The death of Freud - was he a womb twin survivor?

Today we come to the end of this brief discussion of Sigmund Freud  in his life and works, and the possibility that he was a womb twin survivor, with the story of his death.

It is documented in full here

Freud was very tired now, and it was hard to feed him. But while he suffered greatly and the nights especially were hard, he did not get, and did not want, any sedation. He could still read, and his last book was Balzac's mysterious tale of the magical shrinking skin, La Peau de chagrin. When he had finished the book he told Schur, casually, that this had been the right book for him to read, dealing as it did with shrinking and starvation. It was the shrinking, Anna Freud thought, that seemed to speak particularly to his condition: his time was running out. He spent the last days in his study downstairs, looking out at the garden.

Ernest Jones, hastily summoned by Anna Freud, who thought her father was dying, stopped by on September 19. Freud, Jones remembered, was dozing, as he did so much these days, but when Jones called out "Herr Professor, "Freud opened an eye, recognized his visitor, "and waved his hand, then dropped it with a highly expressive gesture that conveyed a wealth of meaning: greetings, farewell, resignation." He then relapsed into his doze. Jones read Freud's gesture aright. Freud was saluting his old ally for the last time.

Freud, addiction and death

Freud was a cocaine addict.  He smoked tobacco all his life and contracted jaw cancer as a result.  He died at the hands of his own doctor and by his own consent.


See this book:  An Anatomy of addiction Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine

 An Anatomy of Addiction tells the tragic and heroic story of each man, accidentally struck down in his prime by an insidious malady: tragic because of the time, relationships, and health cocaine forced each to squander; heroic in the intense battle each man waged to overcome his affliction as he conquered his own world with his visionary healing gifts. Here is the full story, long overlooked, told in its rich historical context.

The full story of Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis and many say the father of modern psychology,  may have been told many times but it requires explanation. Womb twin theory supplies that explanation.

Freud and hysteria - a new interpretation

 Hysteria is a word that is mostly used to describe extreme emotional outbursts, but is also has a special meaning in psychiatry. (See here)

A mental disorder characterized by emotional outbursts, susceptibility to autosuggestion, and, often, symptoms such as paralysis that mimic the effects of physical disorders.

In the early days of his practice as a doctor, Sigmund Freud became convinced that  patients who were displaying strange psychological conditions, such as strange pains or paralysis, were suffering from some kind of trauma, so that had the physical symptoms had psychological causes.
This is from a book about Freud

A large proportion of the patients whom Freud treated during his early years in private practice had initially sought medical advice because they were suffering from physical symptoms; they had enlisted the help of a physician for no other reason than that they believed themselves to be ill. Among their symptoms were headaches, muscular pain, neuralgia, gastric pain, tics, vomiting, clonic spasms, petit mal, epileptoid convulsions, and a host of other physical reactions. [1] It was Freud who, by either making or confirming a diagnosis of hysteria, came to the conclusion that the origin of these symptoms was to be found in his patients’ emotional lives – and specifically in the traumatic events which had supposedly given rise to their illnesses.

He created an idea, that hysteria was sexual in origin  and was related to  child or infant seduction. That the physical symptoms were a defence mechanism against the repressed memory of the seduction.

This seduction theory got him into trouble, as the film "Freud" makes very clear in this clip:




Abuse recovery is still based in this idea.

Present research on the long term effects of child sexual abuse confirms Freud's seduction theory as presented in The Etiology of Hysteria. The theory accurately describes the effects of infantile seduction and the role of repression as a defense mechanism. This study compares the findings presented in Freud's theory to current research on child sexual abuse. Therapists can provide appropriate treatment to adult survivors of child sexual abuse if they recognize the symptoms and understand the role of defense mechanisms.

But the loss of a twin can also produce physical symptoms, such as a feeling of coldness and deadness in the place, or along the side where the twin once was. Birth trauma damage is held in the body as a muscular spasm that can cause muscular pain and skeletal deformity.  Only when the original reason for this muscular spasm is known and fully understood, can healing begin.

I know this from my own experience.  I went to a chiropractor aged 55 with pains in my body and a  30 year limp.  There, in the muscular spasms that lay down my right side, I  found both my birth trauma and my lost twin.   It was the start of this whole Womb Twin project.

(Here is my story to download and read, if you wish to learn more.)

Freud the narcissist - and his siblings

Now here things get intersting:

Here is an interesting article on siblings, with Freud as an example on unconscious feeling's towards one's siblings.

The role of siblings in mental life may have first been underemphasized by Freud, who may have had his own reasons for such downplaying. For example, Freud as a child had a private bedroom filled with books while all of his siblings lived together in one other, crowded room.

 And in another place:

As noted by the authors, the index of the complete standard edition of Freud's works has no reference to sibling (although Siberia is referenced).

A new view of Freudian Theory: the unconscious mind and "hysteria"

This is a nice accessible summary of Freudian theory:
 




This mentions the "unconscious mind" as driving all human actions and choices. It also puts sexuality and the drive towards pleasure as the main influence on our desires and choices, and introduces the idea of "forgotten memories". Is the unconscious mind in fact the Dream of the Womb? There are many people who think so. They are so sure that the unconscious mind is formed in the womb that they have made a whole industry out of prenatal education for fetuses.

Freudian theory and womb twin survivors - Oedipus, mothers and all that

Oedipus married his mother (unknowingly) and killed his father (unintentionally.) Freud invented it in 1896, and people still talk about it as if it was real.




Passionate feelings of love and hate for your parents? Sounds familiar, bearing in mind last week's blogs.

Sexual feelings for a parent? Hmm.

A new view of Freudian theory

When I trained as a social worker at Leicester University in 1969 I discovered for the first time the theories of Sigmund Freud.  He was an Austrian neurologist, and founded all kinds of theories about human psychology.  His work was utterly brilliant, bearing in mind the fact that it was taking place around the turn of the twentieth century. He died in 1926, and therefore knew nothing of the explosion in neuroscience that has taken place in the last hundred years.

Freud's work was based initially on his in depth study of just a few cases - no more than six- and a great deal of long hard thinking about what was going on in the mind of his patients.  Then he began to examine his own psychology. Unfortunately for his followers however, many of these ideas proved to be just to difficult to accept, so they broke away and formed their own theories. But Freudian theory remains as the foundation of psychological thinking, even today. 

But what if we introduced the womb twin survivor hypothesis  and prenatal psychology into the picture?    Would Freud have thought differently if he knew as we now do, that all pre-birth experiences remain in the mind as a template for all future life choices? What if he knew that he was living out his own Dream of the Womb as he sat for years, constantly smoking and giving himself terminal cancer, while thinking about what was going on in the minds of his patients?