Who is wilhelm fliess

Freud consulted with another surgeon, who removed a piece of surgical gauze that Fliess had left behind. Despite this, she remained on very good terms with Freud for many years, becoming a psychoanalyst herself. Fliess also remained close friends with Freud. He even predicted Freud's death to be near the age of 51, through one of his complicated bio-numerological theories "critical period calculations". Their friendship, however did not last to see that prediction out: in their friendship disintegrated due to Fliess's belief that Freud had given details of a periodicity theory Fliess was developing to a plagiarist.

Incidentally Freud died at 83 years of age. Freud ordered that his correspondence with Fliess be destroyed. It is known today only because Marie Bonaparte bought their letters and refused to permit their destruction. Psychology Wiki Explore. Freud then used these comments to help discover the link with other events and feelings.

During this process it was for the doctor to "decide what is and is not relevant: the patient must shape the discourse". This approach, "if it is to be effective, has to be understood as a partnership". It consists first of a reprint of the joint paper they had written, then five case histories, a theoretical essay by Breuer, and a concluding chapter on psychotherapy by Freud.

The first case history, by Breuer, is that of Anna Bertha Pappenheim. The book received mainly hostile reviews. He said he read the case histories with admiration and understanding, and then added the significant prediction: "We dimly conceive the idea that it may one day became possible to approach the innermost secret of human personality The theory itself is in fact nothing but the kind of psychology used by poets. Havelock Ellis , a doctor working in London , and a founder member of the Fabian Society , also praised the book, and agreed with Freud's views about the sexual cause of hysteria.

However, most people were shocked by the idea and it took over thirteen years to sell copies of the book. During the writing of the book the two men disagreed about the role that sexual impulses played in hysteria. David Stafford-Clark has pointed out: "Despite the comparative success of their joint publication, Breuer and Freud never collaborated in any further published material This in fact heralded not only the break with Breuer but the beginning of the independent emergence of Freud's own concept of psychoanalysis.

The basic difference of opinion between the two authors, upon which Freud was later to lay considerable emphasis, concerning the part played by sexual impulses in the causation of hysteria. After the loss of Josef Breuer , Sigmund Freud formed a close relationship with Wilhelm Fliess, an ear, nose, and throat specialist. Breuer considered Fliess to be "one of the richest intellects" he had ever met.

Fliess was very interested in new ideas and was very knowledgeable in the fields of the arts, mathematics and biology. Fliess acted as a sounding board for Freud's developing ideas. Ernest Jones , one of Freud's closest friends, spoke highly of Fliess.

It was this extension that interested Freud and at first seemed to fit in with his own. Their friendship grew through their frequent letters and regular meetings in Vienna and Berlin, but most of all liked to arrange two or three-day trips away from home they called these special meetings "Congresses". They not only exchanged their unorthodox scientific ideas but Freud provided intimate details of his own life which he withheld from wife. In fact, it has been claimed that Freud used these letters as "self-analysis".

During this period Freud's moods swung wildly from elation to depression: "Sometimes he convinced himself of the value of his discoveries; at other times he was plagued with self-doubt. In addition he was troubled with anxiety symptoms: fear of travelling by rail, dread of dying, shortness of breath and cardiac arhythmias, headaches and recurrent sinusitis Yet out of this turmoil Sigmund Freud reported in October, "I am almost certain that I have solved the riddles of hysteria and obsessional neurosis with the formulas of infantile sexual shock and sexual pleasure, and I am equally certain that both neuroses are, in general, curable - not just individual symptoms but the neurotic disposition itself.

This gives me a kind of faint joy - for having lived some forty years not quite in vain - and yet no genuine satisfaction because the psychological gap in the new knowledge claims my entire interest. It was only after the death of his father in , that Freud could begin to open up about how his own early sexual life had influenced his personality.

My little hysteria, though greatly accentuated by my work, has resolved itself a bit further. The rest is still at a standstill. That is what my mood primarily depends on. The analysis is more difficult than any other. It is, in fact, what paralyzes my psychic strength for describing and communicating what I have won so far. Still, I believe it must be done and is a necessary intermediate stage in my work. Freud became convinced that most cases of neurosis can be traced back to incidents in early childhood but did not have full access to those memories that had been repressed into the unconscious.

It seems once again arguable that only later experiences give the impetus to fantasies, which then hark back to childhood, and with this the factor of a hereditary disposition regains a sphere of influence from which I had made it my task to dislodge it - in the interest of illuminating neurosis. In a letter written on 15th October, , Freud begins to explore what later became known as the Oedipus complex.

Being totally honest with oneself is a good exercise. A single idea of general value dawned on me. I have found, in my own case, too, the phenomenon of being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and now I consider it an universal event in early childhood If this is so, we can understand the gripping power of Opedius Rex Everyone in the audience was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy and each recoils in horror from the dream fulfillment here transplanted into reality, with the full quantity of repression which separates his infantile state from his present one.

Oedipus is the son of Laius and Jocasta, the king and queen of Thebes. When his son is born, the king consults an Oracle as to his fortune. To his horror, the oracle reveals that Laius "is doomed to perish by the hand of his own son". Laius orders Jocasta to kill him. Unable to kill her own son, she gives him to a servant to carry out the task.

He abandons Oedipus on a mountain top but he is rescued by a local shepherd. He presents him to the childless king Polybus, who raises Oedipus as his own son. As he grows to manhood, Oedipus hears a rumour that he is not truly the son of Polybus. He asks an oracle who his parents really are. The Oracle seems to ignore this question, telling him instead that he is destined to "mate with his own mother, and kill his own father ". Desperate to avoid this terrible fate, Oedipus, decides to leave Corinth.

On the road to Thebes, Oedipus encounters Laius and the two men quarrel over whose chariot has the right of way. The king attempts to strike Oedipus with his sceptre, but during the struggle Laius is killed.

Before arriving at Thebes, Oedipus encounters the Sphinx, a legendary beast with the head and breast of a woman, the body of a lioness, and the wings of an eagle. The Sphinx was sent to the road approaching Thebes as a punishment from the gods, and would kill any traveler who failed to answer a certain riddle:"what is the creature that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?

The Sphinx throws herself from a cliff, thereby ending the curse. Oedipus' reward for freeing Thebes from the Sphinx is its kingship, and the hand of the now widowed queen, Jocasta. The couple have two daughters, Antigone and Ismene. Many years later another oracle discloses the truth of how Oedipus has killed his own father and married his mother.

Oedipus decides to cut out his mother's womb. However, before he can do this, she hangs herself. Oedipus takes her down and removes the long gold pins that held her dress together, before plunging them into his own eyes in despair. A blind Oedipus now leaves the palace and the chorus repeat the Greek maxim, that no man should be considered fortunate until he is dead.

Sigmund Freud argues that rather than see Oedipus' fate as a horrifying and individual event, he sees it as expressing "the long-forgotten desires of childhood that accompany and shape every individual's sexual development" and "between the ages of three and five, every child must struggle with what comes to be called the Oedipus complex, when, like the Greek king, they long to be rid of the parent of the same sex in order to take possession of the parent of the opposite sex".

Freud later destroyed all of Wilhelm Fliess' letters, but it becomes clear that he advocated the theory that all adults were bisexual and that these repressed desires were the cause of some cases of hysteria. On 25th March, , Freud wrote to Fliess: "I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.

You are certainly right about it. I am accustoming myself to regarding every sexual act as a process which four individuals are involved. Freud told Fliess that he always needed a very close male friend and that he was disappointed by the end of his relationship with Josef Breuer : "In my life, as you know, woman has never replaced the comrade, the friend. If Breuer's male inclination were not so odd, so timid, so contradictory - like everything else in his mental and emotional makeup - it would provide a nice example of the accomplishments into which the androphilic current in men can be sublimated.

Freud admitted to Fliess that the theories emerging from his self-analysis was not really science. His attempts at analyzing his personality was more the work of an artist: "I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker.

I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador - an adventurer, if you want it translated - with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort. Discussion: The presented rise and fall of Fliess' therapeutic nasogenital concept demonstrates that even in established theories which have been confirmed by thousand-fold successful treatment results a critical examination should be consistently performed to question the nature of our "clinical success".

Abstract Introduction: Interdisciplinary contacts between otorhinolaryngology and gynecology are rare. Publication types Biography Historical Article Portrait.