Emma Eckstein - Analysis

Analysis

When she was 27, she went to Freud, seeking treatment for vague symptoms including stomach ailments and slight depression related to menstruation. Freud diagnosed Eckstein as suffering from hysteria and believed that she masturbated to excess, in those days considered dangerous to mental health. Her 'treatment lasted something in the region of three years - one of the most protracted and detailed of Freud's early cases'.

In her analysis, Emma Eckstein 'supplied Freud with the material that would allow him to theorize hysteric symptomology...taught Freud about "the no-man's land between fantasy and memory, resonating with sadistic acts and fantasies of a former historical epoch"' Her 'eager collaboration in her analysis gave Freud much precious material...contributed substantial changes and fundamental new elements to his theories: the wish theory of psychosis and dream; the transferential reconstruction of her early pleasures...fantastic scenes from her inner life'. In particular, Freud's theory of deferred action owed much to 'Emma Eckstein's twinned scenes in shops..."Now this case is typical of repression in hysteria. We invariably find that a memory has been repressed which has only become a trauma through deferred action"'.

Read more about this topic:  Emma Eckstein

Famous quotes containing the word analysis:

    The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.
    Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)

    Analysis as an instrument of enlightenment and civilization is good, in so far as it shatters absurd convictions, acts as a solvent upon natural prejudices, and undermines authority; good, in other words, in that it sets free, refines, humanizes, makes slaves ripe for freedom. But it is bad, very bad, in so far as it stands in the way of action, cannot shape the vital forces, maims life at its roots. Analysis can be a very unappetizing affair, as much so as death.
    Thomas Mann (1875–1955)

    A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.
    Karl Marx (1818–1883)