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travel (to Gmunden). Associating a sister with a box is reminiscent of Freud’s memory (see Chapter One) in which he recalled his half-brother Philipp’s opening a cupboard for him and his own thoughts of his nanny as “boxed up”; young Freud then connected the cupboard or box to his mother’s now being thin after having given birth to his new baby sister. (There were also other but less relevant autobiographical elements.)
From all the preceding material, I conclude again that Freud as a child was eroticized by his nanny or by some other female servant, and that his half-nephew John also probably contributed to this; the seductions set up a kind of compulsive masturbation combined with sexual fantasies. The childhood erotic behavior was also severely challenged by a strong castration threat, reinforced by the nanny but ultimately traceable to Freud’s father. All of this was enough to make Sigmund preoccupied, fearful, and obsessively fascinated with the effects of such sexual experiences, and it was enough to make him “disturbed” in other ways as well. Freud’s Personality: SplittingBefore I take up Freud’s personality, some preliminary remarks are called for. Although I propose here that Freud suffered from moderate degrees of various psychological pathologies, such as splitting and aspects of borderline personality disorder, such diagnoses should not be misinterpreted to mean that I suggest that Freud was seriously disturbed. Instead, I believe that such conditions, present in a limited degree, gave Freud an essential first-hand understanding of such pathology. That is, his own mental states were the primary sources of his psychological observations and insights. The remarkable fact about Freud, however, was not that he suffered from such conditions, but that he refused to succumb to them like countless others, and that he went on to understand them and finally to conceptualize them in such a way as to create not only his own particular theories but to establish a major new conceptualization of psychology. In 1919, Freud published a rather well-known essay, The ‘Uncanny,’ in which he analyzed the nature and origin of this feeling. In the first part, he surveyed the various dictionary definitions and historical origins of the words for “uncanny” in German and other languages. He noted that in German Heimlich (“homelike or familiar”) and Unheimlich (“uncanny”) are not simple opposites, but often similar65; he observed that often the unfamiliar turns out to be a special or odd form of the familiar.66 He also commented that the Hebrew word for “uncanny” means “demonic.”67 Freud then went on to comment on a fantastic tale by Hoffmann, called “The Sand-Man.”68 The story begins, not unlike that of the Wolf- |