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American Imago 60.3 (2003) 253-258



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Preface

Vera J. Camden

In response to Jung's promise to bring to the Weimar Congress in 1911 "many conspicuous representatives of the feminine element" from his coterie in Switzerland, Freud retorted that his Viennese group has "nothing to compare with the charming ladies you are bringing from Zurich" (McGuire 1974, 440, 442). The amused, knowing, even leering tone assumed by both men in this exchange underscores the ambiguity of how the earliest female participants in the psychoanalytic coteries were both perceived and received by the groups to whose membership they aspired. Despite the undercurrent of anxiety in the epistolary banter of Freud and Jung, however, the "feminine element" in important ways provides the impetus for the psychoanalytic movement. As John Forrester and Lisa Appignanesi write, "Psychoanalysis, like feminism, emerges as a response to the 'hysterical woman'" of the late nineteenth century, and it becomes the "cure" for the very illness out of which it arises (1992, 5).

The premise of this special issue of American Imago is that the place of the early women analysts deserves continued and sustained exploration—historically, theoretically, and clinically. Freud's disclaimer of having any "feminine element" in his Vienna cohort as "charming" as Jung's can in retrospect only be read ironically, as a warding off of the knowledge of the "dark continent" with which he was already imbued. As the papers by Madelon Sprengnether, Mary Bergstein, and Rosemary Balsam collectively demonstrate, Freud by 1911 had already recruited three early female analysts—and there is a sense in which he himself brings the total to four! Nellie Thompson's paper extends the trajectory by documenting how Freud's disavowal of the feminine element becomes an anguished legacy enacted in the theories and the life of one of his most devoted followers, Marie Bonaparte. Finally, Judith Vida's review essay takes up two landmark books on Melanie [End Page 253] Klein, who returns the repressed feminine element to the father of psychoanalysis in her adamantine theories of the archaic mother.

Madelon Sprengnether's exposition of Freud's unconscious identification with Irma in his famous "specimen dream" in The Interpretation of Dreams provides the crucial starting point for this collection of essays. Her excavation of Freud's psychic cavities sets the stage for a provocative but compelling claim that Freud was himself metaphorically a female analyst. Freud's mouth is Irma's mouth: Irma, c'est moi. Freud, like the speaker in T. S. Eliot's prose-poem "Hysteria," finds himself "lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles" (1917, 19). As Sprengnether argues, the "self-denigrating and incurable wound" that Freud postulated as the little girl's anatomical destiny is a projection of his own familial history of loss and helplessness. His "theorization of femininity," like his dream of Irma's injection, "very nicely describes his own dilemma," while it presages his demise decades later from oral cancer. Recognizing the overdetermination of Freud's dream symbol of Irma, Sprengnether points to Freud's identification of Irma with Emma Eckstein, best known for being the victim of the bungled nose operation by Wilhelm Fliess in 1895 but who, two years later, became the first of Freud's patients to cross over and set herself up as a practitioner. She thus emerges as the third person of the dream's trinity of original analysts—Freud, Irma, and Emma—who collectively unfold in Freud's clinical unconscious as the "first female analyst."

But if Emma Eckstein can claim chronological priority, Mary Bergstein's paper makes the case that Freud's "model" female analyst "was found, rather than made," and that in the pages of a book. At once ancient sculpture and living girl, the heroine of Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva embodies the prototype of Freud's analytic cure-by-love. In Jensen's novel, Freud confirms the priority of the creative writer that he elsewhere proclaims with both pride and chagrin. Emerging, as Bergstein shows, from within the same "cultural system," the same "period eye" as The Interpretation of Dreams, Gradiva offers a...

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