ABSTRACT
The phenomenon of “transference” was discovered by Freud in the stormy days in which Emma Eckstein was poised between life and death. Shortly after his Irma dream, Freud introduced the concept of infantile sexual shock and formulated the so-called “seduction theory.” Yet, Freud failed to see other things that are obvious to us today. He could not conceive of Emma’s circumcision as a trauma, nor that the nose operation had been an enactment and a product of his countertransference, indeed a repetition of her circumcision. These unthought-of elements will not remain silent: they will surface in Freud’s dreams, fantasies, and memories that will be, along with his father’s death, the main propeller of his interminable self-analysis. A main turning point was the emerging in analysis, in January 1897, of Emma Eckstein’s “circumcision scene,” a scene fabricated from an element of brit milah in which Freud can mirror himself. Freud could have paused to dwell on the suffering that the real event has caused to Emma and to explore the emotions her scene aroused in him. Instead, Freud takes flight into a “primeval sexual cult” scenario, takes possession of Emma’s phallic fantasy, and makes it the source from which, in the years to come, his phallocentric system of thought will flow. In this crucial moment, Freud finds himself in the position of the fetishist, as he erases from his mind the actual castration that his patient has undergone, and then replaces it with a fantasy of universal castration, believed to be the destiny of every woman and the primal fear of every man.
