In the first paragraph of Carolina’s editorial, she summarized the complex issue of the body in psychoanalysis. In my editorial, I will briefly touch on the body in our current society and expand on Freud’s work on the body and his cancer.
In the last three years, our body has been under tremendous pressure due to Covid. Our bodies have been under attack by mass killers. Many bodies have been killed, mutilated, and dislocated. These killings are taking place in churches, schools, and on the streets without any specific reasons. Mass killings are becoming a part of our daily lives. Are we going to survive in a world in which the body is not respected and is perceived as a not-body- not as an entity?
We have seen clinically, bodies that have been traumatized, bodies unable to speak or feel. The body-mind construct is disconnected from the internal–external world. The homeless person has no home. He lives in a state of terror. I wonder, if in this insecure state, he fears somatically the loss of an intact body. In addition to that , society has lost track of them. Homelessness is not just a mental problem, it is something more complex, a manifestation of our country’s social and economic inequities, a location of deprivation in the face of obscene excesses by others.
We as a collective see part of this issue as a fragmentation in American culture due to political forces. These political forces have created a “collective madness,“ a virtual world, with fast fake news to confuse, control and isolate the people.
Michel Foucault stated that the role of society was to control and exclude marginalized people that created problems. The French society built mental hospitals and prisons to maintain social control. The aim was not treatment or rehabilitation but to keep those deemed unfit in controlled places. It seems that madness, losing a sense of reality, has been a main concern in Western civilization.
It was with fragmented, lost and dissociated bodies that mental illness started to be cataloged.
“In Fragments for a History of the Human Body.“ edited by M, Feher. et all ( 1989) the authors summarized various views of the body as seen in many cultures and in different periods. In the last chapter of the book “A Repertory of Body History“ I found a reference to George Didi Huberman’s ( 2004) book “Invention of Hysteria. Charcot and the Photographic iconography in Salpêtrière“
“that links the body with psychoanalysis. In the hospital Salpêtrière the hysterical woman was born. Hysteria at that time was considered a nervous disease that afflicted women. Huberman’s work contradicted the prevailing view demonstrating that hysteria was a construction of the social, a montage of the role of women during that time.
Following Charcot Sigmund Freud became intrigued by the body of the hysterics. With Breuer he wrote “The Studies of Hysteria” Eugene Bleuler (1886) (1994) , in the review of this book wrote, “The factual richness of the book opens a new insight into the psychic mechanism and makes it one of the most recent publications in the field of normal and pathological psychology” (p. 7). The psychic mechanism was repression and sexuality.
Freud rejected Breuer’s ideas because he was not able to accept the concept of sexuality in hysteria. Also he rejected Charcot’s ideas that hysteria was a disorder in the brain, a neurologic disease. In contrast Freud believed hysteria was a psychological phenomenon. The hysteric according to Freud was afflicted by conflicts of sexual nature that could not be expressed in words but in somatic forms. For Freud the body was a body- ego. The body was alive using an expression coined by the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. We see language around this bodily aliveness in the Concordance to the Psychological Work of Sigmund Freud, the word bodies appeared 36 times, the bodily 105 and the body 602.
My brief and simplified history of hysteria is to introduce a new paper for Critica written by Riccardo Lombardi “On Freud and the Body.“ Lombardi, is an authoritative thinker in psychoanalysis on the body. I would like to thank Drs, Patricia Marra and Luisa Marino for their translation. ( See note 1)
One interesting new source on the body and Freud is the book by Peter –Andre Alt,( 2022) “Sigmund Freud, The Doctor of the Unconscious, a Biography. The book focuses on Freud’s cultural background and his struggle with cancer. From Alt we learned that Freud had a frail body. He was tired most of the time, suffered from heart palpitations; and used cocaine to help with depression and shyness.
In 1923 Freud learned he had cancer in his jaw which lasted till his death in London. He had fifty operations that altered his face. Lana Lin in her book “Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects. Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer.” (2017) traced Freud’s operations through notes from his surgeons. Freud had many prostheses which he called ”His Monster” because of the monster Freud was not able to speak clearly. He had many active voice registries according to people who knew him. It is interesting that Freud did not write much about his cancer.
I wondered after reading this book what it was for Freud to have a body that was fractured, monsters that were implanted in his mouth, and the fact that he had to be exiled to London in this impaired state? How could events have influenced his theory?
Freud left Austria in 1938 to escape the Nazi Regime and died in London in 1939 from cancer, helped by his doctor Max Schur. The war started on September 1, 1939 –and ended on September 2, 1945. We witnessed the brutality of humankind. Six million Jews were killed in concentration camps. (See. Note, 2.)
A tragic historical note is that the sisters of Freud died in concentration camps in 1942. They were Rosa, Marie, Adolfine and Regine Pauline. In the book “Leaving Today: the Freuds, in Exile 1938“, edited by Freud’s Museum, (2018) there is a brief note: “and the rest is silence“ Freud’s sisters. p. (108)
The “rest is silence “ is a very enigmatic statement. Is it a death notice? Is it something unbearable that cannot be discussed and must remain silent? Does this silent tomb extend to psychoanalysis where the topic of Freud’s sisters and the camps has rarely been discussed in psychoanalysis?
I had the impression that Freud was guilty of leaving his sisters behind. It is possible to say that Freud used a defensive structure such as denial, or perhaps foreclosure to alleviate grief and loss. Psychoanalysis at that time was rather mechanical, precise, affectless, acting like a protection against a traumatic monster.
A current focus on the body in psychoanalysis is found in an article Paniagua- Hartmann in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (2004) with a paper titled “What has happened to the body in Psychoanalysis”. Since that writing a large body of literature has emerged especially at PINC. I hope to say more in the near future.
In Contrast to the early view of the body I would like to finish with an editorial from Caliban, a psychoanalytic publication from South America published in 2016.
Their editors wrote :
“We can think of different ways in which psychoanalysts relate to the body. The possibilities range from those who read hieroglyphs encrypted in their patients’ bodies to those who decipher bodies resembling Bradbury’s “The Illustrated Man,” to those who, like forensic anthropologists, identify remains, exhume them, and restore lost identities. Talking about the body also involves exploring how it infiltrates many fields of knowledge. Language sheds light on this process. Nothing seems to escape its nominalizing ambition: medical corps, corpus delicti, the body of the nation, celestial bodies, hand to hand (cuerpo a cuerpo), the body of Christ, anatomical body, own body or foreign body; there are even two-body and three body problems in physics.1 Whether we are speaking of typography or architecture, corporations or medicine, chemistry or religion, we need the notion of body.p.1”
The editorial of Caliban reflects a new perception of the body: full of potentiality, that is diversified and part of the social matrix.
I would like to thank the Crtica Editorial Board, the new members of Crtica, and PINC for their support. Also I would like to thank Dr. Sharon Neuwald for her superb editing and her perceptive insights on the Holocaust literature.
Note, 1.
Appignanes,i L. (2009 ) Mad, Bad and Sad: A history of women and the mind doctors. W . W Norton and Company. New York.
An excellent book on the History of Hysteria And The Women’s Body.
Note, 2
The Concentration Camps: Inside the Nazi System of Incarceration and Genocide. https://khc.qcc.cuny.edu/camps/charts
Bibliography:
Alt, P. A, Sigmund Freud Il medico dell ‘Inconscio. Una biografia. Hoepli, Milano.
The original text was published in German (2016.) The Italian translation. was
published in (2022.)
Calibán Magazine. “The Body”. V14, N1, 2016.
Feher, M. Naddaff, R, Tazi, M . (1989)
Fragments for a History of the Human Body, part three, Zone, New York.
Didi Huberman, G. (2004) Invention of Hysteria : Charcot and the Photographic iconography of Salpêtrière.
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Lin, L (2017) Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Object: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer. Fordham University Press. New York.
Kiell, N. (1988) Freud Without Hindsight. Review of his Work
( 1893- 1939).
International University Press, Madison- Connecticut.
Paniagua, C. & Hartmann, E. (2004) What has happened to the body in psychoanalysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 85:973-976.
Leaving Today: the Freuds in Exile 1938.
Published by the Freud ‘s Museum London, 2018.
