CHAPTER TWO

 

 

Psychoanalysis—
the writing cure

Patrick Mahony

 

 

 

 

According to a medieval maxim, anyone who claimed to have read the whole corpus of St. Augustine would most probably be a liar, since the writings of that great thinker were so voluminous. I believe that a similar maxim might hold true today for Freud, if we were to have also at our disposal the stupefying quantity of both his destroyed manuscripts and his extant but still unpublished writings. But there is another pertinent reason that I have started my presentation with Augustine. He made two incisive comments about what writing can mean to an indefatigable author, and Freud could just as well have said them about himself. The first comment, coming from Book Three of the Latin treatise De Trinitate, can be rendered this way: “I myself avow that in writing (this work) I have learned many things which I did not know” [“Ego proinde fateor me ex eorum numero esse concai, qui proficiendo scribunt et scribendo prqficiunt”—Augustine, Omnia Opera, 2: 690]. The second, more poignant citation comes from Letter 143, which I translate as follows: “Admittedly, therefore, I try to be among the number of those who write as they progress and who progress as they write” [“Egoque ipse multa quae nesciebam scribendo me didicisse confiteor”—Augustine, Omnia Opera, 8: 1218].

We might use one more medieval reference in order to see how writing was crucial in Freud's own development. Scholastic philosophers were wont to distinguish between an instrumentum separatum or instrument detached from the user (such as a hammer) and an instrumentum contunctum or instrument connected with the user (such as his hand). In light of this distinction, we may say that Freud's writing was carried out more or less like an extension of himself, a tracing of his inner movement. For another enlightening gloss, we may turn to Roland Barthes, perhaps the foremost Continental critic in our day on the subject of writing. Barthes distinguished between a writer, for whom writing is merely a communicative instrument, and an author, who establishes the very way of discourse and “who radically absorbs the world's why in a how to write” (Barthes, 1964, p. 148; my translation). In this sense, Freud is clearly an author—a genuine, committed author who experienced writing as a mixture of work and pleasure. He would have sympathized with Barthes, who reflected on his own prolific activity this way:

Writing is that play by which I turn around as well as I can in a narrow space: I am boxed in. I struggle between the hysteria necessary to write and the imaginative act, which oversees, guides, purifies, renders common, codifies, corrects, and imposes the aim (and vision) of a social communication…. And yet: the closer I get to the work, the deeper I go into writing; I approach its unendurable depth: a desert is discovered…. It is at this point of contact between writing and work that the harsh truth appears to me: I am no longer a child. Or rather, is it the asceticism of intense pleasure that I am discovering? [Barthes, 1975, p. 140; my translation]

The latter quotation leads us directly into the most tortuous and exalted portion of Freud's writing career called his self-analysis. Freud conducted it through, with, and in writing. Far from being a mere medium of retrospective reportage or a way of storing and retrieving information, writing was an indispensable feature with the deepest significance in Freud's self-cure. Such is my thesis, and in the course of pursuing it, I wish to elucidate the origins of psychoanalysis, the quality of Freud's genius, and the dlstinctiveness of that world masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900a).

Before moving on, we must attend to several preliminary questions. First of all, when did Freud's self-analysis take place? In our reply, we must start by dividing his self-therapy into two stages: a kind of initial, non-systematic one that began around the time that Freud was treating the patients that we can recognize in the Studies on Hysteria (1895d); then an intensified, systematic self-analysis that began in the summer of 1897 and, with interruptions, lasted at least up to the publication of the Interpretation of Dreams in November 1899 (see Appendix). I do not want to burden the reader with dates, but it is important to retain the dates more or less marking the duration of Freud's systematic self-analysis: from the summer of 1897 to November 1899.

It is not a trivial gesture to ask what material Freud's self-analysis focused on. Documentation amply shows that para-praxes, symptoms, and screen memories were worked on in his self-analysis, yet its principal material—and not at all incidentally—revolved around dreams. Again and again, Freud himself was very explicit on this matter. In 1909 he told his American audience at Clark University: “If I am asked how one can become a psychoanalyst, I reply: ‘By studying one's own dreams’”! (Freud, 1910a, p. 33). Three years later, Freud returned to his historical pronouncement and repeated it word for word in a paper on technique (Freud, 1912e, p. 116). Next, in his history of the psychoanalytic movement, Freud reminisced this way about its earliest days:

I soon saw the necessity of carrying out a self-analysis, and this I did with the help of a series of my own dreams which led me back through all the events of my childhood: and I am still of the opinion today that this kind of analysis may suffice for one who is a good dreamer and not too abnormal. [Freud, 1914d, p. 20]

Finally, in 1926, endorsing a paper by a certain English thinker, Freud wrote that its author “carried out a systematic application of the procedure of self-analysis which I myself employed in the past for my own dreams” (Freud, 1926c, p. 280; cf. Jones, 1953, pp. 320–321; Gay, 1988, p. 98 fn.).

The next problem confronting us, the practical modality of Freud's self-analysis, leads us further into the unique history of psychoanalysis. It is a historical irony that a name frequently used for psychoanalytic treatment, the talking cure, had been coined for a very different kind of therapy and one, moreover, that preceded Freud's discovery of psychoanalysis by more than a decade.

The story is familiar: Anna O, Breuer's patient from 1880 to 1882, would jokingly refer to her cathartic treatment as “chimney-sweeping” but in a serious mood would call it a “talking cure” (Freud, 1895d, p. 30). A second ironical disparity of psychoanalytic history is that the other source of our clinical practice, Freud's self-analysis, was preeminently not a talking cure (nor merely a reflective, non-motoric one, for that matter) but a writing cure. (For a while, however, it seems that Freud did analyse himself silently and without recourse to writing—Freud, 1895d, pp. 284, 294.) The evidence for my thesis—both circumstantial and direct—is extensive.

First, concerning the circumstantial evidence, it is relevant that in citing the historical precedents for free association, Freud drew attention to the fact that they had transpired in writing. For example, Freud noted that the nineteenth-century scientist Dr. Garth Wilkinson had described his own manner of writing as an enraptured laissez-faire, letting himself be guided “by an infallible instinct into the subject” and its elaboration. Another predecessor, now much better known, is the essayist Ludwig Börne, who said that to become an original writer one had only to engage in sheer scriptory improvisation for three days. We know the cryptomnesic history of this essay: the young Freud read it, but then for over half a century it slipped deep into an unconscious transcription in Freud's own mind (Freud, 1920b, pp. 263–265). An even more telling precedent is one brought up in the Interpretation of Dreams itself: Schiller, let us recall, held that free association on paper is the way to overcome writer's block. Freud himself added this practical comment:

What Schiller describes as a relaxation of the watch upon the gates of Reason, the adoption of an attitude of uncritical selfobservation, is by no means difficult. Most of my patients achieve it after their first instruction. I myself can do so very completely, by the help of writing down my ideas as they occur to me. [Freud, 1900a, p. 103; italics added]

The documentation that I have thus far adduced prompts us to conceive that Freud's self-analysis was chiefly a written one dealing with dreams. But there are much more pertinent data for our conception. A generally neglected footnote in the Studies on Hysteria shows that as far back as the time of its composition Freud took the trouble with some of his fresh dreams “to write them down and try to solve them” (Freud, 1895d, p. 69 fn.). Freud's writing practice assumed even a greater role at the climactic point of his non-systematic self-analysis. Although it was in the course of analysing the Irma dream that Freud discovered the secret of dreams, critics have overlooked how that dream and its immediate history are literally bathed in writing: being uneasy about his therapeutic treatment of Irma and wanting to lay the blame elsewhere as well as Justify himself before Breuer, Freud sat down late in the day and wrote up the patient's case; the write-up was not done cursorily, for it lasted “far into the night” (Freud, 1900a, p. 108; cf. also pp. 106, 115). According to Freud, this case history, plus some alarming news about Irma's condition, continued to occupy his mental activity after he fell asleep; he then had the famous dream about her. Pertinent to my thesis, the most condensed part of the dream was a chemical formula, which Freud even visualized in bold type. Immediately upon waking, on the morning of 24 July 1895, Freud noted down the dream; he then analysed it, part by part. The dream, therefore, whose most dense section was in print, was itself bracketed by two phases of writing—in other words, day residues and associations were in written form. That is not all. On the same day that Freud analysed the dream, he wrote to Fliess, but he did not mention the writing-up of his epoch-making discovery. Like his dream, Freud's letter was accusatory and—given the topic of my presentation—its opening words become even more charged: “Demon, why don't you write? … Don't you care at all any more about what I am doing” (Freud, 1895d, p. 134).

The foregoing information enables us to become more attuned to the scriptory modality of Freud's systematic selfanalysis that began two years after the Irma dream. During this later period, Freud hyperinvested in the inscription of his dreams and associations and his analysis of them—a praxis that expanded to include his screen memories, parapraxes, transient symptoms, and interactions with patients. It is quite to the point that also at around this time Freud saw an uncanny resemblance between his compositional practice and that of an inspired Biblical writer; hence, while scorning the arbitrary devaluations made by his predecessors, Freud claimed that he was closely attending to dreams, as if they were “Holy Writ” (Freud, 1900a, p. 514). What is more, in recording his own dreams, the practice of free association drove Freud to act like an inspired writer. Accordingly, in reporting his so-called Hollturn dream, Freud declared:

This description is unintelligible even to myself, but I am following the fundamental rule of rendering the dream in those words which occur to me in writing it down, [my translation of G.W. 2/3, 458 ff.; see Freud, 1900a, p. 455 fn.; cf. also pp. 205, 456]

Barely a few months after completing The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud set forth in the most direct terms his precise method of self-analysis and improvised writing:

If we make use of this procedure [of free association] upon ourselves, we can best assist the investigation by at once writing down what are at first unintelligible associations. [Freud, 1901a, p. 636; emphasis added]

Freud thereupon proceeded to Jot down and analyse, in the present tense, the dream he had had the night before. (See the German text in the Gesammelte Werke, 2/3: 649 ff., which renders the dream and its associations in the present tense. The resultant immediacy contrasts with the effect of distance brought about by Strachey's recourse to the past tense—Freud, 1901a, pp. 636 ff.)

The scrupulous method Freud adopted to analyse his dreams, we may say, actually involved him in more rather than less writing. As he said at one point, the “original, classical method” of analysing one's dreams was to skip nothing: in practice, it meant chopping the dream into sequential parts and then dutifully proceeding to associate “to the elements of the dream in the order in which those elements occurred” in the dream report (Freud, 1923c [1922], p. 109). Clearly, this methodical pursuit of the dream from its start to its end eliminated the risk of any random procedure that would easily have resulted in overlooking some dream segments. Another writing strategy of Freud's is more intriguing and relates subtly to his general clinical technique. Freud said:

If the first (dream) account given me by a patient of a dream is too hard to follow I ask him to repeat it. In doing so he rarely uses the same words. But the parts of the dream which he describes in different terms are by that fact revealed to me as the weak spot in the dream's disguise. [Freud, 1900a, p. 515]

We do, in fact, have a few of Freud's own dreams with slightly different written versions, a discrepancy due either to a defensive reaction or to a conscious desire to disguise his dream in published form. But in other instances, such as the dreams that lend themselves to diagrammatic presentation, it seems that Freud tended to rewrite them for the purpose of discovering more through his own associatively spatial rearrangements. For example, in presenting his well-known succinct dream about closing the eyes, Freud states: “I am accustomed [gewöhnlich] to write this in the following (diagrammatic) form” (Freud, 1900a, pp. 317–318; G.W. 2/3: 322–323). We must take the word “accustomed” for exactly what it means—not just two or three times, but many times. The implication is clear: Freud wrote the dream down a number of times to find out the meanings hidden in the various ways he could graphically display it. For another example, we may refer to the Villa Secerno dream, which Freud sent to Fliess with the comment: “The way I have written it out shows what seemed obscure and what seemed multiple” (Freud, 1895d, p. 236; italics added). Significantly enough, Freud wrote out this dream differently in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a, p. 317). [Of the four journals on dreckology or anality that Freud wrote, at least three contained dreams—Freud, 1985d, pp. 291-301. Although Freud was avowedly writing the Journals for Fliess (p. 301), he had not sent the first one, which contained “wild dreams” that were, Freud said, “part of my selfanalysis” (p. 291). Such a declaration makes it clear that Fliess was not privy to all of Freud's self-analysis.]

We can hardly exaggerate the importance of the fact that Freud retained his writing method in his self-analysis even when he dealt with material other than dreams as such. Here Freud is reporting a flash memory about his early childhood:

I saw myself standing in front of a cupboard demanding something and screaming, while my half-brother, my senior by twenty years, held it open. Then suddenly my mother, looking beautiful and slim, walked into the room, as if she had come in from the street. These were the words in which I described [gefasst] the scene, of which I had a plastic picture, but I did not know what more I could make of it. Whether my brother wanted to open or shut the cupboard— in my first translation [Übersetzung] of the picture I called it a “wardrobe”—why I was crying, and what the arrival of my mother had to do with it—all this was obscure to me. [Freud, 1901b, p. 50; G.W. 4: 59]

Note Freud's technique: much as he did with dreams, he wrote down the screen memory and closely heeded the original wording, which he called a “translation”.

Inscription, transcription, translation—these terms were frequently used by Freud to describe the so-called psychic systems and the vicissitudes of their traces; the triad of terms casts light on what writing both as a concept and as a practice signified for Freud. In a practical sense, the place of writing in his self-analysis was partly determined by his innate gifts as well as by external circumstances. Thus, for a considerable period during his writing cure Freud forsook giving his university lectures (Freud, 1895d pp. 332, 347). Even more significantly, throughout his writing cure, Freud did not achieve any talking cure with his patients. [The most influential of these patients was Mr. E; we know specifically of two dreams by Freud about this patient (Freud, 1900a, pp. 435–439, 455–459). Through dreams and memories about his nanny and his childhood libidinal attraction to “matrem nudam” (Freud, 1985d, p. 268), Freud discovered his own Oedipus complex and was “on the way to grasping its universal application”; thus, Freud's belief in oedlpal universality was confirmed, not initiated, by one of Mr. E's dreams (Freud, 1901b, p. 178—for a chronologically reversed and erroneous interpretation of this influence, see Anzieu, 1975, p. 331).]

Throughout Freud's letter's to Fliess (Freud, 1895d), one can see a chronological series of his epistolary laments:

• in March 1897: “I have not yet finished a single case” (p. 232);

• later in the same month: “I am still having the same difficulties and have not finished a single case” (p. 233);

• in May 1897: “I shall wait still longer for a treatment to be completed. It must be possible” (p. 244);

• in September 1897: “[I have] continual disappointment in my efforts to bring a single analysis to a real conclusion” (p. 264; cf. p. 269);

• in February 1898: “I shall not finish a single one [case] this year either” (p. 299).

Even as late as March 1900, we hear Freud bemoaning the elusiveness of the case which he most counted on to resolve his doubts and to have confidence in his dyadic therapy (Freud, 1895d, p. 403). To gauge the bleakness of Freud's therapeutic mood further, in the same letter in 1898 in which he said that he would not finish a case in that year either, Freud announced that he had just finished composing Sexual Aetiology of the Neuroses, an essay that contained the following propagandistic and misleading claim: “I have in recent years almost worked out a therapeutic procedure which I propose to describe as psychoanalytic. I owe a great number of successes to it” (Freud, 1898a, p. 282). In short, such contrasting contemporary private and public statements about the success of the talking cure certainly point to Freud's personal embroilment, and it is reasonable to conclude that his preeminently written cure took on that much more importance.

At this juncture one may want to object that Fliess played a major role in Freud's analysis (cf. Gay, 1988; Jones, 1955, pp. 6, 387, 482; Freud, 1895d, p. 73), and that although they were in contact with each other through the post, they did also communicate with each other verbally during their so-named Congresses. To that objection, I would answer that we must not overestimate the extent of those dyadic encounters. We are sure that there were at least five of them during Freud's systematic self-analysis, but there may have been one or two more.¹ Yet several points must be borne in mind here. The Congresses usually lasted for only one or two days. Next, there was something about these Congresses that conformed to the ordinarily accepted sense of the word, for both men tended to deliver papers to the other or to read silently what the other had written (see, specifically, Freud, 1985d, pp. 287, 335, 344, 349). Thirdly and most importantly, available evidence suggests that the Congresses were essentially intellectual exchanges.

For these and other reasons, therefore, we must not underestimate the role that writing played in Freud's relationship with Fliess. From the outset of their acquaintanceship, Freud envisaged successful writing as a shared ego ideal. In Freud's very first letter, to his appeal for friendship is added a report of compositional production: he is busy writing three essays (Freud, 1985d, p. 16). In his second letter, Freud states his intention to translate a book and adds that “for recreation” he is working on two papers (Freud, 1985d, p. 17).

But, by 1897, Freud's disenchantment with his friend started to surface, for published research, successfully written up and published, came more and more to be a hypersensitive issue between the two correspondents. [The poetic activity of Freud's son, Martin, began in April, 1897 (Freud, 1985d, p. 236) and, through a strange historical fate (identification with his father) seemed by October 1899 to be petering out (p. 377).] We must realize here that Freud's disillusionment concerned not only Fliess's theoretical stance but also his lack of production as such; and in this matter Freud did not have in mind merely a comparison of his own psychological achievements with Fliess's biological work. Indeed, it has generally gone unnoticed that between 1887 and 1900, the years when their friendship was relatively positive, even Freud's neurological publications alone far exceeded in length Fliess's biological ones. To be more specific: between 1887 and 1900 Fliess published two monographs and, from what I can determine, four short articles, the whole totalling fewer than 400 pages. Just to mention Freud's neurological books for the same period, we have, in addition to the book on aphasia, a monograph written with Oscar Rie and containing some 220 pages and a bibliography of 180 titles; then a 168-page monograph dealing with central diplegias; and, lastly, a comprehensive treatise of some 327 pages and 14 pages of bibliography (Jones, 1953, pp. 216–217). Let us not forget either that along with reading and summarizing the massive extant literature on dreams, between 1898 and 1900 Freud published 83 abstracts and reviews of neurological literature (in the Jahresbericht über die Leistungen und Fortschritte auf dem Gebiete der Neurologie und Psychiatrie). If, finally, we also take into consideration, for the overall period between 1887 and 1900, Freud's numerous articles on his own neurological research, the mass of his psychological publications, and his translations of three books by Bernheim and Charcot, we begin to grasp the breathtaking unmatchability of Freud's creative powers and productivity.

In this whole scenario, 1897 was the watershed year for our two protagonists—Freud finished his last book on neurology (in January), and Fliess saw a book that he had completed the previous year appear in print (Freud, 1985d, p. 173). Between 1897 and 1900, however, Fliess wrote nothing but one short article. It is no surprise that reality-testing became a burning issue in the famous friendship, as Freud resorted to an impatient pressuring so that Fliess would come forth with documented evidence of successful work. A chronological sampling of excerpts in Freud's correspondence shows dramatically his growing impatience with Fliess's scriptive unproductivity:

June, 1897: “(I hope) that instead of a short article you will within a year present to us a small book which solves the organic secrets.” [Freud, 1985d, p. 254; cf. p. 304]

February, 1899: “You can write of nothing but the tremendously huge work which is all too hard for the powers of a human being.” [ibid., p. 314—in this same letter Freud said that he himself had just discovered the key between dreams and neuroses]

May, 1899: “A contented letter from you containing evidence of your being well and the promise that you will attempt a first presentation of your earthshaking formulas were a long-missed pleasure.” [ibid., p. 351]

June, 1899: “The announcement that you are engaged in research perhaps may mean, (that) instead of writing? And (thus the) postponement of the date on which I can read something of yours?” [ibid., p. 356]

August, 1899: “Your work apparently has changed into a pupa for me: will I be able to catch it as a butterfly, or will it fly too high for me?” [ibid., pp. 365–366]

If we reflect on these passages and others, we can draw the assured inference that Fliess's promise of his own great book to keep pace with the Interpretation of Dreams was becoming more desperate. [At the beginning of 1900, however, there was a two-month lull in Freud's writing (Freud, 1985d, p. 404).]

The supreme irony was that Fliess was caught on the tenterhooks of his own theory about life's periodicity: he could not predict when he would finish that very book of his that Freud wryly called the “organically growing creation” (Freud, 1985d, p. 428). As a matter of fact, the work did not see the light of day until many years later, in 1906.

The preceding discussion prepares us to examine the composition of the Interpretation of Dreams, which is a fascinating story in itself. We begin in 1908, when Freud prefaced the second edition of his dream book with the following information: “It was, I found, a portion of my own self-analysis, my own reaction to my father's death—that is to say, to the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man's life” (Freud, 1900a, p. xxvi). Freud's retrospection needs some filling in and modification. His father died in October 1896: in May of the following year, Freud began writing the dream book (Freud, 1985d, p. 243) but quickly ran into a self-described writer's block (pp. 253 and 255). Psychoanalytic scholars have overlooked that this very writing block launched Freud into the systematic self-analysis which eventually culminated in his resumption of writing the Interpretation of Dreams. This compositional feature, embracing a unique mixture of scientific and therapeutic goals,² was such that only after the completion of his masterpiece did Freud realize that the very writing of it formed part of his self-analysis. [Earlier during his self-analysis Freud considered the writing of his book to be an alternative activity (Freud, 1985d, p. 299). But by the middle of 1899 he postulated an analogous relationship between the two activities—cf. the highly significant expression, “as it were” (Freud, 1900a, p. 477; G.W. 2/3: 481).] In his letter of 16 May 1897, Freud gives a historical announcement about undertaking the dream book. His inaugural wording of that project is of the utmost importance: “I have felt impelled to start working on the dream, where I feel so very certain” (Freud, 1985d, p. 243).

Freud hyperinvested in the dream material, for it was precisely there that he felt most certain. Also, Freud's feeling of being “impelled” [gedrängt] is one of his recurrent references to his manner of inscriptive work at the time: again and again he speaks of having taken notes during the last “thrust” or waiting patiently for the next “thrust” (Freud, 1985d, e.g., pp. 243–244, 249, 300, 301, 349). Another point about Freud's inaugurating announcement is that he uses the word “dream” to refer to his whole project. In the German text of his correspondence with Fliess, we repeatedly hear Freud talking of his writing project as the “dream” [Traum]; the English translation editorially adds the word “book” in brackets, thus detracting from the force of Freud's condensation of dream book into “dream”. The accumulated force and impact of Freud's condensation is undeniable. By the end of 1897, he is saying: “I shall force myself to write the dream in order to come out of it” (Freud, 1985d, p. 278). “The dream is suddenly taking shape … the dream will be”, Freud would later say (p. 353). And later again: “[I am] entirely the dream” (Freud, 1985d, p. 369; German edition, p. 403; my translation).

Freud's verbal condensation was more than a figure of speech. Family members noticed that when he was composing his monumental treatise, he was in a dream-like state (Jones, 1953, p. 360 fn.). And even he himself wrote to Fliess: “The psychology is proceeding in a strange manner; it is nearly finished, composed as if in a dream” (Freud, 1985d, p. 318). This process of writing the dream book is telling, for the processive nature of Freud's understanding process is inseparable from his written presentation. Here is Freud again, confiding to Fliess:

I can compose the details only in the process of writing. [Freud, 1985d, p. 305; cf. p. 146]

It is entirely taken down [from the dictation] of the unconscious…. At the start of every paragraph I did not know where I would end up. [ibid., p. 319; German edition, pp. 348–349; my translation]

I do not know yet how to delineate and organize (the last chapter) … but a thing like this turns out just as it will. Every attempt to make it better by itself gives it a forced quality (ibid., p. 368).

The foregoing evidence entitles us to conclude that Freud's discourse in most of his dream book is truly performative and ongoing. Its quintessential character is epitomized by the usage of the present tense, and in that way it has the grammatical nature of the manifest dream. Accordingly, more than being just the result and account of Freud's self-analysis, the Interpretation of Dreams enacts and extends it. [Compare the somewhat disparate statements in Anzleu, 1975, pp. 590 and 661. This shaky conceptualization extends to Anzieu's other position that when there is a coincidence of two or three of the dream book's directive personages (dreamer, interpreter, narrator, theoretician), Freud becomes paralysed. But at least the first three coincide in Freud's enactive prose.]

Put in another way: at the time dreaming and writing were not so much collateral as imbricated activities for Freud—an imbrication that could even become collusive. Did not Freud write to his friend, “So far I have always known where the next dream-night would continue” (Freud, 1985d, p. 268)? And when Fliess insisted that a certain important dream be dropped from the monograph, Freud yielded but went on to ask which of the dream's particular elements Fliess objected to—the reference to anxiety, to Martha, or to being without a fatherland? Whatever the objectionable elements, Freud added, he would eliminate them in one of his future dreams, for he could “have dreams like that made to order” (Freud, 1985d, p. 315). It follows, then, that Freud's book about dreams was also a dream to a certain extent. Dreams and book cartwheeled in a series of mutual wishes and fulfilment. The dreams were texts and pre-texts.

Were we to stop at this point, we would not fully grasp the extent to which Freud was more personally involved in writing The Interpretation of Dreams than any other book. Our exploration of this personal involvement leads us to see that, in Freud's mind, there was a profound link between dreams and the maternal body.

Here are excerpts from two strategic places in The Interpretation of Dreams (ch. 2 and 7):

Every dream has at least one place … a navel, as it were, by which it joins with the unknown. [Freud, 1900a, pp. 116 ff.; G.W. 2/3: 116 ff., my translation]

Then this is the dream's navel, the place at which it straddles the unknown. [Freud, 1900a, p. 525; G.W. 2/3: 530, my translation]

These two lapidary expressions anticipate another: “The finding of an object is the refinding of an object” (Freud, 1905d, p. 222). In his dream the dreamer re-finds, “joins with”, and even “straddles” the mother, the unknown. (Strachey's desexualized rendering of aufsitzt or straddles is “reaches down into” (cf. Freud, 1900a, p. 525; Weber, 1982, p. 75.)

The suggestive power of Freud's statements is increased by the fact that the word in German comes from a verb [erkennen, not bekennen] (Anzieu, 1975, p. 215), which, like the English know, can be used in the biblical carnal sense. Let it be stressed that the two appearances of the word “unknown” function as mileposts marking the exploratory distance travelled by Freud in his dream book. In the first citation, drawn from chapter 2, the dream's navel is merely joined with the mother; this controlled attachment is matched by the main material of chapter 2, the Irma dream, whose deeper meanings about the maternal body were given a restricted interpretation by Freud. However, towards the end of his exploration of the dream, in chapter 7, Freud could speak allusively about the dreamer straddling his mother. Such a libidinalization of Freud's writing is brought closer to home when we attend to the larger elements of discursive strategy in the dream book.

The dream book combines both exposition and narrative: if the focus of its exposition, the dream, is symbolic, so are the scene and movement of its narrative. In the clearest terms Freud explained the investigation in his book as a journey through nature—both its landscape, symbolic of the female genitalia, and woods, generally symbolic of the mother (Freud, 1900a, pp. 355, 684; 1916–1917, pp. 156, 159–160). Freud wrote privately to Fliess:

The whole thing is planned on the model of an imaginary walk. At the beginning the dark forest of authors (who do not see the trees), hopelessly lost on wrong tracks. Then a concealed pass through which I lead the reader … and then suddenly the high ground and the view and the question: which way do you wish to go now? [Freud, 1985d, p. 365]

If in this letter the dark forest designates the dream book's introductory historical survey of oneiric literature that was first urged by Fliess (Freud, 1985d, pp. 354–355, 362), in another letter Freud indulges in a more suggestive description: the introductory chapter is a thorny brush wood [Dorngestrüpp] in which most readers will get stuck; they may never proceed beyond it to see the Sleeping Beauty [Dornröschen, literally, little thorny rose or hedge rose] (Freud, 1985d, p. 362; G.W., p. 397). As we know from the Grimms' fairy tale to which Freud is referring, Sleeping Beauty—or the embodiment of perfect femininity—struck by the curse of an evil fairy, is finally revived through the kiss of a rescuing prince. In Freud's private imagination, of course, both he and his ideal reader would be such daring co-conquistadorial princes.

Also, in the Interpretation of Dreams Freud imagistically maps out his investigation as a journeying through a maternal landscape. The exposition in chapter 2 is symbolically identified as “passing through a narrow defile” (Freud, 1900a, p. 122); at this point, Freud says that a dream fulfils a wish, but he does not say “infantile wish”—that will come later. As the journey proceeds, he takes the reader/co-traveller deeper into unconscious wishes. In chapter 5 he finally announces and explores the Oedipus complex. The preoedipal will come with the pitch of investigative excitement in chapter 7, all of which was deliberately expressed in allusions (Freud, 1985d, p. 362); and it is here that Freud seems to associate the deepest investigation into mental processes with a perilous descent into the archaic mother (see Mahony, 1987, pp. 119–110). His stark description is:

For it must be clearly understood that the easy and agreeable portion of our journey lies behind us. Hitherto, unless I am greatly mistaken, all the paths along which we have travelled have led us towards the light—towards elucidation and fuller understanding. But as soon as we endeavor to penetrate more deeply into the mental process involved in dreaming, every path will end in darkness. [Freud, 1900a, p. 511]

In a word, “corpus” referred to both body and book—an equation later chiselled into the memorable phrase in Moses and Monotheism: “The distortion of a text resembles a murder” (Freud, 1939a, p. 43). And so, if the earlier part of Freud's systematic self-analysis led to the discovery of the Oedipus complex and the deceptive power of seductive fantasies, the later part of the self-analysis reshaped those fantasies, in the dream book, into an oedipal and preoedlpal exploration of the maternal corpus.

Accordingly, Freud strove for narrative strategy and epist-emological investigation to converge in his writing. More than a mere reaction to Fliess's writing failure, Freud's writing cure was an act of self-discovery, self-recovery, and growth—indeed, a self-enabling and self-generative act. [For later examples of self-healing in Freud's writing, see Homans, 1988, pp. 17, 26, 31–33].

Another part of this story is revealing. It deals with the stress that led Freud to wait some six months before taking up the first draft of the Interpretation of Dreams and subjecting it to a second and final revision in 1899. [See under the headings “Neurotic symptoms” (pp. 740–741) and “Hysterical symptoms” (p. 736) in the index to Volume 5 of the Standard Edition. Cf. Grinstein, 1980, p. 20: some of the repetitiveness in the Interpretation of Dreams might have arisen from Freud's “inability to deal adequately with certain unconscious material which, therefore, kept striving for expression during this period. Finally, the working through of infantile attachments, that we now take so much for granted, must have been extremely difficult for him.” In the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud gave the impression that the work as a whole had been “finished” in 1898 and that he then waited for over a year before deciding to publish it (Freud, 1900a, p. 477; G.W. 2/3: 481). This is simply not true. Freud finished the initial draft by July 1898, and began the second draft in May 1899. Also, as his letters to Fliess show, the second draft underwent revisions and the entirely new seventh chapter was added.] Publicly, Freud attributed the delay in publication to a lack of self-discipline (Freud, 1900a, p. 453) and to an anticipated distress over self-revelation (Freud, 1900a, p. 477). Privately, however, Freud gave Fliess other reasons for not finishing the revision: he could neither fill in the gap left by an important dream that had been dropped, nor could he complete the proposed connections between dreams and neuroses (cf. Freud, 1985d, pp. 318, 332, 338–339, 345). Anzieu's (1975, pp. 594, 619–620, 632, 658, 737–740) historical explanation for the delay in publication manages partially to combine Freud's private and public excuses—namely, the theoretical blockage that held up the revision was underpinned by unconscious fantasies about Freud's own impotence and castration; and these fantasies appeared in dreams that he could not fully verbalize. (Anzieu, 1975, p. 313, even generalizes that a castration fantasy underlay the paralysis that Freud seemed to have experienced before making each of his great discoveries.)

In my opinion, a supplementary explanation is called for, and this involves me in making the first major modification to the title of my presentation. Freud's self-therapy was not just a writing cure—it was also a publishing cure. Much as in our own day—although in his own fashion—Freud was caught in the turmoil of “publish or perish”. For him, a complete oedipal victory entailed that he should follow in the steps of Shakespeare and expose his achievement in the public marketplace. Recall that in explaining the Oedipus complex in the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud alluded to Hamlet as a capital example, and added that the play was written immediately after the death of Shakespeare's father (Freud, 1900a, p. 265). Hence, if the writing of the Interpretation of Dreams was Freud's own filial mourning for “the most poignant loss” in his life (Freud, 1900a, p. xxvi), it was concurrently an oedipal triumph by means of a corpus that was both text and mother.

On another front, Freud was resisting full awareness of the degree to which the publication of the Interpretation of Dreams would effect an estrangement between himself and Fliess. For all its ills, their friendship had tempered a trying period so that any thought by Freud of a break-up would now be anxiogenic. Besides, in so many ways Freud's relations with Fliess had proved more manageable than those with Breuer—Breuer was strictly a father figure for Freud, whereas Fliess offered the advantageous facility of being turned into a paternal and fraternal transferen-tial object. Moreover, whereas Breuer was reluctant to receive communications about work in progress, Fliess would eagerly receive draft versions from Freud (Freud, 1985d, p. 217). In accordance with such a dynamic, Fliess figured variously in the production of Interpretation of Dreams. Let us note, for example, the generative significance proper to Freud's masterpiece: it began with the pregnancy of Freud's wife (the Irma dream) and ended with Freud's rushing its publication so that he could send it on time for Fliess's birthday (Freud, 1985d, pp. 376, 380). Also, if the co-authored Studies on Hysteria was Freud's first psychological book, his second was a “Dreamchild” (Freud, 1985, p. 405), which, though singly authored, nevertheless needed Fliess as “godfather” (Freud, 1985d, p. 376).

On balance, however, one must be prepared to accord a whole spectrum of meanings to the composition and publication of the Interpretation of Dreams. Freud felt that sending his self-proclaimed dung heap, seedling, and new species (Freud, 1985d, p. 353) to print would arouse “the painful feeling of parting with something which has been one's very own” (Freud, 1985d, p. 376). In sum, Freud symbolically linked the book to the body of himself, his mother, and Fliess—a polyvalency accompanied by separation, castration, and guilt anxieties. Yet I would suggest that the production and release of the Interpretation of Dreams constituted primarily an oedipal gesture, however short of complete success. I am thus led to make the second major modification of my presentation: Freud's self-analysis was a writing and publishing cure that was partial, not complete, and the subtext of The Interpretation of Dreams constituted a substantial amount of acting out, writing out, and publishing out, whose meanings were insufficiently understood by Freud at the time.

In retrospect, it is easy for us to follow the last act of the amity between Freud and his Berlin colleague—a friendship that was dwindling into a memory. If Freud was desperately asking for a place for dynamic influences in Fliess's dating, Fliess himself was charging that Freud's patients improved or worsened according to strict biological laws (Freud, 1985, p. 159). Freud epitomized their theoretical and personal impasse in this striking formula: “Thus we are becoming estranged from each other through what is most our own” (Freud, 1985d, p. 398). Still, Freud was not quite ready to forsake the bond of writing between them: bound by gratitude, Freud set about writing a kind of diary about one of his patients that he wanted to show Fliess (Freud, 1985d, p. 388), and he increased his needling of his unproductive friend (Freud, 1985d, pp. 412, 421, 436, 141, 468). By 1901, Freud found himself in an authorial imbroglio: on the one hand, he withdrew the Dora case from publication because he had allegedly lost his “only audience” in Fliess (Freud, 1985d, pp. 450, 456, 457–458 fn.); on the other hand, Freud proposed that together they write a book on bisexuality (pp. 448 and 450). As we know, if that wish were ever fulfilled, it was only in a dream.

When correspondence was circumstantially resumed between Freud and Fliess in 1904, it dealt—not surprisingly—with none other than the subject of publication, and quickly soured into accusations about plagiarism; the very last bitter exchange between Freud and Fliess died out at around the start of the summer holidays. But at the end of those holidays, as we recall, Freud visited the Acropolis; there he experienced a de-realization that was brought on by guilt for surpassing his father, hence a telling residue of Freud's incomplete self-analysis and its writing out. We may now skip to 1936, when it took the celebration for another writer, Romain Rolland, for Freud to write up his Acropolis visit as a piece of self-analysis. In the remaining part of 1936, a ghost from the past would resurrect to put Freud's self-analysis to a gruelling, nightmarish test. Precisely on December 30, Marie Bonaparte wrote to Freud that she had come upon his letters to Fliess and was ready to purchase them from the eager bookseller.

On 3 January 1937, Freud replied that these “most intimate” and “highly embarrassing” letters should not “become known to posterity” (Freud, 1985d, p. 7). Thus, at both ends of his analytics Freud balked at the publication of a piece of his self-analysis—the Interpretation of Dreams decades earlier, and now his correspondence with Fliess. But that is not all, although the rest of the story is brief. With the news of his resurrected self-analysis fresh in his mind, Freud sat down two weeks later to write the finished copy of Analysts Terminable and Interminable (1937c). (I am relying on my photocopy of the holograph, whose first page bears the date 18.1.1937 also in Freud's handwriting.) The anguishing repercussions of the correspondence continued to remain with him, as can be measured by the fact that prior to 1936 he never talked with his daughter Anna about Fliess, and only “most sparingly” after that date (Freud, 1985d, p. 4). Perhaps from our belated perspective, we can more clearly trace the continuity of the writing cure between The Interpretation of Dreams and Analysis Terminable and Interminable, and we might even risk summing them in one title: Self-analysis, dreaming, writing: terminable and interminable.

APPENDIX

The dating of Freud's self-analysis is one of the quagmires of psychoanalytic scholarship, not least due to Freud's own erroneous commentary: on 14 November 1897, he wrote that there was no sign of his self-analysis until after the summer holidays (Freud, 1985d, p. 279), a statement belied, for example, by his letters of 22 June (p. 254) and 7 July (p. 255). A further difficulty is that in his correspondence to Fliess, Freud referred to his “self-analysis” as such from 14 August 1897 (p. 261) to 3 January 1899 (p. 338), although his looser allusions to this have fostered a variety of chronological interpretations. With some inconsistencies of his own, Anzieu (1975) breaks it down into three phases:

a. September–October 1897 (pp. 582–583)—but cf. p. 311: “between June and August, 1897, Freud undertakes to make it [his self-analysis] systematic”.

b. Spring, 1898, the time when Freud was writing the first version of the Interpretation of Dreams (pp. 582–583)—but on page 353 Anzieu assigns the first version to February–July 1898, a dating that is somewhat in agreement with Kris's (Freud, 1954, p. 34) limitation of the first version to the period of the spring and summer, 1898.

c. Spring-summer, 1899, the time of Freud's drafting the second version of the Interpretation of Dreams (pp. 582–583)— but in another place Anzieu sees the version beginning in mid-January (p. 370), an alternative that is rather later than autumn 1898, which Kris proposes as the beginning of the second version (1954, p. 34). A greater dating difficulty occurs in Anzieu's irregular chronicling of the third phase of Freud's self-analysis: Freud lived “in a permanent self-analytic atmosphere” (p. 718); his self-analysis ended in 1900 (p. 733), in 1901 (pp. 724, 729); he was in occasional self-analysis from November 1899 to February 1901 (p. 663); his trip to Rome in September 1901 terminated his systematic self-analysis (p. 288).

Although fully assured precision cannot be arrived at, we do have some rectifying facts at our disposal. First, Freud began his dream book in May 1897 (pp. 243 and 249)—that is, before his intensified self-analysis. Second, the current term “systematic self-analysis” must be used with caution: (1) Freud applied a “systematic” analysis to his Irma dream in 1895; (2) nor should “systematic” be used freely to mean uninterrupted, for Freud's systematic self-analysis was in fact one of fits and starts. Evidence will only allow Freud's self-analysis to signify one that was intensified for shorter or longer periods. Equipped with these clarifications, we may conclude the following:

a. Freud tried writing his dream book, quickly encountered a writer's block, and then began a systematic self-analysis. Its first phase was closing towards the end of 1897; on 5 November Freud said that it was trickling (Freud, 1985d, p. 277), and by 14 November he reported its continued interruption (p. 281).

b. The second phase started at around the beginning of December 1897 (pp. 284–285) and culminated in the writing of the four private “dreckological” journals, which were finished by the beginning of February 1898 (p. 301).

c. By 9 February 1898, Freud resumed composing the first version of the dream book (p. 298), which he had begun before the start of his systematic self-analysis; by 7 July 1898 he had finished the first version (p. 319).

d. After a period of fruitful intermittent self-analysis early in 1899 [see the letters of 3 January (p. 338) and 2 March (p. 347)], Freud started composing the second version of the dream book—that is, at the end of May 1899 (p. 353)—and had completed it by 11 September 1899 and saw it published in November. The ending of this phase of the systematic self-analysis should be left an open question, for relevant traces are intermittent: on 21 December 1899 Freud (p. 392) reported an advance in self-knowledge; on 11 March 1900 he revealed that, with serious matters banished from his mind, he had not written a line for the previous two months (p. 404).

A final caveat: one must take care in interpreting Freud's claim that the writing of the Interpretation of Dreams was part of his self-analysis. An initial writer's block had induced Freud to begin a systematic self-analysis. The latter proceeded for some time before Freud got back to writing the Interpretation of Dreams proper.

NOTES

1. The dates and places of the Congresses during the period of Freud's self-analysis are as follows: Berlin, September, 1897 (Freud, 1985d, p. 311ff. and 355 ff.); Breslau, December 1897 (ibid., p. 290); possibly in the environs ofVienna, May 1898 (ibid., pp. 314–315); possibly Aussee, July 1898 (ibid., p. 320); Baden, December, 1898 (ibid., p. 337); Innsbruck, April 1899 (ibid., p. 349).

2. I cannot forego making an association to the “separate” categories of the scientific and therapeutic: science and schizo ultimately come from the same Indo-European root, skei (to cut). In Greek, skhizein means to split; science more immediately stems from the Latin scire, to know—that is, to split or separate one thing from another. Thus philological examination unexpectedly sheds light on the possible restorative functions of such different entities as science and schizophrenia.

 

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From: Cahiers Psychiatriques Genevois, Special Issue (1994): 101–119. Reprinted by permission.