by Peter Watson
There was good reason. Though Freud might be a conventional man in his personal habits, The Interpretation of Dreams was a deeply controversial and – for many people in Vienna – an utterly shocking book. To the world outside, the Austro-Hungarian capital in 1900 seemed a gracious if rather antiquated metropolis, dominated by the cathedral, whose Gothic spire soared above the baroque roofs and ornate churches below. The court was stuck in an unwieldy mix of pomposity and gloom. The emperor still dined in the Spanish manner, with all the silverware laid to the right of the plate.6 The ostentation at court was one reason Freud gave for so detesting Vienna. In 1898 he had written, ‘It is a misery to live here and it is no atmosphere in which the hope of completing any difficult thing can survive.’7 In particular, he loathed the ‘eighty families’ of Austria, ‘with their inherited insolence, their rigid etiquette, and their swarm of functionaries.’ The Viennese aristocracy had intermarried so many times that they were in fact one huge family, who addressed each other as Du, and by nicknames, and spent their time at each others’ parties.8 This was not all Freud hated. The ‘abominable steeple of St Stefan’ he saw as the symbol of a clericalism he found oppressive. He was no music lover either, and he therefore had a healthy disdain for the ‘frivolous’ waltzes of Johann Strauss. Given all this, it is not hard to see why he should loathe his native city. And yet there are grounds for believing that his often-voiced hatred for the place was only half the picture. On II November 1918, as the guns fell silent after World War I, he made a note to himself in a memorandum, ‘Austria-Hungary is no more. I do not want to live anywhere else. For me emigration is out of the question. I shall live on with the torso and imagine that it is the whole.’9
The one aspect of Viennese life Freud could feel no ambivalence about, from which there was no escape, was anti-Semitism. This had grown markedly with the rise in the Jewish population of the city, which went from 70,000 in 1873 to 147,000 in 1900, and as a result anti-Semitism had become so prevalent in Vienna that according to one account, a patient might refer to the doctor who was treating him as ‘Jewish swine.’10 Karl Lueger, an anti-Semite who had proposed that Jews should be crammed on to ships to be sunk with all on board, had become mayor.11 Always sensitive to the slightest hint of anti-Semitism, to the end of his life Freud refused to accept royalties from any of his works translated into Hebrew or Yiddish. He once told Carl Jung that he saw himself as Joshua, ‘destined to explore the promised land of psychiatry.’12
A less familiar aspect of Viennese intellectual life that helped shape Freud’s theories was the doctrine of ‘therapeutic nihilism.’ According to this, the diseases of society defied curing. Although adapted widely in relation to philosophy and social theory (Otto Weininger and Ludwig Wittgenstein were both advocates), this concept actually started life as a scientific notion in the medical faculty at Vienna, where from the early nineteenth century on there was a fascination with disease, an acceptance that it be allowed to run its course, a profound compassion for patients, and a corresponding neglect of therapy. This tradition still prevailed when Freud was training, but he reacted against it.13 To us, Freud’s attempt at treatment seems only humane, but at the time it was an added reason why his ideas were regarded as out of the ordinary.
Freud rightly considered The Interpretation of Dreams to be his most significant achievement. It is in this book that the four fundamental building blocks of Freud’s theory about human nature first come together: the unconscious, repression, infantile sexuality (leading to the Oedipus complex), and the tripartite division of the mind into ego, the sense of self; superego, broadly speaking, the conscience; and id, the primal biological expression of the unconscious. Freud had developed his ideas – and refined his technique – over a decade and a half since the mid–1880s. He saw himself very much in the biological tradition initiated by Darwin. After qualifying as a doctor, Freud obtained a scholarship to study under Jean-Martin Charcot, a Parisian physician who ran an asylum for women afflicted with incurable nervous disorders. In his research Charcot had shown that, under hypnosis, hysterical symptoms could be induced. Freud returned to Vienna from Paris after several months, and following a number of neurological writings (on cerebral palsy, for example, and on aphasia), he began a collaboration with another brilliant Viennese doctor, Josef Breuer (1842—1925). Breuer, also Jewish, was one of the most trusted doctors in Vienna, with many famous patients. Scientifically, he had made two major discoveries: on the role of the vagus nerve in regulating breathing, and on the semicircular canals of the inner ear, which, he found, controlled the body’s equilibrium. But Breuers importance for Freud, and for psychoanalysis, was his discovery in 1881 of the so-called talking cure.14 For two years, beginning in December 1880, Breuer had treated for hysteria a Vienna-born Jewish girl, Bertha Pappenheim (1859—1936), whom he described for casebook purposes as ‘Anna O.’ Anna fell ill while looking after her sick father, who died a few months later. Her illness took the form of somnambulism, paralysis, a split personality in which she sometimes behaved as a naughty child, and a phantom pregnancy, though the symptoms varied. When Breuer saw her, he found that if he allowed her to talk at great length about her symptoms, they would disappear. It was, in fact, Bertha Pappenheim who labelled Breuer’s method the ‘talking cure’ (Redecur in German) though she also called it Kaminfegen – ‘chimney sweeping.’ Breuer noticed that under hypnosis Bertha claimed to remember how she had repressed her feelings while watching her father on his sickbed, and by recalling these ‘lost’ feelings she found she could get rid of them. By June 1882 Miss Pappenheim was able to conclude her treatment, ‘totally cured’ (though it is now known that she was admitted within a month to a sanatorium).15
The case of Anna O. deeply impressed Freud. For a time he himself tried hypnosis with hysterical patients but abandoned this approach, replacing it with ‘free association’ – a technique whereby he allowed his patients to talk about whatever came into their minds. It was this technique that led to his discovery that, given the right circumstances, many people could recall events that had occurred in their early lives and which they had completely forgotten. Freud came to the conclusion that though forgotten, these early events could still shape the way people behaved. Thus was born the concept of the unconscious, and with it the notion of repression. Freud also realised that many of the early memories revealed – with difficulty – under free association were sexual in nature. When he further found that many of the ‘recalled’ events had in fact never taken place, he developed his notion of the Oedipus complex. In other words the sexual traumas and aberrations falsely reported by patients were for Freud a form of code, showing what people secretly wanted to happen, and confirming that human infants went through a very early period of sexual awareness. During this period, he said, a son was drawn to the mother and saw himself as a rival to the father (the Oedipus complex) and vice versa with a daughter (the Electra complex). By extension, Freud said, this broad motivation lasted throughout a person’s life, helping to determine character.
These early theories of Freud were met with outraged incredulity and unremitting hostility. Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the author of a famous book, Psychopathia Sexualis, quipped that Freud’s account of hysteria ‘sounds like a scientific fairy tale.’ The neurological institute of Vienna University refused to have anything to do with him. As Freud later said, ‘An empty space soon formed itself about my person.’16
His response was to throw himself deeper into his researches and to put himself under analysis – with himself. The spur to this occurred after the death of his father, Jakob, in October 1896. Although father and son had not been very intimate for a number of years, Freud found to his surprise that he was unaccountably moved by his father’s death, and that many long-buried recollections spontaneously resurfaced. His dreams also changed. He recognised in them an unconscious hostility directed toward his father that hitherto he had repressed. This led him to conceive of dreams as ‘the royal road to the unconscious.
’17 Freud’s central idea in The Interpretation of Dreams was that in sleep the ego is like ‘a sentry asleep at its post.’18 The normal vigilance by which the urges of the id are repressed is less efficient, and dreams are therefore a disguised way for the id to show itself. Freud was well aware that in devoting a book to dreams he was risking a lot. The tradition of interpreting dreams dated back to the Old Testament, but the German title of the book, Die Traumdeutung, didn’t exactly help. ‘Traumdeutung’ was the word used at the time to describe the popular practice of fairground fortune-tellers.19
The early sales for The Interpretation of Dreams indicate its poor reception. Of the original 600 copies printed, only 228 were sold during the first two years, and the book apparently sold only 351 copies during its first six years in print.20 More disturbing to Freud was the complete lack of attention paid to the book by the Viennese medical profession.21 The picture was much the same in Berlin. Freud had agreed to give a lecture on dreams at the university, but only three people turned up to hear him. In 1901, shortly before he was to address the Philosophical Society, he was handed a note that begged him to indicate ‘when he was coming to objectionable matter and make a pause, during which the ladies could leave the hall.’ Many colleagues felt for his wife, ‘the poor woman whose husband, formerly a clever scientist, had turned out to be a rather disgusting freak.’22
But if Freud felt that at times all Vienna was against him, support of sorts gradually emerged. In 1902, a decade and a half after Freud had begun his researches, Dr Wilhelm Stekel, a brilliant Viennese physician, after finding a review of The Interpretation of Dreams unsatisfactory, called on its author to discuss the book with him. He subsequently asked to be analysed by Freud and a year later began to practise psychoanalysis himself. These two founded the ‘Psychological Wednesday Society,’ which met every Wednesday evening in Freud’s waiting room under the silent stare of his ‘grubby old gods,’ a reference to the archaeological objects he collected.23 They were joined in 1902 by Alfred Adler, by Paul Federn in 1904, by Eduard Hirschmann in 1905, by Otto Rank in 1906, and in 1907 by Carl Gustav Jung from Zurich. In that year the name of the group was changed to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and thereafter its sessions were held in the College of Physicians. Psychoanalysis had a good way to go before it would be fully accepted, and many people never regarded it as a proper science. But by 1908, for Freud at least, the years of isolation were over.
In the first week of March 1900, amid the worst storm in living memory, Arthur Evans stepped ashore at Candia (now Heraklion) on the north shore of Crete.24 Aged 49, Evans was a paradoxical man, ‘flamboyant, and oddly modest; dignified and loveably ridiculous…. He could be fantastically kind, and fundamentally uninterested in other people…. He was always loyal to his friends, and never gave up doing something he had set his heart on for the sake of someone he loved.’25 Evans had been keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford for sixteen years but even so did not yet rival his father in eminence. Sir John Evans was probably the greatest of British antiquaries at the time, an authority on stone hand axes and on pre-Roman coins.
By 1900 Crete was becoming a prime target for archaeologists if they could only obtain permission to dig there. The island had attracted interest as a result of the investigations of the German millionaire merchant Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890), who had abandoned his wife and children to study archaeology. Undeterred by the sophisticated reservations of professional archaeologists, Schliemann forced on envious colleagues a major reappraisal of the classical world after his discoveries had shown that many so-called myths – such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey – were grounded in fact. In 1870 he began to excavate Mycenae and Troy, where so much of Homer’s story takes place, and his findings transformed scholarship. He identified nine cities on the site of Troy, the second of which he concluded was that described in the Iliad.26
Schliemann’s discoveries changed our understanding of classical Greece, but they raised almost as many questions as they answered, among them where the brilliant pre-Hellenic civilisation mentioned in both the Iliad and the Odyssey had first arisen. Excavations right across the eastern Mediterranean confirmed that such a civilisation had once existed, and when scholars reexamined the work of classical writers, they found that Homer, Hesiod, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Strabo had all referred to a King Minos, ‘the great lawgiver,’ who had rid the Aegean of pirates and was invariably described as a son of Zeus. And Zeus, again according to ancient texts, was supposed to have been born in a Cretan cave.27 It was against this background that in the early 1880s a Cretan farmer chanced upon a few large jars and fragments of pottery of Mycenaean character at Knossos, a site inland from Candia and two hundred and fifty miles from Mycenae, across open sea. That was a very long way in classical times, so what was the link between the two locations? Schliemann visited the spot himself but was unable to negotiate excavation rights. Then, in 1883, in the trays of some antiquities dealers in Shoe Lane in Athens, Arthur Evans came across some small three- and four-sided stones perforated and engraved with symbols. He became convinced that these symbols belonged to a hieroglyphic system, but not one that was recognisably Egyptian. When he asked the dealers, they said the stones came from Crete.28 Evans had already considered the possibility that Crete might be a stepping stone in the diffusion of culture from Egypt to Europe, and if this were the case it made sense for the island to have its own script midway between the writing systems of Africa and Europe (evolutionary ideas were everywhere, by now). He was determined to go to Crete. Despite his severe shortsightedness, and a propensity for acute bouts of seasickness, Evans was an enthusiastic traveller.29 He first set foot in Crete in March 1894 and visited Knossos. Just then, political trouble with the Ottoman Empire meant that the island was too dangerous for making excavations. However, convinced that significant discoveries were to be made there, Evans, showing an initiative that would be impossible today, bought part of the Knossos grounds, where he had observed some blocks of gypsum engraved with a system of hitherto unknown writing. Combined with the engravings on the stones in Shoe Lane, Athens, this was extremely promising.30
Evans wanted to buy the entire site but was not able to do so until 1900, by which time Turkish rule was fairly stable. He immediately launched a major excavation. On his arrival, he moved into a ‘ramshackle’ Turkish house near the site he had bought, and thirty locals were hired to do the initial digging, supplemented later by another fifty. They started on 23 March, and to everyone’s surprise made a significant find straight away.31 On the second day they uncovered the remains of an ancient house, with fragments of frescoes – in other words, not just any house, but a house belonging to a civilisation. Other finds came thick and fast, and by 27 March, only four days into the dig, Evans had already grasped the fundamental point about Knossos, which made him famous beyond the narrow confines of archaeology: there was nothing Greek and nothing Roman about the discoveries there. The site was much earlier. During the first weeks of excavation, Evans uncovered more dramatic material than most archaeologists hope for in a lifetime: roads, palaces, scores of frescoes, human remains – one cadaver still wearing a vivid tunic. He found sophisticated drains, bathrooms, wine cellars, hundreds of pots, and a fantastic elaborate royal residence, which showed signs of having been burned to the ground. He also unearthed thousands of clay tablets with ‘something like cursive writing’ on them.32 These became known as the fabled Linear A and B scripts, the first of which has not been deciphered to this day. But the most eye-catching discoveries were the frescoes that decorated the plastered walls of the palace corridors and apartments. These wonderful pictures of ancient life vividly portrayed men and women with refined faces and graceful forms, and whose dress was unique. As Evans quickly grasped, these people – who were contemporaries of the early biblical pharaohs, 2500–1500 B.C. — were just as civilised as them, if not more so; indeed they outshone even Solomon hundreds of years before his splendour would become a fable among Israelites.33
Evans had in fact discovered an entire civilisation, one that was completely unknown before and could claim to have been produced by the first civilised Europeans. He named the civilisation he had discovered the Minoan because of the references in classical writers and because although these Bronze Age Cretans worshipped all sorts of animals, it was a bull cult, worship of the Minotaur, that appeared to have predominated. In the frescoes Evans discovered many scenes of bulls – bulls being worshipped, bulls used in athletic events and, most notable of all, a huge plaster relief of a bull excavated on the wall of one of the main rooms of Knossos Palace.
Once the significance of Evans’s discoveries had sunk in, his colleagues realised that Knossos was indeed the setting for part of Homer’s Odyssey and that Ulysses himself goes ashore there. Evans spent more than a quarter of a century excavating every aspect of Knossos. He concluded, somewhat contrary to what he had originally thought, that the Minoans were formed from the fusion, around 2000 B.C., of immigrants from Anatolia with the native Neolithic population. Although this people constructed towns with elaborate palaces at the centre (the Knossos Palace was so huge, and so intricate, it is now regarded as the Labyrinth of the Odyssey), Evans also found that large town houses were not confined to royalty only but were inhabited by other citizens as well. For many scholars, this extension of property, art, and wealth in general marked the Minoan culture as the birth of Western civilisation, the ‘mother culture’ from which the classical world of Greece and Rome had evolved.34