Cultures of Fetishism (6 page)

This loss of the future had been immediately preceded by another calamity. In April of 1923, a leukoplakia in Freud’s mouth was thought to be pre-cancerous. The growth was removed, but the surgeon had not taken any of the necessary precautions to prevent or minimize shrinkage of the scar. Four months later, two months after little Heinz had died, Freud wrote to a friend that he had not been out of pain since the surgery. However, Freud said that what troubled him most was the emotional pain of losing his grandson. “It is the secret of the indifference—people call it courage—toward the danger to my own life.”
14
He felt he could never love anyone else again, not even his other grandchildren.

When a human being feels “castrated” and humiliated by the suffering he is enduring, the erotic colorations of life diminish in intensity, very often yielding to destructive fantasies and actions. What happened to Freud in the years immediately following the calamities of 1923, and some of his own insights into how it changed the ways in which he looked at life, can show how this particular culture of fetishism—the humiliation of a physical or emotional wound that cannot be assuaged—might affect any human being.

Initially, I will be going into some detail about the physical sufferings that attended the surgeries on Freud’s mouth and nasal passages. Later in this chapter I will be connecting these details with some details in Freud’s theory of female sexual development. I will be suggesting that the mutilating surgeries performed on his mouth had stimulated an unconscious feminine identification that was intolerable to a proud man like Sigmund Freud. These feminine identifications, which are unconscious aspects of every man’s mas- culine identity, are frightening to most men, often inducing a defensive misogynist coloration to their erotic life, imbuing it with a degree of destruc- tive aggression toward the female body. Moreover, as we shall see, some of these defensive reactions are connected with an envy of the power of the female body.

Between the physical and emotional castrations of 1923 and the writing of “Fetishism,” were four years consumed by a variety of physical assaults on Freud’s mouth. Some were drastic surgical procedures undertaken to control and conquer the cancerous growth. Others were efforts to ameliorate the ghastly physical effects of the surgeries. His physical state, “which varied only from severe discomfort to real torment,” began in 1923 and “persisted more or less constantly for the next 16 years.”
15

In late September of 1923, a new and distinguished oral surgeon, Professor Hans Pichler, was elected by a colleague of Freud to take over the case from the first surgeon. Pichler examined Freud’s mouth and discovered a malignant ulcer in the hard palate that had already invaded neighboring

tissues “including the upper part of the lower jaw and even the check.”
16
Pichler, in consultation with the first surgeon, decided that a radical surgery was needed, and he performed this major operation in two stages on October 4 and October 11. In the first stage:

the external carotid artery was ligatured and the subanillary glands, some of which were already suspiciously enlarged, removed. In the second operation, after slitting the lip and cheek wide open the surgeon removed the whole upper jaw and palate on the affected side, a very extensive operation which of course threw the nasal cavity and mouth into one. These frightful operations were performed under local anesthesia.(!)
17
[The exclamation was inserted by Ernest Jones, who reported the details of the surgery.]

Much of Freud’s suffering was due to the outcomes of the second surgical procedure, which had joined the mouth with the nasal passages. This drastic surgery required the insertion of a prosthesis, a huge denture-like apparatus, designed to block off the gaping wound in his mouth, separating it from the nasal cavity. Those who saw the device described it as a “horror.”
18

Since the prosthesis made it impossible for Freud to open his mouth wide, it was difficult to remove it for a few hours of relief from the pressure it caused, or to replace it afterwards. One day, for example, after more than a half hour of the combined efforts of Freud and his daughter Anna had failed to achieve the re-insertion of the monstrous device, they were forced to send for Pichler to do it for them.
19
The tight fit, though necessary to close off the nasal passage from the mouth, “produced constant irritation and sore places until its presence was unbearable.”
20
If the horror were left out for longer than a few hours, the tissues would shrink and the prosthesis would have to be altered.

Ernest Jones described the effects of the first “horror” (there would be three more replacement prostheses within the next four years and finally a fifth that was constructed by an orthodontic specialist in Germany):

From now on Freud’s speech was very defective, though it varied a good deal from time to time according to the fit of the denture. It was nasal and thick, rather like that of someone with a cleft palate. Eating was also a trial, and he seldom cared to do so in company. Furthermore the damage done to the Eustachian tube, together with constant infection in the neighborhood, greatly impaired his hearing on the right side until he became almost entirely deaf on that side. It was the side next to his patients, so the position of his couch and chair had to be reversed.
21

Freud’s inability to give up smoking caused further irritation to his mouth and encouraged new leukoplakia, which then had a tendency to proliferate. Soon after the creation of prosthesis number two, Freud writes to a friend in Germany, “I want to thank you again for sending me those good cigars—150 of them. . . . Since it is not my intention to forgo this source of gratification for the short remainder of my life, please take any future opportunity you have to send me additional supplies.”
22

From 1926 until his death, there was an “endless cycle of leukoplakia, proliferation and pre-cancerous lesions. Each of them had to be treated surgically by excision, electrocoagulation, or a combination of both.”
23

A year after his first surgery, Freud had written to his colleague, Karl Abraham, “You must make a real effort to put yourself in my position if you are not to feel ill-disposed toward me.”
24
Those words kept reverberating in my mind as I grappled with the motives underlying Freud’s descent to destructive mysogenism in “Fetishism.” As I put myself in Freud’s place I felt enormous sympathy for him and could appreciate how his physical and emo- tional torments might have influenced the crudely aggressive tone of the 1927 “Fetishism.”

In a letter to Lou Andrea-Salome written on the occasion of his sixty eighth birthday, two years before “Fetishism,” Freud commented on the “crust of indifference that was slowly creeping up around me; a fact I state without complaining. It is a natural development, a way of beginning to be inorganic. The ‘detachment of old age’ I think it is called.”
25
And then in his next sen- tence, where he attempts to explain the underlying cause of his detachment and indifference, Freud arrives at the crux of what I am describing as a “
gradual descent from a discourse of eroticism to a discourse of bodily mutilation and destruction
.” Freud tells Salome, “It must be connected with the decisive crises in the relationship between the two instincts stipulated by me.”
26
Since he had several years earlier written
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
, a revolutionary monograph on manifestations of the death instinct, we can infer that he was referring to the inability of Eros, the life instinct, to tame and modulate the furies of Thanatos, the death instinct.

I am proposing that the catastrophic loss of Heinerle, and the surgeries and ensuing horrors performed on Freud’s mouth, those two simultaneous “cas- trations” that continued to plague Freud during the four years preceding the writing of “Fetishism,” foreshadowed and precipitated the castrations executed in that paper. Even if it were possible to discount the death of little Heinz, the surgical procedures alone would provide context enough for Freud’s emphasis on “the horror of castration,” and his incongruously nonchalant presentations of the mutilations performed by men on the bodies of women. Perhaps the horrors that had befallen him might even have something to do with his con- fusing a fantasy about the female genitals with their reality. His reference to the clitoris as an inferior penis, a
real
small penis (
itals
mine), demonstrates this confusion between fantasy and realty that pervades “Fetishism.” Another example is Freud’s habit of referring to female “castration,” another fantasy about the female genitals that he writes about as if it were a real mutilation.

Plausible as my proposal may be, we should pursue further inquiries in order to have confidence in its validity. Had Freud approached the question of fetishism and female sexuality differently before the calamities that befell him in 1923? Had something fundamental changed in the way Freud went about pursuing his studies? And if so, what was the nature of that change?

Since I am about to make interpretations about a person’s mental state without their consent or cooperation, it is best to begin by giving Freud an

opportunity to answer these questions himself. As we saw in his letter to Salome, his own observations about himself seem to confirm that there was a fundamental change in Freud’s attitudes after 1923.

In a postscript written ten years after the 1925 publication of “An Autobiographical Study,” Freud says: “Shortly before I wrote this study it seemed as though my life would soon be brought to an end by the recur- rence of a malignant disease; but surgical skill saved me in 1923 and I was able to continue my life and my work, though no longer in freedom from pain.”
27

As he looks over his post-1923 accomplishments he emphasizes that though he did not cease his analytic work, “
a significant change has taken place
”
28
(
itals.
mine).

After mentioning that he had carried out some significant bits of analytic work since then, among them his revision of the problem of anxiety (1926) and a simple explanation of fetishism (1927), nevertheless:

It would be true to say that, since I put forward my hypothesis of the existence of two classes of instincts (Eros and the death instinct) and since I proposed a division of the mental personality into an ego, a super-ego and id (1923b), I have made no further decisive contributions to psychoanalysis. . . . This circumstance is connected with
an alteration in myself
with what might be described as a phase of regressive development. (
itals.
mine
)
29

In connection with this regression, Freud speaks of his return to his earli- est interests in religious, moral, and cultural issues: “interests which I had acquired in the later part of my life have receded, while the older and original ones become prominent once more.”
30

While it would be far afield from the central concerns of this chapter to delve into the possible connections between Freud’s growing awareness of his now always imminent death and his return to his youthful thoughts on religion or morality, it is surely to the point that Freud acknowledges the “significant change” in his analytic attitude, and along with it “a significant change in myself.”

Before I contrast Freud’s earlier studies of fetishism and female sexuality with his post-1923 studies, I turn, once again, for a moment more, to another of his self-observations, which, quite to the point of this contrast, appears in his 1925 paper, “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes.”

He introduces that paper with an apology for bringing forth findings that have not yet been proven. Asking himself why he does not postpone publication until he has the necessary proof, he responds, “Because the conditions under which I work have undergone a change, with implica- tions that I cannot hide.”
31
In the past, says Freud, “I was not one of those who were unable to hold back a discovery before it was confirmed or corrected.”
32

But in those days I had unlimited time before me—
“
oceans of time”. . . and material poured in on me in such quantities that fresh experiences were hardly

to be escaped. . . . But now everything has changed. The time before me is lim- ited. The whole of it is no longer spent in working [he meant working analytically with patients], so that my opportunities for making fresh observations are not so numerous. If I think I see something new, I am uncertain whether I can wait for it to be confirmed. And further, everything that is to be seen upon the surface has already been exhausted: what remains has to be slowly and laboriously dragged up from the depths.
33

With these remarks, Freud justifies publishing a work before its value or lack of value can be established. In other words, in 1925 there was, in contrast to his earlier days, an urgency, a pressing need to tackle certain psychoanalytic problems, in this instance, the problem of the differences between the sexes. A tone of agitated urgency, which was not present in his earlier work on the subject, begins to enter into Freud’s writings on gender distinctions.

Putting his prolonged apology for his hasty conclusions behind him, Freud posts with all dexterity to positing some relationships between the anatomical differences between the sexes and what he proposes as the corre- sponding differences between the castration complex in males and females. From there he makes a further precipitous leap into suggesting a direct relationship between the anatomical differences (biological facts) and the social traits of masculinity and femininity (sociological or cultural influences). Or, as he put it in a paper written the year before, “Anatomy is destiny.”
34

According to Freud’s 1925 version of the castration complex, which advances and consolidates the theory put forth in his 1924 paper, when the boy first catches sight of the girl’s genital region, he sees nothing there or disavows the nothing that he does see. It is only later when, for one reason or another, the threat of castration “has obtained a hold on him,”
35
that the early observation becomes a threat. After that, when the boy recollects his first sighting, “he must take seriously what he was previously able to laugh at or ignore.”
36
This combination of circumstances determine the boy’s later relations to women, “horror of the mutilated creature or triumphant con- tempt for her.”
37
Freud’s portrayals of the origins of the little boy’s castration anxiety and its potential effects on the adult male are plausible and, in fact, seem to correspond to the ways that real human beings might think about these matters. Many men who would otherwise be terrified of the female gen- itals triumph over this terror through their macho defense of a triumphant contempt for the female.