Some Observations on the Sense of Smell

Freud's interest in the vicissitudes of olfaction, both in human evolution and in the psychosexual development of the individual, was documented as early as 1897. In a letter to Wilhelm Fliess (13, p. 232), he drew a parallel between the two and discussed the organic component of repression: 'To put it crudely, the current memory stinks just as an actual object may stink; and just as we turn away our sense organ (the head and nose) in disgust, so do the preconscious and our conscious apprehension turn away from the memory. This is repression.'

This line of thought was developed further by Freud in 1909 (16), when he stated that '… a tendency to osphresiolagnia, which had become extinct since childhood, may play a part in the genesis of neurosis'; and in a footnote added in 1910 to the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (15) he said: 'Psychoanalysis … has shown the importance, as regards the choice of a fetish, of a coprophilic pleasure in smelling which has disappeared owing to repression'. Finally, in a footnote to Civilization and Its Discontents (17), he elaborated once more on the relationship between evolution and organic repression: 'Man's erect posture, therefore, would represent the beginning of the momentous process of cultural evolution… There is an unmistakable social factor at work in the impulse of civilization toward cleanliness, which has been subsequently justified by considerations of hygiene but had nevertheless found expression before they were appreciated.' Freud concluded that anal eroticism is from the first subjected to the very 'organic repression' which initiated cultural development, and that it undergoes further modifications under the influence of the social factor which 'comes into play with the fact that in spite of all man's evolutionary progress the smell of his own excretions is scarcely disagreeable to him yet, but so far only that of the evacuations of others'.