Psychosomatic

Abstract

In a letter to Sigmund Freud on September 17, 1924, Karl Abraham reports that he has just purchased from an antiquarian catalogue a paper written by Freud forty-six years earlier.The paper is Freud's third publication, and it is on the nervous system of the lamprey (Freud 1878).Politely negotiating his antiquarian status, Freud replies: ''It is making severe demands on the unity of the personality to try to make me identify myself with the author of the paper on the spinal ganglia of the petromyzon.Nevertheless, it does seem to be the case, and I think I was happier about that discovery than about others since then'' (2002, 515).It has been usual to locate the beginnings of psychoanalysis in Freud's clinical encounters with hysterical patients in the 1880s and 1890s.It was from the strange aggregations of psyche and soma-paralyses, amnesias, strangulated a√ects, nervous tics, and infantile fantasies-that Freud was able to forge the foundations of psychoanalytic theory and method.This approach to reading Freud has stressed the importance of the body for psychoanalysis.A strong case has been made, via hysteria, that the psychological tenets of psychoanalysis are indebted to somatic symptomologythat the psyche is always already of the body.Yet perhaps the body in psychoanalysis has been understood in terms that are too narrow.There has been a tendency, especially in feminist writing, to disregard Freud's neuroscientific and prepsychoanalytic bodies.I would like to extend the somatic beginnings of psychoanalysis back further than hysteria-further chronologically, further phylogenetically.Psychoanalysis can be approached, I argue, not just through the hysterized body of the patient, but also through the spinal ganglia of the petromyzon.

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