Wilhelm Stekel - The Autobiography of Wilhelm Stekel - The Life Story of a Pioneer Psychoanalyst

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The Autobiography of

WILHELM STEKEL

THE LIFE STORY OF A PIONEER PSYCHOANALYST

Edited by

EMIL A. GUTHEIL, M.D.

With an Introduction by

MRS. HILDA STEKEL, London

Fools they that die for some dead past in vain!

All he once lost, the wise man wins again...

WILHELM STEKEL

Copyright 2013 Read Books Ltd.
This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Wilhelm Stekel

Wilhelm Stekel on 18th March 1868 in Boiany, Bukovina, in present-day Ukraine.

Stekel was a physician and psychologist. He was one of Sigmund Freud's earliest followers and is credited along with Freud as having founded the first psycho-analytical society. However, Stekel and Freud eventually fell out and their vision of psychoanalysis took different paths.

Stekel made several important contributions to psychoanalytic theory. His work on dream symbolism was acknowledged in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, as having taught Freud 'to form a truer estimate of the extent and importance of symbolism in dreams'. Stekel also explored the notion of obsessional doubt, saying 'In anxiety the libido is transformed into organic and somatic symptoms; in doubt, the libido is transformed into intellectual symptoms. The more intellectual someone is, the greater will be the doubt component of the transformed forces. Doubt becomes pleasure sublimated as intellectual achievement.'

On the theory of fetishism and perversion, Stekel contrasted what he called "normal fetishes" from extreme interests, saying "They become pathological only when they have pushed the whole love object into the background and themselves appropriate the function of a love object, e.g., when a lover satisfies himself with the possession of a woman's shoe and considers the woman herself as secondary or even disturbing and superfluous.

As well as being an innovator in therapeutic technique, Stekel produced many papers and books on the subject, including Sexual Root of Kleptomania (1911), Compulsion and Doubt (1922), and Sadism and Masochism: The Psychology of Hatred and Cruelty (1929).

Stekel suffered from prostate problems and diabetic gangrene. He put an end to the pain by taking an overdose and committing suicide. Stekel died on 25th June 1940.

PLAQUE IN COMMEMORATION OF DR. STEKELS SIXTIETH ANNIVERSARY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

By Emil A. Gutheil, M.D.

By Hilda Stekel, London

CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD

CHAPTER II
UNIVERSITY DAYS

CHAPTER III
PRACTICING MEDICINE

CHAPTER IV
INTRODUCTION TO FREUD AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

CHAPTER V
THE BREAK WITH FREUD

CHAPTER VI
PRACTICING PSYCHOANALYSIS

CHAPTER VII
A TRIP TO AMERICA

CHAPTER VIII
TRAVEL ON THE CONTINENT

CHAPTER IX
CHIEF OF THE ACTIVE-ANALYTIC CLINIC

CHAPTER X
A REFUGEE FROM THE NAZIS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

by

EMIL A. GUTHEIL, M.D.

WHEN AFTER Wilhelm Stekels death, his wife, Mrs. Hilda Stekel, bestowed upon me the honor of editing his Autobiography, I soon realized what she meant when she intimated that the manuscript had been written in unusual haste. Much of the material was disorganized. Nevertheless, to one who had long been versed in the distinguished psychologists method and who was familiar with many of the details of his personal life, the dramatic force and beauty of his story was consistently apparent.

Wilhelm Stekel was a pioneering psychoanalyst whose prodigious intuition and medical skill had permitted him to compile, study, and interpret the case histories of thousands of patients. When he felt that the sands of his life were running low, he wanted to leave his own case history to posterity, particularly to the coming generations of psychotherapists. He was in a hurry. Cataclysmic World War II events were besetting him; a grave illness he well understood was hewing at his gaunt, proud figure. Calmly, but with intense speed, he prepared his record.

There is no doubt that in his decision to write his autobiography Stekel was influenced by Jean Jacques Rousseaus Confessions. He had always deplored the fact that in world literature only a few autobiographies were sufficiently intimate and frank for the analyst-reader to evaluate the personality of the author involved. Stekel admired the rare courage and brilliant insight of the French philosopher so much that he made a thought-provoking psychological analysis of Rousseaus personality through his writings.

Stekel hoped that his own autobiography would be used in a similar way as a source for analytic research. As a brain specialist might will his own brain to medical investigators, so did the author of the ten-volume work on Disorders of the Instincts and Emotions wish to leave the account of his own instincts and emotions for the benefit of the students of psychoanalysis.

Such was the way of the real Stekel. When the great teacher and practitioner was no longer able to instruct in lecture halls or clinics, when he could no longer introduce live patients to demonstrate the intricacies of psychotherapy, he took the one available subjecthimselfand posed it in the nude, stripped of every conventional reserve.

In his account of himself Stekel tried hard to be unbiased; however, his success in this respect was little more than that of some of his own patients who submitted prepared autobiographical data to him. He was not able to duplicate the vein of the masochistic exhibitionist Rousseau, whose memoirs were extraordinarily revealing because they constituted a form of self-exposure and self-chastisement. The student of psychoanalysis can see in Stekels notes how many of his own complexes remained obscure to him, can detect his unresolved narcissism, his overcompensated feelings of inadequacy; will smile when he reads that the man who was a master in ferreting out other peoples repressions believed that he had hardly any himself. Then there is Stekels failure to recognize his affect-heavy attitude toward his teacher, Freud, upon whom he tried in vain to transfer his own father-complex.

But the analytical reader will also appreciate in Stekel the great clinician and psychologist, the erudite man of letters, the warm-hearted lover of the arts. To the mind of this editor come the words of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the Swiss poet whom Stekel liked to quote:

Im not a book thats filled with clever fiction;

I am a human heart with all its contradiction.

Stekel was both persevering and impatient; shrewd and naive. Was it an accident that it was he who discovered the principle of bipolarity of human emotions?

Stekels Autobiography is more than a personal narrative. It breathes the air of old Vienna and recaptures the charm of the cosmopolitan Europe that was. It throws an interesting light upon an early phase of the psychoanalytic movement in which the author played a prominent part. He describes the intimate gatherings of Freud, Alfred Adler, and himself where they discussed ways and means to introduce psychoanalysis to medicine. Later as co-editor with Freud of

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