Wilhelm Stekel
Wilhelm Stekel (✦March 18, 1868 – †June 25, 1940) was an Austrian physician and psychologist, who became one of Sigmund Freud's earliest followers, and was once described as "Freud's most distinguished pupil." According to Ernest Jones, "Stekel may be accorded the honour, together with Freud, of having founded the first psycho-analytic society"; while he also described him as "a naturally gifted psychologist with an unusual flair for detecting repressed material." He later had a falling-out with Freud, who announced in November 1912 that 'Stekel is going his own way'. His works are translated and published in many languages.
Contributions to psychoanalytic theory
Theory of neurosis
Stekel made significant contributions to symbolism in dreams, 'as successive editions of The Interpretation of Dreams attest, with their explicit acknowledgement of Freud's debt to Stekel': 'the works of Wilhelm Stekel and others...since taught me to form a truer estimate of the extent and importance of symbolism in dreams.
Considering obsessional doubts, Stekel said,
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.
Stekel wrote one of a set of three early 'Psychoanalytic studies of psychical impotence' referred to approvingly by Freud: 'Freud had written a preface to Stekel's book'. Related to this may be Stekel's 'elaboration of the idea that everyone, and in particular neurotics, has a peculiar form of sexual gratification which is alone adequate'.
Freud credited Stekel as a potential forerunner when pondering the possibility that (for obsessional neurotics) 'in the order of development hate is the precursor of love. This is perhaps the meaning of an assertion by Stekel (1911 [Die Sprache des Traumes], 536), which at the time I found incomprehensible, to the effect that hate and not love is the primary emotional relation between men'. The same work is credited by Otto Fenichel as establishing 'the symbolic significance of right and left...right meaning correct and left meaning wrong '. Less flatteringly, Fenichel also associated it with 'a comparatively large school of pseudo analysis which held that the patient should be "bombarded" with "deep interpretations"', a backhanded tribute to the extent of Stekel's early following in the wake of his break with Freud.
Contributions to the theory of fetishism and of perversion
Stekel contrasted what he called "normal fetishes" from extreme interests, "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 (p. 3). In the latter instance, 'Stekel holds that fetichism is the patient's unconscious religion'. "Normal" fetishes for Stekel contributed more broadly to choice of lifestyle: thus 'choice of vocation was actually an attempt to solve mental conflicts through the displacement of them', so that doctors for Stekel 'were "voyeurs who have transferred their original sexual current into the art of diagnosis"'[15].
Complaining of Freud's tendency to indiscretion, Ernest Jones wrote that he had told him 'the nature of Stekel's sexual perversion, which he should not have and which I have never repeated to anyone'[16]. Stekel's 'elaboration of the idea that everyone, and in particular every neurotic, has a peculiar form of sexual gratification which is alone adequate'[17] may thus have been grounded in personal experience.
On sado-masochism, 'Stekel has described the essence of the sadomasochistic act to be humiliation'[18].
Freud's critique of Stekel's theory of the origin of phobias
In "The Ego and the Id", Freud wrote of the 'high-sounding phrase, "every fear is ultimately the fear of death"' - associated with Stekel (1908) - that it 'has hardly any meaning, and at any rate cannot be justified', evidence perhaps (as with psychic impotence and love/hate) of his continuing engagement with the thought of his former associate.
Selected publications
- Stekel W. (1943). The Interpretation of Dreams: New Developments and Technique. Liveright
- Stekel W., Gutheil E. (1950). The Autobiography of Wilhelm Stekel. Liveright
- Stekel W., Boltz O.H. (1950). Technique of Analytical Psychotherapy. Liveright
- Stekel W., Boltz O.H. (1999 reprint). Conditions of Nervous Anxiety and Their Treatment
- Stekel W., Boltz O.H. (1927). Impotence in the Male: The Psychic Disorders of Sexual Function in the Male. *Boni and Liveright
- Stekel W., Van Teslaar J.S. (1929). Peculiarites of Behavior: Wandering Mania, Dipsomania, Cleptomania, *Pyromania and Allied Impulsive Disorders. H. Liveright
- Stekel W. (1929). Sadism and Masochism: The Psychology of Hatred and Cruelty. Liveright
- Stekel W. (2003 reprint). Bisexual Love. Fredonia
- Stekel W. (1917). Nietzsche und Wagner, eine sexualpsychologische Studie zur Psychogenese des *Freundschaftsgefühles und des Freundschaftsverrates
- Stekel W. (1922). Compulsion and Doubt (Zwang und Zweifel) Liveright
- Stekel W. (1922). The Homosexual Neuroses
- Stekel W. (1911). Die Sprache des Traumes: Eine Darstellung der Symbolik und Deutung des Traumes in ihren Bezeihungen
- Stekel W. (1911). Sexual Root of Kleptomania. J. Am. Inst. Crim. L. & Criminology
- Stekel W. (1961). Auto-erotism: a psychiatric study of masturbation and neurosis. Grove Press
- Stekel W. (1926). Frigidity in women Vol. II. Grove Press
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