Emma Eckstein
Encyclopedia
Emma Eckstein was 'one of Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

's most important patients and, for a short period of time around 1897, became a psychoanalyst herself': she has indeed been described as 'the first woman analyst....Emma Eckstein became both colleague and patient' for Freud. 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"'.

Ernest Jones
Ernest Jones
Alfred Ernest Jones was a British neurologist and psychoanalyst, and Sigmund Freud’s official biographer. Jones was the first English-speaking practitioner of psychoanalysis and became its leading exponent in the English-speaking world where, as President of both the British Psycho-Analytical...

 placed her with such figures as Lou Andreas-Salomé
Lou Andreas-Salomé
Lou Andreas-Salomé was a Russian-born psychoanalyst and author. Her diverse intellectual interests led to friendships with a broad array of distinguished western luminaries, including Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud, and Rilke.- Early years :Lou Salomé was born in St...

 and Joan Riviere
Joan Riviere
Joan Hodgson Riviere was a British psychoanalyst, who was both Freud's earliest translator and an influential writer on her own account.-Life and career:...

 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'.

Life

'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 was Gustav Eckstein (1875-1916), a social democrat and associate of Karl Kautsky
Karl Kautsky
Karl Johann Kautsky was a Czech-German philosopher, journalist, and Marxist theoretician. Kautsky was recognized as among the most authoritative promulgators of Orthodox Marxism after the death of Friedrich Engels in 1895 until the coming of World War I in 1914 and was called by some the "Pope of...

, the leader of the Socialist party; and a sister, Therese Schlesinger, a socialist, was one of the first women members of parliament'. Another brother, Friedrich, appears (anonymously) in Freud's Civilization and its Discontents
Civilization and Its Discontents
Civilization and Its Discontents is a book by Sigmund Freud. Written in 1929, and first published in German in 1930 as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur , it is considered one of Freud's most important and widely read works....

as a 'friend of mine, whose insatiable craving for knowledge has led him to make the most unusual experiments', including 'the practices of Yoga
Yoga
Yoga is a physical, mental, and spiritual discipline, originating in ancient India. The goal of yoga, or of the person practicing yoga, is the attainment of a state of perfect spiritual insight and tranquility while meditating on Supersoul...

...He sees in them a physiological basis, as it were, for much of the wisdom of mysticism'.

Emma herself was active in the Viennese
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

 women's movement, 'collaborating with Dokumente der Frauen and Neues Frauenleben '.

After an operation in 1910, however, 'Emma took to her couch, and remained a partial invalid until she died on 30 July 1924 of a cerebral haemmorrhage'.

Analysis

When she was 27, she went to Freud, seeking treatment for vague symptoms including stomach
Stomach
The stomach is a muscular, hollow, dilated part of the alimentary canal which functions as an important organ of the digestive tract in some animals, including vertebrates, echinoderms, insects , and molluscs. It is involved in the second phase of digestion, following mastication .The stomach is...

 ailments and slight depression
Clinical depression
Major depressive disorder is a mental disorder characterized by an all-encompassing low mood accompanied by low self-esteem, and by loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities...

 related to menstruation
Menstruation
Menstruation is the shedding of the uterine lining . It occurs on a regular basis in sexually reproductive-age females of certain mammal species. This article focuses on human menstruation.-Overview:...

. Freud diagnosed Eckstein as suffering from hysteria
Hysteria
Hysteria, in its colloquial use, describes unmanageable emotional excesses. People who are "hysterical" often lose self-control due to an overwhelming fear that may be caused by multiple events in one's past that involved some sort of severe conflict; the fear can be centered on a body part, or,...

 and believed that she masturbated to excess, in those days considered dangerous to mental health
Mental health
Mental health describes either a level of cognitive or emotional well-being or an absence of a mental disorder. From perspectives of the discipline of positive psychology or holism mental health may include an individual's ability to enjoy life and procure a balance between life activities and...

. Her 'treatment lasted something in the region of three years - one of the most protracted and detailed of Freud's early cases'.

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"' Her 'eager collaboration in her analysis gave Freud much precious material...contributed substantial changes and fundamental new elements to his theories: the wish theory of psychosis and dream; the transferential reconstruction of her early pleasures...fantastic scenes from her inner life'. In particular, Freud's theory of deferred 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 through deferred action"'.

Surgery

Freud suspected, in addition to hysteria, a "nasal reflex neurosis
Neurosis
Neurosis is a class of functional mental disorders involving distress but neither delusions nor hallucinations, whereby behavior is not outside socially acceptable norms. It is also known as psychoneurosis or neurotic disorder, and thus those suffering from it are said to be neurotic...

", a condition popularized by his friend and collaborator Wilhelm Fliess
Wilhelm Fliess
Wilhelm Fliess was a German Jewish otolaryngologist who practised in Berlin. On Josef Breuer's suggestion, Fliess attended several "conferences" with Sigmund Freud beginning in 1887 in Vienna, and the two soon formed a strong friendship...

, an ear, nose, and throat specialist. Fliess had been treating "nasal reflex neurosis" by cauterizing the inside of the nose under local anesthesia
Local anesthesia
Local anesthesia is any technique to induce the absence of sensation in part of the body, generally for the aim of inducing local analgesia, that is, local insensitivity to pain, although other local senses may be affected as well. It allows patients to undergo surgical and dental procedures with...

 with cocaine
Cocaine
Cocaine is a crystalline tropane alkaloid that is obtained from the leaves of the coca plant. The name comes from "coca" in addition to the alkaloid suffix -ine, forming cocaine. It is a stimulant of the central nervous system, an appetite suppressant, and a topical anesthetic...

 used as the anesthetic. Fliess found that the treatment yielded positive results, in that his patients became less depressed. Fliess conjectured that if temporary cauterization was temporarily useful, perhaps surgery would yield more permanent results. He began operating on the noses of patients he diagnosed with the disorder, including Eckstein and even Freud himself.

Eckstein's surgery was a disaster. She suffered from terrible infections for some time, and profuse bleeding. Freud called in a specialist, his old school friend, Dr Ignaz Rosanes, who removed a mass of surgical gauze
Dressing (medical)
A dressing is an adjunct used by a person for application to a wound to promote healing and/or prevent further harm. A dressing is designed to be in direct contact with the wound, which makes it different from a bandage, which is primarily used to hold a dressing in place...

 that Fliess had not removed. Eckstein's nasal passages were so damaged that she was left permanently disfigured. Freud initially attributed this damage to the surgery, but later, as an attempt to reassure his friend that he shouldn't blame himself, Freud reiterated his belief that the initial nasal symptoms had been due to hysteria.

Guilt over the episode has been identified as contributing to the dream of Irma's injection
Irma's injection
Irma's injection is the name Sigmund Freud gave to a dream of his. It is the dream with which he opens his seminal work The Interpretation of Dreams, and which forms the linchpin of the analysis in that book....

 in The Interpretation of Dreams
The Interpretation of Dreams
The Interpretation of Dreams is a book by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. The first edition begins:.The book introduces Freud's theory of the unconscious with respect to dream interpretation...

: 'Max Schur
Max Schur
Max Schur, M.D. was a doctor and friend of Sigmund Freud. He assisted Freud in committing suicide.Ernest Jones considered that 'Schur was a perfect choice for a doctor...his considerateness , his untiring patience, and his resourcefulness were unsurpassable'.-Life:Schur was born in Stanislau in...

 grasped right away the significance of the episode to the "Irma" dream...in his paper on the specimen dream'.

Seduction theory

Eckstein is also associated with Freud's seduction theory
Freud's seduction theory
Freud's seduction theory was a hypothesis posited in the mid-1890s by Sigmund Freud that he believed provided the solution to the problem of the origins of hysteria and obsessional neurosis...

. 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'. Freud wrote that 'Eckstein deliberately treated her 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'.

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 - which even Masson concedes is crazy - that...all neurotic patients had been sexually abused'.

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', 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'.

Cultural influences

  • In 1904, 'Eckstein had published a small book on the sexual education of children', although in it 'she does not mention Freud'. A few years later, however, in his open letter on "The Sexual Enlightenment of Children", Freud refers to her book approvingly, highlighting 'the charming letter of explanation which a certain Frau Emma Eckstein quotes as having been written by her to her son when he was about ten years old'.

  • Eckstein appears as a character in Joseph Skibell
    Joseph Skibell
    Joseph Skibell is a novelist and essayist living in Atlanta, Georgia.Skibell is the author of three novels, which use elements of history and fantasy:* A Blessing on the Moon * The English Disease...

    's 2010 novel, A Curable Romantic.

Further reading

  • Eckstein, E., Die Sexualfrage in der Erziehung des Kindes (Leipzig 1904)

  • Chapter 3: "Freud, Fliess, and Emma Eckstein," pp. 55-106. And "Appendix A. Freud and Emma Eckstein" pp. 233-250. In Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff (1984) The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, ISBN 0-374-10642-8

External links

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