The Book of Eels, Patrik Svensson [bill gates best books .TXT] 📗

of glass vessels, pans, bowls, troughs containing small beasts or bits of larger ones in seawater. In between stand or lie test tubes, instruments, needles, cover slips, microscope slides, so that when I am busy working there is not a spot left on which I can rest my hand. I sit at this table from eight to twelve and from one to six, working quite diligently.”

Every morning, Freud goes to meet the fishermen as they come into port with the catch of the day—baskets full of fat Adriatic eels—then heads straight to the laboratory and sets to work. He explains the object of his assignment to Silberstein, attaching simple drawings:

You know the eel. For a long time, only females of the species were known; even Aristotle didn’t know where the males came from and therefore claimed that eels sprang from mud. Throughout the Middle Ages and even in our modern times, there has been a veritable frenzy to find a male eel. Within zoology, where we don’t have access to birth certificates and where creatures—in accordance with Paneth’s ideals—act without first being observed, we cannot say which is female and which is male unless the animals display external differences. That there are in fact differences between the sexes has to first be proved, and only an anatomist can do so (since the eel is incapable of keeping a diary from which we could draw conclusions regarding its sex); he dissects them and discovers either testicles or ovaries. . . . Recently, a zoologist in Trieste claimed to have found testicles, and thus to have discovered the male eel, but since he apparently didn’t know what a microscope is, he failed to provide an exact description of them.

Day in and day out, Freud sits by his desk in the laboratory, cutting up eels, searching, peering through his microscope and making notes, seeking the answer to the mystery. All answers are bound to appear underneath the microscope—that is the promise of science, and if you can’t trust that, then what is there left to believe in?

But Freud doesn’t find any eel testicles, and he gradually grows more frustrated. Every night at half past six, he takes a walk through the narrow alleyways of Trieste, past shops and restaurants, toward the sea, where the setting sun turns the water into a mirror, hiding all life underneath the surface; he hears dockworkers speaking German, Slovenian, and Italian, smells the spices and coffee, sees the fishermen pack up the last of their catch, sees the women with their made-up eyes moving toward the bars in the square. He sees all that . . . and thinks about eels.

My hands are stained by the white and red blood of the sea creatures, all I see when I close my eyes is the shimmering dead tissue, which haunts my dreams, and all I can think about are the big questions, the ones that go hand in hand with testicles and ovaries—the universal, pivotal questions.

For close to a month, Freud sits in his simple laboratory, engrossed by his monotonous and fruitless work, but in the end, he has to admit he’s failed. He hasn’t been able to find what he came to seek: the reproductive organ of the male eel and the definitive answer to the eel question. “I’ve tormented myself and the eels in a vain attempt to discover the male eel, but all the eels I’ve dissected have turned out to belong to the fairer sex.”

It was young Sigmund Freud’s first scientific assignment, and failure was his fate. For weeks on end he stood by his desk, doggedly cutting up eels and searching their cold, lifeless bodies for reproductive organs. Long days, reeking of dead fish, covered in sticky eel slime. And not one testicle did he find. Freud examined over four hundred eels and none could be shown to be male. He knew exactly where in the eel to look, and he could describe what the organs ought to look like, but even so, he never found what he was looking for.

In one of his letters to Eduard Silberstein, Freud drew an eel swimming through the text. Its lips are curled in a faintly mocking smile. In the same letter, he spoke of the eels using the word he had previously used to denote a different, but equally enigmatic creature: “las bestias.”

SO WHAT DID SIGMUND FREUD FIND IN TRIESTE? POSSIBLY, IF NOTHING else, an initial insight into how deeply some truths are hidden. In terms of both eels and people. And thus, the eel came to influence modern psychoanalysis.

Nineteen-year-old Freud was an ambitious young scientist. He’d gone to Trieste to write a groundbreaking report that answered, once and for all, the question that had confounded science for centuries: How do eels reproduce? He probably learned a great deal about the importance of patient and systematic observation in research, knowledge he would later apply to his patients on the therapy couch.

He’d also come to Trieste with an unshakable faith in science and in the rewards that await a person who’s willing to work hard for them. But the eel forced him to confront his own, and science’s, limitations. He found no truth under his microscope. The eel question remained unanswered. Completing his report a year later, he had to admit nothing could be proved about the sex and procreation of eels. He concluded with almost self-abnegating matter-of-factness: “My histological examination of the lobe-shaped organs will not permit me definitively to state the opinion that they are the testicles of the eel, nor does it give me substantial reason to reject it.”

The eel eluded Sigmund Freud; perhaps that was one of the reasons he ultimately abandoned the pure natural sciences for the more complex and unquantifiable field of psychoanalysis. The way the eel eluded him was especially ironic, given what Freud would eventually focus on: it concealed its sexuality from him. The man who would come to define twentieth-century thinking about sex and sexuality, and who would delve deeper into the inner workings