A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis by Friedman David M

Author:Friedman, David M. [Friedman, David M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2008-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

A postscript to the Little Hans case, added thirteen years later, told of a visit Freud received from the real Little Hans, Herbert Graf, then a young man hoping for a career in music. (Graf eventually became stage director of New York’s Metropolitan Opera.) Enemies of psychoanalysis had predicted the worst for Hans, a child exposed, in their view, to the prurient excesses of Freudianism when he was powerless to resist. Freud delighted in reporting that no such calamity had occurred, though he conceded that Graf said he did not recognize himself as the boy described in such detail in Freud’s analytic report.

This second fact exacerbated the fears Freud already felt about his case histories. Though he saw them as a necessary demonstration of his therapeutic method, Freud worried as far back as Studies in Hysteria that they read like “short stories.” Maybe it is only fitting, then, that conflict—physical and psychical—over reality, repression, and the penis would inform one of Freud’s most controversial works, a case history of the entire human race that one contemporary critic mocked as a “just-so story,” an insult inspired by the title of a children’s book by Rudyard Kipling offering fanciful explanations for the leopard’s spots and other zoological curiosities. This boldest of all of Freud’s case histories—a blend of biology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and, some would say, nonsense—was published in 1913 as Totem and Taboo.

Apparently, Little Hans had served the analytic cause once again. Minutes taken at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society show that insights from that case had been pushing Freud on to something larger for some time. Hans’s castration anxiety, Freud told his Wednesday-night colleagues, was more evidence that neurosis arose from the “ruin of sexual impulses” in the past. The way Hans merged his love-hate relationship with his father into a fear of horses, Freud said, resembled the way primitives worshiped their totem animal, a beast they revered as their common father yet, on somber religious occasions, they killed and ate. That totem clans had a taboo against incest, the psychic fuel of the Oedipus complex, also caught Freud’s notice. Was there an analogy between the psyches of primitives, children, and neurotics? Freud wasn’t sure. But in his practice and meetings with fellow analysts, several of whom he had treated for impotence, two conclusions seemed likely: The child is afraid of losing his penis. The neurotic adult is afraid of using it.

Perhaps psychoanalysis, which found its truths in the psychic rubble of the individual’s past, could explain this by studying the past of mankind. The challenge was irresistible. Years later, Freud confessed that medicine had been a “detour” from his true passions—cultural problems and philosophy. So Freud started his research, reading dozens of fat books on anthropology and religion—among them, Edward Tylor’s Primitive Culture, James G. Frazer’s Totemism and Exogamy, and Robertson Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites—before choosing a Darwinian setting for his speculation, the primal horde postulated by the groundbreaking British evolutionist in The Descent of Man.

“We may

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