Part 1

Iistina

“Once again, I had wasted my time climbing to the fifth floor of this old apartment building in Vienna’s inner city but could at least be sure now that I had come to the right place…The slight old gentleman, his full white hair combed back, his expression an odd mixture of reproach, rejection and friendliness, opened the door…’I don’t give interviews,’ he said. ‘Come in.’…’My book is interesting only for experts,’ he said, surprised that I should think of writing about him. ‘In Vienna, hardly anyone is interested in psychoanalysis.” Serge Pankejeff, The Wolf-man, as even he would refer to himself when he called his interviewer Karin Obholzer. “‘This is the Wolf-man,’ ‘I was on my way over,’ I answered as astonished as he. ‘But that’s telepathy,’ he decided, delighted. ‘That’s something you will have to mention. But don’t write how you found me because then there’ll be no end of people coming here and bothering me.” Karin was intrigued by Serge’s biography, and her project to write an article about him bloomed into a book. “I couldn’t really have said why I found [his] book so fascinating or why I felt attracted to this man. For me, there was something romantic about his life, the story of a wealthy Russian aristocrat who had lost his fortune and had to spend the rest of his life as an émigré.” Visiting his apartment, Karin was at the beginning of years of interviews about his psychoanalysis, but they also talked about other things including his painting collection.”Time and again, he called my attention to a painting with the title What Is Truth? He explained that Russian has two words for truth, pravda, which means truth in the everyday sense, and iistina, for the truth that lies behind appearances.” As I reviewed this case study, and parsed out the different perspectives, it is Iistina in the ‘Wolfman’s’ story that is the hardest form of truth to uncover. Can we ever really know what goes on in another person’s mind? How much of our own mind fills in the gaps of what we don’t know? Welcome to Freud’s epic case study of the ‘Wolfman’.

Craving and discharge

Freud’s method of therapy encountered many difficulties including natural gaps in memory. There was also the distance between the analyst’s current sessions and the time of the patient’s first onset of an illness. At the time when Freud began analyzing Serge, he was in a “…battle over psychoanalysis.” He wanted to demonstrate that “the libidinal drives which my opponents would so like to deny are of paramount importance in the formation of neurosis…” Remember, the libido is the craving energy that a biological instinct needs to discharge towards an object. It can be heterosexual or homosexual, but the masculine and feminine inclinations don’t have to escalate towards sex all the time. They can include filial love, friendships and mentorships, but the possibility of escalation towards sex is there and it’s why not all sexual relations conform to one template of heterosexuals with people outside the family.

When the instinct is frustrated, there is pain, and a possibility to develop other mental illnesses depending on genetics, how many traumas there were, and the duration of the trauma. Pain is relieved when there is a discharge of grieving with catharsis, or if discharges are released on the original goal or replacement objects. [See: Studies in Hysteria: https://rumble.com/v1gtdvl-studies-in-hysteria-sigmund-freud-and-josef-breuer.html and Sublimation: https://rumble.com/v1gv2fr-sublimation-sigmund-freud.html] A traumatized or depressed person has to make changes to their environment to improve their situation so that healthy discharges of libido can increase well-being and peace. If a patient is intimidated or depressed, an improvement, or cure, would lead to assertiveness, flexibility and confidence. If sexual objects aren’t available due to rejection, widowhood, or a lack of opportunity, the patient has to find alternative cultural objects to setup the libido and discharge the energy, or pay it off. This results in creative projects being a source of fulfillment.

Being stuck in an intimidated or depressed state leads to unhealthy repressions that may lead to disease, violence against others, violence against oneself, or both. [See: The ‘Ratman’: https://rumble.com/v1gu9qj-case-studies-the-ratman-freud-and-beyond.html]. Freud’s theories of biological drives would be a challenge for him at this point, until The Ego and the Id, when he was able to add more coherence to his theories. Going back to his archaeology metaphor, Freud felt that the physician had to be “‘timeless’ in his approach as the unconscious itself if he wants to learn or achieve anything.” In Freudian theory, desire and trauma, can exist timelessly waiting for that payoff or a bout of grieving to relieve the tension. The analyst has to leave no stone unturned to make those dormant traumas come up to consciousness, and to make sure nothing is left over to continue bothering the patient after the analysis. The analyst also needs an attitude that doesn’t fear difficult cases, because they help to “reduce the treatment time in another, equally severe case.” In Freud’s case, he took his knowledge of Hysteria, Phobia, Obsession, Ambivalence, and Substitutions, and applied what he knew to this case. [See: ‘Little Hans’: https://youtu.be/pD0BdzAduK0]

Sergei Pankejeff: AKA The ‘Wolfman’

As Freud described his patient in his paper, From the History of an Infantile Neurosis, he saw patterns of passivity and an attitude of a “submissive indifference…He listened and understood but would allow nothing to come anywhere near him.” When Freud was making inroads in the therapy, Serge “suspended the work immediately to prevent further possibility of change and to maintain the comfortableness of the former situation. His timidity at the prospect of an independent existence was so great that it outweighed all the hardships of being ill.” Freud then described his transference strategy. “There was only one way of overcoming it. I had to wait until his attachment to me had grown strong enough to counterbalance it, and then I played off the [attachment] against the [timidity].” Freud used a deadline to motivate his patient. “…My patient recognized that I was serious. Under the inexorable pressure of the deadline that I had set, his resistance, his fixed determination to remain ill gave way, after which the analysis delivered up all the material which made it possible…to dissolve his inhibitions and eliminate his symptoms.”

Freud used a military metaphor to describe how difficult it is to deal with resistances of patients as if it were a “hostile army [taking] weeks and months to cross a stretch of land that an express train could cover in a few hours in peace time…” Because of the nature of psychology and the strange contents that arise, Freud cautions an analyst that “…there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.” As we will see, the numerous commentators of this case study, show how much more can be analyzed and how hard it really is to complete an analysis to satisfaction.

Like with his prior case studies Freud wanted to learn more about Serge’s parents. “His parents married young; it was a happy marriage, but the first shadows were soon to be cast by illness on both sides, his mother suffering from gynaecological complaints, his father from attacks of moroseness…” This resulted in neglectful parenting. One of Serge’s early memories, that Freud calls a screen memory, is of Serge seeing “himself standing with his nurse, watching his father, mother and sister being driven away in a carriage, and then going calmly back into the house.” He was cared for by a nurse who was “working class, uneducated and untiringly affectionate towards him. For her [Serge was] a substitute for her own son, who died young.” Later on, extra supervision was hired, of course…a governess, and she did not get along well with the nurse or Serge. Freud described the English governess as a “silly, cantankerous woman, and incidentally, a slave to drink.” Serge was considered a quiet child but after a summer holiday, his parents found him “discontented, irritable, constantly flying into a passion, and would take offence at the slightest thing, raging and yelling like a savage…” Both the mother and the grandmother thought that the influence and bickering between the governess and nurse “Nanja” were changing Serge’s character. When the governess was let go, there was no observed change in him. Serge had memories that his acting out was because he did not “receive two lots of presents at Christmas time, as he had a right to expect.” Serge was born on Christmas so he expected to get birthday and Christmas presents.

Obsession

Serge’s parents had two estates near the city and a big change for him was when both properties were sold and they moved to the city. Much of the chronology was mixed up by Freud’s patient as being either before or after the move, which Serge thought was when he was 5 years old. Among his complaints were his anxiety and his sister’s attempts to exploit it to torment him. “There was a particular picture book, which showed a picture of a wolf standing on its hind legs and stepping out. Whenever he set eyes on this picture he would start to scream furiously, fearing that the wolf would come and gobble him up. His sister, however, always managed to arrange matters so that he would have to see this picture and took great delight in his terror.” He also had ambivalent attitudes to other animals that included approach and avoidance behaviours.

Like in the ‘Ratman’ case, Serge developed superstitious rituals that appeared to Freud as “obsessive-compulsive neurosis. He had told me that for a long period of time he had been very pious. He had to pray at great length and cross himself endlessly before he could go to sleep at night. Every evening he would do the rounds of the holy pictures hanging in his room, using a chair to stand on, and bestow a reverent kiss on each one. It was somewhat out of keeping, with this pious ritual that he recalled blasphemous thoughts coming into his mind, as if planted there by the devil. He was obliged to think: ‘God – swine’ or ‘God – crud’. Once, journeying to a German spa, he was tortured by a compulsion to think of the Holy Trinity when he saw three piles of horse dung or other excrement lying on the road. At this time he used also to adhere to a peculiar ritual if he saw people who inspired pity in him, beggars, cripples, old men. He had to breathe out noisily, and under certain conditions also had to inhale deeply.” Serge had a good relationship to his father when he was younger but it deteriorated with his oncoming depression. Serge’s father began to favour his daughter, which hurt Serge and was the beginning of animosity towards his father. As he grew up, Serge would have periods where he felt better, which he attributed to the influence of his teachers and tutors.

Tearing through the veil

When exploring Serge’s dreams, Freud initially had trouble understanding them, including dreams where he tried to “expose his sister’s nakedness…to tear off layers of clothing…or her veil…” Eventually his patient recalled an early seduction where his sister asked “shall we show each other our bottoms?” Later while playing on the floor his sister “reached for his penis and played with it, saying incomprehensible things about Nanja all the while, as if by way of explanation. She said Nanja did this all the time with everyone, the gardener, for example, she would turn him upside down and the take hold of his genitals.” Freud guessed at what these memories were hiding. “They were intended to erase the memory of an event which later offended the patient’s sense of masculine pride, achieving this goal by replacing historical truth with its wished-for opposite. According to these fantasies he had not taken the passive role towards his sister, but on the contrary had been aggressive, had wanted to see his sister without her clothes on, and had been rejected and punished, and had thus fallen into the rage recounted so insistently by domestic tradition.” Freud was suspicious of Serge’s blame towards the governess, since so many other family members blamed her as well, and also because Serge wanted to defend Nanja from the governess. “His fantasies thus corresponded exactly to the creation of sagas, by means of which a nation which later becomes great and proud seeks to conceal the insignificance and misadventure of its origins.”

Now Freud didn’t think all childhood complaints of molestation were just fantasies. Often there was a mixture of fact and fantasy. “That his sister had seduced him was certainly no fantasy…In a conversation about his sister, a cousin, more than a decade older, had told him that he could remember very well what a forward, sensual little thing she had been. As a child of four or five she had once sat down on his lap and unfastened his trousers to take hold of his penis.”

Anna

Freud recounted the story of Serge’s sister, Anna, who also also needed help, maybe even more than him. “Boisterous and tomboyish as a child, she underwent a dazzling intellectual development distinguished by an acute and realistic understanding; she favoured the natural sciences as an avenue of study yet at the same time produced poems of which their father had a very high opinion. She was intellectually far superior to her numerous early suitors and used to make fun of them. In her early twenties, however, she grew morose, complained that she was not pretty enough and withdrew from all social contact. Sent away on a tour in the company of an older lady, a friend of the family, she told the most improbable stories on her return of how her companion had ill-treated her, yet her inward attention remained obviously fixed on the woman who had allegedly tormented her. On a second journey, which took place soon afterwards, she poisoned herself and died a long way from home.” Freud guessed that she had “dementia praecox,” which was the old name for Schizophrenia. [See: Daniel Paul Schreber: https://rumble.com/v1gu84v-case-studies-daniel-paul-schreber-freud-and-beyond.html]

He also surmised that there were other nervous disorders in the family, including Obsessive-compulsive neurosis. [See: ‘The Ratman’: https://rumble.com/v1gu9qj-case-studies-the-ratman-freud-and-beyond.html]. Freud’s analysis of Serge’s relationship to his sister was that of rival, due to her superior intellect and the attention she got from her father. As they grew older, and both were rebellious to their parents, they grew closer. “In the turbulent sexual agitation of puberty he ventured to approach her with a view to physical intimacy. When she rejected him with as much determination as skill he immediately turned from her to a young peasant girl, a servant in the house who bore the same name as his sister. In doing so he took a decisive step as far as his choice of heterosexual object was concerned, for all the girls he later fell in love with, often with the clearest signs of compulsion, were also servant girls, whose education and intelligence necessarily lagged far behind his own. We cannot deny that if all these objects of his love were substitutes for the sister who had refused him, then a tendency to demean his sister, to neutralize the intellectual superiority which had once so oppressed him, played a crucial part in his choice of object.”

Freud then analyzed Serge’s cold response to news of her death. “He forced himself to an outward show of mourning and was able coolly to rejoice in the fact that he was now the sole heir to the family fortunes.” There was stronger feeling later on. “A few months after his sister’s death he had himself made a journey to the region to where she had died; there he sought out the grave of a great poet whom at that time he idealized, and shed hot tears over the grave.” Serge at the time didn’t understand his reaction until he remembered that his sister’s poems were compared to the poet by his father. He even confused what happened to his sister, suicide by poison, with shooting herself to death. The poet was shot dead in a duel.

Castration Complex

Part of Freud’s theory is that of anxiety being connected with sexuality. Stress can inhibit and prevent sexual development to “higher levels.” The mind looks for parents or siblings, and if applicable, employees in the home for replacements. The typical experience described by Freud was early exhibitionism with masturbation that is then punished. Freud describes when Serge “began to play with his penis in front of Nanja, something that must be taken, as in so many other cases where children do not conceal masturbation, as an attempt at seduction. Nanja disappointed him, telling him with a serious expression that was a naughty thing to do. Children who did that would get a ‘wound’ there…As a result of the suppression of masturbation, the boy’s sexual life became anal-sadistic in character. He became irritable and took pleasure in tormenting animals and people, using this to achieve satisfaction. The principle object of torment was his beloved Nanja, whom he knew how to torture until she burst into tears. In this way he took his revenge for the rejection he had received at her hands, and at the same time satisfied his sexual desires in a form corresponding to his regressive phase. He started to be cruel to tiny creatures, catching flies so that he could pull off their wings, stamping on beetles; in his imagination he also enjoyed beating large animals, horses.”

Masochism

Serge’s sadism did not only go outward, but he was also able to aim it at himself. He had fantasies of boys being beaten on the penis and himself “being locked in a narrow room and beaten…In his imagination his sadism was turned against himself, veering into masochism. The detail of the sexual organ itself taking its punishment allows us to conclude that a sense of guilt directed at his masturbation, was already at work in this transformation.” Here Freud explains what he means about transformation. The instinct can change objective. “By passive aspirations I mean those with a passive sexual objective, but what I have in mind is not a transformation of the [instincts] but a transformation of their objective.” Freud then goes into how ambivalence arises when partial instincts contradict each other with none superseding each other. “Each would exist alongside all the others, allowing him to vacillate unceasingly in a way that proved incompatible with the acquisition of a fixed character.” By being in a passive sexual situation with his sister, Freud then surmises that Serge’s passive attitude is then directed towards his father. “By parading his difficult behaviour he wanted to compel his father to punish and beat him and in this way gain from him the masochistic sexual satisfaction he desired. His screaming fits were nothing other than seduction. In accordance with the motivation behind masochism, he would also have found satisfaction for his sense of guilt in being punished.”

The Wolf Dream

Like Freud’s prior case studies, he constantly has to go back further in time to get at some pathogenic beginning that needs to enter consciousness. Serge described a vivid dream that he recalled as happening when he was three or four. “I dreamed that it is night and I am lying in my bed (the foot of my bed was under the window, and outside the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know that it was winter in my dream, and night-time). Suddenly the window opens of its own accord and terrified, I see that there are a number of white wolves sitting in the big walnut tree outside the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were white all over and looked more like foxes or sheepdogs because they had big tails like foxes and their ears were pricked up like dogs watching something. Obviously fearful that the wolves were going to gobble me up I screamed and woke up. My nurse hurried to my bedside to see what had happened. It was some time before I could be convinced that it had only been a dream, because the image of the window opening and the wolves sitting in the tree was so clear and lifelike. Eventually I calmed down, feeling as if I had been liberated from danger, and went back to sleep. The only action in the dream was the opening of the window, for the wolves were sitting quite still in the branches of the tree, to the right and left of the tree trunk, not moving at all, and looking right at me. It looked as if they had turned their full attention on me. – I think that was my first anxiety-dream. From then on until I was ten or eleven I was afraid of seeing something terrible in my dreams…He always related this dream to the memory that in those childhood years he would express a quite monstrous anxiety at the picture of a wolf that was to be found in his book of fairytales.” Freud then associated the white colour of the wolves with sheep that lived near the estate. How the wolves got up the tree is associated to an old story from his grandfather of wolves chasing a tailor up a tree, each using the other as a ladder, with one wolf trying to revenge his lost tail at the hands of the tailor. The six or seven wolves are connected to a story Serge read ‘The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids.’ Freud ultimately associated the wolf as the first father substitute.

Behind the dream

The main part of the dream for Freud was the story of the tailor, where the lost tail could be associated with fear of castration. Tailors would also factor into Serge’s interest in dressing well, as a way to get back his pride. To get at an event behind the dream Freud separated out the different components of the dream.

“An actual event – occurring at a very early age – watching – motionlessness – sexual problems – castration – the father – something terrible.”

Freud came up with possible connections based on opposites that you can see in his theory of displacement. With displacement, unacceptable wishes are often best hidden to oneself and others by manifesting as an opposite. For Freud, the defenses in the mind are doing this all the time. Opposites are the best place, because synonyms could trigger anxiety further. The grandfather’s story of the tailor up a tree was made into an opposite with the wolves in the tree instead. The opposite of wolves watching from the tree, for Freud, was Serge’s attentive gaze. The wolves being motionless in an opposite form would suggest a violent movement. “In the one case distortion consists in the exchange of subject and object, active and passive modes, being watched instead of watching; in the other case it consists in transformation into the opposite: calm instead of excitement.” More insights surfaced related to Serge’s 4th birthday, which coincides with Christmas Day, where he expected 2 lots of presents instead of one. The presents in the dream were to be hanging on the tree, but “…instead of presents they had turned into – wolves, and the dream ended with his fear that the wolf (probably his father) would gobble him up, so that he sought refuge with his nurse.” The fear of being gobbled Freud connected with a joke Serge’s father made to him. Freud then moved to his familiar Oedipus Complex with the conclusion of Serge’s desire for his father. “Among the wishes that informed his dreams, the strongest one that stirred must have been for the sexual satisfaction he longed to receive from his father. The strength of that wish succeeded in refreshing the long-forgotten memory trace of a scene that could show him what sexual satisfaction from his father looked like, and the result was fright, horror at the satisfaction of his wish, repression of the impulse represented the wish and therefore flight from the father towards the less dangerous figure of the nurse.”

The Primal Scene

Freud started searching for something that would explain Serge’s intimidation through another familiar Freudian complex: The Castration Complex. This was the primal scene of witnessing his parents having sex, ‘coitus a tergo’ [from behind] and witnessing their genitals. This was while he was 18 months old sleeping in a cot nearby. Freud then attempted to surmise how the 4 year old would have processed those memory imprints. “…The positions he saw his parents assume, the man upright and the woman bent over, rather like an animal. We have already heard how his sister used to scare him during his period of anxiety by showing him the picture in his fairy-tale book in which the wolf is depicted standing on his hind legs with one foot forward, paws outstretched and ears pricked…He thought that the position assumed by the wolf in this picture might have reminded him of the position taken by his father in the primal scene we had reconstructed.”

Like with most dreams, they didn’t stay still and morphed into different ones. A similar dream happened when he was six or seven. “…when he heard that he was to have a new teacher the next day, he dreamed the following night that this teacher was a lion and was approaching his bed, roaring loudly, in the stance taken by the wolf in the picture, and once again awoke in terror. By then he had already overcome the wolf phobia and so was free to choose another animal as the object of his anxiety; in this later dream he recognized that the teacher was a father-substitute.”

Freud moved into the time of Serge’s puberty and discussed his desire to be in the man’s position. “From puberty onwards he felt a woman’s greatest charm to be the possession of large, conspicuous buttocks; coitus in any position other than from behind gave him scarcely any pleasure at all.” Freud then applied his theory that anal sex is a more archaic form of sexual pleasure. “It is part of the structure of a disposition to anal eroticism and of the archaic features which distinguish such a constitution. Copulation from behind is after all certainly to be regarded as the phylogenetically older form…According to our previous expectations, the dream should present the child, who is looking forward to having his wishes fulfilled on Christmas Day, with the image of sexual satisfaction received from his father, as seen in the primal scene, providing a model for the satisfaction which he himself longs to receive from his father…The wish-motifs in this dream are blatantly obvious; the superficial daytime wishing that Christmas and all its presents would come (dream of impatience) is reinforced by the more deep-seated wish, permanently present during this period, for sexual satisfaction from his father, which is initially replaced by the wish to re-experience what was so absorbing on the first occasion. The psychic process then runs all the way from the fulfillment of that wish, which has now become unavoidable, and hence to repression.”

Here Freud adds to the possibilities of what children can learn from the primal scene and clarification. Sexual organization for Freud can develop to a genital mode of expression or regress to an archaic anal mode. The juxtaposition of sadism of the active masculine position and the masochistic feminine passive position provide models of pleasure to imitate. The unacceptability of homosexual desires becomes repressed in the child to avoid rejection from the father. “…We must make it clear to ourselves that the primal scene does not give rise to a single sexual current, but to a whole series of them, a positive splintering of the libido. We must keep in view, moreover, the fact that the activation of this scene (I am deliberately avoiding the word ‘memory’ here) has the same effect as if it were a recent experience. The effectiveness of the scene has been postponed, and loses none of its freshness in the interval that has elapsed between the ages of 18 months and 4 years…During his dream he had reached a new phase of sexual organization. Up until then the sexual opposites for him had been active and passive. Since the seduction, his sexual objective had been a passive one, that of having his genitals touched, which regression to the previous stage of anal-sadistic organization then transformed into the masochistic objective of being disciplined, punished…The feminine objective now fell forfeit to repression, and had to be replaced by fear of the wolf.”

Christianity

One of the more amusing parts of Freud’s study is Serge’s attempt to demolish Christianity. As Freud described before, Serge could hold religious beliefs and atheistic skepticism at the same time. Both sides warred with each other. Freud traced his religious superstitions back to his mother and Nanya reading the Bible to him. “He struggled to come to terms with the suffering nature of the person of Christ, and then with the whole way in which his story fitted together. His dissatisfaction and criticism were directed towards God the Father. If he was omnipotent, it was his fault that people were bad and tormented other people, and then went to Hell for it. He should have made them good; he himself was responsible for everything evil and for all torments…In this way his critical faculties were awakened and he was rigorous and unrelenting in sniffing out the weaknesses in the sacred narrative…[He asked] Nanja…whether Christ also had a backside…He did not dare put…[the question to pious Nanja whether] Christ also shat…[He told himself] that since Christ made wine out of nothing, he could also make nothing out of food and was thus able to spare himself the need to defecate.”

These frustrations, continued beyond religious beliefs. Sexual organization to Freud can be incomplete and cause neurosis in the subject, and we can see some of his influence from Alfred Adler and ‘Masculine Protest’. “In sadism he was able to maintain the ancient identification with his father, in masochism he had chosen that same father as his sexual object…The gradual effect of the dream, which brought him under the influence of the primal scene, could have been to enable him to progress to the genital mode of organization, transforming his masochism towards his father into a feminine attitude towards him, into homosexuality. But the dream did not bring progress of this kind with it; it ended in fear. His relationship with his father, which should have led from the sexual objective of being punished by him to the next objective, that of being taken in sexual intercourse by his father, like a woman, was thrown back on to a more primitive level still by the protest of his narcissistic masculinity, and having been displaced on to a father-substitute was split off as fear of being gobbled up by the wolf, but was not by any means dealt with. Indeed, we can only do justice to these apparently complicated facts by maintaining our belief in the coexistence of three sexual aspirations, all focused on the father. From the time of the dream onwards he was unconsciously homosexual; during his neurosis he was at the level of [the oral mode]; the earlier masochistic attitude remained the dominant one. All three aspirations had passive sexual objectives; we find the same object and the same sexual impulse, but a split had occurred which caused them to evolve towards three different levels.”

Here Freud connects religion to sexual sublimation. “His knowledge of sacred history now gave him the opportunity to sublimate the dominant masochistic attitude towards his father. He became Christ, an identification that was facilitated, in particular, by the fact that they shared a birthday. This made him great and also made him…a man. In his doubt as to whether Christ could have a backside we catch a glimmer of his repressed homosexual attitude, for the significance of this brooding thought can only be the question as to whether he can be used by his father as if he were a woman, as his mother was used in the primal scene…The repression of his passive homosexuality corresponds to his misgivings that it is insulting to make a connection between the sacred person of Christ and outrageous ideas of his kind.”

Freud then wondered why Serge couldn’t notice the similarities between the abuse from his father and his own Christ-like passiveness. He also surmised that those masochistic tendencies conflicted with his homosexual impulses. God was the Father and he was Christ, but he wanted his real father more than an abstract God, so his criticism of religion was a way to hold on to his real father. “Thus it was the old love for his father…on which he drew for the energy to combat God and for the sharpness to criticize religion. On the other hand, this hostility towards the new God was not an original act but was modelled on a hostile impulse towards his father that had come into being under the influence of the anxiety-dream, and was fundamentally only the resurgence of the same impulse. The two opposing emotional impulses that were later to rule his whole life met here in a battle of ambivalence over the issue of religion. What this struggle yielded in the form of symptoms, his blasphemous ideas, the compulsion which came over him to think ‘God – crud’, ‘God – swine’ was also for this reason a genuine compromise outcome of anal eroticism.” He would of course punish himself for this blasphemous compromise. “He had either to breathe in the Holy Spirit or else to breathe out the evil spirits which he had heard and read about. He also ascribed to these evil spirits the blasphemous thoughts for which he imposed such great penance on himself. He was obliged to exhale whenever he saw beggars, cripples, or ugly, old and wretched people and he could not see how to connect this compulsion with the spirits. The only way he could account for it to himself was that he did it so as not to become like them.”

Serge had other role models in his life and that included an Austrian man who was an atheist who made convincing arguments that relieved him of some of his religious obsessions. Here Freud started creating a template for masculinity and how certain jobs, tasks and endeavours can provide an outlet for homosexual libido. The wolves in the dream were “a positive eruption of fear expressed at the feminine attitude towards men, which initially he had defended himself against by means of religious sublimation; soon after that he was to defend himself against it even more effectively, by means of military sublimation…Only as he succeeded through analytic therapy in releasing his homosexuality from its fetters was there a turn for the better in this state of affairs, and it was a remarkable thing to watch the way in which – without any urging on the part of the physician – each liberated element of his homosexual libido was eager to be brought to bear on life and attached to the great common concerns of humanity.” It’s as if masculinity, while borrowing a Jungian term, is an archetype of active endeavour and femininity is of passive support. Of course we know today from experience that both men and women can develop a mixture of both roles, and if the person is single they would by necessity need to develop both. It would be cartoonish to be 100% endeavour or 100% support.

Heterosexual template

Another dream involved a scene pieced together by Freud. The method he used was free association. The purpose of free association is to let repressed content to come up from the unconscious and allow painful latent material into consciousness. Then that material has to be connected to real events to let the conscious mind react and release the dormant emotions. “One day a memory of a kind came to the surface, hazy and diffident: very early on, even before the time of his nurse, he must have had a nursery-maid who was very fond of him. She had the same name as his mother. He was sure he had returned her affection. A first love, then, which had vanished without a trace. We agreed, however, that something must have happened then that was to be of importance later. Then he revised his memory once more. She could not have had the same name as his mother, that was a mistake on his part, proving of course that in his memory she merged with his mother. Her real name had come back to him by a circuitous route. He suddenly found himself thinking of a store-room on the first estate where fruit was kept after it had been picked, and of a particular sort of pear with an excellent flavour, a large pear with yellow-striped skin. In his language the word for pear was ‘Gruscha’, and this had also been the name of the nursery maid…Soon afterwards came the memory of a scene, incomplete but, as far as it went, distinct. Gruscha was kneeling on the ground, beside her pail and a short broom made of birch twigs tied together; he was there and she was teasing him or scolding him.”

“In the first months of therapy he had told me about his compulsive infatuation with a peasant girl from whom at the age of 18 he had caught the infection which led to his later illness. At the time he had been conspicuously unwilling to give the girl’s name. It was an isolated instance of resistance; normally he gave unqualified obedience to the ground rules of analysis. He claimed, however, that he was so very ashamed to say the name out loud because it could only belong to a peasant; a girl of better breeding would never have been given such a name. Eventually we learned that this name was Matrona. It had a motherly ring to it. His shame was obviously displaced. He was not ashamed of the fact that he felt these infatuations exclusively for girls of the most lowly birth, he was ashamed only of the name. If the affair with Matrona had anything in common with the Gruscha episode, then we could locate his feelings of shame back in that earlier incident…As he was watching the girl cleaning the floor he had urinated into the room; at this she had threatened him, no doubt playfully, with castration…When he saw the girl crouched down cleaning the floor, on her knees with her buttocks projecting and her back horizontal, he recognized the position that his mother had assumed in the scene of coitus he had observed. In his mind she became his mother, he was overcome by sexual excitement as that image was activated, and behaved in a manly fashion towards her like his father, whose actions he could then only have understood as urination. His urinating on the floor was actually an attempt at seduction, to which the girl responded with a threat of castration as if she had understood what he was doing.” Freud then connects the scene with Matrona. “He was walking through the village attached to their (later) estate when he saw a peasant girl kneeling at the edge of the pond, washing dirty linen in the water. He fell violently and irresistibly in love with the girl on the instant, although he could not even see her face. By virtue of her posture and her activity she had taken Gruscha’s place. We can now understand how feelings of shame applying to the scene with Gruscha could be linked to the name of Matrona…The action of the 2 1/2 year old boy in the scene with Gruscha is the first known effect of the primal scene, one in which he appears as a copy of his father, revealing a tendency to develop in the direction that will later merit the name ‘masculine’. The seduction forces him into passivity, although we were admittedly already prepared for this by his behaviour as an onlooker during his parents’ intercourse.”

Psychological bowels

Continuing Freud’s mechanical method of cause and effect, he zeroed in on Serge’s bowel difficulties as being psychosomatic. “…during his later illness he suffered from extremely persistent disturbance of the bowel function, though one that fluctuated with different causes. When he entered treatment with me he had become accustomed to receiving enemas, administered by a companion; he might not experience spontaneous emptying of the bowels for months at a time, unless there was sudden stimulus from a particular quarter, following which normal bowel activity would be resumed for a few days. His principal complaint was that he felt the world to be shrouded in a veil, or that there was a veil dividing him from the world. This veil was torn open only at the moment when the content of the bowel left the bowel after an enema, whereupon he would feel healthy again, and normal.” Behaviour of bowel evacuation has a variety to Freud that is missed by most people, or ignored. For example, when the hated English governess was present, Serge and Nanya had to share the bedroom with her. “Nanja noted sympathetically that it was always on these nights that he soiled the sheets, something that he normally no longer did. He was not at all ashamed of this: it was an expression of his defiance towards the governess.”

For Freud the bowel can signify hatred, though I doubt that it would be possible to avoid defecation for months at a time. It could also can signal identification for Freud. “At the age of 4 1/2, during his period of great anxiety, it so happened that he once soiled his trousers during the day. He was dreadfully ashamed, wailing as he was cleaned up that he could not go on living like this…It turned out that the words ‘he could not go on living like this’ were spoken in imitation of someone else. On some occasion…his mother had taken him along when she accompanied the doctor who had come to visit her to the railway station. As they walked she was lamenting her pains and bleeding and exclaimed, in those selfsame words, ‘I cannot go on living like this’, without imagining that the child whose hand she was holding would retain them in his memory. The lament, which he was incidentally to repeat on countless occasions in his later illness, thus signified his – identification with his mother.” The problem she had was Dysentery, but to the young child, different associations were made. “Under the influence of the primal scene he inferred that the connection ran as follows: his mother’s illness was due to the thing his father had done with her, and his fear of finding blood in his stools, that is, of being as ill as his mother, was the rejection of his identification with his mother in that sexual scene, the same rejection that awakened him from his dream…The organ through which he could express his identification with the female and his passive homosexual attitude towards the male was the anal zone. Dysfunction in this zone had acquired the significance of the stirrings of feminine tenderness, which it retained also during his later illness.”

Here Freud is showing that the body, or at least one that is capable of bisexuality, looks at masculine and feminine strategies for survival and procreation. When anxiety or punishment rises with a masculine strategy, the body can move into a feminine strategy in compensation. These strategies are there in childhood and adolescence and form part of sexual orientation. At the early stages, sexual theories that children have, in Freud’s time, involved birth of children through the anus. The anus becomes sexualized. As sexuality develops, anxiety towards certain strategies can regress back to older ones. The brain is conditioned by different sources of pleasure and when higher levels (more complicated and adult) aren’t viable, because of anxiety, obstacles or punishment, then the brain reverts to more archaic templates. And yes that means anal sexuality for Freud is an archaic lower level compared to heterosexual sex, even if he doesn’t designate homosexuality unredeemable, he looks at is as primitive. “It is part of the structure of a disposition to anal eroticism and of the archaic features which distinguish such a constitution. Copulation from behind – ‘more ferarum’ [in the manner of beasts] – is after all certainly to be regarded as the phylogenetically older form…He decided in favour of the bowel and against the vagina in the same way as he did later, and for similar motives, when he took his father’s part against God. The new explanation [of the vagina] was rejected, and he held fast to the old theory, which probably provided the material for his identification with the female, later appearing as the fear of a death brought on by bowel infection, and for his first religious scruples, such as whether Christ had a backside.” So these masculine and feminine templates co-exist like a collection. Freud says that “the unconscious does not recognize the word ‘no’; opposites coincide here.” This would influence his later theory of Negation, where there are many yeses in the unconscious, but with repression, only certain yeses are allowed to express themselves openly. “Negation is only introduced through the process of repression.”

At Serge’s infantile stage of 18 months, Freud controversially posits that “the child eventually interrupted his parents’ intimacy by evacuating his bowels, thus providing a motive for his crying…The fact that the little boy produces a stool as a sign of his sexual excitement is to be judged as characteristic of the sexual constitution that is already in place. He immediately takes up a passive attitude and shows a greater inclination towards later identification with the female than with the male.”

“Given that the column of faeces stimulates the erogenous mucous membrane of the bowel, it functions as an active organ, behaving as the penis does towards the mucous membrane of the vagina and acting as a precursor of the penis, so to speak, in the [anal] phase. The surrender of the faeces in favour of (out of love for) another person, for its part, becomes the model of castration and is the first case in which a part of one’s own body is renounced in the hope of winning favour from a beloved other. What is otherwise narcissistic love for one’s own penis is thus not without some trace of anal eroticism. And so faeces, baby, penis, all come together to form a single entity, one unconscious concept – if you will excuse the expression – that of something small that can be separated from the body.” Then the mind conditions a sense of pleasure with this template that then resides in the mind dormant until it can be active again when other templates aren’t active. One of the key observations that supports repression of different contradictory impulses is Freud’s ambivalence. “[Serge] at first expressed resistance, then gave in, but the one reaction did not cancel out the other. In the end two contradictory currents existed alongside one another, one of which abhorred the very idea of castration, while the other was prepared to accept it, consoling itself with femaleness as a substitute.”

Regardless of the lack of proof for this early anal-erotic experience, Freud counted this insight as a win with obvious therapeutic results. “We know how important doubt is to the physician analyzing a case of obsessive-compulsive neurosis. It is the patient’s most powerful weapon, his preferred means of resistance. For years, thanks to this doubt, our patient too was able to let the efforts made in therapy bounce off him, safe behind a barricade of respectful indifference. Nothing changed, and there was no way of convincing him. Finally I recognized the significance of his bowel disorder for my intentions: it represented the touch of hysteria that is regularly found to underlie any obsessive-compulsive neurosis. I promised the patient that his bowel activity would be fully restored; my undertaking forced his disbelief into the open, so that I then had the satisfaction of watching his doubt disappear as his bowel began to ‘add its voice’ to the work, as if it were an hysterically affected organ, regaining its normal function, which had for so long been impaired, in the course of a few weeks.”

Freud’s solution

The deepest strata for Freud is this early imitation of sexual pleasure from parents. “The third current, the oldest and deepest, which had simply dismissed castration out of hand, without entertaining even the possibility of judging whether it was real or not, could no doubt also still be activated.” Once we get to the second higher current the castration complex is beginning to develop, which appears to be a mixture of threat of punishment, and also an abandoning of masculinity when femininity seems more viable. Here the father threatens castration by not being able to share the mother, but also the aggressiveness of his sister and threats of castration from Nanya and Gruscha added to the emasculation. Freud ventures into the same territory as Jung did of a possible inheritance of the actions of ancestors, an even deeper strata. “…In the pre-history of the human race it was certainly the father who carried out castration as a punishment, subsequently reducing it to the practice of circumcision.” This connects with his theory of younger generations being competitors with the patriarch for family members as an original castration threat in Totem and Taboo which was also published around the time of Serge’s analysis. [See: Totem and Taboo: https://rumble.com/v1gsmvn-totem-and-taboo-sigmund-freud.html]

Freud then connects obsession and money to anal birth theories with feminine or (homosexual for a male) templates of sex. Since all our goals in the outside world can connect to social rewards, then money can be coloured by what the social goals are. Just like money can be exchanged, there are social exchanges. For example, Freud also looked at this fecal baby as an imitation of the mother who provides a child as an exchange for pleasurable attention. The fecal baby is considered an old or archaic form of sexual template that can co-exist with later templates, and when later developed forms of sexuality are under stress, older templates can be reactivated with the willpower mechanisms of the brain repressing its expression. The real complaint about not having enough Christmas presents was something else for Freud. “What was missing was sexual satisfaction, which he had taken in an anal sense. His sexual exploration before the dream had prepared him for the fact, grasped during the dreaming process, that the sexual act solves the mystery of where babies come from…In his identification with the female (the mother) he is ready to give his father a child and is jealous of the mother who has already done so, and may perhaps do so again. By way of detour demonstrating a common point of departure in their significance as gifts, money can now attract to itself the meaning of children, and in this way take over the expression of feminine (homosexual) satisfaction…The scandalous thought which occurred to him when he heard the news of [his sister’s] death in fact meant simply: now I am the only child and my father must love me and me alone. Yet while the thought in itself was entirely capable of becoming conscious, its homosexual background was so unbearable that it was easier to disguise it [to himself] as filthy greed [with the now larger inheritance].”

These older desires and intentions can be awoken when there is stress, passivity and indifference. Freud interpreted Serge’s childhood lucky birth caul, that he was told about by his parents, as being connected to the veil he felt during his bowel difficulties. “The veil shrouding him from the world and shrouding the world from him was thus his caul. His lament is in fact the fulfillment of a wish-fantasy, admittedly, of flight from the world. We might translate it thus: my life is so unhappy that I must go back to my mother’s womb…He wishes he were back in his mother’s womb not simply in order to be re-born, but so as to be reached by his father during coitus, to gain satisfaction from him, to bear him a child.”

It’s never simple when reading Freud. When he walks on cracked ice, he usually provides an out. Here’s one of the big outs that he applies for the primal scene. “For the child, just like the adult, can only produce fantasies with material that he has acquired from somewhere…In our case, the primal scene contains the image of sexual intercourse between the child’s parents….It would give us no proof of the reality of this scene if we encountered it in a patient whose symptoms…had emerged some time later in life. Such a patient could have acquired impressions, ideas and knowledge at a wide variety of points in that long interval of time, which are then transformed into a fantasy image, projected back into his childhood and attached to his parents. But when the effects of such a scene emerge in the child’s fourth or fifth year, he must have been present to witness it at an even earlier age…We must stick to our guns…either the analysis based on his childhood neurosis is a delusion from start to finish, or else the way in which I have portrayed it above is the correct one…Another factor is less crucial, however, and could be left aside.” Though I would expect most readers would find it more crucial, not less. Freud says, “the child might have observed coitus between animals, rather than between his parents, and then imputed it to his parents, as if he had decided that his parents would not do it any other way. This interpretation is supported above all by the fact that the wolves in the dream are actually sheepdogs and appear as such in my patient’s drawing. Shortly before the dream, the boy had repeatedly been taken to see the herds of sheep, and there he could have seen big white dogs like this and probably watched them copulating.”

The “I”

Around the time of this case study Freud was interested in Narcissism, [See: On Narcissism: https://rumble.com/v1gtgdl-on-narcissism-sigmund-freud-narcissism-1-of-4.html] and he connected it here with Das Ich, or The I. Freud associates one outcome of masculinity as connected with the I and it is narcissistic. Castration is symbolic of letting go of pleasure with the penis based on early childhood sexual theories competing against correct sexual knowledge that is learned later. The earlier theories are also considered archaic because they are based on infantile guesses. “We can see from the analysis of the anxiety dream that repression follows immediately after the knowledge of castration. The new knowledge is rejected because to accept it would cost the boy his penis. More careful consideration reveals something like the following: what has been repressed is the homosexual attitude in the genital sense, which had been formed under the influence of the new knowledge. This attitude remains preserved in the unconscious, however, constituted as a deeper, closed-off stratum. The driving force behind this repression appears to be the narcissistic masculinity of the genitals that comes into conflict with the passivity of the homosexual objective, a conflict for which the ground was laid long before. Repression is thus one of the outcomes of masculinity.”

Going further, Freud decouples bisexuality as the cause of neurosis and starts to flesh out the “I” and its far reaching influence. “It seems…obvious…that repression and the formation of neuroses proceed from the conflict between masculine and feminine aspirations, from bisexuality. But such a view has its shortcomings. Of these two conflicting sexual impulses one is acceptable to the I who sets repression in motion in favour of one of the two sexual aspirations. In other cases, such a conflict between masculinity and femininity does not exist; there is a single sexual aspiration present, which sues for acceptance but runs counter to certain powers of the I and is therefore banished. Far more frequent than conflicts within sexuality itself are those conflicts that arise between sexuality and the moral inclinations of the I. To emphasize bisexuality as the motivation for repression would be too restrictive, whereas conflict between the I and the sexual aspirations (the libido) covers all eventualities.” This is a layer of detail that Freud felt that Alfred Adler didn’t see. “Against the theory of ‘masculine protest’ as developed by Adler, it must be objected that repression by no means always upholds masculinity against femininity; in many whole categories of cases it is masculinity that is obliged to accept repression by the I.” One can see that as morality changes and people adapt to it, the world wars would have made certain forms of masculinity as being endangering to the entire human race, and the embrace of the feminine as a way to increase survival odds. The irony is that as femininity has gained in prominence, there’s a fear of going too far, where both men and women can see that a certain amount of assertiveness is necessary for survival. Finding that right balance that reduces both toxicity and political correctness will be a trial and error situation for everyone. When should we be assertive and when should we be passive? If one is a woman, how much passivity is too much? Women need assertiveness too. With all the different problems facing us, the answer is nuanced and skillful, not a blunt tool. Carl Jung’s Personality Types will show later on some of the different problem solving attitudes that work well in specific life challenges, but are inadequate in other environments.

Freud’s description of the “I” describes an internal battle where the “I” is battling against a variety of wishes and desires that want to be released. A precursor to an Ego (willpower mixed with fright) fighting an Id (craving).  “A more balanced evaluation of the process of repression in our particular case, incidentally, would challenge whether narcissistic masculinity is significant as the only motivating factor. The homosexual attitude that comes into being in the course of the dream is so powerful that the little boy’s I fails to control it and fends it off through the process of repression. To achieve this end the I enlists the help of the narcissistic masculinity of the genitals that is in opposition to the homosexual attitude. Simply in order to avoid any misunderstanding let me state that all narcissistic impulses work out from the I and remain in the I’s domain, while repression is directed towards those objects carrying a libidinal charge.” On top of that, religion to Freud is an attempt to follow a holy parent to get parental rewards of attention (heaven / nirvana / peace on earth), so that the cravings are controlled. If you think about it the internal prohibitions are about cultural prohibitions if people allow themselves free rein of their desires. At some point those desires will meet up with objects and people that cannot be shared. That’s why religious edicts like the Ten Commandments point out what happens over and over again: fights over scarcity. No matter what the environment is, if there’s scarcity, there’s a potential for conflict.

Ad Astra- Moon chase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH9NvOVil-k

For Freud, Serge’s internal battle is one of self-hatred, or masochism, which creates a passiveness that eventually triggers a feminine sexual response. Then the masculine part of the mind rebels against it. “If it had been masculinity that had triumphed over homosexuality (femininity) during the dream process we should now find an active sexual aspiration, already explicitly masculine in character, to be the dominant one. There is no question of this, however: the essential nature of the mode of sexual organization is unchanged, the anal-sadistic phase still continues in existence and remains dominant. The triumph of masculinity can only be seen in the fact that the boy reacts fearfully to the passive sexual objectives of the dominant mode of organization (which are masochistic, but not feminine). There is no triumphant masculine sexual impulse present, but only a passive one, and an unwillingness to accept it…We can describe the state of affairs after the dream, then, as follows: the patient’s sexual aspirations have been split, the genital mode of organization having been achieved in the unconscious and a highly intensive homosexuality constituted; above this (virtually at the level of consciousness) the earlier sadistic and predominantly masochistic sexual current continues to exist, while the I has altered its position, by and large, towards sexuality, anxiously rejecting the dominant masochistic objectives just as it reacted towards the deeper homosexual ones with the formation of a phobia. Thus the outcome of the dream was not so much the victory of a masculine current as reaction against a feminine, passive one. We would do violence to the facts if we ascribed masculine to this reaction. For the I does not have sexual aspirations, only an interest in self-protection and the preservation of its narcissism. The I protects itself from something it judges to be excessively dangerous, that is, homosexual satisfaction, by developing anxiety.”

Freud then describes the displacement of the father onto the wolf, and in a later dream, a lion. An example you can find in your own life of displacement is if you have a meditation practice and you catch yourself finding a word, or symbol that triggers pangs of low self-esteem, and the brain’s natural tendency to avoid the subject and to try to think of something else. Then obsessive rituals to control impulses and phobias can appear in a variety of ways. “We can say that the fear that goes into the formation of these phobias is fear of [emasculation]. This statement in no way contradicts the view that the fear arises from the repression of homosexual libido. Both modes of expression refer to the same process, in which the I withdraws libido from the homosexual wish-impulse, which is converted into free-floating anxiety and then allows itself to be bound up in phobias. It is merely that the first mode of expression also indicates the motive that drives the I to act in this way.”

Conflict with other modalities

The publishing of this case study was interrupted by the Great War and also an internal war in Freud’s International Psychoanalytic Congress. Freud weighed in on the debate in his On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement. In the ‘Wolfman’ paper, Freud debated with his defectors. He disagreed with Alfred Adler’s emphasis on power. “[He] subordinates everything, including the individual’s sexual attitudes, to motives of this kind, arising from the will to power and the drive to assert oneself. Without for a moment wishing to deny the validity of such motives of power and prerogative, I have never been convinced that they are able to support the dominant, exclusive role he attributes to them. If I had not seen the analysis of my patient through to the end, my observation of this case would have obliged me to modify my prejudice in the direction of Adler’s theories.”

In response to Carl Jung’s theories, Freud again mixes partial agreement with disagreement. “In acknowledging this [ancestral] inheritance I am in complete agreement with Jung [in The Psychology of Unconscious Processes, 1917], a work published too late to influence my own Lectures), but I consider it methodologically incorrect to resort to an [inheritance] explanation before one has exhausted the possibilities of [individual development]; I do not see why we should obstinately deny the pre-history of childhood a significance that we readily concede to ancestral pre-history; I cannot overlook the fact that [ancestral] motives and products are themselves in need of the light that can be shed on them in a whole series of instances drawn from individual childhoods; and finally, it does not surprise me to find that when the same conditions remain in force they again cause the same things to come about organically in the individual as they had done in ancient times, and which they then passed down in the form of a disposition to re-acquire them over and over again…I think we are all too ready to make room for them in our psychoanalytic evaluations. It seems to me that they are only admissible when psychoanalysis correctly observes the prescribed stages, and only starts looking for traces of what has been inherited once it has penetrated the layers of what has been acquired by the individual.”

A big part of psychoanalysis was to seek out what was interrupting the assertiveness and success of the adult in the present day and to follow it back to childhood via dreams. The unconscious is truly unconscious for Freud and dreams provide a pathway to reconstruct events that actually occurred. Desires are imitated in childhood and then continue alive in the unconscious in spite of successive repressions throughout childhood and adolescence. Freud responded to critics, mainly Jung and Adler, and said that if these unconscious desires are not brought to consciousness, then the effects of repression that are happening now, won’t be released. The dreams continue and so do the transferences onto other people. In Freud’s view, his detractors take parts of his theory and don’t go far enough. Freud saw his contribution was that he observed how people regress to old images, emotions and patterns when they find a present conflict. “Present conflict, turning-away from reality, substitute satisfaction in fantasy, regression to material from the past.” Freud points out another contribution he made where he “…left room for a second, progressive influence, which works forward from childhood impressions, showing the way to the libido that shrinks back from life…” The inhibitions of early life continue into adulthood. Freud then staked his claim with this particular case study as the one that should put doubt to rest, but this was the beginning of a fracture in Psychoanalysis and psychology in general. These fractures would return again and again leading to all the differing schools that we can see today. In reality, there was always more detail to be found beyond Freud’s descriptions of early life, and there was definitely more detail found in biology and genetics.

Remembering, repeating and working-through

The difficulty that Freud and his supporting analysts faced, and Freud’s updated methods to counter them, was published around the same time as his work with Serge, Remembering, repeating and working-through. “There is one special class of experiences of the utmost importance for which no memory can as a rule be recovered. These are experiences which occurred in very early childhood and were not understood at the time but which were subsequently understood and interpreted. One gains knowledge of them through dreams and one is obliged to believe in them on the most compelling evidence provided by the fabric of the neurosis.” The difficulty of course is the interpretation. How much of it is from the dreams and buried memories and how much of it comes from the analyst? Regardless, relief comes after resistances are overcome, because the resistances are painful. “After his resistances have been overcome, [the patient] no longer invokes the absence of any memory of them (any sense of familiarity with them) as a ground for refusing to accept them.” Of course, if the interpretation by the analyst doesn’t resonate, due to actual errors, then resistances, habits, rituals, and the mystery of childhood experiences, remain. With a free association method, Freud wanted to target screen memories, which are early memories that are reconstructed by the child at a later date. “Not only some but all of what is essential from childhood has been retained in these memories.” Further than memories in the unconscious, are actions. Sometimes “the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts, it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it.” In a great flourish Freud points out how these actions and transferences that are maladaptive have to necessarily point to the underlying pathology. “The patient does not say that he remembers that he used to be defiant and critical towards his parents’ authority; instead, he behaves that way to the doctor. He does not remember how he came to a helpless and hopeless deadlock in his infantile sexual researches; but he produces a mass of confused dreams and associations, complains that he cannot succeed in anything and asserts that he is fated never to carry through what he undertakes. He does not remember being intensely ashamed of certain sexual activities and afraid of their being found out; but he makes it clear that he is ashamed of the treatment on which he is now embarked and tries to keep it secret from everybody. And so on.”

For Freud, giving the permission to free association at the beginning often has patients clam up and say that “nothing occurs to me.” Yet the actions and behaviours repeat in real life. The repetition shows up in the transference and defense mechanisms used. When people use certain defense mechanisms they are always showing how they may have been used in the past. The transference helps the patient to remember, when it’s interpreted by the therapist in an accurate way. The defenses keep repeating in their forgetfulness, until it’s brought to consciousness and understood as a maladaptive tool. Then the patient can abandon it. Here of course, a good empathic therapist has to be there, or else why would anyone want to talk about what shames them to a total stranger? This is a target that has to be hit by all therapists, that the person has good fertile soil that can grow better things, if talking therapy is to have any value. “His illness must no longer seem to him contemptible, but must become an enemy worthy of his mettle, a piece of his personality, which has solid ground for its existence and out of which things of value for his future life have to be derived.” Sexuality, desire and aggression are those plots of land that the patient must finally believe are worth cultivating. One doesn’t have to repress dark emotions that can be used in better ways. “We render compulsion harmless, and indeed useful, by giving it the right to assert itself in a definite field. We admit it into the transference as a playground in which it is allowed to expand in almost complete freedom and in which it is expected to display to us everything in the way of pathogenic instincts that is hidden in the patient’s mind…The transference thus creates an intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from the one to the other is made.”

Patients also must realize that there are some pleasures with remaining in pathology, and they have to be seen as limiting, and not as rewarding as letting go of the pathology. As the pathology continues in therapy, Freud noticed some of the dangers of the outside world and the damage that can occur during therapy based on those defenses affecting life choices. “One best protects the patient from injuries brought about through carrying out one of his impulses by making him promise not to take any important decisions affecting his life during the time of his treatment – for instance, not to choose any profession or definitive love-object – but to postpone all such plans until recovery.” I would also add imitation, from René Girard to derive where some of these defense mechanisms and shameful desires were imitated from. If your garden has weeds, where did they blow from? Part of identity is realizing how much forgetfulness there is with parental and cultural influences. When the defenses and desires look borrowed, and inauthentic, then they are easier to see as alien and can gradually become discarded by developing desires in other paths. One has to realize, that even if there are genetic influences, there may be an array of developments possible. Unless the genetics points to only one development, the talking therapy may be able to help the patient develop on happier paths, even if the underlying pathology is not completely curable.

The working-through portion of Freud’s paper is the part of the treatment where the patient has to internalize the insights and deal with old habits. They have to recognize the forces operating inside them. “One must allow the patient time to become conversant with this resistance with which he has now become acquainted, to work through it, to overcome it…Only when the resistance is at its height can the analyst…discover the repressed instinctual impulses which are feeding the resistance; and its this kind of experience which convinces the patient of the existence and power of such impulses.” When patients return to the outside world, only internal knowing of mental experiences can create enough acceptance of their insights to prevent being engulfed by more uncertainty from the outside world and the many beliefs and suggestions contained therein. Of course therapists are always at the mercy of what they fail to explore, like the influence of Freud’s own personality in Serge’s treatment, but also how world events after the treatment can change the patient, and it did change Serge’s life forever.

Psychology before WWI

Like with the review of Dora and Freud, it’s impossible to separate the people from the milieu they were in. Serge was connected with the upper class in Russia, and the end of his psychoanalysis coincided with the beginning of WWI. The economic setbacks that naturally happen during a big war stripped him of independence. Margaret MacMillan sets the stage in The War that ended Peace sketching out the lead up to the war. “The coming of war took most Europeans by surprise and their initial reaction was disbelief and shock…With one or two exceptions, they had very little idea of what they were getting their countries and the world into…Most Europeans thought a general war was either impossible, improbable, or bound to end quickly. [Many Europeans] had grown used to peace; the century since the end of the Napoleonic Wars had been the most peaceful one Europe had known since the Roman Empire.” There were smaller wars, to be sure, but nothing compared to what was to come.

Sticking to psychological insights, Margaret has plenty of precursors to what would lead to WWI. “Russia’s leaders…had never forgotten or forgiven Austria-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia Herzegovina in 1908…Russia had failed to back its protégé Serbia when it confronted Austria-Hungary then and again in the Balkan wars in 1912-13. Now Austria-Hungary was threatening to destroy Serbia.” This put more pressure on Russia to not back down. Germany had similar pressures. “Germany had not fully backed its ally Austria-Hungary in those early confrontations; if it did nothing this time, would it lose its only sure ally?” Political brinksmanship had prevented war in the past, but this time it wouldn’t. “This time Austria-Hungary did declare war on Serbia with Germany’s backing; Russia decided to support Serbia and so went to war with Austria-Hungary and Germany; Germany attacked Russia’s ally France; and Britain came in on the side of its allies.” Deeper than all of this was the perception that one was treated better when one had commonalities, like with Nationalism. In a failing colonial world, people were looking for safe havens where their culture could be supported. Being on the wrong end of a colony meant worse treatment. Europe was prime for nationalist sentiment and it would be the replacement for the empire system. Of course those old interests would not go away and a threat of conflict was always hidden underneath the “Golden Age” views that some contemporary commentators saw of the years before WWI. Social Darwinism, a pseudo-science contribution from evolutionary thinking, emphasized race in a wrongheaded way that would be falsified by future discoveries in genetic science. Survival of the fittest could create a false sense of confidence for those who believed that they were special and could count on their natural superiority to win and dominate the world. Pride in military values mixed with Social Darwinism viewed conflict and struggle as a necessary way for “tuning [societies] up.” Purification through struggle and violence. Of course, Nietzschean “Over-man” self-development goals also added to the psychology of people before the war. One must overcome one’s faults, so the perception of war and struggle could be viewed as an opportunity for self-development.  

This sense of pride and contempt is an all human cultures. Humans have clashed on how things should be done in a society and it always intertwined with individual self-interest, and a need to vent frustration. René Girard had a conversation with Renato Rosaldo in Violent Origins, where they covered the old headhunting practice with the Ilongot tribe, and their desire to vent. Though headhunting was a practice throughout the ancient world and even extended into the 20th century. A key factor is dehumanization, which like eliminating pests, makes it easier to act on this practice. Dehumanization is based on including who is cooperative with the culture, and excluding people who go across prohibitions, or who do things differently. They are literally a pest. They always become a target, or scapegoat, for venting. 

“R: Well, I think that the idiom the Ilongot use is much more one of kinship. They say, for example, ‘We don’t want to think of this person as being like one of our kin or one of our brethren.’ They are making an effort to push the person outside the group. They describe the victim, for instance, as the spot where the person urinated, in a dehumanizing way. They no doubt have trouble killing their fellow humans, so there is an effort to treat them as nonhuman…These headhunters, in a way that’s quite unfamiliar to us, see anger as a source of vitality and energy. It’s enactment that is a key thing in this particular system. They don’t deny their anger; rather, it is for them enormously productive. Anger is the sort of thing that gets one up in the morning. Their notions of anger would be my starting point, rather than guilt or excuse…They saw headhunting as a way of venting their anger.

Midsommar – Pee Scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlNrNYxRWkw

G: Can we really consider that a culture in which it would be normal to take out one’s anger in headhunting, rather than going to play golf or poker, should be regarded with equanimity? Why should we not adopt the older view and say that these people should be Westernized?

R: And give up the bad habit?

G: Well, why not consider headhunting a bad habit? I really consider headhunting a bad habit, personally.

R: Let me tell you what I have to say about that. I am not here as an advocate of headhunting. I feel that it’s a bad habit.

G: You feel it’s a bad habit?

R: It’s a very bad habit. I was there for a year before I realized that they did take heads. I thought they had stopped immediately after the Second World War. Because when missionaries in the area told me that my companions had recently gone headhunting, I said, ‘Look, I’ve heard you guys take heads still.’ They said, ‘No! How could you possibly think this of me? I held your wife’s hand on the trail. I carried you across this bridge. I fed you. I’ve looked after you. How could you think that I would do such a thing?’ I said, ‘You’re absolutely right. I’m sorry I brought it up. So, tell me about how you used to take heads.’ It turned out that after I had been there a year, something cracked. We were going to a place, and a man said, ‘That’s where I took a head.’ Pretty soon everybody, with much embarrassed giggling, started to tell their headhunting stories. Within about three weeks, I realized that every man there above the age of eighteen had taken a head.” Western cultures have felt that their technology was a sign of superiority, but it simply helped to escalate damage. Girard talks about westernization, but what he must mean is a Christian influence, but history has plenty of examples of Christianity failing to stop war and sometimes supporting it. The desire to vent is in all of us and Westernization may remove headhunting only to produce another version of the same thing. Instead of headhunting, WWI produced The Battle of the Frontiers, where in one day 27,000 soldiers died. 

Margaret describes the escalation as “science and technology which had brought so much benefit to humankind in the nineteenth century also brought new and more dreadful weapons. National rivalries fueled an arms race which in turn deepened insecurities and so added yet more impetus to the race. Nations looked for allies to make up for their own weaknesses…” The build up of arms was also paralleled with army reserve plans that would allow an army to be called up quickly when needed. The fear that your enemy could win a war faster than you are able to mobilize your army added to the arms race beyond weaponry and technology. All the players before the war were worried that they could fall behind their rivals. The tumult of social revolution was happening during this time. The pressure to replace empires with nations, to improve social conditions through voting rights for women and burgeoning socialist thought, made leaders of the old regimes worried that violent revolution could happen. With the French Revolution as a precedent, how dangerous to the powers-that-be would a new revolution be? Margaret hints the tactic of scapegoating could have been involved when she questions “could war be a way of bridging divisions at home, uniting the public in a great wave of patriotism?” A big part of war tactics is to unite people through scapegoating and targeting a common enemy as René Girard pointed out. If people are distracted by war, then their more local rivalries and social protests give way to the new task of defending the country.

As René pointed out, bigger conflicts stem from smaller, factional, or even individual frustrations and scandals. I would emphasize more the leadership in nations and empires. Those who can make decisions to go to war. They do need support, but depending on how much democracy there really is, those in power can create a lot of pressure. If they make the choice to go to war, much of the population can only react. Unless every war is put to a referendum, those without power have an uphill climb to resist the social pressure, and in some cases they may be punished.

A Hidden Life trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJXmdY4lVR0

Those who are patriotic, or just looking for a place to vent, may find the mobilization a distraction that they are greatly interested in. The solution, in this case a military solution, can be a uniting answer that engulfs the smaller fragmented interests and plans, to be able to mobilize the emotions of the many towards a common enemy. If I don’t like the leader of my country, or a closer rival in my life, I may fear the unknown threat that comes from elsewhere much more. If I feel tired of local rivalry, then allying with my former rivals against a more distant enemy can provide a lot of relief close to my own concerns.

Then when we add the prior individual psychology we just laid out, of self-improvement and overcoming one’s own faults through struggle, individuals are able to view themselves as heroes without being able to imagine that the enemy feels the exact same way. Ironically, like in sports, each side feels they need the enemy to advance their goals by winning at another’s expense. There’s a great pleasure in thinking about the rewards of winning the land and spoils of another country, and an equally great opposite fear of the consequences of losing one’s own country. The slippery part of trying prevent future wars and conflicts is that each side is blinded by the belief that they are the protagonist, because of how much they can lose. The permutations of oppressor and oppressed can exist in any social institution and conflict can ignite in so many different ways. Our brains make excuses for our interests that don’t allow us to budge, because of the fear that if we give in to accusations, and claims, how much are we going to lose? Will we lose everything, including our country? The fear of loss and the tantalizing prospect of winning locks the brain into mobilization. Margaret says, “the war, when it finally came, was so frightful that a search for the guilty started which has continued ever since. Through propaganda and judicious publication of documents every belligerent country proclaimed its own innocence and pointed its finger at the others.” In this tinderbox, all one needed was a match.

The Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

That match was a Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip. His story is a key to understanding violence, and the lesson we all must learn to prevent ourselves from being surprised over and over again by conflicts. How many times do we have to be surprised to learn the lesson? If substitutes for war aren’t consistently chosen, then the pattern repeats. Marginalized people who feel out of step in a changing society, who feel belittled, insulted, slighted, jealous and powerless, can stew in their problems and offer little trouble, but in some cases they can also be a dangerous channel for the frustrations of entire nations and animate revolutions and war. When the powerful ridicule or otherwise ignore the underdog, they create a blindness to the danger they are creating. The over-dog often has to insult the pride of the underdog in the hopes that fear will make them tolerate slights and stay in the powerless position indefinitely. If enough time passes with no major responses, the over-dog can get complacent, just like sports dynasties that collapse. But the pleasure of revenge, a pride in the underdog that can’t back down, because of the fear of further losses and suffering accompanying inaction, motivates underdogs in desperation and surprises the over-confident over-dog. It then triggers the wounded pride of the over-dog creating an escalation. Remember that pride, possibly connected with Serotonin, feels really good and it feels really bad to back away from pride and to let it go. Our self-esteem and the ability to regulate it requires finding evermore sources of goals, tasks, performances, employment and achievements to feel good about ourselves. Some people even commit suicide when they lack a sense of pride for long periods of time. Others resort to addictions. There’s a resistance to let go of it, and people are sometimes willing to die to gain back that fantastic feeling. Pride is Godly and it commands the respect of others. Many people will not take notice of the powerless and give them respect, until they use force to take their own share of power. And of course, if the underdog wins long enough, they become an over-dog with the same consequences attached to over-confidence and a lack of respect for others.

John Keegan in In the First World War details how the match was lit. Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Habsburgs, arrived in Bosnia on the 25th of June 1914 to supervise summer manoeuvres. “After the manoeuvres concluded, on the 27th of June, he drove next morning with his wife to the provincial capital, Sarajevo, to carry out official engagements. It was an ill-chosen day: the 28th of June is the anniversary of the defeat of Serbia by the Turks in 1389, Vidov Dan, the event from which they date their long history of suffering at the hands of foreign oppressors. The role of oppressor, after the retreat of the Ottoman Turks, had been assumed, in the eyes of nationalist Serbs, by the Habsburgs.” The provincial administration warned [Franz] that his visit was unwelcome and might be dangerous. Indeed he did find it dangerous. “On the Archduke’s way to the residence of the provincial governor, one of the terrorists threw a bomb at the car carrying Franz Ferdinand and his wife but it bounced off, exploding under the car following and wounding an officer occupant. The imperial party proceeded on its way. Three-quarters of an hour later, however, en route to visit the casualty in hospital, the archducal couple’s chauffeur took a wrong turning, and while reversing, came to a momentary halt. The stop brought the car opposite one of the undetected conspirators, Gavrilo Princip, who was armed with a revolver. He stepped forward and fired.” It was reported that at the Governor’s residence Franz’s final words were “Sophie, Sophie! Don’t die! Live for our children!” followed by six or seven utterances of “It is nothing,” followed by a choking sound caused by hemorrhage. 

“The assassins themselves and their immediate circle were mostly young Serb and Croat peasant boys who had left the countryside to study and work in the towns and cities of the Dual Monarchy and Serbia. While they had put on suits in place of their traditional dress and condemned the conservatism of their elders, they nevertheless found much in the modern world bewildering and disturbing. It is hard not to compare them to the extreme groups among Islamic fundamentalists such as Al Qaeda a century later. Like those later fanatics, the Young Bosnians were usually fiercely puritanical, despising such things as alcohol and sexual intercourse. They hated Austria-Hungary in part because they blamed it for corrupting its South Slav subjects. Few of the Young Bosnians had regular jobs. Rather they depended on handouts from their families, with whom they had usually quarreled. They shared their few possessions, slept on each other’s floors, and spent hours over a single cup of coffee in cheap cafés arguing about life and politics. They were idealistic, and passionately committed to liberating Bosnia from foreign rule and to building a new and fairer world. Strongly influenced by the great Russian revolutionaries and anarchists, the Young Bosnians believed that they could only achieve their goals through violence and, if necessary, the sacrifice of their own lives.” For Margaret, Franz Ferdinand was “the one man close to the Emperor who might have counseled against the war.” Regardless, the leaders in Europe did not want to back down and declarations of war created a chain reaction throughout the summer. The world was about to change. In Vienna Serge satisfied his curiosity of the assassination news. He witnessed, a now old aristocratic tradition of the funeral procession, that could also be a symbol for the social divisions that people were wanting to see have its own funeral. “I took a taxi drove to Mariahilferstrasse, where there were already many carriages and automobiles waiting for the funeral procession. It was raining. Finally in the light of the flickering torches I saw two hearses, one following the other with a considerable distance between them. I was told the purpose of this was to demonstrate that the Archduke was married to one not of equal birth.” Serge was on his own and had to take what therapeutic improvement he had into the world as it was.

Part 2

Early memories

Serge’s autobiography The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man described a lot of challenges that would affect any person, not just him, and is a good companion piece to Freud’s paper. His earliest memories included memories of illness. “I dimly remember that it was summer and I was lying in the garden, and although I had no pain I felt extremely miserable, because of the high fever, I suppose…I have been told that in my early childhood I was a quiet almost phlegmatic child, but that my character changed completely after the arrival of the English governess, Miss Oven. Although she was with us only a few months, I became a very nervous, irritable child, subject to severe temper tantrums.”

Another memory was of Serge’s parents who went on a trip abroad. “My parents were often away, my sister and I were left mostly under the supervision of strangers, and even when our parents were home we had little contact with them.” His parents left “both Miss Oven and my Nanya to our maternal grandmother, who unfortunately did not really assume this responsibility.” Later on Serge called Miss Oven “a severe psychopath or often under the influence of alcohol…I can remember, and our grandmother confirmed this, that angry quarrels broke out between my Nanya and me on the one side and Miss Oven on the other. Evidently Miss Oven kept teasing me, and knew how to arouse my fury, which must have given her some sort of sadistic satisfaction.” 

Serge’s memories, like for most people, shift and change. Certain underlying patterns of who he liked or disliked would remain the same, but details like the story that scared him in Freud’s analysis The Wolf and the seven little kids morphed into a similar story Little Red Riding Hood. “Unlike me, Anna got on with Miss Oven fairly well, and even seemed to enjoy it when Miss Oven teased me. Anna began to imitate Miss Oven and teased me, too. Once she told me she would show me a nice picture of a pretty little girl. I was eager to see this picture, but Anna covered it with a piece of paper. When she finally took the piece of paper away, I saw, instead of a pretty little girl, a wolf standing on it’s hind legs with his jaws wide open, about to swallow Little Red Riding Hood. I began to scream and had a real temper tantrum. Probably the cause of this outburst of rage was not so much my fear of the wolf as my disappointment and anger at Anna for teasing me.”

Serge described his mother in a more adult sense. “Although she did not suffer from depression, in her youth she…imagined she had various illnesses which she did not have at all. In fact she lived to a considerable age of eighty-seven…Since my mother, as a young woman, was so concerned about her health, she did not have much time left for us. But if my sister or I was ill, she became an exemplary nurse. She stayed with us almost all the time and saw to it that our temperature was taken regularly and our medicine given us at the right time.” Serge learned about religion from his mother and Nanya. His doubts about God’s omnipotence, not being able to stop evil, made him feel guilty that it was a terrible sin to doubt. Not knowing if there was a God or not influenced Serge to play it safe with faith. Ambivalence between faith and reason was with him throughout his life.

Another important memory related to Serge’s sister is in the autobiography. “My sister and I both liked to draw. At first we used to draw trees, and I found Anna’s way of drawing little round leaves particularly attractive and interesting. But not wanting to imitate her I soon gave up tree drawing. I began to draw horses true to nature, but unfortunately every horse I drew looked more like a dog or a wolf than a real horse.” Serge lived on an estate that grew crops and raised sheep. The white wolves, who looked more like sheep dogs, may have influenced his dream. His memory of those sheep was that 200,000 of them were inoculated with a wrong serum and died.

The Wanderer

Between Serge’s parents wandering around and he himself involved in moves, he was a wanderer from the beginning. I found photos of his former estate, Dubiecki Manor, that was purchased by his father one year before Serge’s birth. It’s a ruin now in modern Ukraine, nicknamed The Wolf Lair, but one can imagine the tree he saw out the window, like a Freudian psycho-archaeologist. Which window did he look out of? What were the walnut trees like back then? “We lived on an estate where I was born only in the winter. Our summer home was in Tyerni, a few miles away. Every spring we moved to Tyerni, and our luggage followed us in numerous wagons. In Tyerni, we had a big country house in a beautiful old park. Trips between the estate on the Dnieper and Tyerni took place during the summer.”

The big emotional move for Serge was his first permanent move south. “We moved to Odessa when I was five years old. At that time there were no train connections between our estate and Odessa. One had first to take a little river boat down the Dnieper to Kherson, which took the entire night. Then one had to spend a day and a night in Kherson, and early the following morning continue the journey to Odessa, this time on a larger ship able to weather the possible storms on the Black Sea…My father bought a villa in Odessa, opposite the municipal park which extended to the shore of the Black Sea. This villa had been built by an Italian architect in the style of the Italian Renaissance. Almost at the same time my father acquired a large estate in southern Russia…Only after we were living in Odessa did I learn that my father had sold our estate. I cried and felt most unhappy that our life on the estate, where we were so close to nature, had come to an end, and I would now have to get used to a large and strange city. I learned later from my mother that my father, too, soon regretted the sale, as after a few years our former estate became a city. This recognition that he had made a mistake is said to have precipitated my father’s first attack of melancholia.”

“A few years later my father purchased a second estate in White Russia of about 130,000 acres. It bordered on the Pripet River, a tributary of the Dnieper. Although White Russia lay in the western part of Russia bordering on Poland and Lithuania, it was at the time, especially in comparison with southern Russia, a very backward region. Primeval forests, ponds, lakes large and small, and many bogs impressed one as a remnant of nature still untouched by man. There were wolves in the forests. Several times every summer a wolf-hunt was organized by the peasants of adjacent villages. During my high school  years, I spent a part of my summer holidays on this estate in White Russia and felt myself transposed into the past of hundreds of years ago.”

Serge described his uncles and their different personalities. “Alexis, was a sickly man whose first marriage went on the rocks and ended in divorce. He then married a Polish woman and had two sons. This second marriage was a very happy one. Uncle Alexis was a quiet and unassuming man who kept busy looking after his estate and playing chess, his great hobby. He did this in a thoroughly scientific fashion, one might say.”

This uncle went from sad to happy, but unfortunately his other uncle went in the opposite direction. Uncle Peter, had a sunny happy disposition, but “soon [he] began to show signs of most peculiar behaviour and to express himself no less strangely. At first his brothers were simply amused, as they did not take his changed behaviour seriously and considered it merely harmless whims. But soon they, too, realized that this was a serious matter. The famous Russian psychiatrist Korsakoff was consulted, who, alas, diagnosed this as the beginning of a genuine paranoia. So Uncle Peter was confined in a closed institution. However, as he had a large state in the Crimea, his brothers finally arranged for him to be taken there where he lived many years as a hermit. Although Uncle Peter had studied agriculture, he later wished to devote himself exclusively to historical research. All these plans, of course, came to nothing, because of his delusions of persecution.”

Nanya ended up living as a pensioner with the family, as well as a French governess who seemed to know the secret of happiness, which is concentration. “We visited her from time to time and always found her in the best of spirits. One never had the feeling that she was unhappy or lonely, as she was always busy with little things that absorbed her entire attention.”

New Year’s Day Guided Meditation: https://rumble.com/v1gvmab-new-years-day-guided-meditation.html

Another influence in Serge’s religious life was an Austrian tutor who was an atheist. Being around him allowed Serge to accept that his religious doubts were personal and it was up to us individually to decide if we want to have faith. The problem with Serge was how to deal with the transference, that for so many people, keeps them feeling secure. “…What filled the vacuum thus created?…Perhaps it was a mistake that I took the loss of my religion too lightly, and thus created a vacuum which was only partially and inadequately filled.” This would be a deep question that would resound for the rest of his life. How does one stop the search for a parental replacement and feel secure with oneself? The aimlessness wasn’t affecting only Serge. His sister Anna seemed to feel isolated and lost.

Anna’s trip

“During the two weeks which Anna spent with me on our estate I did not notice anything extraordinary in her behaviour. It struck me as strange, however, that she suggested that I accompany her to the Caucasus, although she knew that I had enrolled in the Law School of Odessa University and that the lectures were just about to begin. When I mentioned this to Anna, she did not insist but she made me promise to write her a letter one week after her departure. This also seemed somewhat strange to me, but I did not attribute any special significance to her request…I saw Anna off at the boat which was to take her and her companion to Novorossysk in the northern Caucasus. We took leave of each other this time with very special warmth. As the steamer took off from the dock, Anna stood in the stern of the ship and waved to me until I lost sight of her. I stayed on the dock a while longer, watching the steamer as it left the harbor and moved out into the open sea.” 

“Exactly one week after Anna’s departure, I wrote her a letter as I had promised. Two or three weeks later we received news that Anna had fallen severely ill, and soon after came the news of her death…We later learned that my sister had taken poison. Following this she had suffered severe pains for two days, but nevertheless she had not told anybody what she had done. Only when the pain had become unbearable did she ask for a doctor. When he arrived she showed him the little bottle which had contained mercury and which had a warning label of a skull on the outside. Apparently this bottle had come from the laboratory which Anna had setup at home for her studies in natural science. Now after attempting suicide she wanted to go on living. There are evidently cases in which you have to be face to face with death to regain your interest in life and your desire to live. At first it looked as if the doctors had succeeded in saving Anna, and she was even said to be out of danger. But after two weeks heart failure set in and caused her death.”

After the shock of her death Serge ruminated on reasons why she would do that. “In our childhood it had been said that Anna should not have been born a girl but a boy. She had great will power and a strong sense of direction, and she always succeeded in evading the influence and the authority of her governesses. As she was growing up, Anna’s feminine traits began to appear. Apparently she could not cope with them and they turned into pathological inferiority complexes. She was enchanted with the classical ideal of beauty with which she contrasted herself. She imagined that she had no feminine charm, which was not at all true, and that if a man were to marry her he would do so for the sake of her money only, since she felt, among other things, that she was not attractive to anyone.”

Rich Woman – Plant and Krauss: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52YxdYmLq24

Late in life during his interview with Karin, Serge recounted more details of his sister. “She was aggressive, and that is the reason the complex did not go away, somehow continued to have effects…There was a childhood seduction when she played with my member. That’s something very important when it happens in childhood. I was very small when this seduction took place. It must have been before my fifth birthday because my father sold that estate when I was five. I can remember that we had sat down between the doors and she played with my penis. But must that necessarily have such consequences, or is it already a sign of sickness that something like that has consequences? Perhaps it also happened to other little boys and had no effect, I don’t know.

O: Most children do have sexual experiences.

W: So you see, that sort of thing happens, it’s no reason for someone to turn into a neurotic. It had no consequences. I’ll admit that it wasn’t as systematic as what my sister did. But you see, when we looked at those pictures of naked women, I pressed a little against her…Freud describes that…I remember that I felt like expressing something sexual and moved closer to my sister. In any event, she got up and left…It was normal. She couldn’t have done anything else, otherwise it would really have been incest. It should not have such consequences…and that must not happen between brother and sister…and that should have put an end to the matter. Well, this sister complex is really the thing that ruined my entire life. For those women who resemble my sister, I mean as regards social position or education, well, that was incest again. There may also be an inheritance of these psychological illnesses, but we won’t discuss that…All she ever really did was sit around with a book. She had no interest whatever in clothes. She really should have been a man. It is a mystery to me why my sister killed herself. She was so talented. I cannot remember my sister except reading. She always said that she was no classical beauty. But then, who is? She certainly wasn’t ugly. Do you remember her picture? She was fairly pretty. She did nothing for her appearance, nothing. And then that horrible death, mercury. It was horrible torture, her teeth fell out. Why does someone do a thing like that?…There would have been people to take an interest, but she didn’t care for them, and then she always thought they wanted her for her money.” Later Serge recounts an important story of his sister running away with the daughter of the chief gardener. They had the idea that they wanted to hire themselves out as maids. She later said “‘being a maid is really the best profession. You do your work and the rest of the time is on your own…’ It could be said that Anna’s tragedy, in spite of her intellectual gifts, consisted in her attempt to suppress her female nature and that she failed in this attempt. Of course, I am referring not to conscious acts but to a mechanism entirely hidden from her conscious mind.”

Grief travel

After Anna’s death Serge noticed his father move his interest from his daughter to him. Serge also had depression and thoughts of suicide. “I had fallen into such a state of melancholy after Anna’s death that there seemed to be no purpose in living, and nothing in the world seemed worth striving for. In such a state of mind one can hardly interest oneself in anything.” He eventually changed his choice of studies in University and decided to take a trip to the Caucasus to improve his emotional state, and tagging along was a family acquaintance. He was enthusiastic about the region and owned property, ‘a Green Cape’, in Batum. The trip started in Novorossysk and “from Novorossysk we preceded by train to Kislovdsk, then a fashionable spa in the north Caucasus, famous for it’s carbonic acid baths. From there we took a side trip by horse and buggy to Bermamut, a high spot offering the best view of the Elbrus, the highest mountain in the whole Caucasus. We started very early and arrived at Bermamut toward evening, under a cloudless, transparent sky. There we found a small, deserted mountain hut, furnished with only a few wooden benches. This hut was perched on the edge of a vast, seemingly bottomless abyss. Opposite us, like a gigantic sugar loaf towering to the sky stood the majestic Elbrus, which we could admire in all its greatness and glory. The valley separating us from the Elbrus extended on either side into immeasurable distance, and on both sides one saw more and more towering, snow covered peaks and steep rocky cliffs reaching down into the depths. Unique as the site was, my depressed state prevented me from really enjoying it or feeling any enthusiasm. Just when we were in Kislovodsk something occurred to me to deepen my already melancholy mood: namely doubts as to whether my decision to change my course of study was a sensible one. So I started weighing all the pros and cons, but without reaching any satisfactory conclusion. Always immersed in my own thoughts, I was not easily accessible to impressions from outside the world, and I experienced everything I saw as unreal and dreamlike.”

“There were other similar spas near Kislovodsk, such as the sulfur springs of Pyatigorsk…[it] was famous not for only its sulfur springs, but also not far from there Lermontov, the second greatest poet of Russia, was killed in a duel. This alone was sufficient for me to visit Pyatigorsk.” Lermontov who insulted a man named Martinov and his clothing, and didn’t know he overheard him, was challenged to a duel. “Lermontov, being first, fired into the air, but his adversary, declining reconciliation, took sharp aim. His bullet hit Lermontov in the abdomen. Just at this moment a terrible thunderstorm broke out, and the critically wounded man could only be taken to Pyatigorsk only with great difficulty and after a long delay. No physician dared to leave his house in this frightful storm, and medical care could not be obtained in time. Lermontov died three or four days later from his severe wound. He was only twenty eight years old. [We] visited the spot where the duel had taken place. It was a meadow like any other at the foot of a wooded hill from which a beautiful view opened to the lonely mountain Maschuk which, standing apart from the other four mountains, looked like a pointed rock springing out of the plain. Hearing that among the sights of Pyatigorsk there was also a so-called Lermontov Grotto. We went to see it.” Serge identified with Lermontov because a friend once said that he looked like him.  Identification can be a lot of fun, but pathological if morbid elements are imitated too much, like tragic deaths. Lermontov had a bad end, his sister also had a bad end in the Caucasus, and Serge was veering in that self-destructive path.

After visiting the grotto, their trip became more rugged as they ascended to the glaciers on Mount Kasbek by mule starting from Vladikavkaz. “We rode our mules along a steep, rocky cliff, narrowly skirting the edge of an abyss several hundred meters deep. It was not pleasant to be haunted by the thought that if the animal made the slightest false step you would be hurled into the abyss. But the mules went so cautiously, at a slow and sure pace, that we could not help wondering at them.” In a grief travel, the trip is more about dealing with emptiness and loss than to relax and have a good time. Anybody who traveled to escape, especially on long arduous journeys should identify with Serge’s masochism and grief. “I am one of those people who feel drawn toward the depths as to a magnet. The anxiety which then overcomes one is primarily directed against this power of attraction, which one has to fight in order not to succumb to it.” After an extended stay where Serge’s friend caught up with his friends and acquaintances, they continued on the Georgian Military Highway. Along the highway Serge found a place where he could paint. “I got out my paintbox and oil paints from my suitcase and went to the nearer bank of the mountain stream Terek. It did not take long to find a suitable subject, as a very beautiful view opened in front of me after I had taken a few steps. I sat down on my stool and tried to transfer to my canvas the impression of the swift flowing river and the majestic mount Kasbek towering in the background…This was the first time I had done so well with a landscape, and it was the beginning of my activities as a landscape painter.”

As they moved out of the mountains they descended into a vast steppe with a warmer climate. “It led soon into a fertile valley, in which corn and wheat fields spread out in all directions, with vineyards and orchards appearing on the hillsides. This cheerful southern landscape was in sharp contrast to the grim mountain world we had just left…We spent one night in Kutais and the next evening boarded the train for Tiflis, now Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia…I noticed that in Tiflis there were already electric streetcars, something which did not yet exist in Odessa…As the heat was becoming uncomfortable in Tiflis, we decided after a few days to proceed to Borshom, a health resort in the mountains not far away. Before leaving Tiflis, we took the funicular to the top of a small mountain in the vicinity to the enjoy the beautiful view over Tiflis and its surroundings. Altogether Tiflis made the impression of a handsome and modern town. This applied, however, only to the section called the European, for Tiflis on those days consisted of two separate districts, the European and the Oriental. The latter had all the characteristics of the Orient, with its shouting sidewalk merchants, its turmoil, and its colorful confusion. Borshom, apart from the advantages of its climate, was famous for the mineral water of its springs, which was used all over Russia as a drinking water, similar to Seltzer or Preblauer water in Germany. The landscape there impressed me by its gentleness and reminded me of places in the foothills of the Alps. The mountains were wooded and of moderate height, the meadows were green, and – a rare thing in the Caucasus in those days – the streets and roads were in good condition. After the heat of Tiflis, Borshom’s fresh, invigorating air was most gratifying.”

Their trip continued from Abastuman to Batum, their final destination. “Batum, situated on the shore of the Black Sea in the southwest corner of the Caucasus, is surrounded by mountains on its other three sides. One finds there eucalyptus and yew, myrtle, cactus, and various palm-like plants. The whole region is characterized by its luxuriant vegetation. Although summer had passed its height by by the time we reached Batum, there was, an oppressive mugginess. The air was not only warm but also very humid, and a thick, sweltering haze always hung over this exotic-looking countryside. Now I had the occasion to inspect personally the ‘Green Cape’ about which [my friend] had raved so much. It was a garden with some sort of weekend bungalow and it had nothing to do with a real ‘cape,’ which I had visualized as a promontory jutting out into the sea. We bathed in the sea twice a day but we nevertheless suffered so much from the humid, sultry heat that even [my friend] was not opposed to to my idea of starting our return trip somewhat sooner than originally planned. So after a week we embarked for Odessa and arrived there after a five day-sea voyage.”

The waxy perception of narcissism

Despite having an amazing vacation, when major decisions are postponed, they have to be faced. When Serge returned from his holiday, he still had to decide on his vocation. He talked to his father in sessions lasting hours to figure out his problem. “…after a few days my father was succumbing to the devastating ambivalence and was even infected by it.” Eventually he chose Law because his attempt to move to the Natural Sciences was more out of avoidance than actual interest. He moved to St. Petersburg with an uncle to continue his studies. He still had depressions and his father setup a meeting with his old doctor for him. “He is inhibited…he cannot get out of himself…I believe the best thing for him would be if he could fall in love.” He tried to get involved in St. Petersburg life. Dating, museums, and lectures left him “in a state of indifference or boredom…There was too crass a contrast between the pulsating life around me and the bottomless, unbridgeable gulf of emptiness within myself.” He eventually asked his father for advice on a sanatorium for him to really deal with this problem, which at the time was diagnosed as manic-depression, like his father was diagnosed. He consulted with Professor Bekhterev in Petersburg, Kraepelin in Munich, and Ziehen in Berlin. He met is love Therese in one of the sanatoriums in Munich, who was a nurse. But in regards to the success of improving his mental stability, he briefly felt better only to relapse, as was his prior pattern. He then describes the classic description of what narcissism does to your perception. “Then I found life empty, everything had seemed ‘unreal’, to the extent that people seemed like wax figures or wound up marionettes with whom I could not establish any contact.”

When your mind is preoccupied with success, status, and advancement, and strategies of how to get there, there is a loss of appreciation of what is around you. It looks hollow because most of the environment is drained of meaning for your goals. The environment is taken for granted or is viewed as an obstacle. His “veil” was made of dreams and hopes projected onto an environment, like a fog separating one from reality. Narcissism can happen to anyone, but when the pathology is severe, it’s a regular state of mind. Being lost in possibilities for power, control and managing fears of uncertainty, covers over your perception in the here and now. It can also act as a barrier to appreciation. You can see that in a prior video that includes some of Heidegger’s meditation practices which was in response to the narcissistic method of Nietzsche. I still have to read more Nietzsche and Heidegger, but what it looks like now is that Nietzsche’s method can easily turn into narcissism, with that style of rumination over success and power, and Heidegger blamed Nietzsche for that influence which lead him to his ultimate involvement with Nazism and all the rumination about power that it entails. As I read more, it could be a misreading that some people did when they read Nietzsche, or an inevitable consequence of obsessive self-development. The problem with self-development is that one is constantly seeking future improvements and getting addicted to only thinking about that. There has to be a balance between planning in your mind and appreciation in the moment. [See: How to motivate yourself – The Being of Beings: https://rumble.com/v1gv3zl-how-to-motivate-yourself-freud-and-beyond.html]

One of Serge’s goals he was ruminating about was developing a relationship with his, then not yet wife Therese. He pursued her, but kept his desire secret from other nurses and doctors. He tried to meet her at Nymphenburg park, but was stood up while he waited into the night. He still pursued her. She eventually consented to walk in the English park with him and talk about her family, and her German and Spanish background. Her calm demeanor with her tragedies, such as her divorce, made her more attractive to him. He focused on finding rooms to rent to privately meet with her, but she rejected him to focus on nursing and her daughter Else. Serge was so depressed that he swallowed a handful of sleeping tablets, but in the end it did no more damage other than making him wake up more slowly. He still tried to meet with Therese only to get another rejection via a letter. Kraepelin and other doctors suggested that he focus on getting out of his manic-depression instead of pursuing Therese. Serge left the sanatorium and stayed at the Bayerischer Hof and pleaded with Therese to see her at least one last time before leaving Munich to never see her again. Later Serge welcomed a visit from his mother, who was able to soothe his ups and downs. They briefly went to Lake Constance where Serge’s painful nostalgia returned. The location evoked “an aura of the remote past, and it seemed to me as if the spirit…was still hovering over the place. All this invited meditation about the evanescence and futility of human passion and striving, and about the wisdom of resignation.” 

Manic depression

Spending time with his family abroad, resuscitated Serge’s positivity. Serge told his uncle in Paris of his love affair with Therese. “It was certainly fortunate for me to be in a city like Paris, where the quick pulse of life and even the sight of the streets helped to distract me.” On the question of Therese his uncle chimed in. “He thought that it was not a question of ‘love’ but merely of ‘passion’ and expressed the opinion that in the view of all these complications at the beginning, no good could have come of it in the future. What is the thing to do if a young man is unhappily in love or if the object of choice seems objectionable to the family? One tries to divert his attention to other women. So my uncle advised me to frequent night clubs and cabarets where plenty of beautiful women ‘for one night’ were to be found.” He also gave him connections to Odessa society ladies.

When Serge returned to Odessa, he waited for his father to return from Moscow. “But more than two weeks passed…Then came a telegram from Moscow with the news that my father had suddenly died.” He wanted to go to the theater but a violent storm made him return to the hotel. He was found dead in his bed in the hotel the next day, despite being young and considered in good health. Crucially Serge surmised that “it is true that he suffered from insomnia and regularly took veronal before going to sleep. Perhaps his premature death was due to an overdose of this sleeping medicine.” Serge received a condolence letter from Therese who found out what happened. After the funeral and the process of disposing the will, Serge got into arguments with his mother and her secretiveness. He wasn’t to get his portion of the inheritance until the age of 28, but it was understandable due to his mental condition.

With this disappointment, Serge moved on with his life, and resumed his painting. He also took lessons. Some of his paintings got recognition, but he fell back into indecision about focusing on painting or continuing his law studies. Eventually he went back to Kraepelin to notify him of his father’s death. Serge looked at himself now as a “hereditary case”, but there was also a silver lining because he would be close enough to Therese to meet her again. They did meet and agreed to stay in touch by letter. He felt that his meeting Krepelin was just a pretext to see Therese again and that was why he was depressed. Her letter of condolence brought up desires of being with her. His depression abated when he met up with her again. He met up with her in Berlin at the Central Hotel. This time their desires reversed. He now was ambivalent about the relationship and she was more eager to be married since she had a daughter and was suffering financial hardship. It blew up in fight in the hotel. He left for the Schlachtensee and wrote a farewell letter to her with the excuse of his mental condition. As expected, Serge had feelings of regret and fell back into depression. Over time he eventually was referred to Sigmund Freud as an attempt to try something different, and like with many of Freud’s patients, he was a last option when other modalities failed.

During this time Serge’s Uncle Peter, who had paranoia, died. He was alone and only around animals. He was found later when his delivered food wasn’t touched. Rats had been chewing on him during this time. Therese found out in a newspaper article titled “A Millionaire Gnawed by Rats.” The law stepped in and Serge was included in the disbursement of his assets, relieving some of the resentment of having to wait until he was 28 to get his father’s inheritance.

When he started with Freud, Freud pointed out that his behaviour was normal up until the final break where he was now falling into a pattern of “flight from the woman.” But Freud wanted the analysis to continue for some months before returning to Therese. Freud’s analysis was hourly, so Serge was able to acquaint himself with the pleasures of Vienna and learned to play card games. Despite Freud’s prohibition on Therese, Serge sent a detective to find her whereabouts. “I had learned that Therese gave up her position in the sanatorium, and now was an owner of a small pension in which she and her daughter Else were living. She looked terribly rundown, and her no longer fashionable dress hung about her body which had become so thin that it was scarcely more than a skeleton…In this moment I determined never to leave this woman, whom I caused to suffer so terribly.”

The vicissitudes of war

When the war broke out, there were anti-Russian sentiments, and Serge and his mother returned to Odessa for the summer before his planned wedding with Therese. Therese stayed behind in Germany with her daughter. Luckily for Serge, being an only child, he avoided being conscripted. After the war broke out he had to go through a lot of legal work to get Therese a permit to enter Odessa. When she arrived they finally got married, though she sold herself short by saying to Serge “I wish you great happiness in your marriage” as if he was marrying someone else. Despite anti-German attitudes Therese put effort into learning Russian until she was able converse with people. Unfortunately she didn’t get a long with her mother-in-law who fought over who ran the household. During this time Serge focused on his law exams and passed, but when things were going well, there was an ever present danger to ruin circumstances. For example, during the Ukrainian independence attempt and the Soviet Bolshevik victory, Serge was caught in crossfire. “In the fall of 1917 the October Revolution broke out. In the late fall of the same year armed conflicts were expected in Odessa. I was advised not to venture too far into the city. Nevertheless one day I went to visit friends who lived at quite a distance from our home. When I set out to return home I was amazed to see how the city had changed in so short a time. The streets were suddenly empty and all the front doors were locked. It was uncanny to walk through this deserted town. Finally I had to turn into a street which ran parallel to ours, from which, in order to reach our house, one had to go either to the right or to the left. As I looked down this street I was terrified to see that it was blocked on the right and the left by armed men. They had formed fighting lines on both sides of the street and opened fire against each other at just this very moment…I crossed the parallel street and turned to the left. The bullets were whizzing and swishing past my ears, but I proceeded at a steady pace, reached the garden gate, and seized the latch.”

With the constant flip flop between different revolutions and fighting forces, Odessa finally landed in the hands of the Austrians. This allowed Therese an opportunity to get to Germany to visit her daughter Else who was in serious condition with pneumonia.

The biggest devastation to Serge’s independence came with economic shocks during the war. “Our fortune was almost entirely invested in government bonds, held in deposit by the Odessa branch of the Russian state bank. The bonds were destroyed in a fire. Furthermore a constant devaluation of money had been taking place. At the time of the German-Austrian occupation an independent Ukrainian currency had been created, which was expected to drop in value rapidly. The inheritance left to me by my father was still administered by my mother, but I had invested most of my inheritance from Uncle Peter in mortgages. My debtors were now very eager to make considerable payments to me, taking advantage of the devaluated currency.” 

By the time Serge made it back to Germany, despite a lot of red tape related to his Russian ethnicity, he brought what money he could. He saw Therese again, but now with a shock of white hair. Else was diagnosed as terminal with her tuberculosis and died a couple of months later.

During this dark time, Serge met Freud again who felt there was still a residue left that needed to be analyzed and this analysis stretched out until 1920. “After WWI there was a catastrophic fall in the value of German and Austrian currency, which finally led to a complete collapse…Because of the currency devaluation I had practically nothing left of the money I had brought with me from Russia. So I was forced to look for some sort of job as soon as possible. By exhausting his connections, including Freud, he was able to find an economics professor who got him an opportunity with an insurance company, a job that would sustain him for years.”

Psychoanalytic Mindfulness

Some years after the war Serge was again stuck in obsessions. Freud assigned him to one of his followers Ruth Mack Brunswick. When she saw him he was “now earning barely enough to feed his ailing wife and himself. Nevertheless, things went smoothly with him until the summer of 1926, when certain symptoms appeared which called him to consult Freud. At this time it was suggested that if he felt in need of analysis he should come to me…He was suffering from [hypochondria related to his nose acne and treatments]. According to him, [an] injury [from treatment] consisted varyingly of a scar, a hole, or a groove in the scar tissue. The contour of the nose was ruined. Let me state at once that nothing whatsoever was visible on the small snub, typically Russian nose of the patient. And the patient himself, while insisting that the injury was all too noticeable, nevertheless realized that his reaction to it was abnormal. For this reason, having exhausted all dermatological resources, he consulted Freud. If nothing could be done for his nose, then something must be done for his state of mind, whether the cause was real or imagined. At first sight, this sensible and logical point of view seemed due to the insight won from the earlier analysis. But only in part did this prove to be the motive for the present analysis. On the other hand, the insight was undoubtedly responsible for the one atypical characteristic of the case: its ultimate accessibility to analysis, which otherwise would certainly not have been present.” Ruth continued associating his complaint that “I can’t go on living like this anymore” to his other statements going back to childhood when he soiled himself and thought that he had dysentery, and when he contracted gonorrhea before his sessions with Freud. It was an identification with his mother. 

His obsession turned towards reflections. “The ‘veil’ of his earlier illness completely enveloped him. He neglected his daily life and work because he was engrossed, to the exclusion of all else, in the state of his nose. On the street he looked at himself in every shop-window; he carried a pocket mirror which he took out to look at every few minutes. First he would powder his nose; a moment later he would inspect it and remove the powder. He would then examine the pores, to see if they were enlarging, to catch the hole, as it were, in its moment of growth and development. Then he would again powder his nose, put away the mirror, and a moment later begin the process anew. His life centered on the little mirror in his pocket, and his fate depended on what it revealed or was about to reveal.”

Despite starting a fresh analysis, Ruth announced that “all the childhood material appears [in Freud’s paper]; Nothing new whatsoever made its appearance in the analysis with me. The source of the new illness was an unresolved remnant of the transference, which after fourteen years, under the stress of peculiar circumstances, became the basis for a new form of an old illness…At the end of 1919 he had come out of Russia and returned to Freud for a few months of analysis, with the purpose, successively accomplished, of clearing up his hysterical constipation.” Unfortunately Serge didn’t have enough money to pay for the analysis. With no work and dealing with a wife who was ill, Freud was able to collect money for him for six years. “The money enabled the patient to pay his wife’s hospital bills, to send her to the country, and occasionally to take a short holiday himself.” Ruth described Freud’s interest in the patient as someone “who had served the theoretical ends of analysis so well…”

Despite the supposed cure, Serge not only continued identification with his mother, but also his sister. Before his analysis with Ruth, just like his sister, “[Serge’s] preoccupations on his looks and health continued on his nose, teeth, and his constipation. In 1924- 1925 Serge found that his nose had healed…” Unfortunately the nose symptoms returned with a pimple on his nose. “He [then] saw the movie The White Sister which reminded him of his sister who preoccupied herself with feelings of depression over acne and not being beautiful enough.” Serge had suicidal thoughts about his looks, and he went to his old dermatologist to have the pimple removed. The blood gave him a sense of relief, but he began to worry about scarring. In the end he had minor scarring that ended up being “the finest white line.”

Like in my review on the treatment of Narcissism, [See: Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorder: https://rumble.com/v1gtj2d-treatment-of-narcissistic-personality-disorder-narcissism-part-4-of-4.html] Ruth appeared to fall into the trap of positive transference, where it’s easy for both therapist and patient to flatter each other. “For a time, despite the patient’s invulnerability on important topics, or because of it, my relations with him were mostly sunny. He brought the clearest dreams in order that I might show my skill at interpreting them, thus confirming his statement that he was better off in my hands than in Freud’s.” When Ruth mentioned the death of the dermatologist that worked on his nose, which was the first time Serge heard of the news, he admitted a desire to kill him, sue him or expose him. Ruth then tried to connect this hatred of the dermatologist back to a possible hatred of Freud. Here Serge defended Freud and viewed his analysis with him more as a friendly connection than a professional one. Ruth countered that Serge was not invited to visit Freud and his family, so was not really a close friend. She saw that the patient was stuck wanting to stay Freud’s favourite son.

“Our entire concern is with a remnant of the transference to Freud. Naturally this remnant implies that the patient has not been wholly freed of his fixation to the father; but apparently the cause of the remaining attachment is not the presence of unconscious material, but insufficient living-through of the transference itself. I say this in the face of the fact that the patient spent four-and-a-half years with Freud and remained well afterward for some twelve years. It is one thing for the analyst to consider a case complete, and another for the patient to do so. As analysts we may be in full possession of the historic facts of the illness, but we cannot know how much living-through the patient requires for his cure.” What he didn’t live through enough was seeing his false self in action. Serge wanted to maintain the pleasant feelings of being the star patient to bask in Freud’s success. He also had financial needs, needs for social praise and survival needs. 

At the end of Ruth’s analysis she declared a cure based on the awareness of his nasal obsession being the same as the gonorrheal infection. An emotional castration. This went back to his identification with his mother and dysentery, and a lingering attachment to his father. “He was now able to realize that his nasal symptom was not a fact but an idea, based on his unconscious wish and the defense against it which together had proved stronger than his sense of reality…At last the patient had sufficiently lived through his reactions to the father, and was therefore able to give them up. The modes of analytic therapy are twofold: the first is the making of hitherto unconscious reactions; the second is the working through of these reactions. The second point involves the primary bisexuality of this patient, obviously the cause of his illness. His masculinity has always found its normal outlet; his femininity on the other hand has necessarily been repressed. But this femininity seems to have been constitutionally strong, so strong, indeed, that the normal oedipus complex has been sacrificed in its development to the negative oedipus complex. The development of a strong positive oedipus complex would have been a sign of greater health than the patient actually possessed. Whether the patient, who has been well for a year and a half, will remain well, it is impossible to state. I should be inclined to think that his health is in a large measure dependent on the degree of sublimation of which he proves capable…All at once he could read and enjoy novels…He could paint, and plan work and study in his chosen field, and again take the general intelligent interest in life and the arts and literature which naturally was his.”

In his interview with Karin Obholzer, Serge didn’t think that Ruth’s analysis helped him as much as his own determination, especially when he didn’t agree with the diagnosis of paranoia. “I gathered all my strength, stopped looking in the mirror, and somehow overcame these ideas. In a few days it was gone…That is my greatest accomplishment…I believe I had most success while I saw Mack because I took a stand against the psychoanalysts, made a decision on my own. Stop constantly thinking about your nose!” Despite the accomplishment in using willpower to drop his nose obsession, Serge would have to face more losses and grief.

Endless grief

Things were going well for Serge with his paintings and vacations, until 1938, a bad year for Austria. “When I returned home the evening before the day of the referendum, I wanted to listen to a radio concert that had been announced. This concert should have began within a few minutes, but quite a long time passed without a sound…Suddenly came the voice of the announcer…[Chancellor] Schuschnigg spoke. His statement contained the information that German armed forces had already crossed the German-Austrian border, and that Schuschnigg – to prevent unnecessary bloodshed – had given the order that there should be no armed resistance.” Despite Therese being somewhat sympathetic to the Germans, she was starting to deteriorate markedly. “Sometimes she would stand in front of the big mirror in the bedroom, look at herself for a while, and then say discontentedly: ‘I am old and ugly!’…She gradually lost contact with her surroundings and wanted neither to visit the few acquaintances we had in Vienna nor to invite them to visit us.”

As anti-semitism started to increase in Austria, and many Jews were starting to commit suicide, Therese made a strange remark. She said that “as only the Jews committed suicide and the Christians on the contrary were too cowardly to do so, it was unjust to consider the Jews cowardly. From this remark it was clear that Therese regarded suicide as a heroic deed.” Later on she shocked Serge again and said “Do you know what we are going to do? We’ll turn on the gas.” She quickly spoke of other normal things as if she never said anything so extreme. A week later the couple went for an outing to Grinzing. “As we sat in a café there, I told Therese about the changes which had taken place in the office since the Anschluss [annex] and mentioned that the employees had been asked to produce their so-called family trees which would prove their Aryan descent, or – as people mockiningly said at the time – that they had no Jewish grandmother.” Her reaction to this was curious and then one day when he went to work “Therese said goodbye especially tenderly, which I took as a sign that her mood had improved.” The morbid scene when he returned home showed that Therese was serious about using gas to commit suicide, and had planned it out far in advance. “I stormed into our hallway where warning notes had been put up: ‘Don’t turn on the light – danger of gas.’ From there I rushed into the kitchen, which was filled with the streaming gas as with a thick fog. Therese was sitting near the gas jet, bent over the kitchen table, on which lay several letters of farewell.” She had been dead for several hours. “I lived this day and the following ones as though in a delirium in which one does not know whether what happens is reality or a dreadful dream.”

Therese’s last letters were cryptic of the cause of her suicidal thoughts. Did she think that she had a Jewish ancestor that would be found out? Did she have a terminal disease that she kept secret? In one letter “Therese tries to justify her suicide on the grounds that she would have died within two or three years, and it would be easier for me if this happened earlier.” 

“I ask you a thousand times to forgive me – I am so poor in body and soul. You have suffered so much; you must surmount this also. My prayers in eternal life shall protect you and comfort you, my blessing goes with you. God will help you to overcome everything, time will heal all wounds, the heart must endure the loss of that which is buried in the earth. It is hard for me to leave you, but you will rise again to a new life. I have only one wish, your happiness, this will give me eternal peace. Do not forget me; pray for me. We shall see each other again…”

“Be reasonable, do nothing rashly but act only after you have quieted down. Take care of your health; be careful not to squander your possessions, so that when you are old you will still have something besides your pension. I have saved only for you, I have loved only you, everything I have done has been from innermost love…Think it carefully before you marry again. Marriage could mean your happiness and salvation – or your doom and destruction. You must find a thrifty, hard-working, good woman – not some frivolous creature. Choose a woman from a good home. Then you can make new relationships. You must resume your life.”

“W: …There was considerable enmity between my mother and Therese. This enmity was Therese’s fault. Nothing suited her; she wanted everything different. That’s the reason I could not have my mother live with me until after Therese’s death. It bothered her that my mother was so attached to her relatives and not to us. That was Therese’s idea. Her relatives were the most important thing to my mother, you understand, but I was never really aware of it. Due to the quarrel with my mother, the fortune was lost because I couldn’t discuss anything with my mother…And she was constantly with her relatives, and those relatives naturally also turned away from me. So it was an awkward situation. 

O: Therese was jealous of your mother.

W: I’d say so. You see it correctly.

O: But your mother also had a prejudice against Therese.

W: Of course. My mother did not like my having married Therese.

O: Because it was a [mismatch]?

W: Of course. She was a nurse – that’s a lower class. But you see how it is when a mother is jealous of her daughter-in-law, and vice versa. My mother was always jealous. My father said that he was unfamiliar with that emotion. But she had reason…

O: And a woman after your mother’s heart, what would she have been like?

W: Rich, for one thing….Therese sensed her rejection. She was very much attached to her mother, to her parents. She wanted my mother to act toward her as her own mother did….Freud said I was looking for something inferior because she was only a nurse, although…there were difficulties, but…I had…received something very good, you see, because she was a very decent human being.” Despite living with Therese, Serge couldn’t clearly say why Therese committed suicide. Maybe it was Hitler and she was afraid that her Spanish ancestry had Jewish in it. She also complained about aging and her health…”Freud said that she was perfectly all right psychologically and that only physical illnesses need be considered in her case… Mack said, ‘That’s where the professor was very badly mistaken…You were married to a crazy woman for twenty-five years.’ In the case of my wife, it was real hypochondria that she was so ill. She wasn’t ill at all. She imagined she was ill, that she wouldn’t live much longer, and so on…”

After the disaster Serge found Psychoanalyst Muriel Gardiner and asked for help “In early spring 1938, shortly after the Nazis had taken over Austria, I came face to face with the Wolf-Man on one of the busy Vienna streets. He did not greet me in his usual polite ceremonious manner but began to cry and wring his hands and pour out a flood of words which because of his excitement and his sobbing were utterly unintelligible.” Muriel guided the panicked Wolf-Man to her apartment. Serge used to teach Muriel Russian grammar and talk about his favourite subjects, French Impressionists, Doestoevsky and of course Freud. Muriel couldn’t keep up the lessons when she began studying medicine, but she would still be visited by Serge to renew her insurance, since he was working for an insurance company at the time. Serge was in a depressed mood. “My wife killed herself. I’ve just come from the cemetery. Why did she do it? Why did this have to happen to me? I always have bad luck, I’m always subject to the greatest misfortunes. What shall I do Frau Doktor? Tell me what to do. Tell me why she killed herself.”

Serge found his wife Terese dead in the gas-filled kitchen and this was recognizable to Muriel. “Suicides were common in the early days of Nazi Austria, as I knew firsthand from my work in pathology in the autopsy rooms of the general hospital, so of course I thought first of political motives. But this was apparently quite out of the question; neither the Wolf-Man nor his wife was Jewish and they were politically completely indifferent. To my astonishment I found that he scarcely even knew that the Nazis were in power.” Muriel managed to get a passport for him and he left for Paris to meet up with Mack Brunswick for more sessions. Muriel went to the U.S. Serge followed Brunswick to England and he returned to Vienna during the Munich Pact. Muriel continued to receive some letters in the United States from Serge until Pearl Harbour. After the war was over news of the Wolf-Man communicated his good mental health and acceptance of his lot in life. He continued to work in insurance and took care of his mother. Though, more sad news arrived about Ruth Mack Brunswick’s untimely death. She had died of a fall in the bathroom while on opiates. She had a painful gastrointestinal illness which led to her dependence on painkillers.

On a later visit to Salzburg Muriel negotiated a meeting with the Wolf-Man in Linz. Serge talked about how he benefited from Ruth’s comfort but also criticized saying “one could hardly call that a real analysis; it was more of a consolation.” He also talked about the kind of women he was attracted to. Muriel pointed out that his taste in women was the same, and connected with his sister’s influence. He gained some solace when his mother was opened up more about her own life, which “cleared up for him some of the problems which he had never understood.”

Both Gardiner and Pankejeff continued sending letters to each other while Serge continued writing his memoirs. A highlight of those letters was when he got in trouble with Russian soldiers. One day in 1951 he went out to paint, and out of a nostalgia for the Russia of his boyhood he wandered away from the English zone into Russian zone by mistake. He went to the top of a hill and found a nice landscape to paint. When he returned to go home and walked towards a streetcar line he was surrounded by Russian guards. He was interrogated, but strangely, after a few days, the interrogator decided to talk about Russian literature instead. They made an agreement where he would return in 3 weeks to show his other paintings and provide personal documents. Out of a duty to make sure that his case was definitely resolved, he took another chance and returned to the Russian zone. When Serge went back, none of the interrogators were there but instead a different soldier who looked at the paintings and talked about his son who also painted. In the end, they showed no interest in Serge. They warned him that all he needed to do was ask permission and they would allow him to paint.

As age creeped up on Serge he started to admit some of his struggles. “I too am growing older, although, I must sadly confess, not wiser. For many years I thought that I, through the many hard blows of fate which I have suffered, would at least in age become somewhat more mellow and would acquire some sort of philosophic outlook upon life. I thought that in old age I could at least spend my last years at a distance from the emotional struggles of which I had so many in my life. But it seems these are illusions also. I am still far away from the capacity for a contemplative life…” Quoting from later works of Freud he showed how difficult it was to deal with strong impulses. “It is interesting how the ‘id’ can be. How it can dissemble, apparently following the commands of the ‘ego’ and ‘superego,’ but in secret preparing its ‘revenge’ and then suddenly triumphing over these apparently higher courts. Then the old emotional conflict breaks out, and the apparently subdued mourning for the great loss which one suffered so many years ago makes itself felt again. Freud says that the unconscious knows no time; but as a consequence the unconscious can know no growing old…Unconscious processes [can] gain the upper hand.” For Gardiner, much of Serge’s complaints about losses, like in his family, and his loss of status, he handled it about as well as many people can. For her “there is no doubt Freud’s analysis saved the Wolf-Man from a crippled existence, and Dr. Brunswick’s reanalysis overcame a serious acute crisis, both enabling the Wolf-Man to lead a long and tolerably healthy life.”

The Ego and the Id – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html

Part 3

On the cutting room floor

Being such important case studies, later analysts would unearth from them what Freud could not see in the early 20th century. Patrick Mahony analyzed some of what was missing in The Cries of the Wolf Man based on more current discoveries, just like he did in his huge review of the “Ratman.” In those days, again, women were often not emphasized as much as men for their influence on a child’s upbringing. “…Freud’s paternalistic bias in his understanding of the case and the [minimization] of maternal transference appears in the odd statement that the father was Serge’s ‘first and most primitive object choice.’ Finally, Freud’s judgment of aggressive factors was wanting. He underplayed the hostile elements in the transference. Stressing sexual explanations, he neglected the essential connection between narcissism and aggression and the patient’s identification with the aggressor; in particular, much of Serge’s early [behaviour] was an identification with an aggressor, which is to be explained not merely as a reaction from passivity to activity but rather as a process whereby becoming the aggressor diminishes [low self-opinion], gratifies the self, and regains self-esteem…Sociologically we must be aware that because of the enormous wealth and aristocratic standing of Serge’s family and attendantly because of its palatial mansion, it is of the greatest unlikelihood that the boy would have slept in his parents bedroom. We can hardly imagine that this reality was not brought up and discussed during the analysis, and yet Freud suppressed this in his reportage.” Freud was also working through his own situation with homosexual libido at around that time with his split with Wilhelm Fliess. In a letter to Sandor Ferenczi Freud wrote that “a piece of homosexual investment has been withdrawn and utilized for the enlargement of my own ego. I have succeeded where the paranoiac fails.” It was also known that Sigmund slept in his parents quarters and was more likely to witness his parents having sex rather than his patient.

Mahony further describes the improbability of the primal scene, and that the child with malaria was able to watch the parents having sex for a long period of time, even if he were only in the room once. The angle of seeing the genitals from the cot would also be improbable. “Apart from the fact that the primal scene may be absorbed into screen memories, the question remains as to whether the exposure to primal scenes must necessarily be traumatic or be interpreted as a sadomasochistic experience. The universality of incest taboos and the inevitability of unconscious guilt incurred in witnessing the primal scene and the child’s possible rage and narcissistic injury are elements to be taken into account in any future answer. At any rate, Freud’s focusing on direct instinctual overstimulation due to a single primal scene overlooked the possible trauma of more important factors: the pathology of earliest object relations; the psychobiological side effects of the nearly fatal pneumonia suffered at the age of three months; life threatening malaria and its sequelae in ego disturbance; and finally, what we now understand as the sensitivity of the rapproachement subphase of separation-individuation when language, secondary process, and gender identification are rapidly evolving and vulnerable.” Here the rapproachment subphase he is talking about, is the age when the child has to start to feel comfortable doing some things on his or her own.

Like the mutual admiration society described earlier, prematurely believing in success can fool both the therapist and patient. Mahony adds that “[by bringing] their ‘interplay of suggestion and compliance’ to bear upon the so-called breakthrough at the end of the case, we see at another level the patient’s submission to his insistent analyst, who all the while eagerly and self-deceptively believed that infantile material was being worked through. The forced termination gratified the Wolf Man’s passive fantasies related to the primal scene and at the same time further entrenched him in a castration complex. There is a partial truth to the diagnostic account of the Wolf Man ‘as having submitted in a feminine manner to Freud and as having produced a child for him – the wolf dream and its analysis – and thereby a cure in part through a misalliance and mutual inappropriate gratification. One might even speak of an ‘[invention] induced by interpretation whereby the dream, placed at the center of the treatment, became the object of an equal ardor and of reciprocal seduction.’ In one sense the patient retreated to a second line of defense; his compliant false self gave Freud what he was looking for, with the result that the patient’s infantile grandiosity remained untouched, a false-self maneuver which ‘settled several critical dilemmas, and satisfied narcissism at both ends of the couch.'” Ironically, Freud was studying Narcissism at this time but all he saw was genital narcissistic masculinity rebelling against femininity.

A big possible miss comes from the former director of the Sigmund Freud Archives, after Kurt Eissler, Jeffrey Masson, who found unpublished material that could be of use to the case study. In his controversial The Assault on Truth, he was “asked…to go through the unpublished material…concerning the Wolf-Man, one of Freud’s most famous later patients. There I found some notes by Ruth Mack Brunswick for a paper she never published. At Freud’s request, she had re-analyzed the Wolf-Man and was astonished to learn that as a child he had been anally seduced by a member of his family—and that Freud did not know this. She never told him. Why? Did Freud not know because he did not want to know? And did Ruth Mack Brunswick not tell him because she sensed this?” His discovery unfortunately doesn’t provide which family member it was and so it remains floating in the possibilities of interpretation. Was it a parent, a sibling, or a caretaker? Freud did acknowledge sexual abuse in childhood, but he focused more on frustrated wishes, precisely because not all victims end up with psychological problems after abuse. A more balanced view that looks at both abuse and frustrated wishes would help, and if Serge had that dealt with in the analysis with Freud, it certainly would have been more insightful.

In the end Mahony found Brunswick’s analysis too timid to break with Freud’s orthodox analysis. “Brunswick bore some similarity to her patient the Wolf Man, and one may wonder whether the overlap influenced Freud’s decision on the referral. To complete this part of the story: during her prolonged stay in Vienna, her health deteriorated, prompting her to follow the dying Freud to London in 1938 to have further analysis with him. Imagine the desperate scene: now a recent widower, the succor-seeking Wolf Man rushing to London to see his analyst, who herself was frail and back in treatment with her own and her patient’s former analyst.” Mahony speculates that this could have been seen as a rejection to Serge because “in London the Wolf Man obtained relief from Brunswick but tried unsuccessfully to see Freud.” Then with Freud’s death, his wife’s suicide, and Ruth’s untimely death, he would eventually have to find others to rely on. By the time Serge was interviewing with Karin Obholzer, he was seeing Kurt Eissler and possibly Dr. Wilhelm Solms. Mahony researched the background to those interviews. “Pankejeff voiced endless resentment of others, including Eissler and Gardiner, who so generously sustained him materially and psychologically; meanwhile he was criticizing Obholzer to Eissler. This backbiting, atypical of the immortal patient, indicates another character change where senility had its say. But it is fitting to ask how much he was influenced by the anti-psychoanalytic interviews, if he spoke for himself, or even more to the point, did he ever speak for himself?”

Life after Freud

Despite the positive overtones of the Psychoanalysts, Psychoanalysis has always been under a lot of criticism, and Serge was the longest living patient of Freud’s. He would provide a lot of material to analyze after so many treatments. The last part of Serge’s life until his death included continued communication with psychoanalysts and an interview with an agnostic journalist, Karin Obholzer. It was very interesting to see the two sides of the Wolfman case. From the point of view of a psychologically untrained journalist, Karin was able to see Serge without the lens of psychoanalysis and to be able to notice how little he changed for an average person. Any unknown biological sources of pathology would continue to manifest in front of her. Yet, from the point of view of psychoanalysts, they are the ones trained to treat patients and are able to see more depth than Karin was able to. It’s very easy when reading these books to get emotional and take sides, because it’s a human life in the balance. Karin would not be able to analyze Serge’s defenses and break through them. She had to take him at his word. Psychoanalysis would develop into different traditions, including Object-Relations and Self-Psychology. Reviews of later psychoanalysts could see what Freud did right and wrong and add further understanding from more recent clinical observations. After all these years of treatment, how much improvement should Serge have noticed? Also, at his advanced age of 86, how much would he remember for an interview? 

Serge’s late views on Freud and Psychoanalysis

Despite all that help from Freud and other Psychoanalysts, Serge remained skeptical at the end of his life. “Freud was a genius, there’s no denying it! All those ideas that he combined in a system…Even though much isn’t true, it was a splendid achievement.” One of the interesting sticking points for Serge was the endless debate about choice and determinism. Even though Freud was mostly of the opinion of determinism, he still talked about choice. “Freud said that when one has gone through psychoanalysis, one can become well. But one must also want to become well. It’s like a ticket one buys. The ticket gives one the possibility to travel. But I am not obliged to travel. It depends on…my decision.” The difficulty for therapists is how to generate desire in people to change, and certainly Freud and others tried. “He had very serious eyes that looked down to the very bottom of the soul. His whole appearance was very appealing. I felt sympathy for him. That was transference. He had a magnetism or, better, an aura that was very pleasant and positive. When I told him about my various states, he said: ‘We have the means to cure what you are suffering from’…He said ‘Treatment means that you have to say everything that occurs to you’…He must have thought that the important things are in the subconscious and that they emerge through free association.” Freud warned him not to rationalize the material. The patient had to trust the the analyst. “That’s how he succeeded in bringing about a total transference to himself. Is that a good thing, do you suppose? That’s the question. Too strong a transference ends with your transferring to individuals who replace Freud, as it were, and with your believing them uncritically. And that happened to me, to a degree. So transference is a dangerous thing….Basically [hypnosis and transference] are similar. I can remember Freud saying ‘Hypnosis, what do you mean, hypnosis, everything we do is hypnosis too.'”

Serge went on explaining how he “worshiped” Freud and how Freud was a replacement to a disappointing father who preferred his sister instead. When his father died, Freud would be able to use a much stronger transference in therapy, and suggestions would be much easier to be adopted. Serge then talked about the difficulty of affording treatment, and how psychology is much better than it used to be. His big concern about psychotherapy was the false promise of happiness after an analysis, and the unexpected dependence on analysts. “The analyst puts the patient back into his childhood. And he experiences everything as a child. But that doesn’t mean that the suffering has to pass. That’s the important question: Must it pass when one remembers something? This question has not really been answered…The disciples of psychoanalysis should have not laid hold of me after Freud.

O: You mean they should have left you alone?

W: Yes, because I would have acted more independently…That is the danger of psychoanalysis, that one is dependent on the decisions of others who are not competent and knowledgeable but who believe that they know everything and can guide one just because they are psychoanalysts…Freud was so anti-religious [but] he and all of psychoanalysis are being blamed for the very thing for which he blamed religion, that it’s nothing but a faith…But psychoanalysis is complicated. Who can make definitive and official statements? The effect was salutary, in any event. But it was not a complete cure.

O: And do you still believe in psychoanalysis?

W: I no longer believe in anything.

O: Nothing at all?

W: All right, I believe in transference. I am of the opinion, of course, that improvement can be made by transference.

O: Today, they also concern themselves with the family or with the couple if that’s what it is.

W: That’s the way it should be, of course. [They] must also deal with Therese and not say, that isn’t my patient.

[But] I never thought much of dream interpretation, you know…Freud traces everything back to the primal scene which he derives from the dream. But that scene does not occur in the dream…That scene in the dream where the windows open and so on and the wolves are sitting there, and his interpretation, I don’t know, those things are miles apart. It’s terribly farfetched.

O: But it’s true that you did have that dream.

W: Yes, it is…I prefer free association because there, something can occur to you. But that primal scene is no more than a construct…The whole thing is improbable because in Russia, children sleep in the nanny’s bedroom, not in their parents’. It’s possible, of course, that there was an exception, how do I know? But I have never been able to remember anything of that sort…If one…concludes from effects to cause, it’s the same thing as circumstantial evidence in a trial.

O: What about the obsessional neurosis now?

W: I believe you are born with something like that, there’s nothing one can do about it.

O: Freud writes that your illness erupted because you got the clap [Gonorrhea].

W: That we have to talk about these unpleasant things!

O: What’s so terrible? It can happen to anyone. Perhaps it will console you when I tell you that I had the clap myself.

W: I am amazed you should tell me. You really seem to trust me!…I had a friend, and this friend had an older friend who arranged it. There was a café with three girls in it. And this friend knew that these girls were [waitresses] in that café and that they could also be put to a different use…And they also had a room…

O: How old were you at the time?

W: Seventeen.

O: Was that your first sexual experience?

W: Yes. In any event, we went and I asked the friend – you’ll have to excuse my telling you these terrible things – whether one should use a prophylatic or not. And he answered, ‘The whore will laugh at you.’ So we didn’t take any long. And then, by way of a joke, he said that there’s a superstition that the name of the first woman with whom one has sexual intercourse will also be the name of the woman one marries. And that was true in our case. Her name was Maria, I remember, and my wife’s name was actually Maria Therese. So it was true.

O: The gonorrhea came later?

W: Yes, later. I got it from a peasant girl. That was a year later. I felt confident; I thought, that can’t happen in the country. People always said that it was risky to go to prostitutes. And out in the country it is less dangerous. The opposite turned out to be true.

O: And you gave the peasant girl money, or were you in love?

W: No, no, you always gave something, that was a matter of good manners.

O: What did you tell Freud you were suffering from?

W: Well depressions…it was because of Therese…Everyone was against Therese: the doctors, my mother, my relatives. They all said that she was a woman with whom one could not live. Had I decided to go see Therese, things might have been alright without Freud.

O: What was the attitude toward masturbation?

W: Well, my God, people said that one became insane, that it is very dangerous, that it’s harmful. And when I saw Freud, he said, ‘Well, that’s an exaggeration. It isn’t that serious.’

O: Did Freud advocate masturbation?

W: No, no, that’s putting it too strongly. He viewed it as harmless.

O: [Ruth] writes that you said, ‘Of course, I only masturbated regularly on the big holidays.’

W: What she wrote there is stupid. It’s absurd.

O: Why? What if you did?

W: When I was seeing her, I was with Therese. I had no need to masturbate.

O: There are people who masturbate nonetheless.

W: But that’s primarily young people who haven’t had the courage to go to a woman or haven’t had the opportunity.

O: One also finds it among couples. It isn’t that unusual.

O: Did you ever have real homosexual relations?

W: Of course not, never. But since you bring it up, I happen to remember something. In Russia, the Armenians were known as homosexuals. I was told when one went to a bathhouse in the Caucasus, they asked, do you want a woman or a boy? When I was a student in Odessa, there was an Armenian. His name was Murato. He was a good-looking person but had disquieting eyes. Very strange eyes. That was what was so beautiful about him. There was a small group of us students, and this Murato was one of us. Once, he said to me, ‘You know, after the performance, we are all visiting S. P. That was an actor in Odessa who was a known homosexual…Murato said, ‘We are all going to see S.P.’ I knew right away what he meant. One day, I was at the university to attend a lecture. All the seats were taken except for one next to this Murato. I sat down there. Suddenly, he takes my hand and starts pressing it. That was supposed to be a test. I immediately distanced myself…I had a second experience…I was going to Paris, there was another gentleman in the compartment. I stretched out and fell asleep in the corner by the window. Then he stepped up to the window and placed his foot close to mine. I didn’t know what to do, should I push his foot away? So I pretended to sleep. Then he played with my knee, but finally he stopped. He wanted to see how I would react.

O: Freud writes about your homosexual tendencies…

W: Subconscious, of course. For Freud, all relations between men are homosexual.

O: It’s probably true that every human being is naturally bisexual.

W: But homosexuals are relatively rare.

O: The educational barriers are very strong…Freud says somewhere that you preferred a certain position during intercourse, the one from behind…that you enjoyed it less in other positions.

W: But that also depends on the woman, how she is built. There are women where it is only possible from the front. That’s happened to me. It depends on whether the vagina is more toward the front or toward the rear…With Therese…the first coitus was that she sat on top of me.”

O: [Quoting Ernest Jones here]: ‘From the age of six he had suffered from obsessive blasphemies against the Almighty, and he initiated the first hour of treatment with the offer to have rectal intercourse with Freud and then to defecate on his head.’

W: For heaven’s sake, what nonsense! To write something like that, I don’t know, is that fellow crazy or what, writing such nonsense. He explained it to me, he sits at the head end rather than at the foot of the bed because there was a female patient who wanted to seduce him, and she kept raising her skirt…That fellow must have a screw loose.”

The quote Obholzer referred to was from Ernest Jones who took the situation too literally. Thankfully Mahony referenced the original letter from Freud writing to Sandor Ferenczi about a transference insult he received from Serge: “A rich young Russian whom I have taken on because of compulsive falling in love, confessed to me, after the first session, the following transference: Jewish swindler, he would like to use me from behind and shit on my head.” Whether Serge forgot the transference or it never happened, at his age during the interview it’s hard to verify. Certainly it’s possible there was an anal obsession with Freud doing the analysis. At this point it’s good to bring in more modern understandings of obsession and homosexuality. 

Homosexual OCD

A lot of conflict between people regarding sexuality is based on phobias and compulsive thoughts. When someone looks at someone else, they don’t only look, the brain assesses imitatively if it identifies with the pleasure that person looks for. People forget that their desire or distaste is their own. For those who obsess, compulsions can happen just from looking at someone or thinking about content that adds to obsession. Freud in particular is a psychoanalyst that talks a lot about obsession and homosexuality. When obsession goes to an extreme it turns into what modern therapists call Homosexual Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (HOCD). Certainly with so much emphasis on sexuality and sexual orientation in Freud’s insights, it’s easy for people to obsess about how they dress, how they hold themselves and think “is that unconsciously gay?” Phobias and stereotypes can easily develop if you are constantly looking for signs. The human mind has many parts to it and it’s capable of imitating emotions of others, just like you see in TV shows, movies, and even singing Karaoke and singing along in concerts are great examples of mimetics. You can imitate being the singer and it creates some emotions of validation, and identity, but this short-term imitation, that can turn into an obsession, is shallow compared to being the actual person. There are more piano notes to being in a long-term homosexual relationship where you are in love with your partner and desire to have regular sex with them, but where you also have deep intimate conversations and long-term joint projects. People can be confused by imitation, identification and compulsions to act. With OCD, the intrusive thoughts are very powerful. It may seem funny to many people, but it actually affects a lot of people, and if they can’t get out of their thoughts/images and into the sensations of their body, they can have doubts about their sexual orientation for long periods of time. 

Monnica Williams did an excellent review of this type of OCD. In general, with OCD…”compulsions are repetitive, ritualized behaviors that the person feels driven to perform to alleviate the anxiety of the obsessions. Depending on the severity of the disorder, the compulsive rituals can occupy many hours each day…A recent study using a broad sample of OCD patients found that 25% experienced sexual obsessions currently or in the past. Sexual obsessions may revolve around a multitude of loci. Common themes include unfaithfulness, incest, pedophilia, unusual behaviors, AIDS, profane thoughts combining religion and sex, and, of course, homosexuality. Since sex carries so much emotional, moral, and religious importance, it easily becomes a magnet for obsessions in people predisposed to OCD….Homosexual anxiety is described here as the obsessive fear of being or becoming homosexual, the experience of intrusive, unwanted mental images of homosexual behavior, and/or the obsessive fear that others may believe one is homosexual. A person may have only one of these facets of the disorder or any combination. Since OCD is characterized by doubt, the person with OCD will contemplate the uncomfortable thoughts or images, agonize over the meaning of the questions that arise, determine possible answers, and then doubt the answers. The person will continually seek evidence to help arrive at a decision, perform compulsive rituals to ward off anxiety, ask others for reassurance, and/or avoid things or situations that worsen the anxiety. At times the person will realize that the fears are extreme but at other times the concerns may seem perfectly rational…People with HOCD may engage in a multitude of checking behaviors and avoidances. They may avoid watching television out of concern that seeing a show with a gay character might trigger the obsessions, causing a ‘spike,’ or surge of anxious thoughts. Others might look at pornographic images of homosexual couples and repeatedly assess whether they feel aroused, or even compare their responses to when they look at heterosexual images. Many people with homosexuality fears worry about a sudden lack of attraction to others of the opposite sex. They may attempt to have intercourse with their partner or masturbate to pornography just to ensure that they are ‘still straight.’ This form of checking is particularly destructive because the anxiety from the OCD typically results in decreased sex drive and/or an inability to perform, which the patient then misinterprets as further evidence of homosexuality. People with HOCD will often solicit reassurance from others then feel temporarily relieved, but the doubts always return. No amount of reassurance is ever enough because complete certainty cannot be obtained. Even though the person may be diagnosed with OCD, until they are treated they often will doubt the diagnosis…Homosexuality anxiety is not caused by dislike of homosexuals, but rather a fear that the person will no longer have access to the opposite sex, something they highly value.”

An example of how extreme it can get is an OCD patient Monnica describes. “I have been diagnosed with OCD for a while now. The therapist I was seeing told me that I should try to be with a man, and that everybody is bisexual. It really freaked me out, and I was suicidal for five months thanks to what she said. The thoughts grew even stronger. Eventually, I couldn’t be with any person of the same sex alone in the same room, watch TV, read the newspaper, or listen to music with male voices.” So this is important for Freudian psychoanalysts who are comfortable with bisexuality, but their patients are not, and also have OCD, especially if they are undiagnosed. Another example is of a 20 year old male masturbating to see which pornography creates the largest pleasure. “I’m struggling with these bloody urges, and I can’t stand it any more. It keeps saying, “You want it,” [obsession] and eventually I say, “Fine,” and I just masturbate to things I hate [compulsion]. It does a little bit for me, but I’m pretty sure that’s the stimulation and not the content. But then as soon as I think of a girl [compulsion], boom, I finish, and I know I am straight. But how am I supposed to get these thoughts out of my head? These urges feel real. I don’t like this. I don’t want to be gay at all. It’s a scary thought that I’d have to spend the rest of my life with a guy [obsession]. I can’t handle that, but something keeps telling me that’s what I want [obsession], even though in reality that’s disgusting to me. OCD is so confusing isn’t it?”

Of course this doesn’t only affect men. “This is all started about two years ago, with obsessions about being gay. Over the past several months my thoughts have been insane. I can’t do anything without freaking out that it is a sign [obsession]. I am in the medical profession. If I have to do an…exam, and a girl is skinny (and of course I’m jealous), I get visuals that I don’t want. If a couple comes in and the husband is ugly, but the wife is pretty and thin, I think, ‘Oh my God, I would rather be with the wife than the husband [obsession].’ Then I try to picture myself years down the road [compulsion], and I can’t see who I am with – a man or a woman. I feel like I have become obsessed with the female body, which could either be due to my horrendous self-esteem or that I’m really gay. I used to be obsessed with the male body and always talking about how hot this guy was or that guy, and now I feel like I can’t do that anymore. These thoughts are shifting my entire outlook on who I want to be with. I have been dating someone for the past seven months, and he is aware of what has been going on. He tries to help, but doesn’t really know how. It seems like it has gotten progressively worse since I have started dating him. In the beginning, sex was awesome, and now it’s all I can do to make it through sex without crying because I feel like I’m going insane. And at times I feel so full of sadness and depression, that I forget how much I love (or think I love) [obsession] my boyfriend.”

Like with most OCD, the treatments involve tackling the logic of obsessive thoughts. “I realized that when the phrase ‘You’re gay’ popped into my head I was telling myself the following: (1) You are inferior to other men, (2) You are effeminate, (3) You are a sissy, (4) No woman would be interested in you. When I saw the lies in these statements, I said to myself, ‘You know what, even if I am gay this distorted belief system is a problem and needs to be fixed.’ Once I saw the lie, it was like a fog lifted, and the horrible depression disappeared instantly. I thought this was really too good to be true so I called my therapist. She told me that, yes, once you realize the distortions in some of your thoughts your mood can change instantly. It was unbelievable.”

Fred Penzel, from the International OCD Foundation, provides some tips for resisting checking behaviour. “Not checking your reactions to attractive members of your own sex. Not imagining yourself in sexual situations with same-sex individuals to check on your own reactions. Not behaving sexually with members of the opposite sex just to check your own reactions. Resist reviewing previous situations where you were with members of the same or opposite sex, or where things were ambiguous to see if you did anything questionable. Avoid observing yourself to see if you behaved in a way you imagine a homosexual or member of the opposite sex would.” The problem with checking behaviour is that it can become addictive because of the relief. Yet the relief doesn’t last because doubts keep returning because it’s hard to be absolute about fuzzy areas like sexual orientation, and certainly having other non-professionals suggest your orientation is to give them too much power. One has to develop skepticism of people who rattle off suggestions that “your clothes are gay, your interests are gay, you saw gay pornography, that means you’re gay, you had thoughts about being gay, then you’re gay.” You can reverse it to see how unscientific those suggestions are. “Your clothes are straight, your interests are straight, you saw straight pornography, that means you’re straight, you had thoughts about being straight, then you’re straight.” Another area of healing can come from exposure therapy, where you actually entertain more ideas of homosexuality to face your phobias. Now this isn’t a checking obsession, these are actually attempts to learn. Depending on how serious the compulsions are, a patient has to be ready to deal with the anxiety. This includes…”reading books by or about gay persons. Watching videos on gay themes or about gay characters. Visiting gay meetings shops, browsing in gay bookstores, or visiting areas of town that are more predominantly gay. Wearing a T-shirt at home with the word ‘gay’ on it. Wearing clothes in fit, color, or style that could possibly look effeminate for a man or masculine for a woman…[Read] about people who are sexually confused. Reading about people who are transgendered. Looking at pictures of people who are transgendered or are transvestites.”

As an aside, on the checking behaviour with pornography, people need to be aware of how much disgust towards any sex is held back in things like pornography. Just like in advertising, all undesirable details are removed, or participants act as if undesirable details are desirable to get the brain to imitate. As long as participants look like they’re having a good time, the brain wants to imitate pleasure. This habit can sneak into areas that require more authenticity. Long-term sexual relationships require a lot of love, caring, and concern. Most of these things are missing from pornography. The relationship template the brain is learning from in pornography is based on what’s left out. This isn’t to bash pornography but much of it leaves out long-term relationships, envy, jealousy, STIs, and relationship skills. Lust also gets boring. What is attractive at the beginning in a relationship can become quite boring after a certain amount of time. Long-term relationships have passion, love and interest that doesn’t fizzle as easily. Having gay or lesbian sex without the human connection that goes beyond a sexual connection is too superficial to be full sexual orientation. Pornography is not a good example for people to decide what their sexual orientation is. At most it can help condition an appreciation of the same sex in terms of lust, but it doesn’t condition romantic love and relationship skills because those things are absent in most pornography. The piano notes of a loving long-term relationship have a lot more variety than sex addiction, and like any addiction, overemphasizing one note is all about short-term quick relief to regulate the emotions, just like alcohol and other substances. If boredom rules addiction and it requires more novelty and intensity then in the example of relationships, long-term relationships would be boring and partners would have to be exchanged constantly. What people with different sexual orientations are fighting for in claiming equal rights is much more than just sex. 

Outside of sexual orientation, a person has to look beyond needing a response from society or authority figures to bless a relationship, and one has to get to a point as if you and your partner are on your own, making your own decisions, without needing validation from others and to be able to feel relaxed, comfortable and happy. This is actually a difficult thing to do. To look at actual relationships and actual objects for their actual value, without needing validation, and agreement from others is an advanced level of intrinsic motivation. Many people want what they want and demand that everyone agree with them, even if opinions from others are irrelevant. A lot of the high people get is on social validation and it can distort any individual’s decision making strategies, and is a huge source of conflict internally and externally. People want you to agree with their religion, philosophy, sexual orientation, and cultural habits. Rewards and punishments constantly steer the mind away from authentic choices. To mind your own business and live your own life actually takes a lot of courage, but the reward is psychological freedom and independence.

Analytical Psychology: The French School: https://rumble.com/v4pemmz-analytical-psychology-the-french-school.html

Horace Frink & Proto-conversion therapy

Of course this mistake of needing help from authority figures to work out sexual orientation also happened in Freud’s time and he was also implicated in those mistakes. Serge wasn’t the only one that became a ward of psychoanalysis, and this can happen in any modality where the therapist receives a parental transference respect from the patient. Freud over emphasized unconscious homosexuality in a way that helped but he was too omnipotent to understand how unbending many sexual orientations are. He eventually figured it out, but it didn’t start off that way. The Frink Fiasco was almost as bad as what happened with Emma Eckstein. [See: Dreams: https://rumble.com/v1gtf6j-dreams-sigmund-freud.html] Horace Frink was a former analysand of Freud’s and he impressed him enough to have Horace selected as Freud representative in America. Frink was having an affair with the banking heiress Angelika Bijur, and Freud suggested that Frink was in love with her and should divorce his wife, which he had two children with. After the divorces and the new marriage to Bijur, Frink’s mental health deteriorated with feelings of guilt. His depression and anger increased with accusations that his new wife was ugly and looked like a man or a pig. Freud responded “Your idea Mrs. Bijur had lost part of her beauty may be turned into her having lost part of her money. Your complaint that you cannot grasp your homosexuality implies that you are not yet aware of your fantasy of making me a rich man. Let us change this imaginary gift into a real contribution to the Psychoanalytic Funds.” Freud was in the dangerous position that most psychologists face, which is how to make money and follow ethics. The pressure to have famous successful cases pushes people to take short-cuts, and is always an influence therapists have to ignore to protect their patients. Frink himself was now stuck analyzing patients for the needed money, even as he started losing faith in psychoanalysis. His ongoing fights with Angelika resorted to blows and she filed for divorce. Freud was forced into having to dismiss Frink from leadership in America, and it turned into a resentment that Freud had against his followers in the United States. Frink continued to deteriorate, including two suicide attempts, leading to an admission in a sanatorium. Now on Freud’s side, he wasn’t responsible for Frink’s affairs, but psychological suggestions are dangerous, partly because it’s actually hard to be a therapist and avoid suggestions, but this is also compounded when important individuals in family relationships are left out of the analysis. Angelika’s ex-husband Abraham asserted himself in a letter to Freud that should be an example to all therapists who should think before they offer any suggestions, especially match-making suggestions. “Dr Freud: Two patients presented themselves to you and made it clear that on your judgment depended whether they had a right to marry. The man is bound in honour by the ethics of his profession not to take advantage of his confidential position toward his patients. The woman was his patient. The woman is my wife. How can you know you are just to me: how can you give a judgment that ruins a man’s home and happiness, without at least knowing the victim, so as to see if he is worthy of the punishment, or if through him a better solution cannot be found? Great Doctor, are you savant or charlatan?”

This is just as much a problem today as it was then. Going back to the concern of the ‘Ratman’ Ernst Lanzer, Patrick Mahony said “it was years later [than his analysis] before Freud fully realized that the uncovering of guilt could lead to the negative therapeutic effect of worsening a patient’s condition.” This is a great example for budding therapists to study before they start the profession. Blame, as is known in the court system, can be accurate, but it also can conflate all the problems that a person has onto a scapegoat and therapists can be scapegoated. Both the therapist and the patient have to take on their own responsibilities for making decisions. Patients need to find second opinions, and if they are capable of agency, they should be doing their own research. The challenge for therapists is to make sure the client knows that psychology is not a magic wand that will make you rich and find the perfect spouse. Psychologists are not experts in every field of life, and suggestions outside of their expertise must be looked at with skepticism. Many things are uncertain, and in a world where people glorify intuition, it can be as dangerous as a random guess. Daniel Kahneman describes when intuition works best “We have seen that reliably skilled intuitions are likely to develop when the individual operates in a high-validity environment and has an opportunity to learn the rules of that environment. These conditions often remain unmet in professional contexts, either because the environment is insufficiently predictable or because of the absence of opportunities to learn its rules.” What this basically says is that you can only trust intuition when you know a lot about something. The best attitude to have in therapy is to be skeptical of all intuitions until the patient’s family and friends are understood very well. Even then, there will be mistakes, so an emphasis that people have to take responsibility for themselves instead of relying on their psychologist like they are a child dependent and the therapist is a parent, must be communicated to the patient. The patient needs to inform themselves and read different points of view, and if they are capable of learning a lot about reality, and the different scientific disciplines, then they can be independent minded enough to make their own decisions, and hopefully, if their problem is not genetic or biological, they can let go of dependence on a saviour therapist. For most therapists, success is when the patient doesn’t need to come back, and the ex-patient now cherishes their own research and decision making skills. 

Why so few talented therapists treat clients with challenging disorders – Marsha Linehan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5mTLFfCQyY

Bisexual erasure and psychological templates

Jonathan Barrett from the University of Nevada, did a good review of early conversion therapy philosophies in Psychoanalysis and how it’s toxicity split off into the United States. Freud eventually learned that “It is not for psychoanalysis to solve the problem of homosexuality…one must remember that in normal sexuality also there is a limitation in the choice of object; in general to undertake to convert a fully developed homosexual into a heterosexual is not much more promising than to do the reverse, only that for good practical reasons the latter is never attempted.” Here he suggests that object choices are made early in life and they are very persistent throughout life. By the time someone is an adult and a patient, unless there is some intensity and pleasure with either object choice, a conversion therapist is in the position of trying to make someone straight when there isn’t enough pleasure already there to support it, and maybe even disgust towards the opposite sex. Another pitfall is bisexual erasure, where again labels are used to block possible experiences. Labels can be useful, but not if they repress real object choices. The actor Alan Cumming provided a warning that repression can go in many different ways. “I see a worrying trend among LGBT people, that if you identify yourself in just one way, you close yourself off to other experiences. My sexuality has never been black and white; it’s always been gray. I’m with a man, but I haven’t closed myself off to the fact that I’m still sexually attracted to women.” This statement is helpful for people who are in homosexual or heterosexual relationships, because they don’t have to pretend they don’t have other desires as well. Having those desires also doesn’t mean people can’t be in a committed relationship with one person. The typical mistake is labeling someone as homosexual or heterosexual when they are concurrently in those kind of relationships, as if they can’t carry both desires in their mind at the same time. Accusations of bi-sexuals being greedy or cheaters can also be put to bed. Cheating can happen in any sexual orientation.

Alan Cumming fan page: http://www.alancumming.com/

Mel B and Ginger Spice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7rqO-PjxQg

Geri Halliwell Mel B Lesbian affair: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGqhC4tejLA

Like in HOCD or in situations of internalized bigotry against homosexual desire in oneself, the brain can move into self-attacking, and that’s what is the pathology. Self-hatred can inhibit at one degree but it can also become more severe with suicidal ideation. Real therapy is to accept desires in oneself without resorting to pathological self-recrimination. Ultimately you are not falling in love with a category, but an individual. More important relationship questions that are not to be overlooked are “am I in the cycle of abuse? Do I have a habitual template to be with abusive people? What is a good relationship?” What a successful relationship looks like, has more to do with relationship skills, and in places like the Gottman Institute, there are so many skills partners have to develop to achieve great long-lasting relationships. Too much focus on sexual orientation may make one miss why you wanted to be in a relationship in the first place. To be with people who are non-abusive and who love and understand you. Ultimately that’s what Serge was not doing. He was moving from one influence to another. Religious influences grafted on him, but then in the presence of an atheist he would lose belief. He was moving from doctors to psychoanalysts, and being swept along cultural changes, but was not able to row his own oar. In the end, Serge’s template of relationships was more important to analyze than what his sexual orientation might turn out to be. Tragically, he learnt that too late.

The Gottman Institute: https://www.gottman.com/

Luise and the cycle of abuse

Towards the end of Serge’s life, his greatest weakness was choosing the wrong relationship template. His last intimate relationship was with a women that Serge called “Luise.” This story should trigger a lot of recognition for those who know about the cycle of abuse. 

W: [Luise] is a very impulsive woman…Twenty years ago…we ran into each other on the street. And she said, let’s make up. I shouldn’t have done that.

My father restricted my inheritance until I reached twenty-eight because he was afraid that I might fall into the hands of…a robber. And I always felt, that’s not a danger for me. I never thought that I…would become involved in such an affair with this Luise…This Luise was completely unsuitable. Luise is an oaf. It’s through her that I spoiled everything for myself.

Therese died and she wrote in her farewell letter: ‘Marry a decent woman and go to Sister…and seek her advice, and don’t become attached to some slut because that could be the end of you.’ She had understood the important thing.

O: That you feel drawn to sluts?

W: Yes, she understood that that’s where the danger lies. When I am friends with a decent woman, I can marry and live in some fashion. But there’s nothing to be done with a slut. Because sluts…either they demand money from you all the time or who knows what…Well, and that’s what happened, and so I find myself in an awful situation with this friend. 

O: But in what way is she a slut?

W: Isn’t it being a slut when the woman gets married and tells me nothing about it…and kept coming to me the whole time? Had she said that she had got married, I would have stopped seeing her. But then she divorced him. All right, slut, what does slut mean? The word isn’t attractive. Couldn’t we find a better one, one that isn’t so offensive? Twice I associated with impossible women, and with the first, things turned out all right. I even wrote about it, I was lucky, I got away from her…And then I got involved with this other one and I can’t get away from her because the woman has nothing. She has no pension, no health insurance, and she is ill…There’s something wrong with her heart, she has angina pectoris, there is something the matter with her kidneys, with her gallbladder, and she has diabetes. What can you do? And now she says she has cancer. I don’t know if it’s true, of course. And she constantly tortures me with reproaches and wants me to marry her. One cannot marry this woman, she is a serious psychopath. I don’t even know what I should talk to her about. It’s always the same thing that interests her. We pass a house and she says, ‘I wouldn’t mind having a house like that…’ She makes demands that are altogether absurd…and I have been her lover for twenty-five years, as it were. I only see her on Sundays…She has had two divorces!

O: And she doesn’t get anything from those men?

W: Nothing. She is so clever, when people are standing in line at the movies or the theater for tickets, she simply walks up and says, ‘I ordered tickets,’ and they give them to her. You’d think she’s really clever. She has no interests, nothing. She says she has read a great deal. But when I saw what was on her shelves, it isn’t true. She is only interested in material things…Constant reproaches. Everything is my fault. I never had any idea that there are people like that, women who are so impossible in every sense…Eissler writes, ‘Let her scold, let her rage, what of it?’ It’s easy for him to talk…But if that woman is constantly causing scandals like one time…We were quarreling on the street and people were already calling the police – that sort of thing is unacceptable. Perhaps you could give me some advice. Solms once said, ‘Men are stupid.’

O: There’s only one advice one can give, and that is that you dissociate yourself from that woman.

W: Solms says that ‘If it didn’t work back then, it won’t change now.’ There were a few occasions when I could have broken with her. But this idea that Solms expressed, that this is the way it has to remain, prevented me. Instead of doing me some good, psychoanalysis did me harm.

O: What was it that attracted you about that woman? Did she have such a strong sexual attraction for you?

W: She had sexual attraction. And the absurd thing is that the sexual attraction wasn’t really all that strong…In the beginning, perhaps, but then it decreased…This woman is always ready to quarrel. That’s her element. To slander, to berate others, to feel the victim…that all kinds of injustices were perpetrated against her. And everywhere she goes she must have her way. Even in restaurants: her portion is so small, the person at the next table had a larger one. Then she has a heart ailement and says, ‘The air is bad.’ Or, ‘It smells of mothballs, that coat hanging there, it smells of mothballs.’ She can’t stand it, the window has to be opened. But the waiter says, ‘We can’t do that, there are other people here, there’s a draft…’ There is nothing you can talk to her about…There’s nothing you can say to her, she immediately starts threatening…It’s forever the same thing: disputes with neighbors, the old Bohemian who doesn’t open the windows along the corridor, there’s a bad smell there, the air is stale…Her interests are so limited. Nothing but constant demands…I feel a certain obligation, because I have been with this woman for such a long time. And she really is ill, isn’t she? But the terrible thing is, one cannot talk to this woman. She wanted to report me to the police. She will make her case public – this injustice, this terrible viciousness, what I did to her because I was so old and she is still so young. The public must hear about this; it must be shown on television…’That should be brought to public notice.’ You can’t talk to her. I sit there like an idiot and keep my mouth shut. And she says, ‘You are having another one of your spells.’

O: What sort of spells?

W: A depression….She has the idea that you must be a fool to have depressions…An entirely primitive idea. Well, and what does Solms say? ‘A serious psychopath with paranoid ideas.’ Wherever she goes, she feels persecuted. She feels disadvantaged by fate.’ She demands money for her health and then she buys clothes. And yet she is sixty years old and hates old women. It seems she feels she’s a teenager.

O: She’s forever buying clothes?

W: Now she has lost weight. And altering things costs more than buying them new.

O: And you go along with that?

W: As you see, unfortunately. But I don’t know how it’s all going to end.

O: Can you afford it?

W: I got money from the book.

O: And all the money you got…you spent nothing on yourself, you gave it all to your friend?

W: Only she benefited, really. I was so restless at home, and so I gave her the money. I did make that mistake.

O: But she is never satisfied?

W: No, never. And now it’s always the same thing: ‘What am I going to do when you die?’ And I console her. Eissler sends me small amounts of money for her.

O: He sends you money? For what?

W: For that woman.

O: He helps you for humanitarian reasons, or did you give him something for the archive?

W: I gave him quite a few paintings.

O: And the archive pays for them, or does Eissler pay out of his own pocket?

W: The archive.

O: Regularly?

W: Yes.

O: So you actually get a kind of pension from the Freud archive.

W: …which does me no good, it’s for the woman. If they sent it to me, and I kept it, I could live quite well…You can see that everything is full of conflict. And that also influences how I feel.

O: And Luise knows about this?

W: She knows about the archive. I haven’t told her anything about the book. But begging isn’t pleasant either. And it is not a pleasant feeling that they send me something because they feel compassion for the woman.

O: Will she get something after your death?

W: I’m uncertain. At times, Eissler says one thing, at others another. So a dependence on Eissler has arisen, and so it drags on. And I receive free treatment. A whole number of dependencies arise, and that’s harmful, of course. It harms the ego I’d say….

O: In other words you have no talent for making life pleasant for yourself…I would not have taken that much from anyone.

W: That’s it: I put up with too much.

O: I find your behaviour odd. If something is proposed to me, I ask myself, what do I want?

W: Yes, yes, I believe the ego is damaged somehow.

W: Eissler wants to keep track of the case that has become so famous – Freud’s most famous case – and see how it ends….Eissler has one opinion, Solms another, and Gardiner a third…One becomes involved in a labyrinth of dependencies that contradict each other…According to the theory, one would have to be completely free, uninfluenced…Psychoanalysis should really enable one to live without a father figure. But what actually happens is that one goes on living with the father figure… Sometimes, when I think about all those things, it seems the only way out…Should one kill oneself? I have gas.

O: Gas, you know, is not what it was in 1938. Today, it’s practically impossible to kill yourself with gas. The gas is detoxified.

W: Thank you for having told me about the gas.

O: Had you seriously considered it?

W: Yes, but now its out of the question.”

Serge did continue on living and enjoyed the company of Karin, and the reader can witness the pleasure that he enjoyed of someone just listening, mirroring and validating him, even if it the interview was about an exposé of psychoanalysis.

“If I were younger, one could at least try it, make an attempt but…You would really be the right woman for me. I get along with you. I don’t get along with the other one, and she clings to me. Because you said that you also had gonorrhea, you caused a profound change in me.”  Unfortunately for Serge, it was too late to make changes and he had a circulatory collapse. “In early July, the Wolf-Man had received his pension for two months, the monthly check and vacation money. Luise supposedly appeared abruptly at his door, he admitted her, and the meeting ended in a loud row. Finally, she simply snatched 10,000 schillings from his hand and ran off. [He] was terribly upset…During the afternoon of this very hot day, as he was coming back from the tobacco shop, he collapsed.”

Serge deteriorated and Karin detailed his last days in the Vienna Psychiatric Hospital: “The Wolf-Man takes a postcard from the open drawer of his nightstand and hands it to me. Here’s what Luise writes to a deathly ill, ninety-year-old man who, confined to his bed, is constantly fighting for his breath.

‘My dear Serge, I have heard that you are already feeling much better, that your appetite is good and that you can already wash yourself. I am pleased. As you are eating with such a hearty appetite, aren’t you thinking of me, that I go hungry, that I am about to be evicted if I cannot pay the rent, that the gas and electricity will be cut off if I can’t pay? How can you do that to a person with whom you have spent forty years? I would like to see you, talk to you. I was already there a few times, but the attendants always tell me that that young girl is visiting you again, so I didn’t want to disturb you. You must be very much in love if you ordered two flannel suits for 4,500 schillings each and pay all that money for her housekeeping expenses as you told me. Unfortunately, I have no money for stamps or letter paper. So far, I have received nothing of the royalties for August from your book The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man. They say you gave it to the professor so he would pass it on to me, but he demands that I pick it up at his place, which is absurd, my lawyer says, and I have it from you in writing that I would get money from Gardiner even after you die.’

[After a brief moment he mumbled,] ‘The woman is crazy.'”

As Luise faded into the background during the last two years of his life, Serge had that feeling that so many people feel at the end of their lives. “Life was in vain, everything was pointless, we must build something, something new, begin at the beginning once more…Give me some advice!” His strength faded and his last gesture to Karin was a heartfelt kiss on the hand and a feeble wave before he died the next day.

Amber Heard and Johnny Depp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aca0KWoHtqQ&t=331s

Modern psychoanalysis

“Take what you can from your dreams, make them as real as anything.” – Dave Matthews

Like with many other case studies of Freud, so many disorders have genetic and early life challenges as their source. Is it OCD, Borderline and Narcissistic personality disorders, or a severe masochistic co-dependency? Or is a mixture of all of them? Using the metaphor of the childhood “lucky caul,” Serge was stuck inside the veil or caul of dreams and specialness to the end, and so were his therapists who sought to make a name for themselves. By not seeing how the sense of specialness and entitlement would interfere with reality testing, the dreams and desires Serge had would fail to find realistic outlets with independent and assertive decision making, especially with choices of partners. The healthy way to attach importance to specialness is to effort. Special effort, not entitlement. The metaphorical veil or caul is ruminating about possibilities and dreaming about changing the past. Being stuck in painful thoughts while remaining inactive leads to a habit of inhibition.

Serge’s past may have looked like a heaven with beautiful estates, servant women, and a sense of entitlement to a great future. It could easily add to the sense of specialness. But when you are at the end of your life, the memories of what actually happened can bring up the question “what if?” He attempted to get his fortune away from Russia, but the inflationary pressures of war diminished it. With his sister’s and his wife’s suicides, and possibly his father’s, the mind could easily think “what if I did this or said that? Maybe they wouldn’t have taken their lives.” Once the past can’t be changed, and in the end, depression never left completely, all that was left for Serge was the hope to “begin at the beginning once more.” What motivations would he have needed to make difference choices when he was younger? Most importantly, what was so pathogenic that he couldn’t have made better choices?

Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, in The Wolf Man’s Magic Words: A Cryptonymy, engaged in an abstract word analysis of all the players in the Serge’s psychoanalysis, and interpreted the wolf dream as the father having incest with his daughter Anna, and Serge being a witness. The English Governess is told by Serge what had happened and she uses it as blackmail to torture Serge and his family. Serge then oscillated between desiring Anna and imitating her, which would be desiring the father in the latter. He would also have knowledge that could hurt both his parents. This theory, and it’s only a theory, brings up a lot of questions. If his father committed suicide, was it because he abused his daughter? Was it because of the political changes he saw in Russia? Was it because he had manic depression? Or is it a combination? Also if instead, Masson and Brunswick were right about Serge being sexually abused, and possibly groomed to desire anal stimulation [anally seduced], both cases could lead Serge to imitate a passive sexual choice. If Serge felt shame about those impulses, then his lack of self-worth and need for repression would continue. A false self that is beyond shame would have to be developed as a protection against a pathogenic secret. The pathogen could be an array of possibilities supported by these theories. For example, shame over wanting to be like Anna, shame over wanting Anna, shame over wanting his father, shame over wanting to be his mother, and shame over wanting to give or receive anal sex. In the end, whatever combination, it would lead ultimately to shame over socially unacceptable sexual desires. Since this “crypt” of a false self in Serge’s mind is hiding a body of pathogenic shame, and most importantly, it’s somehow unconscious, then he did not recover because his pathogenic secret remained a secret, even to himself. The coffin remains shut and the Russian Iistina, or hidden truth, remains hidden. If on the other hand, this secret was conscious all along, but he did not want to share the information for obvious reasons, he would have to take what he learned from Freud’s work and heal himself, if he didn’t trust anyone else.

For example, if he read and understood Remembering, repeating and working-through, and if he could see his sexual appetite as a worthy foundation that could go beyond a sister template, then maybe that knowledge could help him identify with different relationship choices and he could avoid choices like being with “Luise.” To grow better crops, so to say. In his interviews with Obholzer, he clearly identifies his sister as an object choice, identifies Karin as a good example and even admits that if he were younger he would pursue her. Though this could appear insulting because his template includes an aggressive sister, women with less power, prostitutes and “Luise.” Yet reading those interviews with Karin, even if she’s aggressive with trying to land an exposé, one gets the impression that she was desired by Serge because he enjoyed being with a woman who listened and accepted him. She accepted his having gonorrhea and his masturbation as normal. That made him feel better. Feeling better, meaning less stress. The stress was caused by some pathogenic desire that he was ashamed of, whether it was a desire for his sister or desires from one of the theories above or else something he never communicated. Shame, we have to remember is a fear of rejection from important social contacts.

Too much shame means you accept bad people in your life you think you deserve, which stops further development. The low self-esteem made him desperate enough to choose mostly one-night-stands, women who had little in common with him, women with less power and prostitutes. He also chose Therese when she really needed his help financially, after the condolence letter reintroduced them to each other. Therese, despite being suicidal, ended up being the best woman for him and even warned against another improper choice, which he ended up choosing. Self-esteem becomes a necessity so you can choose people who care about you, and of course you have to do the same for them, so that as a couple the individuals have permission to improve themselves. Obholzer pointed out before that Serge lacked the assertiveness to ask for what is good for him. If he wanted to look for further methods from Freud, if he read about his letter to Ferenczi, about how he was able to increase his ego by dropping homosexual friendship with Fliess, it happened naturally with disenchantment. Fliess did malpractice on Emma Eckstein’s face and Freud distanced himself from him. Serge would have to be disenchanted with his toxic relationship template before he could find a replacement. Since so many women he was involved with didn’t want to improve themselves, he would have to be disenchanted by them and move on, while also developing himself. There’s really no reason, even for a criminal, to not improve themselves if they believe they have a foundation for different choices. Regardless of dream therapy and it’s value, one has to accept oneself and be disenchanted with people who don’t allow that. Who’s supporting your goals for self-improvement, and who’s not? Either your biology prevents improvement, in which case you must accept, or it’s just the ideas about yourself that need to change. People have to experiment with their choices to see what’s possible for them and not rely on beliefs.

With scandals of people thinking their parents sexually abused them because of Freudian analysis, with some cases being true, but others not, how accurate of a method is it for courts? Like Mahony says about Abraham and Torok’s theory of father and sister incest, “coherence is not proof.” If some people are capable of passing a lie detector test, and the results are not admitted in all court systems, then certainly dreams could be open to lies and manipulation by so many people. At best dream analysis can help the patient if convincing memories return. They may get a relief where they are able accept what happened, grieve and move on with their life. Phenomenology can only be accessed through the subjective, but unless there is concrete evidence that is objectively available, the whole process moves back onto patient and only they can benefit, since only they can experience their memories. The reader can choose to believe, or leave a question mark for these dream analyses. The memories of the patient must resonate clearly with no skepticism, otherwise it becomes a form of brainwashing where the patient has to believe. 

The biggest question is that if bringing something up into consciousness is supposed to create relief, that may not be the case. Many abuses are not in the unconscious and the patient is very aware of what happened. They don’t talk about it because of possible stigma. For example, if the accusations from Brunswick and Masson were true, and the abuse was conscious, who would want to talk about how their anus was groomed to enjoy sexuality and now impulses are being fought over with repression? Anal flashbacks that are conditioned to repeat impulses and desire for anal pleasure, that are also conscious, would continue to cause stress if the patient ruminates on it and what it means in an obsessive way. When something is conscious, guilt and rumination cause their own problems. Serge was aware of his desire for his sister, but it still influenced him even when conscious. Some people go through horrendous abuse that is unconscionable, but they are still able to thrive. Others go through no abuse, or less abuse, and are psychologically compromised very easily. There could be genetic factors with that. And finally, anybody going through two World Wars, family suicides, and a loss of a fortune, are going to be consciously traumatized. No therapy will bring those people back.

Another area that only René Girard tackled in a major way, is what happens if you remove your transference to God, or imitation of Jesus? His warning is that we can just imitate the people around us and that’s exactly what happened to Serge. From an atheistic perspective, if Serge wanted to be independent of a father figure, then he would have to consciously not worship a God, another human being, or himself. Now that is a difficult meditation practice! In reality most people have a hope for a loving God, even if it’s not aimed at a particular religion, and many people have role models for success. That means social exchanges of trust. Those social exchanges have to be done carefully to avoid exploitation. Like Karin pointed out, if people are making suggestions for you, you have to ask “what do I really want?” Without the ability to negotiate, predators can take everything away from you.

I like Mahony’s description of how challenging a patient like this would be for any therapist, in any modality. “The total profile of the Wolf Man’s analyses constituted a muddled picture. True, a marriage replaced the flight from woman, and the defective capacity to work gave way to the successful [completion] of a doctor’s degree in law and employment for over thirty years in an insurance position. There will surely be those who will criticize psychoanalysis for its technical limitations because of the psychic distress and disorder that stayed on with the Wolf Man: though the depression, guilt, ambivalence, compulsive doubt, and narcissistic demands were abated variously at times, their overall force remained considerable. Whatever shortcomings obtained in the analyses conducted by Freud and Brunswick…I do not think that the best-directed therapy could have sufficiently rehabilitated the severely defective psychic organization and narcissistic structure of the Wolf Man or compensated for the lack of early parental care. He is one of those tragic individuals who remain forever inside a gaping wound and whose hopes grow mostly in lonely dreams.” 

Manchester by the sea – “I can’t beat it”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAcYyreYFyk

Resources:

The Wolfman and other cases – Sigmund Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780142437452/

The Wolf Man by the Wolf Man – Sergei Pankejeff, Ruth Mack Brunswick, Muriel Gardiner, Anna Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780465091973/

The Wolf Man: 60 years later – Karin Obholzer: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780710093547/

The Cries of the Wolf Man – Patrick J. Mahony: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780823610907/

Freud Standard Edition Vol 12: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780701205256/

The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 1: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780674174184/

The Assault on Truth – Jeffrey Masson: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780345452795/

The Wolf Man’s Magic Words: A Cryptonymy – Nicolas Abraham & Maria Torok: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780816648580/

Freud and the Rat Man – Patrick J. Mahony: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780300036947/

Violent Origins: Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation – Walter Burkert, Jonathan Z. Smith, René Girard, Robert G. Hammerton-Kelly, Renato Rosaldo, Burton Mack: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780804715188/

The War that ended Peace – Margaret MacMillan: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780143173601/

The First World War – John Keegan: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780676972245/

The Origins of the War of 1914 – Luigi Albertini: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781929631261/

Lothane, H. Z. (2018). Freud Bashers: Facts, Fictions, and Fallacies. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 66(5), 953–969.

Homosexuality Anxiety: A Misunderstood Form of OCD – Monnica Williams: https://www.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/attachments/72634/williamshocd2008.pdf

Misusing Freud: Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Homosexual Misusing Freud: Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Homosexual Conversion Therapy – Jonathan Barrett: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1027&context=psi_sigma_siren

How do I know I’m really not gay? Fred Penzel: https://iocdf.org/expert-opinions/homosexual-obsessions/

Sigmund Freud urged his disciple to divorce: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-11-12-vw-20532-story.html

The Master’s mad move: https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/jan/30/sigmundfreud

Conditions for intuitive expertise: a failure to disagree. Daniel Kahneman, Gary Klein Am Psychol. 2009 Sep; 64(6): 515–526

Alan Cumming Is Bisexual — And You Might Be Too: https://www.advocate.com/bisexuality/2015/03/30/alan-cumming-bisexual-and-you-might-be-too

Alan Cumming Sounds Off On Being Bisexual And Being Married To A Man: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/alan-cumming-bisexual-_n_4460070

Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/