by Ruth Snowden
FREUD’S CHARACTER
In academic circles Freud was often seen as opinionated and rather peculiar, so that much of his work was done in what he called ‘splendid isolation’, just as it had been from boyhood. He obviously had outstanding intellect, but by his own admission he had a rather neurotic, obsessive personality and could not imagine a life without work. He wrote incessantly and much of his writing was done on his days off, or even after a busy day seeing his patients.
Freud’s obsessive personality meant that he was the kind of person who has to do everything meticulously and accurately and he liked to be in control. This can be seen in various ways outside of his work. He was very superstitious about certain numbers – for instance, he became utterly convinced that he would die at 61 or 62, because of a series of rather tenuous coincidences to do with odd things like hotel room numbers. This kind of thinking is the downside of the type of self-controlled personality that is obsessional enough to produce the astonishing volume of work that Freud did. In extreme cases it can lead to what is known as an obsessional neurosis, where the sufferer is driven by endless compulsive rituals, and becomes unable to function normally.
Freud was a great collector of antiques, fired by his earlier classical studies and his interest in ancient history. He accumulated vast numbers of antique statuettes and other artefacts that are still on display in his study at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, in London, which is now part of a Freud Museum. They are crammed in all over the place, showing that he was not particularly interested in their artistic value, but more in the feeling of connection with the past that they gave him and the sheer pleasure of collecting them.
His compulsive streak shows up again in the fact that he smoked cigars heavily nearly all his life and found it impossible to stop, even when he was diagnosed with oral cancer in 1923 and realized that the tobacco was doing him no good. It was not until he had a heart attack in 1930 that he finally gave up.
FRIENDSHIPS
Freud’s friendships tended to be fairly intense, although he was also prone to falling out with people. This was characteristic of the way in which he related to friends – he would grow to admire someone greatly and value their moral support, but at the same time competitive aspects would gradually creep in and finally destroy the relationship.
This happened in Freud’s relationship with Josef Breuer, who was a highly respected and successful physician in Vienna. He befriended Freud and even lent him money. Their relationship became so close that Freud named his first child Mathilde after Breuer’s wife. For some time Freud was quite dependent on Breuer, but eventually a rift occurred when Breuer simply could not agree with Freud’s insistence upon sexual motives for everything. By the time their joint publication Studies On Hysteria was published in 1893 their friendship had already ended. Years later, after Breuer’s death, Freud was greatly moved to find out that his friend had continued to follow his career with great interest even after the rift between them had occurred.
Some of Freud’s friends had theories that were considered even more bizarre than Freud’s. Breuer suggested that Freud should meet Wilhelm Fliess, a nose and throat physician from Berlin, when Fliess was in Vienna for a medical conference in 1887. A strong bond gradually developed between the two of them. Fliess was obsessed with the numbers 23 and 28, and developed his own scientific theory, called ‘vital periodicity’, involving these numbers. He decided that all vital processes went in cycles of 28 days for women and 23 days for men, and went on to suggest that all sorts of useful predictions could be made from this, such as how long it would take to recover from an illness and even the likely date of a person’s death.
We now know that this idea is not quite as mad as it seemed – it was the forerunner of the idea of biorhythms. Some of Fliess’s other ideas were madder. For example, he thought the nose was an important sexual organ and that the state of the nose reflected various sexual disturbances. This theory has yet to be proved! However, Freud’s friendship with Fliess was typical in that the two men exchanged many ideas and Fliess acted as a useful critic and advisor to Freud until their inevitable falling-out in 1900–01. Fliess was the first person to suggest to Freud the idea of researching jokes and popular fantasies in the light of psychoanalysis. Letters from Freud to Fliess, collected together by Marie Bonaparte in 1938, show the development of his psychoanalytical thinking. Unfortunately, Fliess’s replies were either lost or destroyed by Freud.
Fliess thought the nose was an important sexual organ.
BELIEFS AND OTHER INTERESTS
Early on Freud may have dabbled in the Kabbala, the esoteric branch of Jewish mysticism. He belonged to a Jewish society called B’nai B’rith and enjoyed weekly games of taroc, a complicated and popular card game which some people think is based on the Kabbala. The taroc deck varies in size, but it includes 22 trump cards from the tarot, which are rich in symbolic imagery. The symbolism on these cards may well have set Freud on the path towards his first ideas about the unconscious: it was at this time that he presented his first ideas about dream interpretation. This information has been largely suppressed, probably because it wasn’t approved of in Freud’s contemporary society, with its rising tide of fierce anti-semitism. Later Freud strongly disapproved in public of what he called ‘the occult’ (see Chapter 10).
When he did take some time out from work, Freud enjoyed going for long walks with his family and looking for mushrooms. People often think of him as a stern patriarch, but in fact his children recalled plenty of happy days when he stopped working and took them for family outings. He never bought a lot of clothes: in fact, he is reported to have only ever had three suits, three sets of underwear and three pairs of shoes at a time. However, he was not mean and later in life gave financial support to various friends, patients and students. He enjoyed literature, but unlike many in Vienna he was not particularly keen on music, apart from opera.
Following his diagnosis with cancer, Freud suffered many painful medical treatments and surgical operations. However, he continued to write for the remaining 16 years of his life after the diagnosis of cancer – mainly philosophical and cultural publications. His autobiography reveals very little detail of his personal and private family life, and he deliberately destroyed a lot of letters and personal documents, first in 1885 and then again in 1907. Even though he was fascinated all his life by trying to probe other people’s minds, he was obviously keen to keep his own affairs private. This might reflect a certain amount of insecurity: it is certainly true that right from the early days of the psychoanalytic movement he was very intolerant of people who disagreed with his fundamental tenets, and took their subsequent defections as personal betrayals.
All this may make it seem as if Freud was a remote and inaccessible figure, but this was not the case. An interesting first-hand account of meeting Freud is given by the Wolf Man. He describes his appearance as being ‘such as to win my confidence immediately’. Freud was of medium height and build, correctly dressed, with a long face and a neat beard. His dark, intelligent eyes regarded the Wolf Man penetratingly, but without causing him the slightest feeling of discomfort. He came across as being very self-assured and calm, and the Wolf Man remarks that he had the feeling of encountering a great personality.
The Wolf Man goes on to say that Freud’s consulting rooms were not at all clinical. In fact, they struck him as being more like an archaeologist’s study than a doctor’s office. Fascinating ancient artefacts were everywhere and on the walls were stone plaques depicting scenes from ancient history. Freud explained to him that his love of archaeology was akin to his work as a psychoanalyst, in that he must uncover layer after layer of the patient’s psyche until reaching the deepest and most valuable treasure.
Potted plants and warm curtains and carpets made the place feel cosy, and the windows opened onto a little courtyard. The Wolf Man always felt a sense of sacred peace and quiet there. For him, the place was a sanctuary from the hustle and haste of modern life –
a place where, for a brief time, one was sheltered from one’s day-to-day troubles.
So, Freud was a deeply private person, but by no means unapproachable. And he had his reasons for keeping himself fairly aloof, these being to protect his professional reputation and his family.
In 1938 the Germans occupied Austria, and Vienna became a very dangerous place for anybody Jewish. Freud and his family fled to England, where he was spared the horrors of the Holocaust because he died in London on 23 September 1939. He was the grandfather of painter Lucian Freud and comedian and writer Clement Freud, and the great-grandfather of journalist Emma Freud and fashion designer Bella Freud.
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THINGS TO REMEMBER
Freud is famous because he founded a new system of psychology that he called psychoanalysis.
He lived and worked for most of his life in Vienna.
Freud was married and had six children.
He became interested in hypnosis while studying in Paris.
Freud’s work largely concerns the unconscious.
He said that we have many inner motives for our behaviour, and that these are mostly sexual.
Freud’s work falls into four main phases:
Studies on the causes and treatment of neurosis.
Developing ideas about the sexual origins of neurosis.
Ideas about how the psyche develops from birth onwards – often called id psychology.
Theories about the whole personality and the ways in which people relate to others. This is known as ego psychology.
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2
Freud’s early work
In this chapter you will learn:
about Freud’s medical training and early scientific research
the background of nineteenth-century scientific and moral thinking
Freud’s first ideas about the unconscious.
Freud’s medical training
Freud entered the University of Vienna in 1873 to study medicine. Right at the beginning of his training he became very interested in zoological research. From 1876 to 1882 he carried out research at the Physiological Institute, under the guidance of Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke, one of the most eminent scientific scholars of the day. Freud greatly admired Brücke, who was a man of great intellect. He described him as being the greatest authority he had ever met, and he was hugely influenced by his way of thinking. Brücke demanded extremely high standards of his students – meticulous observation and recording – and many of them were in awe of him. Freud looked up to him as a sort of father figure, and tried to emulate him as much as possible.
Brücke was dedicated to the mechanistic approach to scientific research, which held that all biological processes could be explained in terms of physics and chemistry. This approach was still unpopular early in Freud’s life, because it ruled out vitalist thinking in science.
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Insight
The mechanistic view sees a person as a machine, whose life processes and behaviour are determined by physical and chemical causes. Vitalism takes the opposite viewpoint, saying that life processes cannot be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry alone. Heavily influenced by religious dogma, it assumes that non-material forces are at work in biological processes.
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Freud rejected vitalist ideas and, following Brücke’s teaching, he became convinced that all biological processes follow a rigid pattern of cause and effect. This way of thinking – the determinist stance – assumes that even the workings of a person’s mind can be explained by strict physical laws.
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Insight
Determinism is a popular philosophical stance. It proposes that every event, including what goes on in the human mind, is caused by a prior event or a series of prior events.
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During his clinical training, Freud was influenced by one of his tutors, Theodor Meynert, to specialize in neurology. He was particularly interested in neuropathology – the study of diseases of the nervous system. He did not finish his medical training until 1881, so the course took him three years longer than was normal. This was because he really enjoyed research and his interest lay more in this direction than in actually becoming a doctor. The scientific method involved systematically observing, measuring and experimenting. This kind of work would also have been fundamental to Freud’s other specialism, histology, which is about the study of cells and tissues. This would have involved a lot of painstaking, meticulous work using a microscope, which would have suited Freud’s orderly, methodical way of thinking very well.
Scientific research
During his research work, Freud was given an assignment to investigate the sex organs of eels, about which nothing was known at the time. He also studied the nervous system of lampreys (a kind of fish), and his first published article was on this subject. He wrote 20 or so neurology papers between 1887 and 1897.
The mechanistic scientific view insisted that the mind of a human being and that of an animal such as a frog differed only in their complexity. Even ideas were held to be merely the result of a complicated neurological process. This deterministic view was to remain with Freud throughout his life. He believed that all psychological phenomena, even fantasies and feelings, rigidly followed the same principle of cause and effect.
Freud spent some time studying the effects of cocaine, even injecting it into himself when he discovered that it helped him with bouts of depression and low energy. The drug was not prohibited at the time because its harmful effects had not yet been discovered – in fact, it was sometimes prescribed as an anti-depressant. Freud became interested in research into using cocaine as an anaesthetic, hoping that this might pave the way to fame and fortune. When other researchers did, in fact, prove the drug to be useful in this way the market for it expanded enormously in 1884. In 1885 it was used on Freud’s father to perform a successful eye operation. Freud even sent some to his fiancée Martha, ‘to make her strong’. However, people soon began to become addicted to the drug and its negative effects became clear. Freud realized after this that one had to be very careful when doing scientific research. He continued to use the drug himself occasionally, but fortunately he never became addicted to it.
Freud would have happily stayed in medical research, but he realized that he would not have enough money to support a wife and family. He decided that he would have to go into medical practice and spent the next three years gaining practical medical experience at Vienna General Hospital. In 1885 he was appointed as a lecturer in neuropathology at Vienna University. In the same year, he wrote an essay called Project for a Scientific Psychology. This shows that he was already beginning to embark on a lifelong quest to bridge the gap between the exact science of neurology and the newly evolving science of psychology, which was still heavily influenced by philosophical thinking.
Hysteria and hypnosis
In 1885 Freud won a scholarship to study in Paris under the eminent neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. The few brief months that Freud spent working with him during 1885–6 were to have a profound effect upon his thinking. Charcot was one of the great celebrities of the day, known as the ‘Napoleon of Neuroses’. He was frequently asked to attend rich and aristocratic sick people all over the world. He was a man of enormous charisma, and Freud was to fall under his spell, looking up to him to such an extent that he named his first son after him. Charcot was working with cases of paralysis, trying to discover a way of establishing whether they were the result of organic disease in the nervous system – i.e. disease relating to particular body structures or functions – or whether they were hysterical – that is, neurotic in origin. He hoped to develop a diagnostic technique that would distinguish between the two types of paralysis.
Doctors found hysteria interesting for several reasons:
The symptoms were very varied. They included memory loss, hallucinations, loss of speech, sleepwalking, paralysis, fits, fainting, loss of sensation or numbness in various parts of the body, an
d even curious symptoms such as arching over backwards in bed in a rigid bow shape. These symptoms were also highly unpredictable – sometimes they would disappear completely for no apparent reason, only to reappear in full force later.
Only women were thought to suffer from hysteria. In fact, the word hysteria is derived from a Greek word hustera, meaning ‘womb’. Charcot disagreed with this and said that men could have hysteria too.
Hysteria baffled doctors because it didn’t fit in with the anatomy of the nervous system. For example, an arm might be paralysed exactly up to the shoulder, but the nerves don’t actually stop there.
Nobody knew what caused hysteria and there was no cure. Often, patients were accused of faking it and their fate was a sad one – they were frequently locked away in mental hospitals. Charcot discovered that under hypnosis the symptoms could sometimes be made to vanish at the doctor’s suggestion, but they would then often reappear as the person emerged from the trance state.