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Home , Freud (miniseries), Hippolyte Bernheim, Nancy School, Psychoanalysis

From Introspective Hypnotism to 's Self-. Procedures of Self-Observation in Clinical Practice

"Tout psychologiste est obligé de faire l'aveu même de ses faiblesses s'il croit par là jeter du jour sur quelque problème obscur." Joseph Delbœuf, Le sommeil et les rêves (1885)

"In the summer of 1897, Freud undertook his most heroic feat - a of his own unconscious. It is hard for us nowadays to imagine how momentous this achievement was, that difficulty being the fate of most pioneering exploits. Yet the uniqueness of the feat remains. Once done it is done forever. For no one again can be the first to explore those depths." (Jones 1953: 319) This narration of Freud as the heroic discoverer of the dark continent of the unconscious was published in the first volume of Jones's biography in the 1950s. It is tempting for a critical historian to perceive in this self-analysis a mere hagiographical . The suspicion may stem from the manner in which this singular event is staged: in Jones's book, every chapter indicates at its onset the exact period of time it covers; the only exception being the chapter devoted to Freud's self-analysis. This section mentions just the initial date and leaves the final date blank, stressing both the "unfinished" and "incomplete" character of this exceptional analysis. The self-analysis is thus presented as a truly revolutionary and fundamental event: as an event creating history, without being historically datable.1

1 This framing of the self-analysis as an "endless beginning" links up with the narratives of the mystics. For an analysis of mystic speech and a comparison between forms of writing in mysticism and psychoanalysis, see Certeau (1982; 1987) and, in a similar vein, Chiantaretto (1998). Ellenberger ([1964] 1993) also groups Freud's self-analysis together with the experiences reported by the religious mystics and poets, reclassifying all these diverse singular events under the category of "creative illness". For other critical historians who perceive the major task of history and sociology of in the destruction of , the question of dating the actual beginning of Freud's self-analysis and evaluating its eventual "results" are of chief importance (see Sulloway [1979] 1992: 207-210). Jones's hero-making version was one among many others to come: during the 1950s, wrote and published the first book-length study on the topic. In contrast to Jones, Anzieu (1959; 1986) tried to establish a detailed reconstruction of Freud's self-analysis and the parallel writing of The Interpretation of . Although a second character was introduced - as the Big Other -, the narration of the self-analysis turned into a family story and thus remained an extended chapter of Freud's biography, for most of the psychoanalytic literature after Jones and Anzieu takes for granted that Freud's self-analysis was triggered by a personal reaction to his father's death, guided by the author's own acknowledgment in the preface to the second edition of his book. In this preface, Freud declared that The Interpretation of Dreams was "a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father's death - that is to say, to the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man's life." (Freud 1900b: xxvi) The endorsement of Freud's personal view of his self-analysis, be it on the side of those who sustained its inherent heroism (Eissler 1971: 279) or in the opposite camp of those critical historians who tried to dismantle this " of the hero" (Sulloway [1979] 1992), has largely hindered a historical of its technical significance, especially in relation with other contemporary techniques of self-observation in academic or clinical psychologies. From Freud's usage in his letters to his friend Wilhelm Fliess and in the first version of The Interpretation of Dreams, it is evident that the term "self-analysis" does not denote a singular event, but a specific introspective procedure developed at a time when self-observation was still acknowledged as the chief practice from which psychological facts were to be gained.2 In the original version of the book, the introduction of the term "self-analysis" (Selbstanalyse) occurs

2 According to William James's declaration, "introspective observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always. The word hardly needs to be defined - it means, of course, looking into our own and reporting what we discover there. Everyone agrees that there we discover states of . As far as I know, the existence of such states has never been doubted by any critic however skeptical in other respects he may have been." (James 1890, vol. I: 185) For histories about the demise of introspection in , see Boring (1953) and Danziger (1980).

2 in the chapter about "The Method of Interpreting Dreams" and is used interchangeably with "self-observation": "No doubt I shall be met by doubts of the trustworthiness of 'self-analyses' of this kind; and I shall be told that they leave the door open to arbitrary conclusions. In my judgment, the situation is in fact more favourable in the case of self-observation than in that of other people; at all events we may make the and see how far self-analysis takes us with the interpretation of dreams." (Freud 1900b: 105)3 Thus, in the first edition of the book, "self-analysis" refers to a new scientific technique proposed by Freud to his readers, whereas the second edition performs a reversal and casts the book as a part of the author's personal history.4 In what follows, I do not intend to explore this contradictory relationship between Freud's self-analysis and his book, or the transitions between autobiographical and scientific genres in its text. My task is rather to provide a historical frame for the first version of the dreambook by setting it in the clinical of self-observation in the last decade of the 19th century. Despite the various discussions and reinterpretations of Freud's self-analysis, it is striking to see that no comprehensive studies have yet been undertaken on this topic.5

3 It should be noted that the notion "self-analysis" appears for the first time in Freud's book in plural and in quotation marks ("Selbstanalysen"). Throughout the book, the term recurs in singular only once again in the context of a in which Freud carries out the dissection of his own body (Freud 1900a: 262, 278; Freud 1900b: 454, 477). 4 When this remarkable shift is placed in its concrete historical context and linked to the politics of the psychoanalytic movement, Freud's sudden confession in the preface to the second edition appears in a different light: Between 1899 and 1907, the year when the second edition of the book was completed, Freud had forged the notion of the Oedipus which he now posited as a universal pattern structuring (see Forrester 1980: 84-96). Only gradually, the acknowledgment of the Oedipal pattern provided a clear demarcation of the true and false Freudians. Thus, Freud's new preface should enable contemporary readers to link the freshly developed master of the with the autobiographical information given in his own dream samples in the book. The rewriting of Freud's dreambook in the context of the emergence of the psychoanalytic movement is analyzed extensively in Marinelli/Mayer (2000). 5 Only few historians of psychoanalysis have so far discussed Freud's self-analysis as a technical procedure. For a notable exception, see the study of Schott (1985).

3 During the nineteenth century, various modes of self-observation were cultivated, both in scientific milieus and in everyday life of the literate classes, leading to the genesis of new forms of writing about subjectivity.6 It has to be noted, however, that the initial version of Freud's book - as it was published in the fall of 1899 - was to a large extent directed at a very special audience, namely professionals who worked towards a psychology grounded upon pathological observation and experimentation. This intention is expressed in the opening sentence of Freud's short introduction (Vorbemerkung) to the first edition: "I have attempted in this volume to give an account of the interpretation of dreams; and in doing so I have not, I believe, trespassed beyond the sphere of interest covered by neuropathology." (Freud 1900b: xxiii) Given that the professional readers who were guided by an interest in a psychology founded on neuropathological practice regarded introspection as a problematic and doubtful method, this hesitant style of opening the book does not come as a surprise. Freud himself received his initial training as a neuropathologist in a clinical where the preferred method of experimentation was the induction of hypnotic states in patients and the subsequent observation of their symptoms or actions. Experimental hypnotism as practiced at the hospital La Salpêtrière by Jean-Martin Charcot and his students stood in sharp contrast to procedures of self-observation required by the psychoanalytic method as presented in The Interpretation of Dreams. In fact, Freud's assertion that "the situation is in fact more favourable in the case of self-observation than in that of other people" (Freud 1900b: 105) seems to constitute a complete break with former practices which he employed as a hypnotist, following first the lead of Charcot and than of his opponent , in collaboration with his Viennese colleague . In the following, I will give a different account of the introduction of Freud's self-analysis by restoring some of the ramifications in the medical culture of hypnotism in the 1890s. My argument is that in order to understand the specificity of Freud's new

6 Beside the where the issue figures prominently, several historians of science have drawn attention to the role of self-experimentation in scientific practice. See the work of Schaffer (1992; 1994) for an investigation of "self-evidence" in various disciplines in the 18th and 19th century, Hagner (forthcoming) for psychophysiology, and Strickland (1998) for romantic physics.

4 technique, a missing link between the hypnotism of the French doctors and the introspective procedures of psychoanalysis has to be sought. As a shorthand term denoting this link, I propose introspective hypnotism. I shall proceed in three steps. In the first part, I provide a description of this medical culture which has passed unnoticed in the historiography of psychoanalysis and experimental psychology. Here I add several characters to the picture thus showing how German and Swiss doctors in the 1890s attempted to make introspection an integral part of hypnotic techniques. Introducing self-observation into hypnotism responded to one of the crucial problems encountered by those medical professionals: how to achieve a reliable report on what happens in the experimental . In order to redefine the subject for a proper hypnotic experiment, the doctors made use of a rhetorics of confession which Freud later elaborated in his Interpretation of Dreams. In the second section, I highlight different strategies for transforming psychotherapeutic methods favoring introspection into an experimental program. While introspective hypnotists - such as Oskar Vogt - attempted to transform the consulting room into a psychological laboratory, Freud's self-analytic technique employed strategies that detached it from a concrete location in which the patient's mental state could be controlled. These strategies involved, on the methodological level, reading and writing practices. On the level of transmission of the new technique, it meant to make The Interpretation of Dreams into a surrogate laboratory where the conflicts between the reader and the author could be played out. In my last part, I discuss the problems encountered by early professional readers (like Eugen Bleuler) who were sympathetic recipients of Freud's work, but had also been trained in the culture of introspective hypnotism. The demise of the configuration in which the book formed a surrogate laboratory was triggered by Freud's failure in transforming these readers into Freudians.

5 1. Introspective Hypnotism in Clinical Practice

We have come to think of hypnotism, experimental psychology and psychoanalysis as distinct projects with their own histories. The historiography promoted by the adherents of institutionalized schools or disciplines has largely neglected the overlapping and connections between these fields. Only during the last decade, historical and epistemological studies have tried to challenge this artificial division, mostly from perspectives which focus on the

"construction" or "invention" of experimental subjects.7 The approach I follow here is also indebted to such studies which aim at restoring the often messy genealogies of the subjects constituted in various micro-settings such as the laboratory, the hospital or the consulting room. As Danziger (1990: 49ff.) has noted, the style of recruiting and producing "subjects" in the hypnotic performed in French clinics was entirely different from the introspective procedures advocated by the German psychologists working in university laboratories. For the French representatives of hypnotism like Jean-Martin Charcot, observation, not introspection, of patients was the royal road to a new experimental psychology. The procedures of hypnotic were thus promoted as a counter-model to the psychological experiments conducted in academic sites, the model being Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory at the University of Leipzig. Danziger argues that the definition of a "good subject" relied in both sites on diverging forms of social order: in Paris, the asymmetry between patient and doctor was crucial for the former to be a "good subject". In Charcot's clinic, reliable subjects were defined by extraordinary pathological states which could be observed and measured by medical experts.

The subject (usually a hysterical female patient) had to be brought into a "state of subjection" and her actions were described in a mechanistic vocabulary: She seemed to be entirely reduced to her automatic functions, her "machine animale", and was treated in an analogous way to a frog

7 For a history of hypnotism and experimental psychology in France, see Carroy (1991), and for a social constructionist history of experimental psychology, Danziger (1990). Many of these studies focus on the emergence and evolution of diagnostic categories, (Castel 1998) and double and multiple (Carroy 1993; Hacking 1995) being the most popular ones.

6 in a physiological experiment (except that her belly was not cut).8 In contrast, the ideal Wundtian subject was a healthy normal person (usually a male academic peer or student), trained in introspective techniques, which implied that he was able to report his experiences in a reliable form. Therefore, he had to be endowed with the faculties of "attention" and "judgment", both absent from the hypnotic state of the Parisian subjects. Hence, when hypnotism started to be introduced into German-speaking countries as a method of psychological experimentation in its own right, Wundt launched fierce attacks against it (Wundt 1893). In order to understand the stakes of this debate, Danziger's opposition of an academic laboratory psychology in and a clinical experimental psychology in France has to be largely extended and revised. In fact, what is taken to be the "model of the clinical experiment" in French hypnotism (Danziger 1990: 52ff.), reveals itself to be more diversified and heterogeneous.9 The most influential exponents of hypnotism in Germany, and Switzerland were not followers of Charcot, but rather of his opponent Hippolyte Bernheim of Nancy. One of the striking features of the clinical experiments with hypnotic suggestion conducted at Nancy was their claim to destroy any necessary connection between a specific neuropathological culture and the production of psychological facts that the Salpêtrière school had tried to establish in Paris. According to Bernheim's definition, a mere "verbal affirmation", an "order" was sufficient to bring anybody into a hypnotic state; hence, the production of such states was not restricted to a rare group of patients and did not depend on a sophisticated

8 It should be remembered that the experimental program of hypnotism as developed in the context of physiology and pathology took animal hypnotism as its starting point. In order to establish a genealogy for this research, German physiologists such as Czermak (1873) and Preyer (1880) engaged in a re-interpretation of Athanasius Kircher's famous "experimentum mirabilis" in which a hen was put into a state of immobility. Charcot (1878) also performed such an experiment in his clinic in order to suggest an analogy between the "cataleptic" human subject and the effect produced on the hen. 9 There exist various accounts of the diversity of the French cultures of hypnotism. See Carroy (1991), Harrington (1988), and the important work of Gauchet/Swain (1997) who even argue for a diversification of practices within Charcot's school. For a broad historical overview of various schools of hypnotism, see Gauld (1992).

7 laboratory setting where material agents were used, but could be applied to any kind of people. Bernheim argued against Charcot and his adherents that the extraordinary power of the physician in a hypnotic experiment had to be explained entirely by the belief (the "suggestibilité" or "credivité" ) of the subject and not by a special pathological disposition that could be influenced by material agents.10 This strategy of invoking the subject's power of "imagination" in order to question the causal effects of the magnet on his/her nervous system, echoed the attempts of the scientific commissioners to repudiate mesmerism in Paris during the 1780s (see Chertok/Stengers 1989: 15-37; Schaffer 1992: 349ff.). But, a century later, the implications and practical consequences of this new trial were quite different ones: The movement of hypnotism which hailed Bernheim as having "refuted" Charcot promoted a new "experimental psychology" that should be able to rival the laboratories of German psychologists. The foremost spokesman of this movement was the Swiss August Forel (1848-1931), who acted as the founder of the Zeitschrift für Hypnotismus, Suggestionstherapie, Suggestionslehre und verwandte psychologische Forschungen, which soon turned into a journal for the promotion of his own theoretical and political views about , edited by his disciple Oskar Vogt (1870-1959).11 In the period between 1889 to 1899, Forel and Vogt were among those doctors who most prominently advocated introspective hypnotism as an experimental procedure. In 1889, Forel published his manual on hypnotism which went into many editions during the next two decades. Its first

10 For a sociological analysis of the controversy between the two schools of hypnotism see Mayer (2001). 11 Oskar Vogt who later became a famous brain anatomist and founder of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute for Brain Research in Berlin is rarely mentioned in the history of hypnotism. While Gauld (1992: 537ff.) summarizes Vogt's physiological of hypnosis, the study of Satzinger (1998) is the first to establish the relevant biographical data. Vogt's career as a hypnotist began in 1894 when he visited August Forel, his first publication in the field being a number of annotations to the third edition of Forel's manual on hypnotism (Forel 1895). From 1896 on, he acted as the only editor of the Zeitschrift für Hypnotismus. Between 1895 and 1899, he attempted to establish a laboratory of experimental hypnotism. See the next section of this article.

8 edition was mostly intended as a propaganda pamphlet for the School of Nancy.12 Forel fully endorsed Bernheim's claim that the procedures of hypnotic suggestion were not to be restricted to the small number of hysterics as in Charcot's experiments, but that they should be extended to virtually everyone: " is a trait to be found in every healthy human brain." (Forel 1889: 88) In order to prove his point, Forel inserted at the end of his manual the reports of "two hypnotized hypnotists" (Forel 1889: 81ff.), one being himself, the other the psychiatrist Eugen

Bleuler (1857-1939), with whom he had experimented.13 The doctors' strategy to report their self-observations during a hypnotic state aimed to redefine "good subject" for the experimental study of unconscious phenomena: the subject had not to be regarded as a mere automaton, a puppet in the hands of the hypnotist, but rather as a moral subject whose critical faculties were still active, although to a lesser degree. A major problem in this redefinition was that the patients' retrospective reports about what they had experienced under hypnosis were contradictory. In his first publication on hypnotism, Bleuler noted that "the psychic state of the hypnotized subjects is still entirely unclear. Even introspection does not offer a lot of clarification. Some subjects claim to have not been asleep, and they believe to have obeyed the orders of the experimenter only in order to please ." (Bleuler 1887: 701) This problem had already been raised by Bernheim and sharpened by the Belgian philosopher Joseph Delbœuf (1886; 1889), whose criticisms of the hypnotic experiments performed in Paris and Nancy relied heavily on introspective accounts by patients

12 The English translation of the first edition of Forel's manual (Forel 1890) was not accessible to me. The later translation (Forel 1906) only reproduces the fifth German edition which is a largely revised version. Therefore, the passages cited in the following section have been translated by myself from the earlier German editions. 13 It is not clear when Bleuler was initiated into hypnotism, but it is likely that his first encounter with the technique took place in Paris during the mid 1880s when he visited Charcot's service. His first published text on the subject (Bleuler 1887) reviews mostly the French literature, with the aim to reconcile the findings of the Salpêtrière school and the school of Nancy. From 1885 on, Bleuler was Forel's protegé, becoming first director of the psychiatric asylum Rheinau (1886-1898) and later his successor at the Burghölzli hospital in Zurich. In 1889, Forel mentioned him as one of his collaborators during the First International Congress on Experimental and Therapeutic Hypnotism in Paris (Bérillon (ed) 1890: 155), and credited him in his manual of "having himself hypnotized a great deal and completely mastering the method" (Forel 1889: 81).

9 and self-trained hypnotists like himself. Bleuler's own report of his experiences under hypnosis thus should dispel the uncertainty surrounding the phenomena created by suggestion and put the doctor into a privileged epistemic position with regard to the patient. The psychiatrist notes that he "was quite willing to become hypnotized, but attempted during the hypnosis to back out of the majority of the in order to learn the power of the latter and their influence" (Bleuler 1889: 76). The various suggestions which were given by Forel and another colleague should bring about the array of phenomena commonly observed in hypnotized patients: catalepsy, anesthesia, and hallucinations. Bleuler stresses also that he had experienced the feeling of just pleasing the doctor as introspective patients had reported: "I had the feeling on several occasions of giving in in order to please the hypnotist. But since by staying calm and collected in such cases, I could still attempt to resist, while I was carrying out the suggestion, the uselessness of these attempts convinced me of the incorrectness of my views." (Bleuler 1889: 77) Thus, in his report, Bleuler constantly could switch roles: after slipping into the role of the patient and observing his feelings, he asserted with the voice of the medical expert that the patient was not a liar, but rather did not possess the qualities of a good self-observer. Hence the doctor's introspective report claimed epistemic superiority over that of the patient. Bleuler's report closed with the plea that more "educated persons" should publish their self-observations in order to elucidate the "subjective symptoms" occurring under hypnosis (Bleuler 1889: 77). In order to redefine the subject for psychological experimentation, Forel and his followers extended their self-observations to their everyday life and started recording their dreams. The introspective hypnotists could build on older studies of dreams which were burgeoning throughout the 19th century,14 but they also added new components. They claimed that there existed a close analogy between various phenomena observed in hypnotized persons (especially hallucinations) and striking characteristics of dreams: "The three typical characteristics of the dream existence are, at the same time, the criteria of hypnotic

14 For dream research before Freud, see Saussure (1926) and Métraux (2000).

10 consciousness. They are: hallucinations of perception, exaggerated feeling and reflex actions of the same, and dissociation of the organic logical associations." (Forel 1889: 21f.; cited Forel 1906: 84) The two other peculiarities of dream life which Forel added in a later edition of his manual also corresponded to the phenomena frequently observed in hypnotized subjects: the transformation of sensory perceptions into visual illusions or allegories and "the ethical and aesthetic defect" of the dream content. "The dreamer is frequently a coward and behaves badly. In a dream the best person can commit murder, steal, be unfaithful, and lie, and remain thereby quite calm, or at most feel more fear than remorse." (Forel 1906: 86) The link between dreams and psychic phenomena triggered by suggestion had its ground in physiological theorizing that postulated the between hypnotic states and .15 The procedures of inducing hypnosis thus necessarily entailed the step of first creating a semblance of sleep. If the subjects accepted the that they were asleep, this was the first indication that they had entered into a hypnotic state. The increasing number of dream reports that appeared in successive editions of Forel's manual did not serve any other purpose than that of rendering this analogy between sleep and hypnosis more plausible: "Subjectively we only know (i.e. the of the reflections of our waking consciousness knows) our sleep through the memories of our dreams." (Forel 1895: 51) The collection of dream reports was inserted as an illustration of the thesis that the way of reasoning both in dreams and in hypnosis was the same, both states being qualified as particular forms of "dissociation" of the subject's . In their reports of self-observations and dreams, the doctors made extensive use of a rhetorics of confession: the effects of hypnosis were not only described in a merely physiological vocabulary like in other reports as an inability to move or to speak, but also followed by detailed accounts of the author's feelings, especially feelings of concerning the loss of control. Forel (1889) described in his retrospective report of an auto-hypnosis not

15 The widely used concept of "inhibition" (Hemmung) formed an important bridge for making this link. For a historical study of this notion, see Smith (1992).

11 only how he during his afternoon nap in the hospital passed inadvertently into a cataleptic state in which "partial dreams" and auditory hallucinations occurred, but also the "desperate efforts" to wake himself up and the ensuing fear to fall asleep again.16 The report of an auto-hypnosis thus revealed a contradictory form of establishing authorship: on the one hand, the subjective staging of the fear undermined the stance required from the impassable 'cold-blooded' observer; but on the other hand, confessing this weakness was the guarantee for the learned reader that the reported events were real, because only a strong emotion was believed to leave a durable trace in the subject's brain. In the retrospective account of auto-hypnosis, it is paradoxically a performance of weakness which strengthens the author's authority.17 A non-medical observer of the cultures hypnotism, the Belgian philosopher Joseph Delbœuf, had already resorted to such intricate stagings of the observer's subjectivity, most prominently in his book Le sommeil et les rêves (1885). He had even come to define the ethics of the self-observer via a rhetorics of confession, when he asserted every psychologist to be "under the obligation to confess even his own weaknesses, if he thinks that it may throw light

16 In the third edition of his manual, Forel even added a sentence which dramatizes his experience: "At the time, I began to be afraid not to be able to get out of this state, and avoided to fall asleep during the afternoon." (Forel 1895: 222). In the fourth edition, Forel (1902) replaced his retrospective account by a short summary which is reprinted in the english translation of the fifth German edition: "I myself experienced a sort of autohypnosis some time ago (1878), when going to sleep on a sofa or in an easy-chair in the afternoon. I was only able to awaken myself with difficulty, and at first only partially, so that to begin with only certain muscle groups awakened - i.e., could be voluntarily moved - while the rest of the body remained cataleptic. At the same time partial dreams occurred (hallucinating of steps or of movements, which I really had not made, and the like)." (Forel 1906: 366) 17 The exposition of his weak brain also takes center stage in Francis Galton's introspective reports (Galton 1878) which lead him to the development of the association test and the invention of composite photography (see Mayer 1999). When the self-observer is his own expert witness, the subjective staging of memories is an important ingredient to make his account objective. Forel's text thus differs from other earlier reports of medical self-observation in a hypnotic state, such as Obersteiner (1885) who reports how all his own observations under hypnosis were checked by his friend and colleague von Fleischl.

12 upon some obscure problem" (Delbœuf 1993 [1885]).18 This contradictory performance of authority corresponds to many of the reported situations in which the doctors claimed to be in a state of dissociation. The hypnotized doctor usually portrayed himself in the professional context of the hospital or the private clinical practice, unable to perform his duties. In some cases, the consequences for the patient were fatal ones. Oskar Vogt reports an episode in which he failed to get out of bed when he was called to see a severely ill patient: "A few years ago, I was woken up at night by the father of a child who had again become severely ill. I raised, opened the window, spoke to the father who told me that the child was dying, and promised to come to his house instantly. Despite doing this, I went to bed again and continued sleeping. The next day, I went to see the child at the usual time, found the door closed and learnt from the neighbours to my great surprise that it had died. No memories of what had happened during the last night occurred. In the evening, I came to see the parents. The father received me in a very unpleasant manner. As a reason for his unpleasant behaviour, he told me the aforementioned story." (Vogt 1895/96: 32) How common this narrative strategy was, can be inferred from Wundt's retort to the self- observations and dreams published by the introspective hypnotists (Wundt 1893). According to Wundt, the only possible validation of the hypotheses about unconscious mental life could be achieved through self-observations of a trained subject. But the very combination of the awareness required for an attentive observation of one's own and the partial amnesia occurring after hypnosis, seemed to make any testing of the procedure inconceivable (Wundt 1893: 29). Consequently, Wundt based his entire refutation of hypnotism on a retrospective report of a somnambulistic trance dating back to his time as a medical assistant in Heidelberg in 1855. In his text, he described at length how he was called to a patient who needed a tranquilizer during the night; in a state that Wundt characterized as "dreamlike" (ibid.: 31), he reported to have given her, instead of the needed opium, a portion of iodine. The fact that the patient spit out

18 Forel was in extensive correspondence with Delbœuf, some excerpts of which have been published in Forel (1968). It is most likely that the strategies used by Delbœuf in order to put the hypnotic state in analogy to the normal dream had impacts on Forel. See Delbœuf (1885; 1993 [1885|; 1886).

13 the medication and refused to swallow the rest of it surprised him, but did not make him aware of the fallacy. "Only when I was again back to my room, I suddenly became conscious of what had happened; I was fully awake and realized instantly that I had acted in a sort of somnambulistic state. Frightened by the thought that the patient could have been harmed, I woke the other assistant, reported the incident in the early morning to our professor and only regained my calm, when it became evident that my fears were unfounded. Since the of those days left such a deep impression on me, the incidents of that night have been recorded in my memory with rare truthfulness, so that I still believe to remember quite clearly my state of consciousness in this somnambulistic doze." (Wundt 1893: 32) The story told by Wundt followed exactly the same pattern as the stories told by Forel, Vogt and other introspective hypnotists, except for one trait: all the reported events could be translated into his own psychological which had no room for the hypothesis of the "unconscious". Since Wundt regarded the hypnotic condition as one variant of "abnormal states" that could be triggered by the application of drugs or other modifications of sense impressions, but not systematically regulated in the further process, he classified hypnotism under the category of "observational and not experimental psychology" (Wundt 1893: 72f.). Thus, the clinic as a site of psychological experimentation was sent into the past: Wundt's reminiscence of his scientific beginnings in a medical context did not serve any other purpose than of refusing all the forms of self-observation which came out of a pathological context the title of a true experiment.19 At the end of this section, we may now ask what impact the procedures of introspective hypnotism had on Freud when he was working out the technique which he termed "psychoanalysis" in 1896. The explicit references to the various works published by Forel, Bleuler and Vogt during the 1890s are extremely rare. By August 1888, Freud had clearly

19 In this sense, Wundt's autobiographical report reflects the psychologist's of the clinic as a possible site for psychological experimentation which he sustained in the second edition of his pamphlet (Wundt 1911). Schmidgen (1999) has argued that, contrary to this denial, the clinic formed the primary context of Wundt's experimental knowledge.

14 chosen to become an adherent of the views spread by the School of Nancy, mostly for strategic reasons. In a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, he justified his translation of Bernheim's book on suggestion with the remark that he wanted "to have a hand in a matter that surely will deeply influence the practice of neuropathologists in the next years".20 Another important strategic move in this respect was Freud's positive review of Forel's manual on hypnotism (Freud 1889). But it is striking to see that it does not mention the final section where the introspective accounts of Forel and Bleuler were included. When the first volume of the Zeitschrift für Hypnotismus appeared in 1892, Freud contributed a short case history and was among the collective of doctors who formed the editorial board. It can be assumed that he followed the later developments of the journal and that he also studied the revised editions of Forel's manual.21 In The Interpretation of Dreams, a number of dream reports exhibit similar features as the examples published by Forel, Vogt or Wundt. In the chapter where Freud tries to provide further evidence for his theory of the dream as a wish-fulfillment, he cites as an example of "dreams of convenience" the dream of a medical student who fails to get out of bed (Freud 1900b: 125). The report of this dream dates back to March 1895 when he wrote to Fliess about his latest scientific findings: "Rudi Kaufmann, a very intelligent nephew of Breuer's and also a medical man, is a late riser. He has his maidservant wake him, and then is very reluctant to obey her. One morning she woke him again, and since he did not want to listen to her, called him by his name, 'Mr. Rudi.' Thereupon the sleeper hallucinated a hospital chart (compare the Rudolfinerhaus) with the name 'Rudolf Kaufmann' on it and said to himself, 'So R.K. is already

20 Freud to Fliess, August 29, 1888, in Freud (1985: 24), translation modified. 21 The only hints to Freud's reception of the work done by Forel, Vogt and Bleuler are given in his preface to the second German Edition of Bernheim's book on suggestion. There, Freud criticizes the author for not having made clear "that 'suggestion' (or rather the accomplishment of a suggestion) is a pathological psychical phenomenon which calls for particular conditions before it can come about. (...) And, while he explains all the phenomena of hypnotism by suggestion, suggestion itself remains wholly unexplained, but is veiled by a show of its needing no explanation. This gap has no doubt been observed by all those enquirers who have followed Forel in a search for a psychological theory of suggestion." (Freud 1896: 86f.)

15 in the hospital; then I do not need to go there,' and went on sleeping!"22 Like the introspective hypnotists, Freud upheld the analogy between dreams and hallucinations (as they occurred under hypnosis). Hence he referred Fliess to the "dream " of their common patient which he later included into the same section of his book (Freud 1900b: 125). These dreams which came out of the clinical practice were linked to the those of the medical self-observer who stands in as the model of "an approximatively normal person" (Freud 1900b: 105) Thus, Freud stressed that "dreams of convenience like these were very frequent in my youth" (Freud 1900b: 125). However, they the trait which became prominent in Freud's own self-analysis: the intricate staging of the author's failure, and the detailed exposition of his own feelings in a rhetorics of confession. The exemplification of these traits is provided by the famous dream of "Irma's injection" which serves as the specimen dream for the method of interpretation. Freud introduced this dream analysis with its various "indiscretions" with Delbœuf's imperative for the psychological self-observer (Freud 1900b: 105), but did not refer to the body of confessional writing of doctors. As we have seen, in the rhetorics of medical self- observers who proposed new psychological theories, staging the weakness of the author was a key element. Thus Freud could draw on a special variant of introspection that was developed in a clinical context, and had made the persona of the failing medical expert acceptable.23

22 Letter from Freud to Fliess, March 4, 1895, in: Freud (1985: 114). 23 The further proliferation of this sort of writing can be followed in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b) where Freud reports the following episode from his medical practice: "There is a very old lady whom I have been visiting twice a day for some years. On my morning visit my medical services are limited to two actions. I put a few drops of eye-lotion into her eye and her give her a morphine injection. Two bottles are always prepared for me: a blue one with the collyrium and a white one with the morphien solution. During the two operations my thoughts are no doubt usually busy with something else; by now I have perfomred them so often that my attention behaves as if it were at liberty. One morning I noticed that the automaton had worked wrong. I had put the dropper into the white bottle instead of the blue one and had put morphine into the eye instead of collyrium. I was greatly frightened and then reassured myself by reflecting that a few drops of a two per cent solution of morphine could not do any harm even in the conjunctival sac. The feeling of fright must obviously have come from another source." (Freud 1901b: 177) In the ensuing analysis of this "bungled action" (Vergreifen), Freud reveals that he was absorbed in thoughts about the universality of the Oedipus dream and the

16 2. Experimentalism With and Without Laboratory "Eine Suggestion: Du wirst dieses Buch lesen, auch wenn Du Dich dagegen sträubst. Und je mehr Du Dich dagegen sträubst, desto rascher wirst Du diesem Bann verfallen sein." Hans Schmidkunz, Der Hypnotismus in gemeinfasslicher Darstellung (1892)24

In the first attempts of the introspective hypnotists to redefine the hypnotic subject, texts were opposed to other texts. But in the long run, the doctors needed to train their own subjects in a place that could compete with the laboratories of the experimental psychologists in German universities. This task was undertaken by the German brain-anatomist Oskar Vogt, who became Forel's most prominent follower during the 1890s. From 1895 on, Vogt had the Zeitschrift für Hypnotismus for the promotion of his own method, but was lacking a site where he could establish a laboratory of hypnosis. After his failure to create his own "hypnotic clinic" in Leipzig, due to the interventions of Paul Flechsig and the resistance of Wundt (Satzinger 1998: 44ff.), Vogt took on a position in Alexandersbad, a private sanitarium in Bavaria. There he developed his method, in close collaboration with Korbinian Brodmann who published a detailed account of the method and most of the case histories. Vogt's new subjects were educated and wealthy patients for whom the techniques of suggestion of Nancy had to be largely modified. A major modification consisted in the refusal of giving "orders" to the patient, a practice both recommended by Liébeault and Bernheim, both of whom had dealt with larger groups of patients from the lower classes. Already in his first report about his practice as a hypnotist in Leizpig, Vogt noted that he "generally avoided to give suggestions in the forms of an order, in order not to disturb those subjects who do not want to be deprived of their 'free will'.

wish to have sexual intercourse with one's own mother. Thus, the theorist stages one of his major as the upshot of a mistake in the realm of clinical practice, an act of "sich vergreifen" (which means both 'to make a blunder' and 'to rape somebody'). 24"A suggestion: You will read this book, even if you try to resist it. And the more you resist, the faster you will be under its spell."

17 When dealing with an educated person, I usually present the phenomena of suggestion as something that emerges naturally out of himself." (Vogt in Forel 1895: 42) For the effective redefinition of the subject for a hypnotic experiment that would match Wundt's criteria of a well-trained self-observer, the literacy and of the patient had to be taken into account. The ideal subjects were first and foremost defined by the "ability of their critical and sober self-observation" which comprised the "adequate verbal expression" of what they had observed in themselves (Vogt 1899: 71). Vogt formulated a set of criteria: on the one hand, the subject's "will" and "attention" to observe their inner objects had to be constant, on the other hand, those objects had to be "given in their full intensity" which they only attained in a state of "dissociation" (ibid.: 14). With these requirements, he combined the criteria demanded by Wundt for a good self-observer with the observations of patients made by neuropathologists such as Breuer and Freud in their . Thus, his strategy amounted to transporting the qualities of the psychological introspectionist into the clinic and to extend the method of experimentation to entities which were excluded from Wundt's laboratory in Leipzig. Vogt termed the state of dissociation a "systematic partial waking state which is constituted by a complete waking state for all the elements of consciousness pertaining to the experimental system and by a deep sleep-inhibition (Schlafhemmung) for all the others" (Vogt 1897: 200). Like his master Forel, Vogt had taken the analogy between hypnosis and sleep literally: hence, what had to be achieved first in his laboratory of hypnosis was to put the subject into a state close to sleep. The so-called "fractionation method" developed by Vogt and Brodmann in Alexandersbad should enable the doctor to control systematically the mental changes induced in the patient. In a setting where all possible acoustic and optical excitations were reduced to a minimum, the gradual hypnotization was constantly checked by the doctor's questions. With this procedure, hypnosis was achieved step by step by a "consequent disciplining" of the subject. In marked opposition to the school of Charcot where the patient had to be unaware of the purpose of the experiment, the patient was at the beginning informed by the experimenter about all the qualities required of a "good subject": "Thus, Vogt asserts that he does not want to achieve blind obedience, but rather that he wants to educate his patients in order to increase their

18 and strength of will." (Brodmann 1898: 243) Once the subject had internalized these control techniques, he or she could in turn take on the role of the hypnotist. But Vogt and his followers attempted not only to cure their patients by making them into self-observers, they also asked the future hypnotherapists to subject themselves to the whole procedure. By promoting such a special training for the specialist, Vogt's laboratory of hypnosis should have become the only passage point for the creation of hypnotic phenomena.25 In contradistinction to these introspective hypnotists, Freud dropped the project of turning the consulting room of the hypnotist into a laboratory. Although he had at first been tempted by transforming hypnotism into a laboratory science,26 in an article for a medical dictionary, published in 1891, Freud listed the various disadvantages of Bernheim's suggestion technique when it was practiced outside the space of the hospital. Despite the fact that there was no clear epistemic criterion for the doctor, if the patient was really in a hypnotic state or simulating, the major obstacle was a technical one: Freud reported that most of his patients started arguing with him already over the first and simplest suggestion which should put them to sleep. "I am not in the least asleep" was the initial reaction of the intelligent patient (Freud 1891: 110). From this experience, Freud decided to drop the analogy between sleep and hypnosis and

25 Shortly after the laboratory of hypnosis was realized in Berlin, Vogt abandoned the project. However, his strategies to combine hypnotism and experimental psychology were continuous with those used after 1900 by the exponents of the Würzburg school (like Külpe and Narziss Ach) who started to oppose Wundt's restrictions of the psychic phenomena that could be studied under laboratory conditions. Boring (1953) argues that these new psychological schools emerged in opposition to what he termes Wundt's "classical introspection", namely the idea that the "description of consciousness reveals complexes hat are constituted of patterns of sensory elements" (Boring 1953: 172). For a recent anthology and overview on this theme, see Ziche (1999). To place Vogt in such a genealogy makes sense, since he was seen first and foremost as one of the German opponents of Wundt (see e.g. Farez 1897/98). 26 In several passages of his review of Forel's book on hypnotism, Freud endorses such a view: "Anyone who has assembled a few personal experiences with hypnotism will recall the impression it made on him for the first time he exercised what had hitherto been an undreamt-of influence on another person's psychical life and was able to experiment on a human mind in a away that is normally possible only on an animal's body." (Freud 1889: 98f.)

19 built another theory and technique which did not take the patient's complaisance, but rather his or her "resistance" as a starting-point.27 Thus, the transfer of Bernheim's suggestion techniques to the medical culture of had met problems when "educated persons" in the private practice became its target. Most of the Austrian exponents of the had performed their first experiments on patients from the lower classes, many of them illiterate. For instance, the laryngologist Johann Schnitzler from the Allgemeine Poliklinik, who was assisted by his son Arthur in the hypnosis experiments, pointed out that their illiteracy made his patients into perfect subjects, because they were unable to distort the experimental results (Schnitzler 1888). In the private practice, however, the situation was entirely different, for those patients were from the middle or upper classes and avid readers of the growing literature on hypnotism.28 Such was the clientele of Krafft-Ebing, Breuer, and Freud. A case from the early 1890s illustrates the difficulties of the techniques of suggestion on such a terrain quite well: Nina R., who was first treated under Krafft-Ebing's direction in a private sanitarium in Graz, complained about her hypnotic treatment in a letter by theorizing at length which practices had led to the development of her "nervous states". The patient was then sent to Breuer and Freud in Vienna. The latter classified her way of speaking as "precocious" and noted that "the patient occupies herself constantly with reading and writing" (Freud, quoted in Hirschmüller 1978: 157). The "hypnotic treatment according to Bernheim" which Freud seemed to have applied in combination with physical treatments soon turned into a failure. "The considerable " of Nina R. enabled her to argue with Breuer and Freud over every single detail of the treatment: "in the end, she remained her own doctor and gave us

27 Complaisance was a term introduced by Joseph Delbœuf (1886) to characterize the behavior of the hypnotized subject. Isabelle Stengers has argued that the drive to make psychoanalysis into a laboratory science persisted in Freud's later development of his technique (see Chertok/Stengers 1989; Stengers 1992). In the following, I suggest that this issue should be rather treated in a way that takes the practices of mediation into account. 28 As a reviewer noted in the late 1880s, "the literature on hypnotism is more bought by laymen than by medical doctors" (Pauly 1889: 429). The bibliography of Dessoir (1888; 1890) gives an idea of the amount of work published. During the 1890s, the writings on the subject increased, especially in popular accounts and in the press.

20 the right to console her, to be pleasant with her, and to listen to her complaints, under the condition that we respected the ceremonial which she had built up around herself and did not disturb her cherished habitudes" (ibid.: 160). Thus, reading patients were real troublemakers: not only did they argue with the doctor over what was going on with them during the treatment, they also tended to develop their own theories about their illness and chose, in the extreme case, to become their own doctors. In this context, Freud designed a device by which the reading patient should be turned into an alley and, at best, into a follower. As John Forrester (1997) has persuasively argued, The Interpretation of Dreams was to a large extent conceived as a sort of "transferential machine". Throughout the first chapters of the book, Freud stages the demonstration of his dream theory as a trial between the skeptical reader and the author. Turning the reader into an alley implies that the latter follow the rules set out by Freud at the beginning of Chapter 2. There, Freud asks the reader "to make my interests his own for quite a while, and to plunge, along with me, into the minutest details of my life; for a of this kind is peremptorily demanded by our interests in the hidden meaning of dreams" (Freud 1900b: 106).29 In Freud's textual device, the reader is invited to adopt the author's position and - via this special form of "transference" - to familiarize himself with the method of self-analysis by interpreting his own dreams. The transmission of Freud's new technique is thus entirely conferred to the book and dissociated from the consulting room. This dissociation has an important source in the specific form of scientific communication from which Freud developed a good deal of his new technique: private correspondence. In his letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Freud's initial conception of the self-analysis can be better followed than in his book. The only hint he gives there is that he performs his dream analyses "by the help of writing down my as they occur to me" (Freud 1900b: 103). In his short version of his dreambook On Dreams (1901a), the following description of the technique is given: "It will (...) be enough to say that we obtain material that enables us to resolve any pathological idea if we turn our attention precisely to those associations which are

29 In Strachey's translation, the reader is - as in Freud's German original - male.

21 'involuntary', which 'interfere with our reflection', and which are normally dismissed by our critical faculty as worthless rubbish. If we make use of this procedure upon ourselves, we can best assist the investigation by at once writing down what are at first unintelligible associations." (Freud 1901a: 636) How Freud proceeded, is best illustrated by an example from his correspondence with Fliess. In 1897, he sent his friend a letter in which he analyzed a dreamt telegraph message about the latter's whereabouts (Freud to Fliess, April 28, 1897, in Freud 1985: 236ff.). First of all, Freud writes down the dream content (the telegram words appearing in varying vividness) and the accompanying affects, his anger that Fliess had not gone to the place which he had recommended to him. After the dream report follows the "report on motives" in which the self-analyst reconstructs in writing the provoking cause and the ensuing associations. That the dream is interpreted by Freud as a "wish-fulfilment", the wish to know the exact adress of his friend, is less remarkable than the way in which he does it. He notes that the dream is an expression of his "persistent reaction" to Fliess' "dream of defense, which tried to substitute the grandfather of the otherwise customary father" (ibid.: 237). Behind Freud's dreamwish lies an unresolved scientific dispute between them about the role of the father in the etiology of hysteria, most notably a scientific dispute taking place in dreams. From Freud's correspondence with Fliess, it becomes evident that the specific dialogic form which characterizes the core sections of The Interpretation of Dreams is a result from the author's conflictual discussions with skeptical readers and listeners. Thus, instead of transforming the consulting room of the neuropathologist into a laboratory, Freud rather made the book into a space where he demonstrates how he can win the battle with the reading patient or the critic at a distance. The Interpretation of Dreams amounts in its first version to a refined version of an "experimentalism without laboratory":30 in spite of the intricate ways of checking

30 This expression is taken from Binet (1886: 114), an early instance of a technique by which the experimental findings in hypnotism could be reproduced in a simple writing exercise: attempting to write down a well-known name that one has forgotten. Binet followed the classic example given by Ribot (1881) in his book on memory. Freud's most popular book at the time, The Psychopathology of Everyday-Life (1901b) was conceived in a similar line.

22 the self-observation of the patient or critic in a controlled space in order to subsequently transform him into a good subject, transmission of self-analysis à la Freud consisted in a transformation of readers through the acts of writing, reading and dreaming by the book.

3. The Demise of Self-Analysis

The difficulties of Freud's invention of the "psychoanalytic reader" became apparent when the book met its first actual readers. While academic psychologists mostly rejected The Interpretation of Dreams because of its seemingly unrigorous fashion of exposing the technique of self-analysis, the reactions in literary and philosophical circles were mixed.31 First of all, it became clear that it was not easy to learn the technique from just reading the book. Even before the first reviews were to be published, the philosopher Heinrich Gomperz, one of the first readers of the book, wrote to the author with the request to learn the method of "self-analysis" from him. In order to give him lessons, Freud invited him to come to his home during the evenings. During this "experiment" with Gomperz, he came to realize that "interpreting dreams appears to be more difficult for others than I had indicated" (Freud to Fliess, November 26, 1899, in: Freud 1985: 389). Given these difficulties in non-clinical cultures of introspection, we may wonder about the reactions by the proponents of introspective hypnotism. While Vogt and Forel adopted a negative stance, Eugen Bleuler who still figured as the example of the "hypnotized hypnotist" in Forel's manual (Forel 1906) inaugurated a positive reception of psychoanalysis at the Burghölzli clinic in Zurich.32 Since Freud had still not written a textbook introduction into his technique,

31 For a larger discussion of the early reception on which this section is drawing, see Marinelli/Mayer 2000: 40- 48. 32 Bleuer had already written a positive review of the Studies on Hysteria (Bleuler 1896) when Freud announced enthustiastically in 1904 to Fliess that he "recently found an absolutely stunning recognition of my point of view (...) by an official psychiatrist, Bleuler in Zurich" (Freud to Fliess, April 26, 1904, in: Freud 1985: 461). From 1901 on, Bleuler started to study Freud's work at the Burghölzli together with his assistents Franz Riklin and Carl Gustav Jung.

23 but instead declared The Interpretations of Dreams to be "the forerunner of an initiation into his technique" (Freud 1904: 252), Bleuler set out to learn psychoanalysis by reading the book.33 From his unpublished correspondence with Freud, it becomes evident that he failed to learn the self-analysis from reading the book and that he tried for a certain time to acquire the method by writing down his dreams and interpreting them with his medical assistants and his wife.34 As early as 1905, he wrote to Freud, requesting assistance: "Although I have found your Interpretation of Dreams correct after my first reading of the book, it is the exception that I can interpret one of my own dreams. Often my dreams are such a mess that it is impossible to render them in the words and of the waking person." (Bleuler to Freud, October 9, 1905, LC) Although the Burghölzli hospital at Zurich turned under its new director into a flourishing culture of introspection, it has to be noted that Bleuler had slowly turned away from hypnotism and now favoured the association test as it had been introduced by Francis Galton and later altered and refined by such as Kraepelin. In Bleuler's view, the association test promised not just a firm basis for psychiatric diagnosis, but also an objective science of character: "in the activity of association there is mirrored the whole psychical essence of the past

33 It has to be stressed that Freud refrained for a longer period from any methodical exposition of his psychoanalytic technique. When Leopold Löwenfeld asked him in 1903 for a short account of his own technique of interpretation for his book on obsessive neuroses, Freud still chose the strategy of postponing a textbook introduction into psychoanalysis: "The details of this technique of interpretation or translation have not yet been published by Freud. According to indications he has given, they comprise a number of rules, reached empirically, of how the unconscious material may be reconstructed from the associations, directions on how to know what it means when the patient's ideas cease to flow, and experiences of the most important typical resistances that arise in the course of such treatments. A bulky volume called The Interpretations of Dreams, published by Freud in 1900, may be regarded as the forerunner of an initiation into his technique." (Freud 1904: 252) 34 Only some of Bleuler's letters to Freud are accessible in the Freud collection of the Library of congress, Washington DC (hereafter cited from the unpublished originals as LC); some excerpts were published in English by Alexander/Selesnick (1965). The letters reveal that the official historical account about the formation of the link between Vienna and Zurich has to be revised: before Jung contacted Freud in 1906, Bleuler was already in correspondence with the latter.

24 and of the present, with all their experiences and desires. It thus becomes an index of all the psychical processes which we have but to decipher in order to understand the complete man." (Bleuler 1904, quoted in: Jung, ed 1918: 4f.) The association test consisted in finding the determining "unconscious complexes" by collecting and registering the associations to a given series of words. The complexes were thus conceived of as material entities that could be deciphered from the visible deviations of a standardized association experiment. Thus, for Bleuler, Freud's technique of self-analysis seemed to be a special variant of introspection which could used as a complement of the association test.35 In his letters, Bleuler approached Freud both as a colleague and as the "master" who would instruct him and resolve the riddles of his messy dream life. It seemed natural to him who was reported of walking through the hospital with a bunch of cards on which he constantly noted his observations (Klaesi 1956), to conduct the whole analysis with Freud in writing. Thus, Bleuler started to send his dream reports and his associations to Freud who in turn interpreted them. From the start, Bleuler split his role as a correspondent in two parts: on the one hand, he performed the role of a patient and a disciple who sent in his material anonymously; on the other hand, he wanted to maintain the role of a colleague who was still not convinced by Freud's theories. With this splitting of roles, he put himself exactly into the position that the author of The Interpretation of Dreams had designed for his professional readers in his book. But quite in contrast to Freud's expectation, he did not accept that he was in a position of "emotional resistance (Gefühlswiderstand)" (Bleuler to Freud, October 17, 1905, LC). During the epistolar analysis which lasted for a few months, Bleuler preferred to take on the role of the graphological expert. In order to detect material traces for his unconscious complexes he assigned a crucial role to his typewriter, a dear instrument which accompanied him on travels and even in his bed when he fell ill.36 The typewriter acted for him as an instrument to

35 Bleuler whose was highly eclectic (see Bleuler 1894) had no problems with the combination of various techniques. 36 See Klaesi (1956: 10). In a later series of dream reports (Bleuler 1913), the typewriter figures prominently in one example.

25 indicate his unconscious complexes. Every misspelling should lead to a hidden meaning. "If one has not much practice, the typewriter is a very good reagent for complexes. But damn it that I almost never can get mine out if I do not know them already." (Bleuler to Freud, November 5, 1905, LC) Ultimately, Bleuler concluded that psychoanalysis was "neither a science nor a craft, it cannot be taught in the usual sense. It is an art which has to be inherited and can only be developed" (Bleuler to Freud, November 28, 1905, LC). Bleuler published his critique of psychoanalysis in 1910 under the title "Verteidigung und kritische Bemerkungen" (Bleuler 1910). In this text, which was one of the first extensive criticisms of Freud's theories and procedures from within the psychoanalytic movement, Bleuler disclosed some of the results of his letter analysis with Freud. Although he fully subscribed to the Oedipus complex by portraying himself as a typical case (Bleuler 1910: 647f.), he still doubted the universality of Freud's explanation of dreams and resorted to older concepts (like "" or "inhibition") with which he had become familiar in the experimental culture of hypnotism (ibid.: 726ff.). The fact that Bleuler and the other Swiss representatives of the early psychoanalytic movement failed to be convinced by Freud's device, had consequences both for the further editions of The Interpretation of Dreams and the ways the technique had to be transmitted. It is not surprising that the demise of self-analysis in the psychoanalytic movement started with

Jung's critical remarks about Freud's author position in 1911.37 In the long run, the move from self-analysis to can also be traced back to Freud's failure in making the book the main device of transmission.

Acknowledgments

37 For a more detailed exposition, see Marinelli/Mayer 2000: 107-111. Thus, the demise of the self-analysis coincided with the demise of introspection in academic psychology, which is commonly dated by 1913 with Watson's criticism and the advent of behavorism (Boring 1953; Danziger 1980). But, similar to what Boring has suggested for the history of psychology, self-analysis continues to be active as a procedure in the souterrain of the psychoanalytic institution.

26 Earlier versions of this text were presented at the conference "The Interpretation of Dreams/The Dreams of Interpretation", University of Minnesota, October 5-8, 2000, and in the Psy studies seminar in the Department of History and , University of Cambridge, February 28, 2001. I thank John Forrester, Lydia Marinelli, Alexandre Métraux, Simon Schaffer and Henning Schmidgen for their comments on earlier drafts.

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