Re: Novel-like Books for Courses
On 10 August 2008 Bill Scott wrote:
>Although Mr. Esterson will probably disagree, I believe "The
>White Hotel" by D.M. Thomas is an excellent novel that is
>expository of Freud's thinking and its historical implications.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1550192&blobtype=pdf
I never got around to reading it, so this sounds like a challenge I should
take up. -:) Maybe I'll do so when I've finished reading Henning Mankell's
latest in the Inspector Wallander series!
There is a section in the BMJ article by Thomas (link above) in which he
quotes from the case history of Elisabeth von R. from *Studies on Hysteria*
(1895). It's worth a few comments!
Interestingly, Thomas was alert enough to recognise that "In his case
studies Freud is often fictionalising." Nevertheless, such is the seductive
power of Freud's writing that he has evidently been taken in by this
account, though the truth can be discerned from Freud's own words in the
very passage he quotes. The story that Thomas accepts is stated
unequivocally later in Freud's summing up of the case, where he writes, "we
recall the moment when she was standing by her sister's bed and the thought
flashed through her mind: 'Now he is free and you can be his wife'."
[Freud, SE 2, p. 167]. (Elisabeth suffered from intermittent pains in her
legs, and Freud 'deduces' from miscellaneous elements in her life story
that she was unconsciously in love with her sister's husband, and that the
basic cause of the leg pains was a "conversion" process that occurred when
she was standing beside her sister's death-bed: i.e., Elisabeth's
repressing of the alleged thought quoted above resulted in nerve pains in
her legs.)
In the case history Freud writes that "it had inevitably become clear to me
long since what all this was about" before he reveals the secret [p. 156].
This, as so often with Freud, amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Although he subtly contrives to make it appear that he had induced the
patient to reveal the 'secret', close reading shows that this actually
comes directly from Freud himself: "She cried aloud *when I put the
situation dryly before her* with the words, 'So for a long time you have
been in love with your brother in law" (my emphasis). Now this of course is
a win-win situation for Freud: If the patient accepts his 'solution', then
it's proven. If she doesn't (as here), then she is, as Thomas puts it,
"resisting like mad", and it is again proven.
One of the subtle ways by which Freud persuades his readers that the
patient herself was the source of the fleeting bedside 'thought' ("now he
is free again and I can be his wife") is by his first stating the 'thought'
as a fact that had actually occurred [p. 156], followed by his devoting a
paragraph to his explanation of the supposed feelings of Elisabeth that led
up to this incident, *before* giving his account of how he confronted her
with the 'solution'. [p. 157] It requires a close (and, dare I say,
sceptical) reading to reveal that it is there in the text that the
'thought' is actually an inference of Freud's, and that nowhere does he
state *explicitly* in the following paragraphs that she at any time
accepted his explanation, though he contrives to leave the reader with the
impression that she did. [pp. 157-159] (The section immediately after the
'revelation' is a masterpiece in the art of persuasion.)
Freud's procedure here is exactly as he describes in the theoretical
section of *Studies on Hysteria*, where he writes that "the principal point
is that I should guess the secret and tell it to the patient straight out"
(p. 281). Nevertheless, countless readers of his case histories have come
away from them convinced that Freud had induced the *patients* to reveal
the source of their symptoms.
Note that Freud does not say that the process of 'revealing' and 'working
through' of the alleged guilty thought removed the patient's symptoms: all
he says is the rather tepid, "This process of abreaction did her much good"
-- which sounds like the equivalent of damning with faint praise. He
records that a few weeks after the termination of the treatment Elisabeth's
mother wrote to tell him that she "had rebelled violently and had since
then suffered from severe pains once more" [clearly her own fault, then -:)
] and that "Elisabeth would have nothing more to do with me". However, the
following year Freud happened to see her at a ball and reports that he saw
her "whirl past in a lively dance". He also notes that although her
brother-in-law's connection with the family had "remained unchanged",
Elisabeth had married someone else.
A few concluding thoughts:
1. I put it to you (the jury!) that there is no serious evidence that
Elisabeth's intermittent leg pains were conversion symptoms arising from
her suppressing a fleeting thought that she was in love with her
brother-in-law at the moment she stood by her sister's death bed (nor,
indeed, that she was actually in love with him).
2. Had Freud been treating Elisabeth in 1896 (rather than 1892-93) can
there be any doubt that he would have analytically "traced back" her
symptoms to early childhood sexual abuse, as he did with every single one
of his eighteen patients in that period (having come up with the "seduction
theory" in October 1895)?
3. As I mention in a brief discussion of this case in my article "Freud's
Theories of Repression and Memory" (2003, pp. 148-149), Freud made it the
centrepiece of his second lecture on his famous visit to the United States
in 1909. This version of the story is now appropriately embroidered for the
occasion; he writes concerning the guilty "thought": "Elisabeth remembered
[sic!] it during the treatment and reproduced the pathogenic moment with
signs of the most violent emotion, and as a result of the treatment, she
became healthy once more." Such is the way that fairy-tale versions of
Freud's "cures" became current -- little wonder that Freud wowed the
Americans with his "Five Lectures" delivered at Clark University.
Incidentally, Thomas is in error when he writes of Elisabeth's "gradual
acceptance that she had been seduced". Nowhere in the case history is there
any indication that the brother-in-law had any romantic or sexual interest
in Elisabeth.
Reference:
Esterson, A. (2003). Freud's Theories of Repression and Memory. Scientific
Review of Mental Health Practice, Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall-Winter 2003.
http://www.srmhp.org/0202/review-01.html
Allen Esterson
Former lecturer, Science Department
Southwark College, London
http://www.esterson.org
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