Freud and Castration: A new Look into the Origins of Psychoanalysis

In The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900, pp. 544, 619) and in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud, 1901, pp. 198-199) there are several clinical vignettes that show Freud in the unusual role of psychotherapist to young boys. In such cases his approach was rather uniform and simple. A first phase was characterized by early onanism and consequent severe threats were regularly assumed, so that puberty could be viewed as a revival of the genital stimulation, now strenuously opposed by the ego. Freud's specific idea was that the punishment with which the child had been threatened, was now used by the boy for reproaching himself in retrospect. A simple explanation of the unconscious struggle, technically based on the transformation of images into thoughts, was sufficient for putting the neurosis to an end. Freud was so convinced of the validity of the schema that he applied it to explain the attacks of night terrors in a 13-year-old boy, the case history of whom he knew only from the pediatric literature. Notwithstanding the scarcity of information, he dared the following reconstruction: The boy had been threatened with severe punishment because of early masturbation; with the onset of puberty the temptation had revived and the struggle for repression had taken over the previous threats (Freud, 1900, p. 568).

Despite the simplicity of this schema, while narrating the only two vignettes reported in detail, Freud twice incurred the same sort of slip. In the first case, while relating the boy's material to the mythological castration of Kronos by Zeus (Freud, 1900, p. 619), he did not immediately realize that the mythological atrocity was committed not by Zeus on his father Kronos, but by the latter in his father Uranus. In the second case he wrote “Tarquinius Superbus” instead of “Tarquinius Priscus,” again substituting the name of the son for that of the father (Freud, 1901, pp. 198-199). The first error was analyzed in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Fre