Stephen Black writes: >...In the course of the quiz, they asked a contestant what phobia >Freud had. The correct answer, they claimed, was that he was >afraid of ferns.
>Ferns???? I'm aware that Freud was a very strange man, >but this is too much. Can it possibly be true? I know Freud indicates somewhere that he had a phobia about railways, though I'm not sure it was a fully-fledged phobia, rather some anxiety about travelling by rail. A phobia about ferns is new to me. Chris Green writes: > If you do a Google search of "freud phobia ferns" you get 14,700... A great many of these, of course, are websites in which these words are mentioned unconnectedly (ferns come up in Freud's dream analyses, and there is also a surname "Fern".). A quick search fails to find one that provides a source for the fern phobia claim. One led me to Volume 1 of Ernest Jones's biography of Freud, but this turns out to relate to his supposed "railway phobia", of which Jones writes that though Freud occasionally called it a phobia, it never deterred him from making numerous rail journeys, especially in his younger days. Jones prefers to describe it as "Reisefieber" - "anxiety at departing on a journey". Beth Benoit writes: >Just to show the kind of thing our students find as "fact" on the >internet - that Freud was phobic about the number 62: >http://www.funfacts.com.au/sigmeund-freuds-personal-phobia/ >Where do these things come from? This one actually has some substance! (Though it was superstition, not phobia.) In his forties Freud thought he was going to die at 51 (Jones, vol. 1., p. 31, British ed.), based on Wilhelm Fliess's theory of periodicity: 51 = 28 + 23, the male and female periods respectively. (He carried this idea so far that in *The Interpretation of Dreams* he wrote: "51 is the age which seems to be a particularly dangerous one for men; I have known colleagues who have died suddenly at that age...") He later became superstitiously convinced he would die at 61 or 62. (I can't recall how he arrived at this belief.) In his biography, Peter Gay writes that Freud "felt haunted by these fateful ciphers as reminders of his mortality. Even the telephone number he was assigned in 1899 -- 14362 -- became confirmation: he had published *The Interpretation of Dreams* at 43 and the last two digits, he was convinced, were an ominous monition that 62 was indeed to be his life span." (Gay references a letter to Jung, 16 April 1909.) Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London http://www.esterson.org --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
