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The wider public still sometimes maintains some strange ideas about psychoanalytic practice which are a perfect caricature of reality, as far as the psychoanalytic movement proper is concerned. There are, however, certain pseudo-religious movements of the past which developed, to an amazing degree, what superficial outsiders still believe to be genuinely Freudian ideas.
I recently came across a report on the so-called “Könisgberger Mucker” whose sect led by two clergymen, Ebel and Distel, flourished in the beginning of the 19th century in East Prussia, (see Max Kemmerich: Aus der Geschichte der menschlichen Dummheit, München, Albert Langen, 1912, S. 270-274 and O. Stoll: Suggestion and Hypnotismus, Leipzig, 1904, S. 504ff).
Ebel introduced confession hours for the members of his group which consisted mainly of circles of the Prussian aristocracy and higher civil service. In these confessions, the faithful had to report to three “women in the spirit” primairily about their sexual sins including “Gedankenunzucht”. “The more garrulous one was in this regard, the more revolting expressions one used … the higher one was placed, the more one was regarded as being in earnest about the process of recovery. If the confessed sins did not seem to be important, i.e., not grave enough, then the lack of confession caused dissatisfaction and was called a perseverance in evil, a negotiating with the devil; lukewarmness was said to be worse than frigidity of passion and then began a heated insistence on the revelation of other and more weighty confessions. When such confessions were revealed, God was praised for having mollified the heart of the obstinate. A method of bringing about a gradual purification and progressive sanctification of the members of this pious congregation … consisted … in requesting women to expose before the congregation parts of their bodies generally invisible to male eyes. The men had, then, to accomplish the rather difficult task of looking at the whole disp