Fliess's noses

[A mouse rather than a human]

I am presently trying to read Rieff’s book on Freud, reference 1, from where I branched to the long owned but never actually read reference 2, Freud’s famous book on dreams. From where, picking up on the references to one Wilhelm Fliess, I moved onto references 3 and 4.

It seems that Fliess was Freud’s long-time doctor, family friend, colleague and correspondent - until about the time of Freud’s self-analysis at the end of the nineteenth century, an analysis which was a harbinger of the psycho-analysis to come. There was then a quarrel and a breach, leaving a wound which Freud took some time to deal with.

It seems that Fliess was an ENT man, but also a bit of a numerologist, believing in all kinds of interesting periodicities in worldly affairs, in body and in soul. And sharing an interest with Freud in sex, more or less taboo in respectable bourgeoise conversation at the time. He really got the bit between the teeth when it came to links between the nose and the genitalia, possibly kicked off by finding out about a pair of small erectile organs in the nasal cavity, the vomeronasal organs.

But then I – or rather Bing – turned up references 6 and 7, from which I learn that Fliess might have been onto something, even if he got the details very wrong. While the half read reference 8 and the fully read reference 9 provide some background: inter alia, it seems that the human capacity for smell is not so bad after all: we have the necessary machinery – somewhat different from that of a dog with its muzzle – but most of us don’t bother to use it. Machinery which is now thought to include an extra cranial nerve, CN 0, long known in animals but only more recently identified in humans – with generations of doctors and nurses having been trained on twelve, rather than thirteen cranial nerves – for which last, the various mnemonic jingles and rhymes will have to be reworked.

Further evidence for the importance of smell to humans being the huge amount of time and treasure poured into the scent and taste businesses, both, as it happens, at least until quite recently, completely dependant on raw product from animals and vegetables.

Then there is the consideration that smell is very much part of reproduction, with many plants and animals making extensive use of smell in that department – remembering here that both plants and animals might make smells, but animals are a good deal better at detecting them. Which leads neatly on to Bhutta’s paper at reference 6.

Smell is a very ancient business, with most of the machinery that we now have having first appeared a very long time ago. This being one reason why signals about smells from noses go directly to the brain, unlike the other senses which take longer routes, through less ancient pathways.

Many animals signal conspecifics using chemicals called pheromones. Bhutta cites, by way of example, the fact that pregnant mice are apt to abort when housed with males other than the father. The vector for these chemicals is commonly, but not always, urine. Sweat will do.

To these ends, in many animals the sense of smell is augmented with the accessory olfactory system which ‘consists of the vomeronasal organ, a bilateral tubular structure on the anterior nasal septum, and its projections to the accessory olfactory bulb, lying adjacent to but separate from the main olfactory bulb’. Humans have these organs too, the organs which Fliess took an interest in.

Another component of the smell system is the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), also part of the immune system and which in this context can be thought of as a chemical fingerprint of an individual.

Until recently it was thought that this extra machinery was vestigial in humans who, in consequence, made little use of pheromone signalling – this despite what might be called the reproductive sources of many perfumes.

And human urine does contain pheromones, which can be detected by other animals. However, most humans are averse to the smell of urine and need some other pathway. Possibly the sweat glands under the armpits and the regular olfactory system, with various experiments suggesting that this might be so. Many people can tell the sex of the person from which sweat came and many people can discriminate between family members and others. It also seems to be the case that women are better at detecting and identifying these smells than men.

From all of which Bhutta concludes what while human vision may have taken on some of the functions of smell in other animals, convenient given that the human nose was usually a good way above the ground where most interesting smells were to be found, it may well be that smell is more important than had been thought. Work in progress. In any event, Fliess did have a point after all, odd bird though he may well have been.

PS: somewhat later: resuming my perusal of reference 2, I read the specimen dream in Chapter II again. It now seems more likely that Fliess was interested in the turbinal bones or conchae, also erectile, of the primary olfactory system, rather than the much smaller vomeronasal organs of the accessory system. So one turret of the castle above falls. Repair is left as an exercise for the reader.

References

Reference 1: Freud: The mind of the moralist - Philip Rieff – 1959.

Reference 2: The interpretation of dreams – Sigmund Freud – 1899/1954

Reference 3: Sigmund Freud: Life and Work – Earnest Jones – 1953/1957. Three volumes. 

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Fliess.

Reference 5: The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904 – translated and edited by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson – 1985. Unseen, but cited as evidence of the importance of these letters. With Masson being another rather odd bird.

Reference 6: Sex and the nose: human pheromonal responses – Bhutta M.F – 2007.

Reference 7: Something in the air? New insights into mammalian pheromones - Brennan P.A, Keverne E.B – 1994. The source of some of the material in reference 6. The source of the figure above.

Reference 8: Sentient: What animals reveal about our senses – Jackie Higgins – 2021. Smell gets a look in, although not a very big one.

Reference 9: The human sense of smell: are we better than we think? – Gordon M. Shepherd – 2004. Among the references given in reference 8.