I’ve embarked on a spare time reading of Peter Gay’s Freud, A Life for Our Time, a book that I hear is widely regarded as perhap the best Freud biography available. It’s a very thick book and so far full of interesting information. There are a few familiar stories, but also a lot of interesting stories that I had never heard.
One story I had heard was that Freud’s family of origin always considered him to be very special and very talented. I kind of wondered, like apparently many do, if that story might reflect typical parental cheerleading or perhaps a creation of Freud’s own memory.
This evening, though, I came across a story (p. 22-23) that seems to illustrate Freud’s early intelligence and foreshadow his destiny. At age 16 Freud and a friend, Eduard, formed a “Spanish Academy” were they spoke only Spanish and shared intimate secrets. One secret Freud shared was his crush on a classmate’s sister, a girl named Gisela.
Freud never acted on his crush, but he did psychoanalyze it – a sure sign of things to come! At 16 Freud decided that his feelings were actually the result of his “delight” with Gisela’s mother (think of it as if Oedipus had a “Hot Mama” living next door, I guess). In a letter:
Freud enumerated with delight the charms of Gisela’s mother, an affluent Freiburg matron - her intelligence, her cultivation, her versatility, her invariably cheerfulness, her gentle way with her children, and her cordial show of hospitality, not least to him. Frau Fluss, then far more than her daughter Gisela, was the true target of his taciturn fleeting adolescent passion. ‘It seems,’ [Freud] acknowledged, intuitively anticipating the kind of perception to which he would devote his life, ‘that I have transferrred respect for the mother to friendship for the daughter.’
This quote just stuns me as I read it over and over. I am curious as to what the original letter Freud wrote to his friend Eduard actually said. Transference is considered to be one of Freud’s most enduring psychoanalytic discoveries, but here he mentions it casually as a 16 year old boy. Was it just a casual remark that sounds incredible with 150 years of hindsight? It’s impossible to say, but certainly from our perspective it seems like it was a remarkable observation for a teenager.
