by Ruth Snowden
FREUD’S STUDY OF OTHER ARTISTS
Freud wrote various other psychoanalytical books and papers on the work of both artists and writers, the most famous of which are Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva; The Moses of Michelangelo; and Dostoevsky and Parricide. The first of these, Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva (published in 1907; see Volume IX of The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud), is one example of the way in which Freud examined the psychological motives behind the work of a writer. Jensen’s Gradiva is a story about a young archaeologist, set in Rome and Pompeii. Given his fascination with classical history and archaeology, the setting would obviously have appealed to Freud. In the story, the hero’s chance encounter with a sculpture in a museum arouses fantasies which, according to Freud, represent repressed erotic childhood fantasies. Freud hints that this theme appears elsewhere in Jensen’s work and points to an early incestuous relationship in the writer’s life – another example of repressed childhood memories being channelled into artistic work.
Freud tends to liken the artist or writer to a child at play, living in an escapist world. The very young infant is governed by wish fulfilment according to the pleasure principle, which Freud says uses the variety of mental processing he called primary process. Later, when the reality principle comes into play with its secondary processing – using conscious planning and logic – part of the thought activity becomes split off. This part becomes the world of fantasy and, like the dream world, it is kept free from reality testing.
Freud argues that ‘normal’ people ought eventually to outgrow the need for fantasy, and that happy people never fantasize because they don’t need to express unfulfilled desires. Happily, modern psychology has shown that a moderate amount of fantasy in one’s life is perfectly healthy, and indeed can often be a rich source of creativity. This source of original thinking is not only seen in artists and writers, but also in scientists such as Einstein.
Freud seems to have overlooked the fact that plenty of artists and writers are neurotic. Taking his theory to its logical limit, if everyone’s libido were fully satisfied then there would be no art or literature – a depressing thought. It seems a curiously narrow-minded theory from someone who was clearly passionately interested in both art and literature.
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Insight
The problem is it all depends upon what you define as neurotic, and what you define as fantasy for that matter, since we each construct our own unique version of reality.
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Freud’s work on the unconscious and the use of free-association techniques have had an enormous effect upon both art and literature. Artists in the twentieth century began to experiment a lot more with imagery from dreams, visions and the unconscious. This supposedly new way of thinking led to artistic movements such as surrealism.
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Insight
Surrealism is a twentieth-century cultural movement which emphasizes unconscious and dream imagery in both art and literature. Surrealist art often contains weird images and strange juxtapositions, just as one might see in a dream.
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However, the idea was not actually new – as long ago as the fifteenth century, Hieronymus Bosch was using grotesque and fantastic imagery in his work – but Freud’s ideas led to a great fresh upsurge in interest. Biographers began to examine intimate sexual details and childhood experiences of their subjects, and novelists began to use new techniques such as the ‘stream of consciousness’. This method, used for example by Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), gives the reader a detailed account of everything the character is thinking from moment to moment. It has obvious connections with the free-association technique.
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THINGS TO REMEMBER
Freud eventually tried to extend his ideas about psychoanalysis from the individual to include all of human culture and society.
He saw the purpose of human life as being the pursuit of happiness, dominated by the pleasure principle.
Freud said that: Although civilization is necessary for our growth and safety, the pressure on the individual to conform makes it difficult for people to live happily together. Each individual ego has to find ways of controlling libidinal urges and channeling them into safe and acceptable outlets that society will approve of.
Religion is an illusion, created in order to make it easier for people to cope with life and with being members of an ordered society.
War gives us a glimpse of our deep animal nature and demonstrates the working of the Death Instinct.
Artists and writers have great insight into the workings of the unconscious. But he saw them as escapists, who avoid the real world by living out their fantasies through their work.
Despite this last, somewhat cynical view, Freud’s work on dreams and the unconscious has greatly influenced artists and writers in the twentieth century.
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10
Psychoanalysis
In this chapter you will learn:
some basic techniques of psychoanalysis
details about some of Freud’s own cases
how psychoanalysis grew and gave rise to many modern forms of therapy.
The process of psychoanalysis
Modern psychoanalysts do not usually completely adhere to Freud’s recommendations about how to conduct therapy sessions. Nevertheless, the basic techniques used today by analysts and other psychotherapists are still similar to those used by Freud. As described earlier in this book, Freud emphasized three aspects of the therapy process that are particularly important:
the free-association technique (see Chapter 3)
transference and counter-transference (see Chapter 3)
the analysis of dreams (see Chapter 4).
Freud had some strict ground rules regarding who would make a suitable patient for psychoanalysis. He insisted that the people he took on were reasonably well educated and of fairly reliable character. Psychotic patients and others with more severe types of mental disorders were not suitable. Nor were people over the age of 50, partly, he said, because the sheer volume of material that they would have to wade through was too great and the treatment would have to be prolonged. He also claimed that older people were too set in their ways to benefit from psychoanalysis. Nowadays, however, analysts often take on older patients and treat them successfully.
Freud suggested a trial period of analysis over a week or two before a full commitment was made. This was mainly because more severe mental disturbances may not be immediately apparent. His usual method, once the analysis was in progress, was to try and see a person every day, apart from weekends and holidays, because he maintained that breaks in the process were often detrimental to progress. Nowadays this is not usually a feasible way to do things, and not many people would be able to afford the fees incurred.
Freud always tried to maintain the scientific approach and remain as detached as possible. He tended to sit behind his patient, who would be lying comfortably on a couch. This was partly because he found it too wearing if he was face to face with people all day, and also because he thought it better if the patient did not see the analyst’s changes of expression. He warned against becoming too familiar, suggesting that the analyst should try to be like a surgeon with his patient, putting aside his own feelings and focusing on the operation in hand. Nowadays many analysts adopt a more relaxed attitude and sit facing their patients. However, most analysts do try to guard against becoming too emotionally involved, or revealing much of their own personal life to the patient, because this can easily take the analysis off track.
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Insight
Carl Jung was one of the first analysts to sit facing his patient. This helped people to see him as a human being, rather than just as a doctor.
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Freud also warned that it was not a good idea to attempt an analysis of anybody who is personally known to the analyst, saying that this may lead to the break-up of friendships. He bro
ke this rule himself, however, when he analysed his daughter Anna. He also sometimes chatted about his family to patients and was not really as stern and detached as his popular image tends to suggest.
Some of Freud’s own cases
Freud’s own case histories make very interesting reading and, like most of his work, they are written in a way that is easy to follow. Altogether he mentions 133 cases briefly, but there are only six that are discussed at length. One of these – Judge Schreber – was never actually seen by Freud. We have already discussed one of the others in Chapter 3 – the analysis of Dora, whose real name was Ida Bauer. Another was an unnamed lesbian of 18, whose treatment did not continue for very long. The remaining three are worth looking at in more detail.
LITTLE HANS
Little Hans (real name Herbert Graf, 1903–73) was a five-year-old boy who had a terrible phobia of horses. He was afraid to go out into the street for fear of seeing them and he also dreaded seeing heavily loaded vehicles, which he feared would topple over. Freud only saw the boy once in his consulting rooms – the rest of the time he gleaned information about dreams, conversations and behaviour from the child’s father and made suggestions as to what might help. It is interesting that the father was a colleague of Freud’s, which meant that he was again breaking one of his own rules about who should be taken on for analysis.
Freud saw the case as a study of castration anxiety, resulting from several factors including the birth of a younger sister, an emerging Oedipus complex, and anxiety about masturbation. During the course of the analysis Hans’ behaviour did in fact improve, possibly because he was getting more attention from his father. Whatever the truth of the matter, Freud reported meeting Hans later as a strapping lad of 19 who suffered from no troubles or inhibitions.
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Insight
Freud’s explanation of Little Hans’ problem is an example of how he would sometimes jump to conclusions in order to fit his theories. It seems more likely that the child was simply afraid of horses – after all they can seem pretty huge and threatening when one is very small. The case also illustrates one of the problems with trying to assess the effectiveness of psychoanalysis: would Hans simply have got over his phobia anyway?
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RAT MAN
This case study was published in 1909, entitled ‘Some Remarks on a Case of Obsessive-Compulsive Neurosis’. The patient, whose real name was Ernst Lanzer (1878–1914), was a 29-year-old lawyer who first came to see Freud in 1907. He had obsessional thoughts and displayed obsessive behaviour. He gained his nickname from his idea that someone who was dear to him, such as his father, or a woman he admired, might be punished by having their body eaten away by rats. Oddly enough, this obsession continued in relation to the man’s father even though he had died some years previously. But the Rat Man’s worst fear had originated from a story he had been told while serving in the army. It was about an Eastern punishment where the victim had a pot containing a rat tied to his buttocks, with the evil intent that the rat would eventually gnaw its way out via the person’s anus.
Freud’s interpretation of this obsession was that Rat Man had conflicting urges of both love and aggression towards people who were close to him, originating in childhood sexual conflicts. The obsession was actually useful to the patient because it prevented him from making difficult decisions in his current life and at the same time warded off the anxiety that would arise if he faced his real conflicts.
This was to be one of Freud’s most successful analyses, and after a year’s treatment he was able to report that the patient had been cured of his symptoms. Unfortunately, a long-term follow up was not possible in this case, because the patient was killed in the First World War. Usually people who have suffered from obsessional thoughts and rituals of this type from early childhood tend to relapse, especially at times of stress. The next case is particularly interesting because it provides not only a long-term follow up, but also autobiographical material supplied by the patient himself.
WOLF MAN
The Wolf Man was a Russian, whose real name was Sergius Pankejeff, who lived from 1887–1979. The book about his case history, The Wolf Man, is well worth reading because it contains his own memoirs, Freud’s analysis, a later analysis by Ruth Mack Brunswick, and a follow-up section by Muriel Gardiner, who knew the Wolf Man personally. This makes the book quite unique and provides us with not only a fascinating psychoanalytical case history, but also an intimate human story and many interesting glimpses of history.
The Wolf Man suffered from long bouts of severe depression as well as from obsessional thoughts, especially about his health. Freud’s account of the analysis is long and complex, but it mainly revolves around a dream the Wolf Man recalled from when he was about four years old. In this dream he saw six or seven white wolves sitting in a big walnut tree outside his bedroom window. He awoke in terror of being eaten by them. It is this dream, plus his childhood phobia of wolves, that earned him his nickname.
By a very convoluted process of analysis Freud linked the content of the wolf dream to a hypothetical scene that the Wolf Man had witnessed from his cot when he was about 18 months old. What he supposedly saw was three incidents of his parents having intercourse, with his father penetrating his mother from the rear. Having supposedly unearthed this scene from the Wolf Man’s unconscious, Freud then proceeded to explain, also at great length, that the child never actually witnessed the scene at all – the whole thing was a later fantasy!
The sex scene with his parents was never actually consciously recalled by the Wolf Man, and indeed in his old age he described Freud’s interpretation of his childhood wolf dream as being very far-fetched. It seems far more likely that his childhood fear of wolves stemmed partly from having lived in Russia as a small child, where wolves in the forest were a living reality, and also from having been read Grimm’s fairy tales at an impressionable age.
Freud’s whole analysis seems very contrived, but the gist of his conclusions probably has some element of truth in it. He suggests that repressed sexual urges, some connected with an early attempt at seduction by his sister, who was two years older, apparently wrecked Wolf Man’s future sex life completely and was a major cause of his later neurosis.
However, reading the Wolf Man’s own story plus those of the other contributors to the book, it seems likely that the picture was actually a very complicated one and that other factors were also at work. Mental illness was not unusual in the Wolf Man’s family. His father suffered from melancholia and his mother also showed signs of neurosis, with long-term hypochondria and other obsessive behaviour. An uncle he was especially fond of developed paranoia in adulthood and spent some time in an institution. And his sister, who had a massive influence on him throughout his childhood, took her own life by poisoning herself when he was in his late teens. The Wolf Man had difficult relationships with women throughout his life, including his wife, who eventually followed in his sister’s footsteps by committing suicide.
Although his family was extremely wealthy, the Wolf Man was always very neurotic about money, showing great possessiveness and unnecessary extravagance. He had inherited a huge fortune – his father had owned vast estates in Russia – but the Russian revolution and the Bolshevist regime put an end to all that and eventually he lost not only all his wealth, but all his property as well. He was forced to flee to Vienna and find himself a job. This must have been a very difficult change in circumstances for someone who had taken his wealth and rank utterly for granted in his youth. Some years after his initial analysis, the Wolf Man returned to Freud for further treatment, and this time Freud treated him for free and continued to help him out financially for some years.
Although the Wolf Man undoubtedly felt benefit from his sessions with Freud, it seems likely that this was mainly because he thought very highly of him, seeing him as a trusted friend and protective father figure in whom he could confide. He was never cured of his neurotic symptoms, and carried on having analy
sis in later life, first of all with Dr Ruth Mack Brunswick, and later with various other analysts. Clearly he needed all the support and attention and probably could never have functioned normally within society without it.