradation, a potent combination to be carrying into a nursing relationship
with an infant boy. There is no telling how much repressed—and maybe not
so repressed—envy and class-hatred might have been behind what Jones
calls “the nurse’s normal mixture of affection for children and severity toward
their transgressions” (Jones 1: 5-6). A parallel situation is the American
slave-holding south, where white infants were nursed by black Mammies and grew
up into a culture that idealized white women. The same splitting is present, in
society and psyche alike, to make the idealization possible (and necessary).
The American
situation is founded on a combination of economic exploitation and racism. And
race—Freud’s Jewishness—is a factor that is more important than has
been indicated so far. Freud himself constantly felt the effects of
anti-Semitism, and a few times he was subjected to humiliating personal rebuffs.
As a boy, he had been ashamed of his father’s “unheroic conduct” (SE 4/5: 197) in response to a humiliating
anti-Semitic attack, and he turned to the image of Hannibal for his model of
heroism. “To my youthful mind Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between
the tenacity of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic church” (SE 4/5: 196). Freud’s own tenacity, then,
his inner dialectic between shame and defiance, appears to be heavily
over-determined—by the relationship with his father, by the anti-Semitism
of Austrian society, and, from a great distance in earlier infancy, by the
relationship with his nurse. With the nurse, as we have seen, Freud’s
relationship gains significance from her own degraded socioeconomic position as
a working-class Czech in bourgeois, German-Austrian society. The irony is that
Freud’s own family, from at least the time of his birth forward, was
chronically on the verge of poverty, and the father who shamed him by
predicting he would never amount to anything was himself a failure as a businessman;
remembering this, Freud later described his father as being like Dickens’ Mr.
Micawber, “always hopefully expecting something to turn up” (Jones 1: 2). [End
Page 36]
8. The
Dream of “A Little Sheep’s Head”
Two dreams
remain to be treated out of the four which Freud reports to Fliess between late
May and early October, 1897, when he announces his discovery of the Oedipus
complex. The first of these two is not recorded as a dream the way the
staircase and Irma dreams are. The one detail about an animal skull which Freud
gives from the manifest dream-text, is difficult to understand largely because
it is the only such detail given. But the context is important, because it
connects this detail directly with some of the most fundamentally disturbing
aspects of Freud’s memories of his nurse. Also, the part of the letter
reporting this dream is written separately from the rest and a day later
(October 4 in a letter dated October 3). It is thus a complete text in itself
and—to anticipate the analysis somewhat—has the form of a complete
manifest dream-text.
The text
falls into two parts, the first giving the detail about the animal skull and a
first set of associations:
She
was my teacher in sexual matters and scolded me for being clumsy and not being able
to do anything. (This is always how neurotic impotence comes about; it is thus
that fear of incapacity at school obtains its sexual substratum.) At the same
time I saw the skull of a small animal and in the dream I thought ‘Pig!’ But in
the analysis I associated it with your wish two years ago that I might find a
sheep’s skull on the Lido to enlighten me, as Goethe once did. But I failed to
find one. So I was a little fool [ein kleiner Schafskopf, literally “a little sheep’s-head”]. The
whole dream was full of the most mortifying allusions to my present
powerlessness as a therapist. Perhaps this is where an inclination to believe
that hysteria is incurable has its start” (SE 1: 262-63; AP: 234-35).
We have
already dealt at some length with the first part of this passage and the
bearing it has on Freud’s earliest memory of sexual arousal and shame. This
first half of the text ties together the nurse’s early shaming of him for not
being able to do anything (nichts gekonnt habe), neurotic impotence, fear of incapacity
(Angst vor dem Nichtkönnen),
and powerlessness as a [End Page 37] therapist (Unvermögen als Therapist—note that Unvermögen also means “impotent” and “penniless”).
The second half of the text, with another set of associations, ties together a
memory of the nurse causing him to steal coins and give them to her, a memory
of some ten-florin notes as Martha’s housekeeping money, and a remark by a
woman patient that he should not take any fee from her because she was the wife
of a colleague:
Besides
this, she washed me in reddish water, in which she had previously washed
herself. (The interpretation is not difficult; I find nothing like this in the
chain of my memories, so I regard it as a genuine ancient discovery.) And she
made me carry off ‘zehners’
(ten kreuzer pieces) and give them to her. There is a long chain from these
first silver zehners
to the heap of paper ten-florin notes which I saw in the dream as Martha’s
housekeeping money. The dream can be summed up as ‘bad treatment.’ Just as the
old woman got money from me for her bad treatment of me, so today I get money
from my bad treatment of my patients. A special part was played by Frau Qu.,
whose remark you reported to me: I ought not to take anything from her as she
was the wife of a colleague. (Of course he made it a condition that I should).
(SE 1: 263; AP: 235)
Freud thus
summarizes his interpretation of the dream and his associations as paying for
bad treatment, his patients paying him for bad treatment and, in childhood, he
paying his nurse for her bad treatment. According to the connection made in the
text (“And she made
me [. . .]”), the nurse’s bad treatment is washing him in “reddish” water which
she had just washed herself in. Presumably, Freud imagined that the water was
red from the blood of her menstruation. He says nothing about the washing
incident except to claim that it is “a genuine ancient discovery,” that is, not
a screen memory. Then, in a short concluding paragraph, as an answer to any
severe critic’s objection that these memories are all projections of later
experience onto the past, he points to the washing incident as proof against
such an objection. The incident must be a genuine memory: “Where [else] do all
patients get the frightful perverse details which are often as remote from
their experience [End Page 38] as
from their knowledge?” (SE
1: 263). In a passage full of references to impotence the bloody water suggests
castration anxiety. But the bath itself implies actual immersion and very
possibly anxiety about engulfment in the bloody womb of his birth. In the text,
the bath occupies the same position in relation to the second set of
associations as the nurse’s arousal and shaming of the boy does in relation to
the first set of associations. That is, the first set traces impotence—sexual,
intellectual, therapeutic—to the early experience of arousal and
humiliation. The second set traces two incidents—failing to give his wife
enough housekeeping money, and improperly taking money from a woman patient
(the wife of a
colleague)—to his nurse’s causing him to give her stolen coins in payment
for the “bad treatment” of washing him in bloody water.
Thus, a
pattern emerges of two exchanges between Freud and others, the second exchange
having a form which is the reverse of the first. In the first exchange, the
nurse, Freud’s “prime originator” (“Urheberin”—the first woman to arouse him) is
his teacher in sexual matters (Lehrerin in sexuellen Dingen) who shames him, however, for his
clumsiness and inability to do anything, an exchange recognized by Freud as the
“sexual substratum” of neurotic impotence. The second exchange, though, shows
him identified with
the nurse, through the medium of the bath, and taking money improperly from
women. That is, in fantasy, Freud’s relationship to his nurse has “feminized”
him: first, by putting him in a passive, exploited position and then by
identification, making him the exploiter of others. In a remarkable way, this
text, with its associations and memories, has the form of a manifest dream
similar to a reversal
of the Irma dream. The Irma dream moves from aggression through identification
to passivity. This text moves from passivity through identification to
aggression. By means of a central, pivotal act of identification, the bath, it
moves from his being an object of the nurse’s bad treatment (in effect, she
castrates him, renders him impotent) to his assuming the role of the nurse and
making others the objects of his
bad treatment, in particular his wife and a patient who is the wife of a
colleague. It is, after all, quite natural for a therapist to fantasize himself
as nursing his patients: it is a common theme [End Page 39] today in the clinical literature. But,
for Freud, to assume a nursing role evidently means identifying with his
childhood nurse, and it is experienced as a disaster: bad treatment by a bad
nurse.
The one
detail given from the manifest dream-text, the small animal skull, appears
significant in positive as well as negative ways. “Pig!” and “little sheep’s
head” are very likely names which the nurse called him because of his—in
her eyes—dirty, animal transgressions against the rules of “civilized”
behavior. According to his associations, he fails to find an enlightening
sheep’s skull as Goethe did (which gave Goethe the idea for his “vertebral”
theory of the skull [SE
1: 262n3]). But in the dream, Freud identifies with his nurse’s probable name
for him, ein kleiner Schafskopf:
he becomes the sheep’s skull that he failed to find and thus confirms his
theory of the sexual (animal) origin and meaning of psychic processes—the
“small animal head” describing in effect the infantile, animal beginnings of
the mind.
After this
letter of October 4, almost two weeks pass before Freud writes to Fliess again.
In the meantime, he has talked with his mother, and she has given him a very
important piece of information: it was not he who stole coins for his
Nannie—she
herself stole them from him. She was found out when Freud was two and a half
years old. In her possession were found “all the shiny new kreuzers and zehners
and all the toys” that had been given to him (SE 1: 263-64). She was arrested, tried and
imprisoned for ten months; Freud never saw her again. On the basis of this new
information, Freud corrects what he is now sure was a mistake in his original
interpretation:
I
wrote to you that she led me into stealing zehners and giving them to her. The
dream really meant that she stole them herself. For the dream-picture was a
memory of my taking money from the mother of a doctor—that is,
wrongfully. The correct interpretation is: I = she, and the mother of a doctor
equals my mother. So far was I from knowing that she was a thief that I made a
wrong interpretation. (SE
1: 264)
How wrong, though, is Freud’s original interpretation? How [End Page 40] much is it actually corrected by the new
information? There is in fact a very important piece of new material supplied
by Freud himself and not by his mother. The originally described scene of the
nurse having him steal zehners for her is completed by a “dream-picture” of him
stealing from the mother
of a doctor. Although the text presents a possible confusion between manifest
dream-text (described as a “dream-picture”) and actual memory, this new
material from the dream reveals the figure to whom the wife of a colleague and
his own wife Martha are associations: she is the mother of a doctor. Thus an
important association between mother and wife seems to be what the dream is
communicating, at least in part. But Freud, apparently seeking a true “memory,”
interprets the dream as telling how the nurse and not he stole from his mother.
Inexplicably, and in spite of the associations, he allows himself to drop out
of the scene. “The dream really meant that she stole them herself.” Given the
analysis of the dreams already treated in this essay, this particular piece of
interpretation by Freud is astonishing. In one quick gesture, he at once
declares and denies his own identification with his nurse. Evidently, for
Freud, “I = she” signifies transformation by the dream-work, not
identification: “ I stand in place of her,” rather than, “I am identified with
her.”
At issue here is the question of fantasy and memory. “The evidential value of these coincidences might be invalidated by the objection that on some
occasion in my later childhood I had heard that the nurse was a thief, and that
I had then apparently forgotten it till it finally emerged in the dream. I
think myself that this is so” (SE
1: 264). But if it is so (see page 45 below), and Freud really did not know
she was a thief till later, then it follows that his original interpretation is
closer to his own infantile fantasy life, however much it appears to disagree
with his mother’s conscious memory. Consequently, the later, “correct”
interpretation takes on the status of a rationalizing defense against the
association of patient, wife and mother as objects of his own “bad treatment.”
It is important to remember that, in his theories, Freud is still hovering
between traumatic childhood scenes and fantasies arising from disturbed
impulses as the origin of neurosis. In Freud’s own fantasies, represented by
his [End Page 41] dreams,
there is a nurse in the role of a seductive, humiliating or “bad” mother, and he
is either the object of her bad treatment, or—identified with her—he
makes others the objects of his own bad treatment. The fantasies can be
corrected by someone else’s memories of his childhood. Or—to be more
exact—the fantasies can be supplemented by memories, and compared to them
as a way of confirming their status as fantasies, but they cannot be altered or replaced
by memories. In an absolutely fundamental way, the fantasies are what is true about Freud more than the actual
memories, especially memories supplied by others, his mother in particular. For
his fantasies tell what was actually happening for Freud in that familial space
that is shaped by the fantasies of all the members of the family in relation to
one another. That is, the fantasies have their own validity, their own
“evidential value,” as guides to the past which cannot be negated by
“objective” or “archival” versions reconstructed out of many people’s memories
and checked against one another and with the records. Dreams and fantasies
provide the most direct access to the phenomenological past, the past we bear into the present
in the process of shaping and experiencing it. And the phenomenological past
which Freud bears with him into 1897 and the discovery of the Oedipus complex
is what most concerns us.
Thus, when
Freud reads the new, “corrective” information back into his dream, it becomes
an extension of the dream and, consequently, of the past that informs the
dream. It is not any longer an issue of when in the past he actually knew for a
fact that the nurse was a thief. But, identified with the nurse (“I = she”) in
the past that he bears with him, he turns the bad treatment now on his mother:
in fantasy, he steals from her, he plunders her. In that special fantasy
situation, in which Freud maintains a careful split between two mothers, “good”
and “bad,” he acts with the introjected “bad” mother to plunder the introjected
“good” mother. The outcome, predictably, is guilt. This is Freud’s
characteristic position, the confessed sexual aggressor, a position that finds
its permanent intellectual expression in the theory of the Oedipus complex, the
theory of the man’s unresolved, guilty desire to possess his mother. Freud, the
conscientious, brave confessor of his own aggression, never [End Page 42] quite comprehends that his aggression
against the “good” mother (wife, patient) is based, in fantasy, on
identification with a seductive, aggressive “bad” mother and—hardest fact
of all—that “good” and “bad” mothers are one and the same woman.
9. The
Dream of the One-eyed Doctor
The last
dream reported by Freud before announcing his discovery of the Oedipus complex
appears both in the letters and the Dreambook. Among the four dreams reported
to Fliess between May and October 1897, it appears to be the one dream that
invites a classically oedipal interpretation, even though it is reported almost
as an aside in a letter concerned largely with recollections of the nurse. It
is reported in the October 15 letter (No. 71) immediately after the paragraph
in which Freud corrects his “mistaken” interpretation of the scene of himself
wrongfully taking money from the mother of a doctor:
I
also made enquiries about the doctor we had in Freiberg, because a dream showed
a great deal of resentment against him. In the analysis of the figure in the
dream behind which he was concealed I thought also of a Professor von K., who
was my history master at school. He did not seem to fit in at all, as my
relations with him were indifferent or, rather, agreeable. My mother then told
me that the doctor in my childhood had only one eye, and of all my
schoolmasters Professor K. too was the only one with that same defect. (SE 1: 264)
Apparently,
we do not have the manifest dream-text. Neither Professor von K. nor the
one-eyed doctor is the “figure in the dream.” In the Dreambook version, though,
Freud knows in the dream that the figure is his childhood doctor, but the face
is “indistinct” and confused with that of a school-master. Freud adds that,
aside from this one dream, he has never thought of the doctor since childhood,
though he bears a scar on his chin to remind him of his attentions (SE 4/5: 17).[6]
In another section of the [End Page 43] Dreambook, under the topic of “typical” dreams, Freud
remembers that in his own examination dreams he is always examined in history,
in which he did “brilliantly” partly because of his “kindly” master, the
“one-eyed benefactor of another dream” (SE 4/5: 275). The point about the scar appears again with a
description of the wound in a disguised autobiographical sketch in the article,
“Screen Memories” (1899). Here it is called “an injury to my face which caused
considerable loss of blood and for which I had to have some stitches put in by
a surgeon” (SE 3:
310). Then, twenty years later, in an addition to the Dreambook, Freud
evidently describes the accident itself in an association to the dream of news
about his son from the front (in World War I). This later dream he interprets
as allowing him to indulge in a disguised form “the envy which is felt for the
young by those who have grown old” (SE 4/5: 560)—Freud at the time is about sixty-two years
old. In one part of the dream, his son “climbed up on a basket that was
standing beside a cupboard, as though he wanted to put something on the
cupboard” (SE 4/5:
559). In Freud’s associations, the scene reminds him of an accident that he
says he brought upon himself when he was between two and three years old: “I
had climbed up on a stool in the store-closet (Speisekammer: “larder,” “pantry”) to get something
nice that was lying on a cupboard or table. The stool tipped over and its
corner had struck me behind my lower jaw; I might easily, I reflected, have
knocked out all my teeth” (SE
4/5: 560).
In all of
these versions of the one-eyed doctor dream and its associations, one easily
infers an oedipal ambivalence toward the father. The description of the
accident suggests that Freud may have unconsciously blamed the doctor for the
injury which he in fact treated—leaving the scar which, in the words of
Didier Anzieu, “inscribed in his flesh the punishment of his incestuous
desires” (67, my translation). But if reaching up to get “something nice” to
eat from a pantry cupboard is to be taken as an expression of incestuous
desire, then there is something more than simply an oedipal wish in this scene.
There are strong oral motives at work: reaching for something to eat gets the
little boy an injury to his jaw. [End Page 44]
Another
significant factor is the position of the dream of the one-eyed doctor in the
October 15 letter to Fliess. It comes after a discussion of a dream about the
nurse and immediately before a recollection of a scene involving nurse, mother
and half-brother. In a sense, the scene is reported virtually as an association
to the dream of the one-eyed doctor and, considering the later description of
the accident to Freud’s jaw, it is possible to see why:
I
said to myself that if the old woman disappeared so suddenly, it must be
possible to point to the impression this made on me. Where is that impression
then? A scene then occurred to me which, for the last 29 years, has
occasionally emerged in my conscious memory without my understanding it. My
mother was nowhere to be found. I was screaming my head off. My brother
Philipp, twenty years older than me, was holding open a cupboard [Kasten] for me, and, when I found that my
mother was not inside it either, I began crying still more, till, looking slim
and beautiful, she came in by the door. (SE 1: 264; AP: 237)
Between the
accident to Freud’s jaw and this scene with Philipp and his mother, the common
element is the cupboard (Kasten).
In Freud’s explanation of the scene (a screen memory), he proposes that he
feared the same thing had happened to his mother as had just happened to his
nurse, who had been “boxed up” (eingekastelt) according to Philipp who, says Freud, was
known for his elusive punning. (This is taken by Freud as evidence that he knew
then, at age two and a half, that his nurse had been jailed—see
page 41, above.) Thus, when the boy finds that his mother is not “boxed up” in the
cupboard, he screams louder until, “looking slim and beautiful,” she comes in
the door. But why does he scream louder upon finding that his mother is not
boxed up like his nurse? In a footnote added in 1924 to another version of the
scene and its interpretation, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Freud attempts to explain this by
saying that his disappointment at not finding his mother in the cupboard
derived from a “superficial” motive. The real, deeper motive was to find his mother’s
womb empty of sibling rivals. Freud says here that the nurse’s disap- [End
Page 45] pearance
coincided with his mother’s becoming pregnant with his younger sister Anna. In
the odd family structure which made Philipp the same age as Freud’s mother (and
his father nearer the age of his Nannie),[7]
he probably turned to Philipp to open the cupboard because Philipp would be the
one who put the new baby inside his mother’s womb (or her Kasten). So, at the deeper level, where he
wanted to find an empty womb, his crying is inappropriate, “in the wrong place”
(SE 6: 51n2). But
this explanation, though compelling, leaves the original question
unanswered—unless we adopt the view that the “deeper” motive is disguised
behind an affect opposite to what is appropriate, which is the relief and
happiness he does feel when his mother arrives looking slim and beautiful. There
is no doubt that Freud is right about anxiety over sibling rivals motivating
his happiness at the sight of his slim mother. But it is not at all clear why
the original anxiety over an empty cupboard should mask a deeper motive to find
it empty, except retrospectively,
upon the mother’s arrival, when she is not just seen, but seen to be slim. Freud says, in the version in The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life,
that he took literally, “in a child’s way,” his brother’s punning way of
telling how his nurse disappeared: “She’s boxed up” (eingekastelt). If he feared that his mother
disappeared in the same way, then, upon asking Philipp to open the Kasten in which she was eingekastelt, he presumably hoped to find her there
in the cupboard. So, it is entirely appropriate for him to cry even louder on
finding the cupboard empty.
The scene
does express what looks like an oedipal conflict, Philipp substituting for the
father as the boy’s rival for his mother. And, with the emphasis on the
mother’s slimness, it does express anxiety about sibling rivals. But, in its
first motives, the scene assumes an identification between nurse and mother:
perhaps both now have been “boxed up.” And, through the accident to his jaw
associated with the cupboard (Kasten), there are definitely very primitive, oral motives at
work.
In the letter
of October 15 to Fliess, immediately after dis- [End Page 46] cussing this scene with the cupboard,
Freud announces his discovery of the Oedipus complex: “I have found in my case
too, falling in love [Verliebheit]
with the mother and jealousy of the father, and I now regard it as a universal
event of early childhood” (SE
1: 265). And yet, even in the most oedipal of his recent dreams (the one-eyed
doctor) and in the cupboard scene which immediately follows it in the letter,
love for the mother is a dependent, mostly oral—rather than
phallic—love. In fact, the oedipal ambivalence felt in the one-eyed
doctor dream, between kindly professor and hateful doctor, looks very much like
a later development of an ambivalence felt in relationship to the nurse who
arouses and shames the boy’s bodily impulses. After all, it is the relationship
with the nurse which Freud himself describes as providing the “sexual
substratum” of “fear of incapacity
at school” (SE 1:
262). Furthermore, the accidental injury to his jaw, an association to the
one-eyed doctor dream, is experienced in fantasy as a punishment not so much
for an incestuous wish as for a wish to eat something out of reach and probably
forbidden. Thus, in the material of his own self-analysis, from which Freud
evidently deduces the theory of the Oedipus complex, the father stands more in
the way of the boy’s oral dependence than he does in the way of his phallic
aggression. Consequently, the father becomes the one responsible for the boy’s
loss of the breast while the “slim and beautiful” mother remains the pure
object of the boy’s guilty lust, a mother idealized, in fantasy, in the split
between her and the nurse who now—like the witch in “Hansel and
Gretel”—is “boxed up” and gone forever.
With the
theory of the Oedipus complex, in its many published versions from 1900 till
Freud’s death, it seems as if all the material culled by Freud from analyzing
recollections of his nurse is left to go the way of the abandoned seduction
theory of neurosis. There is a tantalizing hint, though, in the very first
statement of the theory to Fliess: “I now regard it [love of the mother,
jealousy of the father] as a universal event of early childhood, even if not
so clearly as in children who have been made hysterical” (SE 1: 265; italics added). In Freud’s
original view, hysterics always presented conflicts deriving from earlier
disturbances in development than obsessionals did, because [End Page 47] invariably the passive sexual experience
causing hysteria came earlier in childhood than the active experience causing
obsessional neurosis. Also, Freud says to Fliess in January, 1896, “In all my cases of obsessional neurosis, at a
very early age, years before the [active] experience of pleasure, there had
been a purely passive
experience” (SE 1:
223). Thirty years later, in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, long after Freud abandoned both the
seduction theory and the active/passive distinction between the origins of
hysteria and obsessional neurosis, he still speaks of every obsessional
neurosis having a “substratum of hysterical symptoms [. . .] formed at a very
early stage” (SE 20:
113). Evidently, hysteria represented disturbances at a prior, more fundamental
stage of development, a stage of infantile dependence that antedates oedipal
aggression. But it is a stage that Freud seems to bypass in his theories after
he discovers infantile sexuality and the primacy of disturbed impulses and
sexual fantasies in the aetiology of neurosis. For Freud, the central fact is
always the Oedipus complex.
The women
whom Freud, with Breuer, diagnosed as hysterics presented “memories” of
childhood seductions by their fathers or uncles or older brothers. Freud’s
discovery of infantile sexuality meant that each woman had, in effect,
translated an impulse
to seduce her father into a defensive, self-exonerating fantasy, that her father had actually seduced
her. This is the basis for Freud’s description of the little girl’s Oedipus
complex. If the complex is unresolved, or resolved in a distorted or disturbed
manner, then the woman’s infantile impulse to seduce her father is translated
into fantasies of having been seduced by him, which in turn require any number
of neurotic defenses. The significant point is that, just as with the little
boy, the girl’s relationship with her mother has been bypassed. Very late in
Freud’s career, in the astonishing essay on “Female Sexuality” (1931) and in
the lecture on “Femininity” in the New Introductory Lectures (1931), he opens up the whole question
of the girl’s—and, by implication, the boy’s—early attachment to
the mother:
And
now we find the fantasy of seduction once more in the pre-Oedipus prehistory of
girls; but the seducer is regularly the mother. Here, however, the fantasy
touches [End Page 48] the
ground of reality, for it was really the mother who by her activities over the
child’s bodily hygiene inevitably stimulated, and perhaps even aroused for the first
time, pleasurable sensations in her genitals. (SE 22: 120, italics added)
Besides
bodily hygiene, one wants to add a mother’s general bodily care and tenderness
as inevitably stimulating erotic pleasure. Thus, the original seducers and disturbers
of Freud and Breuer’s hysterical women were most likely not their fathers but
their mothers. (In An Outline of Psychoanalysis, written just before his death in 1939,
Freud says of the mother: “By her care of the child’s body she becomes its
first seducer” [SE
23: 188]).
In the essay
on “Female Sexuality,” we find that when a girl turns away from her mother and
enters the phase of oedipal attachment to her father, “she also makes over to
the father her introduction into sexual life” (SE 21: 238). But the original
responsibility is the mother’s. In particular, the little girl’s impulses
toward her mother are found to be “aggressive oral and sadistic wishes in a
form forced on them by early repression, i.e., in the dread of being killed by
the mother [. . .] . It is impossible to say how often this dread of the mother
draws countenance from an unconscious hostility on her part, which the child
divines” (SE 21:
237). This is a very significant statement in the context of the development of
psychoanalytic theory. Freud, at this point, is very close to later theories of
schizoid conflict. For there is now little doubt that the infant who dreads the
mother may be actually responding to the mother’s own unconscious dread and
hostility (Searles chs. 7, 9, 12, 14; also note 1, below). A distinction
is necessary, however, between unconscious hostility and conscious annoyance.
On the one hand, a mother’s normal inability to wholly satisfy her infant’s
often voracious demands can, understandably, make her feel annoyed or
resentful; but this is a conscious expression of a natural ambivalence which
eventually contributes to the child’s growth toward relating confidently to
real, whole persons, rather than to split, idealized “good” and “bad”
projections. On the other hand, a mother may harbor unconscious hostility
toward her infant, a hostility that is uncon- [End Page 49] scious because she herself is probably
burdened with neurotic demands to be a “perfect” mother (in the manner of a
“reaction-formation” against an inner dread of herself as a “bad,” destructive,
devouring mother) and probably suffers with anxiety about her own, and
therefore her child’s bodily impulses and hungers. In this latter case, the
infant, identified with the mother, experiences her unconscious
hostility—masked behind an over-compensating, false tenderness—as
fantasies of both destroying the mother and being destroyed by her.
It is in this
field of disturbed and disturbing early relationships that we encounter fantasy
images of oral sadism, like the “sucked and hungry lioness” in Shakespeare’s As
You Like It (4. 3. 127),
the lioness representing a fantasy of a mother devoured by her infant and now
about to devour the infant in retaliation. At a later combined anal and phallic
stage of development, this kind of relationship very likely takes a form such
as remembered by Freud in relation to his nurse, who evidently imparted to the
boy, in fantasy, an ambivalence of arousal and shame toward his own bodily
impulses. Unconsciously, Freud’s nurse was his seductress and shamer, his
mother the pure object of guilty desire. With what appears to have been a
carefully maintained split between the two, Freud no doubt was able to preserve
his idealization of his mother, to whom he remained closely attached all his
life, until her death in 1930 when he was 74. It is perhaps no coincidence that
the essay, “Female Sexuality,” with its surprises about infantile attachment to
the mother, was published during the year following the death of Freud’s own
mother. As he said then, in a letter to Ferenczi; “I was not free to die as
long as she was alive, and now I am. The value of life will somehow have
changed in the deeper layers” (Jones 3:153).
10. Revolution,
Representation and the Body
The Oedipus
complex was first proposed as an analytic drama describing both the dynamics of
infantile sexuality and the child’s positive development out of a pre-history
of bondage to blind, incestuous impulses, into mature, responsible and creative
life in history and within society. By renouncing his [End Page 50] desire to supplant his father and possess
his mother, the boy achieves the freedom of his own independent selfhood, free
to enter into relationships with others equally free. But the freedom is not
achieved without a price. Repression, the means to freedom, is never quite
successful, and the adult man maintains his independent freedom by keeping up a
constant, defensive preparedness, mostly unconscious, against the incessant
demands of primitive instinctual impulses. This, in brief, is Freud’s tragic
view of life in modern society.
In Civilization
and its Discontents (1930),
he underscores “the extent to which civilization is built up upon a
renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction
[. . .] of powerful instincts” (SE
21: 98). Modifying this view, Herbert Marcuse has proposed that “surplus
repression” in the interest of a ruling elite underlies the unnecessarily high
level of anxiety in advanced, post-industrial, capitalist society. There is
thus a crucial difference between Freud and Marcuse. Freud’s concept of
repression concerns only individual psychology, the individual struggling to
mediate between his (her) instinctual impulses and the demands of civilization
for him (her) to renounce satisfaction of them—demands that are universal
and apply to everyone regardless of his (her) status, power and wealth. That
is, Freud’s concept of civilization is socially and politically blind. Where
Marcuse, following Marx, sees class conflict based in the domination and
exploitation of labor by capital, Freud sees only a biological “instinct” for
aggression. Marcuse’s concept of “surplus” repression is a political concept
describing the exercise of power in a socio-economic field of owners, producers
and consumers. The ruling elite who control and profit from the society’s high
productivity defend their status by turning the productivity against the masses of workers who in fact create
it. Instead of the higher productivity enabling workers to become progressively
freer from long, hard hours of meaningless assembly-line labor, they are driven
harder to create a still higher and more profitable productivity that
continues, however, to be wasted in senseless consumption and protracted
counter-revolutionary struggle (Marcuse 93).[8]
[End Page 51]
And yet,
there are contradictions in Civilization and its Discontents which, in effect, prepare the way for a
Marxian approach. In a passage based on the work of Melanie Klein, among
others, Freud offers a theory of aggression that fundamentally challenges the
view of civilization as creating a heightened sense of guilt by requiring
repression of an instinct of aggression:
In
the most recent analytic literature a predilection is shown for the idea that
any kind of frustration, any thwarted instinctual satisfaction, results, or may
result, in a heightening of the sense of guilt. A great theoretical
simplification will, I think, be achieved if we regard this as applying only to
the aggressive instincts, and little will be found to contradict this
assumption. For how are we to account, on dynamic and economic grounds, for an
increase in the sense of guilt appearing in place of an unfulfilled erotic
demand? This only seems possible in a round-about way—if we suppose, that
is, that the prevention of an erotic satisfaction calls up a piece of
aggressiveness against the person who has interfered with the satisfaction, and
that this aggressiveness has itself to be suppressed in turn. But if this is
so, it is after all only the aggressiveness which is transformed into a sense
of guilt, by being suppressed and made over to the super-ego. I am convinced
that many processes will admit of a simpler exposition if the findings of
psycho-analysis with regard to the derivation of a sense of guilt are
restricted to the aggressive instincts. (SE 21: 139)
Until this
passage late in the book, Freud speaks variously of a “human love of
aggression,” an “inclination to aggression,” an “original, self-subsisting
instinctual disposition” to aggres- [End Page 52] sion, and an “aggressive instinct” (SE 21: 113-14, 122). Here, however, he
introduces the concept of aggression as a response to frustration. This sets up a
contradiction between an innate, anti-social “instinct” or “inclination” for
aggression which demands satisfaction like an appetite, and an aggressive
impulse which is a specific response to a specific frustration. Freud
apparently tries to obscure the contradiction by saying that frustration “calls
up a piece of aggressiveness,” a phrase that confuses the two concepts without
resolving the contradiction.
The
contradiction is resolved once we understand that we are not concerned with
instinct as such, but with the representation of instinct in relations with others
who, by responding to our acts and gestures, represent them back to us in ways
that define them and fix their value. With the concept of representation, we
are dealing with society in all its manifold languages of value, exchange and
distribution: languages which surround and penetrate even the most intimate and
private relationships. Sartre’s observation is relevant here, that the dyadic
relationship, apparently the model of intimate privacy, is an abstraction
presupposing some third subject, internalized by the dyadic couple, which
witnesses their intimacy and represents it to them in its particular, socially
determined style. Thus, (to paraphrase Fredric Jameson), mother and
infant—like the honeymooners alone in their motel—are alone
together with the rest of American, capitalist, bourgeois society (Jameson
243).[9]
Every society develops its own representations of instinct and the body, its
own style and degree of repression. Thus Freud’s discovery of the Oedipus
complex occurs dialectically in relationship to late-nineteenth century,
European, bourgeois society. With his discovery, Freud uncovered the general
role of repression in the growth and maintenance of “advanced” civilization.
But also, the theory of the Oedipus complex itself bears the particular style
of representation and repression developed in Freud’s own society: the
bourgeois oedipal man struggles to preserve his distinction and [End Page
53] independence from
those on whose bodily labor he in fact depends for his existence and status.
The problem
with the Oedipus complex as Freud first proposed it, is that it represents as
exclusively phallic and aggressive a set of conflicted impulses that are also,
if not primarily, oral and dependent. The way out of the complex, its
dissolution, means avoiding castration, the punishment for phallic aggression.
But Freud, in one of his later statements, links castration anxiety to the
earlier themes of dependence by seeing it as an analogy to separation anxiety.
“The high degree of narcissistic value which the penis possesses can appeal to
the fact that the organ is a guarantee to its owner that he can be once more
united to his mother—i.e., to a substitute for her—in the act of
copulation. Being deprived of it amounts to a renewed separation from her” (SE 20: 139). Neurotic impotence, too, is
seen to involve conflicts far more primitive than phallic and aggressive:
[F]or
a man who is impotent (that is, inhibited by the threat of castration) the
substitute for copulation is a phantasy of returning into his mother’s womb.
Following Ferenczi’s line of thought, we might say that the man in question,
having tried to bring about his return into the mother’s womb by using his
genital organ to represent him, is now [in this fantasy] replacing that organ
regressively with his whole person. (SE 20: 139)
This passage
from Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926) is one of the most important in all of Freud’s
writings, because in a particularly rich context it redefines the question of
the Oedipus complex as the hermeneutic question of representation. That is, a
failure in resolving the Oedipus complex is a failure of the capacity for
representation, a malignant regression into pre-social, pre-historical bondage
to blind, incestuous impulses, without relationship, without exchange, without
even language itself. This description, however, will require revision because,
more exactly, it is a dialectic which fails, a dialectic between representation
and fusion, between keeping and losing one’s ego-boundaries, what Marion Milner
calls “that [recurrent] descent into being nothing that is necessary for
becoming [End Page 54] something”
(398), a continuous rhythm of psychic death and resurrection. But the revision
must await further discussion of Freud’s concept of representation.
“Consciousness,”
says Paul Ricoeur, “is a task,” not a given (44). It is a task of continuously
interpreting the symbolic language with which a society represents itself to
its members, and with which its members represent themselves to themselves and
to one another. Thus it is of fundamental importance in Freud’s thought that
representation is the concept with which he seeks to draw a connection between
biology and psychology, between bodily instinct and consciousness and,
ultimately, between nature and society. In his psychology of instincts, Freud
rarely speaks of an instinct as such. He says, instead, that an instinct
appears “as a concept on the frontier [Grenzbegriff] between the mental and the somatic, as
the psychical representative [psychischer Repräsentant] of the stimuli originating from within
the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand upon the mind
for work [Mass der Arbeitsanforderung] in consequence of its connection with the body” (SE 14: 121-22). Ricoeur emphasizes that
“instincts themselves represent or express the body to the mind,” and he
singles out representability as “the most fundamental hypothesis of
psychoanalysis, the one that qualifies it as psychoanalysis” (136-37, italics in original).
Freud, in another passage, speaks of the “Psychical (ideational) representative
of the instinct [psychischen (Vorstellungs-) Repräsentanz des Triebes]” (SE 14: 148).[10]
What these phrases and Ricoeur’s comment indicate is that, though instincts
represent the body to the mind, the mind never directly apprehends an instinct
itself but a representation
of an instinct. That is, the relationship between the representation and the
biological phenomenon named “instinct” is per se impossible to describe, to represent.
Any [End Page 55] attempt
to do so results in an infinite series: it is a representation of a
representation of a representation of . . . . There is no conceivable way to
represent the connection between mind and body, force and meaning, but by the
hypothesis of representability itself, a hypothesis that is validated only experientially.
As a result, the completion of the series (a representation of a representation
of . . .) is not a word or symbol at all but the silent, inward experience of
the body itself, prior to language, prior to representation.
The
hypothesis of representability concerns a part of Freud’s thought that is
usually overlooked by object-relations theorists, that is, the economic model
of quantifiable concepts of libido, cathexis, charge and discharge. Freud’s
metaphor for indicating the final, inconceivable leap from mind to body, from
“representation of . . .” to “instinct,” is discharge. In the metapsychological essay, “The
Unconscious” (1915), he says that ideas rendered unconscious by repression, or
defense in general, are per se
unaccompanied by emotion. That is, strictly speaking, “there are no unconscious
affects as there are unconscious ideas. [. . .] The whole difference
arises from the fact that ideas are cathexes—basically of memory
traces—while affects and emotions correspond to processes of discharge [Abfuhrvorgängen], the final manifestations of which are
perceived as feelings [Empfindungen]”
(SE 14: 178). The
quantification of bodily and psychic energies, and the whole Helmholtzian
apparatus of Freud’s economic model have, in the course of time, been virtually
abandoned: not because science has succeeded any more exactly in describing a
connection between mind and body, but because psychoanalysts have probably
recognized that quantified and objective scientific concepts are necessarily
incapable of describing one’s experience of one’s own body (e.g., Apfelbaum).
Ricoeur, as we have seen, designates the hypothesis of representability as the
one that qualifies psychoanalysis as psychoanalysis. And yet the hypothesis of
representability still refers to the body as the object represented: that is,
it qualifies psychoanalysis also as an analytic psychology of the experience
of the body. [End
Page 56]
Thus, the
capacity for representation is also, dialectically, a capacity for experiencing
one’s own body in silence, without words or images. In Freud’s description of
the neurotically impotent man, the man fantasizes a return to the womb as a
substitute for copulation because, for him, copulating implies a threat of
castration. By itself this sounds accurate, but in its context it creates a
contradiction. The man who adopts a fantasy of returning to the womb as a
substitute for copulation is trying to “bring about his return to his mother’s
womb” in the first place. Because copulation already signifies a return to the
womb, the man’s anxiety is not just about copulation but the return to the womb
that it signifies. And his impotence is a defense. Freud, in his explanation,
has evidently reversed
the relationship between castration anxiety and womb fantasy. That is, the
impotent man does not fantasize a return to the womb because he suffers
castration anxiety: he suffers castration anxiety because he fantasizes
copulation and the primitive fusion it enacts as a ghastly, annihilating
experience of being swallowed up in the womb. In other words, castration
anxiety (in an unresolved Oedipus complex) signifies the failure of a dialectic
between a symbolic process and its absence, the failure of both a capacity for
representation and a capacity for accepting even a brief moment totally empty
of symbols, without representation, without language.
The history
of psychoanalysis has been, in part, the history of an effort to uncover
increasingly more primitive sources of psychic development, and each bit of
progress in describing these primitive sources has occasioned reinterpretations
of earlier psychoanalytic theories and observations. This essay is, in large
part, such a reinterpretation, and it would have been impossible to write
without the rich collection of reinterpretive work that has already been done
on Freud’s own case histories, particularly the case of Dr. Schreber (SE 12: 3). Freud proposed that Schreber’s
psychosis had its deepest motives in his primary identification with his
father, which had been distorted from identification into a passive, homosexual
relationship, the boy desiring to replace his mother as the object of his
father’s love. Since Freud’s analysis in 1911, a great deal more information
about Schreber has been uncovered, and a thorough revaluation [End Page 57] of the case by Robert. B. White has
revealed in Schreber an intensely disturbed primary relationship with his
mother which led finally to paranoid/schizoid psychosis. Freud concluded that Schreber’s
paranoia was a defense against homosexual desire for his father. It was a
defense that worked by two reversals: “I love him” becomes “I hate him” which,
in turn, becomes “He hates me.” White’s interpretation, based on the new
information, suggests the opposite view: that Schreber’s homosexual attachment
to his father was the solution of an intolerable conflict, a compromise between
his desire to love and be loved, and the awful terrors arising from his
paranoid-schizoid relationship with his mother.[11]
Or, from a slightly different viewpoint, it was the child’s compromise
resolution of conflicts in relation to both father and mother. For Schreber’s
father was a famous, respected pediatrician in late-nineteenth century Germany,
who was convinced that infants must be disciplined, sharply if necessary, out
of dependence on their mothers and nurses, a conviction which he put into
exemplary practice in his own home.
Schreber’s
conflict then turns out to originate in a disturbed primary relationship between
the mother and her nursing infant—and not, as Freud proposed, in a
disturbed identification between father and son. Freud’s view, though, does
make sense of Schreber’s more manifest relationship with a godlike “father” who
has clearly usurped the nurturing capacity of the mother, just as Schreber’s
own father jealously interfered in the mother/infant nursing relationship,
turning Schreber’s mother and nurse into agents of his regimen of oral
frustration (White 64; Searles, “Sexual Processes” 432). Still, Freud appears
to have a tendency for finding homosexual impulses as the basic ones against
which neurotic and, in severe cases, psychotic defenses are mobilized. Among
his own case [End Page 58] histories
this is true not only of Schreber, but of “Wolf Man” and the “Dora” case as
well. It appears that this is one way in which psychoanalysis is also
self-analysis. For we have seen in the Irma dream how oral fusion, the mode
specified by Erikson as the origin of “basic trust,” is experienced in fantasy
as homosexual submission and is, therefore, vigorously resisted. Actually, if
we rethink the Irma dream and Freud’s self-analysis in the light of later
discoveries about primitive oral conflicts, then Freud’s work emerges as an
analysis of three stages of development on the theme of oral conflict.
First, in the
most primitive stage, the infant boy experiences intolerable oral ambivalence
toward his mother which, therefore, gets repressed. (For simplicity’s sake, it
is a boy and not a girl, and repression as shorthand for the many possible
defenses.) With the onset of phallic sexuality, the boy’s repressed oral
ambivalence returns in full force and becomes confused with his phallic
aggressiveness. The second stage, recalling the first, becomes intolerable, and
the boy, internalizing his father’s authority and control, submits himself to
his father to be loved, guided and protected—the internalized control
protecting him above all from the terrors of mixed aggression and dependence
toward his mother. But, again, repression inevitably fails, and the oral
ambivalence keeps erupting between father and son, threatening to make theirs a
homosexual relationship. We now reach the third stage as the boy learns to
repress his dependence once again—feared this time as being homosexual—in
aggressively asserted independence and obsessive competition. This is an
over-simplified, abstract summary of what is in fact a complex course of
development, and some of what is attributed to the father might very well turn
up in the mother, depending on the quality of their relationship together and,
individually, with their respective parents. Also, there is no mention of an
anal mode, although it is implied to some degree in the idea of internalized
controls. Still, the three stages do describe, I think, the general shape of
the conflicts which Freud uncovered in his self-analysis, particularly the Irma
dream. And they are offered as a suggestion toward explaining why Freud was to
wait until nearly the end of his career before recognizing the full
significance of the infant’s primary dependence on the mother. [End Page 59]
When Freud’s
oedipal drama is interpreted historically and dialectically in terms of the
primitive, oral conflicts which its child-hero struggles to deny, it becomes an
extraordinarily rich and powerful hermeneutic principle, both positive and
negative, capable of both uncovering denied aggression and recovering lost
wholeness. Above all, it is a dialectical principle, as is immediately obvious
in its relation to its discoverer. For Freud did discover the Oedipus complex
out of his own self-analysis. Thus psychoanalysis always moves at once toward
biography and autobiography, and so much of what has made it capable of its
continued profound development is the courage of Freud and others among the
early analysts in submitting their own experience, much of it very personal, as
evidence for the validity of their work. Above all, too, this hermeneutic
principle is historical. Not only is it at all times an historically determinate
text, originating in a particular society at a particular moment in time, and
therefore always needing to be interpreted. But, also, as a principle or
representation, by which child and society are perceived representing
themselves to one another through the agency of the parents, it confronts the
society at the moment of its continued renewal in history. And it questions the
forms by which the society represents to itself the bodily labor and energy of
its people and the very materiality of the world.
Freud himself
thus questioned his own society, but he pushed the field of questioning back
into the mythic prehistory of the primal horde. Commenting on Freud’s theory of
the primal horde, Paul Ricoeur singles out a crucial passage from Totem and
Taboo (1913):
In
thus guaranteeing one another’s lives, the brothers were declaring that no one
of them must be treated by another as their father was treated by them all
jointly. They were precluding the possibility of a repetition of their father’s
fate. To the religiously based prohibition against killing the totem [which
commemorated the father] was now added the socially-based prohibition against
fratricide. (SE 13:
146)
For Ricoeur,
“the true problem of law is not parricide but fratricide; in the symbol of the
brothers’ covenant Freud encoun- [End Page 60] tered the basic requisite of analytic
explanation [for the origin of society], which was the problem of Hobbes,
Spinoza, Rousseau, and Hegel—namely, the change from war to law”
(210-11). Thus, in the resolution of the Oedipus complex and the institution of
the super-ego, we recognize the Hobbesian transition from the state of nature
to the state of civil society. And yet, serious problems arise with Ricoeur’s
description of the question of the origin of social organization. He is, of
course, commenting on Freud’s description and relating it to the tradition of
the social contract which, in the history of political philosophy, is the
closest analogue to the primal horde myth. But his emphasis on the change from
war to law implies acceptance of a false ideological split between order and
disorder that is inherent in the social contract tradition. Also, both Ricoeur
and Freud, by calling fratricide the true problem rather than parricide,
obscure the question of class conflict, the brothers appearing to constitute a
classless society. This, too, reflects a false ideology inherent in the social
contract tradition.
We need to
recognize that the philosophers named by Ricoeur—Hobbes, Spinoza,
Rousseau, and Hegel (why not Locke?)—are, each in his own distinct way,
philosophers of bourgeois revolutions: from the English revolution of 1649 and
1688 to the French revolution of 1789. Their political philosophies must be
read historically in relation to the momentous changes in Western political and
social institutions signaled by the judicial murder of kings and the abolition
of monarchy in favor of more democratic forms of rule. The name of Hegel,
moreover, is ominous in this context, because the model of conflict between the
brothers is undialectical. It omits the fact that, historically, in the
seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the “sons” were in their turn
“fathers” to the vast number of laboring men and women who, without property,
were without political identity and were therefore excluded from the social
contract, except as the exploited dependents of the contracting “brothers.”
Thus, in Freud’s description of the brothers “declaring that no one of them
must be treated by another as their father was treated by them all jointly,” we
see [End Page 61] what
is, in effect, the creation of a ruling class in place of the single monarch.
Freud’s myth and the social
contract model are both undialectical because they project
into the past a hypothetical moment when men “rationally” agree to transform
their lives together from natural disorder to social and political order. This
implies an idealist concept of order: it excludes the internal contradictions
that make social and political orders the bearers of the very disorder which
disturbs and eventually transforms them. Freud, of course, understands a psychic dialectic of order and disorder, the ego
negotiating a precarious balance between social reality, the impulses of the
id, and the commands of the superego. But this is the problem: social order,
for Freud, is threatened by the always potential failure of the individual to keep control over his unruly
impulses, never by the failure of the social order itself to withstand the
disorder built into it in the form of class-conflict. The English and French
revolutions were bourgeois revolutions in the sense that they very deliberately
resisted more radical moves toward equalizing property. Where the social
contract theory applies to them is the moment in each where an emergent ruling
class agrees to put a brake on the violence that has gained them political
power but now threatens to dispossess them.[12]
The new order is thus also a new disorder: the masses of dispossessed remain,
as before, outside the social contract, allowed only to submit and existing
only to be ruled and exploited. The brothers have, indeed, internalized their
murdered father, and the working classes are [End Page 62] their “children,” another set of brothers
(and sisters) working toward the moment when they in turn will create a
revolution to abolish the bourgeois “fathers.”
On the
opening page of Love’s Body,
Norman O. Brown proposes that Freud, in effect, projected into a mythic
prehistory the constitutional crisis of the seventeenth century in England (3).
By taking back the projection, we reground psychoanalysis in history. It is
not in a mythic pre-history but in our actual history that we have acted out
the murder of our political fathers. This is an interpretation invited by the
very language of English kingship, which was given archetypal expression in Sir
Robert Filmer’s theory of patriarchal sovereignty, a theory which John Locke
deliberately attacked in the first of his Two Treatises of Government.[13]
Freud, in effect, uncovered a Darwinized version of Locke’s social contract in
the unconscious of late-nineteenth century bourgeois Europe. In Locke’s theory,
the social contract is devised by men seeking to renounce fratricidal violence
in order, as a class, to protect the property they have acquired prior to the creation of civil society. The
social contract thus makes a significant break with the common law tradition,
according to which property is appropriated from out of the common wealth of an
already existing society. In the common law tradition, ownership bestows on the
property owner certain obligations to society in recognition of his social
dependence. Locke’s social contract, on the contrary, is a theory of social in-dependence, men owing their society
nothing for the property they have appropriated, with the practical consequence
that, for instance, they agree to pay taxes not as a social obligation but for
their, own rational self-interest (Locke, Second Treatise secs. 36-37, 50 [310-13, 319-20];
Macpherson 221).[14] The social
con- [End Page 63] tract,
like the resolution of the Oedipus complex, resolves murderous competition
among men while repressing the more fundamental question of dependence. The struggle to deny dependence, which
Locke had resolved in the service of rational self-interest among the emergent
bourgeois rulers of seventeenth century England, Freud rediscovered in the bad
dreams of the European bourgeoisie who, since 1848, were already in the midst
of a crisis and about to be engulfed still deeper by World War I and the Russian
Revolution. Thus Freud’s discovery of the Oedipus complex emerges not only from
memories of a small boy’s guilty, aggressive lust for his mother, but from
memories of dependence on her, too—a dependence remembered, however, as
the seduction of a small bourgeois, Austrian boy by a Czech working-class woman
in a province of the Austrian Empire still recovering from the Revolution of
1848.[15]
Jim Swan
Center for
the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture
409 Samuel
Clemens Hall
SUNY at
Buffalo
Buffalo, NY 14260
* A shorter,
somewhat different version of this essay was presented to the Group for Applied
Psychoanalysis, Boston, on May 14, 1973.
Notes
[1] Searles
quotes from Freud, “Female Sexuality” (1931):
Everything in the sphere of this first attachment to the mother seemed to me so difficult to grasp in analysis—so grey with age and shadowy and almost impossible to revivify—that it was as if it had succumbed to an especially inexorable repression. But perhaps I gained this impression because the women who were in analysis with me were able to cling to the very attachment to the father in which they had taken refuge from the early phase that was in question [of attachment to the mother] (SE 21: 226).
[2]
The development of Freud’s theories is a
record of his struggle with the contradictions in the concept of
identification. In The Ego and the ld (1923), he notes that the pre-oedipal infant does not
distinguish sexually between mother and father; thus, the first identification
occurs with both parents, not just the father (SE 19: 31n1).
[3] According to James Strachey, the phrase “Oedipus Complex” is used for the first time in print in “Contributions to the Psychology of Love” (1910). See The interpretation of Dreams (SE 4/5: 263n2).
[4] Max Schur describes Freud’s nurse as a seductress, pointing in particular to the word “Urheberin” (Freud 125), though he does not analyze the literal meaning of the word. Schur, whom I read after making my own analysis, is the only reader of Freud who interprets Freud’s memories of the nurse in this manner. It is interesting to see that research cited by Schur shows that Freud’s nurse was not actually a nurse but a maid, on whom Freud evidently projected a great deal of the character of a nurse (124). The word “Nannie” used in this essay is Ernest Jones’s very British translation of Kinderfrau, which Freud uses interchangeably with die Alte and das alte Weib in his letters to Fliess (Anfängen 233-34, 236-37).
[5] Thus Jean-Paul Sartre describes the
bourgeois as the distinguished
man:
The
distinguished man is the result of selection (on the part of his superiors): he
is the superior individual recruited by class cooption (or maintained in his
class by permanent recognition). But he isn’t born (even if he is in fact a bourgeois and
the son of a bourgeois). For nature and blood confer their privileges on the
aristocracy. But in the ‘democratic’ world of capitalism, it is nature that
represents universality, with the result that at first glance the worker is a man just like the bourgeois.
Distinction is an antinature: the bourgeois is distinguished in that he has suppressed needs in
himself. And in fact he does suppress them, both by satisfying them on the one
hand, and by hiding them on the other (occasionally displaying a certain asceticism):
he maintains dictatorship over the body in the name of an absence of need: or
in other words a dictatorship of culture over nature. (Critique de la raison
dialectique. Vol. 1
(Paris, Gallimard, 1960- ): 717, italics in original; quoted by Fredric
Jameson, Marxism and Form:
285-6, Jameson’s
translation).
[6] Freud omitted the point about the scar in all editions of the Dreambook from 1922 until his death, apparently in an effort to preserve the disguise of his own autobiographical material in the article on “Screen Memories” (SE 3: 301).
[7] Freud’s mother was the same age, approximately, as Philipp and Emanuel, the two sons born to his father by his first marriage (Jones, 1: 11).
[8] Marcuse’s reading of Freud raises many
more problems than can he treated appropriately in this essay: for instance,
his neglect of the concept of representation in Freud’s instinct theory, and
his acceptance of the “death instinct” although in a form almost opposite in
meaning to Freud’s concept (Marcuse 78; Robinson 214-15). Still, Marcuse is a
rare thinker among Marxists who often indulge the luxury of dismissing Freud as
a mere “bourgeois ideologue,” even though they lack an adequate psychology for
describing connections between individual development and mass ideology.
[9] See Jameson’s discussion of Sartre on this point (242-44); also Ricoeur: “The repressing agency makes its appearance as the psychological expression of a prior social fact, the phenomenon of authority, which includes a number of constituted historical figures: the family, the mores of the group, tradition. explicit or implicit education, political and ecclesiastical power, penal and, in general, social sanctions” (178).
[10] Ricoeur comments on the ambiguity of Freud’s concept of instinct: “in some texts an instinct is what is ‘represented’ (by affects and ideas) ; in others, it is itself the psychical ‘representative’ of organic forces that are not yet clearly known. [. . .] the important point for us is that an instinct is knowable only in its psychical representatives” (Freud and Philosophy 137n57).
[11]
“Contemporary analysts tend to reverse the relationship and regard
homosexuality as a defensive technique for dealing with paranoid fears by
submission” (Charles Rycroft, letter to Vincent Brome, 19 January 1966, quoted
by Brome [129]). For a sensitive, illuminating treatment of this theme in a
literary text, see Schwartz, “Leontes’ Jealousy.” I am grateful to Professor
Schwartz for the many fruitful conversations we have had concerning
psychoanalysis.
[12] See Christopher Hill: “In 1641 Sir Thomas Aston defined ‘true liberty’ as meaning ‘that we know by a certain law that our wives, our children, our servants, our goods, are our own, that we build, we plough, we sow, we reap, for ourselves.’ It meant the assertion of the rule of ‘the free’ [i.e., the propertied] against threats either from would-be absolutists or from ‘our servants,’ the democrats” (188). On the French Revolution, see Fredric Jameson’s précis of Daniel Guérin, La Lutte des classes sous la première République, 2 vols. (Paris, 1946): “The functional purpose of Robespierre [. . .] was to eradicate whatever elements—whether counter revolutionary or genuinely popular—remained to endanger the control of the middle classes; and when this was done, he himself was dispensable and could give way to that enjoyment of the fruits of the enterprise which was the Directory. Thus, his death is not the end to the basic process but only one of its moments, and the Revolution itself does not really come to a halt until the failure of Babeuf’s conspiracy eliminates the last progressive forces from the scene” (Marxism and Form 266-67).
[13] See Peter Laslett, “Two Treatises of Government and the Revolution of 1688,” Part III of his Introduction to Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (45-66).
[14] Macpherson’s reading of Locke is still considered controversial. Laslett, a ready critic of attempts to read modern concerns back onto earlier thinkers, calls Macpherson’s reading of Locke “thoroughly unrealistic and occasionally unhistorical” (105n). Neither Laslett, nor other critics whom he cites in his support, however, are able to refute Macpherson’s major argument that Locke’s theories “undermined [. . .] the traditional view that property and labour were social functions, and that ownership of property involved social obligations” (Macpherson 221). One need only consider Locke’s view (sect. 50) that “Inequality of private possessions” is made practicable by the use of money “out of the bounds of Societie” (320 italics added). That is, in the state of “nature,” with the use of money for exchange, a distinction grows up between those who are propertied (and thus with political identity) and those who are not, and civil society is created to preserve an already existing “disproportionate and unequal Possession of the Earth” against encroachment. To say that this reading of Locke is unhistorical is to ignore the fact that a whole class of men like Sir Thomas Aston (quoted above, note 12) had already understood, almost forty years before the Two Treatises were written, a concept of private property which only awaited Locke to give it permanent, philosophical expression.
[15] See Carl
Schorske, “Politics and Patricide in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.” This fine article did not appear in time for me to
benefit from its detailed account of the role of late nineteenth century
Austro-Hungarian politics in Freud’s dreams, recollections and theories.
Kenneth A. Grigg’s important paper also appeared too late to be used here:
“‘All Roads Lead to Rome’: The Role of the Nursemaid In Freud’s Dreams.” Grigg
recognizes how Freud displaces his oedipal desires onto the nurse, thus
preserving his mother’s purity.
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