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intellectual conscience requires that some account of Balmary's
study be rendered . I shall try to be mercifully brief.
Freud began his analyses by asking his patients to tell him their
stories , or alternatively, by asking them to tell him what was bother–
ing them. Lacan' s "decisive innovation" in this connection, accord–
ing to Balmary, was to follow these questions by asking the patient
an ultimately superceding question : " Who made you ill?" The
answer is always " the Other," mostly Father, sometimes Mother,
however the case may be . Accordingly, she begins her account by
retelling the Oedipus story from an alternative perspective. (Of
course, she cannot go back to Sophocles's representation of the
myth, which is what Freud did, but that is a minor matter.)
Oedipus, she asserts , was the victim of his father ' s behavior; his
father made him ill : this "fundamental misapprehension" of the
truth of the Oedipus story is at the foundation of Freud' s almost
entirely misguided, if nonetheless important, project . And why did
Freud read the Oedipus legend incorrectly so as to make " only
Oediplls himself the source of his tragic action"? He did so because
it was imperative to him, Freud, to abandon his central early theo–
retical formulation-"the theory of the father ' s fault."
In other words, the renunciation of the early " seduction the–
ory" that Freud first constructed out of the stories told to him by his
hysterical patients was the most important error of his career. What
induced Freud to make such a calamitous blunder? Freud made this
mistake , in 1897, in the course of his self-analysis. This self-analysis
was itself begun in part in the aftermath, or as a result of, the death
of Freud's father in 1896. According to Balmary, during that self–
analysis the following crucial event or set of events took place . Freud
"somehow" discovered (or had to confront) the existence ofthat sec–
ond wife, Rebecca. He also discovered that she had disappeared,
vanished without a trace, had somehow been gotten rid of (perhaps
because she was childless, a ground for divorce under Orthodox
Jewish law). She also, still according to Balmary, probably commit–
ted suicide as a result of her repudiation by Jacob Freud, and
Sigmund may have learned of this too. But he learned even more ; he
"somehow" learned that his mother, Amalie , was pregnant with
him when his parents got married , and that he was born in March,
not May, 1856 (his parents were married at the end ofJuly 1855). So
what Sigmund Freud discovered in the course of his self-analysis is
that Jacob Freud was a regular old devil, aJewish Don Juan, a puta-
