Freud and Albert Moll: how kindred spirits became bitter foes.

Harry Oosterhuis

doi:10.1177/0957154x20922130

Abstract

This article explores the antagonism between Sigmund Freud and the German neurologist and sexologist Albert Moll. When Moll, in 1908, published a book about the sexuality of children, Freud, without any grounds, accused him of plagiarism. In fact, Moll had reason to suspect Freud of plagiarism since there are many parallels between Freud's Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie and Moll's Untersuchungen über die Libido sexualis. Freud had read this book carefully, but hardly paid tribute to Moll's innovative thinking about sexuality. A comparison between the two works casts doubt on Freud's claim that his work was a revolutionary breakthrough. Freud's course of action raises questions about his integrity. The article also critically addresses earlier evaluations of the clash.

Highlights

This article explores the antagonism between Sigmund Freud and the German neurologist and sexologist Albert Moll
On the morning of 25 April 1909, Sigmund Freud wrote to Sándor Ferenczi that he was awaiting ‘two very interesting guests’: the German neurologist Albert Moll and Oskar Pfister, a Protestant pastor from Zurich
‘Little Hans’, he wound himself up into several spirals, became more and more venomous, and to my great joy, jumped up and prepared to take flight. At the door he grinned and made an unsuccessful attempt to retrieve himself by asking me when I was coming to Berlin

Summary

Character assassination

Moll’s criticisms, which were not entirely unreasonable or unusual (Jung, the psychologist William Stern and the journalist Karl Kraus, for example, expressed similar objections), struck at the heart of psychoanalysis. Freud and his associates had mistrusted and demeaned Moll before his book appeared. The contents of Moll’s sexological writings published in the 1890s, which were more cautious and nuanced than those of most other sexual scientists, remain underexposed and warrant more attention than they have received so far Despite his meticulous analysis of how sexologists, in particular Moll and Ellis, foreshadowed many of Freud’s ideas, Sulloway (1992: 212) argues that Drei Abhandlungen surpassed their work in originality. There is a general belief among historians and other commentators that Freud, drawing on other thinkers, fully eclipsed established views; that he inflicted, in Arnold Davidson’s (1987: 264–5) words, ‘a conceptually devastating blow to the entire structure of nineteenth-century theories of sexual psychopathology’.14 This interpretation is connected to the story about the hostile reception of Drei Abhandlungen among a shocked and indignant public who could not swallow Freud’s radical and disturbing ideas (Jones, 1955: 12). Moll questioned prevailing medical explanations of ‘perversion’ in terms of psychopathology and degeneration. He was in favour of more equal relations between man and woman, companionate marriage, women’s right to sexual satisfaction, social support for unmarried mothers, and a rational sexual education of children

Similarities and contrasts

Similarities in the sexual theories of Moll and Freud