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description. Freud had a somewhat older half-nephew, John (the “cousin” in Freud’s screen memory); he had a younger sister (several, in fact); he described himself as being an hysteric. Moreover, Freud was preoccupied with nursemaids and servants as sources of sexual trauma leading to neurosis. He was especially so preoccupied during this period of his self-analysis.
A page or so later, Freud remarked that obsessions are always reproaches related to a sexual deed performed with pleasure in childhood. This pleasure usually means masturbation, but also included is the pleasure involved in the seduction of another, such as a sister. Further on, Freud introduced a case history of an 11-year-old boy who suffered from obsessive rituals engaged in before he was able to go to bed. The explanation Freud provides is that “years before, a servant-girl, who had put the handsome boy to bed, took the opportunity of lying upon him and abusing him sexually.”39 This kind of comment makes one wonder about Freud’s remark, already quoted from the autobiographical Screen Memories paper, that a screen memory involves “putting back into early childhood a seduction to masturbation” that had “in fact occurred at a later period.” In yet another paper of 1896, The Aetiology of Hysteria, Freud reiterated that every case of hysteria has its origin in early sexual experience,40 and he listed three kinds of abuses. This list was based on his experience with now a total of, 18 cases of pure hysteria or hysteria combined with obsession—6 men and 12 women. In a few of these cases, the abuser was a stranger who assaulted the child, and the primary experience of the child was terror. The most numerous cases of sexual abuse were due to “some adult attendant of the child—a maid, nurse, governess, teacher, unhappily only too often a near relation….”41 The third category involved sexual relations between two children of a different sex, and Freud added: “[W]here there had been a relation between two children I was sometimes able to prove that the boy—who played the aggressive part—had previously been seduced by a woman….”42 Krüll proposes that Freud’s famous staircase dream indicates the nanny as a source of sexual seduction.43 This dream was first mentioned in a letter to Fliess in 1897. Freud wrote to Fliess: …I dreamt that I was walking up a staircase with very few clothes on. I was walking up very briskly…when I noticed that a woman was coming up behind me, whereupon I found myself rooted to the spot, unable to move, overcome by that paralysis which is so common in dreams. The accompanying emotion was not anxiety but erotic excitement.44 Whether this was the nanny or some other woman is not clear. Freud called her a “woman” here, but a “maid-servant” later when referring to a nonsexualized, more toned-down version of the dream in The Interpre- |