Читаем Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud полностью

So much for the orthodox view. Now for the revised version. There are four main charges. In increasing order of importance they are that, one, Freud did not invent the ‘free association’ technique. This was invented in 1879 or 1880 by Francis Galton and reported in the journal Brain

, where the new technique is described as a device to explore ‘obscure depths’.35 The second charge is that it is a myth that Freud’s books and theories met with a hostile reception – recent scholarship has revealed the extent of this myth. Norman Kiell, in Freud Without Hindsight
(1988), reports that out of forty-four reviews of The Interpretation of Dreams published between 1899 and 1913 (which is in itself a respectable number), only eight could be classified as ‘unfavourable’. Hannah Decker, herself a Freudian, in her book Freud in Germany: Revolution and Reaction in Science, 1893–1907 (1977), concludes that ‘an overwhelming percent of the [published] lay response to Freud’s theories about dreams was enthusiastic’.36
Though The Interpretation of Dreams may not have sold well, a popular version did do well. The history of the unconscious, reported earlier in this chapter, and the evolution of such ideas as the superego, childhood sexuality, and repression, show that Freud was not saying anything that was completely new. Why, therefore, should people have taken such exception? He never had any problems getting his views published. He never published his views anonymously, as Robert Chambers did when he introduced the idea of evolution to a wide range of readers.

The third charge is that the picture Freud himself painted of one of Breuer’s most famous patients, ‘Anna O.’, or Bertha Pappenheim, was seriously flawed and quite possibly based on deliberate deceit. Henri Ellenberger himself traced the clinics where Pappenheim was treated and unearthed the notes used by Breuer. Since some of the wording in these reports is identical with the later published paper, we can be sure that these are indeed the original notes. Ellenberger, and others since, found that there is no evidence at all that Pappenheim ever had a phantom pregnancy. This is now believed to be a story Freud invented, to counter the apparent lack of sexual aetiology in the Anna O. case as recounted by Breuer, which was completely at odds with Freud’s insistence that sexual matters lay at the root of all hysterical symptoms. In his biography of Josef Breuer (1989), Albrecht Hirschmüller goes so far as to say that ‘The Freud–Jones account of the termination of the treatment of Anna O. should be regarded as a myth.’37

Hirschmüller himself was able to show that many of Pappenheim’s symptoms went into total or partial remission spontaneously, that she went through no catharsis or abreaction – in fact the case notes end abruptly in 1882 – and that, following treatment by Breuer, she was hospitalised in the next years no fewer than four times, each time being diagnosed with ‘hysteria’. In other words, Freud’s claim that Breuer ‘restored Anna O. to health’ is false and, moreover and equally important, Freud must have known it was false because there is a letter of his which makes clear that Breuer knew Anna O. was still ill in 1883, and because she was a friend of Freud’s fiancée Martha Bernays.38

The significance of the Anna O. case, or at least the way Freud reported it, is threefold. It shows that Freud exaggerated the effects of the ‘talking cure’. It shows that he introduced a sexual element when none was there. And it shows that he was cavalier with the clinical details. We shall see that these tendencies all repeated themselves in important ways throughout the rest of his career.

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Культурология / История / Образование и наука