Reconstructing Freud's prototype reconstructions

Book Review: Mourning Freud

“…Balsam highlights Freud’s unconscious anxiety about the female body, particularly, the pregnant body. She also cites Harold Blum’s 2015 article about the extreme physical intimacy of the Freud family’s accommodations during his first three and a half years. In Balsam’s words, “In a single room without heat, a toilet, or running water, he lived at close quarters with parental sex, pregnancies, births, nursing, and the illnesses and death of his brother Julius, a year younger.…”

Freud, The Birthing Body, and Modern Life

“…In childhood, Freud was certainly surrounded by pregnancies up to the age of ten, his mother having had seven more children after him. Harold Blum (2015), in his vivid reconstruction of Freud's earliest life in Příbor (now in the Czech Republic and then in the Austro-Hungarian empire), writes of the extreme physical intimacy of the family's second-floor accommodations during his first three and a half years. In a single room without heat, a toilet, or running water, he lived at close quarters with parental sex, pregnancies, births, nursing, and the illness and death of his brother Julius, a year younger.…”