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Thirty years ago Carlo Bonomi had the intuition that the castration complex, as well as the striving after the penis, were the traces or, more accurately, the symbols of a catastrophic event. He discovered a sentence in a letter from Freud to Fliess, which he had the merit to heed:
Imagine, I obtained a scene about the circumcision of a girl. The cutting off of a piece of the labium minor (which is even shorter today …). (Letter to Fliess, January 24, 1897)
When Albrecht Hirschmüler confirmed that the girl in question was indeed Emma Eckstein, Bonomi pursued his investigation. In 2000, at the centennial Congress of Psychoanalysis, he revealed the fact that in 1886 Freud had training in neuro-pediatrics with Dr. Adolf Baginsky, and also that for the next 10 years he directed the department of nervous diseases at the Public Institute for Children's Diseases in Vienna, where he worked three days a week. Bonomi discovered that Baginsky had written several books on the subject of combatting the scourge of infantile masturbation. For girls, circumcision, Beschneidung, consisted of cutting off one of the labia minora, or the excision of the clitoris, or the cauterization of the entrance to the vagina. This practice was recommended at the end of the 19th century in Vienna as well as in Berlin. Bonomi spent considerable time following up this discovery. He consulted historians of psychoanalysis and the works of many analysts in the United States and in Europe who had studied the founding and the early days of psychoanalytic practice. Having examined an abundance of documents obtained from analyst researchers, he became convinced that as a child, Emma had been subjected to sexual abuse disguised as punitive surgery.
Bonomi gave the two volumes of his work the following subtitles: Sigmund Freud and Emma Eckstein to the first, and Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi to the second. Emma Eckstein and Ferenczi were the two paradigmatic patients Freud cited in his 1937 article “Analysis