Don’t go chasing eel testicles:
A brief, select history of Sigmund Freud
If you know anything about psychology, you know the name Sigmund Freud. If you know anything about Sigmund Freud, you know about his theories on the human mind and human development. If you know anything about one particular theory, his psychosexual theory, you know that you are a repressed sexual being that likely has an unconscious desire to have relations with a mythical Greek King’s mother. What you may not know, because it’s conceivably ancillary to his greater works, is that it all began in pursuit of 19th century science’s holy grail: “The elusive eel testicles.”
Although it is stated, in some annals, that an Italian scientist named Carlo Mondini discovered the eel testicles in 1777,{1} it is elsewhere stated that the search continued up to, and beyond, an obscure nineteen-year-old Austrian’s 1876 search. It is also stated, that the heralded Aristotle conducted his own research on the eel that resulted in postulations that these beings either came from the “guts of wet soil”, or that they were born “of nothing”. One could say that such results had to come as a result of great frustration, as Aristotle was so patiently deductive in so many other areas, but he is also the one that stated that maggots were born organically from a slab of meat. “Others, that conducted their own research, swore that eels were bred of mud, of bodies decaying in the water. One learned bishop informed the Royal Society that eels slithered from the thatched roofs of cottages; Izaak Walton, in The Compleat Angler, reckoned they sprang from the “action of sunlight on dewdrops”.”{2}
Before laughing at any of these findings, one has to consider how limited these researchers were, with regard to the science of their day. As they say with young people, Freud probably didn’t know enough to know how futile this task would be when he was first employed by a nondescript Austrian zoological research station. It was his first job, he was nineteen-years-old, and it was 1876. He dissected approximately 400 eels, over a period of four weeks, and he worked in an environment that the New York Times described as “Amid stench and slime for long hours”.{3} His ambitious goal was to write a breakthrough research paper on the animal’s mating habits that had confounded science for centuries. One has to imagine that a more seasoned scientist may have considered the task futile much earlier in the process, but an ambitious, young nineteen-year-old, looking to make a name for himself, was willing to spend long hours slicing and dicing these eels, to hopefully achieve an answer that could not be disproved.
Unfortunate for young Freud, and perhaps fortunate for the field of Psychology, we now know that eels don’t have testicles, until they need them. The ones Freud studied, apparently didn’t need them at the time he studied them, for Freud ended up writing that he had only been supplied with eels “of the fairer sex”. Freud did, eventually, write a research paper, but it detailed his failure to locate the testicles, and he moved onto other areas as a result. The question that anyone reading Freud’s later, Psychological theories has to ask, in conjunction with this knowledge, is how profound was this failure on the rest of his research into human sexual development?
Most of us had odd jobs at nineteen that have, in one way or another, affected us for the rest of our working lives. For most of us, these jobs were low-paying, manual labor jobs that we slogged through for the sole purpose of getting paid. Most of us weren’t pining over anything, in search of a legacy that would put us in annals of history. Most of us had no feelings of profound failure if we didn’t do well in these low-paying, manual labor jobs. Most of us simply moved onto other jobs we found more rewarding and fulfilling.
Was the search for eel testicles the equivalent to a low-paying, manual labor job to Freud, or did he believe in this vocation so much that he was devastated when he failed? Did he slice the first hundred or so open and throw them aside with the belief that he simply had another eel of the fairer sex, as he wrote, or was he beginning to see what had plagued the other scientists, including Aristotle, for centuries? There had to be a moment, in other words, when he began to realize that they couldn’t all be female. He had to realize, at some point, that he was missing the same something that everyone else had been missing. He had to have had some sleepless nights struggling to come up with some different tactic. He probably lost his appetite at various points, and he probably shut out the world in his obsession to achieve infamy in marine biology. If even some of this is true, even if it was only four weeks of his life, it could reasonably be stated that this moment in his life affected him profoundly.
If Freud had never existed, would there be a need to create him?
Everyone has a subjective angle from which they approach a topic they wish to study. It’s human nature. Few of us can view any subject, or person in our life, with total objectivity. The topic we are least objective about, say some, is ourselves. And the topic, on which we theorize most, when we theorize on humanity, is most commonly ourselves. All theories are autobiographies, in other words, that we write in an attempt to understand ourselves better. With that in mind, what was the subjective angle from which Sigmund Freud approached his most famous theory on psychosexual development in humans? Was he entirely objective when listening to his patients, or was he forever chasing eel testicles in the manner Don Quixote chased windmills?
After switching vocations to the field of Psychology, did he view the patients that sought his consultation as nothing more than the set of testicles he couldn’t find a lifetime ago? Did testicles prove so prominent in his studies that he saw them everywhere in the manner that a “rare” car owner begins to see that car everywhere, after driving that “rare” car off the lot? Some would say that if Freud engaged in such activities, he did it unconsciously, which others could say may have been the basis for his other theory on unconscious action. How different would Freud’s theories have been if he had found eventually found what was then considered the holy grail of science at the time? How different would his life have been? Would he have ever switched vocations, or would he have remained a marine biologist based upon the fame he achieved?
How different would the field of Psychology be, if he had decided to remain a marine biologist? Or, if he had eventually switched to Psychology, for whatever reason, after achieving fame for being the eel testicle spotter in marine biology, would he have approached the study of the human development, and the human mind, from a less obsessed angle? Would his theory on psychosexual development have occurred to him at all, and if it didn’t, was it such a fundamental truth that it would’ve eventually occurred, without Freud’s influence?
It can be said, without too much refutation, that many in the world have had their beliefs of human development more sexualized by Freud’s largely disproved psychosexual theory? How transcendental was this theory, and how much subjective interpretation was involved, and how much of that interpretation was derived from the frustration involved in his inability to find the eel testicle? Did Freud spend the rest of his career overcompensating for that initial failure?
Whether it’s an interpretive extension, or a direct reading of Freud’s theory, modern scientific research theorizes that most men want some form of sexual experience with another man’s testicles, and if they say that don’t, their lying in a latent manner, and the more vociferously a man says they don’t, so goes the theory, the more repressed their homosexual desires are.
The Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, a sexual orientation law think tank, released a study in April 2011 that stated that 3.6% of the males in the U.S. population are either openly gay, or bisexual.{4} This leaves 96.4% of this population that are, according to Freud’s theory, closeted homosexuals in some manner. Neither Freud, nor anyone else, has put a rough estimate on the percentage of heterosexuals that have erotic inclinations toward members of the same sex that are unconsciously experienced or expression in overt ways, but the very idea of the theory has achieved worldwide fame. Read through some psychological studies on this subject, and you’ll read the words: “It is possible..,” “certain figures show that it would indicate..,” and “all findings can and should be evaluated by further research”.{5} In other words, no conclusive data, and all figures are vague, purposely say some, for use by those that are in favor of the homosexual movement that would have you believe that most of the 96.4% that express contrarian views are actively suppressing their desire to not only support the view, but to actively involve themselves in the movement.
Sigmund Freud has been called “history’s most debunked doctor”, but his influence can still be seen in the field of Psychology, and in the ways society views human development, and sexual development, throughout the world. The greater question, as it pertains specifically to Freud’s psychosexual theory, is was he a closet homosexual, or was his angle on psychological research affected by the initial failure to find eel testicles? Or, to put it more succinctly, which being’s testicles was Freud more obsessed with throughout his life?
