Mental health articles

Theory of Periodicity One of the more entertaining, although probably no less factual, rationales for Freud’s renunciation pertains to a series of events involving Freud, one of his good friends, and one of his patients. While the following is not so much a rationale for rejecting his theory of seduction, it does give an interesting view of the process by which this reversal may have occurred. The following is a brief summary from Masson’s (1984) book on Freud’s renunciation of the seduction theory. In the early years of his professional life, Freud worked with a patient, Emma Eckstein, who had been sexually abused as a child by her father (Masson, 1984). This trauma, Freud argued, was responsible for her hysteria. At the time, Freud was good friends with Wilhelm Fliess, a physician who was advancing a theory, perhaps not unusual for its time, that the nose was the center of sexual feelings and that an operation on the nose could correct sexual dysfunction, especially the desire to masturbate. Evidently, Ms. Eckstein may have had this desire, although it is not certain. Regardless, Fliess wanted to operate, and Freud consented. Fliess had never performed this operation before and apparently made serious mistakes (Masson, 1984). After Ms. Eckstein had a severe and life-threatening hemorrhage, another physician reoperated on her nose and found that Fliess had inadvertently left a piece of gauze in her nose, causing the subsequent infection and hemorrhage. In Freud's first letter to Fliess after this second operation, Freud was obviously concerned about the error, but already appeared to be rationalizing it. In this letter, Freud said that Fliess had done the best he could and that it was an unfortunate accident. Although Freud expressed concern for his patient, he was "inconsolable" about Fliess' part in the affair (p. 69). This incident markedly strained the relationship of the two men (Masson, 1984). Freud seemed to need to reconcile this experience so that the operation, and his approval of it, could be justified. The more letters that were written between the two, the softer the recriminations became. Finally the men, relying on another of Fliess' theories—the theory of periodicity—began to alter the reality of the operation (Masson, 1984). This theory states that the numbers 28 (the female period) and 23 (the male period) are critical numbers and that all events in a person's life are determined by these numbers. Within 15 months of the operation, Freud and Fliess had begun to dismiss Fliess' culpability for the operation. Instead, they now believed that Ms. Eckstein would have bled anyway, as the operation fell on a critical date. Nine months later, Freud dismissed the event further by stating that the bleeding was a result of Ms. Eckstein's “wish to have Freud by her side” (Masson, 1984, p. 102) and “her own perverse imagination” (p. 106). As Freud stated in his letter to Fliess, “As far as the blood is concerned, you are completely without blame!" (as cited in Masson, 1984, p. 105). Freud now had reason to state that hysteria was not caused by real events, but by fantasized events. Perhaps it was a small step, then, to state not only that Ms. Eckstein’s abuse was an incestuous fantasy, but that all female children have incestuous fantasies. As Masson (1984) states: From 1894 through 1897, no subjects so preoccupied Freud as the reality ofseduction and the fate of Emma Eckstein. The two topics seemed bound together. It is, in my opinion, no coincidence that once Freud had determined that Emma Eckstein’s hemorrhages were hysterical, the result of sexual fantasies, he was free to abandon the seduction hypothesis.

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