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2020
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Publié par
Date de parution
17 septembre 2020
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9781528762403
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
Publié par
Date de parution
17 septembre 2020
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9781528762403
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
The Autobiography of
WILHELM STEKEL
THE LIFE STORY OF A PIONEER PSYCHOANALYST
Edited by
EMIL A. GUTHEIL, M.D.
With an Introduction by
MRS. HILDA STEKEL, London
Fools they that die for some dead past in vain!
All he once lost, the wise man wins again . . .
W ILHELM S TEKEL
Copyright 2013 Read Books Ltd. This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Wilhelm Stekel
Wilhelm Stekel on 18 th March 1868 in Boiany, Bukovina, in present-day Ukraine.
Stekel was a physician and psychologist. He was one of Sigmund Freud s earliest followers and is credited along with Freud as having founded the first psycho-analytical society. However, Stekel and Freud eventually fell out and their vision of psychoanalysis took different paths.
Stekel made several important contributions to psychoanalytic theory. His work on dream symbolism was acknowledged in Freud s The Interpretation of Dreams , as having taught Freud to form a truer estimate of the extent and importance of symbolism in dreams . Stekel also explored the notion of obsessional doubt, saying In anxiety the libido is transformed into organic and somatic symptoms; in doubt, the libido is transformed into intellectual symptoms. The more intellectual someone is, the greater will be the doubt component of the transformed forces. Doubt becomes pleasure sublimated as intellectual achievement.
On the theory of fetishism and perversion, Stekel contrasted what he called normal fetishes from extreme interests, saying They become pathological only when they have pushed the whole love object into the background and themselves appropriate the function of a love object, e.g., when a lover satisfies himself with the possession of a woman s shoe and considers the woman herself as secondary or even disturbing and superfluous.
As well as being an innovator in therapeutic technique, Stekel produced many papers and books on the subject, including Sexual Root of Kleptomania (1911), Compulsion and Doubt (1922), and Sadism and Masochism: The Psychology of Hatred and Cruelty (1929).
Stekel suffered from prostate problems and diabetic gangrene. He put an end to the pain by taking an overdose and committing suicide. Stekel died on 25 th June 1940.
P LAQUE IN C OMMEMORATION OF D R . S TEKEL S S IXTIETH A NNIVERSARY
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE By Emil A. Gutheil, M.D.
INTRODUCTION By Hilda Stekel, London
C HAPTER I CHILDHOOD
Introduction - Early Childhood - Books - The Shoemaker s Apprentice - My Family - The High School - First Love - Between Materialism and Idealism
C HAPTER II UNIVERSITY DAYS
Vienna - Military Service - Acute Illness - The Pacifist Movement - The Duel - The Loss of a Friend - Engagement
C HAPTER III PRACTICING MEDICINE
Work with Krafft-Ebing - The Military Hospital - Looking for a Job - Opening of Practice and Marriage - Joys and Woes of General Practice - Marital Clouds - Flight to the Mountains - Home Again-Children s Songs
C HAPTER IV INTRODUCTION TO FREUD AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
How I Met Freud - Analysis with Freud - Oh, These Doctors - Working with Freud - Nervous Anxiety States - The Growth of Psychoanalysis - Decline of Marriage
C HAPTER V THE BREAK WITH FREUD
Congress in Weimar - The Vienna Circle - Anxiety - Adler s Secession - Separation from Freud
C HAPTER VI PRACTICING PSYCHOANALYSIS
Psychosomatic Disorders - War Psychiatry - A Case of Schizophrenia - By Bicycle Through the Alps - The Vitamin of Love - Disorders of the Instincts and Emotions - The Dinner Speech - A Great Passion - War s End - Back to Civilian Life
C HAPTER VII A TRIP TO AMERICA
U. S. A. Is Beckoning - New York - Chicago - The Future of Psychoanalysis - Truth in Analysis - Success - Washington, D. C. - My Friend, The Gangster - Stepping on Other People s Toes
C HAPTER VIII TRAVEL ON THE CONTINENT
Europe - Davos - The Congress on Psychotherapy - Congress in Baden-Baden - Diabetes
C HAPTER IX CHIEF OF THE ACTIVE-ANALYTIC CLINIC
The Psychotherapeutic Clinic - Books on Dream Interpretation - Freud-Stekel - The Challenge of Time - A Mother Fixation - A Manic-Depressive Psychosis - Paris - Brazil
C HAPTER X A REFUGEE FROM THE NAZIS
The Nazis in Austria - Dogs - High Speed Living - Flight from Nazism - London - Illness - An Experiment in Education - Meeting Old Friends - The Outbreak of the War - Epilogue
INDEX
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Plaque in Commemoration of Dr. Stekel s Sixtieth Anniversary
As a Young Physician
Dr. Sigmund Freud
Dr. Carl G. Jung of Zurich, Switzerland
First Issue of the Zentralblatt f r Psychoanalyse
Zentralblatt f r Psychoanalyse for December, 1911
Dr. Alfred Adler
Zentralblatt f r Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie for May-June, 1913
Dr. Emil A. Gutheil
Homeward After Office Hours
Among His Students (1924)
Congress in Baden-Baden
In Conversation with Dr. Heimsoth (Berlin)
Chief of the Active-Analytic Clinic
Wilhelm Stekel, M.D.
On His Voyage to Brazil (Companions Unknown)
Lover of Dogs
On His Flight from Austria. One Last Look Toward His Homeland from Free Switzerland
Rest in Forest (Switzerland)
PREFACE
by
E MIL A. G UTHEIL, M.D.
W HEN AFTER Wilhelm Stekel s death, his wife, Mrs. Hilda Stekel, bestowed upon me the honor of editing his Autobiography , I soon realized what she meant when she intimated that the manuscript had been written in unusual haste. Much of the material was disorganized. Nevertheless, to one who had long been versed in the distinguished psychologist s method and who was familiar with many of the details of his personal life, the dramatic force and beauty of his story was consistently apparent.
Wilhelm Stekel was a pioneering psychoanalyst whose prodigious intuition and medical skill had permitted him to compile, study, and interpret the case histories of thousands of patients. When he felt that the sands of his life were running low, he wanted to leave his own case history to posterity, particularly to the coming generations of psychotherapists. He was in a hurry. Cataclysmic World War II events were besetting him; a grave illness he well understood was hewing at his gaunt, proud figure. Calmly, but with intense speed, he prepared his record.
There is no doubt that in his decision to write his autobiography Stekel was influenced by Jean Jacques Rousseau s Confessions . He had always deplored the fact that in world literature only a few autobiographies were sufficiently intimate and frank for the analyst-reader to evaluate the personality of the author involved. Stekel admired the rare courage and brilliant insight of the French philosopher so much that he made a thought-provoking psychological analysis of Rousseau s personality through his writings. 1
Stekel hoped that his own autobiography would be used in a similar way as a source for analytic research. As a brain specialist might will his own brain to medical investigators, so did the author of the ten-volume work on Disorders of the Instincts and Emotions wish to leave the account of his own instincts and emotions for the benefit of the students of psychoanalysis.
Such was the way of the real Stekel. When the great teacher and practitioner was no longer able to instruct in lecture halls or clinics, when he could no longer introduce live patients to demonstrate the intricacies of psychotherapy, he took the one available subject-himself-and posed it in the nude, stripped of every conventional reserve.
In his account of himself Stekel tried hard to be unbiased; however, his success in this respect was little more than that of some of his own patients who submitted prepared autobiographical data to him. He was not able to duplicate the vein of the masochistic exhibitionist Rousseau, whose memoirs were extraordinarily revealing because they constituted a form of self-exposure and self-chastisement. The student of psychoanalysis can see in Stekel s notes how many of his own complexes remained obscure to him, can detect his unresolved narcissism, his overcompensated feelings of inadequacy; will smile when he reads that the man who was a master in ferreting out other people s repressions believed that he had hardly any himself. Then there is Stekel s failure to recognize his affect-heavy attitude toward his teacher, Freud, upon whom he tried in vain to transfer his own father-complex.
But the analytical reader will also appreciate in Stekel the great clinician and psychologist, the erudite man of letters, the warm-hearted lover of the arts. To the mind of this editor come the words of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the Swiss poet whom Stekel liked to quote:
I m not a book that s filled with clever fiction;
I am a human heart with all its contradiction. 2
Stekel was both persevering and impatient; shrewd and naive. Was it an accident that it was he who discovered the principle of bipolarity of human emotions? 3
Stekel s Autobiography is more than a personal narrative. It breathes the air of old Vienna and recaptures the charm of the cosmopolitan Europe that was. It throws an interesting light upon an early phase of the psychoanalytic movement in which the author played a prominent part. He describes the intimate gatherings of Freud, Alfred Adler, and himself where they discussed ways and means to introduce psychoanalysis to medicine. Later as co-editor with Freud of Zentralblatt f r Psychoanalyse he writes of the search for landm
