International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 2015

Vol. 24, No. 1, 47–56, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2014.893394

Reconstructing Freud’s prototype reconstructions

HAROLD P. BLUM*

Abstract
Although at age 75, Freud asserted “deep within me there continues to be the happy child of Freiberg” (Příbor), his
statement may now be regarded as an idealized version of his infancy and early childhood, devoid of trauma and stress. His
reconstructions of his first three years of life, reported in his letters of October 1897 to Wilhelm Fliess, are subject to their
own reconstruction. He had just repudiated seduction trauma as an exclusive etiology of psychopathology. Freud was then
in the throes of an intense transference–countertransference relationship with Fliess, with reactivated unconscious conflict
and developmental challenge. The reconstructions of his nursemaid, of his reactions to the birth and death of his first
sibling, and of seeing his mother “nudam” require re-evaluation and revision in the context of contemporary psychoanalytic
theory and new knowledge. While the specific reconstructions are of continuing interest, the methodology of analytic
inquiry into early childhood and parenting transcends the inevitable limitations of the infancy of psychoanalysis. The
concept of reconstruction potentiated the development of psychoanalytic thought, although with recurrent controversy,
especially concerning retrospective meaning, psychic reality, and historical reality.

Key words: reconstruction, nursemaid, screen memory, splitting

In October 1931, Freud wrote to the Mayor of
Příbor “Deep within me, although overlaid, there
continues to live the happy child of Příbor … who
received from this air, from the soil, the first
indelible impressions” (Gay, 1988, p. 575). Freud’s
childhood, however, was more complicated and
conflicted than his statement suggests. His infancy
was also characterized by trauma, stress, interper-
sonal conflict, and burgeoning intrapsychic conflict.
The happy child he described in 1931 may be
compared with an idealized screen memory. Freud
actually wrote in somber terms about his childhood
in Příbor in his initially anonymous paper “Screen
memories” (1899). Little Sigmund’s early childhood
involved a series of losses, a familial upheaval, and a
socioeconomic crisis. Freud later indicated that his
life in Příbor had a catastrophic end.
Much of Freud’s initial reconstructions, the main
focus of this paper, concerned his first three years of
life in Příbor, in the Czech Republic, then within the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. Astounding for their bril-
liance, complexity, and depth, these reconstructions
were related to Fliess (Freud, 1985) in a series of
letters during the very brief period of the month of
October 1897. They pertained to his infant brother,
Julius, his mother, his nursemaid(s), and his relation-
ship with his nephew, John. The Oedipus complex
was first formulated, and simultaneously antecedents
of the Oedipus complex were reconstructed and given
importance in their own right. The social, cultural
context of life in Příbor (Burianek, in press; Mahler,
this issue; Papiasvili, this issue), the intersection of
Freud’s internal and external worlds, historical facts,
our imagination, and our transference and counter-
transference to Freud will all influence the process of
reconstruction and reinterpretation.
Reconstructions of early childhood had never
before been systematically attempted, nor had early
object relationships been considered as forerunners
of adult object relations and adult personality. Freud
glimpsed his own infantile life and fantasy life largely
from dreams, as well as memory fragments and
screen memories. Without a well-defined methodo-
logy, skeptical of his own findings, he checked his
reconstructions and distorted memory fragments
with his mother. Asking her for factual correction
and validation, he struggled to differentiate fact from
fantasy, historical reality from psychic reality, the
interpersonal and the intrapsychic. These issues,
which concerned Freud for a lifetime, have recurred
as controversial subjects up to the present. Recon-
struction was an entirely new approach to the under-
standing of infancy and early child development
beyond the reach of conscious adult memory.
These initial reconstructions, dazzling in their day,
require modification and updating in the light of
contemporary theory and new knowledge. They
are nevertheless landmarks in the evolution of

*Correspondence: Harold P. Blum, 23 The Hemlocks, Roslyn Estates, NY 11576, USA. Tel: +1 516 621 6850. E-mail: hpblum1@gmail.com

(Received 3 March 2014; accepted 6 February 2014)

© 2014 The International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies
48 Harold P. Blum
psychoanalysis; the process of reconstruction trans-
cends the content.
Freud did not appear to be aware of his own
motivations for these reconstructions, nor did he
comment on his own vacillation at that time regard-
ing seduction trauma, a misleading term for child
abuse. He did not link his pioneer reconstructions
in the very brief period of October 1897, which
reinstated the seduction trauma (child abuse) of
pathogenesis, after his just having repudiated it
(September 1897). This repudiation had exonerated
his father, whom he had previously accused of
abusing his siblings. He did not refer to the first
anniversary of his father’s death in October 1896,
and was not then aware of the significance of his own
fatherhood. He was apparently not cognizant at this
time of his ambivalent transference relationship with
Fliess, nor of the possibility that, at 41 years of age,
he may have been experiencing a mid-life crisis
(Anzieu, 1986). Freud was motivated toward his
work on dreams from an early age, but the first
anniversary of the death of his father, the replace-
ment of Breuer by Fliess, and his burgeoning inner
struggle to emancipate himself from dependency on
Fliess were all determinants of his seemingly sudden
burst of insight in October 1897.
Life in one room in Příbor
Little Sigmund was domiciled for his first three years
and four months in one small room in which he lived
with his parents. This was on the second floor of a
building above a locksmith’s shop. The locksmith
lived in the other second-floor room. In the frame-
work of the one room, little Sigmund would have
been exposed to the sights, sounds, smells, move-
ments, vibrations, and emotional resonances of that
confined space. There was no running water,
plumbing, heating, toilet, or kitchen. There were
temperature extremes of freezing winters and burn-
ing hot summers. Freud’s very likely exposure to the
primal scene in the one room with his parents in
Příbor has been frequently emphasized in psycho-
biographical discourse. Freud’s later reconstructions
of the primal scene are related to his early experience
in Příbor. His case of the Wolfman (Freud, 1918) in
particular, centered on the reconstruction of the
patient’s primal scene experience, may be under-
stood as having a parallel in Freud’s own primal
scene reconstruction. Besides the primal scenes
disguised in his Specimen Irma dream and others
in the “Interpretation of dreams,” he urged analysts
to send him clinical reports of primal scenes.
However, a singular focus on the primal scene will
be blind to the complexity of family life in the
framework of the one small room.
Freud’s first exposure to language in the Freud’s
room would have been Yiddish, spoken between his
parents and to him. German and Czech and other
dialects would have been first encountered in the
world external to this room. Communication within
the room, the private life and the secrets of the
parental couple, would have been very different from
their public persona, language, and behavior; differ-
ent from the external cultural, linguistic, and reli-
gious milieu. Parental harmony or discord, the
obvious as well as the more subtle affective reactions
of the parental couple, would have been conveyed to
little Sigmund, and his every cry or laugh, and so on,
heard by Amalia. The intimate scenes may have
greatly stimulated rather than inhibited the curiosity
of an infant with Freud’s endowment.
In the one small room, Freud also would have
been exposed to his mother’s pregnancy with Julius
and accompanying bodily changes, her nursing of
Julius, and Julius’s fatal gastrointestinal illness.
Probably born in October 1857, Julius would have
been conceived when Freud was about nine months
of age. Freud may have been exposed to the home
birth of Julius when Freud was 18 months of age.
Considering the amenorrhea of lactation, a natural
form of contraception, Freud was likely to have been
nursed for no more than seven months. The oral-
maternal deprivation coincident with the life and
death of Julius may have been an important deter-
minant of Freud’s oral addiction to cigars, and his
later oral cancer.
Play within the room would have been limited and
close to or with Amalia. Play with his nephew John
in the fields would have been an important develop-
mental experience for little Sigmund, with wild space
for experiment and exploration of reality (Winnicott,
1971). The lack of privacy, the probable difficulty of
maintaining personal boundaries, and the enclosure
without personal space can be stifling and deeply
disturbing. However, a crowded room was then the
way of life of most people in little towns like Příbor,
and indeed is currently so in many areas of the
world. Issues of space, suffocation, and separation
abound.
Before her marriage, Freud’s mother, Amalia,
had been living in Vienna with her parents, Jacob
and Sara Nathansohn (“Amalia” is derived from
her Hebrew name, Malka, meaning queen). She
was born in Brody, Jewish Galicia. At 20 years of
age, she moved to Příbor with her new husband, like
her father named Jacob, and twice her age. Jacob
Freud had two grown sons living in Příbor from his
first marriage in Tysmenitz, Galicia: Emanuel, age
24, and Philip, age 20. How did Amalia psycholo-
gically adapt, so far removed from her family and
friends, with no relatives in Příbor, except for her

husband, his sons, and Emanuel’s wife? Her experi-
ence would have been similar to that of a recent
immigrant.
Now in a different sociocultural and linguistic
surround, she quickly became pregnant with Sig-
mund, born nine months after her marriage. Her
pregnancy with Julius, and his birth and death, were
followed by the birth of Freud’s five sisters and his
brother, Alexander, all before Freud was 10 years
old. Jacob Freud had lost his father, Shlomo, for
whom Freud was named, six months before Freud’s
birth. Although named Shlomo Sigismund Freud,
neither Shlomo nor Solomon was used as his first
name. Freud changed his first name from Sigismund
to Sigmund in connection with his shifting adoles-
cent identity. Amalia lost her brother Julius one
month before the birth of her son Julius, probably
named for his deceased uncle. While Amalia’s health
and state of mind during her pregnancy with
Sigmund and then with Julius are not recorded,
object loss, mourning, and possible maternal depres-
sion would all have influenced her relationship with
infant Sigmund. Freud’s mother, conspicuous by
her absence, is hidden behind a defensive barricade;
there are many more references to his father in “The
interpretation of dreams” (Freud, 1900), and in his
case histories. Off limits for published discussion,
Amalia, was alive until 1930, age 95. Amalia was
supposedly the only woman Freud kissed in public.
The Freud family in the Příbor area
Born in Brody, Galicia, a town with an 88% Jewish
population, Freud’s mother initially spoke Yiddish.
Having moved with her parents to Vienna, she
acquired some degree of fluency in colloquial
German. Upon arrival in Příbor, she presumably
had to learn a rudimentary Czech language. Freud’s
father conducted his business in Czech and in
German, could read and write Hebrew, and would
have known Polish from being reared in Tysmenitz.
Brody and Tysmenitz were centers of Jewish reli-
gious and cultural life in Galicia, Poland, now part of
the Ukraine. Both orthodox and more assimilated
Jews were to be found in Tysmenitz (Krull, 1986).
Although in business with his orthodox Jewish
grandfather, Jacob Freud was exposed to the wider
world as a traveling merchant before settling in
Příbor. Assimilated, Freud’s parents were married
by a non-orthodox Rabbi.
There are no Jews lefts in Tysmenitz or Brody;
virtually all the resident Jews were murdered in the
Holocaust. Sigmund Freud never visited Tysmentiz
or Brody. In Příbor, Jacob Freud was a “tolerated
Jew,” requiring that his business permit be renewed
about every six months. Jacob also told Sigmund at
Reconstructing Freud’s prototype reconstructions 49
about age 10 the humiliating tale of his having had
his hat knocked off and being forced into the gutter
in Příbor by an anti-Semite who hurled the insult
“Jew, get off the pavement.” To add insult to injury,
Jacob had donated funds beyond the tax for pave the
walk (Burianek, in press). The gutter was littered with
animal droppings and sewage, so Jacob’s humiliation
was meant to be severe and public. Jacob would have
to watch his step; Jews would have to keep a low
profile.
Wider meanings of Jacob’s report to Sigmund at
age nine or 10 may be inferred (Freud, 1900). His
father may have unconsciously conveyed his fantasy
of his son avenging his humiliation or compensating
for his humiliation through high achievement. Jacob
may have indicated that Jewish life in Vienna was
superior to that of Příbor six years prior, that paths
and opportunities were open to enterprising Jews. At
the same time, Jacob devalued himself in front of
Sigmund in his depiction of abject submission to
bigotry. Jacob failed in business and could not
support his family. He may have symbolically ceded
his paternal authority to Sigmund, who would then
have to resolve his guilt over his Oedipal victory in
developing psychoanalysis. Sigmund then identified
with Hannibal and other military heroes who would
be victors rather than victims, and who could reverse
defeat and masochistic submission. A 3% minority
in Catholic Příbor, a village with a population of
4500, the Jewish families were insecure and aware of
anti-Semitic diatribes, uprisings, and a history of
violent persecution. Jews in Příbor were accepted,
yet foreign, outsiders in a xenophobic land (Mahler,
this issue; Papiasvili, this issue; Robert, 1975).
Pregnant with Julius, Amalia stayed at the Spa at
Roznau, 10 miles south of Příbor, with Sigmund and
one of his nursemaids, Resi Wittek, for several
months. She was separated from her husband, his
relatives, and friends such as the Fluss family.
According to their records, babies were born at the
Spa, possibly including Julius Freud. The Spa “cure”
was primarily mineral baths, rich in sulfur, with rest
in the sun for the treatment of pulmonary disorders.
Since the Freud family lived a poor, spartan life in
one room in Příbor, how could Amalia afford the
prolonged stay at the Spa? If Amalia had tuberculosis
like her deceased brother Julius, her delicate physical
and or psychological condition could have justified
the stay. Jacob and his sons or Amalia’s family of
origin would have somehow defrayed the cost.
Amalia appears to have been indulged in frequent
visits to the Roznau Spa even after she had moved to
Vienna. She visited Roznau 24 times for stays of
variable length while living in poor circumstances in
Vienna. It does not appear that she ever visited
Příbor again, even though it was very close to the
50 Harold P. Blum
spa. Twice she was accompanied to Roznau by
Sigmund and a sibling. Were the stresses of closely
repeated pregnancies, nursing, and nurturing relev-
ant to her spa retreats? Had she been worried about
her own health? Was she concerned about the
transmission of disease to her children, especially
after the illness and death of her infant Julius?
Mourning and depressed after his loss, the spa might
also have been viewed as a physical and psycholo-
gical place for her to recover. If she had been
depressed, the availability of the nursemaid (Resi)
at the Spa takes on greater meaning (Green, 1986;
Guntrip, 1975; Kardiner, 1977).
The nursemaids
Freud’s references to his nursemaid in his early
reconstructions are fascinating, contradictory, and
enigmatic, both revealing and concealing. Many
prior analytic contributions have elaborated the
significance of Freud’s nursemaid(s) (Grigg, 1973;
Hardin, 1987, 1988; Swan, 1974). Condensed into
one figure in Freud’s letters, three nursemaids have
now, however, been documented. Two of the three
nursemaids, Monica Zajic and Magdalena Kabatova
were in their 20s, similar in age to Amalia and
Maria, Emanuel’s wife. Monica was the daughter of
the locksmith, the family’s landlord, although both
she and Magdalena were listed as residing in
Emanuel’s home. They may have shared functions
as housemaid and nanny for the children of Amalie
and Marie. Magdalena is the only one referred to in
the historical records as a nanny, and, of interest,
also as a wet nurse. Did she function as a wet nurse
for any of the Freud family’s children? Was there a
brief period of Sigmund having had a wet nurse
when Amalia was pregnant with Julius? While there
are retrieved records of two nursemaids having
resided in Příbor, the third, Resi Wittek, is men-
tioned only as having accompanied Amalia to the
spa; her name appears on the guest list of the
Roznau Spa as a servant of Amalia Freud in June
1857. That there were three nursemaids might have
added to little Sigmund’s bewilderment about their
relationship to him. Three nursemaids with different
temperaments and attitudes might also have been a
spur to Sigmund’s adapting and attuning to a world
of different languages, cultures, and religions.
Freud alleged that the nursemaid had been his
teacher in sexual matters, implying sexual abuse
(letter to Fliess, October 4, 1897). Freud stated,
“She washed me in reddish water in which she had
previously washed herself [The interpretation is
not difficult … (i.e., he had been washed in her
menstrual blood. I find nothing like this in the
chain of my memories so I regard it as a genuine
ancient discovery.)].”
Freud thought the nurse had induced him to steal
coins for her, corrected in the next letter to Fliess, on
October 15, 1897. His nurse was the direct thief,
discovered by his half-brother Philip, and was
arrested by the police during Amalia’s confinement
with Freud’s first sister, Anna, born December 31,
1858. Freud’s mother validated the reality of his
reconstruction, adding that the nurse was impri-
soned for 10 months. No record of her arrest or
imprisonment has yet been found, but she could
have been immediately dismissed and disappeared,
or the prison records lost. Freud would ever more
grapple with the issues of reality or fantasy, historical
reality or psychic reality, memory or screen memory
or pseudo-memory.
Freud’s ambivalence to his nursemaid(s) is
marked in the letters of October 3 and 4; he briefly
referred to the “prime originator” (the nursemaid) as
the source of his neurotic conflicts. The nursemaid(s)
was seen as the perpetrator of seduction trauma,
which was then reinstated as a source of psycho-
pathology. However, seduction trauma was no
longer the virtually exclusive etiology. In the October
3, 1897 reconstruction, the “prime originator” was:
an ugly, elderly, but clever woman who told me a great
deal about God almighty and Hell, and who instilled in
me a high opinion of my own capacities … If I am
successful in resolving my own hysteria, then I shall be
grateful to the memory of the old woman who provided
me at such an early age with the means for living and
going on living.
Freud’s ambivalently loved nursemaid was depicted
as both a protective, supportive mother surrogate and,
in contradiction, also as a corrupt perpetrator of
seduction, abuse, and delinquency. Was this ambi-
valence to a nursemaid an example of splitting or a
reaction to different nursemaids? Did any of the
nursemaids have a living child of her own? Had any
of the nursemaids had a recent miscarriage or a
deceased infant? A nursemaid who did not produce
sibling rivals could have been safely dissociated from
a disappearing mother. The nanny could have been a
displacement for his mother, and the mother a
displacement for the nanny (Colombo, 2010).
Why did Freud consider his nursemaid rather
than his mother as bolstering his self-esteem and
providing “the means for living”? I believe his
mother was always more important, more influential
in his life than any one nanny. The relationships of
the nursemaids to Freud’s mother, to each other,
and to their shared care of little Sigmund are
obscure. The nursemaids were Christian; as paid

servants they could be dismissed at any time.
Moreover, the existence of three nursemaids sug-
gests that an attachment to any one of them would
have been limited. Freud’s mother’s initial reference
to the nursemaid as ugly and old suggests an
emotional dislike, rather than merely a comment
about her physical appearance. This shifting dis-
placement among the main women in Freud’s life
would not have been unique at that time. In his letter
to Fliess on February 9, 1898, Freud mentioned,
“Had a delightful dream … which unfortunately
cannot be published … its second meaning shifts
back and forth between my nurse, my mother!, and
my wife and one cannot really publicly subject one’s
wife to reproaches of this sort.” The figure of the
nursemaid was recurrent in Freud’s dreams and
thoughts. Freud’s references to the nursemaid or
nanny far exceed in number the rare references to his
mother in the Fliess letters and in “The interpreta-
tion of dreams.”
At the time the Freuds were in Příbor, and
subsequently in Vienna, Jews were periodically
accused of the mythical crime of killing Christian
children to use their blood in the ritual Passover
meal. These accusations and occasional arrests
caused widespread fear among European Jews. In
what was then a famous case, the nanny of a Jewish
child claimed she had secretly baptized him, taking
him to church as an infant. The Catholic Church
proclaimed that no Christian child could be raised in
a Jewish family. Forcibly taken from his distraught
parents in June 1858, the child, Edgardo Mortara,
became a ward of the Pope; later he became
an evangelical priest encouraging Jews to convert
(Kertzer, 1997). International protests against the
Jewish child’s kidnapping may well have reached
Příbor when Freud was two years old. (I wrote to the
Vatican many years ago to inquire if there was any
record of Sigmund Freud having been baptized, but
received no reply.) Despite this atmosphere, Freud’s
parents were not alarmed by the nanny taking their
toddler to church, or afterwards by Freud’s preach-
ing like a priest. Did his parents want privacy and
time without their child? Amalia may have been
more relieved than alarmed about Sigmund being
taken to church.
The “reddish water” reconstruction may have
been further overdetermined, including Freud’s
experience with his nursemaid in church. Freud
possibly confused a reference in church to being
“washed in the blood of the lamb” with the nurse-
maid’s washing him (Vitz, 1993). An observant
toddler, Freud might have noticed the bloodstained
garments of mother or nursemaid being washed,
conflated with his own bath. (Sanitary napkins and
tampons were not available until 1890.) Freud might
Reconstructing Freud’s prototype reconstructions 51
possibly have confused bloody water from the nearby
slaughter of animals or from reddish colored water in
a close stream (Burianek, in press). If, as Freud was
convinced, he had really been bathed in bloody
water, might he also have been abused in other
ways? Was he subjected to harsh treatment, for
example in bathing or dressing or after urination or
defecation? Washing Freud in the nursemaid’s
menstrual blood could have been the enactment of
her fantasy that he was born from her womb, her
biological child. The nursemaid appears without
further genetic analysis in other of Freud’s (1900)
dreams, for example in his dream of “running up the
stairs,” and in “my son, the myops” (Anzieu, 1986).
Julius
Freud (in a letter to Fliess dated October 3, 1897),
reconstructing his reactions to the birth of his
brother Julius and his rivalry with him, Freud stated,
“I greeted my one year younger brother (who died
after a few months) with adverse wishes and genuine
childhood jealousy; and that his death left a germ of
self reproaches in me.” (While Julius’s death certi-
ficate exists, no documentation of the date and
location of Julius’s birth has as yet surfaced.) Infant
mortality, then about 33%, deeply influenced par-
ent–child relationships and social attitudes towards
children. Freud’s reconstruction of his reaction to
the birth of Julius and to the death of Julius at six
months of age when Freud was just 23–24 months of
age was remarkable (Blum, 1977). Without any
overt acknowledgement of his prior (1897) Julius
reconstruction, Freud (1931, pp. 132–133) elabo-
rated and generalized on reactions to new siblings:
This jealousy is constantly receiving fresh nourishment
in the later years of childhood and the whole shock is
repeated with the birth of each new brother or sister. Nor
does it make a difference if the older child remains the
mother’s preferred favorite. A child’s demands for love
are immoderate. They make exclusive claims and toler-
ate no sharing of their mother.
Note that this essay, written soon after his
mother’s death (1930), still avoids the mother’s
reactions to her pregnancies, the death of Julius,
and to having additional children. Did Freud
unconsciously blame his mother as well as himself
for the loss of Julius and the concurrent disappear-
ance of a nursemaid? He also lost his mother to his
sister Anna. There is an implication that he uncon-
sciously fantasized that his mother had been impreg-
nated by his half-brother Philip rather than his own
father. An increase in size of the family alters the
relationship of the parents to their first child, the
52 Harold P. Blum
parents to each other, and each sibling’s relation to
each parent and to each other. In this connection,
Freud (1914) once designated the Oedipus complex
as a family complex without further explanation.
The term “Oedipus complex” in its schematic
form, however, did not at first address the negative
Oedipus complex, or the “family complex” in which
there is more than one child (Blum, 2011). Related
to the discovery of the Oedipus complex, his father
and his half-brother Emanuel were building their
families at the same time in Příbor, very likely with
Oedipal conflict.
Freud’s infantile jealously of his first sibling, his
brother Julius, can be interpreted in relation to his
unconscious infantile rivalry and envy of Fliess.
Fliess was two years younger than Freud and could
represent Julius as well as Freud’s parents. His
rivalry with Fliess for scientific discovery, under-
neath their friendly collaboration, was another
powerful incentive for Freud’s own discoveries.
Freud’s and Fliess’s wives had been pregnant con-
currently, and Freud was pregnant in conscious
fantasy, gestating psychoanalysis: “After the frightful
labor pains of the last few weeks, I gave birth to a
new form of knowledge.” His allusions to being
pregnant disappear after the Fliess relationship had
terminated and Freud had analyzed his feminine
identification in their relationship, and bisexual
identification in the primal scene (Blum, 1990;
Newton, 1995).
Travel phobia
In his October 3, 1897 letter to Fliess, Freud noted
that his travel phobia was at its height. Related to his
travel phobia and his father having been forced off
the pavement, Sigmund Freud analyzed the myth of
Oedipus dramatized by Sophocles. Oedipus did not
permit his father to travel beyond where the three
roads met, unknowingly killing his biological father.
Freud could not enter Rome until sufficient progress
had been made in his self-analysis in 1901. Similar
unconscious conflicts were reactivated in 1904
when Freud experienced depersonalization and de-
realization on the Acropolis (Robert, 1975).
Freud had observed that two great universal
questions of children are “where do babies come
from?” and “what are the anatomical differences
between the sexes?” In this same letter as the
reconstruction of his reactions to Julius (October
3, 1897), Freud recounts an experience of seeing
his mother “nudam” on the train journey from
Leipzig to Vienna when he was between two and
two and a half years of age. Freud was actually
closer to three and a half or four years of age at the
time of that train trip. By using Latin and dating
the exposure to his nude mother at an earlier age,
Freud may have been defending against his dawn-
ing awareness of incestuous overstimulation and
Oedipal guilt. The letter gives the impression of a
first and single exposure to his naked mother. A
contemporary deconstruction of his reconstruction
of “matrem nudam” suggests that repeated expos-
ure to his mother’s body and to the primal scene in
the one room in Příbor seems far more probable.
Freud might have seen his mother dress and
undress, and he had to have observed changes in
her body during and after her pregnancy with
Julius (Balsam, 2012). Amalia was probably preg-
nant again during the train ride to Leipzig, since
Freud’s second sister, Rosa, was born on March
22, 1860 in Vienna. The train ride with his
mother, apparently without the presence of his
father, might have condensed into the single
incident previous frequent exposures and intimate
excitement. Freud’s exposure to his pregnant
matrem nudam was probably a further contribution
to the pathogenesis of Freud’s travel phobia. His
travel phobia may have been related to conflicts
regarding both seeing his mother nude as well
as not seeing her and experiencing separation
anxiety.
Reconstruction and screen memory
In a letter to Fliess of October 15, 1897 Freud
wrote, “a scene occurred to me which in the course
of 25 years has occasionally emerged in my con-
scious memory without my understanding it.”
Screen memories are enduring, vivid, visual, and
usually isolated or encapsulated. Bernfeld (1947)
realized that Freud’s early years in Příbor were
referred to in this letter, later disguised as the report
of a patient in Freud’s paper “Screen memories”
(1899). The subjects remained anonymous because
of the autobiographical character of the content.
A compromise formation, Freud’s screen memory
has been described as unusual, an adolescent mem-
ory projected backward in time to early childhood.
Freud’s screen memory, however, concerns both his
adolescence and his early childhood in Příbor and a
constellation of memories and fantasies (La Farge,
2012). Freud did not connect his adolescent fantasy
to his father having fathered his half-brother when
his father was an adolescent. Fantasy and memory
may have been reactivated when Freud’s father and
his half-brother Emanuel were concurrently father-
ing children in Příbor. The Oedipus complex had
many roots and offshoots in its initial construction in
October 1897.
In the “Screen memories” paper, the disguised
subject (Freud) and his nephew (John) snatched a

bouquet of yellow flowers (dandelions) from his
niece, Pauline. Without identifying the Příbor set-
ting, Freud (1899) quoted the presumed patient:
At the top end of the meadow there is a cottage … in
front of the cottage door two women are standing, a
peasant woman with a handkerchief on her head and a
children’s nurse. Three children are playing … one of
them is myself (between the ages of two and three)… the
two others are my boy cousin who is a year older than
me, and his sister who is almost the exact age as I am.
We are picking the yellow flowers (dandelions)… The
little girl has the best bunch … we the two boys – fall on
her and snatch away her flowers. She runs up the
meadow in tears and as a consolation the peasant woman
gives her a big piece of black bread … we throw the
flowers away … ask to be given some bread too. And we
are … given some.
The scene would have taken place in 1859, in April
or May when dandelions bloom; Sigmund was about
three years old, John (born, August 13, 1855) three
and three quarters, and Pauline, two and a half. The
peasant woman might have represented Marie,
Emanuel’s wife; the nurse could have represented
any or all of Freud’s nursemaids (Krull, 1986).
In the same “Screen memory” paper (1899), an
adolescent girl wore a yellow dress, as had Gisela
Fluss, the object of Freud’s adolescent crush, when
he visited Příbor. This dress appears to be linked to
the yellow flowers stolen from Pauline. In the paper,
Freud related a fantasy of deflowering a bride,
apparently a conscious adolescent masturbation
fantasy. The flowers are significant in Freud’s 1898
dream of the botanical monograph with associations
referring to screen memories (Anzieu, 1986). We
now know that Freud was passionately admiring not
only of Gisela, but also of her mother (Clark, 1980).
His screen memory overlay his unconscious incestu-
ous fantasies concerning Gisela’s mother and ulti-
mately his own mother. His adolescent fantasy
concerning Gisela may be regarded as a reactivation
of the childhood scenes with his playmates. Freud
also very likely would have been aware that his father
was an adolescent when he fathered Sigmund’s half-
brothers.
Freud regarded his playmates as highly significant
in his reconstruction at the time, and as a prototype
of his later object relations. Following his recon-
struction of his affective response to the birth and
death of Julius, Freud (in a letter to Fliess dated
October 3, 1897) stated:
I have also long known the companion of my misdeeds
between the age of one and two years is my nephew, a
year older than myself, … who visited us in Vienna when
I was fourteen years old. The two of us seem occasionally
Reconstructing Freud’s prototype reconstructions 53
to have behaved cruelly to my niece, who was a year
younger. This nephew and this younger brother have
determined, then, what is neurotic, but also what is
intense in all my relationships.
The nature of their collusion in crime against
Pauline or possibly also with each other is obscure.
Did they play sexual games, or rudely undress
Pauline and inspect or touch her genitals? Were
they cruel to Pauline in rough and tumble play as
well as filching her little bunch of flowers? These
reconstructions of the childhood past and the
“Screen memory” paper (1899) may have significant
connections to Freud’s conflicts during October
1897. Freud may have been struggling with his guilt
over having recommended the botched surgery
Fliess performed on Emma Eckstein. Freud uncon-
sciously then regarded Fliess as his companion in
crime, since Emma nearly died of the surgery
(Krull, 1986).
John
Freud (1900) repeated the formulation of the roots
of his relationships in “The interpretation of dreams”
(1900) with some elaboration. He referred to his
nephew John as his earliest friend and opponent.
They came to blows, and despite the fact that Freud,
on dream evidence, assumed he was physically
stronger, although in the wrong, “might prevailed
over right.” Freud stated (1900, p. 483) that:
my warm friendships as well as my enmities with
contemporaries went back to my relations in childhood
with a nephew … all my friends have in a certain sense
been reincarnations of this figure … my emotional life
has always insisted that I should have an intimate friend
and a hated enemy. I have always been able to provide
myself afresh with both, and it has not infrequently
happened that the ideal situation of childhood has been
so completely reproduced that friend and enemy have
come together in a single individual – though not of
course, both at once or with constant oscillations, as may
have been the case in my early childhood.”
Dependent friendships followed by animosity
would characterize Freud’s relationships with
Breuer, Fliess, and Jung. Dazzling in their day,
reconstructions of his relationship with John should
no longer be accepted without modification. Are
these ambivalent relationships with John stereotypes
for all of Freud’s subsequent object relations, parti-
cularly with men? The splitting of the figure of John
into friend and enemy, and the following integration
into one person, strikingly foreshadows the develop-
mental concepts of Klein (1957) and Mahler, Pine,
and Bergman (1975). Freud’s remarks also anticipate
54 Harold P. Blum
a failure to unify split loved and hated self and object
representations in severe personality disorders (Kern-
berg, 1984). In his initial reconstruction, Freud
proposed a theory of internalized object relations
and implied object representations before the elucida-
tion of drive theory. Aggression and hostility were
noted before the introduction of a separate aggressive
drive. Freud’s nephew could hardly have had the vital
influence on his object relations of Freud’s mother or
father. Little John lacked authority over parental
figures, nor does it now seem possible for John to
have been an exclusive prototype for Freud’s later
object relationships. However, John could have been a
significant determinant of Freud’s ambivalent peer
relationships.
John may also be seen as a displacement from
Amalia, who was then not clearly within Freud’s
theoretical framework and is little evident in the
reconstruction. Dear friend and hated enemy, John
prefigures Freud’s Oedipal relationship to his own
father (John’s grandfather) and on a deeper level his
mother. Fighting with John for possession of the
field or toys side-steps the trenchant issue of exclus-
ive possession of the mother. Freud’s later emphasis
would be the rivalry with the father for the mother,
with the Oedipal fantasy of parricide. John Freud
may well have been a safe substitute target for
Freud’s hostility toward his parents. That John is
revived in Freud’s fantasy life testifies to his having
been a meaningful figure, deconstructed here also as
a composite of parents and siblings.
Considering the mother–son relationship, Freud
mainly interpreted erotic rather than both erotic and
hostile fantasy. Even in his later years, Freud (1933)
regarded the mother–son relationship as the most
perfect of human relationships, free from ambival-
ence. But in the one dream, Freud (1900) recalled
from his childhood at about age nine, his mother was
carried by bird-beaked figures as though dead.
Matricidal fantasy was not interpreted. Similarly, it
may be noted that Freud did not directly confront
the mother’s possible hostility, jealousy, and
destructive attitude toward her baby.
Without reference to his reconstructions in the
origins of psychoanalysis, Freud, in his final paper
(1940, p. 188) placed the mother figure front and
central in his initial reconstruction of pre-Oedipal
object relations in his final outline:
A child’s first erotic object is the mother’s breast, that
nourishes it; love has its origins in attachment to the
satisfied need … This first object is later completed into
the person of the child’s mother … the root of a
mother’s importance, unique, without parallel, estab-
lished unalterably for a whole lifetime as the first and
strongest love-object, and as the prototype of all later
love relations – for both sexes.
Discussion
Freud’s capacity to trace his psychic life back to its
first roots is amazing and still mysterious. Was his
rejection of seduction trauma as the crucial deter-
minant of pathogenesis the key to his immediate
theoretical advance? Or had these reconstructions
been percolating in his unconscious? Recognizing
the gulf between hypothesis and the validation of his
reconstructions, Freud (in a letter to Fliess, October
3, 1897) wrote, “My self-analysis which I consider
indispensable for the clarification of the whole
problem has continued in dreams and has presented
me with the most valuable elucidations and clues.”
In the throes of resistance to insight and growing
insight into resistance, Freud (in a letter dated
October 27, 1897) wrote, “I live only for the ‘inner
work’. I am gripped and pulled through ancient
times … my moods change like a traveler from a
train … Many a sad secret of life is here followed
back to its first roots.” Shortly afterward (in his letter
to Fliess of November 14, 1897), Freud incisively
asserted, “True self analysis is impossible.”
Freud introduced the Oedipus complex in the
same burst of creativity as his analytic approach to
his brother Julius and nephew John. Oedipal conflict
and sibling conflict virtually coalesce in Freud’s
monumental initial reconstructions, which also
encompassed interpretations of Oedipus Rex and
Hamlet. The germ of guilt that Freud mentioned in
connection with the death of Julius foreshadows the
later significance of Oedipal guilt, and the guilt of
the survivor. The differentiation of developmental
phases and the awareness of countertransference,
subjectivity, and cultural context awaited later con-
ceptualization. The formulation that early object
relations are forerunners of later object relations,
however, was novel and fundamental. Reconstruc-
tion may have diminished resistance to incipient
insight, and affectively appropriate insight reciproc-
ally fostered reconstruction.
Freud’s (1900) continued genetic interpretation of
his dreams led to reconstructions and a working-
through of his fratricidal and parricidal conflicts,
evident in his 1898 “non-vixit” dream. In that
dream, the revenants of ghosts of past persons can
magically be made to reappear and disappear. Fliess
could be annihilated in the present transference, as,
in the buried past, Julius had similarly disappeared.
Freud would later attribute fainting in Munich 1912
in Jung’s presence to unconscious conflict regarding
the death of Julius. Freud then said how sweet it is to
die (Schur, 1972). Bringing back lost objects in

reconstruction and memory may have served undo-
ing, reparation, and atonement
Freud, in his reconstructions, searched from the
start for correspondence to historical facts, to reality,
rather than only to fantasy or what was merely a
coherent or plausible narrative. An archeologist of
the mind, he sought to reconstruct the buried past.
For a long time, he was only irregularly aware of his
own countertransference, including counteridentifi-
cation. There was then, and continues to be, no
definite boundary between clarification, interpreta-
tion, and reconstruction. The genetic interpretation
of dreams, daydreams, and transference may merge
with reconstruction. Analysts and patients regularly
engage in reconstruction even when this dimension
of analytic work is not formally identified. Like the
founder of psychoanalysis, current patients are
stimulated to consult relatives, memoirs, diaries,
home movies, and so on. Despite rigid injunctions
by some analysts to rely only on analytic data,
I believe it is valuable for rational conviction and
analytic research to have reconstruction validated in
external reality.
An integration of various strands of analytic work,
reconstruction is today understood in a wider con-
text than filling in a missing gap in memory (Blum,
2005; Green, 2012). The retrieval of repressed and
dissociated memory is still therapeutically valuable,
although screen memories, memory distortions, and
fragmentation require reconstruction. Currently,
reconstruction complements and often supplants
memory retrieval. There is a kernel of truth in the
past and present, in the transference–countertrans-
ference field (Hinz, 2012). Reconstruction provides
a genetic framework for transference interpretation,
loosens defenses, and helps to restore the continuity
of the self. Pointing from the past to the future, with
increasing self-knowledge, reconstruction fosters
intrapsychic interpersonal and intergenerational
integration on higher levels and greater complexity
than was possible in childhood (Faimberg, 2006).
Freud’s reconstructions are in the realm of autobio-
graphical memory and do not address current
propositions regarding ego deficits, procedural
memory, presymbolic thought, and somatic
imprints.
So appropriate to the postmodern remodeling of
the psychoanalytic edifice, Freud (1937, p. 265)
soberly cautioned, “We do not pretend that an
individual construction is anything more than a
conjecture which awaits examination, confirmation,
or rejection.” Despite the inherent limitations of
Freud’s first reconstructions, there is on occasion
in analysis resonance with Freud’s wistful statement
to an uncomprehending Fliess, in a letter dated
Reconstructing Freud’s prototype reconstructions 55
October 3, 1897: “I cannot convey to you any idea of
the intellectual beauty of the work.”
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Author
Harold P. Blum is executive director of the
Sigmund Freud Archives. He is a clinical professor
of psychiatry and training analyst at the Institute of
Psychoanalytic Education of the New York Univer-
sity School of Medicine; past vice-president of the
International Psychoanalytical Association; and past
editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Psycho-
analytic Association.
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