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1Ludwig Jekels was not only the first Pole to join the psychoanalytic movement, he was among the first supporters of Freud’s theory. Although he was almost a generation older than the other protagonists of this book, his life seems typical for the whole group of Galicians who studied in Vienna, came across psychoanalysis almost by accident and then fully committed themselves to the cause. Reconstructing Jekels’ biography I draw extensively on B.G. Czarnecki’s doctoral thesis, “Ludwig Jekels (1867–1954) und die Anfänge der Psychoanalyse in Polen, Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Zahnmedizin der Medizinischen Fakultät der Eberhard Karls Universität zu Tübingen”, Institut für Ethik und Geschichte der Medizin, 2006. Czarnecki presents a wealth of unpublished archival material, e.g. from the Historical Museum in Bielsko-Biała, the Książnica Beskidzka library, the archive of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute as well as two archives in Vienna – the Universitätsarchiv and the Wiener Stadt und Landesarchiv.

2Jekels was born in Lviv in 1867 as Ludwik Jekeles – he changed his name in 1903. His father, Izaak Jekeles, died early, leaving the boy under the guardianship of his uncle Maurycy (or Moryc), a prominent lawyer, member of the Lviv branch of the Bar Association, lawyer at the National Court and deputy editor-in-chief for the legal journal Prawnik [The Jurist]. In 1883 he took over the law firm of Franciszek Smolka, who chose to devote all his time to politics.2 Ludwig Jekels attended a gymnasium in Lviv, graduating in 1885.3 His school years must have left him with fond memories, for when his alma mater proposed to celebrate its 110^th anniversary with a commemorative volume of essays by former students and teachers in 1930, he was happy to contribute an essay.4 His essay “Z psychologii litości” (“The Psychology of Pity”) appears alongside articles by Slavicist Alexander Brückner, linguist Jerzy Kuryłowicz and philosopher Roman Ingarden.5

3 Jekels studied medicine in Vienna and obtained his doctoral degree in 1892. His journey to psychoanalysis was anything but straightforward. First he worked at the University of Vienna’s Dermatological Clinic, in November 1893 he returned to Lviv to take up a position at the garrison hospital, the following year he was back in Vienna working at the Rudolfstiftung, where he would remain until 1896, when he moved on to the Carolinen-Kinderspital, also in Vienna. In 1894-1895 he also took courses in gynaecology and bacteriology.6

4In 1897 Jekels settled in Jawor in Prussian Silesia, where he became the director of a sanatorium that advertised itself as “an institute for hydropathy, climate cure, sheep whey therapy and inhalation”. In an advertisement in Kurier Lwowski he presents himself as a former assistant at the imperial and royal Rudolfstiftung in Vienna, indicating that he had studied under medical director Wiktor Opolski in Lviv as well as Prof. Krause, Prof. Limbeck, Prof. Schauta, Prof. Winternitz and others.7 Around this time he married Zoë Gross from Cieszyn, a talented writer who would later give birth to their two sons, Alfred and Stefan. Thanks to Zoë’s dowry – she was the daughter of Dr Wilhelm Gross, a lawyer – the young doctor was able to purchase a hydropathy centre on a property of 28 hectares in Bystra near Bielsko. The resort, established in 1874, was somewhat run down, but for Jekels it was a dream come true.

5The village of Bystra, which now lies in the Silesian Beskids, has a complicated history which illustrates problems of national identity and belonging, and the difficulty of determining where “Poland” was.8 From the First Partition of Poland in 1772 until the end of World War I it was divided along the stream Białka, forming two separate villages – Bystra Śląska and Bystra Krakowska. The latter had belonged to the First Polish Republic until it became part of Galicia after the Third Partition. Bystra Śląska had been part of the Kingdom of Bohemia until it was annexed into the Habsburg Empire in 1526.9

6Jekels’ sanatorium, in the Silesian part of Bystra, had excellent transport connections. The twenty-mile branch of Kaiser Ferdinands Nordbahn between Vienna and Cracow had been inaugurated as early as 1878. There was a station, Wilkowice-Bystra, on the Dziedzice–Żywiec line, one mile from Bielsko and Biała, with ten trains per day running between Bystra and Bielsko and an electric tram connecting the train station in Bielsko with the so-called Zigeunerwald by the sanatorium. Horse-drawn cabs could be hired at a stand by the Bielsko train station, and finally the health resort provided its own shuttle service to pick up guests when they arrived on train.

7Most importantly, the location was advantageous from a climatic point of view. Lying on the south and south-east facing slope of a mountain, the sanatorium in Bystra was sheltered from the wind and received plenty of sunlight. Patients could be treated throughout the year, as Jekels explained:

Bystra is exceptional thanks to noticeably higher temperatures and a lusher flora even compared to places in its immediate surroundings. Wine grows here, and the roses in the sanatorium’s gardens bloom under the open sky even in early December. The remarkable permeability of the soil should also be mentioned, as well as the local population’s excellent health and low mortality.10

8Advertisements for the sanatorium appeared in the Silesian and Galician press in 1898, and illustrated brochures were published in Polish (1902) and German (1904).11 The brochures proudly cite an excerpt from Ludomił Korczyński, a prominent researcher from Cracow’s Jagiellonian University, who expressed a strongly favourable opinion on the sanatorium in Zarys balneoterapii i balneografii krajowej [An Outline of Polish Balneo|therapy and Balneology]. Thanks to Dr Jekels, Korczyński writes, the establishment has attained an altogether higher level:

The new owner has invested much energy into refurbishing and enlarging the institute, and after two years of hard work a suitable standard has successfully been implemented; the place is outfitted in such a way as to satisfy not only the doctors but also the patients, entitled to expect a certain level of ease and comfort.12

9The sanatorium was unquestionably modern. Besides a post and telegraph office, guests had access to an intercity telephone. All rooms had electric lighting, and the building was fully plumbed for water-closets. While all forty guest rooms had ceramic tile heaters, the changing rooms and baths in the part designed for hydrotherapy were equipped with radiators. Two large conservatories allowed guests to enjoy the fresh air on rainy days. Fine common rooms eased socialising, including a dining room, a “con|versation room” with a grand piano as well as a recreation and smoking room. A library housed more than five hundred works of Polish, French and German literature as well as a selection of press material in these three languages. Leisure activities for patients included billiards, bowling, croquet, cricket, boccia and dance soirees.

10Prices for one week at the sanatorium ranged from 52 Kronen 50 Hellers to 80 Kronen 50 Hellers, with a discount of 7 Kronen in the winter season.13 This included “a room with service,” full board with a personalised diet (high calorie regimens were available as well as weight loss programmes), and, of course, treatments such as “hydrotherapy, gymnastics, electrotherapy, Gal|vanic baths, electric light baths, sunbathing and exposure to fresh air”.14 Surcharges applied for consultations with a medical doctor or massage therapist. According to the brochure, one-day tickets were also available. A variety of other attractions awaited visitors between or after treatments:

The resort’s buildings are surrounded by almost six morgen of grounds. Many a rare plant specimen – rare in terms of both species and size – can be found, and on hot summer days the park provides the shade that is generally desired. There is a lake fed by waters from the nearby Białka river; spa’s guests can use row boats at the leisure. Further down there is a 50-metre covered walkway, allowing strolls in rainy weather, then we find a bowling alley and a lawn tennis facility, which was newly opened this year. Besides the carefully maintained garden paths, an alley lined with linden trees, the so-called “esplanade,” runs alongside the embankment of the Białka for 150 metres. The park offers a view over the Żywiec Basin, and on clear days the peaks of the Tatra mountains can be seen with the naked eye. Serpentine paths lead from the new section of the park to the neighbouring forest, which can be reached within a few minutes. This forest, belonging to the city of Bielsko, stretches over several miles and, thanks to the work of the Beskid Society, it offers many stunning walks and shady trails that are signposted so clearly that this place deserves to be called a forest park rather than a forest. Some of the shorter forest walks lead to the residence of Baron von Klobus in Łodygowice, the source of St Maurice, the source of St Stefan, the source of St Jadwiga; the Kurhaus in the Zigeunerwald (with many villas and restaurants), the devil’s bridge and the Białka waterfalls. Nearby peaks – including Klimczok (1200m) and Babia Góra (1700m), can be reached on comfortable paths, with cozy lodges and hotels providing tourists with meals and a place to stay the night. (pp. 14-17)

11As a young doctor Jekels believed in methods that were both traditional and popular, such as hydropathy and rest in a healthy mountain climate. The advertising brochure proclaims his credo at the time:

Every illness is the result of 1) a disposition to illness (either inherited or acquired) and 2) pathogenic factors, with the disposition to illness being rooted in unhygienic living. Building on this obvious fact, the physical-dietary method promotes a lifestyle based on the strictest rules of nutritional science and hygiene – of body and mind. The circumspect and skilful application of natural stimuli reduces the patient’s disposition to illness, boosting physical strength and resistance to illnesses both latent and manifest. (p. 18)

12The complaints that Jekels singled out as warranting therapy include “a frail constitution that demands fortifying,” diseases of the heart, of the respiratory organs or the digestive tract, female health disorders, the nervous system (“headaches, neurasthenia, hysteria, chorea, athetosis, dizziness, as well as tabes dorsalis, spinal irritation, etc. etc.” p. 25). Although the treatments on offer were said to include psychotherapy, the first point on the institution’s statutes proclaims: “We do not admit mentally ill patients” (ibid.) – a statement that implies that neurotic patients were treated but psychotic ones were not.

13It was not long after he took over the health resort in Bystra that Jekels first met Sigmund Freud. As he recounts in his unpublished recollections, he was eager to build partnerships with doctors whose recognisable names might attract wealthy patients to his establishment.15 He came across Freud’s name when he consulted the University of Vienna’s register, and in 1898 or 1899 he visited Berggasse 19 not knowing the first thing about psychoanalysis. He could not have picked a worse time. Freud had just published a critique of Kneipp’s treatments and their short-lived effects. This article, titled “Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses,” would prove to be a breakthrough in his career. He writes:

The present treatment of neurasthenia – which is, perhaps, carried out most successfully in hydropathic establishments – has as its aim the amelioration of the nervous condition by means of two factors: shielding the patient and strengthening him. I have nothing to say against such a method of treatment, except that it takes no account of the circumstances of the patient’s sexual life. According to my experience, it is highly desirable that the medical directors of such establishments should become properly aware that they are dealing, not with victims of civilisation or heredity, but – sit venia verbo – with people who are crippled in sexuality. They would then, on the one hand, be more easily able to account for their successes as well as their failures; and, on the other, they would achieve new successes which, till now, have been at the mercy of chance.16

14Freud told his Galician visitor politely but firmly that when it came to treating nervous illnesses, their positions were decidedly incompatible. Half a century later Jekels recalls:

My visit was evidently without any success. And a few moments later, I took my leave greatly relieved despite my failure.
Since I have entered Freud’s house I had been feeling ill at ease, in some ways oppressed and confined. This quality of feelings is perhaps the strongest if not the only recollection of this episode. The atmosphere of seclusion from the world seems to have been so intense at the time – perhaps in conjunction with the emptiness and dimness of the rooms – that I was quite unable to perceive any details of the furniture and, what’s more, I was prevented from noting more sharply the features and facial expression of Freud who wore a dark frock coat.
Some possible ray of light fell upon that experience of mine a few years later when I learned from oral communication by Freud and still later from his writings that my first visit at his home came just at a time when Freud following grave disappointments imagined to live as a sort of Robinson Crusoe in “splendid isolation”.17

15 Freud and Jekels met again, three or four years later, at the University of Vienna. Jekels had come because he felt puzzled by the cases of hysteria he encountered in his psychiatry practice. In his recollections he writes that although he had been fortunate to listen to many outstanding researchers’ as a medical student, Freud’s lectures exerted an immediate fascination on him and opened up new horizons. Driven by an enthusiasm he had never experienced before, he felt compelled to return to Vienna year after year in the early 1900s.

16Perhaps it was during one of these visits that Jekels met Isidor Sadger, a colleague from Nowy Sącz who was among Freud’s very first students. He had started attending Freud’s lectures as early as the winter semester 1895/96 (he recalls having been one of only three students enrolled on the course and the only one who would later work in psychoanalysis);18 he also heard Freud’s lectures in 1898 and in both semesters of the academic year 1903/04. This is the point at which Jekels joined the small audience consisting of Eduard Hitschmann, Paul Federn, Rudolf Reitler, Hanns Sachs, Maximilian Steiner and Isidor Sadger.19 Sadger and Jekels might also have met before, when they were students in Vienna. Sadger, born the same year as Jekels, finished school in Vienna and then went on to study medicine, graduating in 1891, a year before Jekels. Both had initially focused on hydrotherapy in the cure of nervous diseases. Until 1909 Sadger worked for Vincenz Priessnitz, the founder of modern hydro|therapy, at his sanatorium in Gräfenberg in Silesia. There is a remarkable link between hydropathy and psychoanalysis: among the 78 doctors who were members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society between 1902 and 1937, no fewer than twelve ran their own spas or had experience working as doctors at hydropathy spas.20 Jekels’ advertising material indicates that the hydrotherapy staff were recruited from Priessnitz’s famous spa, so this is another possible point where they might have met.

17A mention of Sadger in The Interpretation of Dreams suggests that professional ties already existed between Sadger and Freud at the time:

On one occasion a medical colleague had sent me a paper he had written, in which the importance of a recent physiological discovery was, in my opinion, overestimated, and in which, above all, the subject was treated in too emotional a manner. The next night I dreamt a sentence which clearly referred to this paper: “It’s written in a positively norekdal style”. The analysis of the word caused me some difficulty at first. There could be no doubt that it was a parody of the [German] superlatives “kolossal” and “pyramidal”; but its origin was not so easy to guess. At last I saw that the monstrosity was composed of the two names “Nora” and “Ekdal” – characters in two well-known plays of Ibsen’s. Some time before, I had read a newspaper article on Ibsen by the same author whose latest work I was criticising in the dream.21

18The article that Freud refers to is “Das Wunder vom denkenden Eiweiß,” where Sadger expresses his admiration for the neuroanatomist Paul Flechsig.22 In Freud’s dream, Sadger’s article on Flechsig is superimposed onto the series of texts on Ibsen that Sadger had written in 1894-95 for Allgemeine Zeitung.23 Sadger had an abiding fascination with creative personalities. Besides his articles on Ibsen, he also published on Gerhard Hauptmann, Robert Hamerling, Ferdinand Raimund and Goethe.24 His first presentation at the VPS focused on Nikolaus Lenau,25 and in the following years he wrote about Konrad Ferdinand Meyer, Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Hebbel.26 A separate study on his method, which he called “pathography,” appeared in the first issue of Imago in 1912.27

19Isidor Sadger officially joined the VPS in November 1906 – the same year that Jekels started to attend the Wednesday gatherings. This coin|cidence in the timing suggests that Sadger may have invited Jekels to Berggasse 19. Sadger never underwent analysis himself, but he was considered an excellent analyst. His patients included psychoanalysts Hermine Hug-Hellmuth and Wilhelm Reich. His focus was on homo|sexuality, which he related to narcissism – in fact he is credited with introducing the term narcissism to psychoanalysis.28 Strongly opposed to the penalisation of homosexuality, he still believed in its curability, and at the First International Psychoanalytic Congress in 1908 he presented the case of a homosexual he had treated.

20Sadger had a reputation as an extremely zealous follower of psycho|analysis, more Freudian than Freud himself. In a letter to Jung, the founder of the movement wrote disparagingly of “Sadger, that congenital fanatic of orthodoxy, who happens by mere accident to believe in psycho|analysis rather than in the law given by God on Sinai-Horeb”.29 Karl Abraham compared him to a student of the Talmud who rigorously applies every principle described by his master.30 He also had a tendency to oppose changes in the group, be it the the admission of women to the Society’s gatherings or the question of allowing individuals with no medical training to become psychoanalysts; in the 1920s, moreover, he took issue with Freud’s structural model of the psyche, which identified the three distinct agents of id, ego, and super-ego. Despite his commit|ment to the movement he was not generally liked by his colleagues. They criticised his bad manners and language, his frequent gaffes, his all but pornographic interest in sexual matters and his general air of slovenliness, from poorly groomed nails to the couch in his office31.

21Fascinated with Freud’s lectures, Jekels joined the very small group of his disciples at a time when the Austrian medical establishment was openly hostile to psychoanalysis – or at least ignorant of it. His memoir contains the following anecdote: Jekels was reading a newspaper in one of Vienna’s coffee houses when a group of famous psychiatry professors entered. Their leader, a certain Prof. Hirschl, took a seat at Jekels’ table and began to question him about what he was doing there. “I am waiting for Saturday to hear Freud,” Jekels replied. This provocation led to a heated exchange in which the worst insults were hurled at Freud and his followers. Jekels, controlling his temper, proposed a rational debate. Hirschl agreed, and an hour later he was forced to admit defeat. Now Jekels asked his vanquished opponent how it was possible that “you who live door to door with Freud concede to me, a provincial, a better knowledge of Freud?”. The embarrassed professor had nothing to say to this.32 Jekels’ story is emblematic for the early days of psychoanalysis, when the doctors who appreciated Freud were the ones from outside Vienna.

22According to the protocols that Otto Rank began to take when the VPS was founded in 1908, Jekels first attended gatherings as a guest and discussant in October 1909, though he soon came to be trusted with important tasks. When the question of re-organising the VPS was on the agenda on 14 April 1910, Jekels was in charge of devising an advertising strategy of sorts. He proposed that psychoanalysis courses should be offered to medical doctors and educators, and that a lecture tour could spark interest among Austria’s academic youth organisations.33 His official application to join the VPS is dated 20 April 1910, and a secret ballot was held the following week. Of the 20 members, thirteen voted in support of his candidacy and two against. Who could have been so ill-disposed towards Jekels? One negative vote certainly came from Fritz Wittels, who was unable to attend the meeting and submitted a postal vote. He included a letter and an urgent request that it be read out loud (p. 479). His request was not granted, since the ballot was supposed to be secret, nor was the message summarised in the protocol. We shall never know what accusations Wittels might have levelled against the doctor from Bystra.

23Despite this mysterious incident Jekels was admitted to the VPS, and he remained in it until it disbanded in 1938. He attended its meetings regularly and took advantage of the opportunity to present early drafts of articles that were later published in psychoanalytical journals. He also attended each of the International Psychoanalytic Congresses, beginning with the first congress in Salzburg on 27 April 1908, when Bystra still figures as his place of residence.34 Another congress was held in Salzburg in 1924, inspiring the editors of the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse to compare the lists of attendees. They came to the following conclusion: the first congress had 32 participants; in the intervening sixteen years, two of them had died; three – Adler, Stekel and Jung – withdrew from the movement; a few active members (including Freud himself) were unable to travel to Salzburg in 1924; the majority, however, had lost interest in psychoanalysis. Jekels was among no more than nine Freudians who attended both congresses in Salzburg. The others were Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, Paul Federn, Sándor Ferenczi, Eduard Hitschmann, Ernest Jones, Otto Rank and Isidor Sadger.35

Gabriela Zapolska at the spa in Bystra

24Until he sold his sanatorium and moved to Vienna in 1912, Ludwig Jekels juggled his activities as a member of the VPS with the management of his spa. It is in Bystra that he made his first independent attempts at psychoanalytical therapy. One person he treated at this time was Gabriela Zapolska (1857–1921), a Polish novelist, playwright and stage actress.

25Zapolska arrived in Bystra in June 1906. She had been dealing with multiple health issues ever since her suicide attempt in 1888. As Anna Janicka recently argued, “from then on [Zapolska] mostly played the part of a patient, while the roles she had previously carved out for herself – that of an actress, a writer, an emancipated woman – came to be subordinated to the rhythm dictated by the fact of living with a medical condition”.36 In her quest to ease her many different ailments she underwent countless treatments with renowned specialists. If she was pleased with an esta|blishment, she often published a sort of sponsored article – a review, usually illustrated with promotional photographs, in which she heaped praise on the spa or the doctor who had treated her. Some of her reviews read like straightforward advertising. Spas that received such positive reviews include Andrzej Chramiec’s Hydropathic Institute in Zakopane (G. Zapolska, “Cudze chwalicie”, KC 1903, no. 177, pp. 1-2; “Cztery miesiące w Zakładzie dra Chramca”, TZ 1903, no. 6, pp. 41-43); Apolinary Tarnawski’s clinic in Kosiv (G. Zapolska, “Lecznica kosowska”, Ś 1906, no. 29, p. 14); Henryk Ebers’ sanatoria in Krynica (G. Zapolska, “Przez moje okno”, KW 1907, no. 193, pp. 2-3) and the Venice Lido (G. Zapolska, “Na Lido”, SPL 1907, no. 128, pp. 1-2; “Przez moje okno”, KW 1907, no. 80, pp. 2-3; “Zima na Lido”, NIL 1907, no. 12, pp. 7-8; “Na Lido”, TI 1907, no. 52, pp. 1062-1063); Dr Żurakowski’s clinic in Tatarów (G. Zapolska, “Przez moje okno: W sanatorium dra Żurakowskiego”, WN 1912, no. 3323, pp. 4-5, no. 3324, pp. 4-5, no. 3325, pp. 4-5) and Józef Zakrzewski’s “Mariówka” near Lviv (G. Zapolska, “Na czasie”, SPL 1909, no. 328, pp. 1-2). In her review of Józef Zakrzewski’s spa near Lviv Zapolska defends her approach to publicity: “And if I were accused of engaging in ‘advertising’ – I should be proud of such a label, for I am promoting a cause that is good, honest, pure […]. Let them accuse me of advertising. Never mind, I’m not going to worry about it”.38 She also indicates that her campaign to support Polish spas has a political dimension: “I am plain and open about the fact that I am boycotting German “Bäder” […]. I want to draw attention to other spa towns – Polish ones.” (ibid.)

26A rather different picture of these spas emerges from Zapolska’s bitter comedy Asystent [The Assistant], completed in 1919. This play was published in Niedrukowane dramaty Gabrieli Zapolskiej, vol. 2, ed. by J. Jakóbczyk (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2012). The idyllic backdrop of a mountain resort turns out to be conducive to matrimonial intrigues more than anything else. Zapolska’s novel Jak tęcza [Like a Rainbow, 1902], which tells the story of the young and wealthy widow Helena, also conveys a rather ambivalent message. Helena comes to Bad Reichenhall for rest and a change of climate, but she falls into the traps of a serial seducer. At the Venice Lido she meets a lawyer from Lviv. They fall in love, but the man turns out to be married. Helena, who went abroad in perfectly good health, falls ill because the atmosphere in these establish|ments strains her nerves. She dies soon after returning home.40

27When her novel Jak tęcza was published, Zapolska could not have known that within a few years she would come to loathe a health resort for entirely different reasons. Bystra was advertised in the press like many other hydrotherapeutic centres of its kind:

A sanatorium and naturopathy institute. Hydrotherapy, electro- and mechanotherapy, gas baths, electric baths, fresh air and sunbathing. High|land climate, beautiful walks, extensive coniferous forests. Western com|forts, electric lighting, waterworks, etc. etc. Excellent cuisine. Prices inclu|ding treatments and medical supervision starting at 4 roubles per day. Owner and director: Dr Ludwig Jekels. This exemplary advertisement appeared in the satirical journal Mucha (1909, nos 21 and 23). Jekels also had it published in Nowa Gazeta (1909, nos 221, 232, 321, 357).

28Jekels makes no mention of the fact that he offered psychoanalytic therapy, even though he was going back and forth between Bystra and Vienna and was probably quite eager to verify Freud’s theories in practice. Thus Zapolska came to be one of the many patient-victims of psychoanalysis on whom turn-of-the-century doctors were testing the effectiveness of their new form of therapy.

29No documents survive to indicate under what circumstances Zapolska arrived in Bystra. The only trace of her stay at the clinic are her letters to her husband, the painter Stanisław Janowski. They had been married for about three years when Zapolska arrived in Bystra; in one of her letters she estimates that since their wedding she had already spent 22 months in various sanatoria.42 Unfortunately Zapolska’s published correspondence does not include all the letters and postcards she posted from the sanatorium, but I was able to access the manuscripts at the Biblioteka Ossolińskich in Wrocław. Zapolska wrote to her husband frequently, addressing him with various nicknames, from the standard “Staś” to unique endearments such as “Uńć” or “Uńciasek”. One letter dated 10 June 1906 opens with the following words: “My dear Uńć! I write whenever I can, and I’ve written 2 cards and 2 letters.” Here the editor, Stefania Linowska, provides a footnote: “All of these were omitted – they describe quarrels with Dr Jekels and the course of the illness” (p. 701). It is remarkable that the details of Zapolska’s therapy did not strike the editor as worth reprinting. Perhaps she failed to recognise Jekels’ unique position as one of Poland’s earliest practicing psychoanalysts – after all, she indexes him simply as “a doctor from Bystra”. Research on the history of psycho|analysis in Poland is made more difficult by blindspots such as these. Fortunately, the entire manuscript collection of Zapolska’s letters and postcards has survived, providing a wealth of archival material that deserves closer examination.43

30In the first letter, probably written in late May 1906, Zapolska complains to her husband:

My dear Staś! Writing these few words to you I am shaken by a very sad event. We’ve rejoiced too early. Yesterday, an hour after lunch, I suffered a sudden attack. For half an hour I was unable to reach anyone on the telephone. Finally the doctor burst in. He shone a light into my eyes, pricked me with needles, pulled me out of bed, told me to walk around, kneaded my stomach with his fists – while I was throwing up my lunch, which had been too rich. Finally he began to shout at me: “Do you realise that if you lose a few pounds more there will be no way to help you with your lungs?” He ordered hot chocolate and poured it into me despite my tears and pleading. I kept throwing up until midnight, with no one there to help me. For dinner he sent me trout in aspic. Today I’m in bed, exhausted, restless, my tears will not dry up. I’m alone! All alone! I think I’d rather die at once… Why, he might have made me eat, but beginning slowly, with things that are easy on the stomach. He forces me to eat things that have never agreed with me, not even when I was well!!! […] I do want to eat, because I can see that I am dying – but I cannot do it all at once. Now it has been raining unremittingly – I am alone with my illness. They’ve left me alone with my illness… No one ever comes to check in on me – and I’d rather die than call for him. I would sooner be alone when I die than to go through the same ordeal as yesterday. Today he told me he reckoned I’d feel better that way. But the opposite is the case. Many kisses. I love you and I keep calling out for you in tears. (p. 1–2)

31This unsettling description of Jekels’ methods barely brings to mind psychoanalytic therapy, though it recalls methods that were commonly used to test responsiveness in hysterics (shining a light in the pupil, pricking with needles, burning the heels with a candle etc.). Zapolska appears to have been left in complete isolation; in fact, her letter has no date in the upper right-hand corner but a scribbled addition: “This loneliness is killing me” (ibid.). Verbal and physical violence are used to make her eat, and she vomits after every meal. Zapolska portrays Jekels as an insensitive tyrant who makes light of her ailments, who purposefully makes her eat the types of food that harm her most, and who scares her by telling her she would die. When she reacts with despair he is unable to console her. Zapolska describes the tension between herself and the doctor in her second letter:

Again they told me to eat trout for dinner. I was too frightened to refuse. My stomach, tortured and sick, could not take it – I was in agony the whole night, did not sleep a wink. […] Instead of giving me light meals, especially at night, they are forcing me to be miserable and overstrain my stomach. Even Jaworski said I should be careful. I tolerated the trout for the first time. Now, following an attack, I feel exhausted, my stomach is tired, he [Jekels] cannot, doesn’t want to understand this… He’s a hundred times more heartless than Tarnawski. Just one template and nothing besides. I ask for cupping on my lower back – he laughs. “Whoever came up with that?” “Kruszyński, Feuerstein, Breiter, Daszkiewicz, Owczarski.” “That’s not going to convince me.” “Please, can I get coffee when I feel weak?” “No!” I ask for water in my tumbler. “Nonsense!”… I say: “I have neuralgia in my shoulder and neck.” He replies: “Some people work to support their families with neuralgia such as yours.” What sort of answers are these? Today I told him that “things have come so far that I barely have the courage tell you, Sir, that yesterday I was spitting up blood”. “And why is this?” “Because you’re going to tell me that other women scrub outhouses while spitting up blood.”… And so I respond in tune with his own method. But I don’t know what may happen next. I am terribly upset about having to wage this battle. I do want to eat, the best proof is that I was staring at my watch, eager for the next mealtime, but now I’m afraid because the food is not the sort I could eat after a year of not eating – it’s of the kind that used to make me sick when I was all fine… Today I broke down crying when he came. I told him that he cannot treat me so rudely, that it’s unacceptable. He apologised and I could see he was sorry. He asked what I wanted to eat. I asked for minced meat with egg yolk, vegetables, eggs, milk, butter, bread rolls, cream, light sweet dishes; once I get better I can have fish, but not in aspic with vinegar – only boiled. He left. If he doesn’t follow my instructions I’ll have to leave. I don’t even dare ring for someone when I feel faint – I don’t dare do anything here. Yesterday was horrible – horrible, the whole day. Kisses – and I swear on your life that what I write is the truth.44

32To present the situation from Jekels' perspective, we could say that Zapolska was a difficult patient. She constantly questions his authority, comparing him to her previous doctors and demanding the same treat|ments and medications they had recommended. Both letters, moreover, have overtones of a power game. Zapolska insists she knows best what’s good for her, making Jekels’ compliance with her wishes a prerequisite for her willingness to see him and to remain at the clinic; in fact, she presents the very success of her therapy as conditional on his response to her demands. She writes about being too frightened to ask for anything, but her letters sometimes give the impression that she wanted to be completely in charge of her own cure, with the doctor’s responsibility being limited to satisfying her wishes. That said, Jekels seems to ignore his patient’s complaints, suggesting that she only imagines her symptoms and talks herself into being ill.

33Zapolska’s next letter, written a few days later, describes another altercation with Jekels:

My dearest, best, kindest Uńciasek! Poor Lunia is writing at 6 a.m., because she cannot sleep. When she awoke and realised she was all alone, and that another whole day would pass and she’d be there like a madwoman in a cell, they would only bring her food, administer treatments and nothing, nothing – not a single word of kindness! … nothing else.
I had a terrible experience yesterday. They served fried chicken for lunch, kohlrabi, fried sago and stewed apples. I ate the kohlrabi and some of the apple stew, sending back the rest and asking for eggs, potatoes, butter. No! Then the doctor rings to tell me that I must eat the chicken. They bring butter. I start to cry, because I do want to eat but I cannot, because I haven’t been able to stomach fried chicken in the best of health, I was severely ill whenever I tried. Then I asked them to move my bed in my new room, because I want to look out at the trees and not at the heater, which looks quite like the one in Lviv, the one I’d stared at for four months. Again the telephone rings. I’m not allowed to move my bed! Why? Because I’m not allowed. This arbitrary bullying of poor sick people surely is absurd! When he came in looking like an inquisitor I asked: “What is this supposed to be, a battle between the two of us or our common battle against my illness?” Finally I was able to explain things, and seeing that he’s just stubborn and that in this situation I need to be a good girl, I promised that once I get stronger I shall eat fried chicken and allow him to run this experiment on me. He replied, in all seriousness: “Yes, I did well to wait for you to finally tell me how we might get out of this muddle.” I thought this was silly and strange. He keeps telling me not to trouble myself with details, and then he makes such a mountain out of a molehill!
It has been pouring down and it’s cold – Lunia is terribly sad. I will count the days until your arrival! If only the sun came out, if only I could lie down on the veranda! But no…
The doctor told me that yesterday the same incident with the chicken occurred with the patient in room 20, who’s in bed as emaciated as I and undergoing a high-calorie therapy. She, too, sent back her chicken, saying she usually throws up any chicken she eats, so she didn’t want it. I was pleased that without having plotted with her I had done exactly the same thing. After all, when someone hasn’t been eating for a year, surely they ought to be more considerate and mindful of what that person says. I wrote down what foods do not agree with me when I am well – fried meat, pork, pancakes and other fried dishes, onions, apples. I enjoy all of these – but I cannot have them. And in the evening already they served me the sort of food I wanted.45

34This letter has a number of marginal notes where Zapolska asks her husband to send her laxatives, presumably trying to hide the fact that she was using them from her doctor:

Do send me some soda right away! I’m running out of supplies. I’m also sending you the prescription for that medicine in powder form, in case I should need help evacuating. But the soda I need now. […] My chest hurts a lot. I can’t take a deep breath. But then, the weather is awful. Perhaps that’s why. […] Dark thoughts are gnawing away at me. And what can you expect! In this loneliness! It is terrible – not having anyone to talk to! […] Yesterday I felt faint twice. They administered some drops but didn’t want to give me coffee. I’m sending you two prescriptions. That powder (no need for suppositories) and that other powder for headaches and toothaches! (ibid.)

35In her next letter – the last one omitted from Zapolska’s published corres|pondence – she again protests vehemently against Jekels’ methods:

My dearest and most wonderful Uńć! Yesterday two hours after lunch I had another attack. They refuse to perform cupping, so I continue to be in agony. Yesterday I begged them to let me go. He became kinder, tried to make amends for everything, gently stroked my hair, but I was in bed alone and all I had was the thought of you and that image of the Virgin Mary. You say in your letter that I’m going to get well. But how? For every meal I eat I pay with terrible pain and then begins the process of artificially getting it out of my body. My lungs hurt dreadfully. And I miss you so much! I see that you are all that’s left of my life… I’m not deluding myself – no… I’m going to die from this enfeeblement! These doctors have killed me! After all, I lost 13 kilograms since November and Tarnowski! And no one cared to acknowledge that! They kept telling me that I was putting on weight. God!… p. 9–10. This letter was written on “Saturday, 6 a.m.,” probably 9 June 1906.

36Zapolska sent two more letters from Bystra, both with a focus on nutrition (both were published in the collection of Zapolska’s correspondence). In the first she writes: “They’ve become very careless about my food. With every meal another item disappears. There’s no more hot chocolate, no sweet dishes. What’s left is eggs, milk, Kneipp’s coffee substitute, biscuits, once I got minced meat and spinach before bedtime.”47 In the second letter she complains: “Yesterday I threw up my lunch again, and he told me to stick my finger in my mouth, throw up and then go back to eating” (p. 203). Zapolska continued to use various medicines without consulting her doctor: “The last bit of Sanatogen is what I have to save myself” (ibid.); “Validol is my rescue” (ibid.). She still laments that her demands are not being satisfied: “I asked for more eggs. They promised to bring me some but they didn’t.” (p. 201) Another recurring theme is her loneliness:

Think of me sometimes. Lying in bed, surrounded by four walls, sick, lonely amidst these coldhearted and indifferent people! And the sound of water outside my window, and thinking this is the end of my life. And this all day long! All day and all night, because last night I couldn’t sleep […]. It is an unfathomable sensation to be crossed out from the list of people who live and work while still alive.

37Besides her criticism of Jekels’ methods, Zapolska also complains to her husband about the number of Jewish guests. Her attitude to Jews is quite striking; at the beginning of her stay she told her husband: “Jekels is a Jew, but I won’t let that put me off. Quite to the contrary perhaps” (p. 201). Soon, however, she writes about the other guests in a way that can only be described as a free expression of anti-Semitism: “I looked down from above as they were having lunch. How awful. Over a dozen Jews, like convicts, dressed in black, whispering to each other. Frightful!” (p. 203).

38Towards the end of her stay Zapolska is outraged about the bill, which she finds disproportionate to the service she received:

I am terribly upset about this robbery. I didn’t get my money’s worth, he’s all alone, there’s no way I can ask for advice or help […]. To lie alone in a cave like this with that man who only frightens me constantly saying I’ll end up having “no way out”.(pp. 203-204)

39Zapolska suffered from a number of complaints, so a key question raised by her letters is what diagnosis Jekels might have proposed. She described the following dialogue:

Yesterday he burst in and said: “Please make your way downstairs to the bath at 7 a.m. tomorrow morning, you will have water poured on your back.” I just replied, “no”. He said, “pardon me?” And so I told him: “I keep coughing all day long, yesterday I was spitting blood.” “Where?” I showed him. “That’s nothing.” “Please listen to me.” He listened for a long time. Finally he got up, disconcerted. “In that case do not come downstairs – not that it’s a bad place to be, but I want to check your weight.” “I’ll come downstairs to be weighed.” “No, stay in your bed and don’t move!” Then he added: “What you have in your lungs is a very serious infection. If you continue to weaken your body it’ll become hopeless.” To this I replied: “I know, especially where hydrotherapy is concerned” (p. 203).

40Zapolska, who arrived at Bystra weighing no more than 47 kilograms, gained some four pounds during her stay of two weeks, more or less. The high-calorie cure was apparently successful, and Zapolska remarked that “Jekels is triumphing” (p. 204). She still complained about her lungs, and the doctor conceded that she had advanced tuberculosis. Still, her therapy seems to have focused on anorexia, which Jekels evidently saw as a hysterical symptom with no organic cause. Taking into account the context of the epoch and Jekels’ interest in psychoanalysis, his behaviour – so shocking and ruthless in Zapolska’s account – seems par for the course.

41At the turn of the century, the term “hysterical anorexia,” introduced by the French physician Ernest-Charles Lasègue in 1873, was used as a matter of course in psychiatric circles.48 Long before either Charcot or Freud began to study the disorder, Lasègue’s description of the progression of the illness in “De l’anorexie hystérique” became a starting point for all future researchers. Lasègue was the first to point out that anorexic women tend to refuse food under the pretext of gastric problems. Even when no physical disorders could be identified, they strongly believed the only remedy was to renounce food. This, Lasègue argues, is what makes their behaviour hysterical. Among the hysterical symptoms he lists a lack of appetite, aversion to food and the fear that eating might provoke some inexplicable physical reaction; a growing resistance to any attempts to be fed; constipation and an intense use of laxatives. He also notes that anorexia is difficult to treat, since the patient persistently questions and opposes the doctor’s authority, “knows better” and merely pretends to comply with his recommendations.49 Following Lasègue, doctors recom|mended hydrotherapy, force feeding if necessary, as well as complete isolation, justified by the assumption that a patient’s immediate sur|rounding often triggers the illness.

42Nineteenth-century clinical descriptions of anorexia, its diagnoses and recommended treatments show a noticeable overlap with Zapolska’s accounts: she believed the food would make her ill; she refused or at least drastically reduced nourishment; there is the ritualisation of eating only some products prepared in specific ways; she probably induced vomiting and used laxatives – to a doctor of Jekels’ generation these behaviours would surely have suggested that her case was a type of hysteria.

43Jekels must have been familiar with two of Freud’s articles on anorexia as a hysterical symptom. The first, dated 1893, describes a case where hypnosis was used to cure an anorexic woman.50 The second, published in Studies on Hysteria (1895), is an account of Emmy von N.’s psycho|analysis.51 Both patients were adults when they were treated for anorexia. Of the first we only know that she was the mother of three; more information is available on Emmy von N., a forty-year-old widow and highly educated mother of two daughters; “her intelligence and energy,” Freud writes, “were no less than a man’s” (p. 103). Even if hysteric patients tended to be young girls, these two cases show that Freud and his colleagues did not view mature women as immune to anorexia.

44Zapolska was over forty years old when she came to Jekels. Her hysterectomy had undermined her sense of femininity, as a letter to her husband written in 1903 indicates:

I’ve lost the thing that makes a woman a woman. […] When a woman loses the ability to become a mother, her need for a closer relationship fades away, in other words, she is not a wife. I am now in this stage. […] I feel like I’m old already, beyond the age designed for experiencing love. This is only natural, for the moment a woman is not able to become pregnant she ceases to seek that sort of emotion. Instead, she runs away and hides with a sense of aversion, wanting nothing but tranquillity.52

45In her letters from Bystra, Zapolska describes herself as a “skeleton,” “decay,” “something horrible” that fills her “with dread at night” (p. 200).

46Freud’s first anorexic patient had trouble breastfeeding. With the firstborn, he writes, “there was a poor flow of milk, pains were brought on when the baby was put to the breast, the mother lost appetite and showed an alarming unwillingness to take nourishment, her nights were agitated and sleepless” (p. 118). She experienced the same difficulties three years later, after giving birth to her second child: “she vomited all her food, became agitated when it was brought to her bedside and was completely unable to sleep. She became so much depressed at her incapacity that her two family doctors […] recommended that just one more effort should be made – with the help of hypnotic suggestion” (pp. 118-119). Freud describes his visit to her:

I found her lying in bed with flushed cheeks and furious at her inability to feed the baby – an inability which increased at every attempt but against which she struggled with all her strength. In order to avoid the vomiting, she had taken no nourishment the whole day. Her epigastrium was distended and was sensitive to pressure; palpation revealed abnormal motility of the stomach; there was odourless erucation from time to time and the patient complained of having a constant bad taste in her mouth. The area of gastric resonance was considerably increased. Far from being welcomed as a saviour in the hour of need, I was obviously being received with a bad grace and I could not count on the patient’s having much confidence in me. (p. 119)

47Freud reports that he hypnotised the patient in order to ease her sym|ptoms, and this allowed her to eat her dinner without any trouble. The following day, however, she could not bear the sight of the heavy lunch. “No sooner had it been brought in than her former disinclination retur|ned: vomiting began even before she had touched it. It was impossible to put the child to her breast.” (ibid.) Again, Freud hypnotised her, and this is how he describes her reaction:

[S]he would break out against her family with some acrimony: what had happened to her dinner? did they mean to let her starve? how could she feed the baby if she had nothing to eat herself? and so on. When I returned on the third evening the patient refused to have any further treatment. There was nothing more wrong with her, she said: she had an excellent appetite and plenty of milk for the baby. (Vol. I, p. 120)

48The situation was repeated when the patient had her third baby. Again Freud was called, and again he came for two sessions of hypnosis, which allowed her to breastfeed the child. In his report Freud outlines the conversion model of hysteria: affectively burdened fantasies, cut off from consciousness, are transformed into uncontrollable behaviour that takes command of the body, which until that moment used to serve “the predominant ego-consciousness” (p. 127). Here is what happens when a hysteric ignores her suppressed aversion to breastfeeding and makes a conscious decision to do it anyway:

[Her unconscious resistance] evokes in her all the subjective symptoms which a malingerer would put forward as an excuse for not feeding her child: loss of appetite, aversion to food, pain when the child is put to her breast. And, since the counter-will exercises greater control over the body than does conscious simulation, it also produces a number of objective signs in the digestive tract which malingering would be unable to bring about. (p. 123)

49A few years later Freud would replace hypnosis with the new psycho|analytical method, which evolved during his work with Emmy von N., the first patient who asked Freud to remain silent while she told him about her problems; she refused to let him touch her or look at her. One of her many complaints was anorexia – understood at the time as a symptom or sub-type of hysteria. She pretended to eat, but, convinced her meals would make her ill, she would throw them out into the garden. She also refused to drink water for the same reason. One passage in Freud’s case description could almost have been taken out of Zapolska’s letters, allowing us to imagine how Jekels might have described her therapy:

Next day the nurse reported that she had eaten the whole of her helpings and had drunk a glass of the alkaline water. But I found Frau Emmy herself lying in a profoundly depressed state and in a very ungracious mood. She complained of having very violent gastric pains. “I told you what would happen,” she said. “We have sacrificed all the successful results that we have been struggling for so long. I’ve ruined my digestion, as always happens if I eat more or drink water, and I have to starve myself entirely for five days to a week before I can tolerate anything.” I assured her that there was no need to starve herself and that it was impossible to ruin one’s digestion in that way: her pains were only due to the anxiety over eating and drinking. It was clear that this explanation of mine made not the slightest impression on her. For when, soon afterwards, I tried to put her to sleep, for the first time I failed to bring about hypnosis; and the furious look she cast at me convinced me that she was in open rebellion and that the situation was very grave. I gave up trying to hypnotise her, and announced that I would give her twenty-four hours to think things over and accept the view that her gastric pains came only from her fear. At the end of this time I would ask her whether she was still of the opinion that her digestion could be ruined for a week by drinking a glass of mineral water and eating a modest meal; if she said yes, I would ask her to leave. (pp. 81-82)

50Freud’s patient was less defiant than Zapolska. Faced with an ultimatum she accepted his interpretation and told him she had developed an aversion to food as a child. Freud managed to convince her that appetite was related to libido, and that when a hysteric felt disgust with regard to food the root cause could be a camouflaged sexual aversion. Jekels was evidently familiar with these two early texts by Freud, and it is possible that Freud had shared with him his ideas about the relationship between anorexia and melancholia.53

51It seems that Jekels treated Zapolska’s refusal to eat as a sort of auto-aggression, or rather a masked suicidal intention. The tall middle-aged woman who weighed no more than 47 kilograms and suffered from serious tuberculosis refused to eat or was excessively selective about what she ate; it seems that she induced vomiting and used laxatives – in other words, she was practically inviting death upon herself. Jekels advised her of the danger several times, in tune with Freud’s belief that to make a patient aware of the mechanisms of their illness had a thera|peutic effect.

52At the first Congress of Polish Neurologists, Psychiatrists and Psycho|logists in 1909 Jekels gave a paper on the treatment of psycho-neuroses through Freud’s psychoanalytical method.54 He argues that the therapy’s goal is to “make [the patient] aware of imaginary complexes that, through suppression, have sunk into the unconscious”; these complexes are the root cause of the illness and responsible for physical symptoms (p. 612). They always remain “in a state of great conflict with the rest of the individual’s consciousness,” which performs an affective reversal: “following suppres|sion, that which was pleasurable comes to be associated with a sense of disgust, shame or moral repulsion” (p. 614 ). The case report in this paper does not mention Zapolska, but it is likely that Jekels would have seen her ailments as “a transformation of sexual impulses into symptoms of an illness” that are “nothing but perverted sexual fulfilment” (p. 615). Perhaps he also remembered Zapolska in the 1930s, when he presented his theory of primary masochism as founded on a regression to the oral phase, where pleasure is derived from forgoing satisfaction.55

53If Jekels did indeed diagnose Gabriela Zapolska’s with hysteria, we might say that he confirmed – perhaps unwittingly – the disparaging cognomen that had accompanied her ever since her debut as a writer. Shortly after her short story collection Akwarele (Watercolours) was published in 1885, an article titled “Histeria w naszej literaturze” (Hysteria in Polish Literature) by Włodzimierz Zagórski appeared in Słowo.56 The critic argues that younger writers are prone to “hysterical clownism” – a trend best represented by Zapolska. He describes these writers as naturalists whose muse was “a woman boarding at Charcot’s Salpêtrière Hospital” (p. 1). Other critics who disliked Zapolska’s work took up the idea of portraying her as a “hysteric,” and for many years she was not able to shed the label.57 It comes up again in Bronisław Chrzanowski’s “Histeria w beletrystyce” (Hysteria in Fiction, 1894), the first in-depth study of her work:

[H]er works are like a wailing that flows from a torn soul consumed with fever. Her expressiveness, her oddity and the exaltation and vehemence of her imagination make her stand out from the great cohort of good-humoured and well-balanced talents. She has almost all the gifts needed to be the painter and poet of hysteria.58

54The philosopher and critic Stanisław Brzozowski wrote in the same year:

Zapolska is characterised by a nervous disquiet that keeps her from ever settling somewhere or calming down. She can be unbearably shrill, lacking all critical faculties […], she goes from one phase to another and changes her point of view with remarkable ease. We would be looking in vain for any logic in those changes. […] To talk about an evolution in her views would be pointless and naive. They are arbitrary and changeable like any whim […]. We must control our nerves if we want to search her ostentatious gestures and her hysterically unbridled nerves for that one thing that gives and guarantees Zapolska a place in literature – pain, disquiet, emptiness. When she confidently lavishes coquettish smiles and glances on social issues and trends she is ridiculous; when she pours forth blame and dithyrambs with a tragic gesticulation, she is boring; but when moan-words, sob-words, words of blood and bitterness tear themselves away in her spasmodic rapture, the thing that sobs with her is often the pain and misery of downtrodden human beings, the hunger of the soul, not a mere search for experiences. This happens, for a moment. But that moment is precious.59

55Brzozowski realises that hysteria can be a distinct language serving to com|municate what cannot otherwise be expressed in writing. In recent years, scholars inspired by feminist re-appropriations of psychoanalysis have written about the “hysterical” nature of Zapolska’s works in similar ways.60 It is noteworthy that Zapolska herself prompted this understanding of hysteria. Her long-forgotten column for the series “Na czasie” [On Time], published in Słowo Polskie in 1909, explores the language used by female criminals. She is interested not so much in their crimes but in the way in which they talk about them:

[I focus on] the history, the legend that a woman who has committed a crime creates around that fact. I say “around” because that woman is taking delight in sketching out, weaving strange, complicated paths that are supposed to represent the whole “truth”. Some wild mischievousness tells her to lead legions of people through the labyrinth of her ravings – people who are paid to be astute and rational.61

56Zapolska argues that when a woman is tried for a crime, she should not be held accountable for any lies she tells. Instead, she should be allowed to weave her (mendacious) story, this being the only way in which the truth hidden within can be uncovered. A wife and husband, Zapolska argues, may burst out laughing when she truthfully tells him she was going on a tryst. Similarly, a woman accused of a crime will freely admit her trans|gressions if only she is allowed to speak freely:

[She] throws before the judge proof of what she has done like flowers from the garden of her soul. Here she reaches deceitfully for the crimson, bloody flower of the truth. Nonetheless, the judge keeps contradicting her, instead of saying, “it is beautiful how you talk, madam, please go on, I am quite enraptured with you”. The felon would then provide details, and a person who has a sense of form should become sensitive to the heart of the matter within a few minutes. Especially if she suddenly breaks out in hysterical howls while telling her story. (p. 2)

57The defendant’s hysteria does not signify her unreliability – quite to the contrary. In popular opinion the woman’s hysterical cries cover up her lies, but for Zapolska they are always evidence of truth.

58Zapolska admits that by pointing to this aspect of hysteria she “reveals the Achilles heel in the soul of women” (ibid.). At the same time, a diagnosis of hysteria was the most effective means to disciple women who did not fit into traditional roles. Used with regard to a work of literature, it simply expressed the critic’s disdain for writing that seemed overly emotional, feminine and “neurotic,” too eager to take up sexual themes.62 From what Zapolska relates about Jekels – his refusal to acknowledge that her symptoms might have an organic cause, his insistence that she was exaggerating and play-acting – he felt the same dislike and indifference as the reviewers who accused her of exaltation, a lack of talent and volatile convictions.

59It is worth mentioning that Zapolska had an opportunity to get to know a hysteria clinic long before she arrived at Jekels’ sanatorium. Trying to launch an international career like the actress Helena Modjeska (originally Modrzejewska) in the years 1889 to 1895, she lived in Paris and wrote articles for Kurier Warszawski and Przegląd Tygodniowy. Looking for original topics she reported on events like the Exposition Universelle and the opening of the Eiffel Tower. The general fascination with hysteria and hypnotism is also reflected in her articles. For instance, she writes about the trial of Gabrielle Bompard, who claimed to have killed a man while being in a hypnotic trance (Zapolska call her the “Monster-Woman”).63 Another point of interest is the Salpêtrière Hospital, the psychiatric insti|tution for women where Jean-Martin Charcot performed groundbreaking research on the therapeutic aspects of hypnotic suggestion.64 Charcot, who saw a high responsiveness to hypnotism as a pathological state proper to hysteria, held weekly public seances where he routinely demonstrated his ability to make various symptoms appear or disappear in his patients. Zapolska gave a detailed account of one of his lectures as well as the annual Lunatics’ Ball or bal des folles.65

60Before delving into Zapolska’s representations of hysteria and hyp|nosis I should like to draw attention to the Salpêtrière as a hub that attracted some of the key characters of this book. In late 1885 to early 1886, a short time before Zapolska’s arrival in Paris, the young neuro|logist Sigmund Freud worked as an intern at Charcot’s asylum. This yet undistinguished “Privatdozent” at Vienna University was eager to learn about his French colleagues’ remarkable findings, which were followed closely by medical experts across Europe. Another young doctor who studied under Charcot at the same time was Julian Ochorowicz, a Polish pioneer of psychology. Perhaps they were introduced by Charcot, shook hands and then only nodded at each other from afar in the clinic’s labyrinthine hallways, never getting a chance to sit together in the crowded meeting rooms – no documents survive to indicate whether they knew each other then.

61Ochorowicz was a few years older than Zapolska. In fact, he was of the same generation as the Polish positivist writers Aleksander Święto|chowski and Bolesław Prus, his fellow students at the gymnasium in Lublin in the 1860s and then at Warsaw’s Szkoła Główna (the “Main School,” a historical form of the University of Warsaw), where Ocho|rowicz studied for a degree in the natural sciences.66 Ochorowicz’s first publication in the field of psychology was a dissertation on research methods, which he submitted to a school essay competition at the age of seventeen.67 He continued to be an ambitious student and published three books before graduating from university.68 In 1872 he went to Leipzig to complete his university education. His doctoral thesis was published in 1874.69 The following year Ochorowicz moved to Lviv, where, following his habilitation in 1879, he became Galicia’s first lecturer in psychology. The Ministry in Vienna rejected his candidacy for the position of associate professor, reportedly because Ochorowicz’s superior, Euzebiusz Czerkawski, harboured an unavowed animosity towards his younger colleague. See E. Kosnarewicz, “Czy praca historyka jest złudzeniem?”, FP 1997, vol. II, no. 2, p. 58. Ochorowicz tried unsuccessfully to obtain a position within Galicia’s newly established regional govern|ment. These disappointments inclined him to leave for Paris, where the Jagiellonian University had promised him a scholarship. This, too, fell through eventually, but the disappointed candidate found other means to move to the French capital.

62It was Ochorowicz’s article “Le sens du toucher et le sens du magnétisme” [The Sense of Touch and the Sense of Magnetism] for the Revue Scientifique that became a turning point in his career. Charles Richet, the physiologist and future Nobel Prize winner whose research focused on hypnosis at the time, took note of the Pole’s work.71 He invited Ochorowicz to the Société de Psychologie Physiologique, established in 1885, and presented Ochorowicz’s invention – an instrument intended to measure a patient’s susceptibility to hypnosis – to his colleagues at the Société de Biologie. Ochorowicz would use his “hypnoscope” on more than 700 people, concluding that almost 33% of the general population were to some degree responsive. His findings contradicted the theory proposed by Charcot, who saw susceptibility to hypnosis as an indicator of hysteria; at the same time, however, Bernheim’s claim that almost anyone could be subjected to hypnotic suggestion was called into question. Ochorowicz boldly proposed that if a patient passed the hypnoscope test, there was no need for pharmacological treatment – hypnosis alone would suffice. Throughout his career he would scrupulously test each new patient by placing a magnetic ring on their finger and checking if they experienced any sensations of cold or heat, tingling, pain or numbness. If a person did not respond he or she might still be treated with other kinds of “mental medicine,” such as magnetism or “affectotherapy” (which I will address below). Ochorowicz gradually abandoned hypnotism and turned to magnetism, which for him was synonymous with mesmerism and which he considered to be more effective. Still, he continued to hypnotise patients who displayed an appropriate susceptibility. His theses sparked interest among psychiatrists at the Salpêtrière and Ochorowicz was invited to test the hysterics under the care of Jean-Martin Charcot and Auguste Voisin.72

63In August 1889, the International Congress of Physiological Psycho|logy was held during the Exposition Universelle in Paris. It was the brainchild of Julian Ochorowicz, who had first talked about it as early as 1881.73 Freud, now a student of Charcot’s rival Hippolyte Bernheim in Nancy, travelled to the capital to attend both this meeting (scheduled from 6 to 10 August) – the first international conference for psychologists – and the First International Congress for Experimental and Therapeutic Hypnotism, which was taking place almost simultaneously (8 to 12 August).74 He and Ochorowicz may have crossed paths at the psycho|logists’ congress. There was a marked difference in status between Ocho|rowicz, the prime mover of the conference, and Freud, six years his junior. Ochorowicz was already at the threshold of an international career; he was the author of De la suggestion mentale, published in 1887 with a preface by Richet, then translated into English as Mental Suggestion.75 Freud, mean|while, was yet to find his path.76

64Zapolska visited the Salpêtrière in 1889, after Ochorowicz and Freud had already left. Her hope was that getting to know Charcot and his patients would enhance the psychological realism of her novels – and indeed, she was not the only writer to look for inspiration at the asylum; a few years earlier the lectures at the asylum had been frequented by Guy de Maupassant.77 She had already drawn on the motif of hysteria in her novel Przedpiekle [The Gateway to Hell78], and she would return to it in Janka.

65The beginning of Przedpiekle was serialised in the weekly Przegląd Tygodniowy in early 1889, a few months before Zapolska set out for Paris.79 She mailed the final chapters from France, to be published in December. According to a letter that she wrote to her editor several years later, she had survived a suicide attempt in 1889, and this “catastrophe cut that novel in half”.80 We do not know how she had initially envisioned the plot and what effect her mental health crisis and Parisian experiences ultimately had on it, yet it is worth taking a closer look at this novel. The protagonist, eight-year-old Stasia, is sent to a girls’ boarding school after the death of her mother, but the institution fails to meet the boarders’ essential needs for food and fresh air, or to provide them with a basic education. What is more, the staff systematically corrupt their vulnerable charges. The girls are sexualised prematurely, but their libido is then harshly suppressed. The school essentially produces hysterics. Stasia is a teenager when she suffers the last of a series of nervous attacks, which are presented as a reaction to her unremitting internal conflict and a channel for her repressed desire. The doctor who tends to the young woman gives an explanation that echoes Charcot’s lectures:

You are a woman in every sense of the word, Miss, […] a woman perfectly shaped, built to be a mother to many children and a passionate lover to the man who will possess you, as a husband or in a manner that is less legitimate. […] Your temperament demands a powerful fulfilment of your destiny as a whole, with all the responsibilities for which you have been created. When it is poorly guided, such a temperament gives rise either to debauchery or to madness.81

66Indeed, Stasia displays all the symptoms of the patients at the Salpêtrière. This is how Zapolska describes her attack:

Now a cold shudder ran through her entire body. […] A stream of saliva surged into her throat, she felt an itch in her jaws, a violent need to throw herself at someone, to tear something up, to drink warm blood, and be it her own.
Some animal was awakened in her, terrible, violent […].
She was swept away by an impulse to throw herself on the floor, to roll around and to scream at the top of her lungs, to tear at her clothes, which bothered her beyond description […].
And suddenly, with a look of madness in her eyes, with saliva drooling from her drooping lower lip, Stasia jumped up from her bench and, standing up straight like a string, she gave forth one awful cry that cut through the air like the steam whistle of a locomotive – a cry that hysteria wrenches from its victims. When she was done yelling she remained motionless, with her hands up in the air, her eyes wide open, giving the impression of a woman who was either hypnotised or insane […]
And suddenly, as if someone had cut away her legs, Stasia fell to the ground between the benches, her breath rasping frightfully. She tossed about convulsively between the desks, showing the flickering whites of her eyes. (pp. 221-222)

67Facial twitches make Stasia’s face resemble “the mask of a clown” (p. 223); she feels “thousands of ants running beneath her skin” (p. 234) and displays the typical arch of hysteria (“taut like an arch, Stasia lifted herself off the upholstered chaise longue for some time, supported on her heels and the tip of her head” (p. 250). Her therapy consists of the standard methods, foreshadowing Jekels’ treatment of Zapolska a few years later (“The doctor rolled up the sleeves of his frock coat, clenched his hand into a fist and began to kneed the young woman’s abdomen with all his might” (p. 227). Stasia also suffers from an eating disorder similar to the one Zapolska would develop:

She stopped eating, limiting herself to a bare minimum. When people insisted she should eat just a little bit more, she would tighten her lips with a grimace peculiar to women suffering from hysteria. She took pleasure in analysing the pangs of hunger, drawing in the smell of delicious food just to irritate her stomach some more. But every now and then, when no one was looking, she would grab something to eat and wolf it down, gasping and choking. (p. 238)

68Like in many of Freud’s case descriptions, Stasia is saved when she marries and has a baby. Zapolska does not shy away from a theme that had been taboo until countertransference was described more than twenty years later: Stasia marries her doctor, the man who knows her better than she knows herself and who guides her temperament until “the boarding girl from the gateway to hell would become a woman” (p. 280).

69We do not know if Zapolska had plotted out the ending of Przedpiekle from the outset or if the final scenes were influenced by her observations at the Salpêtrière. She certainly used her Paris experience in Janka, which she sent to the editors of Kurier Codzienny in separate chapters from December 1893 through July 1894. It seems that one instalment was published even as Zapolska was drafting the next one.82 Some parts, therefore, must have been written while scenes from Charcot’s hospital were still fresh in her mind.

70Janka is a coming-of-age story about a young girl from a ruined noble family who refuses to play along with her father’s plan to marry her off to the highest bidder. (It is worth noting that Janka grows up without a mother, just like Stasia in the previous novel. This makes her susceptible to mental illness, as Zapolska believes maternal love to be the only safeguard for young girls.83) Janka runs away to Paris with her brother’s tutor, a charming and intelligent young socialist. She wants to study, work and be independent, and above all, she wants to find out who she is outside of the restrictive norms and conventions that determine her sex and class at home. Following a string of disappointments, Janka finds herself living in abject poverty; it is her father’s death right at the end of the novel that sets her free. It is her love for the tutor that saves her from sliding into moral degeneracy, as she wants to be worthy of his love and respect. Tragically, however, the young man dies from hunger and exhaustion soon after they become engaged. Janka is found lying unconscious on his grave. She spends a month at the Sainte-Anne mental asylum, then is sent back to Poland. The conditions at the clinic are rather decent (at least compared to her family home, where she is locked up in a padded room with barred windows), but it would be hard to talk about a therapeutic setting. The ambitious professor Vallet, introduced plainly as Charcot’s rival, identifies Janka as an interesting object to study. He diagnoses her with folie mystique and decides she qualifies for hypnotic experiments. Janka is not ill as much as she is unhappy and hopeless, and so she is perfectly aware of what is happening to her. This allows Zapolska to present the narrative in this episode from the protagonist’s perspective. Vallet, leading a crowd of onlookers, enters the patient’s room:

Now began the dismal comedy, the ghastly public performance in which the professor played the leading role of a travelling showman praising his wares and advertising the marvels one would see in his booth […].
He pulled Janka away from the wall a short distance and then, with the precision of a photographer’s assistant, he lifted her arms. She immediately let them drop. […]
Vallet leaned over her shoulder […], pointed with his fingers and whispered excitedly:
“Le voilà!… le voilà!…”
Janka unthinkingly looked in the direction he indicated and saw a yellowish and well-maintained wall. She lowered her gaze back to the floor and stood there, kneading the heavy fabric of her skirt.
“Le voilà!… ta vision…,” Vallet said, continuing to whisper. Only now did Janka realise why they were all here. They had come to torture her, to drag her soul onto the grid of an awful torment. The expectation was that, in front of them all, she would be in agony, like she was that day at the cemetery of Bagaceux, among the flowers covering Jan’s tomb… These people who surrounded her wanted to arouse all of that in her, and while they claimed their motivation was science, in fact they had only come to satisfy a sort of collective curiosity. In the name of research they wanted to drag her back onto the scaffolding of pain and force her once more to live through what she had survived on that memorable winter afternoon…
“Voilà le tombeau!…,” Vallet said to her, pointing at the floor and making her bend down.
Now Janka stared at the polished floor and saw the feet of the students, who slowly moved back to make a slightly bigger half-circle. Her thoughts began to whirl in her head like started birds. She ran her hand across her forehead, for an instant she thought she saw the shadow of the withering flowers and the shape of the tomb on the floor.
“Voilà le tombeau!…,” Vallet repeated quickly, as if to throw the thread of her own thoughts and impressions at her. But she straightened up and with all that remained of her willpower she pushed away this obvious suggestion, which intended to reduce her woes to the scale of an ordinary hospital comedy. She stretched and her entire body stiffened, then, reaching up her arms, she began to cry with a frightening voice, in Polish:
“No! no! no!…leave me alone!…”
She bent over backwards, as if an invisible hand were pulling her head towards the centre of her spine. Her face instantly looked ten years older, her jaw came unhinged and her deadly pale skin took a greenish hue…
The students began to turn away, disappointed. They had expected a case of mystical insanity, but what they had before them was a regular nervous attack with a tinge of hysteria. A few of them shrugged their shoulders. “That Vallet always manages not to hit the mark!” […]
For a while Vallet carefully looked at the young woman, then he pushed up her eyelids and saw the whites of her deep-set eyes.
“She’s going to be a nice ‘great hysteric,’” he pronounced as he left.84

71Here Zapolska captures the most controversial aspect of the Salpêtrière presentations, namely the fact that women diagnosed with hysteria were made to display their symptoms on call. The most gifted hysterics were compensated and treated with special consideration. Thus they became actresses in Charcot’s staging, replaying their own hysteria as best they could. Zapolska, a playwright and stage actress herself, was keenly aware of the dynamics of a theatre. She must have noticed that the doctor’s practice encouraged the women to invent presentable manifestations of hysteria, to exaggerate their symptoms and to adapt them to the audience’s expectations, to outdo one another and to compete for the doctor’s favours.85

72Zapolska’s “Wykład Charcota” (Charcot’s Lecture), printed in Przegląd Tygodniowy in 1893, brings to mind a theatre review. The text opens with a detailed description of the setting inside the clinic, including the sceno|graphy on the stage. There is a hint of irony in the way Zapolska portrays the public in the lecture hall: they are said to be waiting for “the star of the evening” – in reality it was 10 a.m. Zapolska does not limit herself to a description of the great psychiatrist’s talk – her summary barely takes up a third of the length of the piece. Instead, she wants to give an account of Charcot’s performance, which is why she gives equal importance to the aura of the spectacle, including her impressions before the lecture and after. Her text is not a report on the doctor’s theses written for Polish specialists – it is a story about a place that fashionable Parisians enjoy visiting. Zapolska judges the performance with an expert eye: “a wide stage at the back, where a clever sort of mise-en-scène has been set up by a skilful hand”.86 She pays attention to the choice and significance of the colours in the arrangement and, based on the props which, quite like in the theatre, were placed on the stage by design, she wonders at the scene about to unfold:

On the right-hand side there was a large table covered in green woollen fabric, there were chairs and armchairs. A little lamp flickered on the table, and small steel instruments gleamed in its unsteady light, there was a shimmering bowl filled with ice and the greyish shape of a plush pincushion with big needles. By the wall a medium-sized blackboard had been mounted on an easel that look like a gallows. On the left-hand side elevated poles supported large sheets of paper displaying human faces that shone forth in colours so bright that they pierced the body with their scarlet, gold, blue and Green of Verona. The magic of those colours made these pictures look like mystical flowers conjured up and hung up suddenly in miserable darkness, like a series of cosmic phenomena that radiated suddenly from beyond the rotten clouds in the dark of the night. (ibid.)

73Zapolska also observes the audience. The men try to sit as close to the stage as possible. Some have made sure to arrive early and read newspapers to kill time; those in the upper benches have brought along opera glasses. The hospital clock sounds the hour and, like the bell at a theatre, a hush descends on the audience. The protagonist appears on stage: “an old man, pale, with a grimace on his face that is odd and spreads unease, and with huge black eyes glimmering from between his furled eyebrows” (p. 175). His persona captures everyone’s gaze, “all eyes converge at this point, as if they were fixated by some supernatural power. The old man becomes the focus of the will and minds of every person in the hall” (ibid.). Throughout the presentation Charcot seems to put his audience under a hypnotic spell, playing the role of the master of ceremonies. Zapolska draws on the metaphor of the theatre to describe the patients he presents: “One might think that a skilful stage director had scattered these groups of people, or, rather, these rags of human bodies that walk up from behind the wings like a huge army, terrible and deadly” (p. 179).

74Zapolska’s reportage does not end when she leaves the lecture theatre. Instead, she makes the reader accompany her all the way to the gate of the “city within a city”.

in the huge courtyards […], in the shade of verdant trees, old women are wandering around in blue dresses, chatting, gossiping, soaking up the sun. The heads of madwomen appear and disappear beyond the bars of the pavilions, and the caretakers’ black dresses glide along the walls. A hustle and bustle is heard through the wide open door of the dining room and the clink of the faience – the tables are set and rows upon rows of sick people are taking their places. There is movement and life throughout this grave – a jostling within the confines of a cemetery, a dance of skeletons artificially moved by the hand of science. (p. 183)

75Zapolska’s observations bring to mind the quest of modernist theatre practitioners such as Gordon Craig, whose uber-marionettes resemble the madwomen in Charcot’s performance.87 In the concluding image of “a dance of skeletons artificially moved by the hand of science” the hospital appears like a huge puppet theatre in which plays by Maeterlinck or Wedekind might be staged.

76Charcot’s lecture resembles the traditional theatre, where an imagi|ned fourth wall separates onstage and offstage areas and where actors and audience have defined roles. An entirely different sort of spectacle is the annual ball at the Salpêtrière, which Zapolska describes in a separate article. Like her article about Charcot’s lecture, “Bal wariatek” [The Lunatics’ Ball] begins with a lengthy introduction, but it is far more dynamic. The first article was written from the point of view of a person who has already found a good vantage point to observe the set design and the arriving audience. The opening of “Bal wariatek” is more unsettling. The reporter portrays herself walking down the street, next to the wall that surrounds the hospital’s extensive campus. The darkness of the winter evening is only lit “here and there” by flickering “little lights in the lace patterns of the barred windows” (ibid.). The Salpêtrière is endowed with life: it is a “living grave” that never sleeps, “lying awake in the secrecy of the night, suffering, moaning, wailing with the laughter of a woman choked by the hand of madness” (ibid.). Its walls are “slow, lazy, full of anguish, with a majestic aura like monstrous animals fallen to the earth and embracing an enormous part of the globe with their stretched-out wings” (p. 71); the trees in the courtyard have thin, dry branches that stand for “the despair of women’s hair blown about and torn by a convulsive hand in the throes of an attack from a skull on fire” (p. 72). To step over the threshold of the hospital grounds is to enter hell, and Zapolska quotes Dante’s “Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate” (“abandon all hope— ye who enter here”) several times. Here, to enter the Salpêtrière is to cross a point of no return and step into the realm of darkness and death.

77The hospital clock chimes. It is the same one as in Zapolska’s previous article, though here it is compared not to the signal ringing in a theatre but to a graveyard bell. Music is heard and the ball begins. Zapolska points out that a special day was chosen for the event, namely the midpoint of Lent, the forty-day fast in the Christian Church. Traditionally, the atmosphere of contemplation that characterises this period was interrupted on the Wednesday of the fourth week. Boisterous celebrations remind the faithful that they ought to start preparing for Easter. This carnivalesque hiatus – the element of laughter and fun finding expression within the strict rules of repentance and recollection – gives rise to Zapolska’s key metaphor for the event at the Salpêtrière: a ball in a graveyard.88

78The great event at the Salpêtrière actually consists of two separate balls. Visitors have access to the minor ball, which presents the “idiots and epileptics” among the patients, as well as the major ball featuring the “hysterics, lunatics and deranged women”. The latter is by far the more popular. At the minor ball, the patients’ fanciful costumes “mask the shapes of their bodies, contorted, repulsive, dwarfish […], hundreds of frightfully mad eyes, without a glimmer, without a spark of intelligence, slanted lips with no smile, with blobs of saliva dribbling onto the beads on their costumes and their dress collars, their arms hanging loosely by their sides, their legs shaking, their spines misshapen” (p. 79). At the major ball, meanwhile, the guests may have felt almost as if they were at a regular party. Zapolska remarks that the only difference between a group of hysterics and a group of average girls is that the hysterics tend to be prettier.

79The ball is structured in a way that maintains a separation between the gazing men and the women who are gazed at. On the one hand there are the doctors wearing “black skullcaps and white coats, as well as the guests in tailcoats and white ties,” and on the other hand there are the patients in sleeveless ball gowns, decked out in costume jewellery and exuding the scent of violets and hyacinths. But there is no clear spatial division. The guests can interact with the “cases” on display – not only by entering into conversation but also through physical contact during the dances. For Zapolska, this conventional form of drawing-room entertainment represents “insolent debauchery”.89 For the Salpêtrière’s madwomen, however, it is – like a fit of hysteria – a means to express physically what cannot be said in words.

80Zapolska observes that the guests at the ball tend to stand in a cluster by the wall, leaving as much space as possible to the exceedingly attractive girls from the asylum dressed in showy gowns.

[They] dance, completely flooded with glamour and the looks of the crowd, excited, their hollow cheeks flushed, showing off the velvet and satin of their costumes (provided by the administration), filled with this never-ending and insatiable desire to please, to arouse interest, and be it by their misfortune, proud of the extraordinary phase of their hysteria, which makes them stand out from the crowd.90

81This is apparent especially when the famous physician Jules Voisin enters the ballroom:

[H]e talks to each one of them, urges them to dance, smiles in a familiar way. They, poor souls, soak up every word, every glance, every friendly handshake. He is the culminating point of all they want and yearn for. Like predatory animals crawling at their oppressor’s feet. A whole rainbow of colours and the sheen of bare arms and shoulders, feverish faces, mad looks and smiles surround this dark male silhouette. (p. 75)

82The Lunatics’ Ball also resembles a scene from a modernist play, reminding us that theatre practitioners of the period often used dance as a way to express the immediate language of the body, to avoid the falsehood and misunderstandings that arise in discourse and to express their opposition to a culture based on the spoken and written word.91 In the works of Ibsen, Strindberg, Wilde, Hofmannsthal or Hauptmann, dance is always associated with female characters or with sexuality and illness. Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, recognised the “Dionysian power” of the St. Vitus’ dancers, who reminded him of the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks.92 Similarly, turn-of-the-century reformers of the art of dance rejected the rigid principles of classical ballet and looked to places like mental asylums for inspiration for emotional modern moves.

83The attempt by Charcot and his colleagues to classify hysterical gestures and poses of the body filled successive volumes of the famous Iconographie de la Salpêtrière. A similar system of scenic poses was developed at the same time by François Delsarte, one of the key inspirations for modern dance. Delsarte claimed to have assembled an inventory of all possible positions in which a human body can express an emotion. Both projects can be read as parts of a strange dance score. Delsarte, like the artists and photographers who provided the illustrations for Iconographie de la Sal|pêtrière, was trying above all to chart the physical expression of powerful emotions. It is no coincidence that the photographs of the hysterics would later come to be associated with the melodramatic acting style we know from the earliest silent films – both Charcot’s and Delsarte’s works were carefully studied in film studios.93 First, however, they served dancers such as Loïe Fuller, Izadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, who drew on them to develop their own forms of physical expression: the hysterical body became an inspiration for the modernist dancers who wanted to express their femininity in unrestrained ways. A hysterical attack transformed through dance ceased to be a pathological symptom and became art.94 But can we also speak of art in the case of the performance that took place every Tuesday at the Salpêtrière, when Charcot’s patients would enact their hysteria at his behest, putting on a show they had practiced to perfection and that was repeatable down to the minutest detail? Was a hysteric who performed on the stage of an asylum, following the script written by her doctor, still ill or already an artist?

84In her article on the Lunatics’ Ball Zapolska writes that the patients’ nerves “are dancing a hellish sarabande to the rhythm of some music only they can hear”.95 But how are we to tell a dance that mimics hysteria from a fit of hysteria that takes on the form of a dance? A dance show titled “The Lunatics’ Ball at the Salpêtrière” would have been entirely plausible. Without changing the choreography, costumes, gestures or mimics, the patients would have become artists and their ball a work of art. The following description from Zapolska’s article allows us to imagine such a performance:

Sharp, exciting noises cut through the heated ambience of the ballroom. The clink of glass and silverware flows from the buffet, decorated with greenery and big red oranges. A crowd of jesters, Italians, Gypsies, queens of the night, girl-Pierrots, Zouaves is moving about with incredible speed. Berets, fezzes, hats, wreaths and helmets flash by, get mixed up, are reunited, are separated and then find each other once again. The lunatics wave their hands, scream and laugh, in seventh heaven […]. Sequins tingle to the bells of the fools’ caps… (p. 78)

85Zapolska’s keen interest in the women at the Salpêtrière might be related to her fascination with the combined themes of dancing and madness, which she had already explored in her first play Małaszka (1886), a stage version of her prose debut (a scandalous short story of the same title published in 1883). The heroine is a Ukrainian peasant woman whose temperamental eroticism is presented as pathological, and Zapolska uses dance to characterise her: Małaszka’s sexuality “is awakened by music, which tears her out of her numbness, makes her dance, then leads her into a state of ecstasy”.96 Zapolska played the main role herself in the first couple of performances, thus embodying the heroine whom she describes as “a madwoman, witch, she-devil, soulless seductress, alcoholic, infanti|cide and arsonist”.97 Elsewhere she says, “I speak with Małaszka’s words”.98 Zapolska’s identification with this heroine explains perhaps why she approaches several hysterics at the Lunatics’ Ball. Apparently she tries to establish some sort of mutual understanding, to shatter the invisible glass that separates her from these women:

A fifteen-year-old girl, as pretty as a picture and dressed up as a Scotswoman, is dancing the quadrille with another girl dressed as a jester. I approach the Scotswoman, praising her outfit. She smiles and replies with marvellous arrogance that she is indeed the best dressed girl at tonight’s ball… She talks in a lucid manner, only when she tries to tell me the price of a ribbon tied in a bow around her arm, her face scrunches up, she grimaces and cannot remember.99

86What surprises Zapolska most, both in this case and in others, is the fact that the young ladies appear so very normal. There is barely any difference between them and her. Voisin introduces her to the “most interesting patient at the Salpêtrière,” who reminds the writer of her own reflection in a distorting mirror. The woman who lives in her own fantasy world. The power of her imagination, the doctor tells Zapolska, is such that “plenty of healthy people, especially writers, like you, Madam, might envy her” (p. 77). Encouraged by Voisin’s words, “I shall leave you two alone, I expect you will not be bored,” the patient takes Zapolska’s arm and for a while they stay together, like a two-headed monster, conjoined twins, while the other inmates dance the cancan to an insanely fast rendition of Offen|bach’s La Vie parisienne.

87The themes of dancing and otherness also appear in Zapolska’s reports on the colonial pavilions at the World’s Fair. Here she takes the role of the (male) European subject for whose diversion the bodies of dark-skinned women are put on display. The passages related to women from faraway places – and women dancers in particular – are particularly prejudiced and condescending, as Zapolska fails to perceive any grounds for identification with them, be it based on no more than their shared womanhood. This is how she describes the Javanese pavilion:

A cool wind blows up the feather-light skirts of the Javanese women milling about their village and their straw huts. They are exceedingly petite, flat-faced and terribly plain-looking, but they are rouged like… some of the ladies in Warsaw. Their coquettishness is well developed, very well developed indeed!
Drinking tea in a Javanese café I was able to observe one of these monsters teasing passers-by not only with her slanted eyes but by making her entire torso twist and turn. A pink aster pinned to the tip of her head made an impression so comical that I was doubled over with laughter. (p. 100)

88Zapolska also condemns the amount of rouge used by the dancers from Cairo were, whom she calls “ugly, oh! very ugly!”:

Their skin is black but not completely, it is that tawny complexion of Gypsy women who never wash. […] Eyes with no expression, accentuated with heavy kohl, staring at the audience apathetically, as if the soul were completely asleep in these miserable bodies. Flat, triangular faces with chins that are exceedingly long and thin sit on skinny, gawky necks, with a huge gap in the place of an underchin. (p. 121)

89To call a belly dance a dance, Zapolska continues, would be a profanation.

[The Egyptian woman] was mincing in one spot, with […] her belly flying like it was on springs. Every now and then it appeared to be making circular motions, then came convulsive shimmies that shook the folds of her skirt. Her eyes were lowered to the ground and she was shivering among the patches on the carpet. This bayadère was skinny and wretched under her tricot, she was ugly, ridiculous, offensive!… (p. 122)

90Zapolska offers not a single gesture of empathy with the colonised women. The hysterics’ ball is a different matter because her position as a guest and onlooker is not necessarily recognisable. The presence of a woman reporter at the ball upsets the separation of the sexes intended by the hospital administration. The guests were supposed to be clearly distinguishable from the mentally ill women kept at the institution. Since all patients are female, a male visitor cannot be mistaken for an inmate. Zapolska is painfully aware of the fact that an outside observer might assume she was one of Charcot’s disturbed women – after all, she was neither a nurse nor a maid, identifiable by their uniforms. Her elegant gown, which usually filled her with pride, could easily be taken for a madwoman’s fancy dress. This may be the reason why Zapolska abstains from dancing and talks to the doctors, and, most importantly, why she is in a hurry to leave the hysterics’ party. She goes over to the minor ball, avoided by the men in tailcoats. The way she portrays the patients in this room is as harsh as her descriptions of the dancers at the World's Fair. In her words they are “unformed foetuses, projects for a human suddenly halted in their devel|opment, with squashed brains and only the heart fully developed”.100 Certain that she cannot be mistaken for one of the disabled girls, Zapolska can finally take her place among their surveillantes.

91After the ball Zapolska and the remaining guests make their way to the main gate. She stops in front of the ward for women who might harm themselves or others. Zapolska looks through the windows, knowing that behind the bars there are women tied to their beds day and night. She cannot see them, but she hears their voices: “a continuous, never-ending wailing, muffled giggling, cries, complaints of women’s voices mixed like the litanies of the condemned, like a rosary of hidden demons who tell each other about their bloody visions in the darkness of the night” (p. 82). This makes her “freeze with horror.” The article concludes with the writer comparing her still vivid impressions from the ballroom with this “tomb of human souls,” while the dance music, which the orchestra still continues to play, blends with “a song that rings with the emptiness of a graveyard” (p. 83) from behind the barred windows. At the hysterics’ ball Zapolska was uneasy because she was aware she might be mistaken for a mad|woman. Faced with the suffering of patients who, despite Philippe Pinel’s reforms, remained chained and fettered, this concern transforms into trepidation and horror.

92Zapolska’s fascination with the women diagnosed with hysteria at Charcot’s clinic and her apparent need to distinguish herself from them is apparent in her article on the Lunatics’ Ball. It made her keenly aware of how exchangeable their roles were, how easily she might find herself on the other side. A similar preoccupation is evident in her report on Charcot’s lecture, written the following year (1893). Zapolska describes herself and the handful of female students sitting in a lecture theatre otherwise filled with men; she then writes that the women in the room find themselves gazing at an oil painting on the wall behind the stage – possibly Tony Robert-Fleury’s Le docteur Philippe Pinel faisant tomber les chaines des aliénés [Pinel freeing the insane from their chains]. She focuses on one detail:

Against the painting’s dark background the huge figure of a woman in white with tousled ginger hair glows in tragic horror, as if she were embodying a demonic flogging that cuts a person’s nerves and brain like rain – a rain that excites, that muddles one’s thinking, that gives the lie to the legend of free will, mocking calculation and the smoothed-out paths on which the human body ought to glide toward the grave. Among the streaks of ginger hair, the white mask, morbidly beautiful with the beauty of a Pierrot tormented by a vulture pulling not at the liver but at the brain, appears grievously to complain of faults that are not her own, and, marked with the stigma of heredity, hung up in the space of this sad hall, she exudes the horror of a mystical warning: Today it is me… who knows! Tomorrow you… (p. 173)

93Zapolska was so shaken by her visit to the Lunatics’ Ball in 1892 that she fell ill for some time.101 In a letter to Stefan Laurysiewicz dated 5 May 1892 she mentions the thoughts that preoccupied her despite her recent success on stage: “What if I am a hysteric? I shudder at the idea. That was alright for my mother, as she was surrounded with people at her com|mand, money, doctors. But I! I! Am I to suffer now for her caprices and follies? Would this be hereditary?” (p. 336). Thus it is perhaps unsurprising that a few years later, when she was being treated in Bystra, she would feel such resistance against any identification with the unfor|tunate women institutionalised at the Paris hospital, “their wide-open eyes, foam of despair at their mouths, their hair sticky with the sweat of deadly fear”. Not only had literary critics already labelled her a “hysteric,” but her family history had taught her how easily she might become one of those “whose souls desperately thrash about within the confines of the body, dying beyond the iron bars...”.102

94In the summer of 1906, when Zapolska refused to take on the role of a hysteric at Jekels’ spa in Bystra, she was convinced that her symptoms were based on an organic problem. Several months later, in November 1906, it turned out that her ailments did indeed have a concrete and incontestable cause – she had been carrying a tapeworm more than 10 metres long. This parasite was responsible for her complaints, from stomach pains to weight loss and food aversion. Besides containing graphic descriptions of how she excreted the tapeworm, her letters to her husband express a strong sense of satisfaction about the fact that she had not given in to Jekels. The parasite Cestoda becomes the ultimate argument in her dispute with the doctor:

Two years of torture!!! Two years of attacks during new moons. And yesterday was the time of the new moon. You had called it “drama,” and for Jekels and the other crooks it had been “hysteria”. […] God! I’ve been to hell and back. And everyone assaulted me with orders like “get a grip on yourself!”. No one believed me. Now here’s my revenge – this triumph. One should always listen to a sick person. […] When I think back to the time when I was losing my mind and you and Mrs. Ogińska kept saying, “this is disgusting and make-believe” – I am overcome with such pain, such grief, such terrible anger! And Jekels, who put a burning candle to my heels, who shouted at me like I was a lunatic – Jesus Christ! I had to bear all of this – for what? For having carried in me such a horrible beast – a normal tapeworm is nothing compared to what I have got in this jar here. […] I will have a moment of real triumph. Faced with a clear-headed patient, not some cobbler’s wife, they should have listened. […] Oh, those crooks, those crooks! Right now, thinking about the people who refused to believe me, I would like to take this beautiful tapeworm they bred and stuff it into their gobs.103

95For Zapolska, the tapeworm proved her self-knowledge, but above all it was her argument against Jekels’ inaccurate assessment. Besides, the parasite, preserved in ethanol, is to play a role in an act of vengeance: the jar is to be etched with the names of all the doctors who had failed to recognise the actual cause of her illness. The psychoanalyst comes first in the “gang of villains”:

The one I hate most is Jekels, because when I said to him, “I have a tapeworm,” he knocked on my forehead and laughed, saying: “This where your tapeworm is, Madam – in your brain.” (p. 222)

96Zapolska’s failed cure brings to mind a famous case from the mid-1890s, namely that of Emma Eckstein, a patient of Freud’s whom he referred to his friend Wilhelm Fliess. The otolaryngologist believed at the time that a woman’s sexual problems were linked to changes in the mucous membranes in her nose – a theory that soon lost traction. Eckstein’s condition deteriorated dramatically after Fliess operated on her, but Freud believed that the young woman’s complaints – which included profuse nosebleeds – were hysterical symptoms unconsciously intended to seduce him. When Eckstein eventually found a competent surgeon, it turned out that Fliess had left a half-metre of gauze in her nasal cavity, which was the actual cause of her post-operative haemorrhages. Freud was forced to acknowledge that he had made a mistake diagnosing Eckstein as a hysteric. More than that – by referring her to his colleague he was implicated in the disastrous operation that caused her suffering and permanent disfigurement. His guilty conscience surfaces in one of his dreams, analysed in the opening of The Interpretation of Dreams.104 This dream, which he calls “Irma’s injection,” inspired him to propose that dreams are wish fulfillments helping the dreamer overcome his or her sense of guilt. In Freud’s dream, Irma/Emma herself becomes responsible for her suffering because she did not follow the doctor’s advice, refused his treatments and stubbornly held on to her own views.

97There are certain parallels between Zapolska and Eckstein. Both were difficult patients, obstinate and defiant. But unlike Eckstein, Zapolska was not convinced when her doctor insisted she was a hysteric. While Eckstein trained as a psychoanalyst soon after her own failed treatment, Zapolska never exchanged her role of a patient for that of a doctor, even though she would become an enthusiastic supporter of Kazimierz Radwan-Pragłowski’s method of treating nervous diseases through autosuggestion.105 She never wrote a review of Jekels’ spa, nor did she ever return to Bystra.

98Zapolska’s late novel Szaleństwo [Madness], probably conceived soon after Zapolska’s stay in Bystra, serves as a postscript of sorts in this story.106 The opening chapters portray a doctor-patient relationship gone wrong. The protagonist Rena is a young girl from a family of petty nobility in Podolia. Dr Brzeziewicz, a neurologist from Lviv who had studied under Charcot, is called to see her after she suffers “an attack with recurring hyserico-epileptic cramps”.107 Their first meeting is set in a fashionable spa where she was taken “to calm down the femininity that was awakening in her rather too vehemently” (p. 41). Brzeziewicz sees in Rena something more than “the common passionate hysterical drives whose object he had been until then,” while she begins “to desire [him] with the full madness of her slack nerves” (ibid.). After a therapeutic season at the spa, just when she is supposed to part with her doctor and return home with her mother, Rena has a fit of hysteria. Brzeziewicz is surprised and aghast at her outbreak and proposes to her as the only way they can remain together. They marry despite her family’s opposition.

99This novel reads almost like a continuation of Przedpiekle [Limbo/Purgatory], where Zapolska creates a happy end by having the hysterical Stasia marry her gynaecologist. Rena’s marriage, too, is based not so much on romantic feelings as on her dependency on her doctor: “it was above all the relief for her desperate nerves, which feared they would become uncontrollable and go astray, fighting against the invisible Hydra, which, especially on rainy days, would tear at them with her steel claws” (p. 43). Rena turns out to be much less neurotic than predicted – all she needs is bromine, an appropriate diet, baths and franklinisation. The improvement in her condition, however, leads to another problem, she begins to feel jealous – not as a wife or lover but as a patient:

[This was] a different kind of jealousy, not the common hackneyed type, not the kind that craves for the rights of ownership, that refuses to share the exaltations of the spirit or the nobler, better part of the person bound in wedlock, but the jealousy of a patient, the jealousy of nerves that do not want, do not tolerate even a part of that soothing fluid benefitting other nerves clamouring to be calmed as well. (p. 50)

100The doctor, however, gives priority to “other, more interesting cases”:

The doctor’s office had a door to the bathroom, and Rena would often sneak up during consultations and try to overhear anything at all […]. She heard a woman’s plaintive voice, then the gentle, soothing voice of the doctor. She knew that tone he had, she knew it very well. After all, it was on this path that he had dragged her along… Now there was silence… He’s examining her, he’s doing it softly, affectionately, gently. That woman’s nerves are calming down under the impression of his barely noticeable touch. She, meanwhile, is shaking all over, hugging the door because she is so tense and full of longing for this kind of soothing. Oh! How gladly she would give away all their sensual contact for the care that Brzeziewicz has for a sick woman. How she would collapse on the chaise longue, covered in a length of white linen, submitting her forehead, her face, her hands to the touch of his cool fingers that seem filled with soothing pleasure. To change places! To change places with the women in the waiting room and parlour, ready for their turn. To leave to them the place of a wife, this place outlined by a template and marked with duty. To tell him, “calm me down, treat me the way you used to, the way you soothe your lady patients, stop longing to be a husband to me – be my doctor.” (pp. 52-53)

101Zapolska portrays Brzeziewicz as a truly faithful student of Charcot’s who relates hysteria to an overly repressed sexual drive. The hysterical Rena must have filled him with hopes for intense erotic experiences, but he was disappointed:

Rena remained cold. Their marriage bed did not allow her to forget herself. Bewilderment and a sullen look greeted her husband every time he tried to come closer to her, she felt anxious and fearful of the brutality of the fact that made her nerves cramp with horror whenever she thought about it. Brzeziewicz realised he had misdiagnosed her. He had assumed that the nervous attacks that Rena had experienced before their marriage were rooted in the precocious development of her body. He had been sure that married life would restore the equilibrium in her strange being.
He had anticipated mad outbreaks of passion, expecting her to lose herself – at least in the beginning – in a desire for continuous and exhausting spasms. But what he found was an indifference that perhaps covered up aversion. So it was not sensuality that had raged jealously deep inside Rena, but nerves. (pp. 50-51)

102Rena was a disappointment to her husband, both as a patient and as a lover, and she was not interested in the role of a wife. Zapolska offers the following seemingly innocent dialogue to illustrate their fundamental misunderstanding:

“Please understand that to me you are number one among all women, and you will always be. […]”
“Among all women,” she asked, her teeth clenched.
“Yes!”“And... among all patients?” (p. 60)

103The doctor admits casually:

“As a patient, thank God, you have retreated far into the background. I have other, more important cases and those absorb me completely; as a patient you have mislead me a little bit […]. I thought you were troubled with an exceedingly strong development and drive as a woman. I was convinced that the great and violent upset in your precociously quivering nerves would calm down and settle at a normal level. […] But it happened differently. You remained cold and you belong to the type of woman who… well, you recovered along a different path, which I am sincerely glad to see […]. So keep taking your bromine and don’t neglect your baths…” (pp. 61-62)

104Rena’s greatest tragedy is that she has ceased to be an interesting patient to her husband. “Apparently there are other women on this earth who do not disappoint him in his diagnoses and therapeutic method!” It is her husband’s disillusionment with her that plunges her into real mental illness. One of her most important symptoms – the one that eventually makes her husband pay attention – is an eating disorder. First Rena refuses all solid foods, sustaining herself on liquids only. The situation worsens when Brzeziewicz decides to show up for meals and to make sure she eats regularly.

Rena would take her place at the family dinner table […] so worked up, so tense that if her husband cajoled her into swallowing anything, her body could not keep it inside. Insane paroxysms of pain, convulsions and cramps, combined with nervous spasms, a transfixed gaze, contractions in her hands and face afflicted the poor creature and turned every meal into an agony instead of reinvigorating her body. (p. 294)

105Realising that Rena suffers from a nervous disorder, Brzeziewicz sends her back to her parents’ village, where she eventually commits suicide. The reason why he chooses not to attend to his wife is that he is about to speak at a congress for neurologists: “The paper is ready. I’m going to talk about nervous stomach problems and present my massage therapy… there is no doubt… I’m going to captivate them… I’m going to conquer them…” (p. 304).

106There is a striking coincidence worth mentioning here. In 1909, just as Zapolska was completing her novel and describing the ambitious doctor who abandons his sick wife to attend a conference, Jekels was preparing for the Congress of Polish Neurologists, Psychiatrists and Psychologists in Warsaw, where he would illustrate Freud’s theories with cases from his own work as a medical doctor. We do not know if Zapolska was aware of his plans – no documents survive to indicate that she kept track of his career. But the poignancy of this fictional scenes allows us to imagine how she might have felt if, scanning the morning papers, she had read an announcement of a presentation by the doctor whom she had come to loathe.

A celebration of Polish science

107Jekels developed a keen interest in Freud’s new theory and its therapeutic applications, and he put considerable effort into introducing psychoanalysis to Polish medical circles. Before World War I he translated two of Freud’s works, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (O psychoanalizie, 1911) and Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Psychopatologia życia codziennego, 1913), and he authored a book titled Szkic psychoanalizy Freuda [An Outline of Freud’s Psychoanalysis, 1912]. He also attended the first Congress of Polish Neurologists, Psychiatrists and Psychologists in Warsaw (11–13 October 1909) and the second in Cracow (20–23 December 1912).

108The first congress was masterminded by the psychiatrist Rafał Radzi|wiłłowicz.108 Most of the 270 attendees were members of the neurological section of the Warsaw Medical Association (Warszawskie Towarzystwo Lekarskie). Some 70 participants, however, had come from outside the Kingdom of Poland, and the event can be seen as the first Warsaw-based conference to bring together scholars from across Poland’s three partitions.109 Conferences for scholars from across partitioned Poland had taken place since 1869 (the date of the first Conference of Polish Doctors and Naturalists), but they were always held in Galicia until Radziwiłłowicz called his colleagues to Warsaw.110

109 When it comes to the event’s reception in the press, the magnitude of the congress overshadows its actual content. Most journalists opted for a lofty style and frequent references to the patriotic significance of this cross-partition conference, which they most often describe as “a celebration of Polish science”. Front-page articles in the daily newspapers Wiadomości Codzienne111 and Kurier Poranny112 proclaim that the congress proves that Polish researchers are still active in the Russian partition, despite the adverse conditions there. A similar argument can be found in Aleksander Świętochowski’s article for Prawda:

The congress of neurologists and psychologists is the very first celebration of science in our sad city, whose epithet, “city of illiterates,” is supported by rows and rows of horrifying statistics. […] Just as our people go abroad to find jobs and young people leave to study, so our scholars, the strongest and most independent creative and scientific minds, must […] emigrate to find the conditions they need to do the work that is their raison d’être. Our greatest minds, our celebrities live among other peoples, and it is thanks to other peoples that they are able to work. […] If only we could kindle a few bright hearths of science in this dark backwater of ours, if only we could keep those worshipers of light with us forever – how different our lives would be! How much brightness would come to each of our nooks and crannies, how much light would enter our heads, how quickly the fungus of stagnation that has covered the walls of our homes would fall off! Light is the most effective antiseptic. In this atmosphere, saturated with the miasma of decay, the devotees of a better tomorrow are reaching their arms up to the light. Perhaps our honourable guests might fill our humble abodes at least with the redemptive longing, the creative thirst from which a new dawn is born.113

110As the organisers put it, the conference brought together doctors who treated “diseases of the nerves (neurologists), mental illnesses (psychiatrists) or the human soul (psychologists)”.114 The question why such specialists and not others had been invited to Warsaw, however, was barely discussed at any length in the press. Only the neurologist Wacław Męczkowski considered the question in an article titled “Nerwowość polska” [Poland’s Nervous Dis|position] in the weekly Tygodnik Ilustrowany. Męczkowski, a superintendent at Warsaw’s Infant Jesus Hospital and one of the conference organisers, argues that if neurology has experienced the strongest development of all the branches of the medical sciences in Poland, then “apparently it must be because medical observers had access to particularly rich material”. No diseases are as highly contingent on living conditions as the disorders of psyche, which is why the percentage of highly strung and oversensitive souls must be greater in an oppressed country:

The Polish nation, which in the last one hundred years has experienced so many breakdowns, so many upheavals, so many periods of excitement, hope and then despair, has almost continuously lived in conditions that did nothing to encourage nervous and psychic wellbeing. As soon as one storm had passed and the nation began to restore itself, new waves would appear and knock it over. This constant tossing and turning, up and down from high tension to resignation, all this, naturally, must have found its reflection in the mental state of society, at least of the majority.115

111Męczkowski goes so far as to wonder how “this special disease, unique perhaps in the whole world and typically Polish” could be described. He calls it “the melancholia of political survivors, the sadness of people cast out of the normal conditions of living as a state, a patriotic Weltschmerz”. It is a burdensome form of neuropathy transmitted from one generation to the next. Męczkowski – who happened to be a member of the conspi|ratorial National League (Liga Narodowa), the germ of radical Polish nationalism – adds that the patients afflicted by this disease are constantly in contact with the most susceptible of all “races”, namely the Jews: “[L]iving side by side with such a neuropathic people cannot but leave a mark on the Polish people […]. It must be from there that the fresh juices flow that continuously excite Poland’s nervous disposition” (ibid.).

112During the congress, the programme for day was reprinted in Warsaw’s morning papers, sometimes along with abstracts. None of the major newspapers, however, published detailed accounts of the presentations. The discussions were generally believed to be too technical to interest a general audience. Besides, members of the public were charged a fee of ten roubles to attend the congress – a forbidding sum according to some reporters. The budget for the event was tight. While in Galicia various social activities were usually offered to encourage interaction outside the panel sessions, the organisers of the Warsaw congress were not able to provide much of a networking programme.116 The correspondent for Kurier Warszawski wrote:

[T]he overall atmosphere at the congress was serious, somewhat too grave perhaps. No diversions were offered, none of the excursions that usually accompany academic conferences and congresses, and which would have been welcomed by our guests from Galicia or the Poznań region, who are entirely unfamiliar with Warsaw and its surrounding area. At the one formal dinner, guests were asked for a financial contribution (it must be said that given our customary generosity towards chefs and restaurant owners, those contributions turned out to be rather meagre) and this is all there was in terms of social interaction.117

113The same newspaper reveals that on the evening of 11 October attendees went to the theatre and then dined at the cabaret “Momus”. The next day, after the morning sessions, breakfast was served at the Hotel Bristol. Participants from outside the Kingdom of Poland were invited to a banquet at the Merchants’ Resource Association (Resursa Obywatelska), a palace on the prestigious Krakowskie Przedmieście street. No doctor from Bystra appears on the list of attendees. After the congress, however, Jekels joined a group of twenty delegates on an outing to the mental asylum in Drewnica. Kurier Poranny reports:

Having toured the institution, the visitors sat down to talk over breakfast. Dr Jekels commended the achievements of the Society for the Care of Nervous Patients, which – despite persistent financial difficulties and a lack of state support – sustains 140 patients, and most of them free of charge.118

114The dissemination of knowledge was hampered by the fact that only two presentations were given at plenary sessions. These were Kazimierz Twardowski’s opening talk, “O metodzie psychologii” [On the Method od Psychology] as well as Rafał Radziwiłłowicz’s closing remarks, “W sprawie naszej terminologii psychologicznej” [On Polish Psychological Terminology]. The remaining papers were divided into three parallel sections. Kurier Warszawski contains a telling account by reporter W. M. Kozłowski, who decided to attend the psychological section, “intelligible to any person with a general education”.119 Concerning the remaining two sections, he left them to those who wrote for specialised medical publications.

115When it comes to promoting the cultural transfer of psychoanalysis, Jekels made two strategic mistakes. First, he had failed to submit an abstract of his paper, titled “Leczenie psychoneuroz za pomocą metody psychoanalitycznej Freuda” [The Treatment of Psychoneuroses with Freud’s Psychoanalytical Method] and supplemented with case studies from his own clinical practice. An abstract might have helped attract listeners from among the congress participants. It could also have been printed in the newspapers – along with many others – ahead of the congress. As it is, none of the announcements mention a presentation on Freud’s theory. The feature articles in Tygodnik Ilustrowany and Świat contain no reference to “psychoanalysis,” while readers of Kurier Poranny would have seen no more than the title of Jekels’ paper.120 Jekels’ second mistake is that he submitted his paper to the psychiatric section, which went completely unnoticed in the general press. This unfortunate decision, which would have a considerable effect on the reception of psychoanalysis in Poland, must be understood in its historical context: Freud’s theory had an uncertain status at the time. Most of his early followers were psychiatrists by training, although Freud himself had specialised in neurology and had no connection to academic psychiatry. Psychologists, meanwhile, tended to have a background in philosophy. The presenter who would have been the best match to Jekels is Edward Abramowski, the author of Źródła podświadomości [Sources of the Subconscious], but Abramowski, based in Geneva at the time, never made it to the conference. His paper, “Stany podświadome jako zagadnienie psychologii doświadczalnej” [Subconscious States as a Problem in Experimental Psychology], which also touches on Freud’s theory, only became known when it was published in the volume of proceedings.121 Even if Abramowski had been able to participte, however, he would have read his paper in the psychology section, which means that Jekels would still have been alone among the strictly medical presentations in the psychiatry section. No documents survive to suggest that Abramowski and Jekels ever met after the conference, either.

116The psychology section also attracted journalists because of a scandal involving Julian Ochorowicz, introduced above as one of Charcot’s students in Paris. His paper, “O promieniach sztywnych i promieniach X X” [Rigid Rays and XX Rays], outlines his experiments with the medium Stanisława Tomczyk (or Tomczykówna in contemporary Polish sources). During his presentation he showed stereoscopic photographs of the phenomenon of telekinesis, which he argued was based on previously unknown X X rays as well as invisible “rigid rays” that allowed a medium to move objects in space without touching them. Władysław Heinrich, the chair of the psychology section, reacted by saying that such unscientific research did not merit a discussion. Kazimierz Twardowski was more inclined to give Ochorowicz the benefit of the doubt and proposed to set up a commission that would re-examine his findings. The presenter, however, declined to give his permission.122

117The press coverage was divided. Critical voices appear for instance in Kurier Poranny, Myśl Niepodległa as well as specialist publications such as Gazeta Lekarska, which had already opposed Ochorowicz for some time.123 One of the participants, the prominent pedagogue Jan Władysław Dawid, reported on the congress for Społeczeństwo. His article is representative in that he points out a gap between the neurological and psychiatric sections on the one hand and the psychological section on the other. In the first two sections, “both the papers presented and the level of expertise among the audience consistently maintained a high scientific standard,” while the third section “left much to be desired in this regard”.124 According to Dawid this was based on the lack of strict entry requirements in the field:

Compared to other experimental sciences, psychology in its present state is more open to admit enthusiastic individuals with little talent, and such individuals took the opportunity [of this congress] to speak about things they had nothing to say about […]; the lecture hall of this section was also filled with dilettantes drawn by the label of psychology and eager for exciting stories, although for them a significant part of the lectures […] had to remain uninteresting or incomprehensible. (ibid.)

118Dawid does not mention Ochorowicz’s name, but he clearly alludes to him in the following critique:

Warsaw’s narrow intellectual atmosphere, deprived of any critical thinking, is constantly being poisoned by certain individuals who, under the mask of scientific research, excite the public’s unhealthy curiosity about mysterious phenomena and their hunger for sensational stories. These individuals are not picky about how they advertise themselves, they enjoy the support of a considerable section of the press, they attain fame and – herein lies their main purpose – they fill their own pockets. (ibid.)

119Ignacy Baliński, a journalist for Kurier Warszawski, took an entirely different approach. He advertised Ochorowicz’s paper ahead of the congress, vouching for the authenticity of the findings and giving a detailed account of a seance with Tomczyk that he had attended.125 Ochorowicz was also treated favourably by the illustrated press, whose editors were only too glad to reprint his photographs of supernatural phenomena. Photographs of seances with a medium appeared in Tygodnik Ilustrowany126 and in Świat.127 It was also in Świat that a journalist wondered why Ochorowicz’s presentation at the congress had stirred up “a sort of unwarranted protest”.128

120Indeed, Ochorowicz’s presentation at the congress provoked a scandal – one that can only be explained by the growing hostility of the Polish scientific and medical establishment after his return from France. At the Salpêtrière he had conducted experiments with his invention, the hypno|scope, and he had observed mediumistic seances organised by Charles Richet and Pierre Janet. Once he settled in Warsaw, his focus shifted to occult phenomena, which, initially at least, he set out to study with the rigorous methods of the natural sciences.

121According to Ochorowicz, individuals who are susceptible to hypnosis also tend to be capable of ideoplasty, i.e. they are able to modify physiological states through their imagination. He had already discovered the principle of the reversibility of forces, and he had successfully applied it in various inventions in electrotechnics.129 For instance, building on the notion that if the voice can modify the waves of an electric current, then the waves of a current could reproduce the voice, he had devised a prototype of the telephone, which he presented, along with a model of his hypnoscope, at the Exposition Internationale d’Anvers.130 Ochorowicz had turned to the development of devices transmitting light, sound or images across space as a way to support himself in Paris after Galician institutions revoked his scholarship, but he soon became passionate about this line of research.131 If one kind of force could be changed into another and back, and if physical sensations could give rise to internal images, then, Ochorowicz conjectured, the imagination should be able bring about physical sensations, too. He distinguished between the ideoplasty of sensations (which essentially referred to various types of hallucination), the ideoplasty of movements (where, for instance, imagining a yawn evokes an actual yawn) and material ideoplasty (which explained phenomena such as stigmatism, where imagining a wound causes one to appear on the subject’s body).

122Seances with a medium seemed particularly likely to confirm his principle of the reversibility of forces, but in 1884 Ochorowicz began to explore how his discovery could be applied in medicine. He believed that the power of suggestion could be used to lower some patients’ temperature or to regulate their metabolism. He also proposed that “a preventive psychic vaccination” could make a person immune to viruses. He was less interested in the therapeutic use of hypnosis than in its very mechanism, which he was eager to explain. Still, when his inventions in electrotechnics turned out to be less profitable than expected, he began to treat patients to supplement his income.132 He had no licence to practice medicine, but having already worked with patients in Lviv and in Paris he felt confident enough to offer his services as a healer. In 1888 he decided to settle in Warsaw and to open his own medical practice.

123Ochorowicz’s return, preceded by raving accounts of his work in the Polish press (several newspapers mentioned his collaborations with Richet and his success as a conference organiser in France), caused great agitation in the medical establishment.133 Contributors to Gazeta Lekarska, a newspaper for medical professionals, argued that as a philosopher Ochorowicz was in no way qualified to practice medicine; he was labelled an impostor and a “Falstaff of the sciences”.134

[He is] a person sitting at a poker table and making pronouncements on the innocuousness of all kinds of bacteria, making light of the effects of vaccinations, he dismisses all the hard work of science and the most valuable contributions of the most distinguished scholars as balderdash, and he uses mere speculation to attribute the immense spectrum of mental disorders to mystical causes whose deviant effects he proposes to regulate with a few hypnotic and magnetic manipulations. (p. 478)

124One person who frequently sided with the vilified experimentalist was Bolesław Prus (1847-1912), the most prominent Polish writer of the realist movement. Perhaps, if Jekels had decided to speak in the same section as Ochorowicz, his paper might have attracted the prominent novelist’s attention. This would be another missed opportunity in the story of psychoanalysis during the Congress.

125In March 1888, Ochorowicz gave lectures at Warsaw’s city hall. The lecture series, “Z historii magnetyzmu i hipnotyzmu” [From the History of Magnetism and Hypnotism], sparked outrage, to which Prus reacted with no less than five articles in Kurier Codzienny.135 Even though he defends his friend Prus still declares that he does not believe in magnetism or hypnotism – in fact they are as repugnant to him as a frog.136 He also writes that he would never submit to a treatment based on hypnosis and that he and his friend often argue about this. Still, he continues, he does not understand the bitter hatred directed at the doctor of philosophy, nor the epithets such as ignoramus and charlatan. Prus reminds the medical experts that progress in their field is always due to courageous experimenters such as Ochorowicz, who are not afraid to test new – often forbidden – methods:

If I were the medical establishment, I would neither approve of hypnotism nor condemn it. I would simply demand that hypnotic healing be performed in my presence. I would draw up statistics of illnesses and results and compare them to the medical statistics, and if the method turned out to be good, I would incorporate it into medicine. (p. 85)

126Warsaw’s leading medical practitioners soon decided to follow Prus’s advice. Ochorowicz was invited to test his new methods on the patients of the Hospital of the Holy Spirit. The experiment was chronicled in Kurier Warszawski.137 A report in in Kurier Poranny, however, suggests that Ochorowicz’s conflict with the medial establishment only escalated during the few weeks he spent at the hospital. His series of seances was suspended when doctors complained about his lack of basic knowledge of anatomy, physiology or pathology; they also claimed that the patients under the hypnotist’s care were deteriorating. Ochorowicz retaliated in the press, claiming the hospital staff had subjected him to constant chicanery, disrupting the therapeutic process138. Prus commented on the unfortunate course of events by pointing out that his friend had twenty years of experience with hypnotism; he compared Ochorowicz’s authority with that of Charcot and he admonished the doctors that they were about as well equipped to evaluate the hypnotist’s accomplishments as they were to judge a ballet performance. Hypnotism, the novelist argued, had an immediate effect on the patient’s nervous system and was distinct from medicine, which needed to take recourse to pharmaceutics such as morphine, chloral or chloroform to achieve similar results. Once more he compares his friend to Galileo, Columbus, Fulton and Stephenson:

[A]ll great discoveries and inventions have followed the same trajectory. First doubt was cast on the sanity of the discoverer or inventor, then they were tried in court, and eventually… others profited from their work while they most often died in misery. The future of hypnotism is hard to predict today. Perhaps it will go down the same route as the perpetuum mobile or attempts at squaring the circle, which have all ended in fruitless endeavours. But perhaps its fate will be that of electricity, which at its birth was limited to attracting bits of paper or straw, and today illuminates our streets, welds boilers, transmits people’s thoughts and speech across long distances and brings movement into workshops. (p. 141)

127Despite his appreciation for Ochorowicz, Prus publicly pressed him to provide concrete answers to the question “with what illnesses and in what percentage of patients hypnotism is beneficial or harmful” (p. 201).

128Prus’s contributions to Kurier Codzienny were not limited to the above-cited “Kroniki”. Instalments of his novel The Doll (Lalka) were being published at the same time, and it can be no coincidence that his last article in support of Ochorowicz (number 208, dated 29 July) appeared shortly before a chapter from the novel that portrayed a mesmeric perfor|mance in Paris (numbers 211 and 213, dated 1 and 3 August respectively):

The spectacle, of about two hours’ duration, showed Palmieri sending his mediums to sleep by the use of his gaze, but in such a manner that they were still able to walk, answer questions and perform various acts. The persons sent to sleep by the hypnotist also displayed unusual muscular strength in obeying his commands, and even more unusual lack of sensitivity, or hyper-sensitivity of the senses. As Wokulski was seeing these phenomena for the first time in his life, and did not conceal his incredulity in the least, Palmieri invited him into the front row. Here, after some experiments, Wokulski realised that the phenomena he was witnessing were not conjuring tricks, but derived from some unknown properties of the nervous system.139

129Prus also describes Wokulski’s unsuccessful attempt to enter into a hypnotic state that might help him verify if his love for Izabela is based on more than mere suggestion. This part of the novel has been described as no less than a fictional representation of the beginnings of psychoanalysis.140

130In late 1893 and early 1894, Ochorowicz hosted the famed Italian medium Eusapia Palladino in Warsaw in order to study her mediumship. He prepared the ground for their public seances with articles in Kurier Warszawski and Tygodnik Ilustrowany. Here he details the investigations he had previously conducted with Palladino in Rome. On that occasion she had been staying with the painter Henryk Siemiradzki, a declared spiritist who invited Ochorowicz to study Palladino’s supernatural abilities with scientific methods. (At that time, photographs of an extraordinary pheno|menon such as a levitating table were seen as sufficient evidence of its authenticity.) Ochorowicz was aware that the medium had already been investigated by his mentor Charles Richet, as well as another famous psychiatrist, Cesare Lombroso. The two had failed to deliver a unanimous verdict, so his ambition was to put the extraordinary tales he had heard to the test himself. Having failed to find conclusive evidence in Italy, he invited Palladino to Warsaw. Summarising his findings from his experi|ments with Palladino and other media in the five-volume work Zjawiska mediumiczne [Mediumistic Phenomena, 1913], Ochorowicz proposes a distinction between a lower and a higher order of mediumism. The first includes the panoply of phenomena commonly associated with medium|ism, where the medium most often resorts to tricks (though not always consciously, as the fraud often results from involuntary muscular spasms, telepathy, or a manifestation of the participants’ imagination). Mediumism of a higher order arises through hypnotism and gives effects such as tele|kinesis, materialisation or transfiguration. Ochorowicz insisted on several occasions that he had succeeded in verifying such a higher order of mediumism with rigorous scientific methods, and he argued that its occurrence was due to a particular kind or force of nervous energy within the human body, which was able to act not only on the body’s own tissues and functions but also on external objects.141

131Ochorowicz always distanced himself from spiritism, emphasising that “mediumistic phenomena are manifestations that are above all psycho|logical,”142 while spiritism was no more than a particular interpretation, a sort of faith rather than a science.143 The phenomena observed during seances were not the work of spirits – he did not believe in those – but resulted from the embodiment of either collective or individual mental images or from “the momentary transfer of a nervous and muscular force from one organism to its surrounding” (ibid.).

132Bolesław Prus was present at several experiments with Eusapia Palladino and reported on them in his “Kroniki” and in an extensive series of articles for Kurier Codzienny.144 Again, just like in 1888, he was taken aback by the fact that Ochorowicz’s most vociferous opponents were scientists of his own generation who, twenty years earlier, had challenged the authorities of the time by championing positivism and the theory of the evolution of species by natural selection. They had betrayed their earlier belief that “every new truth goes through three phases: first it is called irrelevant, then harmful, and finally… as old as the hills!…” .145

133According to Prus, Poles have a remarkable tendency to discredit their own inventors. He describes Warsaw as “a hotel in which advocates of stagnation have always been most loudly heard while progressive minds either fell into drudgery or escaped this asparagus patch, and where mediocrity and careerism are cultivated while the great souls are drying up” (ibid.). He lists the names of Abakanowicz, Modrzejewska, Paderewski, Siemiradzki and Sienkiewicz, who all decided to go abroad not only for better work conditions and better pay, but above all because other societies were able to appreciate their work:

We only value those who prosper or who are fashionable, but we are unable to recognise a person’s independent and utilitarian faculties. Instead of learning from individuals of excellence we malign them, or at the very least we snub them, and this is why those who are born among us avoid us like the plague. In the end, anyone would tire of a society that not only offers poor remuneration but then also rants about its workers, even those who have made a name for themselves across Europe. (p. 376)

134Prus remained a sceptic regarding Eusapia. “My mind,” he wrote, “gene|rally does not harmonise with miraculousness, or, rather, I know only two miracles: the starry sky in the countryside and my own existence in nature. Wondrous things that are advertised with particular insistence arouse my suspicion.”146 However, unable to account for the phenomena he had observed, he did not rule out the existence of some new principle that would demand to be studied with scientific methods: “if the spiritists’ theory were recognised as a scientific fact, new and vast horizons would open up before humanity, to which our civilisation would compare like dusk to daylight.”147 He also signed an affidavit written by participants of sessions with Eusapia Palladino and published in Kurier Warszawski.148 In another article he declared:

[O]bjects really do move, levitate and rise to the tabletops; mysterious touches or the removing of glasses have really taken place; little lights really do glimmer etc. All these are facts, unlike the illusions caused by suggestion, hypnotism or intoxication with some substance or other.149

135Prus remarks that spiritism spread rapidly “towards the end of the most civilised century,” an era associated above all with “the power of rationality,” an era that uses “chemistry and physics to account for spirits”. He came to the conclusion that this fashionable phenomenon was rooted in the universal need to believe in a world beyond what could be experienced with the senses – a need that neither materialism nor positivism could satisfy.

Here is what spiritism says to the millions hungry for ideals: You have banished the Spirit from Nature, so you get the spirit in your flats and movables. You have rejected the inspirations of poetry, so you get the “trances” of mediums. You have laughed off metaphysical philosophy, so now you get to listen to table legs. These are the reasons why I take spiritism and mediumism seriously, like a fact that cannot be made to go away with an ironic smile or a flick of the wrist.150

136Prus believed that “the tables will only be silent, and mediums will only cease to be the object of admiring observations” when “pioneering research manages to find the spirit in nature beneath the ethers and waves of modern physics, and psychology manages to relate that spirit to the feelings and desires of humankind” (ibid).151

137There is no evidence to suggest that Prus engaged in the debate on the congress of 1909. An extensive account of the congress and Ochorowicz’s photographs feature in two issues of Tygodnik Ilustrowany – this would have been an ideal platform, but Prus’s “Kroniki” in these issues do not even mention the congress. Seeing that his friend was being attacked in the press, however, Prus decided to discuss mediumistic phenomena in a longer piece for Tygodnik Ilustrowany. In this article, published on 19 February 1910, Prus positions himself as “a devotee of the experimental and empirical sciences” who “considers the scientific methods to be among humanity’s most important intellectual achievements”.152 Given that the two were acquainted ever since their school days, Prus vouches that even as a teenager Ochorowicz had been noted for “his exceptional abilities, strong yet noble character and his pursuit of truth” (p. 223). For the novelist, Ochorowicz is on a par with scholars such as Copernicus, Columbus or Galileo – all misunderstood and spurned by their contemporaries. He goes on to describe his impressions from seances with Tomczyk, the medium Ochorowicz portrayed at the conference, and confirmed her ability to make objects levitate without touching them. Prus’s conclusion is characteristic for his approach: “mediumism is like an opening in the wall of the human body, a window through which we can see… the soul, whose existence materialism denies with such certainty!” (p. 227).

138But let us look once again at the parallels between Ochorowicz and Freud. Neither of them saw treating patients as a priority. Ochorowicz stated on several occasions that his work on the history of magnetism had convinced him of the difficulties and humiliations associated with every nonorthodox medical practice, which is why he avoided it at all costs and focused on strictly scientific work instead. Responding to critics in 1888 he argues provocatively:

Why did I remain silent so long, allowing false or inaccurate stories to spread? It was a matter of personal interest… Although I had been careful to avoid having too many patients […], I was so overburdened with work (on average I was magnetising forty people a day) that anyone who managed to make my potential patients change their minds was doing me a favour. Given this state of affairs, the attacks in the press and the biased reports seemed to me like a safety valve. Whenever a rant against me or against hypnotism in general was published I would place it on the table in the waiting room to scare off anyone who was still undecided.153

139Ochorowicz often portrays the Polish medical establishment as backward. Above all, he criticises his colleagues for reducing medical care to physiology and for presenting pharmacology as the most important therapeutic method. In 1912 he describes this attitude as “neophobia,” “an aversion to useful novelty” rampant at scientific institutions.154 Many illnesses, Ochorowicz believes, are caused by orthodox medicine. Doctors refuse to listen to patients and prescribe cures and medication as a matter of routine. He discusses the possibility of becoming “sick from medicine”155. Finally, he exposes the hypocrisy of doctors who ridicule him in the press but then call on him when they are unable to treat their patients successfully. In the introduction to Psychologia i medycyna (a collection of previously published essays on psychology and medicine), he throws down the gauntlet to his opponents. The book’s publication in 1916, a year before Ochorowicz’s death, gives a definitive character to the following statement:

[T]his is the work of a heretic; he who disagrees that all fields of scholarship and all fields of practice ought to remain open to anyone should stop troubling themselves by trying to understand the views of this writer, whose only idol is the love of truth – truth understood subjectively but actualised as objectively as possible.156

140Ochorowicz defines psychotherapy as “the study of the curative influence of mental factors on the body”.157 Every doctor should be a psychologist first and foremost, he argues, since psychological factors not only figure prominently among the causes of disease – they also belong to the most effective correctives.

141Applying these theories to nervous disorders only, Ochorowicz would have been quite in line with the pioneers of psychoanalysis, but he saw mental causes as the key to every kind of physical ailment. Witold Szumlański, superintendent at the Hospital of the Holy Spirit, disparages Ochorowicz’s experiments: “For Mr. Ochorowicz there are no incurable diseases […], no therapeutic indications, he is indifferent to the question what organ is affected in what ways, he only needs to know if the individual in question is sensitive to the hypnoscope.”158 One controversy concerned Ochorowicz’s claims on infectious diseases such as rabies or cholera, published in Kurier Warszawski and Gazeta Rolnicza: proposing that epidemics were to a large extent the result of imagination and autosuggestion, he dismissed disinfection or antiseptics and recommended that efforts should focus on strengthening the nerves, boosting willpower and rooting out prejudice.159

142Despite Ochorowicz’s insistence on the interdependence of body and mind, however, it would be hasty to conclude that he saw psychotherapy as the only valid or unconditionally effective treatment. He did indeed believe that the method could cure any disease, but he also insisted that not all patients could be treated in this way. Some, he argued, were too resistant, often because their ailment fulfilled some essential need. He linked these patients’ non-susceptibility to his methods to a deeply concealed reluctance to being cured – and he felt quite unable to surmount it. These ideas led him to propose the method of “affectotherapy,” understood as “treatment based on an affective and nervous shock,” which should be applied especially in cases of hysteria. A detailed description of this approach can be found in Ochorowicz’s article “Choroby i uczucia” [Afflictions and Emotions] from 1892. It brings to mind Freud’s cathartic method, and it foreshadows Freud and Breuer’s famous “Preliminary Communication” of 1893.160

143Freud was disappointed by the results achieved by hypnosis, so he abandoned the method soon after leaving France. Years later he recalled:

I soon came to dislike hypnosis, for it was a temperamental and, one might almost say, a mystical ally. When I found that, in spite of all my efforts, I could not succeed in bringing more than a fraction of my patients into a hypnotic state, I determined to give up hypnosis and to make the cathartic procedure independent of it. Since I was not able at will to alter the mental state of the majority of my patients, I set about working with them in their normal state.161

144Freud’s dissatisfaction with hypnosis led him to work out alternative tech|niques to help his patients recall repressed traumatic experiences. Free asso|ciation and the interpretation of dreams were able to tease out events for which physical symptoms with no evident medical cause were only masks. One of his patients, Anna O., had referred to his therapy as “the talking cure,” but in 1896 Freud replaced this metaphor with the term “psychoanalysis”.

145Like Freud, Ochorowicz was quick to dismiss hypnosis as an unreliable method. In his programmatic article “Magnetyzm bez hipnotyzmu” [Magnetism without Hypnotism, 1890] he goes so far as to compare hypnosis to pharmacology:

Today the hypnotists’ suggestive medicine is no more than a translation of the old pharmaceutical methods into the language of psychology. Instead of drugs they administer suggestion, but they continue to exercise control over the body, they continue to impose their wildest fancies, or at least their good intentions, which do not always conform to the natural mechanisms of healing.162

146Freud was slowly modernising the French therapeutic tradition and he focused on practices that his masters might have considered marginal. (For instance, he adopted Bernheim’s observation that suggestion can also be used on a fully conscious patient, and that the best method to achieve this is to place the patient on a couch while sitting out of their sight; from Charcot he borrowed the idea that the hysteria was rooted in sexuality and trauma.) Ochorowicz, meanwhile, remained faithful to his teachers and gradually returned to the sources. He was among the few scholars of his time who tried to rehabilitate mesmerism, also known as animal magne|tism. According to its inventor, Franz Mesmer, nervous diseases resulted from an imbalance in the distribution of vital fluid, but patients could be cured by the influence of a doctor’s magnetic fluid. Ochorowicz would probably have found this theory more scientific than Freud’s work on “the talking cure,” which must have struck him as suspiciously unverifiable. In 1915, Ochorowicz lists some of the psychotherapeutic practices he had encountered. He mentions Freud’s psychoanalysis, Pierre Janet’s technique of “reshaping painful memories by way of suggestion,” as well as the method of persuasion developed by Joseph Jules Déjerine and Paul Charles Dubois. He concludes that “all these gentlemen are unknowingly applying magnetism” and that “just magnetism without psychoanalysis, without persuasion and without suggestion obtains more lasting results”.163

147Hypnosis, Ochorowicz argues, relies on one individual’s imagination having a subjective influence on his or her own body: “in fact everyone is hypnotising himself” (p. 194). Magnetism, in comparison, has the benefit that it hinges on the impact of one organism on another. In Mental Suggestion he writes:

If disease is transmitted by contagion, health should be transmissible in the same way. […] health must be, so to speak, more contagious by bodily contact than is disease, being more expansive, in that it re-acts better outward. […] What they call animal magnetism, so far as it is physical action, is nothing but a contagion of health and of force.164

148Elsewhere he adds: “to heal is not to look for a club with which to beat the illness but to help the sick person balance out their disorders”.165 As early as 1890 he had already argued against abandoning magnetism for the sake of treatments based on hypnosis only. He compared both techniques in terms of the patient-doctor relationship:

Hypnotists today are producing automatons, pawns, blind tools of the most diverse of influences – the magnetists of the old days, however, describe lofty magnetic states with a certain solemnity. They used to listen to their mediums, ask for their clairvoyant advice, while hypnotists only give orders, walking over the medium’s independence. The magnetisers used to listen to nature – the hypnotists want to commandeer it. The former acknowledged their personal influence and worked to avoid mixing influences – the latter do not recognise their personal influence and allow anyone to torment their hypnotised patients. Who is right? In part, they are both right, but the therapeutic value of these two forms is very different and while I recognise the great scientific importance of hypnotic research I have no doubt that magnetism is much more significant in practice.166

149Ochorowicz outlines the most important differences in another article:

Hypnotism is an abnormal state close to dreaming, where the susceptibility to suggestion, proper to sensitive individuals, is enhanced, independently of the personal traits of the performer. Magnetism is the inductive influence of one organism upon another, where the main role is played by the individuality of the performer. Anyone can be a hypnotist, but not every person can be hypnotised, as not all are equipped for this type of dreaming. All people, by contrast, can be magnetised, even if to be a magnetiser one must be healthy, strong and gifted with a certain innate aptitude.167

150Ochorowicz was convinced that if a particular kind of force hidden within the magnetiser was able to help a sick person, then a magnetic trance – but not a hypnotic one – gives rise to a certain relationship between two persons: “a hypnotised individual is a pawn in the hands of anyone, while an individual in a magnetic trance yields to only one person, and only relatively speaking, because, unless he is in a state of lethargy, he regains his autonomy and can even appear to be awake. Hypnotism is intoxication, stupor and possession,” while magnetism is “a healthy and strong person affecting a sick or weaker one”.168 Here Ochorowicz foregrounds empathy: “anyone who intends to treat people with magnetism needs to have compassion for those who suffer” (ibid.). Compassion had already appeared in Ochorowicz’s first published work, the dissertation Jak należy badać duszę from 1869, which includes a short supplement on psychological empathy.169 Believing that “a thinking and feeling person will discover all of humanity within himself,” Ochorowicz defines empathy as the ability to enter the state of another. He also portrays compassion as a scientific method as well as the basis for all art, especially literature.170

151Research in magnetism and hypnosis has been discussed as a precursor of psychoanalysis. For Chertok and de Saussure it inspired a reflection on the therapeutic significance of the object relationship, later leading Freud to describe the mechanism of transference.171 If we accept this argument then Ochorowicz doubtless stands with Freud, rather than with his French colleagues and mentors, who consistently depersonalised the doctor-patient relationship. In “Choroby i uczucia” he wrote:

[The doctor] ought to beware of every word he utters before his patient and he must be able to guess what effect it will have. He who wants to heal a sick person must enter into the sick person; it is not enough to do some palpating and percussing. The doctor must be a psychologist, he must be a physiognomist, he must be a sympathetic confessor – otherwise he will do harm despite himself. Above all, therefore, he must listen to the patient carefully, allow him to get everything off his chest, and not treat him like a mere specimen required to reveal what it is without participating. To get to know the illness is not the same thing as to get to know the patient – and even though it may be a heresy for medical circles, I say that the latter task is the more important one.172

152Ochorowicz’s life suggests that the history of psychoanalysis might have evolved in an entirely different direction. After all, he was present at the very sources of psychoanalysis, had worked with the same professors as Freud, participated in the same experiments and came to similar con|clusions. At one point, it seemed likely that he would rise to more international prominence than Freud. Eventually, however, he came to be seen as a dangerous oddity.173 Sigmund Freud, by contrast, is known as the founder of a therapeutic school and institutionalised international move|ment who brought together countless followers from across the world even in his lifetime. This success was by no means a lucky coincidence – it was the result of a carefully devised and perfectly implemented strategy.

153As for paranormal phenomena, Freud, too, was interested in them. According to Ernest Jones, he was fond of telling stories about strange coincidences and mysterious voices, and magical thinking did exert a certain influence on him.174 What fascinated him most was telepathy, although was sceptical about any evidence that was presented. As early as 1910, namely in the third edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, he included a discussion on prophetic and telepathic dreams.175 In 1922 he went so far as to discuss the strong connection between dreams and telepathy in Imago.176

154Freud first considered studying supernatural phenomena in 1915; he dreamed that his sons were killed in the war, and a few days later he learned that Martin was indeed wounded at the same time.177 In a letter to Nandor Fodor in 1921 he avowed that he does not count himself “among those who right off reject the study of the so-called occult psychological phenomena as unscientific, as unworthy, or even as dangerous” (p. 443); instead, he describes himself as “a complete layman and newcomer” in this field, but one who cannot “get rid of certain skeptical materialistic prejudices” (ibid.).178 In the same year he gave a presentation titled “Psychoanalysis and Telepathy,” proposing that even if most occult phenomena can be explained on the basis of the natural sciences or as projections of strong wishes, some cases of telepathy might turn out to be genuine. Worrying that a public discussion of telepathy might detract attention from psychoanalysis, Freud made sure that his thoughts on the subject were confined to the debates of the Secret Committee.179 His paper, never published in its entirety, was based on tests that Freud had conducted with his daughter Anna. In the years to follow, Sándor Ferenczi would also run telepathic experiments with her. No accounts survive; we only know that Freud encouraged his colleague to give a paper on the subject at a psychoanalytical congress.180 In 1926, Freud confessed in a letter to Jones that he had an enduring “favourable bias toward telepathy” (p. 596), which he kept secret only for the good of psychoanalysis, for he did not want to risk its association with occultism. Still, he continued, “my personal experience through tests, which I undertook with Ferenczi and my daughter, have attained such convincing power over me that diplomatic considerations had to be relinquished” (p. 597). He added that the study of telepathy reminded him of the “great experiment of [his] life,” when, the founder of psychoanalysis, decided to confront a hostile environment. Then, too, was forced to counter the dominant beliefs of recognised authorities. But Freud also reassured Jones: “If anyone should bring up with you my Fall from grace, just answer calmly that my acceptance of telepathy is my own affair, like my Judaism and my passion for smoking, etc., and that the subject of telepathy is not related to psychoanalysis”.181

155In 1921 Freud wrote to the American psychiatrist Hereward Car|rington: “If I were at the beginning rather than at the end of a scientific career, as I am today, I might possibly choose just this field of research, in spite of all difficulties.”182 Such a path had been open to Freud when he was a freshly baked graduate of medicine specialising in neurology. In the 1920s, however, that decision was not his anymore. He was no inde|pendent experimentalist but the head of an institution whose goals and ambitions had risen above all else. Ernest Jones and Max Eitingon, the vigilant guards of psychoanalytical orthodoxy and leading figures in the international organisation to promote the doctrine, finally managed to dissuade the master from tackling paranormal themes under the banner of psychoanalytical research. Freud, however, remained interested in them until the end of his life. Eran Rolnik cites Freud’s correspondence with Yochanan Lewinson, a Berlin-based dentist who believed that many Arabs had telepathic abilities, which they used during the Great Arab Revolt. Grateful for this hint Freud took the opportunity to explain:

You have surely noticed that when it comes to matters of telepathy, my intention has been to minimize any admission that it exists. Here is how things stand: I believe in telepathy but I do not do so willingly. I have not yet managed to overcome completely my distaste for what is termed the occult, and therefore I continue to demand further evidence of its existence.183

156The manner in which Ochorowicz’s paper was received at the first Congress of Polish Neurologists, Psychiatrists and Psychologists invites reflection on the situation of the scientistic field on the eve of the twentieth century. Just a few years earlier, the most highly respected scholars had studied mediumism without having to worry about their reputation. By 1909, however, the community of Polish scholars considered it a type of charlatanry unworthy of discussion. Ochorowicz’s paper caused a scandal and eventually placed the speaker outside the field of science, while Jekels’ presentation on psycho|analysis was taken seriously and elicited some critical engagement. At this stage, Freudianism was not yet forced to defend its place within the field of science as defined at the time.

Polish Freudians express their highest esteem

157Jekels’ presentation was programmed for the afternoon session on Tuesday, 12 October 1909. In the morning the psychiatric section heard a paper on dementia by Adam Wizel and Maurycy Bornstein. The papers that make up the afternoon programme (3.00 to 7.30 p.m.) were more or less exclusively medical.

158Jekels’ goal was to generate interest in Freud’s theories among Warsaw’s medical community, which until then was quite unfamiliar with psycho|analysis. The most prominent members, after all, had trained either with Babinski and Janet in Paris or with Kraepelin in Munich. Polish interns at these two institutions regularly published detailed accounts of their work in the medical journal Medycyna i Kronika Lekarska, which indicates that these were the most highly respected research centres in the field of nervous diseases. In 1908, for instance, the journal printed Maurycy Bornstein’s “Listy Psychiatryczne” [Psychiatrical Letters] from Munich as well as Tadeusz Jaroszyński’s “Listy neurologiczne” [Neurological Letters] from Paris. This publication already shows how profoundly Janet and Babinski had influenced Jaroszyński, and in the years to come he would continue to put their theories above any other concept of hysteria. In his “Letters” Jaroszyński discusses the French masters in some detail, while the name of Freud – misspelled as “Fred” – is only mentioned in passing.184

159Jaroszyński’s presentation at the congress was the only one that inspired Jekels to participate in the discussion. He was much older than the freshly baked neurologist who spoke about the different schools of psychotherapy, including Freud’s “method of psychoanalysis and abreaction” in which he observed “much exaggeration, as well as much real insight”. A report on the discussion was published in Medycyna i Kronika Lekarska:

[Our] colleague Jekels argues that Babinski’s reformed understanding of hysteria provides nothing but a few ancillary methods for differential diagnosis and classification. […] The manifestations of hysteria can be cured with every and any means (Lourdes or ten drops of valerian extract), but a deeper understanding of their causes and mechanisms can only be achieved through the psychoanalytical method. If Freud’s theory seems fantastical, let us keep in mind that hysteria itself is no less fantastical. (MIK 1909, no. 46, pp. 1137-1138.)

160Jaroszyński is said to have responded with these words: “No doubt, Freud’s theory has its merits and advantages, but it is blatantly one-sided and generalising in that it reduces all nervous symptoms into one scheme which can only be applicable to a limited number of cases.” (p. 1139)

161Jekels’ own presentation, “Leczenie psychoneuroz za pomocą metody psychoanalitycznej Freuda” [Treating Psychoneuroses with Freud’s Psycho|analytical Method] begins by outlining Freud’s theory and a brief description of the therapeutic techniques of psychoanalysis. The final part presents a selection of cases from his clinical practice at the spa in Bystra. This paper coincides with the time when Jekels realised it was impossible to reconcile psychoanalysis with managing the sanatorium. He also confesses that the analyses undertaken within the limited timespan of a patient’s stay in Bystra were neither thorough nor complete. His examples were only meant to indicate possible applications of Freud’s theory and to suggest to what extent psychoanalysis could help a doctor understand his patient – in no way was it a matter of a definitive cure or a complete analysis of the patient’s personality.

162Jekels’ first example was that of Mrs G., a mother of five who experienced severe choking for three years. This symptom made it difficult for her to eat, but she continued to smoke cigarettes, hiding her habit from her husband. Having conducted what Jekels ironically describes as one of “those famous and notorious sexual interviews” (p. 618), Freud determined that she feared another pregnancy and was bored with her marriage. What is more, it turned out that her choking coincided with her developing unrequited feelings for a young officer. A dream analysis un|covered an even older suppressed desire for her brother-in-law, Arnold, whom she suspected of being “unable to have proper intercourse” and of having “a tendency towards perverse sex acts” (ibid.). Mrs G.’s had taken up smoking while she was infatuated with Arnold. For Jekels the matter was clear: Arnold’s cigarettes – which the patient described as “fat, rich and masculine” (p. 619) – fascinated her to an unusual degree. The cramps she experienced whenever she tried to swallow food stood for her fantasy of performing fellatio on him.

163Another patient, Mrs Anna S., lived in a frustrating marriage with a man 25 years her senior. Jekels identified her repressed desire for her own father and her fantasy to become pregnant with him. He believed that her complaints – abasia and astasia – were rooted in the memory of her mother, who had suffered from debilitating pain in her legs during pregnancy. The third patient, Mr T.M., was a twenty-year-old who complained of persistent constipation. He was diagnosed with an anal fixation: his sexual abstinence, combined with passionate feelings for a woman he truly loved, had caused an inner conflict that reactivated his infantile erogenous zones. Finally, a thirty-year-old clerk came to see Jekels with agoraphobia and neuralgia of the left half of the face – symptoms that Jekels related to his desire to marry and impregnate his sister, for episodes of the illness were always related to visits to the family, sometimes even the mere idea of such a trip would set off his neuralgia. “This fantasy explained all his physical symptoms: the inability to leave the house was a result, so to say, of his being ashamed to show himself to the world […], while the apparent neuralgia was like the red mark left by a slap in the face – according to Freud this often symbolised a shameful, vulgar thought” (p. 622).

164Jekels concludes with the following words:

I do not know if and in how far the examples presented here in such a condensed form will be able to convince you, esteemed colleagues. I shall not be surprised if this is not the case, for I fully agree with Freud, who says in one of his latest works that analysis can only become fully con|vincing when it is experienced in every detail. Be that as it may, I believe that Freud’s research and its results present a major breakthrough in the fields of psychiatry, neurology and psychology and that they have implications for our very worldview. (p. 623)

165Jekels’ presentation was discussed more intensely than any other during the congress.185 The first commentator was the psychiatrist Adam Wizel who had spent one year as an intern at the Salpêtrière in 1889.Cf. A. Wizel, “Lekcye prof. Charcot (Ze wspomnień osobistych)”, PT 1892, no. 27, pp. 576-577. Adam Wizel used hypnosis as a therapeutic method for many years and only turned to psychoanalysis much later in his career. (Cf. M. Bornsztajn, “Adam Wizel (życiorys)”, KKS 1929, no. 4, pp. 314-317.) In his book Zaburzenia płciowe pochodzenia psychicznego [Sexual Disorders of Mental Origin, 1914] Wizel writes:
“Freudism, which today fascinates a certain not-so-critical group of doctors, is yet to obtain the sanction of science. The majority of serious neurologists and psychiatrists voice their gravest objections against it […]. What fate awaits it in the future – whether it will ever, if not wholly then perhaps in part, be accepted by science – that we are in no position to tell. We only know that as of now, official science is turning away from Freudism with disdain”. A. Wizel, Zaburzenia płciowe pochodzenia psychicznego: Studium kliniczne i psycholo|giczne (Warsaw: [s.n.], 1914), p. 165
He remarked that Freud was correct claiming that unconscious fantasies play a key role in the pathogenesis of hysteria, but there was nothing new about this idea, for Charcot had already made the same discovery. The greatest failing of psychoanalysis, meanwhile, was that it reduced all repressed complexes to the denominator of sex. Wizel also alleged that in many cases memories of trauma were not drawn out from patients but implanted in them by way of suggestion:

[When] a doctor pokes around the patient’s soul for weeks, constantly looking for some unconscious memories, when he inundates the patient with thousands of questions that are very drastic in nature, and when, like an inquisitorial magistrate, he will not give up until he finds out something interesting, then it is no surprise that […] the doctor can easily suggest such or such fantasies to his patient.187

166This kind of procedure risks doing more harm than good, “for to suggest very drastic fantasies to a person who has no sexual anomalies whatsoever can only have a negative impact on their mental health” (p. 625). Wizel also critiqued the immense liberty of Freudian interpretations, especially when it came to dreams. “There is no commentary too drastic for a follower of Freud,” (ibid.) he concluded.

167Jekels was defended by Witold Łuniewski, the future chair of the psychiatric hospital in Tworki. He had recently returned from the University of Zurich, where he had studied with Eugen Bleuler. He spoke of the misconception according to which Freud reduced the aetiology of nervous diseases to sexual factors only. Karol Rychliński, the founder and director of the psychiatric hospital in Drewnica, conceded that “Freud’s theory is a fabulous step towards the progress that looms ahead in our understanding of various nervous states” (p. 625), and that every doctor who uses psychotherapy ought to take it into consideration; still, psychoanalysis was only “a research method” rather than a therapeutical tool. Now the psychologist Ludwika Karpińska protested and, citing her observations in Carl Jung’s clinic, she submitted that full healing was indeed a possibility “when the patient does not stop with having his complexes analysed by a doctor but continues to analyse himself, thus preventing the emergence of new pathological complexes” (p. 627). Karpińska, who had just obtained her doctoral degree in philosophy, advised her reluctant Polish colleagues that “Freud’s psychology is spreading to broader spheres; at the universities (Basel, Zurich) his works are being discussed in seminars that draw not only medical students but also professional psychologists and educators” (ibid.).

168Jekels responded to each of his opponents’ remarks, but he also insisted that he had never observed any harm done by applying Freud’s method – quite to the contrary, he always noticed that “besides the fact that a given symptom vanished, the patient also experienced growth and spiritual elevation of sorts” (p. 627).

169In the end, Jekels’ presentation turned out to be a considerable success, and in his memoirs he relates the following incident: after his presentation the prominent Joseph Babinski invited him to Paris. Jekels decided to discuss this invitation with Freud, who first inquired about Babinski’s age, and when he heard that the professor was of his own generation he replied, laughing, that no mature researcher could be expected to renounce his theory in favour of someone else’s. Jekels decided to decline the invitation.188

170Jekels played a prominent role at the congress. Despite the heated de|bate that followed his presentation, he was elected to chair the last panel on Wednesday, 13 October 1909. What is more, his presentation was one of the few that were published in Medycyna i Kronika Lekarska before the volume of proceedings appeared.189 It also formed the basis for the proposal that psychoanalysis should figure as a separate subject area at the next Congress in Cracow in 1912.

171The attendants of the first Congress sent Freud a telegram with formal greetings: “Polish Freudians express their highest esteem.” “Polnische Freudianer übersenden vom tagenden Congresse Ausdrücke höchster Anerkennung” [Polish Freudians send expressions of highest esteem from the ongoing Congress]. A similar telegram, signed with the same names, was sent to Jung. This was reprinted in F. Marcinowski, “(…) by popchnąć naprzód świadomość ducha”, p. 2017. This hap|pened on Jekels’ initiative, and, as he wrote in a letter to his teacher, this, too, was a point of contention.191 It would later turn out that this for|mulation mostly expressed a wish, for none of the signatories, besides Jekels himself, could be called a Freudian – not at that point in time nor at any other. Besides the above-mentioned psychiatric doctors Witold Łu|niewski and Kazimierz Rychliński the telegram was signed by Józef Sycianko, chief physician at the Jewish hospital in Vilnius; Kazimierz Kempiński, a Jewish doctor and social activist from Sieradz; Witold Chodźko, director of the psychiatric hospital in Kochanówka near Łódź, formerly a close collaborator of Stefan Żeromski at the Lublin-based Edu|cational and Cultural Association (Towarzystwo Oświatowo-Kulturalne “Światło”), and later the first Minister of Health of independent Poland;192 as well as Ludwika Karpińska, who gave a paper titled “Przyczynki do|świadczalne do widzenia głębi” [Experimental Contributions to Analysis of Depth Vision] at the psychological section.

172Among the “illegible and unpronounceable”193 signatures on his telegram greeting, Freud had only ever heard of Karpińska. Jung had told him about this talented philosopher with a PhD from Zurich who had briefly worked with the Burghölzli group. Karpińska, born in Płock in 1872, was the only person whom Jekels managed to get interested in Freud’s theories, and she soon accompanied him on a trip to Vienna. Thus she became the first woman to attend the meetings of the Vienna Psycho|analytic Society. She attended four meetings in late 1909 and early 1910, participating in the discussion on two occasions. At one of those meetings she questioned the legitimacy of Freud’s reference to Kantian philosophy, arguing that Kant’s hypotheses on the categories of space and time were epistemological and ought not to be used in relation to feelings.194 Karpiń|ska never joined the Freudian movement, but before World War I she played a key role introducing Polish philosophers to psychoanalysis, thus redressing the strategic mistake Jekels had made trying to disseminate Freud’s theories among psychiatrists.

173Karpińska’s first work in psychoanalysis was a remarkably detailed discussion of Jung’s method titled “Badania doświadczalne nad kojarze|niem wyobrażeń” [Experimental Studies on the Association of Mental Images], which she first presented to the members of the Towarzystwo Psychologiczne [Psychological Association] in Warsaw and to the doctors of the neurological and psychiatric clinic in Cracow before having it published in the Cracow-based Przegląd Lekarski in 1912.195 Besides outlining the history of research on free association she also gives a clear and convincing introduction to the Zurich school’s most important discoveries in the field and presents rich material gained through her own experimental studies. She also outlines the notion of the complex as an emotionally tinted collection of individual mental images, both conscious ones and ones that amnesia had cut off from consciousness; the more repressed they are, however, the more powerfully they affect the process of association, its fluency and reaction time, as well as the patient’s ability to recall or reproduce a given association:

[So-called “free associations”] are strictly and subtly determined by innumerable factors that lie outside our consciousness […]. It has been said that associations depend on a patient’s openness and that a person can say whatever he wants while being examined, and yet, he does not say whatever he wants but must betray what he considers to be the most hidden […], an entire series of deep secrets […], everything that hurts and rejoices the individual in question.196

174Karpińska’s article indicates that besides Jung’s method she had also been inspired by Ludwig Binswanger’s idea of measuring associations with the help of a galvanometer: the deflection of the pointer was said to indicate the power of the emotive colouring related to a psychological stimulus. Karpińska had no doubt that this method offered experimental evidence for the existence of the unconscious; she even compared such a recording of a person’s associations to “a snapshot of his soul” (ibid.).

175At the Second Congress of Polish Neurologists, Psychiatrists and Psycho|logists in 1912, Karpińska gave a paper titled “Psychologiczne podstawy freudyzmu” [The Psychological Foundations of Freudism] in the newly formed psychoanalytical section. She would present the same talk at a gathering of the Polish Psychological Association [Polskie Towarzystwo Psy|chologiczne] in Warsaw on 17 April 1913197 and had it published in Przegląd Filozoficzny.198 Karpińska starts with the disclaimer that she only intends “to provide a short outline familiarising readers with the basic principles of Freud’s psychological concepts” and concludes by apologising for the fact that she has restricted herself to commonplaces (“I have said almost nothing, and I have passed over almost everything in silence”). Nevertheless, her article – which passes over the therapeutic aspect of psychoanalysis – is the most extensive and most competent discussion of Freud’s theory published in Polish before World War I. Karpińska presents the evolution and structure of the psychic apparatus according to the first topic as well as its normal as well as pathological mechanisms; she also discusses the analogy in the processes of ontogenesis and phylogenesis that Freud recently developed in Totem and Taboo. The implication that certain nervous disorders can be associated with aspects of cultural production intrigues her. If hysteria caricatures artistic creativity, obsessive disorders of religion, paranoia of philosophy, then studying the psychology of mental disorders could shed light on the very development of culture. For Karpińska, Freud’s greatest achievement is not that he reveals the effect of the unconscious on the life of the psyche – “there has never been any doubt about a formulation as general as this”. It is that he demonstrates that “among the unconscious circumstances of the psyche, a separate and crucial role is played by emotional factors whose effect on our thinking and acting we deny, but which are all the more involved in determining mental phenomena that to our conscious mind seem incom|prehensible, irrelevant, coincidental” (p. 526).

176A German translation of Karpińska’s essay, which Sándor Ferenczi judged to be “very good,”199 was published in the Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse in 1914. This version, titled “Über die psycho|logischen Grundlagen des Freudismus,”200 leaves out a part of the conclu|sion of the original Polish text: here Karpińska draws on a manichean motif in Persian mythology, picturing the soul as divided into “one bright and one dark [part], one recognised and one condemned, one good and one evil – one Ormazd and one Ahriman”.201 For Karpińska, the essence of Freud’s psychology can be expressed with the words Aryman mści się – Ahriman takes revenge – which she found in the title of one of her favourite short stories by Stefan Żeromski.202 Many years later the  writer and critic Karol Irzykowski would compare Karpińska’s conclusion to Freud’s epigraph for The Interpretation of Dreams, “Flactere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo” from Virgil’s Aeneid:203

What Freud calls Acheron is the entire sphere of the unconscious. In this context it is worth recalling that one of the participants at the Cracow congress came up with a different literary analogy, namely that in that sphere “Ahriman takes revenge”. The sentimentalism of the Polish notion is striking: always that battle between good and evil. In Freud and the real Freudians there is none of that mawkish naivety. Ahriman’s dwelling is subjected to serious studies. They fight fire with fire. Ahriman is com|batted not with an angel but – with Ahriman.204

177Karpińska’s article “Ein Beitrag zur Analyse ‘sinnloser’ Worte im Traume” [A Contribution to the Analysis of “Meaningless” Words in Dreams] is an analysis of a dream she had had four years previously. In contrast to her first article, this one was published only in a Freudian journal (Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse, 1914) – no Polish version exists.205 This text contains the only mention of her plan to translate The Interpretation of Dreams into Polish – a project that was never realised. Her last publication in the field of psychoanalysis was the short article “O psychoanalizie” [On Psychoanalysis] published in Ruch Filozoficzny (1914).206 Its greatest merit, besides the extensive and up-to-date bibliography of Polish publications on psychoanalysis, is that Karpińska demonstrates that Freud’s theory has evolved into a separate field of study. She mentions the International Psychoanalytical Association (consisting of groups in Vienna, Zurich, Berlin and New York) and the recent internal split resulting from Jung’s departure from Freudian orthodoxy. Karpińska also lists four journals that offer a platform for psychoanalysis. Pointing out that the movement was flourishing especially in the US, where it was developing “unimaginably fast and in proportions typical of anything in that country” (p. 34), she remarks that within a few years, “the development of psychoanalysis has taken on such dimensions that a mastery psycho|analytical literature now requires exclusive commitment” (p. 33). This article possibly marks the moment where the author herself decided to proceed along a different path.

178Karpińska’s works in German are signed “Dr. Louise von Karpinska (Zakopane),” and the same version appears on the attendance lists of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. She settled in the mountain spa town of Zakopane in 1908, when she married Marcin Woyczyński, a medical doctor and cultural and political activist.207 His career suggests that they belonged to a progressive intellectual milieu: Woyczyński had been editor-in-chief of the weekly Przegląd Zakopiański in the first quarter of 1903.208 In 1904 he became the director of the Czytelnia Zakopiańska, a Public Reading Room and Library founded in 1900.209 What is more, Woyczyński was politically active in the Zakopane section of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS).210 In World War I he joined Józef Piłsudski’s Polish Legions, an independent Polish military formation of the Austro-Hungarian Army; after the war he was a colonel in the Polish army. He was on friendly terms with Marshal Piłsudski ever since the revolution of 1905, and after the May 1926 coup d’état, when the Marshal assumed power, he became his personal physician, secretary and aide, enjoying his complete trust. According to one historian, Woyczyński was “discreet, entirely devoted to Piłsudski and free of any political ambition. He enjoyed playing solitaire, which brought them closer on yet another level”.211

179Ludwika Karpińska also combined her career with political activism. Until the outbreak of World War I she was active in socialist organisations campaigning for Poland’s independence. In 1914 she joined the Legions as an orderly; during the defence of Lviv she rose to the rank of sergeant.212 She became director of the Municipal Psychological Laboratory (Miejska Pracownia Psychologiczna) in Łódź,213 taught at the Free Polish Univer|sity (Wolna Wszechnica Polska) in Warsaw and served on the editorial board of the journal Psychotechnika. Her main interest was pedagogy, and she studied children with learning difficulties as well as highly gifted ones.214 Finally, she taught psychology, psychoanalysis and psychotechnics to teachers, technical engineers, legal guardians, and other professionals.215

180In the 1930s Ludwika Karpińska and her husband lived in Warsaw. Their apartment was on the ground floor of the General Inspectorate of the Armed Forces on Ujazdów Avenue (today the Prime Minister’s Chancellery). Piłsudski had his office on the first floor, and after a while he set up a second apartment there as well.216 Marcin Woyczyński accom|panied Piłsudski on frequent trips to Vilnius and on various holidays abroad. It is certain that in the spring of 1932 he and his wife accom|panied the Marshal to Egypt via Romania, Turkey and Greece.217 Accor|ding to Piłsudski’s biographer, their friendship ended abruptly in April 1935, a month before the Marshal died of cancer. In one of his arbitrary fits of anger he accused Ludwika Karpińska of receiving guests – “stran|gers, apparently foreigners”. He was convinced that they had links to the East and that their presence on the grounds of the Inspectorate posed a threat to military secrets.218 The visitors in question were probably Stefania Sempołowska and Wanda Wasilewska, who were involved in Communist circles and who, like Karpińska, belonged to an organisation that cared for political prisoners. Karpińska, who was sick and lying in bed at the time, was immediately arrested and interrogated. Neither forced confessions nor a search of the apartment produced any evidence, and yet she spent several weeks at the Pawiak prison. Her husband, whom Piłsudski had once described as his “best companion among the living” (ibid.), moved out of the apartment at the Inspectorate and they never saw each other again. According to the official version of events, Woyczyński, very ill himself, asked Piłsudski to be relieved of his duties.219 His place was taken by lieutenant-colonel Dr Stefan Mozołowski. After Ludwika Karpińska’s release the couple relocated to Vilnius, where she died in early 1937. Marcin Woyczyński died in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.

Warsaw Medical Association [Warszawskie Towarzystwo Lekarskie]

181Having enjoyed some success at the congress in Warsaw, Jekels began to keep track of the activities of the neurological and psychiatric section of the Warsaw Medical Association to gauge the longterm effects of his presentation. The journal Neurologia Polska, established in 1910, published programmes and reports of their meetings, and over the years to come Jekels studied these notes and summarised them for the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse.220 For instance, he notes that Tadeusz Jaroszyński’s paper “Przyczynek do psychoanalizy obsesji” [A Contribution to the Psycho|analysis of Obsession], presented on 19 March 1910, draws on Freud; besides an outline of Jaroszyński’s paper Jekels also presents a summary of the ensuing discussion:221 Maurycy Bornstein expressed reservations about psychoanalysis and critiqued Freud’s focus on sexual causes; Henryk Higier, meanwhile, acknowledged Freud’s contributions to the theory of neurosis but accused his students of exaggeration, mentioning Sadger’s article “Analerotik und Analcharakter” as a negative example.222

182Jekels’ account of the meeting of 7 May 1910, devoted entirely to hysteria, is quite detailed.223 Jaroszyński and Sterling compared Freud’s theory of nervous diseases to the therapeutic concepts developed by Janet and Babiński. Once more, Higier turned out to be an implacable critic, arguing that Freud’s alleged discoveries had been known to the medical profession since time immemorial; in his view they reached all the way back to Hippocrates, while Freud’s contributions on childhood sexuality, the mechanisms of repression and the expression of the unconscious through symbols were impossible to demonstrate and therefore struck Higier as a travesty of scientific argumentation. The success of psycho|analysis, Higier continued, was due to effective advertising; Freud’s followers blandished patients by showering them with time and attention disproportionate to their complaints.224 Bornstein spoke up in defence of psychoanalysis, though he insisted he was no uncritical follower of Freud. Having read some psychoanalytical literature he was inclined to have a positive opinion; Freud’s essay “Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neu|roses,” for instance, shed light on aspects of childhood sexuality that had previously been overlooked or denied.

183At this point it is worth mentioning that some of Jekels’ prewar opponents would come to accept Freud’s methods after World War I. Today historians of psychoanalysis count Tadeusz Jaroszyński, Maurycy Bornstein and Henryk Higier as well as his son Stanisław Higier among the “personal core of Polish psychoanalysis” in the interwar years.225 Their individual contributions to the field merit a short digression: Tadeusz Jaroszyński, a researcher in pedagogy and director of the Polish Society for Child Research (Polskie Towarzystwo Badań nad Dziećmi) who had studied with Babiński, was Jekels’ most important rival when it came to disseminating psychoanalysis before 1914. Jekels published his Szkic psychoanalizy Freuda [An Outline of Freud’s Psychoanalysis] in Lviv in 1912, the same year that Jaroszyński’s O metodzie psychoanalitycznej Freuda i jego teorii powstawania nerwic na tle zaburzeń płciowych [Freud’s Psychoanalytical Method and His Theory of the Development of Neuroses in the Context of Sexual Disorders] appeared in Warsaw. After World War I, however, he turned to Christian Science, leaving the field to Jekels.226 Maurycy Bornstein was superintendent of the psychiatric ward at Warsaw’s Jewish Hospital in Czyste in the 1920s. He disseminated Freud’s methods there and published several articles inspired by psychoanalysis.227 In 1924 he also gave a well-attended lecture series on psychoanalysis at the Free Polish University.228 By the late 1930s Bornstein had become a veritable apologist of psychoanalysis.229 Like Bornstein, Henryk Higier studied medicine at the University of Warsaw and then at Emil Kraepelin’s clinic in Munich; both were affiliated with Warsaw’s Jewish Hospital in Czyste.230 In the light of Higier’s critique of Freud’s followers in 1910 it is remarkable that some twenty years later he expressed his admiration for Stekel in Warszawskie Czasopismo Lekarskie.231

184The tone of Jekels’ reports on the meetings of the Warsaw Medical Association is highly dramatic. He inserts question marks and exclamation points in parentheses or adds “sic!” to highlight elements that strike him as erroneous. The therapies offered by Polish specialists (e.g. Jaroszyński) are described as “purportedly [angeblich] psychoanalytical”; Higier’s critique of psychoanalysis is described as krass (shocking, crass). Perhaps it is Jekels’ outrage about the fact that Polish psychiatrists were not doing justice to Freud’s theory and method that impelled him to attend the 11th Conference of Polish Doctors and Naturalists in Cracow in July 1911.

185The conference was a very large five-day event with seventeen sections: philosophy (participants included Jan Łukasiewicz, Kazimierz Twardowski, Jan Władysław Dawid, Władysław Witwicki), the natural sciences (divided into physics, chemistry, mineralogy, geology and geography), zoology and anatomy, botany, agriculture, pharmaceutics, veterinary science, theoretical medicine, internal medicine, neurology, paediatry, surgery, gynaecology, dentistry, ophthalmology, public health and medical journalism. This time Jekels applied to the neurological section, which consisted of six presen|tations. Not all were relevant to Jekels’ interests, but Tadeusz Jaroszyński gave a paper titled “O nerwicach: Rozróżnienie i istota postaci poszczegól|nych: histerii, nerwicy wzruszeniowej, neurastenii, nerwicy lękowej i psychastenii” (On Neuroses: Differentiation and Essence of Individual Forms: Hysteria, Affective Neurosis, Neurasthenia, Anxiety and Psychas|thenia). After the presentation Jekels criticised Jaroszyński for passing over Freud’s work.232

186Jekels’ presentation was titled “O czynniku decydującym w stosunku pacjenta do lekarza” (The Decisive Factor in a Patient’s Relationship with the Physician). He proposes that “the mental factor in the patient’s relationship with the doctor described as suggestion is affective in nature, or libidinal-erotic, to be precise” (pp. 515-516). Jekels begins by outlining Freud’s theory of sexuality, putting special emphasis on the child’s feelings of erotic desire towards the parents, then he explains the concept of transference: in a patient’s subconscious fantasies the doctor takes the place of the parents – especially the father – in charge of his or her destiny. This is why the patient’s relationship with the doctor has a sexual colouring.

187Several experts reacted to Jekels’ presentation. Karol Rychliński was not convinced that sexuality plays a key role in the development of neuroses; indeed psychoanalysis could harm a patient by arousing his or her dormant sensuality. The validity and results of the psychoanalytical method were also questioned by Henryk Halban, the first professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Lviv, a prominent scholar who over the course of his career also served as rector and long-time dean of that institution.233 The Cracow-based neurologist Adam Rydel, brother of the poet Lucjan Rydel (pp. 409-411), was happy “fully to acknowledge Freud’s genius” but had doubts about whether a doctor who worked with psychoanalysis could ever avoid being influenced by his own complexes. Jekels responded to all critics:

[The] subjectivism of psychoanalysis is no greater than that of any other scientific discipline; practical experience plays the same role here as it does in every profession. What all intellectual accusations against analysis usually conceal is the critic’s own complexes, which are easily laid bare. The only correct path is to master these personal conflicts and to perform an objective examination along the analyst’s trajectory. Then those who criticise Freud today will come to the same results as Freud’s followers, and they will be convinced that nervous disorders are an expression of a disturbance in the individual’s sexuality. (p. 516)

188As had been the case with the First Congress of Neurologists, Psychiatrists and Psychologists, the debates held at the 11th Conference of Polish Doctors and Naturalists failed to percolate to the general public. According to Józef Zawadzki’s report for Medycyna i Kronika Lekarska, too many presentations were included in the programme; what is more, they were divided into mini-sections whose venues were so far apart that participants could not attend more than a few thematic blocks. “[While] the first couple of panels were quite busy, the number of listeners kept dwindling until, towards the end of the conference, it had declined to a small handful of people.”234

189Jekels’ report on this event appeared anonymously in the section “Aus Vereinen und Versammlungen” of the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse.235 His claim that the neurological section’s meeting had taken place “under the sign of Freud’s psychoanalysis” [im Zeichen der Psychoanalyse Freuds] is clearly an exaggeration. What is more, Jekels figures prominently in his unsigned report, first with his response to Jaroszyński’s paper (which he describes as an energetic outline of Freud’s theory of neurosis), then with an in-depth discussion of his own presentation and the ensuing debate, which he criticises for veering off the topic.

190It appears that Jekels consciously chose to fight on two fronts. He tried to popularise psychoanalysis among Poles although he knew full well that they saw him as an eccentric newcomer not to be taken too seriously. At the same time he embroidered his success in Poland, ensuring that the psychoanalytical press portrayed him as the emissary of psychoanalysis to Polish medical circles. His strategy proved effective. In a letter dated 5 December 1911 Freud wondered if Polish clinicians would take to psychoanalysis; humorously acknowledging Jekels’ “apostolic effectiveness” he affirms that this man alone deserves credit for any success in this area.

191A review of medical journals, however, suggests that few medical doctors in Warsaw showed an interest in psychoanalysis before World War I. Neurologia Polska published only one article on the subject in 1912 and three articles in 1913. The essay that appeared in 1912 is Franciszka Baumgarten’s “Teoria snu Freuda” [Freud’s Theory of Dreams],236 previously presented at a meeting of the Polish Psychological Association and discussed below.237 In 1913 Neurologia Polska published articles by Jan Nelken and Hermann Nunberg, which I shall present in more detail in the context of the Second Congress of Polish Neurologists, Psychiatrists and Psychologists.238 The last article to thematise psychoanalysis in this journal is Wacław Radecki’s discussion of the applications of associative experiments in medicine, which focuses on Jung’s method to reveal emotional trauma.239 Psychoanalysis also disappears from the neurological and psychiatric sections of meetings of the Warsaw Medical Association. Freud’s theory is not mentioned even once in the reports published in Medycyna i Kronika Lekarska between 1911 and 1918, nor do we find any presentations related to psychoanalysis in the programme of the neuro|logical and psychiatric section of the first Conference of Polish Doctors and Naturalists in newly independent Poland.240 It was not until the 1930s that psychoanalysis made its comeback in the medical journals – often thanks to individuals who had previously been sceptical if not overtly opposed.

192Before I turn to another aspect that influenced the status of psycho|analysis in Warsaw in the early twentieth century, I would like to present Franciszka Baumgarten’s remarkably innovative but forgotten essay on Freud’s theory of dreams, published in Neurologia Polska in 1913. Baum|garten begins by outlining the state of research on the interpretation of dreams and by summarising the psychoanalytical method illustrated with Freud’s well-known dream, “Irma’s Injection”. In the second part she takes up the challenge posed by Freud, who proposed that analysing one’s own dreams was the best training for a psychoanalyst-to-be. Confronting Freud’s argument with the material she gained over two years of self-observation, Baumgarten finds that a person’s mental attitude may influ|ence if not their dreams then at least the ways in which they are remembered. Whenever she tried to find out if her dreams really fulfilled her suppressed desires she would wake up and remember only the part that was obviously related to the realisation of a desire:

Clearly this explains why those who approach Freud’s theory with unconditional faith are able to confirm the truthfulness of his ideas – their attention is focused on certain aspects of that phenomenon as indicated by Freud. But this also explains why those who see Freud as a fantasist will find their dreams confirming their already critical attitude.241

193Baumgarten is also suspicious of free association as a method to explain a dream. She compares this technique to “a mathematical problem whose answer is known from the outset, so that the problem is modified until it leads to the expected answer” (p. 1037). She concludes that dreams do not express desires as often as they stand for “the fulfilment of fears, troubling thoughts, disturbing assumptions” (p. 1039).

194In a footnote Baumgarten explains that she had recorded more than two hundred dreams, and that these particular examples were chosen because they were the least complex and at the same time least crude. To present more characteristic dreams would demand an excessively detailed biographical self-portrayal (ibid.). But her dreams are interesting in their own right, indicating the struggles of a woman scientist in the early twentieth century. For instance, she dreamed that she was giving a lecture on psychology in a girls’ boarding school when the new headmistress came in. Baumgarten found herself unable to string together a coherent sentence in her presence; she kept uttering unconnected words until one of the pupils passed her a notebook from which she could read. In another dream a speaker she admired attended her presentation and reacted with pity and disdain. One nightmare was about a close female friend secretly producing a substantive work that drew on Baumgarten’s findings and preceded her own publication. One particularly touching dream is this:

A great number of people come to see us. Everyone is praising somebody else, not me. I am indignant and I loudly tell Mrs Z. about my achieve|ments, my work and efforts. I give a detailed list of all the facts that endorse me. Mother confirms everything I say. But the other people still look like they do not believe me. No one has ever heard of any of my accomplishments. The ladies look like they had arrived in order to accuse me. (pp. 1040-1041)

195It is also worth mentioning the few dreams in which Baumgarten ex|perienced a desire being fulfilled. After reading Zofia Niedźwiedzka’s novel Kobieta z przeszłością [A Woman with a Past, published under the pseudonym Bohowityn] she dreamed she was married (“the destiny of a married woman seems to me strangely certain, secure, free of storms or unpleasant experiences,” p. 1042); worried about her edgy style she dreamed that a very demanding female friend was complimenting her on her writing; she also dreamed that she was invited to join a newly established scientific association, that she managed to purchase a first edition of Leibniz, and that a well known anti-Semite married a Jewish woman and converted to Judaism. Many of her dreams expressed her fear of growing old as a single woman, and Baumgarten saw this as an argument against Freud’s theory, as she was quite aware of her desire to marry. Such dreams could not be said to indicate that “a certain idea was symbolised because it had been repressed” (p. 1047). The material she had assembled also allowed her to put forward a new type of dream. Freud’s typology includes only dreams that are the guardians of sleep and where a sensory experience that risks waking up the sleeper is integrated into the dream. Baumgarten, however, noted that she would often wake up with a fright at night when she had an unusually appointment the next morning and was worried about oversleeping.

196The most striking passage in Baumgarten’s critique is her discovery of what Freud would later call the “superego”. Freud, she argues, wrongly assumes that the censoring mechanism which keeps primary instincts out of a person’s consciousness is weakened in a dream, allowing for the expression of elements we strictly condemn while awake. She gives several examples of her own dreams to show that “subconscious morality sometimes stands above the morality of wakefulness” (p. 1053). This proves that “the dark sphere of the subconscious” does not consist only of “primitive selfish instincts, as Freud would have it, but can also include the loftiest wishes, desires and intentions,” and that “our conscious actions meets the sharpest criticism of an unknown but real inner voice” (p. 1056). Baumgarten’s discovery positions her as a promising theorist in psychoanalysis, but her interest dwindled after World War I, when she moved to Switzerland and married Moritz Tramer, one of the founders of child psychiatry. In 1929 she began to give lectures in psychotechnics and psychology at the University of Bern; she also conducted research on the assessment of professional aptitudes.242 Applied psychology apparently displaced her early fascination with Freud’s method.

197Let us return now to the development of psychoanalysis among Warsaw’s neurologists and psychiatrists. Comparing the minutes of the meetings of the Medical Association it becomes apparent that Freud’s method achieved peak popularity among clinicians in 1910. 1910 is also the year when Kazimierz Oczesalski’s summary of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality was published in Gazeta Lekarska (K. Oczesalski, “Źródła i ujścia popędu płciowego – podług Freuda”, GL 1910, no. 4, pp. 84-88). In 1911 Stanisław Trzebiński gave a lecture titled “O teorii Freuda i psychoanalizie” [On Freud’s Theory and Psychoanalysis] at a meeting of the Polish Medical Association (Polskie Towarzystwo Lekarskie) in Kiev. It was published in the Poznań-based Nowiny Lekarskich (1912, no. 8, pp. 451-456, no. 9, pp. 522-526, no. 10, pp. 587-590). It seems that one influential factor was the flourishing of the psychoanalytical movement in Russia.244

198It is worth recalling here that in the early twentieth century Freud’s theory enjoyed greater popularity in Russia than anywhere else. His works were translated into Russian before any other language: a Russian version of Über den Traum appeared as a supplement to the fifth issue of the journal Вестник психологии, криминальной антропологии и гипнотизма [Vestnik psichologii, kriminal'noj antropologii i gipnotizma] as early as 1904, representing the very first translation of any work in the field.245 In 1908 Nikolay Osipov, a doctor at the Psychiatric Clinic of Moscow University, began to publish articles in psychoanalysis.246 (Like many early Russian psychoanalysts he had first learned about Freud as a student in Switzerland.) It was also in 1908 that Osipov paid Freud a visit in Vienna. On his return to Moscow he set up a small study group. Vladimir Serbsky, the director of the hospital, joined the group and soon decided to open a special psychoanalytical ward at the clinic for nervous diseases. In 1912 Osipov published his first case study – the history of a patient with an anxiety disorder.247 In 1909 – the year that marked the birth of the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psycho|pathologische Forschungen – Osipov and a certain Nikolay Vyrubov founded the journal Психотерапия [Psichoterapija], to which Osipov contributed a great number of articles.248 Thirty issues of the journal appeared until 1914. Aleksander Etkind identified a steadily growing proportion of articles with a psychoanalytical orientation: some 42% of the articles published in 1910 deal with psychoanalysis (including translations of works by Freud and his students, such as Stekel and Adler; these articles mostly focused on therapeutic technique, but also touched on other subjects – Freud’s “Creative Writers and Day-dreaming” is a case in point); in 1911 the proportion rises to 62%; in 1912 it is 71% and in 1913 no less than 87%.249 In 1909 Osipov also began – in collaboration with Osip Feltsman – to publish translations of Freud in the series Психотерапевтическая библиотека [Psikhoterapevticheskaia biblioteka], which appeared with the publisher “Hаука” [Nauka]. By 1914 they had made available a number of books by Freud, including Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, the case study called “Little Hans” (Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy), as well as Freud’s interpretation of Wilhelm Jensen’s novel Gradiva and The Interpretation of Dreams.

199Psychoanalysis also blossomed in Odesa, where Moshe Woolf practiced medicine after completing his studies with Karl Abraham in Germany. When Osipov emigrated to Prague after the Russian Revolution, Woolff took over his editorial responsibilities. He was Freud’s tireless Russian translator and the most active populariser of psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union until he left for Germany in 1927. As early as 1912, Freud wrote in a letter to Jung that “a local epidemic of psycho-analysis” was raging in Russia (p. 9), but its popularity would peak after the revolution of 1917, especially in the early 1920s. In 1922, Woolf’s translation of Freud’s Introduction to Psychoanalysis, which had a print run of 2000 copies, was sold out within a month. At the congress in The Hague in 1920, Russian members of the International Psychoanalytical Association were influential enough to ask that the psychoanalytical press should include articles in Russian as well as Russian abstracts of other articles. Their request was denied only because printing in the Cyrillic alphabet turned out to be too costly.250 Following Berlin and Vienna, the third psychoanalytical training institute with a clinic was founded in Moscow in 1922 (Государственный психоаналиический институт [Gosudarstvennyj psichoanalitičeskij institut]).251 It enjoyed the authorities’ approval at first and received funding from the central administration – in fact no other government ever supported psychoanalysis in this way. Besides Leon Trotsky, who met Adler in 1908 and participated in psychoanalytical gatherings, the party leaders who were favourably disposed towards psychoanalysis were Nikolai Bukharin, Karl Radek and Adolph Joffe. In 1922, the Russian Psychoanalytical Society (Русское психоаналитическое общество; Russkoe psichoanalitičeskoe obščestvo) was founded in Moscow; Ivan Ermakov was its first chair. Alexander Luria established an analogous body in Kazan the following year, while smaller groups were active in Leningrad, Odesa, Kharkiv and in Rostov-on-Don. These societies merged and were incorporated into the IPA in 1924. The Russian Psychoanalytical Society was disbanded in 1933, three years after its last report appeared in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse. It was also in 1930 that the Moscow-based Institute of Psychoanalysis (Государственный психоана|литический институт [Gosudarstvennyj psichoanalitičeskij institut]) was closed and that the last Russian translation of a work by Freud – The Future of an Illusion – was published. This date, which coincides with Trotsky’s defeat and his expulsion from the Soviet Union, marks the end of psychoanalysis in Russia.

200Before World War I Russian scholarship had a significant impact on researchers in Warsaw. The volumes of the Психотерапевтическая библиотека [Psichoterapevtičeskaja biblioteka] edited by Osipov and Ermakov and published with the Moscow-based “Hаука,” [Nauka] can still be found at Warsaw University’s library. The first issue of Neurologia Polska contains a summary of three successive volumes of the Russian Психотерапия [Psichoterapija].252 The roundabout way in which psychoanalysis percolated into medical circles in Warsaw is also exemplified by a publication by Tadeusz Jaroszyński, a member of the Warsaw Medical Association. On 7 May 1910 he gave a paper titled “Psychologia i psychoterapia histerii” [The Psychology and Psychotherapy of Hysteria] which was later published in Medycyna i Kronika Lekarska. Although he had discussed Freud’s work with Jekels at the Congress in 1908, it seems that he only had second-hand-knowledge of Freud’s theory – his bibliography barely contains any references to psychoanalysis.253 The only works by Freud that are listed are a short article titled “L’Hérédité et l’étiologie des névroses” from a 1896 issue of Revue neurologique (this text never appeared in any other language), which Jaroszyński had possibly come across during his stay in Paris, as well as Freud’s recently published Über Psychoanalyse, a short volume based on his American lectures in which he summarises the key concepts of psycho|analysis. Jaroszyński’s bibliography does, however, mention Osipov’s “О психоанализе [O psikhoanalize],” published in the third issue of the Russian Психо|терапия [Psichoterapija] in 1910. If Freud’s theory aroused any interest in Warsaw it was only marginally thanks to Jekels’ efforts. They would most likely have gone entirely unnoticed if not for the news about the new trend raging in the psychiatric wards of the capital of the Russian Empire.

Zoë Jekels

201One event that was to have a deciding impact on Jekels’ life was a personal tragedy. On 21 January 1910 his wife Zoë, aged thirty-one, took her own life with a revolver. The reasons for her suicide are unknown. Zoë Jekels – or Jekelsowa in early-twentieth-century Polish – was a writer with a few volumes of poetry and prose in German published under the pseudonym “Zoë”.254 In November 1908 Kurier Warszawski printed a short article on her in the column “Z literatur obcych” [From foreign literatures]:

For some time now German-language critics, especially in Viennese magazines, have been paying particular attention to the poems, novels and plays appearing under the pseudonym “Zoë”. This name stands for a young and good-looking writer, Mrs Zoë Jekelsowa, wife of Dr Ludwig Jekels from Lviv, owner and director of a sanatorium in Bystra in Austrian Silesia. Mrs Jekelsowa is the daughter of Wilhelm Gross, a highly respected lawyer in Cieszyn, and her mother is a native Viennese; she speaks German fluently and uses this language for her literary work. She has published at various intervals: the poetry collection Die Fluthen [The Waves]; the novels Uferlos [Borderless], Tempelschänder [Temple Desecrators], Über den Wolken: Märchen für Erwachsene [Above the Clouds: Fairy Tales for Adults] and more. Most recently Mrs Jekelsowa has written Die Spiele Ihrer Exzellenz [The Games of Her Excellency], which is to be performed on several German stages. This comedy, whose plot is based on recent events, is set in Moscow, and it has already been translated into English for Britain and America; Mrs Florentyna Lubodziecka has also translated the piece into Polish for the theatre in Cracow.255

202Zoë Jekels wrote Die Spiele Ihrer Exzellenz together with Rudolf Strauss, a journalist and writer about five years her senior. Nothing is known about their relationship. Strauss, born in Bielsko in 1874, graduated from secondary school there in 1893.256 Having moved to Vienna, he founded the journal Liebelei in 1896, and he co-founded and edited the Wiener Rundschau. By 1899 he was in charge of the review Die Wage and joined the editorial team of Neue Freie Presse.257 Besides essays on literature and theatre he also wrote short stories: the collection Mädchen und Frauen [Girls and Women] appeared in 1898, Sumpf und Sonne [Bog and Sun] in 1906. He also experimented with comedy writing in Die Waffe des Don Juan [The Weapon of Don Juan, 1901]. Die Spiele Ihrer Exzellenz is a farce that takes place against the background of the 1905 Russian Revolution. The protagonist Vera – the titular “Her Excellency” – is the shallow wife of a governor who despises her husband and is bored with her comfortable life. The first act centres on a reception hosted by the governor. Vera has little understanding of the political situation and thinks of nothing but dressing for the evening and seducing a certain count Alexinsky. At the reception, a revolutionary throws a bomb and the governor dies. In the second act Vera is so curious about the assassin that she visits him in prison. (The only line that the censor objected to in his political tirade was his exclamation, “Long live the revolution!”.) She is so impressed with the young socialist who fights for his convictions that she decides to become active in the underground movement. She finds a new “game”: helping socialists escape from prison and obtaining information from the director of the police to warn them of planned raids. Her new double life is a welcome distraction from her boredom. In the third act her political engagement is put to the test. She is to help assassinate count Alexinsky, whose lover she had hoped to become. The final scene, amusing even today, combines a political execution with intense flirtation. Vera is easily disarmed, and the play ends with the would-be Judith and her Holofernes leaving for Monte Carlo.

203Die Spiele Ihrer Exzellenz was Zoë Jekels’ greatest literary success. The text was published in Vienna in 1909.258 It was performed at Vienna’s Burgtheater and Berlin’s Neues Schauspielhaus (the prominent critic Siegfried Jacobsohn wrote a scathing review in which he wondered what was more embarrassing – Zoë Jekels’ lack of talent or her lack of taste259). As for the Polish verion, Florentyna Lubodziecka did indeed translate the play into Polish, but it was for the theatre in Lviv, where it was staged on 7 November 1910. The Polish translation was never published but two manuscript copies survive – one for the censorship board and one for the prompter.260 The actors in the main roles at the Lviv theatre were Wanda Siemaszkowa as Vera and Roman Żelazowski as Alexinsky. Kornel Makuszyński reviewed the piece for Słowo Polskie, judging it to be rather weak in general but praising the well-written final scene and the actors’ performance in it:

In the first act of The Games of Her Excellency a bomb explodes with a loud bang. We should read this as a sign of the authors’ honesty – they make clear […] what we are in for. The smell of dynamite hovers above the stage almost until the very end, when the scent of perfumes becomes clearly noticeable – apparently French and not of the cheapest sort. We cannot tell which of the two playwrights wrote the final scenes, but out of gallantry let us assume that it was the lady; the last scenes of this comedy may not be a demonstration of talent but they do bespeak perfect familiarity with contemporary French comedy writing […]. To experience the denouement of the play we are required to stay until the end; this suggests that the writers were quite clever, but in this regard every playwright today is wiser than the host of the wedding at Cana, who kept inferior wines to be served at the end. In times of drought and infertility three jokes make a farce and one scene make a comedy, which is why the best parts cannot be staged right in the beginning. This is why “Her Excellency,” a very clever woman, keeps “playing” for three acts, just like that, pour passer le temps, until nine o’clock, because it would be unseemly to end a play before ten; then she begins to act with more brio and everyone is satisfied. There was nothing exceptional, – well, but that final scene… Everything has been seen before, yes, but that “final” scene. A melodrama with “psychology,” – well, yes, but then that final scene…261

204In the remaining part of the review Makuszyński remarks that the audience was unusually kind, alluding to Zoë Jekels’ recent suicide: “yesterday’s performance enjoyed a strange sympathy among the public; sorrowful tales about its young author made an impression”.Obituaries appeared in several Polish-language publications. Kurier Warszawski, for instance, published a eulogy:
“She was on friendly terms with many families from Warsaw and across the Kingdom who had spent time at the spa in Bystra. Her manner was cordial and friendly, so that people were always fond of her. She took advantage of the fact that several Polish writers visited Bystra and made an effort to become acquainted with the treasures of our poetry, becoming enchanted with the beauty of Mickiewicz’s verse and the wondrous flights of imagination of Słowacki and others. To her children she passed on the Polish language and culture” (KW 1910, no. 27, p. 3).
Then he adds:

However, even without these stories one might take a liking to this play, which is half naive, half skilful, half strained and half sincere. There is a harmless charm in its naive reflection on important issues and in the sincere enthusiasm that overflows from its schoolgirlish references to bloody tragedies ; our attention is drawn to the skilful application of something that resembles psychological problems when viewed from a distance or through a magnifying glass, but which is in fact a commonplace from a literary handbook on feminine inconsistencies, and which essentially serves French comedy as an everyday motif. (ibid.)

205It is noteworthy that Makuszyński repeatedly uses terms such as psycho|logy or psychological ironically and in quotation marks. He remarks that the playwright produces “almost psychological analyses” just as Viera feigns revolutionary zeal. It is not clear if Ludwig Jekels attended the premiere, less than a year after his wife’s death, but Makuszyński’s comment could be an allusion to his profession. Ludwig Jekels was a well-known practitioner at the time; he had talked about the treatment of neuroses using Freud’s method at the Congress of Neurologists, Psychiatrists and Psychologists the year before. One contributor to Kurier Warszawski wrote during that congress:

Warsaw is currently graced with the presence of Mrs Zoë Jekelsowa and her husband, Dr Ludwig Jekels, director and owner of the sanatorium in Bystra in Austrian Silesia, one of the section chairs at the congress of neurologists and psychologists that took place in our city. In German literary circles Mrs Jekelsowa, who publishes under the pseudonym “Zoë,” has long been known for her poetry, novels and plays. One of them, The Games of Her Excellency, which revolves around the most recent revo|lutionary events in Moscow, is about to be staged in Cologne, Vienna and New York. The young, pretty and highly talented Zoë Jekelsowa, daughter of a prominent lawyer in Cieszyn, has been educated in German and writes in that language. That said, she has excellent command of Polish and, thanks to Polish translations, will no doubt soon make a name for herself in our native literature as well.263

206With its revolutionary themes, the play by Zoë Jekels and Rudolf Strauss became unexpectedly relevant again in 1917 and was staged twice more in Warsaw (directed by Karol Borowski at the Teatr Mały, with the brilliant actress Maria Przybyłko-Potocka in the title role) and as a tribute performance in Lublin. Both reviews suggest that Zoë Jekels had sunk into oblivion during World War I. The critic refers to her as “Zoë Jekelesówna,” with a suffix that misidentifies Zoë as the unmarried daughter of Jekels.264 In Kurier Warszawski, where her work was promoted a few years earlier, her name appears as “Zofia Jakielsonowa” and the reviewer, Adam Dobrowolski, describes her as “a lady from Warsaw who witnessed the revolutionary upheavals in Russia in 1905 at close hand and recorded her observations in rough notes that the German playwright [Rudolf Strauss] used to produce a fine play”.265

207One glimpse into Ludwig Jekels’ life after Zoë’s death emerges from his correspondence with Sigmund Freud and his family. From 1 to 28 July, about half a year after he was left a widower, he hosted Freud’s daughters Anna and Sophie, as well as Minna Bernays, Freud’s sister-in-law, in Bystra. Anna, then a troubled fifteen-year-old, was the only one among the Freuds’ six children who chose a career in psychoanalysis. Her first letter to her father, which opens their published correspondence, Briefwechsel (2006), was written in Bystra on 13 July:

I am fine here and I like Dr Jekels a lot. I am doing my best to get as well by autumn as the short time will allow. I am also putting on weight and am already quite plump and fat, but am not being paid anything for it. Dr Jekels is very nice to us and talks a lot about you. He won’t lend me Gradiva, however, without your explicit permission.266

208The correspondence of Freud and Jekels, archived at the Library of Congress, includes letters in which Freud writes about his own plans to visit Bystra. On 14 May 1910 he sent Jekels a postcard asking about detailed information on the amenities at the spa, as he was considering a visit with his family in July.267 On 26 May he told Jung about his plans.268 As late as 5 June he wrote to Ferenczi that Minna was leaving for Bystra with Sophie and Anna, and that he was going to join them there on 14 July.269 On 3 July, however, he wrote that he had changed his mind, indicating briefly that he heard Bystra was too crammed and unsuitable in other ways as well (“Aber wir erfahren, daß Bistrai zuwenig Raum hat und auch sonst nichts Rechtes ist” (p. 184)). In a letter to Jekels written on the same day Freud explains that he was told the villa lacked sufficient space for him and the rest of his family – his wife and two sons – to join Minna, Anna and Sophie, which is why he had to call off his visit and travel straight to Holland. A week later he apologised again, insisting it was not easy for him to reject Jekels’ kind invitation, especially as his womanfolk enjoyed such good care, which should mark the beginning of a friendship between the two families. Another letter was posted on 3 August from Noordwijk by the North Sea: once again Freud thanks Jekels for having taken care of Sophie and Anna, stressing that he found them in excellent health and asking to be charged the full fee for their stay. He also mentions that Minna was talking about him with affection and deep respect, which pleased him greatly.

209Freud’s decision to cancel his trip was most likely informed by the letters he received from Minna.270 On 18 July she reported that the sanatorium was so overcrowded that some of the guests had to take lodgings in nearby homes. Still, in this throng of people there was not one person she could talk to. The barrier was not so much the language – German and French were spoken – but the fact that “the neurotics of the lowest sort” who came to the institute were simply unpleasant. She also wrote that the nervous patients at the spa “are no more abhorrent to anyone than to the doctor himself; he curses every arrival”.271 Similar remarks are also found in Anna’s letters: “Dr Jekels keeps on telling us how he dreads seeing his patients and I can imagine how much more unpleasant it must be for you, since you have even more” (p. 30). She complains: “Most of the people in the establishment are very disagreeable and always stare at us because they can’t imagine what we are doing here; very few of them speak German either” (ibid.). According to Minna, Jekels tried to compensate for these disagreeable experiences by being tirelessly friendly and polite. He spoiled the girls, who were doing well and were quite satisfied. One of their favourite pastimes was to play with Stefan, Jekels’ six-year-old son. Anna was gaining weight, “walks barefoot, always sits in the box seat when we travel and rolls hoops along the road – in other words, back to nature!” (p. 33)

210As early as 20 July, however, Minna announced: “I shall leave Galicia with no heartache, it was really awfully dull here, either for the south or at least for the west!”272 Three days later she was impatient with Freud because he still had not made up his mind about where to go with the whole family and asked her to prolong her stay in Bystra. To give him a sense of the place she conjures up the mugginess of Reichenhall and the humidity of Alt-Aussee and suggests Bystra was similar, “minus, of course, the charm of those two places”. In Minna’s account the sanatorium was so hideous that she deserved a reward for having stopped Freud from coming. “But the poor doctor need not know about this,” she added. “He harbours a fanatical cult about you. We had one of your photographs framed for him in Bielsko – he hung it above his bed as the only ornament in his room”. Minna felt sorry for Jekels, pestered by people whom she found repulsive. Jokingly she wrote that she would have to write an article on the psychology of the sanatorium for Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse. Two days later she assured her worried brother-in-law that despite a certain discomfort the girls were having a good time, that they were always cheerful and polite, and that Anna had certainly been cured for good (pp. 260-261).

211Minna urged Freud not to discuss financial matters with Jekels, cautioning him that the question of billing would offend him. Jekels, she insists, would be overjoyed if Freud only professed his friendship and respect. “I cannot describe to you how much he cares about you and how attached he has become to us.” Minna also mentions that she promised Jekels to take care of his child – probably a reference to placing Stefan in a school. After the death of his mother the boy was admitted to the boarding school by the Kremsmünster Benedictine Abbey; he later made a living producing film posters and advertising for the Austrian press.273 According to Hermann Nunberg he died from tuberculosis before World War II. All that is known about Jekels’ older son, Alfred, is that he was mentally ill and died at the hands of the Nazis.274

212In his memoirs Jekels writes that he had invited the entire Freud family to Bystra but that plans were changed due to the bad weather, so that Sigmund Freud’s arrival was called off and Minna, Sophie and Anna left early. This must have been the explanation he was given by the Freuds, or at least it is the reason he chose to remember half a century later. He also adds that it was not so much this unfortunate turn of events that stood in the way of their continued personal interaction but the fact that he began to undergo an analysis with Freud.275

213The duration of Jekels’ therapy is not easy to determine. It probably began with irregular meetings that took place during his visits to Vienna (perhaps in 1908, when he stayed for two months), but a systematic analysis could only have started in 1912, after Jekels sold the sanatorium and moved to Vienna. (His state at the time is suggested in an anonymised patient history written few years later. This short text, titled “Eine Symptomhandlung” and published in Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse in 1913, describes the case of a neurotic doctor who feels guilty for the tragic demise of his young and beautiful wife and is afraid to enter into a relationship with another woman because he worries she would suffer the same fate.276) Thanks to the recent discovery of Freud’s patient calendar from 1910 to 1920, currently held at the Freud Museum in London, we know that Jekels was seeing his analyst throughout the “season” of 1912/1913.277 Freud always saw his clients from the autumn until the end of June, then he would spend two or three months holidaying with his family. While most analyses lasted less than three months, Jekels came to Berggasse five days a week from Tuesday 15 October 1912 until Saturday 4 July 1913 and spent a total of one hundred and seventy-five hours on Freud’s couch. In this sense his case is unique. Unfortunately the calendar, probably used as a billing record, only reveals the names of the patients, without any mention of their therapeutic process. For Ulrike May, the length and intensity of Jekels’ analysis suggests that he was undergoing therapy rather than simply being analysed as part of his own training as a psychoanalyst. The fact that several of Jekels’ colleagues in Vienna mention his depression apparently confirms this assumption.278

Notes

• 1 Reconstructing Jekels’ biography I draw extensively on B.G. Czarnecki’s doctoral thesis, “Ludwig Jekels (1867–1954) und die Anfänge der Psychoanalyse in Polen, Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Zahnmedizin der Medizinischen Fakultät der Eberhard Karls Universität zu Tübingen”, Institut für Ethik und Geschichte der Medizin, 2006. Czarnecki presents a wealth of unpublished archival material, e.g. from the Historical Museum in Bielsko-Biała, the Książnica Beskidzka library, the archive of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute as well as two archives in Vienna – the Universitätsarchiv and the Wiener Stadt und Landesarchiv.
• 2 See PSIA 1883, no. 44, p. 354.
• 3 The report of the gymnasium’s directorate is reproduced in J. Kowalczuk, Historia szkolnictwa, oświaty i wychowania na ziemiach odłączonych II Rzeczypospolitej – Kresach Południowo-Wschodnich (Cracow: Kowalczuk, 2008), vol. 6, p. 455.
• 4 When Jekels was a boy, the school, being an Austrian institution, was called “II C.K. Gimnazjum we Lwowie”. In 1930 it was part of the Polish educational system called “II Państwowe Gimnazjum im. Karola Szajnochy”.
• 5 Księga pamiątkowa II Państwowego Gimnazjum im. Karola Szajnochy we Lwowie 1820–1930: Rozprawy byłych uczniów i profesorów II Gimnazjum (Lviv: Drukarnia uniwersytecka, 1930). This article was based on the German version published the same year: L. Jekels, “Zur Psychologie des Mitleids”, I 1930, no. 1, pp. 5-22. For an English version see L. Jekels, “The Psychology of Pity” in Selected Papers (New York: International Universities Press, 1952), pp. 88-96.
• 6 B.G. Czarnecki, Ludwig Jekels, pp. 14-15.
• 7 KL 1897, no. 135, p. 9.
• 8 Krzysztof Pawlak and Zbigniew Sokolik falsely place Bystra near Lviv. See their chapter on Poland in Psychoanalysis International: A Guide to Psychoanalysis throughout the World, ed. by P. Kutter (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1992), vol. 1, pp. 243-251.
• 9 According to an Austrian census of 1900, the Galician part had 947 inhabitants, all of whom were Polish-speaking Catholics. Of the 487 individuals who lived in the Silesian part of Bystra, 361 were Catholics, 85 Protestants, and 41 Jews; 312 of the inhabitants were German-speakers and 173 spoke Polish, while one person indicated Czech as their mother tongue. Gemeindelexikon der im Reichsrate vertretenen Königreiche und Länder, bearbeitet auf Grund der Ergebnisse der Volkszählung vom 31. Dezember 1900, vol. XI: Schlesien (Vienna: Hölder, 1906); vol. XII: Galizien (Vienna: Hölder, 1907).
• 10 See the advertising brochure Sanatoryum i zakład wodoleczniczy „Bystra” w Śląskich Beskidach: Leczenie fizykalno-dyetetyczne (Bielitz: Sohmeer, 1902), p. 10.
• 11 See for instance the German-language Silesia 1898, no. 101, p. 7. Sanatoryum i zakład wodoleczniczy „Bystra”; Sanatorium „Bistrai” bei Bielitz in den Schlesischen Beskiden: Physikalisch-diätetische Behandlung (Vienna: Industrie, 1904).
• 12 L. Korczyński, Zarys balneoterapii i balneografii krajowej (Cracow: Korczyński, 1900), p. 276.
• 13 Exemplary civil servants’ yearly salaries in 1902 were 24,000 Kronen (mayor); 11,280 Kronen (councillor); 8,640 Kronen (auditor); 2,122 (court usher). The average monthly rent for a one-bedroom flat in Lviv was 278 Kronen. Stanisław Hoszowski, Ceny we Lwowie w latach 1701-1914, Badania z dziejów społecznych i gospodarczych, 13 (Lviv: Mianowski, 1934), pp. 146-155 and p. 175.
• 14 Sanatoryum i zakład, p. 30.
• 15 Jekels produced his recollections at the request of Siegfried Bernfeld, who was writing a biography of Freud. The typescript is held in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. (Manuscript Division, Siegfried Bernfeld Papers, Box 17: Recollection of Ludwig Jekels). Jekels wrote his recollections in English, probably not long before he died. The text is not dated, but other accounts in the collection were all written in the early 1950s.
• 16 S. Freud, “Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses”, SE III, p. 274.
• 17 “Recollection of Ludwig Jekels”, p. 2.
• 18 I. Sadger, Recollecting Freud, ed. by A. Dundes, trans. by A. Dundes and J.M. Jacobsen (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), pp. 7-8.
• 19 “Recollection of Ludwig Jekels”, p. 3.
• 20 Cf. E. Mühlleitner, J. Reichmayr, Following Freud in Vienna, p. 81.
• 21 S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE IV, p. 296. Cf. U. May, “Ein Traum und ein Brief: Zur frühen Beziehung zwischen Freud und Isidor Sadger”, LA 1999, no. 24, pp. 25-48.
• 22 I. Sadger, “Das Wunder vom denkenden Eiweiss”, DRV 1897, no. 22, pp. 93-110. Flechsig would later treat Paul Schreber, the “case of paranoia” described by Freud. See S. Freud, Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides), SE XII, pp. 1-82.
• 23 I. Sadger, “Henrik Ibsen – Rosmersholm: Eine psychiatrisch-ästhetische Studie”, AZ 1894, no. 162, no. 164, no. 165; “Ibsens Gespenster: Eine ästhetisch-pathologische Studie”, AZ 1894, no. 229; Ibsens Frau vom Meere: Eine pathologisch-mystische Studie”, AZ 1895, nos 140–141.
• 24 I. Sadger, “Gerhard Hauptmann: Von einem Nervenpathologen”, AZ 1894, nos 142–143. I. Sadger, “Die Leiden Robert Hamerling’s”, WMP 1898, no. 9, no. 19; I. Sadger, “Ferdinand Raimund: Eine pathologische Studie”, DW 1898, nos 23–25; I. Sadger, “War Goethe eine pathologische Erscheinung?”, DRV 1899, no. 24.
• 25 In 1909 Sadger published the book Aus dem Liebesleben Nikolaus Lenau. Cf. “Nikolaus Lenau: Ein pathologisches Lebensbild”, AZ 1895, nos 208–209.
• 26 I. Sadger, Konrad Ferdinand Meyer: Ein pathographisch-psychologische Studie (Wiesbaden: Bergmann, 1908); I. Sadger, Heinrich von Kleist: Ein pathographisch-psychologische Studie (Wiesbaden: Bergmann, 1910); I. Sadger, Friedrich Hebbel, ein psychoanalytischer Versuch (Vienna: Deuticke, 1920). Sadger had already written an article on Hebbel: “Über das Unbewusste und die Träume bei Hebbel”, I 1913, no. 2, pp. 336-356.
• 27 I. Sadger, “Von der Patographie zur Psychobiographie”, I 1912, no. 2, pp. 158-175.
• 28 Cf. U. May-Tolzmann, “Zu den Anfängen des Narzissmus: Ellis – Näcke – Sadger – Freud”, LA 1991, no. 8, pp. 50-88.
• 29 The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, ed. by W. McGuire, trans. by R. Manheim, R.F.C. Hull (London: Hogarth, 1974), p. 128.
• 30 Alan Dundes, “Introduction,” in I. Sadger, Recollecting Freud, p. xxiii.
• 31 Paul Roazen, Helene Deutsch: A Psychoanalyst’s Life (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1985), p. 150.
• 32 “Recollection of Ludwig Jekels”, p. 5.
• 33 Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, vol. 1, p. 476.
• 34 Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, vol. 1, p. 391.
• 35 IZP 1924, no. 2, p. 226.
• 36 A. Janicka, “Doświadczenie ciała i choroby w listach Gabrieli Zapolskiej”, AS 2000, no. 1, p. 130.
• 37 Spas that received such positive reviews include Andrzej Chramiec’s Hydropathic Institute in Zakopane (G. Zapolska, “Cudze chwalicie”, KC 1903, no. 177, pp. 1-2; “Cztery miesiące w Zakładzie dra Chramca”, TZ 1903, no. 6, pp. 41-43); Apolinary Tarnawski’s clinic in Kosiv (G. Zapolska, “Lecznica kosowska”, Ś 1906, no. 29, p. 14); Henryk Ebers’ sanatoria in Krynica (G. Zapolska, “Przez moje okno”, KW 1907, no. 193, pp. 2-3) and the Venice Lido (G. Zapolska, “Na Lido”, SPL 1907, no. 128, pp. 1-2; “Przez moje okno”, KW 1907, no. 80, pp. 2-3; “Zima na Lido”, NIL 1907, no. 12, pp. 7-8; “Na Lido”, TI 1907, no. 52, pp. 1062-1063); Dr Żurakowski’s clinic in Tatarów (G. Zapolska, “Przez moje okno: W sanatorium dra Żurakowskiego”, WN 1912, no. 3323, pp. 4-5, no. 3324, pp. 4-5, no. 3325, pp. 4-5) and Józef Zakrzewski’s “Mariówka” near Lviv (G. Zapolska, “Na czasie”, SPL 1909, no. 328, pp. 1-2).
• 38 G. Zapolska, “Na czasie”, p. 1.
• 39 This play was published in Niedrukowane dramaty Gabrieli Zapolskiej, vol. 2, ed. by J. Jakóbczyk (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2012).
• 40 Maria Komornicka published a scathing review of the novel in the literary journal Chimera: Włast [M. Komornicka], “Powieść”, CH 1905, vol. 9, no. 27, p. 508.
• 41 This exemplary advertisement appeared in the satirical journal Mucha (1909, nos 21 and 23). Jekels also had it published in Nowa Gazeta (1909, nos 221, 232, 321, 357).
• 42 G. Zapolska, Listy, ed. by S. Linowska (Warsaw: PIW, 1970), vol. 2, p. 476.
• 43 “Listy Gabrieli Zapolskiej do Stanisława Janowskiego z lat VI 1906 – I 1907”, Biblioteka Ossolińskich, Manuscript 12.055/I.
• 44 p. 3–4. This letter was written on “Friday”. The date would probably have been 1 June 1906.
• 45 p. 6–7. This letter was written on “Wednesday,” probably 6 June 1906.
• 46 p. 9–10. This letter was written on “Saturday, 6 a.m.,” probably 9 June 1906.
• 47 G. Zapolska, Listy, vol. 2, p. 200.
• 48 See A. Guillemot, M. Laxenaire, Anorexie mentale et boulimie: Le poids de la culture (Paris: Masson, 1997), p. 8.
• 49 Such opposition to authority was seen as characteristic of hysteria in general, as I discuss in my article “Wokół ‘żony rzeźnika’: Modele histerii u Freuda i Lacana”, in Freud i nowoczesność, ed. by Z. Rosińska, J. Michalik, P. Bursztyka (Cracow: Universitas, 2008), pp. 175-191. It is also worth noting that Dora, Freud’s famous case of hysteria and his most obstinate and rebellious patient, is said to have suffered from anorexia (cf. M. Ramas, “Freud’s Dora, Dora’s Hysteria: The negation of Woman’s Rebellion”, FS 1980, no. 3, pp. 472-510).
• 50 S. Freud, “A Case of Successful Treatment by Hypnotism”, SE I, pp. 115-128.
• 51 S. Freud, J. Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, SE II, pp. 48-105. For a detailed discussion of the case of Emmy von N. (Fanny Moser) see Ola Andersson, “A supplement to Freud’s case history of ‘Frau Emmy von N.’”, in Studies of Hysteria 1895, Scandinavian Psychoanalytical Review, 1979, 2 (1), pp. 5-16.
• 52 G. Zapolska, Listy, vol. 2, p. 127.
• 53 Freud writes about the relationship between anorexia and melancholia in a letter to Fliess in December 1894. (The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904, trans. and ed. by J. Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1985), p. 99). He also discusses the refusal to eat as a symptom of melancholia in his famous essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1915), SE XIV, pp. 249-250. Many years later Gustav Bychowski, another Polish Freudian, would explore this relationship and the suicidal tendencies behind anorexia. See G. Bychowski, “Structure des dépressions chroniques et latentes”, RFP 1961, nos 4/5/6, pp. 927-935.
• 54 L. Jekels, “Leczenie psychoneuroz za pomocą metody psychoanalitycznej Freuda, tudzież kazuistyka”, in Prace I-go Zjazdu neurologów, psychiatrów i psychologów polskich odbytego w Warszawie 11–12–13 Października 1909 r., ed. by A. Ciągliński, W. Gajkiewicz, W. Męczkowski, R. Radziwiłłowicz, J. Rotstadt, A. Wizel, L. Biszofswerder (Warsaw: Wende i S-ka, 1910).
• 55 L. Jekels, E. Bergler, “Übertragung und Liebe”, I 1934, no. 1, pp. 5-31.
• 56 Publicola [W. Zagórski], “Histerya w naszej literaturze (Felieton patologiczny)”, SŁ 1885, nos 147–149. Józef Kotarbiński published a response in Kurier Codzienny, which incited Zagórski to further publications: “Histerya w naszej polemice”, SŁ 1885, nos 177–178, “Polemika o histeryę w polemice”, SŁ 1885, nos 211–213. From today’s perspective the debate appears to have concerned conflicting definitions of realism: for Kotarbiński, a defender of naturalism, the phenomenon that Zagórski labelled “hysteria” only fulfilled the principles of realistic representation.
• 57 This accusation appears in an article by Józef K. Potocki (Marian Bohusz [Józef K. Potocki], Przegląd literacki, “Wędrowiec” 1885 no. 31, p. 364.) as well as in Jan L. Popławski’s particularly abusive article “Sztandar ze spódnicy” (A Banner Made from a Skirt), in Prawda. See Wiat. [J.L. Popławski], “Sztandar ze spódnicy”, P 1885, no. 35, reprinted in A. Janicka, Sprawa Zapolskiej (Białystok: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu w Białymstoku, 2013), pp. 234-240.
• 58 B. Chrzanowski, “Histeria w beletrystyce”, NI 1894, no. 3, pp. 58-63.
• 59 S. Brzozowski, Współczesna powieść i krytyka literacka (Warsaw: PIW, 1971), pp. 113-116.
• 60 D. Sajewska, Chore sztuki: Choroba/tożsamość/dramat (Cracow: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2005), esp. pp. 497-519; K. Kłosińska, Ciało, pożądanie, ubranie: O wczesnych powieściach Gabrieli Zapolskiej (Cracow: Wydawnictwo eFKa, 1999); A. Janicka, “Figury tożsamości: O języku bohaterek w prozie Gabrieli Zapolskiej”, in Literatura Młodej Polski: Między XIX a XX wiekiem, ed. by J. Sztachelska, E. Paczoska (Białystok: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu w Białymstoku, 1998).
• 61 G. Zapolska, “Zaśniedziały systemik”, SPL 1909, no. 16, pp. 1-3.
• 62 Cf. K. Kłosińska, Ciało, pożądanie, pp. 7-37.
• 63 See A. Janicka, “Paryż 1889: Relacje prasowe Gabrieli Zapolskiej”, in Obrazy stolic europejskich w piśmiennictwie polskim, ed. by A. Tyszka (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Akademii Humanistyczno-Ekonomicznej, 2010), pp. 157-162.
• 64 G. Zapolska, “Bal wariatek w Salpêtrière”, PT 1892, no. 16, pp. 196-197, “Wykład Charcota”, PT 1893, no. 25, pp. 287-288.
• 65 Cf. G. Didi-Huberman, Invention de l’hystérie: Charcot et l’iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (Paris: Macula, 1982). Detailed photographic documentation of Charcot’s pseudo-theatrical performances survives. For instance, the famous publication Iconographie de la Salpêtrière, a catalogue in 32 volumes published between 1875 and 1918, offers case descriptions and photographs of the patients. It contains numerous cases of anorexics patients stripped and exposed for the benefit of anyone who cared to look.
• 66 See J. Ochorowicz, “Przed trzydziestu laty,” in Wspomnienia o Bolesławie Prusie, ed. by S. Fita (Warsaw: PIW, 1962), pp. 23-40.
• 67 J. Ochorowicz, Jak należy badać duszę, czyli o metodzie badań psychologicznych (Warsaw: Ochorowicz, 1869).
• 68 The first was a study in criminal psychology: J. Ochorowicz, Miłość, zbrodnia, wiara i moralność: Kilka studiów z psychologii kryminalnej (Warsaw: Ochorowicz, 1870). It was followed by two theoretical treatises: O wolności woli (Warsaw: nakład prenumeratorów, 1871), and Duch i mózg: Studium psycho-fizjologiczne (Warsaw: Księgarnia Maurycego Orgelbranda, 1872).
• 69 J. Ochorowicz, Bedingungen des Bewusstwerdens: Eine physiologisch-psychologische Studie (Leipzig: Heinrich Matthes, 1874).
• 70 See E. Kosnarewicz, “Czy praca historyka jest złudzeniem?”, FP 1997, vol. II, no. 2, p. 58.
• 71 Richet and his team worked unofficially, they did not belong to the group led by Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière, nor were they tied to the competing school around Hippolyte Bernheim in Nancy. Cf. S. Nicolas, L’hypnose: Charcot face à Bernheim. L’école de la Salpêtrière face à l’école de Nancy (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004); P.H. Castel, La Querelle de l’hystérie: La formation du discours psychopathologique en France (1881–1913) (Paris: PUF, 1998).
• 72 Ochorowicz describes the tests he performed at the Salpêtrière in a commentary on the Polish translations of his French articles; these were included in his monumental Psychologia i medycyna (Psychology and Medicine, 1916 (vol. 1)), the first original Polish psychology handbook aimed at non-specialist readers.
• 73 J. Ochorowicz, “Projet d’un congrès international de psychologie”, RPF 1881, vol. XII, pp. 1-17. In 1916 Ochorowicz recalled:
  “Leaving Lviv, where I had worked as a lecturer for six years, I decided to move to Paris; to prepare the ground I sent Ribot’s Revue Philosophique a little treatise on the current state of psychology, including a project to organise international congresses for those who work in the field […]. When I visited Ribot in Paris in 1881 to discuss the congress he smiled wearily and said, more or less: ‘A congresses for psychologists! That’s a fine idea, which is why I was very happy to print your article. But where would you find the psychologists for such meetings? … I cannot see them.’ ‘How is that’, I said, baffled, and began to list names of French writers of books, translations and monographs. ‘Yes, there are a few of us, perhaps over a dozen; but these are either secondary school philosophy teachers, scattered across the provinces, or doctors who dabble in psychology in their free time, or, finally, professional philosophers who will shrug at the thought of a congress...’” J. Ochorowicz, Psychologia i medycyna (Warsaw: Gebethner i Wolff, 1916), vol. 1, p. 4.
  At the congress in 1889 Ochorowicz gave a paper critiquing Bernheim: “Des différences qui existent entre le sommeil hypnotique et le sommeil normal”. A Polish version published in 1916 contains a report on the entire congress. See J. Ochorowicz, “Kwestie psycho-medyczne na pierwszym kongresie międzynarodowym Psychologii Fizjologicznej”, in Psychologia i medycyna, vol. 2, pp. 227-261.
  
• 74 The First International Congress for Experimental and Therapeutic Hypnotism [Premier Congrès International de l’hypnotisme expérimental et thérapeutique] took place from 8 to 12 August 1889. Cf. L. Chertok, R. de Saussure, The Therapeutic Revolution, from Mesmer to Freud, trans. by R. H. Ahrenfeldt (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1979), pp. 120-121.
• 75 J. Ochorowicz, De la suggestion mentale (Paris: Octave Doin, 1887) (2^nd ed. 1889); J. Ochorowicz, Mental Suggestion, trans. by J. Fitzgerald (New York: The Humboldt Publishing, 1891) (the title page reads: “Dr. J. Ochorowicz, Sometime Professor Extra|ordinarius of Psychology and Nature-Philosophy in the University of Lemberg”). A Polish translation was not published until 1937: Julian Ochorowicz, O sugestii myślowej, trans. by J. Dembowska-Duninowa, foreword by Charles Richet, foreword to the Polish edition by Józef Świtkowski (Cracow: Redakcja “Lotosu”, 1937).
• 76 Working under Charcot, Freud lost his passion for laboratory research and turned to psychopathology and therapy, but it would not be until the mid-1890s that he established a reputation of his own. In fact, for years after his return Vienna he was known as a student of the Salpêtrière’s famous psychiatrist. He also translated several works by Charcot and Bernheim into German. Freud’s translation of Charcot’s Neue Vorlesungen über die Krankheiten des Nervensystems, insbesondere über Hysterie was published in 1886. Freud also translated two works by Bernheim: Die Suggestion und ihre Heilwirkung was published, with a lengthy preface by Freud, in 1888, while Neue Studien über Hypnotismus, Suggestion und Psychotherapie appeared in 1892. Only gradually did he develop his own method and disagree with his colleagues in France, who saw heredity as the key factor in the aetiology of nervous illnesses. It was Freud’s notion of repression, introduced in his article “Die Abwehr-Neuropsychosen” in 1894, that marked the beginning of his career as an independent researcher on hysteria.
• 77 Cf. G. Zapolska, Listy, vol. 1, p. 413. On Maupassant’s visit to the asylum in 1885 see J. Poirier, Littérature et psychanalyse: Les écrivains français face au freudisme 1914–1944 (Dijon: Éditions universitaires de Dijon, 1998), p. 7. J. Beizer discusses hysteria in nineteenth-century French literature in Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
• 78 Translator’s Note: Zapolska’s novel Przedpiekle (“literally “pre-hell,” a term that is distinct from both purgatory and limbo) is not available in English, but various translations of the title have been proposed. Teresa Murjas translates it as “Hell’s Mouth” in her study The Morality of Mrs. Dulska: A Play by Gabriela (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2007); Halina Filipowicz’s version is “On the Threshold of Hell,” cf. A Laboratory of Impure Forms: The Plays of Tadeusz Różewicz (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991). Other anonymous propositions include “The Gateway to Hell”, “Anteroom to Hell”, “Foretaste of Hell”.
• 79 Cf. K. Kłosińska, Ciało, pożądanie, pp. 211-243.
• 80 Letter to Adam Wiślicki dated 11/06/1894, G. Zapolska, Listy, vol. 1, p. 447.
• 81 G. Zapolska, Przedpiekle (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1957), pp. 250-251.
• 82 Nota wydawcy [Editor’s note, no name], in G. Zapolska, Janka: Powieść współczesna (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1957), p. 365.
• 83 Cf. K. Kłosińska, Ciało, pożądanie, pp. 225-227.
• 84 G. Zapolska, Janka, pp. 317-319.
• 85 Similar dynamics mark the description of the boarding school in Zapolska’s Przedpiekle. Once Stasia starts having nervous attacks, the other girls come down with the same affliction. During an evening prayer mass hysteria erupts in the girls’ dormitory:
  “As if an echo was roused, Stasia’s cry is answered by another similar cry, then a third and fourth. Finally those cries blend into a choir and now more than a dozen girls are standing up, swirling and falling down, bodies hitting the floor. Like an epidemic these convulsions pass through the rows of agitated girls. […] they continue to writhe in contortions, biting into their own flesh, tearing at their clothes. At the same time they scream incomplete sentences, choking on their own words or spitting them out with foam. This is one bundle of nerves, writhing, unfettered, refusing to obey. The whiteness of their flesh stands out against the sombre backdrop of their dresses, their twisted faces shine among dense tangles of hair. The entire dormitory is filled with cries, wails and hysterical laughter. The misery of womankind presents itself in its fullness, the plague that besets society shows in all its ugliness”. (pp. 247-248)
  
• 86 G. Zapolska, Publicystyka, ed. by J. Czachowska, E. Korzeniewska (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1959), vol. 2, p. 172.
• 87 Gordon Craig, “The Actor and the Uber-Marionette,” in On the Art of the Theatre (London: Heinemann 1912), pp. 54-95.
• 88 The ball at the Salpêtrière, where gangs of men come to visit marginalised women, has some aspects in common with a mid-Lent tradition in rural Poland, where boys go around smashing clay pots filled with ash on the doors of houses of marriageable girls. This violent form of courtship stigmatises girls who failed to find a husband in the preceding carnival season. Group pressure is exerted to control women’s choices and, ultimately, their lives.
• 89 Zapolska portrays the promiscuity of such dances through the male protagonist of her novel O czym się nie mówi [What No One Talks About, 1909]. He remembers a young lady who barely made an effort to conceal her immodest pursuit of pleasure:
  “She was able to arouse herself and her partner and make them both climax, knowing full well that she would come out unscathed because she came… from a good family. With this brand as her armour she went to market and took big swigs from the dimmed pleasure that, to a woman, can be a hundred times more exciting than giving herself up fully and naturally. Krajewski remembered what torture it was, this stage of insolent debauchery sweetly called flirting, when his physical and mental powers abandoned him, when he struggled with an abomination that surrounded him like a monstrous tangle – a tangle that disdainfully rejected the established order of things. When he pressed that lady’s full and flaming body against his he felt as if he were falling into a sick kind of sleep, a rotten fever that would lure him into a swamp reeking of the vapours of poisonous herbs. Through the gown that sheathed her body he sensed her skilful and unhealthy straining, in her face he saw a quivering and her nostrils flaring, and he understood that in that moment she was making love not to him but to her own sensuality, and that she was going wild with herself alone”. G. Zapolska, O czym się nie mówi (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2002), pp. 77-78.
  
• 90 G. Zapolska, Publicystyka, vol. 2, p. 74.
• 91 Cf. D. Sajewska, Chore sztuki, pp. 428-458.
• 92 The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, The first complete and authorised English translation, trans. by W.M.A. Haussmann, ed. by O. Levy, vol. 1, The Birth of Tragedy, or: Hellenism and Pessimism (Edinburg: Foulis, 1910), p. 26.
• 93 See C.J. Preston, “Posing Modernism: Delartism in Modern Dance and Silent Film”, in Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 58-100.
• 94 Cf. F. McCarren, “The ‘Symptomatic Act’ Circa 1900: Hysteria, Hypnosis, Electricity, Dance”, CI 1995, no. 4, pp. 748-774.
• 95 G. Zapolska, Publicystyka, vol. 2, p. 71.
• 96 D. Sajewska, Chore sztuki, p. 499.
• 97 Sajewska quotes Zapolska’s letter to Wiślicki. See Chore sztuki, p. 511.
• 98 G. Zapolska, Listy, vol. 1, p. 70 (another letter to Wiślicki).
• 99 G. Zapolska, Publicystyka, vol. 2, p. 75.
• 100 G. Zapolska, Publicystyka, vol. 2, pp. 79-80.
• 101 Cf. G. Zapolska, Listy, vol. 1, p. 316.
• 102 G. Zapolska, Publicystyka, vol. 2, p. 71.
• 103 G. Zapolska, Listy, vol. 2, pp. 219-220.
• 104 S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE IV, p. 107. Other interpretations of this dream have been proposed, e.g. by Paweł Dybel in Zagadka „drugiej płci”. Spory wokół różnicy seksualnej w psychoanalizie i feminizmie (Cracow: Universitas, 2006), pp. 151-161 or by Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester in Freud’s Women (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1992), pp. 117-146.
• 105 Zapolska describes autosuggestion not merely as a form of therapy but also as a way to create a new society consisting entirely of “moral giants”. See G. Zapolska, “Wirujące myśli. Siła – wola – wiara”, KW 1910, no. 150, pp. 2-3.
• 106 It is difficult to tell exactly when Szaleństwo was written, as the signature “Mariówka, September 1900” in Zapolska’s collected works (published by Instytut Literacki in 1923) must be a typographical error. The novel was serialised in Dziennik Polski in 1909 and first came out as a book in early 1910. One critic suggests that Zapolska completed the novel at Dr Zakrzewski’s institute in September 1909. See J. Czachowska, Gabriela Zapolska: Monografia bio-bibliograficzna (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1966), p. 420. According to Zapolska’s autobiography (1910), she had already begun working on Szaleństwo at the time of completing Moralność Pani Dulskiej [The Morality of Mrs. Dulska] in November 1906. See “Gabriela Zapolska o sobie”, in G. Zapolska, Jeden dzień z życia róży (Lviv: “Lektor” Instytut Literacki: 1923), p. vi. The fact that the plot combines two noticeably distinct storylines suggests that it may have been written in two stages. The core plot deals with a woman who cannot identify the father of her illegitimate child; she subsequently succumbs to madness. (Many years later, Helena Deutsch would write about uncertain paternity as a risk to a mother’s mental health in The Psychology of Women (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1944), vol. 1, pp. 206-208. Deutsch’s argument shows remarkable similarities with Zapolska’s novel.)
• 107 G. Zapolska, Szaleństwo (Warsaw: Lektor, 1923), p. 42.
• 108 Radziwiłłowicz was the brother-in-law of the novelist Stefan Żeromski and allegedly served as a model for Tomasz Judym, the protagonist of Żeromski’s novel Ludzie bezdomni [Homeless People]. Cf. T. Nasierowski, Żeromski, Strug, Dąbrowska a psychiatrzy wolnomularze (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Instytutu Historii PAN, 1997), pp. 21-59.
• 109 Reconstructing the congress I draw primarily on the following materials: MIK 1909, no. 41, pp. 975-1018; accounts in KW 1909, no. 282–284, as well as the proceedings, Prace I-go Zjazdu neurologów, psychiatrów i psychologów polskich. For a recent discussion of the congress see F. Marcinowski, “‘(...) by popchnąć naprzód świadomość ducha i leczyć jego zboczenia’: Pierwszy zjazd neurologów, psychiatrów i psychologów polskich w Warszawie w 1909 roku”, in Na drogach i bezdrożach historii psychologii, ed. by T. Rzepa, C. Domański (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2014), vol. 3, pp. 211-221.
• 110 According to Jarosław Cabaj it is the medical scientists who organised the greatest number of cross-partition conferences. Ten general conferences for doctors and naturalists took place between 1869 and 1914. Cross-partition conferences for narrower specialisations were launched in the 1880s: surgeons alone were able to attend 17 such events before World War I; there were three conferences on balneology, two on internal medicine, two on psychology and one on hygiene. Cf. J. Cabaj, Walczyć nauką za sprawę Ojczyzny: Zjazdy ponadzaborowe polskich środowisk naukowych i zawodowych jako czynnik integracji narodowej (1869–1914) (Siedlce: Wydawnictwo Akademii Podlaskiej, 2007), pp. 39-53. The Congress of Polish Neurologists, Psychiatrists and Psychologists was the first academic conference in the Russian partition of Poland to attract participants from abroad, and there was only one other event of this kind, namely the Conference of Polish Surgeons in 1910.
• 111 “Pierwszy Zjazd Naukowy”, WC 1909, no. 232, p. 2.
• 112 “Psyche polska”, KPO 1909, no. 11, p. 1.
• 113 A.S., “Święto nauki”, P 1909, no. 42, pp. 8-9, cf. also h.a.k, “Zjazd neurologów, psychiatrów i psychologów polskich”, P 1909, no. 43, pp. 6-7.
• 114 “Pierwszy Zjazd Naukowy”, p. 2.
• 115 W. Męczkowski, “Nerwowość polska (z powodu I Zjazdu neurologów, psychiatrów i psychologów polskich)”, TI 1909, no. 42, p. 852.
• 116 Cf. J. Cabaj, Walczyć nauką, pp. 102-109.
• 117 W.M. Kozłowski, “Pierwszy zjazd naukowy w Warszawie”, KW 1909, no. 285, p. 2.
• 118 KPO 1909, no. 15, p. 1.
• 119 W.M. Kozłowski, “Pierwszy zjazd naukowy w Warszawie”, KW 1909, no. 288, p. 2.
• 120 “Pierwszy zjazd naukowy polski w Warszawie”, TI 1909, no. 42, p. 864. Demil., “Święto nauki polskiej”, Ś 1909, no. 42, pp. 14-15. KPO 1909, no. 13, p. 1.
• 121 E. Abramowski, “Stany podświadome jako zagadnienie psychologii doświadczalnej”, in Prace 1–go Zjazdu, pp. 872-889.
• 122 Ochorowicz did not submit his paper for publication, but it was summarised by the secretaries of the congress in Prace I-go Zjazdu neurologów, psychiatrów i psychologów polskich. See also J. Ochorowicz, “Mediumizm na pierwszym zjeździe polskich neurologów, psychiatrów i psychologów”, DZ 1909, no. 289–292; Dniowy, “XX: Wywiad u prof. Juliana Ochorowicza”, DZ 1909, no. 278.
• 123 “Zjazd neurologów, psychiatrów i psychologów polskich”, KPO 1909, no. 14, cf. also “Sztywne promienie i trzy Stasie”, KPO 1909, no. 16; “Zapiski: Dr Julian Ochorowicz”, MN 1909, no. 115; GL 1909, no. 42, pp. 936-938.
• 124 Wł., “Pierwszy Zjazd Neurologów, psychiatrów i psychologów polskich”, SPO 1909, no. 42, p. 505.
• 125 I. Baliński, “Seans z nowym medium dr. Ochorowicza”, KW 1909, no. 282, p. 3. Cf. also “Doświadczenia mediumiczne dr. Ochorowicza”, KW 1909, no. 335.
• 126 TI 1909, no. 43, p. 884.
• 127 “Nowe badania mediumiczne w Warszawie”, Ś 1909, no. 43, p. 21.
• 128 Demil., “Święto nauki polskiej”, p. 15. Ochorowicz’s sensational findings also had some international resonance. In 1912 Józef Brenner, a Hungarian psychiatrist better known under his pen name Géza Csáth, published a book titled Az elmebetegségek psychikus mechanizmusa [The Psychological Mechanism of Mental Illness]. Describing the case of Miss G., a paranoid patient hospitalised in late 1909, he cites a passage from the journal she kept at his behest:
  “Oh, who can make the invisible soul visible? I recently read about a medical conference in Warsaw where a professor by the name of Ochorowicz made the surprising statement that a hypnotised body gives off rays. He claimed that he has managed to photograph these invisible rays: oh, how I rejoiced at these news, for it was confirmation of one of my claims: that the soul, that which is truly alive within us, is electrical matter. Oh, please come to my rescue and ask Professor Ochorowicz how he managed to photograph these hitherto invisible rays? Because if that is indeed possible, soon it will also be possible to take a picture of the focal point of these rays, the soul. And then I could prove that what I said was true”. (G. Csáth, Egy elmebeteg nő naplója: Az elmebetegségek psychikus mechanizmusa, ed. by S. Mihály, trans. by P. Sherwood)
  
• 129 J. Ochorowicz, “Siła jako ruch: Studium z filozofii fizyki”, AT 1879, vol. IV.
• 130 Cf. R. Wajdowicz, Julian Ochorowicz jako prekursor telewizji i wynalazca w dziedzinie telefonii (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1964).
• 131 Incidentally, Ochorowicz’s friend Bolesław Prus was so intrigued that he modelled a character in his novel The Doll (Lalka) on him: the inventor Ochocki, who dreams about flying machines, is described as a “great maniac” and “scientific idealist”. trans. by T. Bhambry (David Welsh, the translator of The Doll, does not translate these terms). For more information on Ochocki see for instance J.A. Malik,“Lalka”: Historie z różnych światów (Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 2005), pp. 115-170.
• 132 Cf. J. Ochorowicz, Psychologia i medycyna, vol. 1, p. 364. Towards the end of his life Ochorowicz funded his research with investments in a holiday boarding house and villas in Wisła (cf. A. Wantuła, “Dr Julian Ochorowicz w Wiśle”, ZŚ 1937, no. 3).
• 133 W. Matlakowski, A. Fabian, “Dr. fil. J. Ochorowicz i nauka: Przyczynek do historii cywilizacji u nas”, GL 1888, no. 23, pp. 477-506; K. Zawisza, “P. Julian Ochorowicz: Dr filozofii jako reformator medycyny”, GL 1888, no. 26, pp. 567-575; cf. also W. Szumlański, “Wyniki doświadczeń leczniczych dokonanych przez p. Ochorowicza w Klinice Terapeutycznej Wydziałowej”, ZD 1888, no. 32.
• 134 W. Matlakowski, “Dr. fil. J. Ochorowicz i nauka: Przyczynek do historii cywilizacji u nas”, GL 1888, no. 23, p. 495.
• 135 KC 1888, no. 79, no. 132, no. 145, no. 166, no. 208. Prus’s “Kroniki” are short articles that he wrote from the age of twenty-seven until the end of his life. They were published in Kurier Warszawski (1875-82 and 1883-87), Kurier Codzienny (1887-1901) and Tygodnik Ilustrowany (1905-11). I draw on the edition B. Prus, Kroniki, ed. by Z. Szweykowski, (Warsaw: PIW, 1961), vol. 11, pp. 83-85, pp. 127-129, pp. 138-143, pp. 161-162, pp. 200-202. Cf. R. Stachura-Lupa, “Prus o działalności naukowej Juliana Ochorowicza”, in Bolesław Prus: Pisarz nowoczesny, ed. by J.A. Malik (Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 2009), pp. 210-220.
• 136 B. Prus, Kroniki, p. 83.
• 137 Kurier Warszawski (1888) no. 96, no. 110, no. 122; Kurier Poranny (1888) no. 119.
• 138 J. Ochorowicz, “Nowe metody lecznicze przed sądem naszych lekarzy”, KW 1888, no. 191–200, no. 202 and no. 203.
• 139 Bolesław Prus, The Doll, trans. by D. Welsh (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1996), pp. 379-380.
• 140 Cf. S. Kuśmierczyk, “Opis początków psychoanalizy w powieści Prusa? (Przyczynek do wiedzy o powstawaniu Lalki)”, PH 1983, no. 9/10, pp. 241-247.
• 141 Cf. A. Cygielstreich, “Julian Ochorowicz jako psycholog”, PF 1917, no. 2/3/4, pp. 99-121.
• 142 J. Ochorowicz, Zjawiska mediumiczne (Warsaw: Redakcya i Administracya Biblioteki Dzieł Wyborowych, 1913), vol. 2, p. 259.
• 143 J. Ochorowicz, Zjawiska mediumiczne, vol. 1, p. 38.
• 144 B. Prus, “Eusapia Palladino”, KC 1893, nos 339–341, no. 343, no. 344, no. 346, no. 348, no. 352, no. 353 (from 8 to 22 December). In the same year installments of Prus’s novel Emancypantki appeared in Kurier Codzienny; the final chapter appearing in KC 1893, no. 281. Cf. J. Tomkowski, “Pozytywizm i duchy”, in Mój pozytywizm (Warsaw: IBL, 1993), pp. 177-229 and T. Jodełka, “Bolesław Prus w sieci spirytyzmu”, TW 1962, no. 9, pp. 102-113.
• 145 KC 1893, no. 201, reprinted in B. Prus, Kroniki (Warsaw: PIW, 1970), vol. 13, pp. 372.
• 146 B. Prus, “Eusapia Palladino”, KC 1893, no. 339, p.1.
• 147 KC 1894, no. 46, reprinted in B. Prus, Kroniki, vol. 14, p. 41.
• 148 “Sprawozdanie uczestników posiedzeń z Eusapią Palladino”, KW 1894, nos 27–36 and no. 39.
• 149 B. Prus, “Eusapia Palladino”, KC 1893, no. 352, p. 1.
• 150 B. Prus, “Eustapia Palladino”, KC 1893, no. 353, p. 1.
• 151 Cf. S. Fita, “Pozytywista ewangeliczny”: Studia o Bolesławie Prusie (Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, 2008), pp. 31-46.
• 152 B. Prus, “Zjawiska mediumiczne”, TI 1910, no. 8, reprinted in B. Prus, Kroniki, vol. 20, pp. 221-227 (p. 222).
• 153 J. Ochorowicz, “Nowe metody lecznicze przed sądem naszych lekarzy”, in Psychologia i medycyna, vol. 2, pp. 42-43.
• 154 J. Ochorowicz, “Neofobia”, SF 1912, no. 4, pp. 3-28.
• 155 J. Ochorowicz, “Nowe metody lecznicze przed sądem naszych lekarzy”, in Psychologia i medycyna, vol. 2, p. 68.
• 156 J. Ochorowicz, Psychologia i medycyna, vol. 1, p. iii.
• 157 J. Ochorowicz, “Choroby i uczucia”, in Psychologia i medycyna, vol. 2, p. 332.
• 158 W. Szumlański, “Wyniki doświadczeń leczniczych”, p. 150.
• 159 Cf. J. Ochorowicz, “Kwestia wścieklizny, prawdziwej i imaginacyjnej; Czynniki psychiczne w cholerze; Ostatnia epidemia paryska w oświetleniu psychologicznem” in Psychologia i medycyna, vol. 1, pp. 386-481; “Zaraza nerwowa” in Psychologia i medycyna, vol. 2, pp. 36-42.
• 160 J. Breuer, S. Freud, On The Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication from Studies on Hysteria (S. Freud, SE II, pp. 1-19).
• 161 S. Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, SE XI, p. 22. Cf. also S. Freud, “Freud’s Psycho-Analytic Procedure”, SE VII, pp. 248-254.
• 162 J. Ochorowicz, “Magnetyzm bez hipnotyzmu”, in Psychologia i medycyna, vol. 2, p. 203.
• 163 J. Ochorowicz, “Prace z psychologii doświadczalnej: Wydawnictwo Instytutu Psychologicznego”, PF 1915, no. 1/2, p. 62.
• 164 J. Ochorowicz, Mental Suggestion, trans. from French by J. Fitzgerald, with a preface by Charles Richet (New York: Humboldt, 1891), p. 142.
• 165 J. Ochorowicz, “Choroby i uczucia” in Psychologia i medycyna, vol. 2, p. 335.
• 166 J. Ochorowicz, Odczyty o magnetyzmie i hypnotyzmie, miane w Warszawie w 1888 i 1889 na dochód Towarzystwa Osad Rolnych i Przytułków Rzemieślniczych (St. Petersburg: Księgarnia Polska, 1890), p. 109.
• 167 J. Ochorowicz, “Magnetyzm bez hipnotyzmu”, p. 209.
• 168 J. Ochorowicz, Odczyty o magnetyzmie, p. 71.
• 169 J. Ochorowicz, “O psychologicznem współczuciu”, in Jak należy badać duszę, pp. 91-95.
• 170 Ochorowicz’s views on the psychology of creativity anticipate Freud’s writing on this topic. In an article on the potential applications of psychology he states that “only psychology can show us the true task of art, for that which art aims for is in the end an impression of the spirit, so it enters into the sphere of psychology” (J. Ochorowicz, “Zastosowania psychologii”, AT 1881, vol. 2, p. 76). Psychological compassion, a method of internal observation for psychologists, is for a poet a type of sensitivity that allows him “to feel the mental states, joy, despair, love, horror, ecstasy or gloom, of other creatures, and not only those states that he experiences himself, but others, which are not immediately accessible to him”. See J. Ochorowicz, O twórczości poetyckiej ze stanowiska psychologii: Dwa odczyty publiczne wypowiedziane w Warszawie i we Lwowie w kwietniu i w maju 1877 (Lviv: Księgarnia Karola Wilda, 1877), p. 14. This text, published long before Freud formulated his psychoanalytic interpretation of art, contains every aspect of Freud’s concept (first presented in 1907 in “Creative Writing and Day-Dreaming”). The similarities are astonishing. In 1877 Ochorowicz compares literary creativity to the work of dreaming, proposes that creativity is rooted in the sexual drive, thematises the way in which artistic creativity is shaped by the recovery of the writer’s own childhood experiences, in particular those related to the figure of the mother, explores the question of unthinking association and proposes that creativity is a source of pleasure.
• 171 L. Chertok, R. de Saussure, The Therapeutic Revolution.
• 172 J. Ochorowicz, “Choroby i uczucia”, p. 335.
• 173 Ochorowicz’s reputation remains unchanged. For instance, in Stefan Chwin’s 1999 novel Esther, set at the turn of the twentieth century, the protagonist suffers from a sort of hysteria and is examined by a certain Ochorowicz, becoming the main attraction at a public hypnotic seance. See S. Chwin, Esther (Gdańsk: Tytuł, 1999), p. 121.
• 174 Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Times (London: Papermac, 1989), p. 443.
• 175 This text was also printed in the daily press. See S. Freud, “Die okkulte Bedeutung des Traumes”, NFP 1925, no. 21906, pp. 10-11.
• 176 Besides Freud’s essay “Traum und Telepathie,” George Devereux, the editor of Psychoanalysis and the Occult (New York: International Universities Press, 1953) also reprinted articles by Eduard Hitschmann, Géza Róheim, Hans Zulliger, Dorothy Burlingham and other analysts interested in phenomena such as telepathy or clairvoyance. Interestingly, Helene Deutsch’s article on supernatural experiences during analysis echoes Ochorowicz’s notion of “psychological compassion”. She argues that seemingly inexplicable experiences result from intuition and empathy, from the analyst’s far-reaching identification with the patient. See “Okkulte Vorgänge während der Psychoanalyse”, I 1926, no. 2/3, pp. 418-433.
• 177 Peter Gay, Freud, p. 354.
• 178 Cf. N. Fodor, Freud, Jung and Occultism (New York: University Books, 1971).
• 179 Some of the passages in question were published in the New Introductory Lectures, “Dreams and Occultism”, SE XXII, pp. 31-57.
• 180 The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, ed. by E. Brabant, E. Falzeder, P. Giampieri-Deutsch, trans. by P.T. Hoffer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1993), vol. 3, p. 209.
• 181 The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones 1908–1939, ed. by R.A. Paskauskas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 597.
• 182 Letters of Sigmund Freud, selected and edited by Ernst L. Freud, trans. by T. and J. Stern (New York: Dover Publications, 1992), p. 334.
• 183 E. J. Rolnik, Freud in Zion: Psychoanalysis and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity (London: Karnac, 1997), pp. 61-62.
• 184 T. Jaroszyński, “Listy neurologiczne”, MIK 1908, pp. 418-421.
• 185 See MIK 1909, no. 47, pp. 1164-1165.
• 186 Cf. A. Wizel, “Lekcye prof. Charcot (Ze wspomnień osobistych)”, PT 1892, no. 27, pp. 576-577. Adam Wizel used hypnosis as a therapeutic method for many years and only turned to psychoanalysis much later in his career. (Cf. M. Bornsztajn, “Adam Wizel (życiorys)”, KKS 1929, no. 4, pp. 314-317.) In his book Zaburzenia płciowe pochodzenia psychicznego [Sexual Disorders of Mental Origin, 1914] Wizel writes:
  “Freudism, which today fascinates a certain not-so-critical group of doctors, is yet to obtain the sanction of science. The majority of serious neurologists and psychiatrists voice their gravest objections against it […]. What fate awaits it in the future – whether it will ever, if not wholly then perhaps in part, be accepted by science – that we are in no position to tell. We only know that as of now, official science is turning away from Freudism with disdain”. A. Wizel, Zaburzenia płciowe pochodzenia psychicznego: Studium kliniczne i psycholo|giczne (Warsaw: [s.n.], 1914), p. 165
  
• 187 Prace I-go Zjazdu, pp. 624-625.
• 188 Recollection of Ludwig Jekels, p. 6.
• 189 L. Jekels, “Teoria Freuda o histerii i jego metoda psychoanalizy”, MIK 1909, no. 52, pp. 1268-1272.
• 190 “Polnische Freudianer übersenden vom tagenden Congresse Ausdrücke höchster Anerkennung” [Polish Freudians send expressions of highest esteem from the ongoing Congress]. A similar telegram, signed with the same names, was sent to Jung. This was reprinted in F. Marcinowski, “(…) by popchnąć naprzód świadomość ducha”, p. 2017.
• 191 Cited in B.G. Czarnecki, Ludwig Jekels (1867–1954), p. 85.
• 192 Cf. E. Herman, Neurolodzy polscy (Warsaw: Państwowy Zakład Wydawnictw Lekarskich, 1958), pp. 174-180.
• 193 The Freud/Jung Letters, p. 264.
• 194 Cf. Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, vol. 2, p. 365. The presence of Jekels and Karpińska was recorded at the sessions of 15 and 22 December 1909 as well as 12 and 19 January 1910.
• 195 L. Karpińska, “Badania doświadczalne nad kojarzeniem wyobrażeń”, PL 1912, nos 43–47.
• 196 no. 47, p. 678.
• 197 RF 1913, no. 5, p. 125.
• 198 L. Karpińska, “Psychologiczne podstawy freudyzmu”, PF 1913, no. 4, pp. 508-527.
• 199 The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, vol. 1, p. 532.
• 200 L. von Karpinska, “Über die psychologischen Grundlagen des Freudismus”, IZAP 1914, no. 4, pp. 305-326.
• 201 The Persian legend of Ormazd, the supreme deity, and Ahriman, the Prince of Darkness, would have been familiar to Polish readers thanks to Mickiewicz’s poem; German readers were unlikely to know either that or Żeromski’s story.
• 202 L. Karpińska, “Psychologiczne podstawy freudyzmu”, p. 527.
• 203 “If I cannot sway the heavens, I'll wake the powers of hell!” Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. By R. Fagles (New York: Viking, 2006), p. 223.
• 204 K. Irzykowski, “Badania Anacherontu”, in Pisma rozproszone 1923–1931, ed. by A. Lam (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1999), p. 414.
• 205 L. von Karpinska, “Ein Beitrag zur Analyse ‘sinnloser’ Worte im Traume”, IZAP 1914, no. 2, pp. 164-170. Freud added Karpińska’s nonsense formation “Svingum elvi” to his older examples of verbal deformations in the fifth edition of The Interpretation of Dreams (1919). See S. Freud, SE IV, p. 303.
• 206 L. Karpińska, “O psychoanalizie”, RF 1914, no. 2, pp. 33-38.
• 207 For clarity I refer to Ludwika Karpińska-Woyczyńska as Karpińska.
• 208 Cf. J. Bujak, “Przegląd Zakopiański (1899–1906)”, ZP 1984, no. 1, p. 57. Przegląd Zakopiański appeared between 1899 and 1906. It was founded by the graphic artist Walery Eliasz Radzikowski and its first editor was Dionizy Bek. It was published thanks to the efforts of Stanisław Witkiewicz and other intellectuals who came to Zakopane from across the Polish partitions (Dionizy Bek, Stanisław Eliasz Radzikowski Jr., Mieczysław Limanowski). Their goal was to develop the city both economically and culturally. Campaigns were launched to promote Witkiewicz’s Zakopane Style in architecture, to highlight literature written in the local dialect, and to educate readers about the history and art of the Podhale region. Several articles focusing on the Tatra mountains were written by Stefan Żeromski, Stanisław Przybyszewski, Władysław Orkan, Tadeusz Miciński and Jerzy Żuławski. Przegląd Zakopiański also published Wacław Wolski’s Tatra-themed poems. See M. Behrendt, “O Przeglądzie Zakopiańskim”, POD autumn–winter 1976, pp. 65-71.
• 209 Woyczyński’s predecessor was Piotr Chmielowski (1848-1904), a literary critic and professor of literary history. Chmielowski established a workshop for writers within the Czytelnia; he also organised readings and exhibitions. For instance, the 17-year-old Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz – later known as Witkacy – exhibited his paintings at Zakopane’s first fine art exhibition in 1902. Under Chmielowski’s leadership this somewhat elitist institution became independent of philanthropists’ donations and transformed into a public library with a mission to promote literacy and education. Cf. M. Mantyka, Z dziejów zakopiańskiej biblioteki 1900–2000, (Zakopane: Wierchy, 2000), p. 26. When Woyczyński became director, his most important colleagues were Dionizy Bek, head of the Association of Community Schools [Towarzystwo Szkoły Ludowej], and Stefan Żeromski, chairman of the Association of Public Libraries [Towarzystwo Biblioteki Publicznej] in Zakopane.
• 210 Woyczyński’s first wife Maria was a socialist activist; she left him in 1908 for Józef Mirecki, a member of the PPS Revolutionary Faction. See F. Tych, “Józef Mirecki” in Polski Słownik Biograficzny (henceforth PSB), vol. 21, p. 334.
• 211 A. Garlicki, Józef Piłsudski 1867–1935 (Cracow: Znak, 2012), p. 907.
• 212 Karpińska was awarded the Cross of Independence (Krzyż Niepodległości, the second highest Polish military decoration in the interwar period) as well as the Cross of Valour (Krzyż Walecznych).
• 213 Cf. L. Karpińska-Woyczyńska, “Miejska Pracownia Psychologiczna w Łodzi (szkic działalności od założenia do października 1927 roku)”, PS 1927, no. 3.
• 214 On the first group see: L. Karpińska, “Badanie dzieci umysłowo niedorozwiniętych ze szkół powszechnych m. Łodzi”, SP 1921, no. 3/4, pp. 351-379; “Rola psychologii w doborze dzieci umysłowo upośledzonych do szkoły pomocniczej”, RP 1923, no. 4/5/6, pp. 65-75. On the second group see: L. Woyczyńska, “Dobór dzieci uzdolnionych i próby zdolności zawodowej młodzieży w Berlinie i Hamburgu”, RP 1923, no. 1/2/3, pp. 18-35.
• 215 M. Więckowska, “Dr. Ludwika Karpińska-Woyczyńska”, p. 173.
• 216 A. Garlicki, Józef Piłsudski, p. 907.
• 217 Cf. M. Lepecki, Pamiętnik adiutanta marszałka Piłsudskiego (Warsaw: PWN, 1987), p. 104.
• 218 A. Garlicki, Józef Piłsudski, p. 1040.
• 219 Cf. e.g. M. Lepecki, Pamiętnik adiutanta, p. 295.
• 220 Before Neurologia Polska was established, reports on the meetings of the Warsaw Medical Association’s neurological and psychiatric section appeared in Medycyna i Kronika Lekarska. The question of psychoanalysis had first been raised – though in a surprising manner – at two successive meetings of the Warsaw Medical Association in the spring of 1909. Maurycy Bornstein and Władysław Sterling, studying under Kraepelin in Munich, discussed cases of hysteria that in their opinion proved Freud’s theory to be one-sided, as no trauma of a sexual nature was diagnosed as the root cause (MIK 1909, no. 34, pp. 811-813; no. 38, p. 918; no. 39, pp. 939-940). In 1910 Sterling once more emphatically disagreed with the notion that sexual disorders caused nervous diseases; choosing the lesser of two evils he preferred Jung’s approach to psychoanalysis. (“Istota histerii w świetle nowoczesnych teorii psychologicznych”, MIK 1910, nos 43–47).
• 221 L. Jekels, “Aus der Sitzung der neurologischen–psychiatrischen Sektion der War|schauer Gesellschaft der Ärzte”, ZFP 1911, no. 5/6, pp. 269-270.
• 222 Jekels does not summarise the meeting on 17 May 1910, but here, too, psychoanalysis was discussed rather critically. Władysław Sterling spoke about “the paranoid system of interpretation” by some of Freud’s “overly zealous epigones”:
  “Please read the works of Stekel, Abraham, Sadger, Maeder, Juliusberger and many others. Nowhere has the principle of du sublime au ridicule been carried out so ruthlessly, and nowhere has fanatic and one-sided thinking muddled its own deep and healthy source to such detrimental effect as in these works”. (W. Sterling, “Istota histerii”, p. 1099).
  
• 223 L. Jekels, “Aus der Sitzung der neurologisch-psychiatrischen Sektion der Warschauer Gesellschaft der Ärzte”, ZFP 1911, no. 9, pp. 428-430.
• 224 Cf. NPL 1910/11, vol. 1, pp. 97-98.
• 225 T. Rzepa, B. Dobroczyński, Historia polskiej myśli psychologicznej (Warsaw: PWN, 2009), p. 270.
• 226 Cf. C.W. Domański, “Tadeusz Jaroszyński (1880–1933): Neurolog, psycholog i teoretyk wychowania”, in Na drogach i bezdrożach historii psychologii, ed. by T. Rzepa, C. Domański (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2014), vol. 3, pp. 163-175.
• 227 See e.g. M. Bornstein, “Znaczenie teorji psychoanalitycznej dla psychiatrii”, KKS 1928, no. 4; “Życie płciowe kobiety w świetle psychoanalizy”, WCL 1929, no. 17-18. Discussions of Bornstein’s career include M. Jarosz, “Oryginalność poglądów naukowych Maurycego Bornsztajna (w 110. rocznicę urodzin)”, PSP 1985, no. 4, pp. 307-315; G. Herczyńska, “Maurycy Bornsztajn 1874–1952”, PPIN 2003, no. 1, pp. i-viii.
• 228 M. Bornsztajn, Psychoanaliza (6 wykładów, wygłoszonych na Wolnej Wszechnicy w Warszawie) (Cracow: Okręgowy Związek Kas Chorych, 1930).
• 229 E. Herman writes about Bornstein’s “fanatical enthusiasm for Freud’s work” in Neurolodzy polscy, pp. 136-145 (p. 141). Bornstein is also the only propagator of psychoanalysis mentioned in an early historical account of Polish psychiatry: T. Bilikiewicz, J. Gallus, Psychiatria polska na tle dziejowym (Warsaw: Państwowy Zakład Wydawnictw Lekarskich, 1962), p. 208
• 230 Cf. E. Herman, Neurolodzy polscy, pp. 260-270.
• 231 H. Higier, “Przełom w psychoanalizie”, WCL 1929, no. 42, pp. 995-997. In 1938 Henryk Higier spoke up against the Nazi psychiatrist Matthias H. Göring, a cousin of Hermann Göring, who, having assumed the position of chair of the Aryanised German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy (Deutsches Institut für Psychologische Forschung und Psychotherapie), was propagating “Aryan” psychoanalysis. Higier also criticised C.G. Jung for sympathising with the Nazi doctrine of racial purity (H. Higier, “Lekarz a wyznanie i rasa”, WCL 1938, no. 3, pp. 53-55 as well as “Psychoterapia a rasizm”, WCL 1938, no. 15, pp. 623-625).
• 232 Księga pamiątkowa XI Zjazdu Lekarzy i Przyrodników Polskich w Krakowie 18–22 lipca 1911 (Cracow: Komitet Gospodarczy, 1912), pp. 510-512.
• 233 E. Herman, Neurolodzy polscy, pp. 256-260.
• 234 MIK 1911, no. 31, p. 787.
• 235 “Aus der XI. Versammlung polnischer Ärzte und Naturforscher: Neurologische Sektion”, ZFP 1912, pp. 54-55.
• 236 F. Baumgarten, “Teoria snu Freuda”, NPL 1912, no. 9, pp. 1013-1063. The preceding issue (1912, no. 8, pp. 965-982) contains Baumgarten’s essay on the relationship between psychology and psychiatry, “O wzajemnym stosunku psychologii do psychiatrii”, which mentions Breuer, Freud and Jung.
• 237 RF 1912, no. 3, p. 46.
• 238 H. Nunberg, “Niespełnione życzenia według nauki Freuda”, NPL 1913, no. 3, pp. 11-14; J. Nelken, “Badania psychoanalityczne chorób nerwowych”, NPL 1913, no. 3, pp. 145-155.
• 239 Wacław Radecki, “Przyczynek do analizy zastosowania w medycynie doświadczeń skojarzeniowych”, NPL 1913, no. 7/8, pp. 368-403.
• 240 NPL 1925, no. 2.
• 241 F. Baumgarten, “Teoria snu Freuda”, p. 1036.
• 242 H. Veillard-Cybulska, “Franciszka Baumgarten-Tramer”, PW 1971, no. 3, pp. 360-361.
• 243 1910 is also the year when Kazimierz Oczesalski’s summary of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality was published in Gazeta Lekarska (K. Oczesalski, “Źródła i ujścia popędu płciowego – podług Freuda”, GL 1910, no. 4, pp. 84-88). In 1911 Stanisław Trzebiński gave a lecture titled “O teorii Freuda i psychoanalizie” [On Freud’s Theory and Psychoanalysis] at a meeting of the Polish Medical Association (Polskie Towarzystwo Lekarskie) in Kiev. It was published in the Poznań-based Nowiny Lekarskich (1912, no. 8, pp. 451-456, no. 9, pp. 522-526, no. 10, pp. 587-590).
• 244 See Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible; M.A. Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
• 245 See A. Mikhalevitch, “L’âge d’argent de la psychanalyse russe: Les premières traductions des œuvres de Freud en Russie prérévolutionnaire (1904–1914)”, RIH 1991, no. 4, pp. 399-406. For a comprehensive bibliography of Russian translations of Freud see I. Manson, “Comment dit-on ‘psychanalyse’ en russe?”, RIH 1991, no. 4, pp. 419-421.
• 246 The first text was “Психологические и психопатологические взгляды Сигм: Фрейда в немецкой литературе 1907 года” [Psichologičeskie i psichopatologičeskie vygliady Sigm. Frejda v nemeckoi literature 1907 goda] published in ЖНиП [ŽNiP] 1908, 1–2, pp. 564-584. This and other early Russian psychoanalytical studies can be found, along with a comprehensive bibliography, in the anthology В.И. Овчаренко, В.М. Лейбин, Антология Российского Психоанализа [V.I. Ovčarenko, V.M.Lejbin, Antologija rossijskogo psichoanaliza].
• 247 “О навязчивой улыбке”, ЖНиП [O navjazčivoj ulybke, ŽNiP] no. 12, pp. 570-578.
• 248 Many of Osipov’s studies explored psychological themes in literature: in 1910 he discussed Tolstoy’s psychological intuitions in his portraits of women such as Natasha Rostova in War and Peace or the heroine of Anna Karenina.
• 249 Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (Boulder: Westview Press 1997), p. 118.
• 250 Cf. IJP 1920, no. 2, p. 208.
• 251 Biographical notes of Russian psychoanalysts from the beginning until the turn of the millennium and descriptions of psychoanalytical institutions can be found in the reference work В.И. Овчаренко, Российские психоаналитики [V.I. Ovčarenko, Rossijskie psichoanalitiki] (Москва: Академический Проект, 2000).
• 252 NPL 1910, no. 1, pp. 91-92.
• 253 T. Jaroszyński, “Psychologia i psychoterapia histerii”, MIK 1910, nos 48–51.
• 254 Cf. M. Holzmann, H. Bohatta, Deutsches Pseudonymen-Lexikon (Vienna: Akademischer Verlag, 1906), p. 320.
• 255 KW 1908, no. 322, p. 6.
• 256 Jahresbericht des k. k. Staatsgymnasiums zu Bielitz für das Schuljahr 1900/1901 (Bielitz: Verlag des k. k. Staatsgymnasiums, 1901), p. 30.
• 257 F. Brümmer, Lexikon der deutschen Dichter und Prosaisten vom Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zur Gegenwart (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam, 1913), p. 115.
• 258 Z. Jekels, R. Strauss, Die Spiele ihrer Exzellenz: Drei Akte (Vienna: Akademischer Verlag, 1909).
• 259 S. Jacobsohn, Das Jahr der Bühne (Berlin: Oesterheld, 1912), pp. 187-188.
• 260 The manuscripts survive at the Biblioteka Śląska, sign. BTL 3885 and BTL 3884.
• 261 K. Makuszyński, “Z teatru”, SPL 1910, no. 518, pp. 1-2.
• 262 Obituaries appeared in several Polish-language publications. Kurier Warszawski, for instance, published a eulogy:
  “She was on friendly terms with many families from Warsaw and across the Kingdom who had spent time at the spa in Bystra. Her manner was cordial and friendly, so that people were always fond of her. She took advantage of the fact that several Polish writers visited Bystra and made an effort to become acquainted with the treasures of our poetry, becoming enchanted with the beauty of Mickiewicz’s verse and the wondrous flights of imagination of Słowacki and others. To her children she passed on the Polish language and culture” (KW 1910, no. 27, p. 3).
  
• 263 KW 1909, no. 286, p. 4.
• 264 ZL 1917, no. 192, pp. 3-4.
• 265 KW 1917, no. 270, p. 6.
• 266 Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud, Correspondence 1904-1938, trans. by N. Somers, ed. by Ingeborg Meyer-Palmedo (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), p. 30.
• 267 Cited in B.G. Czarnecki, Ludwig Jekels (1867–1954), p. 85.
• 268 The Freud/Jung Letters, p. 322.
• 269 The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, vol. 1, p. 177.
• 270 S. Freud, M. Bernays, Briefwechsel 1882–1938, ed. by A. Hirschmüller (Tübingen: Diskord, 2005), pp. 255-265. Some passages from these letters have been translated in the annotations of Anna Freud’s correspondence with her father. These are used where possible, otherwise translations from the German are provided by T. Bhambry. Freud’s replies to Minna have not survived.
• 271 Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud, Correspondence, p. 33.
• 272 S. Freud, M. Bernays, Briefwechsel 1882–1938, p. 259.
• 273 Accessible on < http://www.bildarchivaustria.at >.
• 274 H. Nunberg, Memoirs: Recollections, Ideas, Reflections (New York: Psychoanalytic Research and Development Fund, 1969), p. 21.
• 275 “Recollection of Ludwig Jekels”, pp. 9-10.
• 276 L. Jekels, “Eine Symptomhandlung”, IZAP 1913, no. 3, pp. 260-262.
• 277 Cf. U. May, “Freud’s Patient Calendars: 17 Analysts in Analysis with Freud (1910–1920)”, PAH 2007, no. 2, pp. 153-201.
• 278 E. Bergler, “Ludwig Jekels 1867–1954”, IJP 1955, no. 36, pp. 71-73.