2. Freud Mutilates Emma Eckstein
via.listverse.com
Dr Sigmund Freud has gained a reputation through pop culture of the past 40 years as a cuddly eccentric, full of endearing theories about how you secretly fancy your mum and defy your father through nudity. While this is probably underselling Freud’s legacy as the Father of modern psychology, at least social opinion has cast him in a benign light. This may not be the case had Joe Public heard of the case of Emma Eckstein.
The aforementioned woman was a patient of Freud’s, whom he was treating for a nervous illness. Due to being Freud, the psychiatrist quickly determined that Eckstein’s malaise was rooted in sexual dysfunction and diagnosed her as suffering from hysteria and “excessive masturbation”. While the diagnosis is reasonably creepy, we are not able to verify the accuracy due to the Hippocratic oath, so it can be assumed that Siggy was correct. His prescription, however, was all kinds of wrong.
Freud sent Eckstein to his physician colleague, Willhelm Fleis, who believed that the best cure for excessive self-abuse was to cauterise the nasal passages. He promptly burned the unlucky Eckstein’s nostrils shut, causing infection and disfigurement due to the careless misplacement of a surgical gauze. While Freud’s actions were definitely on the creepy side, the experiment could well have worked – having a fool burn your nose off is bound to hamper your sex drive.
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