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Emma Eckstein | |
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![Emma Eckstein (1895)[a]](/mt/?noimg=&dark=on&url=http%3a%2f%2fen.wikipedia.org%2fwiki%2fFile%3aEmma_eckstein.jpg) Emma Eckstein (1895)[a] | |
| Born | 28 January 1865 Vienna, Austria |
| Died | July 30, 1924(1924-07-30) (aged 59) |
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Emma Eckstein (1865–1924) was an Austrian author. She was "one ofSigmund Freud's most important patients and, for a short period of time around 1897, became apsychoanalyst herself".[1] She has been described as "the first woman analyst", who became "both colleague and patient" for Freud.[2] As analyst, while working mainly in the area of sexual and social hygiene, she also explored how 'daydreams, those "parasitic plants", invaded the life of young girls'.[3]
Ernest Jones placed her with such figures asLou Andreas-Salomé andJoan Riviere as a "type of woman, of a more intellectual and perhaps masculine cast ... [who] played a part in his life, accessory to his male friends though of a finer calibre."[4]
Emma Eckstein was born in Vienna on 28 January 1865 to a well-known bourgeois family with close connections to Freud: one of her brothers wasGustav Eckstein (1875–1916), asocial democrat and associate ofKarl Kautsky, the leader of theSocialist Party; and a sister,Therese Schlesinger, a socialist, was one of the first women members of parliament.[5] Another brother, Friedrich, appears (anonymously) in Freud'sCivilization and its Discontents as a 'friend of mine, whose insatiable craving for knowledge has led him to make the most unusual experiments', including 'the practices ofyoga...He sees in them a physiological basis, as it were, for much of the wisdom of mysticism'.[6][7]
Eckstein was active in the Viennesewomen's movement, collaborating withDokumente der Frauen andNeues Frauenleben.[8]
After an operation in 1910, however, Eckstein took to her couch, and remained a partial invalid until she died on 30 July 1924 of a cerebral hemorrhage.[7]
When she was 27, she went to Freud, seeking treatment for vague symptoms includingstomach ailments and slight depression related tomenstruation. Freud diagnosed Eckstein as suffering fromhysteria and believed that shemasturbated to excess; masturbation in those days was considered dangerous tomental health. Her 'treatment lasted something in the region of three years – one of the most protracted and detailed of Freud's early cases'.[5]
In her analysis, Emma Eckstein "supplied Freud with the material that would allow him to theorize hysteric symptomology...taught Freud about 'the no-man's land between fantasy and memory, resonating with sadistic acts and fantasies of a former historical epoch'."[9] She told Freud that “On two occasions, when she was a child of eight, she had gone into a shop to buy some sweets and the shopkeeper had grabbed at her genitals through her clothes. In spite of this first experience she had gone to the shop a second time, after which she stopped away. Afterwards she reproached herself for having gone a second time [...] And in fact a ’bad conscience’ by which she was oppressed could be traced back to this experience.”[10] Her "eager collaboration in her analysis gave Freud much precious material...contributed substantial changes and fundamental new elements to his theories: thewish theory of psychosis and dream; thetransferential reconstruction of her early pleasures...fantastic scenes from her inner life."[11] In particular, Freud's theory ofdeferred action owed much to "Emma Eckstein's twinned scenes in shops...'Now this case is typical of repression in hysteria. We invariably find that a memory has been repressed which has only become a trauma throughdeferred action'."[12]
Freud was at the time under the influence of his friend and collaboratorWilhelm Fliess, an ear, nose, and throat specialist. Fliess, whom Freud had called "theKepler of biology", had developed theories today consideredpseudoscientific, including the belief that sexual problems were linked to the nose by a supposed nasogenital connection. Fliess had been treating "nasal reflex neurosis" bycauterizing the inside of the nose underlocal anesthesia. Fliess conjectured that if temporary cauterization was useful, surgery would yield more permanent results. He began operating on the noses of patients he diagnosed with the disorder, including Eckstein and Freud.
His surgery proved disastrous, resulting in profuse, recurrent nasal bleeding; Fliess had left a half-metre of gauze in Eckstein's nasal cavity, the subsequent removal of which left her permanently disfigured. Though aware of Fliess's culpability, Freud fled from the remedial surgery in horror, he could only bring himself to delicately intimate in his correspondence to Fliess the nature of his disastrous role and in subsequent letters maintained a tactful silence on the matter or else returned to the face-saving topic of Eckstein's hysteria. Freud ultimately reasserted his full confidence in Fliess's competence, making Eckstein responsible for the catastrophe by concluding that her post-operative haemorrhages were "wish-bleedings", caused by her hysterical longing for the affection of others.[13][14][15][16][17][18]
Guilt over the episode has been identified as contributing to the dream ofIrma's injection inThe Interpretation of Dreams: "Max Schur grasped right away the significance of the episode to the 'Irma' dream...in his paper on the specimen dream."[19]
Eckstein is also associated withFreud's seduction theory. In 1897, Freud cites her analytic findings to Fliess as support for his "so-called seduction theory, the claim that all neuroses are the consequences of an adult's, usually a father's, sexual abuse of a child".[20] Eckstein wrote that "Freud deliberately treated his patient in such a manner as not to give her the slightest hint of what would emerge from the unconscious and in the process obtained from her...the identical scenes with the father".[21]
Jeffrey Masson in his assault on Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory makes much of Eckstein's role, linking Freud's "abandonment" of her position with respect to the Fliess surgery to his "abandonment" of her evidence for the paternal etiology of neurosis: for "the idea – that...all neurotic patients had been sexually abused".[22]
Yet while few (since Schur) would dissent that in regard to the failed surgery "Freud's evasiveness is blatant....Freud was eager to protect Fliess from the obvious charge of careless, almost fatal malpractice",[23] there is at the same time much to suggest that "as far as the seduction theory is concerned, Eckstein is a red herring...no more relevant than Freud's other patients. The fact that Masson lavishes so much attention on her...[is because] Emma Eckstein is for him a woman whom Freud and Fliess abused. She is thus the prototypical psychoanalytic victim...this symbolic function".[24]
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