Known as the man who thought boys grow up with a sexual desire for their mother and hostile jealousy towards their father, and that girls develop anxiety about not having a penis, his revolutionary contributions to the development of psychoanalytical theory are sometimes overshadowed by the highly debated of his ideas.
One investigation by Freud, however, barely gets a look in at all - the time he dissected 400 eels to find the male sex organs. Yes, really.
In 1876, Freud, then a 19-year-old medical student at the University of Vienna, was also studying zoology. Under the tutelage of Carl Claus, he went to Trieste, Italy, with the aim of finding out if eels had the male sex organs.
For centuries before this, scientists had wondered quite how eels were able to reproduce
For centuries before this, scientists had wondered quite how eels were able to reproduce. Aristotle speculated that they were born from the mud (or ‘the entrails of the earth’ as he dramatically put it), but others believed they might have been created by sunlight shining on dewdrops, or simply out of nothing. However, Freud’s mentor Claus had read a report claiming that Polish scientist Simone De Syrski had found structures in eels that could possibly be the testes.
Freud’s study was a notable effort to find out once and for all if De Syrski was right, and if eels indeed had male sexual organs. There had recently been a discovery of a female eel with eggs, so surely the male of the species would have the male equivalent?
Well, the answer was, frustratingly for Freud, more complicated. After a month, he had dissected over 400 eels, acquiring them from fishermen’s daily catches and painstakingly searching for any proof that male eels possessed sexual organs. However, he didn't find anything substantial beyond proving knowledge that already existed. He did find one eel who had organs hidden in the abdominal cavity, but Freud seemingly wasn’t happy with this - that was one eel out of 400, and he was no closer to finding out how eels truly reproduce.
In hindsight, Freud’s experiment was let down on one major flaw - he wasn’t selective with the eels that he was using. Newer studies have shown that eels only develop male sexual organs in later life, when they migrate to the Sargassa Sea to spawn before dying. If this had been known, then Freud could have acquired the eels at the right time in their lifespan and made an anatomical breakthrough years in advance.
…Ernest Jones, believed that Freud's frustration at his inability … influenced his psychosexual theories…
Nevertheless, Freud’s failure to make any major breakthroughs with this experiment (at least a failure in his eyes) might have been very influential to his work in the long run. His friend, psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, believed that Freud’s frustration at his inability to come to conclusive proof about eels’ reproductive cycles influenced his psychosexual theories about humans later on in life. So, if you’re ever irritated by having to learn the Oedipus complex: blame eels.