It is hard to believe that Breuer would have reported such an event to Freud early in their relationship, when they were just getting to know one another, but not later once they were intimate colleagues studying hysteria together. It is also hard to believe that Freud would have forgotten such an important event initially, not been reminded of it when he read Breuer’s report of the case of Anna O. in the book they co-authored on hysteria in 1895, and yet spontaneously recalled it many years later. All this is possible, of course, but it is more likely that Freud’s 1932 account of the events involves a memory distortion itself, because false memories can be created as easily as true ones can be forgotten. Even in this account, he refers to having “guessed” at what really happened, and his reference to Breuer having the means to open the “doors to the Mothers” does not exactly relieve the suspicion of an oedipal displacement!

There is also evidence against the view that Breuer rejected Freud’s sexual theory of hysteria because he found it distasteful. In fact, Breuer had claimed that although Anna O.’s illness was not based in sexuality, he had other patients in whose illnesses sexuality played a major role. Indeed, in the theoretical chapter Breuer wrote for the 1895 book on hysteria that he co-authored with Freud, Studies on Hysteria, Breuer had spent many pages addressing the role of sexuality in hysteria. He began this review with the statement: “We are already recognizing sexuality as one of the major components of hysteria. We shall see that the part it
plays in it is very much greater still and that it contributes in the most various ways to the constitution of the illness.”40 His review ended with the conclusion: “It is self-evident and is also sufficiently proved by our observations that the non-sexual affects of fright, anxiety and anger lead to the development of hysterical phenomena. But it is perhaps worth while insisting again and again that the sexual factor is by far the most important and the most productive of pathological results.”41

Breuer was therefore far from rejecting sexuality as a cause of hysteria, or even as the most important cause. What he rejected was Freud’s claim that it was the only cause. He characterized his view of this divergence with Freud in a personal letter written in 1907 after their break. “Freud is a man given to absolute and exclusive formulations: this is a psychical need which, in my opinion, leads to excessive generalization.”42

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

There is a problem with Freud’s reinterpretation of Anna O.’s case, however. It is based not on actual evidence as Breuer reported it to Freud, but rather is a result of what Freud himself inferred. What Freud actually writes in his 1914 report is that “I have strong reasons for suspecting that after all her symptoms had been relieved Breuer must have discovered from further indications the sexual motivation … He never said this to me in so many words but he told me enough at different times to justify this reconstruction of what happened.”38 (emphases added) This means that Freud’s alternative story of the case of Anna O. is formed via inference and is therefore quite subject to the expectations Freud would be bringing to it. If this is so, then it may be a displacement of his oedipus complex that led Freud to infer that there was something sexual going on between Breuer and Anna O. in the case that originated psychoanalysis.

In all published accounts Freud indicates that this reinterpretation of Anna O.’s case is derived by inference, but there is one personal letter he wrote quite late, in 1932, which claims that Breuer explicitly reported to him Anna O.’s hysterical pregnancy. In this letter Freud writes:

What really happened with Breuer’s patient I was able to guess later on, long after the break in our relations, when I suddenly remembered something Breuer had once told me in another context before we had begun to collaborate and which he never repeated. On the evening of the day when all her symptoms had been disposed of, he was summoned to the patient again, found her confused and writhing in abdominal ramps. Asked what was wrong with her, she replied: “Now Dr. B.’s child is coming!” At this moment he held in his hand the key that would have
opened the “doors to the Mothers,” but he let it drop.39

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

His account next turns to the reason why psychoanalysis has met with such hostility: its assertion of the centrality of sexual impulses in psychic life. He claims that Breuer had experienced the importance of sexuality in the classic case of Anna O. out of which psychoanalysis grew, but that Breuer had repudiated the role of sexuality in hysteria and in psychic life more generally. Having rejected this essential tenet of psychoanalysis, Freud’s argument goes, Breuer cannot be seen as its true originator.

A review of the evidence, however, suggests that Freud’s characterization is distorted in a number of ways. And it appears that the cause of this distortion is a displacement onto Breuer of Freud’s childhood sexual rivalry with his father. Recall that Anna O. was a hysterical patient of Breuer’s who, according to Breuer’s report of the case, was cured of her disorder when she was able to remember emotionally disturbing memories associated with the fatal illness of her father. Breuer saw her hysteria as resulting from these disturbing emotions brought up by her father’s illness, and in his report of the case he explicitly said of Anna O. that “the element of sexuality was stonishingly undeveloped in her.”37 But Freud believed that this was not the full story. After each of Anna O.’s symptoms had been relieved, Freud now claimed, there emerged at the end of her treatment a final
symptom that Breuer had never reported: a hysterical pregnancy in which she claimed to be carrying Breuer’s baby.

According to Freud, Breuer did not want to admit to such a distasteful revelation, and so he did not report this symptom in his case study
and denied a role for sexuality in causing Anna O.’s hysteria. But Freud saw in Anna O.’s hysterical pregnancy the basis for understanding the true meaning of her illness. Freud’s reinterpretation of the case was that the source of Anna O.’s illness lay specifically in sexual impulses for her father. These sexual impulses, which had been repressed since childhood, were reawakened while she was caring for her father at his sickbed, and displaced onto Breuer as a father-substitute.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

As a young professional Freud’s work came to be psychoanalysis, and he came to view his mentor Josef Breuer as a rival for it. We have seen that Breuer served as a father figure to Freud when Freud was establishing his career as a young physician, providing emotional, intellectual, and financial support.

Most importantly for our current concern, Freud went so far as to characterize Breuer as the founder of psychoanalysis when he was first
invited to the United States in 1909 to give a series of lectures on the psychoanalytic movement. But by 1914 when Freud wrote his “History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement” he explicitly retracted his earlier view. The reasons he gave for rejecting Breuer as the founder of psychoanalysis now appear to reflect a displacement of his oedipal rivalry with his father onto Breuer.

Freud’s 1914 paper begins by pointing out that in 1909 he had attributed the founding of psychoanalysis to Breuer but that friends complained that the credit belonged to him. His initial method of deciding the question is quite unusual: Freud claims that the ownership of psychoanalysis must be his because he himself has met with great hostility whereas Breuer has met with none. In the first paragraph he writes: “I have never heard that Breuer’s great share in psycho-analysis has earned him a proportionate measure of criticism and abuse.

As I have long recognized that to stir up contradiction and arouse bitterness is the inevitable fate of psychoanalysis, I have come to the conclusion that I must be the true originator of all that is particularly characteristic in it.”36 This peculiar reasoning sounds as if it is modeled on an oedipal dynamic: The true owner of psychoanalysis (mother) will elicit hostility (jealous rivalry) from others.

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There are a number of clues that Freud displaced his sexual interest for his mother onto his work. Consider his decision to study medicine in the first place. On graduating from secondary school, Freud was still undecided about his future career, drawn both to law and to medicine. According to his autobiography, he decided on medicine immediately after hearing Goethe’s essay on Nature read aloud at a popular lecture. Jones describes this essay as “a romantic picture of Nature as a beautiful and bountiful mother who allows her favorite children the privilege of exploring her secrets.”34

That Freud took from this an erotic meaning is affirmed by a passage he wrote years later in The Interpretation of Dreams. Discussing the case of a man who had broken down in a frenzy crying “Nature! Nature!,” Freud wrote: “The physicians in attendance thought that the cry was derived from reading Goethe’s beautiful essay, and that it pointed to overwork in the patient in the study of natural philosophy. I thought rather of the sexual sense in which even less cultured people with us use the word ‘Nature’.”35

And consider his imagery over a decade later, when shortly after receiving his medical degree he applied for a postgraduate grant. On the night before the committee was to meet to decide who would get the grant, Freud dreamt that his recommender on the committee told him he had no chance because there were seven other competitors. Freud knew that in reality there were only two others, whereas the number seven represented instead the number of siblings in his own family of origin. This indicates that he experienced competition in his medical pursuits as akin to competition for his mother.

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Other opportunities for conflict with Eli emerged and were taken up over the course of Freud’s engagement to Martha, until the final months when they were securing sufficient funds to finalize their wedding date. It turned out that Martha had given half of her dowry to Eli, who as a businessman would know how to invest it wisely. Freud, however, knew nothing about investing and assumed that the cash was locked away in a safe. At the point when Freud told Martha to retrieve the money, Eli had overinvested his funds and could not easily lay his hand on ready cash, so he attempted to delay his fulfillment of Martha’s request.

This elicited Freud’s mistrust and fury once again, probably because in withholding the money Eli was withholding what to Freud was his means for marrying Martha. Freud wrote Martha a number of frenzied letters
denouncing Eli as a thief and telling her to insist that Eli return the money immediately, but Martha replied that she trusted her brother and resented Freud’s harsh words against him. Freud then took the matter into his own hands and wrote Eli directly, at which point the hurt Eli somehow got cash to send to Martha the next day, along with a note expressing his innocence and pain at Freud’s brutal words. When Martha wrote Freud rebuking him, his reply said that she should not write him again until she had promised to break off all relations with Eli! This tested Martha’s love to the fullest. But in the end they weathered this storm as
they had weathered previous ones, and Freud emerged feeling victorious over his rival, even at the cost of Martha’s feeling utterly shattered and drained.

Although Freud’s feeling of rivalry with Fritz Wahle can be seen as justified and might have been felt by many men in his situation, his feeling of rivalry with Eli Bernays is hard to see as warranted and probably constitutes an error or distortion. That he viewed Eli in this way when there was not good basis for this view suggests that he was displacing onto this adult relationship expectations that were derived from an entirely different source in childhood. But perhaps the most surprising displacement of Freud’s childhood oedipus complex in adulthood was one that was played out on another stage entirely. It appears that Freud’s attitude toward his professional work was also modeled after his childhood attitude toward his mother, and that in this case, too, he saw rivals. Yet whe we remember that Freud argued in his theory that work serves as an object of displacement of one’s sexual or aggressive impulses, this should not be so surprising after all.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

Now it is worth asking whether this rivalry with Fritz over Martha’s love is a true example of displacement. Are Freud’s powerful feelings of rivalry with Fritz an expression of his childhood hostility toward rivals for his mother’s love? In this case it is hard to know, for the reality of the adult situation might justifiably call up these same feelings without their having any childhood basis. Fritz did have a reputation for stealing women away from other men, and his reaction to Martha’s engagement to Freud certainly sounds like more than a feint in that direction. So in this case
we cannot be sure.

But there were other instances when Freud experienced revivals of this same dynamic when their basis in reality was by no means so clear. One occasion emerged shortly after Freud’s successful defeat of Fritz, when he now became fearful of another competitor for Martha’s love. This time the competitor was Martha’s own brother, Eli Bernays.

Eli was a friend of Freud’s and indeed of the whole Freud family. He became engaged to Freud’s sister Anna around the same period that Sigmund and Martha were engaged, and he had taken on the youngest Freud, Alexander, as an apprentice. Yet Freud stated soon after his engagement to Martha that Eli was his “most dangerous rival.”33 He seemed to seize the first opportunity he found for drawing the battle lines. Alexander at age 16 was being apprenticed to Eli without pay.

Although this was customary, Freud told Alexander after 2 months that he should ask Eli for a salary and quit if not given one immediately. The dutiful younger brother asked as he was told, and Eli said he would begin payinghim at the arrival of the new year, which was 2 months away. Because the salary was not to be given immediately, Alexander quit.
Eli was exasperated and complained to Freud about the situation, but Freud was unmoving. Freud insisted that Martha side with him on the matter and against her brother, and she did. As in the case of Fritz, Freud later told her that if she had not done so, he would have broken things off with her.

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It was not only their physical separation or the thought of losing her from ill health, however, that disturbed him. As in his relationship with his mother, he also was deeply fearful of rivals. The first potential rival appeared in the form of a man named Fritz Wahle. Freud had heard that Fritz had the reputation of being able to steal a woman away from another man. But Fritz was a close friend of Freud’s, and had been a brotherly friend to Martha for many years before Freud and Martha met. What’s more, he was engaged to marry Martha’s cousin by the time Freud began to court Martha.

As it turns out, however, Fritz’s feelings for Martha were apparently more than fraternal, for when he heard of her engagement to Freud he broke down crying. When he and Freud met shortly thereafter, he threatened to shoot Freud, and then himself, if Freud did not make Martha happy. Freud tried to laugh off the threat, but Fritz then declared that if he wrote Martha telling her to dismiss Freud she would, and he immediately penned such a letter, using phrases such as “beloved Martha” and “undying love.” Taking him quite seriously now, Freud tore the letter into pieces. The next day Freud, still much upset, said “He is no longer my
friend, and woe to him if he becomes my enemy. I am made of harder stuff than he is, and when we match each other he will find he is not my equal…’ Guai a chi la tocca.’ [Woe to him who touches her.] I can be ruthless.”31

Despite this confident assertion, Freud began to doubt his hold on Martha and to suffer an appalling dread. This was made worse by Martha’s reaction to the situation, writing Fritz a letter assuring him that their friendship could continue unchanged. Freud was so enraged by the letter that he wrote to Martha: “I lose all control of myself, and had I the power to destroy the whole world, ourselves included, to let it start all over again—even at the risk that it might not create Martha and myself—I would do so without hesitation.”32 When they next saw each other, Freud told Martha that she must reject all contact Fritz attempted with her. After many talks about the matter in which Martha was evasive, she finally agreed. Later in their relationship, Freud told her more than once that if she had not agreed then, they would have had to part forever.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

Childhood Patterns Revisited in Adulthood
Thus, personal experiences that Freud had in these early years appear to have had an impact on the psychological theory he subsequently developed. But we should look as well at the influence of adult life experiences on Freud’s theory, for The Interpretation of Dreams was written when he was over 40. One of the most striking things we find when we turn to his adulthood, however, is the extent to which his adult relationships repeat the same dynamic we saw in his early years.

This repetition gives a further personal source for his theoretical concept of displacement, in which powerful impulses of infantile origin are redirected toward other figures later in life. The dynamic that recurs, of course, is that of the oedipus complex: a passionate longing for a loved other and the need to fight rivals to secure exclusive ownership of that other. We first see this dynamic at play during Freud’s courtship and betrothal with his future wife, Martha Bernays.

Martha as the Mother
Freud was 25 when he met Martha and she was 20 (the age of his mother at the time of his birth); they became engaged 2 months later. Freud did not yet have the financial resources to establish a family, because he had only just received his medical degree the year before. As a result, Freud and Martha were engaged for 4 years before they could marry, and for 3 of those years they lived in distant cities. The luck in this for biographers of Freud, if not for Freud himself, is that there is a record of these years in the many letters totaling over 900 that Freud wrote to his betrothed.

Ernest Jones was allowed by the family to read the full set of letters and was deeply impressed by what he described as Freud’s “grande passion.” Jones wrote that the letters reveal “above all how mighty were the passions that animated Freud… He was beyond doubt someone whose instincts were far more powerful than those of the average man.”28 Freud’s passion was expressed most fully when he felt keenly his separation from Martha or when he worried about her ill heath, which preoccupied him to an unrealistic degree. In one letter, for example, he wrote about his longing to be with her as “a frightful yearning—frightful is hardly the right word, better would be uncanny, monstrous, ghastly, gigantic; in short, an indescribable longing for you,”29 and elsewhere when anxious about her health: “I really get quite beside myself when I am disturbed about you. I lose at once all sense of values, and at moments a frightful dread comes over me lest you fall ill. I am’so wild that I can’t write much more.”30

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

Freud saw this contemporary interruption and unfriendly response as an analogy to the childhood one he now recalled. After going to sleep that night, he had a dream in which he was sleepwalking. In interpreting this dream Freud reports an association to a patient who had developed the idea that he was committing murders while sleepwalking. Freud writes: “I knew that hostile impulses towards his father from the time of his childhood, in connection with sexual material, had been at the root of his illness.

By identifying myself with him [by sleepwalking in the dream], I wanted to make an analogous confession to myself.”26 The memory, dream, and associations, then, portray his sexual interest in his mother, his aggressive wish to displace his father, and his father’s rejection of this effort. Thus, we can find in these two rare early memories a basis for many of Freud’s later theoretical propositions: the role of sexual and aggressive impulses, the view of these impulses as unacceptable
and requiring censorship, and of course the oedipus complex itself.

The other important relationship to consider from Freud’s early childhood is that with his older nephew John, who lived nearby during Freud’s first 3 years before the family moved to Leipzig. According to his descriptions in The Interpretation of Dreams, theirs was a relationship that was both intense and ambivalent. Freud reports that they were inseparable, and that they both loved each other and fought with each other. With John being the elder of the two he won their physical battles, and Freud paints a picture of John treating him badly on occasion and of himself standing up courageously to his tyrant. He imagines his childhood thoughts pursuing the following lines: “It serves you quite right if you had to vacate your place for me; why did you try to force me out of my
place? I don’t need you, I’ll soon find someone else to play with.”2

These feelings toward John seem to echo both the hostility of a battle for primacy that he felt with other family members (”It serves you quite right if you had to vacate your place for me; why did you try to force me out of my place?”) and the pain of loss of intimacy that he felt with his mother (”I don’t need you, I’ll soon find someone else to play with.”). Both love and hate were felt toward the same person in this inseparable playmate of his earliest years. Perhaps this relationship, then, poignantly impressed upon Freud that conflict rages within an individual between two driving impulses of love and hate, the sexual impulses and the aggressive impulses.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest