Steve Berman Potery

Freud in Trieste

Freud was just
19 yrs old in 1876 when he arrived in Trieste.
He’d been sent by his teacher/mentor Carl Claus on a quest to discover evidence of the male counterpart to the female eel, only convincingly described in 1824. Freud wrote his childhood friend Eduard Silberstein of the “bellas bestias” beautiful beasts, i.e. the women of Trieste but months later, having failed in his scientific endeavors, he wrote of them as “brutta brutta” – ugly ugly

Dissecting over 400 eels in his search for the male organs – the testes – of the European (Adriatic) eel, he failed to discover what he was hunting for. In fact, only after another 20 years was a sexually mature male eel found off the coast of Sicily. And the mystery of where eels reproduced came nearly a half century after Freud with the discovery by the Danish scientist Johannes Schmidt that eels – both European and American – reproduce thousands of miles from Europe, in the Sargasso Sea.

Did this early failure play a part in turning Freud from natural science to his career in psychology? Did the hidden nature of eel sex prompt him years later to seek out the latent and hidden aspects of human sexuality? Did his famous thesis of “penis envy” bear some relationship to his failed search for the eel’s penis? No way to know, but the circumstances are suggestive.