Life_and_Charector

Chapter 1 Life and character Sigmund Freud was born on 6 May 1856 in the Moravian town of Freiberg, now Pribor in the Czech Republic. His mother, Amalie, was the third wife of Jacob Freud, a Jewish wool merchant, some twenty years younger than her husband. In 1859, when Sigmund Freud was three years old, the family moved to Vienna. For the next 79 years Freud continued to live and work in this city, for which he recurrently professed distaste, but which he was extremely reluctant to leave. In 1938, he was compelled to take refuge from the Nazis, and spent the last year of his life in England, dying on 23 September 1939, shortly after the beginning of the Second World War. Freud’s mother, a vivacious and charming lady who survived until the age of 95, was only 21 when Freud was born. She went on to bear seven other children; but Sigmund, referred to by her as ‘mein goldener Sigi’ (‘my golden Sigi’), remained her indisputable favourite, one circumstance to which Freud attributed his inner confidence. Freud also believed that his later success was directly related to his being a Jew. Although Freud never practised the Jewish religion and dismissed all religious belief as illusory, he was very conscious of being Jewish, made few friends who were not Jews, regularly attended the meetings of B’nai B’rith, his local Jewish society, and declined royalties from those of his books which were translated into Yiddish and Hebrew. He attributed his intellectual autonomy to his being Jewish, writing that, when he first 1 1. Freud arrives in Paris on his way to London, 1938, with Marie Bonaparte and William C. Bullitt. Marie Bonaparte (Princess George of Greece) paid the sum demanded by the Nazis to let Freud out of Austria, because his own bank account and cash had been confiscated. William Bullitt, the American ambassador in Paris, had been joint author with Freud of a (very bad) book on the former American president Woodrow Wilson encountered anti-Semitism at the University of Vienna, his lack of acceptance by the community drove him into opposition and fostered his independence of judgement. As a boy, Freud was intellectually precocious and an extremely hard worker. For six successive years, Freud was first in his class at school; and, by the time he left, had not only obtained a thorough knowledge of Greek, Latin, German, and Hebrew, but had learned French and English, and had also taught himself the rudiments of Spanish and Italian. He began to read Shakespeare at the age of eight. Shakespeare and Goethe remained his favourite authors. From his earliest years, Freud was a serious, dedicated student who was evidently expected by his family and teachers to make his mark in the world, and who himself acquired a conviction that he was destined to make some important contribution to knowledge. Family life revolved around his studies. He took his evening meal apart from the rest of the family and, because the sound of her practising disturbed him, his sister Anna’s piano was removed from the apartment by his parents. Freud enrolled in the medical department of the University of Vienna in the autumn of 1873, but did not graduate until 30 March 1881. His initial interest was in zoological research. From 1876 to 1882 he carried out research in the Physiological Institute of Ernst Brücke, an authority whom he greatly admired and who exercised a considerable influence upon his thinking. Brücke and his co-workers were dedicated to the idea, then not widely accepted, that all vital processes could ultimately be explained in terms of physics and chemistry, thus eliminating religious and vitalist concepts from biology. Freud remained a determinist throughout his life, believing that all vital phenomena, including psychological phenomena like thoughts, feelings, and phantasies, are rigidly determined by the principle of cause and effect. Freud was reluctant to practise medicine, and would have been content to spend his life in research. But, in 1882, he fell in love and became 3 Life and character Freud 2. A letter to Martha written in agitation, hence the ink blots – Freud begs her not to ask for an explanation. 9 August 1882 engaged to Martha Bernays. Since there was no possibility of his earning enough to support a wife and family if he remained in Brücke’s laboratory, Freud reluctantly abandoned his research career, and spent the next three years gaining medical experience in the Vienna General Hospital, preparatory to embarking upon medical practice. In 1885 he was appointed a lecturer in neuropathology at the University of Vienna. From October 1885 to February 1886 he worked at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris under the great neurologist Charcot, whose teaching on hysteria awoke his interest in the problems of the neuroses, as opposed to organic diseases of the nervous system. In April 1886 Freud opened his medical practice in Vienna, and, on 13 September, at last married his fiancée. Their first child, Mathilde, was born in October 1887. Five more children 4 3. Freud and his fiancée Martha Bernays on their engagement, 1885 were to follow, the last being Anna Freud, born in 1895, the only one of Freud’s children to become a psychoanalyst. His wife, Martha, was content to devote herself entirely to his welfare and to that of their six children throughout their long and tranquil married life. We know from letters that their sexual life declined comparatively early; but their family life remained harmonious. After his death, she wrote to a friend: And yet how terribly difficult it is to have to do without him. To continue to live without so much kindness and wisdom beside one! It is small comfort for me to know that in the fifty-three years of our married life not one angry word fell between us and that I always sought as much as possible to remove from his path the misery of everyday life. From the mid-1890s onward, Freud’s life becomes the history of the development of psychoanalysis. Studies on Hysteria, written jointly with Josef Breuer, appeared in 1895. If one considers the influence which Freud has had upon contemporary thought, and the fact that his own Freud contributions to psychoanalysis are so extensive as to require twentyfour volumes, it is extraordinary that the first psychoanalytic publication did not appear until he was 39 years old. What kind of personality is able to achieve so much within the span of only half a lifetime' Most people of outstanding intellectual achievement exhibit traits of personality which psychiatrists label obsessional; that is, they are meticulous, scrupulous, accurate, reliable, honest, and much concerned with cleanliness, control, and order. Only when these admirable traits become exaggerated do we speak of obsessional neurosis, a disorder which ranges in severity from mild compulsions to check and recheck to a state of total disablement in which the sufferer’s existence is so dominated by rituals that normal life becomes impossible. Freud himself recognized that his personality was obsessional, and told Jung that, if he were to suffer from neurosis, it would be of the 6 4. Freud in the Dolomites with his daughter Anna, 1913 obsessional type. His intellectual precocity, and his dedication to work, which remained compulsive from boyhood onwards, are characteristic. He wrote to his friend, Fliess, that he needed a ‘dominating passion’. He claimed that he could not contemplate a life without work, and that, for him, the creative imagination and work went together. He was an enormously productive writer. Most of his writing was done on Sundays, or late at night after a day in which he might have spent eight or nine demanding hours seeing analytic patients. Although he took long summer holidays, during which he was an energetic walker, he allowed himself little time for relaxation during the working week. Like most people with this type of personality, Freud was extremely neat in dress and appearance, even when early poverty made this difficult. A letter to Wilhelm Fliess reveals that a barber attended him daily. He exhibited all the most valuable traits characteristic of this variety of personality, being scrupulous, self-controlled, honest, and passionately concerned with the pursuit of truth. Freud himself Freud described obsessional personalities as being ‘especially orderly, parsimonious and obstinate’ (SE, IX.169). He was certainly orderly and obstinate; and may have appeared parsimonious in his early days, when he was extremely poor and dependent on the financial help of friends like Josef Breuer. His tastes remained simple, and Ernest Jones tells us that he never owned more than three suits, three pairs of shoes, and three sets of underclothes. In later years, he could not tolerate owing money to anyone; and, although charging high fees to those who could afford them, gave generous financial help to those in need, including some patients, his own relatives, and poverty-stricken students. He also suffered from some of the tensions which are inseparable from the valuable traits found in obsessional personalities. He was superstitious about numbers. In a letter to Jung (16 April 1909), he reveals that, for many years, he was convinced that he would die between the ages of 61 and 62. In 1904, he went to Greece with his brother, and writes that it was ‘really uncanny’ how often the number 61 8 or 60 kept on cropping up in connection with 1 or 2. His hotel room in Athens was numbered 31; that is, half of 62. He tells Jung that this obsession first appeared in 1899. At that time two events occurred. First, I wrote ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ (which appeared postdated 1900), second, I received a new telephone number which I still have today: 14362. It is easy to find a factor common to these two events. In 1899 when I wrote ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ I was 43 years old. Thus it was plausible to suppose that the other figures signified the end of my life, hence 61 or 62. (The Freud–Jung Letters, 219). Such superstitions, often combined with compulsive rituals and a preoccupation with death, are commonly found in cases of obsessional neurosis. Ernest Jones has drawn attention to the fact that, like many other creative men of genius, Freud exhibited a peculiar oscillation between scepticism and credulity. Although Freud did not subscribe to the belief in mediums and ‘spiritualism’, which seduced so many scientists towards the end of the nineteenth century, he did retain an irrational conviction about the occult significance of numbers and a more than half-hearted belief in telepathy. Freud exhibited a number of other obsessional habits and traits. For example, he was a compulsive smoker of cigars. When, during the years 1893 to 1896, he suffered from a recurrent cardiac arrhythmia which may have been partly attributable to smoking, he found it impossible to abstain for long. At the age of 67, he developed a cancerous condition of the palate, which recurred throughout the rest of his life, requiring more than 30 operations. Although he knew that smoking was an agent which provoked recurrence by the irritation which it caused, he was unable to abandon the habit. Obsessional personalities usually exhibit self-control to the point of appearing inhibited and lacking in spontaneity and Freud was no exception. But smoking was his Achilles’ heel; a compulsive part of his behaviour, which he was unable to master. 9 Life and character 5. Part of Freud’s collection of antique statuettes His collecting habits were also characteristic. Freud had a passion for antiquities, stimulated by his classical studies, his romantic longing for Rome, and his interest in the remoter aspects of human history. Photographs of his apartment in Vienna, and the reconstruction of that apartment in his study at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, now the Freud Museum, show his collection of antique statuettes. These crowd the shelves and the top of his desk so closely that not one can be appreciated as an aesthetic object in its own right. This display is not that of a connoisseur but that of an obsessional collector whose interest is in accumulation rather than in beauty. Freud himself realized that his interest in such objects, like his interest in sculpture, depended upon the historical associations of the object and its emotional and intellectual meaning rather than upon its aesthetic form. He frankly admits as much in his essay on ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’; a piece which also exhibits Freud’s meticulous attention to small details, which would escape the scrutiny of most observers. This close attention to detail also showed itself in his clinical interpretations of his patients’ symptoms, dreams, and other psychological material. Freud had a lively appreciation of literature. The excellence of Freud’s own literary style was recognized when he was still a schoolboy. In 1930, he became the fourth recipient of the Goethe prize for literature awarded by the City of Frankfurt. In Freud’s collected works there are more references to Goethe and to Shakespeare than there are to the writings of any psychiatrist. His appreciation of music was confined to opera, the type of musical performance which most appeals to the unmusical. A nephew describes him as despising music. Freud’s inhibited, controlled nature extended to his autobiography, which concentrates almost entirely upon the development of psychoanalysis and tells us next to nothing about his personal life. As early as 1885, he wrote to his fiancée telling her that he had destroyed his notes, letters, and manuscripts of the last 14 years, presciently adding that he had no desire to make it easy for his future biographers. 11 Life and character 6. The entrance to Freud’s last house, 20 Maresfield Gardens, London, NW3, now the Freud Museum Freud, the man who spent his life investigating the kind of intimate secrets which people strive to conceal from themselves as well as from others, was extremely reluctant to reveal his own. In his clinical work, Freud was kind and tolerant, as psychoanalysts have to be. However, his kindness was not based upon any great expectations of the human race, whom he regarded with distaste or with detachment rather than with love. I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole. In my experience, most of them are trash (‘Psychoanalysis and Faith’, 61–2) he wrote in one letter. One analysand records that his interest was curiously impersonal . . . He was so concentrated on the inquiry he was pursuing that his self functioned only as an instrument Life and character Those who were close to him admired him, not only for his intelligence and breadth of culture, but also for his integrity and courage. Perhaps he lacked something in immediate warmth. In a letter to Jung (2 September 1907) Freud wrote: I have always felt that there is something about my personality, my ideas and manner of speaking, that people find strange and repellent, whereas all hearts open to you. If a healthy man like you regards himself as an hysterical type, I can only claim for myself the ‘obsessional’ type, each specimen of which vegetates in a sealed-off world of his own. (The Freud–Jung Letters, 82) Freud’s honesty compelled him substantially to modify or revise his ideas on a number of occasions throughout his long life; but this always 13 seems to have been brought about by new insights of his own rather than by any response to the criticism of others. When Freud had reached a particular conclusion, he was intolerant of disagreement, and this rigidity led to the long series of defections among his collaborators and disciples which is such a regrettable feature of psychoanalytic history. Freud treated such defections as betrayals rather than as intellectual divergences. Breuer, the first collaborator to become estranged, wrote to Forel: Freud is a man given to absolute and exclusive formulations . . . this is a psychical need which, in my opinion, leads to excessive generalization. Breuer was right on both counts. Where human frailty was concerned, Freud exhibited a quite unusual tolerance. This, because it has led to a more civilized attitude towards neurosis, sexual deviation, and other forms of emotional maladaptation, is one of Freud’s most valuable legacies. But, in the early days of psychoanalysis, he could not allow Freud those close to him to dispute what he claimed to be the fundamental, absolute tenets of the new science of the mind which he had originated; and this led not only to the breaches with Breuer and Fliess, but to the departure of Adler, Stekel, Jung, Rank, and others from the psychoanalytic movement. Breuer’s remark about ‘excessive generalization’ is also well founded. Freud was a bold and original thinker; but the nature and length of the psychoanalytic procedure, which he invented, meant that he based his conclusions about human nature on a very small sample of the human race. Freud’s patients belonged predominantly to the upper or uppermiddle classes. Moreover, the type of case upon which early psychoanalytic theory was originally based, namely, severe conversion hysteria in women, is seldom seen today. Excessive generalization is a temptation for all original thinkers, who are usually in love with their own ideas and who therefore overvalue them. 14 Perhaps novel and unpopular ideas would never win a hearing unless their originators were entirely convinced that they were right. Freud was not only sure that he had discovered new aspects of the truth about human beings, but he was also a persuasive writer who endeavoured to meet all possible criticisms which his readers might advance in the course of his own exposition; a technique which is deliberately ‘disarming’. He expected hostility and incredulity and often experienced both. But his literary skill and his absolute conviction of his own rightness eventually made psychoanalysis a force to be reckoned with throughout the Western world. There is also another reason for overgeneralization, which springs not from overvaluation of the new ideas, but from a desire or need which is very characteristic of thinkers with obsessional personalities. Because their psychology is based on the need to order and control, they tend to look for, and be attracted by, comprehensive systems of thought which promise near-complete explanations of human existence, and which therefore hold out the hope that the individual can master both his own nature and external reality by means of his new understanding. Many of the greatest philosophers, including Kant and Wittgenstein, were people of this kind, creating their own systems, impervious to the ideas of others, often unable to read the works of other philosophers with profit or pleasure. Freud claimed to be a scientist, and was certainly not a philosopher in the technical sense, nor particularly interested in the subject, although, as a young man, he had translated a book by John Stuart Mill. Nevertheless, he resembled some philosophers in being a systembuilder. Very early in its history, psychoanalysis left the narrow confines of the consulting room and made incursions into anthropology, sociology, religion, literature, art, and the occult. It became, if not a philosophical system, at least a Weltanschauung; and this extraordinary expansion of a method of treating neurotics into a new way of regarding human nature had its origin in the psychological needs of its founder. 15 Life and character Freud repudiated religion as an illusion, yet needed some systematic approach to making coherent sense out of the world. He called the system which he invented a science; but psychoanalysis is not, and could never have been, a science in the sense in which physics or chemistry are sciences, since its hypotheses are retrospective and cannot be used for prediction, and most are insusceptible of final proof. Freud’s deterministic stance, and his insistence that psychoanalysis was a science, have discredited his discoveries in the eyes of philosophers like Popper, and of scientists like Medawar, with the consequence that they have failed to appreciate the importance of psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic system and as a way of looking at human nature. A short book cannot attempt an account of everything that Freud wrote. What follows is an attempt to evaluate his more important theories in the light of modern knowledge. Freud 16