Published

p325 of The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904. (Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Editor and Translator). (1985c). Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

Available www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Freud (18980831)

Further information

Preface, Note on Method & Introduction to ‘The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904’ : 1985 : Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. See this site /5 Authors A-Z (Masson)

Citation

One of three mentions by Sigmund Freud of his hysteria in Introduction to Female Sexuality – The early psychoanalytic controversies : 1999 : Russell Grigg, Dominique Hecq & Craig Smith, see this site /5 Authors A-Z (Grigg or Index of Authors’ texts)

P16 of Grigg, Hecq & Smith, Apart from the question of femininity, there remains one riddle though. What was it that caused Freud’s blindness in the area of femininity, and more particularly his delay in recognizing the crucial mother-daughter dyad? Was this inadequacy dictated by Freud’s own masculinity and status as father, as, ultimately, he and others suggest, or by the phallocentric and patricentric nature of psychoanalysis as he conceived it,[30] by his self-diagnosed hysteria,[31] by his hysterical phobia as diagnosed by Didier Anzieu?.[32]

Footnote 31. See letters to Fliess of 14.9.1897, 30.9.1897 and 3.10.1897, in Letters to Fliess, 26l, 270 and 325. NOTE This footnote is not correct.

Sigmund Freud notes his hysteria in three places :

14.09.1897 is not the date of a letter. p261 of Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s translation is 14th August 1897 Letter 67. See Letter to Wilhelm Fliess : 14th August 1897 (Known as Letter 67) : Sigmund Freud on this site /3 Sigmund Freud (18970814 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts)

&

30.9.1897 is p269 of Masson’s translation, 4th October 1897 Letter 70. See Letter to Wilhelm Fliess (Known as Letter 70) : 3rd & 4th October 1897 : Sigmund Freud

&

3.10.1897 is p325 ( Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s translation) is the 31st August 1898 Letter 95. (This text)

Quotation

31st August 1898. At noon today I leave with Martha for the Adriatic , whether we shall stay in Ragusa, Grado, or somewhere else will be decided on the way. “The way to gain riches,” according to an apparently eccentric but wise saying, “is to sell your last shirt.” The secret of this restlessness is hysteria. In the inactivity here and in the absence of any fascinating novelty, the whole business has come to weigh heavily on my soul. My work now appears to me to have far less value, and my disorientation to be complete; time-another entire year has gone by without any tangible progress in the theory-seems incommensurate with what the problem demands. Moreover, it is the work on the success of which I have staked my livelihood. True, the results have been good, but perhaps only indirectly, as though I had applied the lever in a direction that indeed yields to the line of cleavage of the stuff;[1] what the latter is, however, I do not yet know. So I am running away from myself to gather as much energy and objectivity as is possible, because, indeed, I cannot let the work go.

[1] The image is that of splitting wood or rock.