The Language of Flowers

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Notes

All the letters to Fliess referred to in this paper come from J. Masson, ed. & trans. (1985), The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Freud’s letters to Silberstein are contained in W. Boehlich, ed. (1990), trans. A. Pomeranz, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein, 1871–1881. Cambridge, MA and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Freud’s letters to Emil Fluss are collected in Ernst Freud, “Some early unpublished letters of Freud,” Int. Jo. Psycho-Anal., 50 (1969): 419–428.

On February 1, 1900, Freud wrote Fliess, “I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament but a conquistador, an adventurer, if you want it translated, with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.”.

The letters to Martha Bernays quoted here are from The Letters of Sigmund Freud, edited by Ernst Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1960).

In a letter to Fliess (February 19, 1899), he described a man who blushes and sweats every time he sees a woman at the theatre. Freud said: “He is ashamed, no doubt, but of what? Of a fantasy in which he figures as the deflowerer of every person he meets. He sweats as he deflowers, working very hard at it. An echo of the meaning of this symptom finds a voice in him, like the resentment of someone defeated, every time he feels ashamed in the presence of someone: Now the silly goose thinks I am ashamed. If I had her in bed she would see how little embarrassed I feel.”.

Freud discussed this theme in 1905, 1910b, 1912, and 1930. In 1912, he wrote: “The affectionate current springs from the earliest childhood year and corresponds to the child’s primary object choice. These affectionate currents persist throughout childhood and carry with them the eroticism which is diverted from sexual aims. The incest taboo forces the displacement from early infantile objects to other extraneous objects with whom a real sexual life may be carried on. Two factors decide whether this advance in the developmental path of the libido is to fail. The first is amount of frustration in reality which opposes the new object choice. Second, is the amount of erotic interest that is maintained in infantile objects and the fixation sustained by masturbatory activity … Where they love they do not desire, and where they desire they cannot love” (pp.182–83).

Freud wrote to Fliess on August 7, 1901: “I do not share your contempt for friendship between men, probably because I am to a high degree party to it. In my life, woman has never replaced the comrade, the friend.” Freud saw successful collaboration with men as an example of the sublimation of androphilic currents in men.

Quoted in Boehlich, 1990, p. 196.

The dream deals with Freud’s discomfort while on a railway journey to an imaginary place called Hollthurn (where he immediately thinks of Holothurians, sea slugs). His discomfort is connected to an elderly couple who appear to resent his presence in their compartment because they wish to be affectionate with each other. In the dream, Freud becomes enraged and recalls the time when he intruded into his parents’ bedroom when he was seven years old and urinated on the floor, and his father’s angry rebuke, “The boy will come to nothing” (Freud, 1900, p. 216). In Grinstein’s view, the dream deals with Freud’s hostility toward his father and his wish to prove to Jacob that he is successful by identifying his work in the Project and The Interpretation of Dreams with Aclane Smith who wrote a treatise on economics and James Clerk-Maxwell who wrote on principles of physical science. Hostile feelings toward his father come out in allusions to primal-scene material and infantile object choices. Grinstein also suggests that “Freud had doubts about the success of his aggressive struggle against the authority of his father.” (Grinstein, 1980, pp. 351–353).

This is not the only instance of Freud’s disillusionment with his father. Perhaps the most frequently cited is the incident reported in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) when his father failed to stand up to the bully who said “Jew! Get off the pavement” (p. 197), which started Freud on a path of finding heroic replacements for his father in history, politics, and literature.

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Notes on contributors

Barbara S. Rocah

Training and supervising analyst at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis.