[스크랩] Letter from Freud to Fliess

 

 

 

 

Letter from Freud to Fliess
October 15, 1897

 IX., Berggase 19

Dear Wilhelm,

 

My self-analysis is in fact the most essential thing I have at present and promises to become of the

greatest value to me if it reaches its end. In the middle of it, it suddenly ceased for three days, during

which I  had the feeling of being tied up inside (which patients complain of so much), and I was

really disconsolate until I found that these same three days (twenty-eight days ago) were the

bearers of identical somatic  phenomena. Actually only two bad days with a remission in between.

From this one should draw the conclusion that the female period is not conducive to work.

Punctually on the fourth day, it started again. Naturally, the  pause also had another determinant -

the resistance to something surprisingly new. Since then I have been once again intensely

preoccupied [with it], mentally fresh, though afflicted with all sorts of minor disturbances  that come

from the content of the analysis.

 

My practice, uncannily, still leaves me a great deal of free time. The whole thing is all the more

valuable for my purposes, since I have succeeded in finding a few real  points of reference for the

story. I asked my mother whether she still remembered the nurse. "Of course," she said, "an elderly

person, very clever, she was always carrying you off to some church; when  you returned home you

preached and told us all about God Almighty. During my confinement with Anna (two and a half

years younger), it was discovered that she was a thief, and all the shiny new kreuzers and zehners

and  all the toys that had been given to you were found in her possesion. Your brother Philipp

himself fetched the policeman; she then was given ten months in prison." Now look at how this

confirms the conclusions of my  dream interpretation. It was easy for me to explain the only possible

mistake. I wrote to you that she induced me to steal zehners and give them to her. In truth, the dream

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 the

doctor equals my mother. So far was I from knowing she was a  thief that I made a wrong

interpretation.

 

I also inquired about the doctor we had had in Freiberg because one dream concentrated a good

deal of resentment on him. In the analysis of the dream figure behind  which he was concealed, I also

thought of a Professor von Kraus, my history teacher in high school. He did not seem to fit in at all,

because my relationship with him was indifferent or even comfortable. My mother then  told me that

the doctor in my childhood had only one eye, and of all my teachers Professor Kraus was the only

one with the same defect (1): The conclusive force of these coincidences might be weakened by the

objection  that on some occasion in my later childhood, I had heard that the nurse was a thief and

then apparently had forgotten it until it finally emerged in the dream. I myself believe that that is so.

But I have another,  entirely irrefutable and amusing proof. I said to myself that if the old woman

disappeared from my life so suddenly, it must be possible to demonstrate the impression this made

on me. Where is it then? Thereupon a scene  occurred to me which in the course of twenty-five

years has occasionally emerged in my conscious memory without my understanding it. My mother

was nowhere to be found; I was crying in despair. My brother Philipp (twenty  years older than I)

unlocked a wardrobe [ Kasten) (2) for me, knowing that my mother was not in it and that thereby he

could not calm me down? Now I suddenly understand it. I had asked him to do it. When I missed 

my mother, I was afraid she had vanished from me, just as the old woman had a short time before. So

I must have heard that the old woman had been locked up and therefore must have believed that my

mother had been locked  up too - or rather, had been "boxed up" [ eingekastelt] - for my brother

Philipp, who is now sixty-three years old, to this very day is still fond of using such puns. The fact

that I turned to him in  particular proves that I was well aware of his share in the disappearance of

the nurse.(3)

 

Since then I have got much further, but have not yet reached any real point of rest. It is so difficult

and would  carry us so far afield to communicate what I have not yet finished that I hope you will

excuse me from it and content yourself with the knowledge of those elements that are certain. If the

analysis fulfills what I  expect of it, I shall work on it systematically and then put it before you. So far

I have found nothing completely new, [just] all the complications to which I have become

accustomed. It is by no means easy. Being  totally honest with oneself is a good exercise. A single

idea of general value dawned on me. I have found, in my own case too, [the phenomenon of] being

in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now  consider it a universal event in early

childhood, even if not so early as in children who have been made hysterical. (Similar to the

invention of parentage [family romance] in paranoia--heroes, founders of religion). If  this is so, we

can understand the gripping power of Oedipus Rex, in spite of all the objections that reason raises

against the presupposition of fate; and we can understand why the later "drama of fate" was bound

to fail so  miserably. Our feelings rise against any arbitrary individual compulsion, such as is

presupposed in Die Ahnfrau (4) and the like; but the Greek legend seizes upon a compulsion which

everyone recognizes because he senses  its existence within himself. Everyone in the audience was

once a budding Oedipus in fantasy and each recoils in horror from the dream fulfillment here

transplanted into reality, with the full quantity of repression  which separates his infantile state from

his present one.

 

Fleetingly the thought passed through my head that the same thing might be at the bottom of

Hamlet as well. I am not thinking of Shakespeare's conscious intention, but believe, rather, that a real

event stimulated the poet to his representation, in that his unconscious understood the

unconscious of his hero. How does Hamlet the hysteric justify his words, "Thus conscience does

make cowards of us all"? How does he explain his irresolution in avenging his father by the murder

of his uncle--the same man who sends his courtiers to their death without a scruple and who is

positively precipitate in murdering Laertes?(5) How better than through the torment he suffers from

the obscure memory that he himself had contemplated the same deed against his father out of

passion for his mother, and - "use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?" His

conscience is his unconscious sense of guilt. And is not his sexual alienation in his conversation

with Ophelia typically hysterical? And his rejection of the instinct that seeks to beget children?

And, finally, his transferral of the deed from his own father to Ophelia's? And does he not in the

end, in the same marvelous way as my hysterical patients, bring down punishment on himself by

suffering the same fate as his father of being poisoned by the same rival?

 

I have kept my interest focused so exclusively on the analysis that I have not yet even attempted to

try out, instead of my hypothesis that in every instance repression starts from the feminine aspect

and is directed  against the male one, the opposite hypothesis proposed by you. I shall, however,

tackle it sometime. Unfortunately I barely participate in your work and progress. In this one respect I

am better of than you are. What I  can tell you about mental frontiers [] of this world finds in you an

understanding critic, and what you can tell me about its celestial frontiers [] evokes only

unproductive amazement in me.

 

 With cordial greetings to you, your dear wife, and my new nephew,

Your Sigm.(6)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes:
[1]Strachey: The episode of the one-eyed doctor is mentioned in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900),  Standard Edition, 4, 17; and in Lecture XIII of the Introductory Lectures (1916-17), ibid., 16, 201. [cf. Harris & Harris] [2]Kasten (box) in Austria is equivalent to Schrank and means a wardrobe or closet. The same story occurs in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life. [3][Strachey: The story of the screen memory about the cupboard was included at greater length in Chapter IV of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), SE, 6, 49-51. In a footnote added to that passage in 1924 Freud pointed out the womb-symbolism of the cupboard, and pursued the whole analysis further.]
[4]Die Ahnfrau was F. Grillparzer's first published play (1817). It concerns brother-sister incest and parricide.
[5]Actually, Hamlet murders Polonius, not Laertes.
[6]Freud is, to say the  least, fascinated with the problem of understanding other people's "passions," and we can hardly expect him to have been immune to the connotations of such interest alleged to be universal. Indeed, the major  preoccupations of Freud's life (and hence the most over-determined sublimations) are directly indicative of this obsessively pursued interest: the problem of screen memories, and the origins of gender.

Masson, J.M. (1985) (Ed.) The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904 . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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