Freud, Ferenczi, and the “disbelief” on the Acropolis

Abstract

Ferenczi's 1929 claim that “no analysis can be regarded … as complete unless we have succeed in penetrating the traumatic material” resonated deeply in Freud, influencing his last works. According to the author, it reactivated in Freud the same traumatic memories that were at the heart of his self-analysis, letting them resurface in the 1936 essay “A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis,” in the striking simile of the Loch Ness monster. The image of “the sea-serpent we've never believed in” is then analyzed and used as a sounding lead for Freud's self-analysis. The transformation of the love-object into an attractive monster, which is found as a recurrent pattern in Freud's life and work, hints at the centrality of the combined figure of woman and serpent in mythology, in psychoanalysis, and in Freud's self-analysis. Finally, the background of the “memory disturbance” on the Acropolis is traced back to the woman patient who had dreams of gigantic snakes. It is suggested that the patient might be Emma Eckstein and that a still unexplored thread exists, which runs through the foundation of psychoanalysis, connecting the surgical operation of Emma, the Irma dream, and the Acropolis incident.

Keywords:

• history of psychoanalysis
• traumatic memories
• bisexuality

Notes

¹Although the notion of the “phallic” stage only appeared on the scene many years later, in Freud's paper on “The infantile genital organization of the libido” (1923), the imago of the phallic woman is clearly implicated in the figure of “old dragon.”

²In the same paper, Freud asserts “that everyone possesses in his own unconscious an instrument with which he can interpret the utterances of the unconscious in other people” (Freud, 1913a, p. 320).

³Freud's letter to Martha, 19 June 1882 (Freud, 1960). See Fried, 2003, pp. 419–422, and the excellent exploration of the Melusine phantasy in Freud that is contained in Rosenberg (1978). For comments on both Ichtyosaura and Melusine, see Eissler (1978). Abraham (1982), Harrison (1988), and Doria-Medina (1991).

⁴As outlined in Freud's 1913 paper, the main concern of obsessional neurotics is “to protect their object-love from the hostility lurking behind it” (Freud, 1913a, p. 325). The pattern of hostility that underlies the revelation of the universality of the Oedipus myth went mainly unnoticed but not completely so: Rudnytsky (1987, p. 64), for instance, cast in it a “pattern of unconscious hostility towards women.”

⁵The issue of persistent bisexuality was first discussed in Nuremberg, in March 1897, and later stood between the two friends, causing the first open disagreement in January 1898. One year later, the contention about the intellectual property of “bisexuality” resurfaced as an issue of Oedipal rivalry between siblings (as is alluded to in the associations to the “non vixit” dream), ending, in 1904, in a dispute.