What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [28]
The Nose on Freud’s Face
Sigmund Freud was not a big fan of the nose. He believed odor perception was vestigial, the sensory equivalent of the appendix. In his view, smell became obsolete when our evolutionary ancestors took on upright, bipedal posture and put distance between the nose and the ground. At the same time, Freud’s ape-man discovered shame and disgust in the exposure of his genitals. This led him to turn away from the stink of excrement and to suppress his sense of smell in general. To Freud, this was a vital precondition for the emergence of civilization—the repression of smell meant the repression of wild sexual impulses and their redirection to more refined behavior. Freud thought that children recapitulated the history of the species as they grew up, and thus that the infant’s early interest in smell fell away like embryonic gill slits. Freud’s leading American disciple, A. A. Brill, summarized the master’s view: “All children make good use of the sense of smell in early life; some of them, as we shall learn later, retain it even in adult life; most of them, however, lose it, so to speak, as they grow older.” To the orthodox analyst, psychologically mature adults move on and leave fascination with smells to perverts and neurotics.
Like many of Freud’s theories, his views on smell are difficult to summarize without making them sound simpleminded and ridiculous. The original texts consist entirely of a few sentences in a letter to his confidant Wilhelm Fliess, a German ear-nose-and-throat physician, and two footnotes in the book Civilization and Its Discontents, and are part of what historian Peter Gay called Freud’s “audacious, highly speculative venture into psychoanalytic prehistory.” Nevertheless, after becoming part of the bedrock of psychoanalytic theory, they helped devalue smell in the wider intellectual world.
It is puzzling that Freud, who found a sexual angle in every other facet of psychology, thought it had so little to do with the sense of smell. Is sexual attraction no longer an affair of the nose? Are modern women scentless and modern men oblivious, or vice versa? In a recent University of Texas study, men said T-shirts worn by women near the time of ovulation smelled more pleasant and sexy than T-shirts worn during a nonovulatory part of the cycle. Modern women, it seems, continue to produce a scent cue associated with ovulation and modern men continue to respond to it. This low-technology experiment could have been done in Vienna in 1930 or New York in 1932, had either Freud or Brill cared to test their theories.
Brill toed the party line when he wrote in 1932 that “the sense of smell unlike the sense of sight plays a very small part in the life of civilized man,” and “modern man has little need of his sense of smell.” Though surrounded by modern, civilized men, Freud and Brill never bothered to ask their opinion. The psychologist Paul Rozin and colleagues got around to it a few years ago. They asked people to rank the unacceptability of permanent loss of sense of smell, loss of hearing in one ear, and loss of the left small toe. According to about half the respondents, loss of smell was the least acceptable alternative. The average person is not as dismissive about the sense of smell as Freud thought he was. What could have motivated Freud to construct a psychoanalytic conjecture so flimsy it could be blown up with a simple opinion poll?
The experts think it was something, well, Freudian. The psychoanalyst Annick Le Guérer attributes it to Freud’s “repression” of his “transferential relationship with Fliess.” The anthropologist David Howes thinks Freud’s conflicted emotions toward Fliess led to his “denial of nasality” and a desire to “cut the nose out of psychoanalytic theory.”
I have a more straightforward hypothesis. Based on the facts of his medical history, I suspect Freud suffered from hyposmia. The repeated insults of cocaine, nose surgery, influenza,