Sigmund Freud: the father of psychoanalysis
At the dawn of the 20th Century, one young
doctor in Vienna developed a theory that would
change our understanding of the human mind
forever.
Using cutting edge techniques the doctor delved
further into the psyche than anyone had before.
He created names, like the Id and Superego,
that are still in use today.
Catalogued patterns of thinking, like transference
and the Oedipus Complex, that still influence
us over a century later.
Even now, his name is still instantly recognizable:
Sigmund Freud.
Born in the mid-19th Century in what was then
the Austrian Empire, Freud’s life was that
of a consummate outsider.
He was an ethnic Jew in a city of Catholics;
an atheist in community of practicing Jews.
In a time of intense conservatism, he preached
that everyone was bisexual, and shocked society
when he suggested erotic desire was rooted
in childhood trauma.
The father of psychoanalysis, the inspiration
for surrealism, and a maverick who courted
controversy, Freud ushered in our modern notion
of the mind.
Yet he died in exile, persecuted and loathed
by the city he’d dedicated his life to.
Oedipus Freud
If you were to leave Vienna and walk due north
for 150 miles, you would eventually come to
a little town called Příbor.
A small, somewhat pretty place, Příbor is
utterly unremarkable among Czech towns in
almost every respect.
With one exception.
It was here, on May 6, 1856, that Sigmund
Freud was born.
At that time, Příbor was a heavily Catholic
town in the Austrian Empire with the German
name of Freiberg, and a Jewish community so
tiny you could count its members on one hand.
But small didn’t mean persecuted.
Freud managed to be born at a fortuitous time
for Jews in the Austrian Empire.
Just a few years before, the new emperor,
Franz Josef, had decreed the law would stop
persecuting other religions.
No longer would the Empire’s Jewish inhabitants
be subject to ghettos and restrictions.
They would be free, even to live unrestricted
in the imperial capital of Vienna.
Not that the Freuds immediately took advantage
of this right.
The first few years of Freud’s life were
passed in the pleasant dullness of Příbor,
a dullness that nonetheless masked an eccentric
upbringing.
Freud’s father Jacob was by now on his second
marriage, and his mother Amalie was twenty
years Jacob’s junior.
One consequence of this was that, by the time
Freud was born, he already had a nephew a
year older than him.
John was Freud’s first great friendship.
As toddlers, the two were inseparable.
But, as Freud would later remark, they were
also rivals.
That model of an intimate male friendship
that was also overshadowed by great rivalry
would be one that repeated throughout Freud’s
life.
In 1859, Freud’s older half-brother took
John and moved away to Manchester in England.
At first, Freud tried to fill the hole of
John’s frenemyship by becoming unhealthily
close to his mother, but while Amalie doted
on her boy, she was also by now heavily pregnant.
Needless to say, the subsequent glut of four
girls and two boys vying for Amalie’s attention
would make young Freud crazy jealous.
That same year, 1859, Jacob’s business collapsed
and he moved the family to Leipzig.
But things were no better in Saxony and, in
1860, the Freuds joined the mass influx of
Jews from across the Austrian Empire moving
to Vienna.
The austere capital of a deeply conservative
monarchy, Vienna in 1860 was a European power
center, but one with a dull reputation; the
dowdy sister of elegant Paris and industrious
London.
Yet it was also a capital on the cusp of change.
As Jewish intellectuals, Hungarian aristocrats,
and German artists all converged on the city,
the seeds were planted for Vienna’s transformation.
One of the key figures in this transformation
would be Sigmund Freud.
The family’s early years in Vienna aren’t
much to remark upon.
They settled into Leopoldstadt and Jacob presumably
got a decent job.
We can infer this because, in 1865, he was
able to pay for 9-year old Freud to attend
an excellent gymnasium.
And, no, not that sort of gymnasium; “gymnasium”
is the Central European term for a specialist
school.
During his years at this Lycra-less gymnasium,
Freud excelled at academic subjects, developed
a voracious appetite for books, and had yet
another of his trademark intimate frenemyships,
this time with a lad named Eduard.
But it wasn’t until his last year there
that Freud made a casual decision that would
change his life.
A public reading of one of Goethe’s nature
essays was being staged, and the young Freud
went along on a whim.
It was while listening to this essay that
Freud had a flash of inspiration.
He now knew what he wanted to do with his
life.
He was going to study medicine.
Making the Man
The next decade passed in a blur.
In 1873, Freud enrolled at the University
of Vienna as a medical student, where he gained
a solid reputation as a brain anatomist.
It was while at the University that he was
introduced to the older Dr Josef Breuer, a
guy who is gonna become really important to
our story really soon.
Two years later, in 1875, Freud traveled to
England for the first time, meeting up with
his old frenemy John.
He returned to Vienna obsessed with Britain,
despite, as he put it, all the “fog and
rain, drunkenness and conservatism.”
By 1881, Freud was a qualified medical practitioner.
Barely was the ink dry on his degree than
he’d met and fallen in love with his future
wife, Martha Bernays.
See what we mean?
Busy decade.
Bernays and Freud were soon engaged, but there
was a problem.
Martha Bernays came from a highly respected
family.
Her grandfather had been chief Rabbi of Hamburg.
Her parents were used to the finer things.
So when this semi-impoverished wannabee doctor
came and asked for their daughter’s hand
in marriage, they were all like:
“Uh, no.
Come back when you’ve got a decent job and
aren’t dressed like a hobo.”
And so Freud found himself, in 1882, suddenly
in desperate need of a steady income.
For a Viennese medical student at that time,
the best way to get ahead was to do something
groundbreaking, get noticed, and use your
fame to set up a practice.
While Freud already had a reputation as a
brain expert, he had nothing on his CV guaranteed
to make his name.
So Freud decided to roll everything on a gamble
that couldn’t fail.
He was going to introduce Vienna to cocaine.
We promise we haven’t got confused and accidentally
started reading from our old Pablo Escobar
script.
Freud really was certain that a breakthrough
with cocaine was where his future fame – and
the money to marry Martha – lay.
In April, 1884, he brought a huge quantity
and began experimenting with it as a cure
for depression, for indigestion, for alcoholism…
anything that might work.
Unfortunately, he missed the one major breakthrough
cocaine could have afforded him.
It was Freud’s friend, Karl Koller, who
discovered it could be used to numb people’s
eyes prior to surgery.
By the time a year had passed, Freud’s great
foray into cocaine had gotten him nothing
but missed opportunities and an expensive
addiction.
So he decided to change tack.
That July, Freud left Vienna and traveled
to Paris to study under the great neurologist
Jean-Martin Charcot.
For most of the 19th Century, nervous disorders
had been approached from a biological perspective,
like fixing a leaky ship.
If you could discover where the fault was
and patch it, you’d have a whole person
again.
But Jean-Martin Charcot had changed that.
Where others would talk about surgery, Charcot
was interested in hypnosis.
Where doctors in Vienna might whisper about
brain structure, Charcot was dabbling with
healing patients using only the power of words.
For Freud, witnessing Charcot’s methods
was more mind-blowing than a noseful of Uncle
Escobar’s marching powder.
Freud returned to Vienna in 1886, certain
Charcot’s methods would give him an edge
in his competitive field.
At first it looked like another fail.
Freud’s contemporaries basically accused
him of falling for a load of French merde.
But Freud was determined.
He set up his own practice, consulting on
nervous diseases using hypnosis.
And he soon had a regular enough income to
be able to afford marriage.
On September 13, 1886, Sigmund Freud and Martha
Bernays were wed.
Over the next eight years, their union would
produce six children.
For Freud, marrying Martha must’ve felt
like the affirmation he’d been waiting for.
Here he was, after all those false starts,
owner of a successful practice, and married
to the woman of his dreams.
But Freud wasn’t content to just stop now.
He’d gotten a taste for grandiose ideas,
for eccentric innovations.
His next one would change medicine forever.
A Brand New Science
Come the mid-1890s, Freud was restless.
He’d been practicing his brand of psychotherapy
for nearly ten years now, and was no longer
getting the results he desired.
It was while in this despondent mood that
he got to talking with his old teacher, Dr
Josef Breuer.
During the conversation, Breuer just happened
to mention one of his own old cases.
Way back in 1882, Breuer had treated a woman
he called Anna O.
Anna had been suffering from what used to
be called hysteria, a catch all term 19th
Century doctors used to mean anything from
seizures, to anxiety, to being too unladylike.
But Anna had also been strong willed.
She shrugged off Breuer’s attempts to use
hypnosis, and suggested they work via talking.
Over the next few weeks, patient and doctor
developed something they called the “talking
cure”.
Instead of Breuer using hypnosis to implant
suggestions, he’d just allowed Anna to unburden
herself, a kind of cathartic release.
The idea that you could use talking to get
at hidden trauma was the craziest thing Freud
had heard since his days with Charcot.
Naturally, he loved it.
In 1895 he helped Breuer write a case study
they published together as Studien über Hysterie.
However, Breuer was uncomfortable with Freud’s
obsession with his case.
Despite what he claimed, Breuer hadn’t actually
cured Anna.
She was still in decline, and today it’s
thought unlikely Breuer’s treatment was
helpful.
Still, Freud persisted.
He began introducing the talking method to
his own practice.
Invented the classic psychoanalyst set-up
we know from movies: y’know, with the patient
lying on a comfortable couch, while the doctor
sits out of sight, taking notes.
Pretty soon, Freud was using free association
to get his bourgeois patients to talk about
their darkest desires.
And he kept finding out that all of them were
obsessed with sex.
So, this is where we get to the first of many
controversial parts of Freud’s work.
All of Freud’s patients were female, and
it’s a frequent accusation that Freud was
simply pathologizing ordinary female sexuality.
Whether or not that’s true, Freud soon came
to believe that our hidden desires were at
the root of many of our problems.
Before long, he’d coined a term for the
process of treating these problems: psychoanalysis.
But if you’re expecting to hear this is
the beginning of Freud’s rise to becoming
a household name, you may have to think again.
For Freud, the late 1890s were spent in the
intellectual wilderness.
Sure, things were OK financially.
And his home life was going fine.
Martha had just given birth to their youngest
daughter – the future child therapist Anna
Freud.
But Freud’s reputation was floundering.
His initial attempts to create a handbook
for psychoanalysis collapsed.
Among the Catholic establishment, there were
rumblings that Freud was wasting his time
with some “Jewish science”.
Once again, Freud was in need of a breakthrough
to put his name in the spotlight.
In 1897, he found it.
Up until that point, Freud had listened as
many of his patients described what appeared
to be sexual abuse in their childhoods.
Before 1897, Freud had tended to believe them.
That year, he changed tack.
Freud’s eureka moment was deciding the abuse
his patients reported wasn’t real.
Instead, it was all fantasies brought on by
repressing their sexuality in childhood.
And here we get to yet another controversial
segment.
Nowadays, it’s acknowledged that children
experience immature sexual feelings, usually
in the form of embarrassing crushes or really,
really wanting to hold Chloe’s hand during
recess.
But we also acknowledge that some adults really
do abuse children.
Even adults from respectable, middle class
families.
It’s far from certain, but some argue Freud
unwittingly helped cover up a culture of abuse
in Vienna.
Still, the breakthrough gave Freud the notoriety
he’d always craved.
Now he just had to convince the deeply conservative
society he lived in to take his wild thoughts
on sexuality seriously.
How hard could
that be?
Breakthrough
If the 1890s were Freud’s wilderness years,
the first decade of the 20th Century was Freud
marching in from the desert, kicking down
the gates of Vienna, and forcing the world
to listen to his ideas.
In 1900, Die Traumdeutung – know in English
as The Interpretation of Dreams – hit the
bookshelves with all the force of a bomb going
off.
The basic outline of Freud’s thesis was
linking dreams with repressed desire, often
stemming from childhood, while also talking
about fantasy and daydreams reflecting unconscious
wants.
If that sounds a little abstract, know that
this book is where the idea of the Oedipus
Complex comes from, something that we still
talk about over a century later.
But the most consequential part was Freud’s
insistence that his discoveries didn’t just
apply to his patients.
They were universal.
This great ocean of dark desire was roiling
away in all of us.
It was this insight that would ensure Freud’s
name went down in history.
Starting in 1902, Freud followed up Die Traumdeutung
with regular lectures at Vienna University.
Although the number of attendees was small,
there was a core, loyal group.
Before long, that group was meeting with Freud
every Wednesday to discuss psychoanalysis.
By 1908 they would grow into the hugely influential
Vienna Psychoanalytical Society.
As these meetings began to spread Freud’s
ideas, the man himself was hard at work, churning
out book after book.
First came Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens
(The Pathology of Everyday Life), which introduced
the world to Freudian slips – disappointingly
not a lacy undergarment you wear to seduce
your mother, but the act of accidentally saying
something revealing.
This was followed in 1905 by Fragment of an
Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, which first
diagnosed the phenomenon of transference.
It was around this time that Freud’s growing
fame brought him into contact with Carl Jung.
To say Jung was important to Freud’s life
is like saying the Civil War probably affected
Abraham Lincoln’s career.
Their collaboration was intense and tragic.
Intense because their meetings would turn
into nonstop 13 hour debates.
And tragic because… well, you’ll see.
In Jung, Freud saw someone who could make
psychoanalysis mainstream.
Both because Jung was twenty years younger,
but also because he was a gentile.
He may have been an atheist all his life,
but Freud was only too aware of how Europe
saw even nonobservant Jews.
That his discoveries could be pigeonholed
as mere Jewish quackery.
For several years, the collaboration spurred
both Freud and Jung to greater heights.
Jung was there when Freud held the first international
psychoanalytic congress in Salzburg.
He was there when Freud gave his only lecture
series in America, at Clark University, Massachusetts.
And he was there, defending Freud in the public
eye whenever his ideas were ridiculed.
Alas, it was not to last.
In 1913, resentments that had been building
between the two men finally came exploding
out.
There are many theories about what caused
their rift, but given today’s subject, it
seems only fitting to highlight one particularly
Freudian interpretation.
We know that Freud occasionally fretted he
had a gay side – indeed, he claimed all
humans were innately bisexual – and that
he may have harbored repressed feelings for
Jung.
We also know that Jung had unresolved anger
issues relating to his father, feelings he
often directed towards father figures like
Freud.
Whatever the truth, the break between the
two men was permanent.
In 1913, Freud wrote the younger man a letter,
telling him he never wanted to see him again.
Jung seems to have agreed.
He never tried to contact Freud again.
It was the end of a period of intense creativity
for Freud, and the end of his dreams of grooming
a successor.
But that time period was also the end of something
else, too.
Freud didn’t know it, but he was living
through the last days of Europe.
The End of a World
The First World War was like a wrecking ball
crashing into the house of cards marked ‘history’.
In the short years between 1914 and 1918,
the war swept away three whole empires, including
Austria-Hungary.
Come late 1918, Vienna had gone from being
a seat of European power to the backwater
capital of a small, impoverished nation known
simply as Austria.
For Freud, the war had been marked by the
constant threat of tragedy, both personal
and professional.
On the personal side, all three of his sons
had been drafted to serve in the Austro-Hungarian
Army, making the death of at least one of
them seem almost inevitable.
On the professional side, the outbreak of
war killed the international psychoanalysis
movement stone dead.
For four long years, Freud was confined to
Vienna, able to do nothing but write, think,
and dream of a better future.
It was during this period that the lifelong
cigar smoker first discovered a strange growth
on his jaw.
Yet Freud was lucky.
All three of his sons came back alive from
the front.
And when the war ended in 1918 and the economy
of Austria was battered by runaway inflation,
Freud was able to take British clients to
provide his family with hard currency.
For the lifelong anglophile Freud, this was
a dream come true.
His patients were from the famous Bloomsbury
set, a collection of freethinking writers
and artists.
When they came to him for treatment, Freud
made it a condition that they translate his
works into English.
It was this agreement that would eventually
make Freud a household name.
Yet it was also in this postwar period that
tragedy finally struck.
In 1919, a virulent new strain of influenza
swept the world.
Known as Spanish Flu, it remains one of the
deadliest pandemics in history.
In one short year, it killed up to 50 million
people.
Among that 50 million was Freud’s daughter,
Sophie.
The death of Sophie came as a devastating
blow to Freud.
Barely had he recovered than he himself was
diagnosed with cancer of the jaw.
It was the start of a long decline from which
Freud would never recover.
But life goes on.
As the Great War gave way to the Roaring Twenties,
Freud continued to write, publishing Das Ich
und das Es (The Ego and the Id), the work
that gave us terms like superego that are
still in use today.
He also began to focus on his daughter Anna’s
development, taking her to psychiatric conferences,
and increasingly sending her in his place
when the cancer left him too weak.
It was around this time, when Freud was at
his lowest ebb, that psychoanalysis really
began to take off.
In Paris, the surrealists founded an entire
art movement inspired by Freud’s discoveries.
In Vienna, Freud found himself suddenly treating
the fabulously wealthy, like Marie Bonaparte,
a descendant of Napoleon.
By the end of the twenties, you could even
convince yourself Freud’s life was getting
back on track.
The cancer still hadn’t killed him.
He was publishing books like Civilization
and its Discontents, and psychoanalysis was
taking off in America
But sadly, we already know this was just an
illusion.
From our vantage point of the 21st Century,
we can already see the clouds gathering on
the horizon.
The storm that will be unleashed by one nationalist
with a fanatical hatred for Jews.
For the Jewish Freud, still living in Vienna,
that storm would be destined to consume him.
Burning Books, Burning People
On May 10, 1933, a large group of students
gathered outside the State Opera in Berlin.
But these students weren’t there to down
kegs or party.
They were there to burn books.
Barely two months earlier, the German parliament
had passed the Enabling Act, handing total
power to Adolf Hitler.
Now the Nazi student groups were showing their
enthusiasm for the new regime by consigning
25,000 “un-German” books to the flames.
Among the books that burned that day were
the works of Sigmund Freud.
In Vienna, Freud could only watch as neighboring
Germany fell to Nazism.
His sole consolation may have been that Austria
hadn’t yet succumbed.
Although fascists seized control of the country
in 1934, they stopped short of the outright
anti-Semitism of the Nazis.
Still, the growing violence in Germany must’ve
put everyone on edge.
What if Hitler decided to take over Austria?
In 1938, he finally did.
On March 12, German tanks rolled across the
border, annexing Austria into the Third Reich.
On the streets of Vienna, people lined up
to cheer the Nazis.
Buildings were draped in Swastikas, street
parties held.
All alone in his apartment, Freud simple noted
two words in his diary: 'Finis Austriae'.
By this stage, Freud was nearly dead from
the cancer spread throughout his system; a
walking cadaver that couldn’t even make
it to the family’s summerhouse outside Vienna.
When people suggested he leave the country
he told them it would never happen.
Nor would it have, had it not been for what
happened to Anna.
On March 22, Anna Freud was arrested by the
Gestapo.
They ruthlessly interrogated her for hours
before throwing her back out onto the street.
The incident shook the elderly Freud to his
core.
The next day, he decided to leave Austria.
This was easier said than done.
Under the new Nazi regime, the whereabouts
of Jews was closely tracked.
Leaving the country required a special exit
visa, and you can guess how often the Gestapo
handed those out.
Thankfully, Freud had three very important
people on his side.
The first was his patient, Marie Bonaparte.
The second was William Bullitt, the US ambassador
in Vienna.
But the third was less expected.
Komissar Anton Sauerwald was a dyed in the
wool Nazi, tasked with overseeing Jews in
Vienna.
But Sauerwald was also a former student of
one of Freud’s closest friends.
He’d spent all his years of study learning
to respect the famous doctor.
So when he discovered Freud was looking for
an out, he decided to help him.
That Spring, Sauerwald secured exit visas
for Freud and 16 of his family members.
Elsewhere, Princess Marie was using her vast
fortune to grease as many palms as possible,
while William Bullitt was applying diplomatic
pressure.
After three months, the Freuds were finally
given the all clear to leave Austria for England.
The ride to London must’ve been both hopeful
and heartbreaking.
Here was Freud, finally fulfilling his teenage
dream to live in England, but under the gloomiest
circumstances.
It probably didn’t help that all four of
Freud’s elderly sisters had been unable
to get exit visas.
Although Freud wouldn’t live long enough
to hear the news, all four would perish in
concentration camps.
On June 6, 1938, Freud and his family finally
arrived in London by train.
Word had leaked out, and a huge crowd had
gathered to welcome the world’s most famous
psychoanalyst.
As he saw the rows upon rows of people cheering,
Freud felt like he’d finally come home.
*
Freud would live barely a year after reaching
England, passing away on September 23, 1939,
just twenty days after Britain declared war
on Germany.
He kept receiving patients almost until the
very end.
When the author H.G Wells came to visit, Freud
confided in him that it had always been a
fantasy of his to be an Englishman.
In its own strange way, that fantasy had come
true.
Today, it’s fashionable to knock Freud’s
theories, to poke fun at his experiments with
cocaine, his obsession with sex.
Certainly, there are few psychiatrists today
who would say Freud’s methods were completely
sound.
Yet to just focus on Freud’s medical work
is to miss the point.
No matter what you think of him, Freud completely
transformed the way we understood the human
mind.
Just think how often you hear about people
having “complexes”, or suffering from
transference, or having problems with mother
or father figures.
Think how deeply ideas of psychoanalysis and
childhood trauma have penetrated into our
fiction, into our art.
Think just of how significant surrealism became.
Sigmund Freud may have died an exile, unloved
by his home country.
But he also died the father of psychoanalysis,
and the greatest explorer of the human mind.
For that reason, if no other, he deserves
to be remembered.
