7: Regression: “Back to the Beginning…”
Michael T O’Brien, M.A., Ed.D.
Now that we have some insight into what Freud’s Oedipus Complex seems to have really been about, based on an analysis of — not about a male child wishing to kill his father, but about a father who killed his male child — we can ask: where do we go from here?
Freud’s advice, as we have seen (#6), was that we go back to the beginning, to when a particular idea made its first appearance. Freud’s first mention of an Oedipus complex in his own case came in October of 1897, as we have seen. But he did earlier mention the basic theme that later became dramatically expanded in his October allusion.
Peter Rudnytsky, an English professor with a keen interest in Freud and psychoanalysis, called attention in 1987 to the first appearance of the themes of Freud’s later proclamation of an Oedipus Complex in letters and drafts Freud wrote in May of 1897. In particular, in Draft N, enclosed with a letter dated that May 31. It begins: “hostile impulses against parents (a wish that they should die) are also an integrating constituent of neuroses. They come to light consciously as obsessional ideas” {Freud 1985: 250}. That allusion gets us off to a start.
Draft N here was the culminating part of a series of three drafts that Freud wrote — known now as Drafts L, M, and N. All are on “The Architecture of Hysteria” (pp. 240–250). It was what was in the first that led to what was in the third.
In the first, which we have cited before (see #3, #5), Freud described the architecture of hysteria as one of using fantasies (or fictions) as “psychic façades produced in order to bar access to… memories [of] past events” (240). At the end of that draft he presented this account of a father who had had an affair with a lady that produced a child whom they, in reality, killed. Freud described the father here as a patient of his named “E.” He had had a dream, behind which lay a real event. Freud presents the dialogue he supposedly had with “Mr. E.”:
“I dreamed that, just as I arrived at my house with a lady, I was arrested by a policeman, who requested me to get into a carriage. I demanded more time to put my affairs in order, and so on. It was in the morning, after I had spent the night with this lady.” — ”Were you horrified?” — ”No.” — ”Do you know what you were charged with?” — ”Yes. With having killed a child.” — ”Has that any connection with reality?” — ”I was once responsible for the abortion of a child resulting from an affair. I dislike thinking about it” {p. 242}.
Notice the discrete “elements” of thoughts that occur together here: “I,” a “lady,” “arrested by a policeman,” “my affairs,” “charged with,” “having killed a child,” in “reality,” “I was once responsible,” “a child resulting from an affair,” and finally: “I dislike thinking about it.” I think that if we separate these elements of thought, coming from the mind of Freud, from the larger narrative in which he embeds them (my patient, Mr. E.), we can gain some critical clues as to the larger issues he had in mind, and might have been worrying about.
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We should note also that Freud presents this account at the end of his Draft, which has been discussing the architecture of hysteria. It’s as if he considered this account an example of just what he had been writing about, i.e., presenting a fantasy as a psychic façade in order to bar access to “these memories” of an event that had gone before.
In the letter which contained this Draft, Freud had been talking about how certain “impulses… derive from primal scenes” and “breakthrough into consciousness,” “forming compromises” (that is, of symptoms) and protective fictions which play a key role in hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and paranoia, and how “the protective fictions (fantasies)… penetrate into normal life amid distortions because of compromise” (239). So, the example of his dialogue with Mr. E. which followed in his attached Draft may have been intended by him to provide an example of just what he was writing, not a little confusingly, in this letter of May 2.
The account above of the man who had the affair with the lady and produced, and then killed the child, might have represented a partial breakthrough into his consciousness of a similar memory of his own, and that his representation of it here represents his formation of a compromise, to provide a “protective fiction” for himself. The thoughts that consciously occurred to him to write about here may thus, as his very own theory more generally claims, have been unconsciously determined by infantile memories he had repressed earlier.
So we find, earlier in Freud’s history, this much more detailed narrative. It provides the larger context to the simple insight arrived at through “analyzing” Freud’s Oedipus Complex. It supports what Freud said about the “reversal of a thing into its wish-fulfilling opposite” being one of his strategies of self-defense {1900a: 327}, quoted at more length in essay #6.
Going “back to the beginning” seems to work well as an heuristic strategy.
© Michael T. O’Brien, M.A., Ed.D. Lincoln, MA. February 6, 2025.
References
Freud, S. (1900a). The Interpretation of Dreams (J. Strachey, Trans.). In J. Strachey (Ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 4–5). London the Hogarth Press, 1953.
Freud, S. (1985). The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904 (J. Strachey, Trans.). Belknap Harvard University Press.
Rudnytsky, P. L. (1987). Freud and Oedipus. New York: Columbia University Press.
