Freud And The Eels (#147)
Think about a person with a great theory. Do you sometimes wonder, how they came up with that idea?
For example Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Let's have a quick look at his life before he started all the psycho stuff.
As a 19 year old young man, he resided in the Italian city of Triest. Apparently he was quite fond of the Italian women ("bellas bestias", according to one of his letters) but he was mainly preoccupied with dissecting eels (de: Aale). Why eels? To that date, nobody had succeeded in finding the genitalia of an eel (like, ever). And neither did Freud.
I can imagine Freud getting quite upset because of the missing eels' testicles. (And maybe also because of his own, I don't know how fond the "bellas bestias" were of him).
Anyways, maybe he just projected his own frustration onto something else and in his mind it went on like this:
"Wow, if I get so frustrated because I can't find genitalia in an insignificant animal, how frustrating must it be to never find a penis in my own body!? For example, if you have a female body...?"
And the theory was born: der Penisneid (en: penis envy).
Svensson, P. (2020) Das Evangelium der Aale. Translated by H. Granz. München: Carl Hanser Verlag.