Word: freud
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...surgery was hardly a success: Emma's nose began to bleed regularly and profusely. A few weeks after the operation, another doctor found that Fliess had left over half a meter of gauze inside her nose. As Freud later wrote to Fliess, the other physician "pulled at something like a thread, kept on pulling and before either one of us had time to think, at least half a meter of gauze had been removed from the cavity. The next moment came a flood of blood. The patient turned white, her eyes bulged, and she had no pulse." However, with...
...aftermath of this fiasco, Masson maintains, Freud gradually and subconsciously convinced himself that Emma's bleeding was not caused by the actions of his friend Fliess, but occurred for other reasons. Freud came to believe that her spells of bleeding were Emma's ways of expressing a longing for his presence. Freud wrote that "her episodes of bleeding were hysterical, were occasioned by longing" and that "she became restless during the night because of an unconscious wish to entice me to go there, and since I did not come during the night, she renewed the bleeding, as an unfailing means...
Masson carefully traces this shift, chronicled in the letters Freud wrote to Fliess in the aftermath of the operation. According to Masson. "The powerful tool that Freud was discovering the psychological explanation of physical illness, was being pressed into service to exculpate his own dubious behavior [in allowing the operation] and the even more dubious behavior of his closest friend. Freud has begun to explain away his own bad conscience...
...other main influence on Freud's thought, according to Masson, was the criticism and pressure which he received after proposing the seduction theory in the mid-1890's. Standard psychiatric theory in the 19th century emphasized that much of patient's recollections are fantasies, and Freud's original challenge to this orthodoxy was greeted with disapproval. Largely ostracized from the psychoanalytic community. Freud gradually discarded his new theory in order to end his professional isolation, Masson argues...
...earlier chapter, Masson discusses the years Freud spent in Paris in the 1880's, where it is likely that he witnessed autopsies performed on young children who had been abused, raped, and murdered. To Masson, this means that Freud must have known that sexual abuse was a common part of many childhoods and only surrendered his seduction theory to criticism and his guilt over the Eckstein case. Indeed, Masson maintains that Freud was haunted by the seduction theory all his life, for he knew how widespread child abuse was from his time in Paris...