Читать книгу The Autobiography of Wilhelm Stekel - The Life Story of a Pioneer Psychoanalyst - Wilhelm Stekel - Страница 7

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EMIL A. GUTHEIL, M.D.

WHEN AFTER Wilhelm Stekel’s 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 psychologist’s 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 Rousseau’s 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 Rousseau’s personality through his writings.¹

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 subject—himself—and 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 Stekel’s 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 people’s repressions believed that he had hardly any himself. Then there is Stekel’s 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:

“I’m not a book that’s filled with clever fiction;

I am a human heart with all its contradiction.”²

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?³

Stekel’s 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 Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse he writes of the search for landmarks in a new field, of the discouragements and disagreements, and finally of world-wide acceptance of their theories.

The editor has tried to select with discrimination those details of Stekel’s intimate life which he deemed essential for the understanding of the author’s personality. Whenever the blue pencil has been wielded, it has been done with full respect for the author’s text and theme.

In the Autobiography, in addition to photos, various members of Stekel’s school are briefly introduced as well as miscellaneous biographical material presented by the editor.

¹ “Jean Jacques Rousseau. Analysis of an Exhibitionist.” Chapter XXV of Stekel’s Psychosexueller Infantilismus, Urban & Schwarzenberg, Vienna, 1922.

² “Ich bin kein ausgeklügelt Buch;

Ich bin ein Mensch mit seinem Widerspruch.”

³ This psychological phenomenon was rediscovered by the Swiss, Eugene Bleuler, who termed it “ambivalence,” the name by which Freud introduced it into psychoanalysis.