Freud by Frederick Crews

Author:Frederick Crews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

2. GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN

As for “Katharina,” she too was a subordinate woman who wouldn’t be available to contradict Freud’s story about her. Although her encounter with him occupies the fewest pages of the major cases in Studies on Hysteria, that segment is the one in which Freud grants himself the most license to vaunt his deductive powers. In this instance, however, he was wrong to think that his departures from the truth would never be found out. Here, then, we can judge how far he would go, when feeling accountable to no one, in order to align a case history with his theory of the hour.

In a letter to Wilhelm Fliess of May 30, 1893, Freud reported that he was just then arriving at a fresh diagnosis, virginal anxiety, which he defined as “a presentient dread of sexuality, and behind it things [that virgins] had seen or heard and half-understood.”* A few lines below in the same letter, he announced, “My family is going to Reichenau tomorrow.”12 That was their favorite vacation spot, in a resort at the foot of a mountain called the Raxalpe (or simply the Rax) in the Semmering range, fifty miles southwest of Vienna. And it was from there, on August 20, that he laconically disclosed to Fliess, “Recently I was consulted by the daughter of the innkeeper on the Rax; it was a nice case for me.”13 Needless to say, it proved to be a case of “virginal anxiety.”

One day around the middle of August, the inveterate hiker Freud, stopping at the slopeside lodge on the Rax, had apparently been drawn aside for an impromptu consultation by a waitress, roughly eighteen years old, who was indeed the daughter of the innkeeper. Having learned from the guestbook that he was a physician, she is said to have asked for advice about asthma attacks that had begun tormenting her two years before. That was presumably her whole complaint—not hysteria, not anxiety, but asthma, an affliction that would have been especially worrisome in thin mountain air.

According to the case history, however, Freud’s questioning elicited an account of numerous symptoms that had been accompanying “Katharina’s” attacks, including giddiness, choking and crushing sensations, a fear of imminent death, fear of assault from the rear, and hallucinations of an unidentified man’s horrible face. All but the last two of these, we may observe, were plausible concomitants of asthma; but to Freud’s way of thinking all of them pointed to the same explanation, the hysterical reenactment of anxiety previously experienced when Katharina had been flooded with a sexual excitement that she couldn’t handle. It was quite a windfall for Freud that Katharina freely reported (if she did) the very symptoms he already believed to indicate “dread of sexuality, and behind it things [that virgins] had seen or heard and half-understood.”

Katharina had no idea why she had contracted asthma, but Freud, with Holmes-like quickness of mind, had already figured it out:

I had found often enough that in girls anxiety was

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