On the 1st of May 1889, the young (33 year old) psychoanalyst-on-the-make Sigismund Schlomo Freud took on the case of a “a lady of about forty years of age”, a Frau Emmy von N., who we now know to be the Swiss noblewoman Baroness Fanny Louise von Sulzer-Wart. 

Baroness Fanny had married 29 years previously at the tender age of 23 the 65 year-old Swiss watchmaker and industrialist Heinrich Moser, who died 4 years after the marriage from a heart attack. In the minds of Moser’s five children from his previous marriage, the idea got around that Fanny might have toe-tagged their father after having him sire her two new Moser offspring with birthright claims to his vast fortune.

This is the first time that Freud decides to give his friend Josef Breuer’s technique of “investigation under hypnosis” a try-out as he attempts to help his new patient with her suffering somatizations (resembling very much the symptoms of Fibromyalgia today). Freud starts using techniques which will in time become (after he has ditched the overt hypnosis angle) his own special contribution to human animal therapeutics.

What have these initial forays into our so-called "hysterical" human Egos (Freud's word for the Ego was simply "Ich", I) got to do with a poem that Rainer Maria Rilke would write a decade or so later about a panther he'd spent a day watching behind bars in the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris? 

This first episode (part of a trio) begins exploring this koan, trying to join up some of these dots between one of Freud's first talking cure patients (Emmy/Fanny), with Joseph Mortimer Granville's invention of the medical vibrator (the percuteur) in 1880 and its uses by male doctors on their female patients' genitalia; James Strachey's mistranslations of Freud's Ich into Ego and the effect this would have on psychoanalytic thought and practice, and David Attenborough being chased around the Scottish Highlands by a large, angry grouse called The Caipercaillie.

Poems discussed in this episode:

THE PANTHER

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,

has grown so weary that it cannot hold

anything else. It seems to him there are

a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,

the movement of his powerful soft strides

is like a ritual dance around a center

in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly–.

An image enters in,

rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,

plunges into the heart and is gone.

-Rainer Maria Rilke (English translation by Stephen Mitchell)

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FIRST FOOTNOTE ON ZOOMORPHISM

It seems we have said too little about

the heart, per se,

how it sits in its chambered nub

of grease and echo

listening for movement in the farthest

reed beds — any feathered thing will do,

love being interspecific, here,

more often than we imagine.

If anything, I’d liken us to certain

warblers, less appealing in the wild

than how we’d look

in coloured lithographs,

yet now and then, I’m on the point of

hearing

bitterns at the far edge of the lake,

that cry across the marshes like the doom

you only get in books, where people die

so readily for love, each heart becomes

a species in itself, the sound it makes

distinctive, one more descant in the dark,

before it disappears into the marshes.

-John Burnside

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Transcript: http://stevewasserman.co.uk/rilkes-panther-the-cage-of-self/