Wilhelm Stekel Theory of neurosis
What was Stekel's theory of neurosis?
What was Stekel's 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. CANNOTANSWER
In anxiety the libido is transformed into organic and somatic symptoms; in doubt, the libido is transformed into intellectual symptoms.
Wilhelm Stekel (; 18 March 1868 – 25 June 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.". However, a phrase used by Freud in a letter to Stekel, "the Psychological Society founded by you," suggests that the initiative was entirely Stekel's. Jones also wrote of Stekel that he was "a naturally gifted psychologist with an unusual flair for detecting repressed material." Freud and Stekel later had a falling-out, with Freud announcing in November 1912 that "Stekel is going his own way". Stekel's works are translated and published in many languages.

Early life 
Stekel was born in 1868 in Boiany (Yiddish Boyan), Bukovina, then an eastern province of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but now divided between Ukraine in the north and Romania in the south. His parents, who were of mixed Ashkenazi and Sephardic background, were relatively poor, a fact which restricted his life choices. However, the fact that he later used "Boyan" as one of his noms de plume seems to corroborate his own account of a happy childhood. 

After an abortive apprenticeship to a shoemaker, he completed his education, matriculating in 1887. He then enlisted as a "one-year-volunteer" with the 9th Company, Prince Eugen's Imperial Infantry Regiment No 41 in Czernowitz [today's Chernivtsi, Ukraine]. Under this scheme he was not obliged to do his military service until 1890, after completing the first part of his medical studies. He was therefore free to enrol at the University of Vienna in 1887, and studied under the eminent sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Theodor Meynert,  Emil Zuckerkandl, (whose son would later marry Stekel's daughter, Gertrude), Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke, Hermann Notnagel, and Max Kassowitz. 

From 1886 to 1896 Freud was head of the neurological department at the "1st Public Institute for Sick Children" (otherwise known as the Kassowitz Institute) of which Kassowitz had been the director since 1882. As Stekel worked at this institute during the summer semester of 1891, it seems probable that he knew about Freud then, and possibly was also introduced to him by one of the founder members of the Wednesday Psychological Society, Max Kahane, who also worked there. 

In 1890 Stekel completed the first six months of required military training, which he described as "the most disagreeable period of my life." No doubt in part because of this experience, in 1891 Stekel attended the International Pacifist Convention in Bern, funded by the well-known peace activist Berta von Suttner, and founded a University Pacifists Club supported not only by von Suttner, but also by Krafft-Ebing. 

Nevertheless, he was in such financial straits that at the instigation of his family he applied for a military scholarship. This bound him to another six years of service in the army, and also prohibited him from marrying until his release in 1897. He managed, however, by intentionally failing an examination and using a loophole in the regulations, to gain his release in 1894. 

Thereafter Stekel opened a successful doctor's practice, while as a sideline, following the example of his elder brother, the journalist Moritz Stekel, wrote articles and pamphlets covering issues around health and disease. In 1895 Stekel wrote an article, "Coitus in Childhood" which Freud cited in an article on "The Aetiology of Hysteria" in 1896. The same year Stekel cited Freud in an article on migraine, which, however, did not appear until 1897.

Career 

Stekel wrote a book called Auto-erotism: A Psychiatric Study of Onanism and Neurosis, first published in English in 1950. He is also credited with coining the term paraphilia to replace perversion. He analysed, among others, the psychoanalysts Otto Gross and A. S. Neill, as well as Freud's first biographer, Fritz Wittels. In his 1924 Freud biography, Wittels expressed his admiration for Stekel, to whose school he at that time adhered. This annoyed Freud who wrote in the margin of the copy of the book Wittels sent him 'Zu viel Stekel,' (Too much Stekel). Much later, Wittels, who by then had returned to the Freudian fold, still praised Stekel's "strange ease in understanding" but commented, "The trouble with Stekel's analysis was that it almost invariably reached an impasse when the so-called negative transference grew stronger". Stekel's autobiography was published posthumously in English in 1950.

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 '.<ref>Otto Fenichel, 'The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (London 1946) p. 224</ref> 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).
Stekel also deals differently than Freud with the problem of perversion. A lot of perversions are defense mechanisms (Schutzbauten) of the moral “self”; they represent hidden forms of asceticism. To Freud, the primal sexual venting meant health, while neuroses were created because of repressing sexual drives. Stekel, on the other hand, points out the significance of the repressed religious “self” in neuroses and indicates that apart from the repressed sexuality type, there is also a repressed morality type. This type is created in the conditions of sexual licentiousness while being opposed to doing it at the same time.
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".

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". Stekel's "elaboration of the idea that everyone, and in particular every neurotic, has a peculiar form of sexual gratification which is alone adequate" may thus have been grounded in personal experience.

On sado-masochism, "Stekel has described the essence of the sadomasochistic act to be humiliation".

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.

On technique
Stekel "was also an innovator in technique...devis[ing] a form of short-term therapy called active analysis which has much in common with some modern form of counselling and therapy".

On aesthetics
Stekel maintained that "in every child there slumbered a creative artist". In connection with the psychoanalytic examination of the roots of art, however, he emphasised that "...the Freudian interpretation, no matter how far it be carried, never offers even the rudest criterion of 'artistic' excellence...we are investigating only the impulse which drives people to create". Analyzing the dreams of artists and non-artists alike, Stekel pointed out that "at the level of symbol production the poet does not differ from the most prosaic soul...Is it not remarkable that the great poet Goethe and the unknown little woman...should have constructed such similar dreams?".

Personal life
Stekel committed suicide in London by taking an overdose of Aspirin "to end the pain of his prostate and the diabetic gangrene". He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on 29 June 1940. His ashes lie in section 3-V of the Garden of Remembrance but there is no memorial.

He was married twice and left two children. Stekel's autobiography was published posthumously, edited by his former personal assistant Emil Gutheil and his wife Hilda Binder Stekel. She died in 1969.

A biographical account appeared in The Self-Marginalization of Wilhem Stekel (2007) by Jaap Bos and Leendert Groenendijk, which also includes his correspondence with Sigmund Freud. See also L. Mecacci, Freudian Slips: The Casualties of Psychoanalysis from the Wolf Man to Marilyn Monroe, Vagabond Voices 2009, pp. 101

In popular culture
 He is referenced in the episodes 22 and 26 of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.
 A quote attributed to Stekel ("The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause.  The mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.") is referenced in The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. Cited by a character in the novel as a statement of Stekel's, it has sometimes been attributed to Salinger and may indeed be his paraphrase of a statement by the German writer Otto Ludwig (1813-1865), which Stekel himself has quoted in his writings: "Das Höchste, wozu er sich erheben konnte, war, für etwas rühmlich zu sterben; jetzt erhebt er sich zu dem Größern, für etwas ruhmlos zu leben." Cf. q:Wilhelm Stekel#Misattributed.

Selected publications
Stekel W. (1911). Die Sprache des Traumes: Eine Darstellung der Symbolik und Deutung des Traumes in ihren BezeihungenStekel W. (1911). Sexual Root of Kleptomania. J. Am. Inst. Crim. L. & CriminologyStekel W. (1917).  Nietzsche und Wagner, eine sexualpsychologische Studie zur Psychogenese des Freundschaftsgefühles und des FreundschaftsverratesStekel W. (1921). The beloved ego, foundations of the new study of the psyche
Stekel W. (1921) The depths of the soul; psycho-analytical studies
Stekel W. (1922). Compulsion and Doubt (Zwang und Zweifel) Liveright
Stekel W. (1922). Disguises of love ; psycho-analytical sketches
Stekel W. (1922). The Homosexual Neuroses
Stekel W. (1922). Bi-sexual love; the homosexual neurosis (2003 reprint: Bisexual Love. Fredonia)
Stekel W. (1922). Sex and dreams; the language of dreams
Stekel W. (1926). Frigidity in women Vol. II. Grove Press
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).  Peculiarities 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. (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. Live right
Stekel W. (1952). Disorders of the Instincts and the Emotions -- The Parapathaic Disorders, Vol. 1 and Sexual Aberrations -- The Phenomena of Fetishism in Relation to Sex, Volume 2. (Two volumes in one.) Liveright
Stekel W., Boltz O.H. (1999 reprint). Conditions of Nervous Anxiety and Their TreatmentStekel W. (1952). Patterns of Psychosexual Infantilism Grove Press Books and Evergreen Books
Stekel W. (1961). Auto-erotism: a psychiatric study of masturbation and neurosis''. Grove Press

References

Further reading

External links

 Wilhelm Stekel's article "Poetry and Neurosis. Psychology of the Artist", Heksis 2/2010
 Kazimierz Dąbrowski "Remarks on Wilhelm Stekel's Active Psychoanalysis", Heksis 2/2010
 

1868 births
1940 deaths
1940 suicides
People from Novoselytsia Raion
Austrian Jews
Austrian psychologists
Freudians
Austrian sexologists
Austrian psychoanalysts
History of psychiatry
Suicides in London
Jewish psychoanalysts
Austrian emigrants to the United Kingdom
Drug-related suicides in England
Emil Arthur Gutheil (January 21, 1889 – July 7, 1959) was a Polish-American psychiatrist specializing in human sexuality, music therapy, and psychoanalysis. He was a founder of the Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy and editor of the American Journal of Psychotherapy.

Life and career
Gutheil was born in Poland and educated at the University of Vienna. He was neuro-psychiatrist at the University Clinic and served as personal assistant to Wilhelm Stekel. He co-founded the Active-analytic Clinic in Vienna, but emigrated with his wife to the United States in the late 1930s, fearing Nazi persecution. He served at the psychiatric clinic of Mount Sinai Hospital, New York. Gutheil edited Stekel's autobiography.

Gutheil died in New York City following a heart attack. The Gutheil Library at Baruch College and the Gutheil Memorial Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy are named in his honor.

Selected publications
Gutheil EA (1930). An analysis of a case of transvestism. In Stekel, Sexual Aberrations; the Phenomenon of Fetishism in Relation to Sex. Liveright, pp. 345–351.
Gutheil EA (1934). Analysis of a Case of Migraine. Psychoanalytic Review, 21:272-299
Gutheil EA (1939). The Language of the Dream. M.D. New York - The Macmillan Company.
Gutheil EA (1944). Psychoanalysis and brief psychotherapy. J. Clin. Psychopath. & Psychotherapy, vol. VI, pp. 207–230.
Gutheil EA (1947). Occupational neurosis in a musician. Am J Psychother. 1947 Oct;1(4):448-67. 
Gutheil EA (1947). A rare case of sadomasochism. Am J Psychother. 1947 Jan;1(1):87-92. 
Gutheil EA (1948). Dream and suicide. Am J Psychother. 1999 Spring;53(2):246-57. 
Gutheil EA (1948). Training in psychotherapy. Am J Psychother. 1948 Oct;2(4):676-89. 
Gutheil EA (1949). On the margin. Am J Psychother. 1949 Jul;3(3):430-3. 
Gutheil EA (1951). The handbook of dream analysis. Liveright. 1970 reprint 
Stekel W, Gutheil EA, eds. (1952). Patterns of psychosexual infantilism. Liveright, 
Gutheil EA (1952). Music and your emotions. Liveright. 1970 reprint 
Gutheil EA (1952). Does psychotherapy dormant psychoses? Am J Psychother. 1952 Oct;6(4):673-6. 
Gutheil EA (1954). Music as adjunct to psychotherapy. Am J Psychother. 1954 Jan;8(1):94-109. 
Gutheil EA (1954). The psychologic background of transsexualism and transvestism. Am J Psychother. 1954 Apr;8(2):231-9.  
Gutheil EA (1955). Current trends in psychotherapy. J Med Soc N J. 1955 Nov;52(11):580-5. 
Gutheil EA (1955). Pseudoneurotic forms of depressive psychosis. Am J Psychother. 1955 Oct;9(4):719-36. 
Gutheil EA (1958). Public education in preventive psychiatry. Am J Psychother. 1958 Oct;12(4):826-30. 
Gutheil EA (1958). Dreams as an aid in evaluating ego strength. Am J Psychother. 1958 Apr;12(2):338-57. 
Gutheil EA (1959). Reactive depressions. Reactive depressions. In S. Arieti (Ed.), American handbook of psychiatry, Vol. 1. New York: Basic Books, 1959.
Gutheil EA (1959). Problems of therapy in obsessive-compulsive neurosis. Am J Psychother. 1959 Oct;13:793-808. 
Stekel W, Gutheil EA, Wertham F, van Teslaar JS (1961). Auto-erotism: a psychiatric study of masturbation and neurosis. Grove Press
Gutheil EA (1962). The exhibitionism of Jean Jacques Rousseau. An abstract of Stekel's analysis. Am J Psychother. 1962 Apr;16:266-77.

References

External links
PCMH History: Gutheil Library via Baruch College

1889 births
1959 deaths
University of Vienna alumni
Polish emigrants to the United States
Polish psychiatrists
American psychiatrists Rosalie Adolfine Johanna Gabler (c.1870–1949) was a German-British psychotherapist. A "good friend and former pupil" of the pioneer psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel, she translated several books by Stekel into English.

Life
Around 1901 Gabler had a child, Katharina, known as Katie. However, she subsequently divorced her husband and moved with her daughter to England. In the early 1920s she befriended Harold Samuel Coxeter, father of the future geometer Harold Coxeter. In 1922 her daughter Katie married Harold Samuel Coxeter.

Gabler was a member of the British Psychological Society and the Society for the Study of Orthopsychics. She also corresponded with the British Sexological Society.

In June 1934 she became naturalized as a British citizen. In the 1940s she was living in Peaslake near Guildford.

Works
 (tr.) The Beloved Ego: foundations of the new study of the psyche by Wilkelm Stekel. Kegan Paul & Co.: London, 1921.
 (tr.) Disguises of love: psychoanalytic sketches by Wilhelm Stekel. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1922.
 (tr.) Conditions of nervous anxiety and their treatment by Wilhelm Stekel. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1923.

References

Naturalised citizens of the United Kingdom
German emigrants to England
British psychotherapists
Year of birth missing
19th-century births
1949 deaths