On 9 August 2011 Beth Benoit wrote: >Thanks again for the really fun video and for the update >about Freud's purported erotic moment as a toddler on a >train. It does give one pause for thought about how he >may have occasionally (?) sculpted an event to fit his theory.
For the sake of brevity I omitted an important parenthetical ending to the sentence of Freud's that I partially quoted, without which his early rationale on the "discovery" of the Oedipus complex cannot be fully understood. To the report to Fliess (dated 3 October 1897) of the occasion of a train journey from Leipzig to Vienna with his mother when he was between two and two-and-a-half years old when "we must have spent the night together and there must have been an opportunity of seeing her naked" Freud added: "you inferred the consequences of this for your son long ago as a remark revealed to me." This evidently alludes to something Fliess had told Freud about his son Robert, who was only one year ten months old at the time of the letter. Freud writes "long ago", indicating the event must have occurred when Robert was a baby. With justification, Richard Webster infers that Fliess's report must have been that he had noticed his baby son had an erection, and associated this with (presumably) the presence of his wife naked at the time. (*Why Freud Was Wrong*, p. 254.) On such fragile foundations was Freud's Oedipus theory built, rather than the heroic "self analysis" of mythical psychoanalytic history. N.B. Unfortunately Richard Webster recently died at the early age of sixty: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jul/31/richard-webster-obituary Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London allenester...@compuserve.com http://www.esterson.org --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=11862 or send a blank email to leave-11862-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
