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By Root 1373 0

he had to do it himself. To some extent, however, he made Wilhelm Fliess, to whom he was developing a powerful attachment, a surrogate analyst. Fliess, although an ear, nose, and throat specialist, had many interests, including psychology, about which he formulated a number of theories, some brilliant and others mystical and absurd. Freud wrote regularly and often to Fliess, telling him what was happening in his research and self-analysis, and met him from time to time for what Freud called “congresses”—two or three days of intense discussion about his and Fliess’s work and theories. Fliess’s letters in response to Freud’s do not exist nor is there any record of what he said in their congresses, but it is generally believed that he helped in the self-analysis or at least that Freud clarified his own thinking in the course of telling the results of self-analysis to a trusted confidant.

Every day, for several years, Freud used free association and the examination of each night’s dreams to seek hidden memories, early experiences, and the concealed motives behind his daily wishes, emotions, slips of the tongue, and little memory lapses; he sought to understand himself and, through himself, psychological phenomena common to humankind. “This analysis is harder than any other,” he wrote to Fliess early in the process. “But I believe it has got to be done and is a necessary stage in my work.”30 Time and again he thought he was finished, only to discover otherwise; time and again he came to a standstill, fought to make progress—and made it, as a later letter tells:

I am now experiencing in myself all the things that as a third party I have witnessed going on in my patients—days when I slink about depressed because I have understood nothing of the day’s dreams, fantasies, or mood, and other days when a flash of lightning brings coherence into the picture, and what has gone before is revealed as preparation for the present.31

No wonder it was hard work. He was unearthing from his “dung heap,” as he called it, memories that had been deeply hidden because they were repellent and guilt-producing, such as his childish jealousy of a younger brother (who died in infancy, leaving a permanent residue of guilt in Freud), his conflicting feelings of love and hate for his father, and particularly a time when, at two and a half, he saw his mother nude and was sexually aroused.32

Ernest Jones, in his monumental biography of Freud, said that the self-analysis produced no magical results and that Freud’s neurotic symptoms and dependence on Fliess actually became more pronounced in the first year or so as disturbing material came to light. But by 1899 Freud’s symptoms were much improved and he felt far more normal than four or five years earlier. By 1900 the task was largely complete, although for the rest of his life he continued to spend the last half hour of every day analyzing his moods and experiences.

The self-analysis, imperfect though it was, had considerable personal benefit but yielded a far greater one, according to most Freud scholars. Through it Freud arrived at a number of his theories about human nature or confirmed theories he had been deriving from his experience with patients.

The most important of these was that children, even in their early years, do have powerful sexual feelings, which are particularly apt to involve sexual attraction toward a parent, usually of the opposite sex. But children sense that these desires and fantasies are so wicked in the eyes of their parents and other adults that they thrust them into the unconscious and forget that they have ever had them.

Now at last Freud understood why so many of his patients had told of being seduced in childhood. The “memories” they had unearthed were of childish fantasies, not of actual seductions.33 He had been on the right track; he simply hadn’t gone far enough to reach the psychic truth. Jeffrey Masson, an apostate psychoanalyst and ferocious Freud critic, has alleged that Freud gave up his seduction theory because it offended his fellow physicians and was bad