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

of humans than anyone before him, could not, where eels were concerned, even locate their sex organs. He had gone to Trieste to find an eel’s testes but discovered only an enduring enigma. He wanted to understand the sexuality of a fish, but found, at best, his own.

It was also ironic because Freud’s relationship with aquatic creatures was already slightly complicated. Much has been written about young Freud’s relationship with a girl named Gisela Fluss. It began in 1871, when the then-fifteen-year-old Freud lived for a time as a lodger with Gisela’s family in Freiberg. Freud was clearly attracted to Gisela, who was then only twelve, and expounded on how beautiful and alluring she was in letters to, among others, Eduard Silberstein. It may have been his initial sexual awakening, but, be that as it may, it ended in frustration and suppression. When Gisela married someone else a few years later, Freud gave her the moniker Ichtyosaura, or “fish lizard,” after the scientific name for the prehistoric aquatic reptiles who were contemporaries of the dinosaurs.

To Freud, it was obviously a form of adolescent wordplay; Fluss means “river” or “flow.” Gisela, as a member of the Fluss family, was a kind of sea monster, representing everything repressed and frustrating, such as sexuality, which moves furtively beneath the surface. That Freud chose a prehistoric water creature for her nickname was perhaps also his way of telling himself that the youthful and uncontrollable passion he’d felt for her would now belong to his past. He wouldn’t let himself be seduced like that by anyone or anything ever again—until las bestias of Trieste appeared like the symbolic offspring of this his first Ichtyosaura.

After his stay in Trieste, it would be years before Sigmund Freud approached the subject of sexuality again, but once he did, it was hidden or repressed sexuality that interested him. His theory about castration anxiety takes as its starting point the assumption that a child will at an early age develop a fear of being castrated, of being maimed and stripped of his or her sex, diminished and rendered harmless. Boys at the age of four or five are filled with unconscious sexual longing for their mother and feel in competition with their father. They perceive a threat, a fear of being punished for their urges, but they also feel shame and inferiority; this makes them realize their own insignificance in the world, which leads to the development of self; in due course, their yearning for their mother is replaced by identification with their father. And the pivotal moment in this process is, according to Freud, when a boy realizes women do not have penises. That is, he sees the woman, sees the absence of a male sex organ, and in that moment becomes aware of himself and his place in the world.

Freud’s theory of penis envy is related to castration anxiety but deals with the psychosexual development of women. Girls are, like boys, at first closely bonded to their mothers, he claimed; it’s when they first discover that they themselves have no penis that they slowly start dissociating from their mother and become drawn instead to their father. Girls see the penis as an attribute that symbolizes power and activity. Learning, in this way, their place in the world, they develop envy and experience guilt, which is projected onto their mothers. They can see what they lack, see the absence of a male sex organ, and in that moment become aware of themselves and their limitations.

These theories have been challenged many times since they were first formulated, and from many different perspectives. Can the male sex organ, or the possession or lack of it, be such a pivotal detail in the psychosexual development of humans? It seems absurd and a little ridiculous. These are theories from a different time, which grew out of a different historical context. They are also theories that dodge the accepted scientific method. They operate within the suppressed and the concealed. They can’t be systematically observed or verified or rejected. They are not the kinds of truths a microscope can reveal.

And yet they must be founded on the basis of some kind of experience. We can picture the young scientist in a cramped laboratory in Trieste. He is far from home in a strange city, and he is wearing a white coat and glasses, with a well-trimmed, dark beard. He is standing by a desk in front of a small window, with a sticky dead eel in his hand. And he’s looking through his microscope, as he’s done four hundred times before, and what he can see through the lens is no longer just an eel, it is also himself.

DESPITE THE CONCERTED EFFORTS OF THE YOUNG FREUD, THE MYSTERY of the eel’s reproduction remained unsolved for a while longer. In 1879, a German marine biologist, Leopold Jacoby, wrote, somewhat dejectedly, in a report for the US Commission of Fish and Fisheries:

“To a person not acquainted with the circumstances of the case, it must seem astonishing, and it is certainly somewhat humiliating to men of science, that a fish which is commoner in many parts of the world than any other fish . . . which is daily seen at the market and on the table, has been able in spite of the powerful aid of modern science, to shroud the manner of its propagation, its birth, and its death in darkness, which even to the present day has not been dispelled. There has been an eel question ever since the existence of natural science.”

What neither Freud nor Jacoby knew was, of course, that eels have no visible sex organs until they need them. Its metamorphoses are not just superficial adaptations to new life conditions. They’re existential. An eel becomes what it needs to be when the time is right.

Twenty years after Freud’s failed efforts, a sexually mature male silver eel was finally found off the coast of Messina in Sicily. And thus, the eel had finally become a fish.