Free Sigmund Freud* by Kathleen Krull Page A

the entire country as a “big mistake.” It was commercial, vulgar, shallow. The food upset his stomach—especially those crude charcoal-grilled hunks of meat (steaks)—and he was always having trouble finding a bathroom. The people were too informal and lacked respect for his authority, daring to address him as Sigmund!
    Even worse, his relationship with Jung deteriorated during the trip. Perhaps a “pretend” son could also harbor an Oedipal death wish toward his “pretend” father. At least that’s how Freud interpreted Jung’s behavior. The day before they set sail for America, Jung started talking about prehistoric mummies. Freud got so upset that he fainted—he thought Jung was indirectly voicing a desire to be rid of Freud.
    On the other hand, as much as Freud complained about the “savage” New World, the United States proved to be a surprisingly fertile field for Freud’s seeds.
    He made a sterling impression on G. Stanley Hall, a psychologist who had founded the American Psychological Association in 1892 (initial membership: twenty-six). Also on William James, a professor who had set up a psychology lab at Harvard and written The Principles of Psychology . He especially impressed James Putnam, a Harvard neurology professor treating hysterics at Massachusetts General Hospital, who now became convinced that psychoanalysis was the best treatment.
    Freud was exhilarated that in “prudish America one could, at least in academic circles, freely discuss and scientifically treat everything that is regarded as improper in everyday life.” He felt validated. “Psychoanalysis was no longer a project of delusion, it had become a valuable part of our reality,” he said. “It was like the realization of an incredible daydream.”
    Americans, and not just those in medical circles, were particularly mesmerized by his well-written case studies, with their vivid titles like “The Rat Man” and “The Psychotic Dr. Schreber.” Freud’s most famous, still-talked-about case was known as “Dora.” This was an eighteen-year-old girl whose real name was Ida Bauer. Her symptoms were typical of hysteria—headaches, a constant cough, depression. Her father insisted on treatment after Dora began accusing one of his friends of molesting her. Freud repeatedly dismissed her reports of abuse as an example of repressed desire. “This case has opened smoothly to my collection of picklocks,” he boasted. Not that smoothly. Dora angrily broke off treatment after three months. With much more known now about sexual abuse, most therapists today disagree with his handling of her case and believe he should have taken her accusations seriously.
    A more successful case study involved “Little Hans,” a five-year-old boy with an overpowering fear of horses. To Freud it was a classic example of the Oedipal complex at work, expressing Hans’s fear of his father. (Hans’s real name was Herbert Graf—he went on to become a stage director of the New York Metropolitan Opera.) In “The Wolf Man,” Freud helped a wealthy Russian with depression and obsessions that made it difficult for him to function. Freud traced his patient’s problems to a dream, from age four, of seven wolves staring at him menacingly. (Although this man, Sergei Pankejeff, never fully recovered and continued to suffer breakdowns, he took pleasure in answering his phone “Wolf Man here.”)
    Meanwhile, Freud’s old Wednesday group made one final change. In 1910 the group, now the official International Psychoanalytic Association, imposed the first standards and qualifications for analysts—so far anyone analyzed and trained by Freud or one of his followers could advertise himself as one. Freud believed that an analyst should be educated, but not that a medical degree was necessary—doctors were too apt to look at biological causes, not psychological: “I want to protect analysis from the doctors.”
    In 1911 the first book on him appeared. Other