Reading Freud's Patients

Memoir, Narrative and the Analysand

Anat Tzur Mahalel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429675522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

Winner of the 2021 ABAPsa Book Prize Award!

What would the story of analysis look like if it were told through the eyes of the analysand? How would the patient write and present the analytic experience? How would the narrative as written by the analysand differ from the analytic narrative commonly offered by the analyst? What do the actual analytic narratives written by Freud's patients look like?

This book aims to confront these intriguing questions with an innovative reading of memoirs by Freud's patients. These patients—including Sergei Pankejeff, known as the Wolf Man; the poet H. D.; and the American psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner—all came to Vienna specially to meet Freud and embark with him on the intimate and thrilling journey of deciphering the unconscious and unravelling the secrets of the psyche. A broad psychoanalytic and literary-historical reading of their memoirs is offered in this new entry to the popular Routledge History of Psychoanalysis Series, with the purpose of presenting the analysands' narratives as they themselves recounted them. This makes it possible to re-examine the links among psychoanalysis, literature, and translation and sheds new light on the complex challenge of coming to know oneself through the encounter with otherness.

This book is unique in its focus on multiple memoirs by patients of Freud and presents a fresh, even startling, close-up look at psychoanalysis as a clinical practice and as a rigorous discourse and offers a new vision of Freud's strengths and, at times, defects. It will be of considerable interest to scholars of psychoanalysis and intellectual history, as well as those with a wider interest in literature and memoir.

Chapter 1

Psychoanalytic space and writing space

Introduction

Psychoanalysis, from its very beginning, is intertwined with text and writing. The psychoanalytic space is created and developed by various aspects of textuality as much as it is created and developed by the encounter between two subjects in the clinic. At the heart of both psychoanalysis and writing are self-reflection and the exploration of the unconscious. Within this space, the subject recreates the subject’s life narrative, self, and singular voice.

On the verge of the twentieth century, the modern world adopted psychoanalysis with great enthusiasm. It became a central and curious entity, supplying innovative understandings of intrapsychic, intersubjective, and cultural phenomena. The challenge that psychoanalysis offered to the modern enlightened subject, governed by logic and intellect, was profound. Accepting the centrality of the unconscious transformed how we understand subjectivity and one’s relations with his inner world and surroundings. It was suggested that we turn our attention from an omnipotent, divine, outer entity toward an inner entity that carries the individual’s reservoir of psychic energy, private history, and way of remembering.

Psychoanalysis calls for a new kind of listening to the human voice, a very fine tuning of one subject to self and other, in an attention that is both concentrated and free-floating, analytic and sensual, aiming to explore the unconscious but not forcing it to be revealed. This is an attention that requires a vast space of time and effort in order to be fully and truly productive. It is also the unique attention received from the analyst that gradually creates, in turn, a similar attention within the analysand. For Freud, the meaning of contenting oneself “with studying whatever is present for the time being on the surface of the patient’s mind” (1914a, 147) lies in putting the focus on listening to the subtle nuances of expression, voice, and body gestures, the distinguished narrative brought to the analytic setting and its weaving during the process. At the outset of analysis, Freud used to say, “Before I can say anything to you I must know a great deal about you; please tell me what you know about yourself” (1913a, 134). In these words, the abstinent analyst, who may be experienced as frustrating at times, is brought to light in his generosity, the generosity of true listening.

An area of psychoanalytic exploration that has not yet received the attention it deserves is the literature written by analysands. In this book I offer a unique collection of texts written by analytic patients, in fact by patients of the father of psychoanalysis himself, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). The specific choice of texts presented here allows an alternative point of view on the history of psychoanalysis, on the psychoanalytic setting as introduced and created by Freud, and on his patients’ encounters and relationships with him. Freud’s patients felt themselves to be participants in the historical moment of the creation of a new scientific field that suggested an innovative way to understand the human psyche, development, motivations, pathology, and cure. This new field suggested revolutionary paths for exploring the unconscious and understanding enigmatic phenomena such as dreams, parapraxis, and perversion.

The writings of Freud’s patients express admiration for him as an intriguing researcher and gifted writer, which was the main reason they all made great efforts to overcome important challenges and become his analysands. Another thing that makes this collection of texts unique is that the therapeutic relationship with Freud existed not only in the analytic, but also in the textual, space. The authors of these texts read Freud vigorously before, during, and after their analytic encounters with him, and experiences of reading and writing received a prominent place in those encounters. Freud used to talk freely with his patients about literature, books, and the experience of reading and writing, and his rich library played an important role in analysis, as Freud would approach it, open one book or another, and read from it or check some point in the book. He used to loan books to his patients and present copies of his own literary works to them as gifts.

Freud’s writing created a new literary genre, weaving together the poetic and the scientific, the mythic and the autobiographical, and offering a continuous search for the various languages of the psyche. His use of canonical literature is characterized by deep emotional participation and intimacy, expressing his profound attachment to literature and textuality. The classical poets and authors, including Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Lessing, Schiller, and his most beloved Goethe, had served as central figures of admiration and identification for Freud since childhood. Poetry was a source of inspiration, both personal and professional, for Freud in various stages of his life. The image of the poet appears in his writing as a mentor, a source of consolation and guidance, and a voice expressing his deepest fantasies and longings (Anzieu 1986 [1959], 118–121, 146, 292–294, 309–314; Frankland 2000, 6–62; Nägele 1987, 23–45). An example of Freud’s deep ties to the literary world can be found in his literary self-portrait, An Autobiographical Study. He states there that the main inspiration for his decision to study medicine was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s essay Nature (which we now know to have been written, in fact, by a friend of Goethe’s and erroneously attributed to Goethe himself) (Freud 1925a, 8). Freud identified most deeply with Goethe’s education and formation (Bildung), as presented in Goethe’s autobiography, Aus Meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, to which Freud dedicated an essay (Freud 1917a). Freud was especially inspired by the apprenticeship period through which the young Goethe had to go in order to find his place in society, and the way in which Goethe, as author and poet, used his own personal reminiscences as an exemplum. Freud also took profound inspiration from Goethe’s dedication to science and poetics and his attraction to the unknown as an enigma waiting to be solved, but whose secrets are never completely revealed (Anzieu 1986 [1959], 119, 370–371).

Freud’s affinity for the literary realm gave his patients the opportunity to create a multi-layered dialog with him that included rich and profound literary aspects. They read his writings and usually also the literary corpus that inspired him. Their psychoanalytic-poetic dialog with Freud continued to develop even after their separation from him and even his death, finding its expression in the memoirs they wrote and published about him. The patients’ narratives are autobiographical texts, for they center on the narrative of transformation and development of the self. They can also be regarded as a collection of memoirs on Freud, for his figure, as an analyst, scholar, and author, stands in the center of the texts. These texts are also influenced by the genre of the psychoanalytic case study and by Freud’s own distinguished writing. Nevertheless, they cannot, obviously, be regarded as case studies, for the point of view they suggest is different, and this is also what makes them distinct and subversive.

Psychoanalytic writing and case studies

Case studies are a distinguished and unique genre created by psychoanalysis. They offer the story of a single analysis or psychotherapy, with an emphasis on the subject’s history, the sources of the development of the distress or illness, and the therapeutic process and its results. Case studies are the most central and prominent window into psychoanalytic work, both for professionals and for the broad public. Because this genre first appeared in Freud’s writing, the case studies were mainly read and used as texts aimed at conveying knowledge of scientific and cultural importance about psychoanalytic work. Nevertheless, these texts were, from the outset, also regarded as stories, telling the tales of people’s lives and psychic transformations. In Freud’s book, Studies in Hysteria, from 1895, which was written in collaboration with Joseph Breuer, the genre of the psychoanalytic case study was introduced solemnly, with a slightly apologetic tone,

I have not always been a psychotherapist. Like other neuropathologists, I was trained to employ local diagnoses and electro-prognosis, and it still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science. I must console myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject is evidently responsible for this, rather than any preference of my own.

(1895, 160)

These words express Freud’s complex stance toward the revolutionary aspects of his revelations, which were profound but not necessarily in accordance with the scientific zeitgeist of his time.

The genre of the case study originally strived to offer a scientific observation of the analytic process, but the text can by no means avoid the subjective point of view, for the process by its very essence strives for subjectivity and the creation of the subject. The case study genre, therefore, at its core, represents a bold turning away from the empirical dogma of the objective scientist and a movement toward hermeneutics, wherein the psychoanalyst resembles an investigator of ancient texts and forgotten languages; this investigation, however, cannot be carried out without the active participation of the analysand.

Today, psychoanalytic writing is explicitly situated between referential writing, which remains loyal to the actual events that took place, and fiction. The final text of a case study contains aspects of the psychodynamics of the analysand in the context of the analytic encounter and of the analyst’s psychodynamics, as well as the working through of these aspects as processed in the analytic encounter and its transformation into text (Ogden 2005). The case study is therefore the product of a complex and vast work of translation, first from the inner discourse of the analysand to the analytic discourse created with the analyst, and then from the analytic discourse to text.

The case study is obligated to tread a path between the referential and the fictional, the actual and the fantasmatic, the ethical demand for truth and the need to tell a story. The referential aspect of the case study entails a loyalty to the need to give voice to the patient’s narrative. The fictional aspect of the text reveals the analytic experience in its emotional and sensual richness, which cannot be delivered using facts. Hermeneutic readings of Freud’s classical case studies allow us to evaluate their multi-layered richness, including the intertextual links they create with other genres (Cohn 1999). I want to suggest that although Freud’s intention was to offer a narrative, in which the source of pathology is revealed in full through psychoanalysis, the texts that were finally produced expressed a complex matrix of points of view on different subjects in various contexts. The analytic process is presented as a work of art woven together from the threads and patches of its various narratives and interpretations. What the case study offers is not, finally, a mimetic documentation of the therapeutic process but rather a translation into text of continuous chains of events, experiences, and interpretations. In the work of translation offered in the case study, the biographical narrative of the analysand is reconstructed and the subject is transformed and re-created as a protagonist. The analyst is also transformed in the process of writing, becoming the author of the analysand’s biography. In this respect, the case study always contains both biographical aspects of the analysand-protagonist and autobiographical aspects of the analyst-author (Anderson 2001, 60–65).

Analytic narratives from the patient’s point of view

In the early days of psychoanalysis, the crucial assumption about authorship was that there is a certain truth in the psychic cure, and that this truth is held by the analyst. The analyst conveys this truth to the patient in the analytic setting and to the broad scientific community in writing. Contemporary relational psychoanalysis no longer seeks the truth as an ontological entity; instead, the truth that is sought is a relational entity created in the intersubjective experience of exploration. As a result, there has been a vast development in the thematic and stylistic aspects of contemporary case studies, mainly in relation to the importance of psychic transformation to the experiential and intersubjective aspects of the process, as well as the mutual aspects of the transference relationship. Nevertheless, the literary transformation of the analytic process is still loyal to the classical assumption, continuing to offer a narrative written by only one of the two participating subjects.

A crucial concept in the examination of the analysand’s writing is the concept of voice. As pointed out by Ogden (1998), psychoanalytic literature is profoundly and consistently devoted to the development of the self, in the sense of the psychic potential of the subject. The concept of voice, on the other hand, which can be understood as the actualization of the self in active expression, has been overlooked. Voice is the experience of the self as created in the act of speech and includes the collection of linguistic expressions of the self; voice is “the way the self is created through the use of language” (428). So, in contrast to thought, which has the familiar quality of an inner experience, the voice we use for talking and writing has a quality of otherness. A person experiences his or her own speaking differently from how that person experiences his or her own thought. Speaking and writing therefore create a unique experience of attention to the self, of listening and reflecting. This different experience invites new questions in regard to voice, including: How do I sound? Is this how I want to sound? What makes me sound this way? In contrast to the self, which is evaluated as being true or false, voice is evaluated in terms of the extent to which it expresses a live experience, the extent to which its use of language awakens lost or repressed experiences. Both the analytic setting and writing offer the conditions in which a subject can hear herself or himself speak, sometimes for the first time: “in the very act of speaking, inner was becoming outer, thinking was becoming talking, unthinkable context was becoming thinkable content, experience was being turned inside out” (Ogden 2009, 147).

These ideas call for a unique and distinct language created between analysand and analyst in the analytic setting. This language is a mutual creation, constructed from the various languages of both participants and a new language that is created in the process of exploring the unconscious and of psychic transformation. The notion of a distinct and unique language created in analysis raises intriguing questions: What happens to it after the analysis ends, after the analytic couple separates? What happens to it in a new relationship that the analysand creates (an intimate relationship, a new analysis)? What happens to it after the analyst dies, and after the analysand dies? Is this language forgotten, extinct, does it disappear?

After the analysis terminates, the analysand faces the challenge of preserving and continuing the process of psychic transformation without the actual daily encounter with the analyst. In terms of language, this challenge can be articulated in the questions: How can one promise the continuation of the language created in psychoanalysis? How can one continue to think and speak it? What linguistic transformations does the termination of analysis create? And How can it remain alive? These questions occupied me in my reading of the writing of Freud’s analysands: in other words, to what extent do these texts express the private language created between Freud and the authors, any late understandings and interpretations, and a translation of the messages received from him?

One of the fascinating transformations offered in these texts is the movement from the position of analysand and reader to the position of author. This transformation holds dialectic qualities, for, on the one hand, it continues and resonates with the affinity between literature and psychoanalysis, as well as with Freud as a father figure, and, on the other hand, it serves as an act of differentiation and even subversion. The analysands’ writing continues the psychoanalytic striving to create and recreate new and forgotten languages. The analytic language is distinct from everyday language in its loyalty to the exploration of the unconscious not only thematically, but also in the attention given to the various and mysterious ways the unconscious reveals itself, as Freud writes in Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria:

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore. And thus the task of making conscious the most hidden recesses of the mind is one which it is quite possible to accomplish.

(1905a, 77–78)

In articulating the first law of psychoanalysis, Freud makes a pivotal distinction between psychoanalytic communication and ordinary conversation,

You will notice that as you relate things various thoughts will occur to you which you would like to put aside on the ground of certain criticisms and objections. You will be tempted to say to yourself that this or that is irrelevant here, or is quite unimportant, or nonsensical, so that there is no need to say it. You must never give in to these criticisms, but must say it in spite of them—indeed, you must say it precisely because you feel an aversion to doing so … say whatever goes through your mind.

(Freud 1913a, 135, emphasis in original)

Freud describes this unique kind of communication using the well-known yet inspiring image of the train journey: “Act as though, for instance, you were a traveler sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which you see outside” (ibid.). The patient then “reads” this opening text that he or she receives from the analyst and offers back the patient’s own private translation of it, according to the patient’s inner world, thoughts, memories, fantasies, and linguistic expressions. Thereafter, both participants dedicate themselves to the reading and interpreting of the various texts the analytic encounter offers them. Transforming the analytic process into a story by writing can be understood as a continuation of these mutual processes of reading and writing, expressing and interpreting, while retranslating reminiscences from analysis and the author’s history.

Writing, in the literary-textual sense, has to do with leaving a mark, one that remains alive e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series editor’s foreword
• Prologue
• 1. Psychoanalytic space and writing space
• 2. Fragments of an Analysis with Freud by Joseph Wortis: criticism and longing
• 3. Diary of My Analysis with Sigmund Freud by Smiley Blanton: from a deadlock of silence to the act of writing
• 4. My Analysis with Freud: Reminiscences by Abram Kardiner: memory, mourning, and writing
• 5. An American Psychiatrist in Vienna, 1935–1937, and His Sigmund Freud by John Dorsey: “My Sigmund Freud”
• 6. The Wolf Man and Sigmund Freud by Sergei Pankejeff: between a case study and a memoir
• 7. Tribute to Freud by Hilda Doolittle (H. D.): between the analytic and the poetic
• 8. The creation of voice in psychoanalysis and literature
• Epilogue: psychoanalysis terminable and interminable
• References
• Index