by Ruth Snowden
THOUGHTS ABOUT WAR
During World War I, Freud at first supported the Austro-German Alliance for which members of his family fought. However, he was a pacifist at heart and became very disillusioned with war.
In 1915 Freud wrote two short pieces describing his thoughts about war. He expressed his bewilderment as the nations of the civilized world slaughtered one another and destroyed so much that science, technology and art had strived to achieve. Freud recognized the gap between what passes as acceptable behaviour for a state and what is expected of the individual. He also saw that the state demanded complete obedience from its people, and yet treated them like children by its censorship of the truth. His sense of disillusionment increased as he observed:
• the low morality shown in the behaviour of states
• the brutality that emerged in the behaviour of individuals, who used war as an excuse to unleash aggression.
Freud said these two observations proved that deep down human nature consists of instinctual impulses; therefore we can never totally eradicate evil. A person can be ‘good’ in one set of circumstances and ‘bad’ in another. People conform and obey because they need love and fear punishment.
Freud is not really trying to say that it is impossible for humans to behave in a civilized fashion. He actually says that people have overestimated their own capabilities – we are not as highly evolved as we had thought we were. If we were less demanding of ourselves, this would lead to less disillusionment and the ability to be more open and honest.
Freud lived to see the start of World War II as well. Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany in 1933 and there was a public burning of Freud’s books in Berlin. Freud saw this as progress, saying that in the Middle Ages they would have burned him too. How wrong he was – fortunately Freud was spared the horror of the Holocaust because he and his immediate family fled to England, but several members of his wider family were victims. One wonders what he would have thought and felt about it. His fellowship with other Jews mattered to him and he had belonged to a Jewish club in Vienna, even though he did not follow the Jewish religion.
Another Jew to flee from Nazism was the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. In a letter written in 1932, he persuaded Freud to write again about war. Freud replied that war was more a problem for statesmen to worry about, but he tried to arrive at some psychological insights, as follows:
• Usually conflicts of interest among humans are settled by the use of violence.
• Several weak people can combine to overcome one strong one.
• A community is held together by emotional ties.
• Problems arise within a community when suppressed members begin to want more power.
• The instincts of love and hate are both essential – you cannot have one without the other.
Freud therefore concluded that war could be prevented only if a central authority was set up which had the right to settle all conflicts of interest. To this end, he suggested educating a special elite, with independent open minds, who would ‘give direction to the dependent masses’. (This sounds curiously similar to what the Nazis had in mind.)
ART AND LITERATURE
Freud’s work on the unconscious and the use of free-association techniques has had an enormous effect upon both art and literature. Artists began to experiment a lot more with imagery from dreams, visions and the unconscious. This gave rise to movements such as Surrealism, the most famous example of which is the work of Salvador Dalí. This idea was not actually new – as long ago as the fifteenth century, Hieronymus Bosch became famous for his grotesque and fantastic imagery – but Freud’s ideas led to a fresh upsurge of interest in such things.
Biographers began to examine the 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, gives the reader a detailed account of all that the character is thinking from moment to moment. It has obvious connections with the free-association technique.
Freud believed that all art and literature was the result of the sublimation of libidinous urges. Daydreams and fantasies were ways of evading the tedious grip of the reality principle. Artists and writers actually allowed themselves to live in their fantasy world, so effectively evading the reality principle and using their fantasies in creative ways. This cunningly avoids the worse peril of becoming a sexual pervert or neurotic.
The artist is likened to a child at play, living in an escapist world. According to Freud, ‘normal’ people ought to outgrow this, and happy people never fantasize because it means that they are expressing unfulfilled desires. Happily, modern psychology has shown that a moderate amount of fantasizing can be positive and perfectly healthy.
Freud seems to have overlooked the fact that plenty of artists and writers are neurotic and no doubt there are just as many perverts among them as there are in the general population! 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.
RELIGION
Freud wrote three books about his views on religion: Totem and Taboo (1913), The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Moses and Monotheism (1937). In general he was dismissive of religious teachings because they were not scientific and thought about religion only from a psychological point of view. He suggested that people had created ‘the gods’ to fulfil the need for parental figures, protecting people and watching over them.
For Freud, religion was a projection of the superego, instilling fear of wrongdoing but also a sense of paternal protection.
At the heart of his criticism of religion is the fact that its teachings cannot be verified. To Freud, religious ideas are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, most primal needs. Religious questions lead people to be introspective and not scientific, and this can lead them towards self-deception. Freud does rather grudgingly admit that religious teachings have undoubtedly helped to build and maintain civilization, but argued that they have also discouraged freethinking. He also admits that he too may be chasing an illusion, concluding that, although science itself is not an illusion, we may place too much emphasis upon its teachings.
Freud was an atheist and basically dismissed the whole idea of there being a god. He seems to base all his ideas on patriarchal, monotheistic religions and very much emphasizes the idea of God as a father figure. Because he sees religion as an illusion, he suggests that ideally it should be abandoned. He admits, however, that this would be difficult in practice because religion forms the basis for our rules of law and order, and the human race is not sufficiently advanced yet to cope without it.
According to Freud, the principal tasks of civilization are:
• to defend people against the perils of nature, such as famine, flood and disease
• to control and regulate instincts such as incest, cannibalism and lust for killing
• to demonstrate achievements that are considered worth striving for.
The principal tasks of ‘the gods’ are:
• to protect people from the perils of nature
• to reconcile people to the cruelty of fate, especially death
• to compensate for the suffering imposed by civilization.
Religious rituals give the individual protection from the unruly libidinal urges arising from within and so enable the person to function within a group. Religion has another advantage – it promises an afterlife, which not only lessens the fear of death but also suggests that the person will be rewarded eventually for suppressing some of his instinctual urges. Freud does not seem to have understood the ecstatic and mystical states that many people associate with religion, and barely considers them at all. He dismisses such states, comparing them with being in love. Both states, he says, are examples of regression to a very early stage, where the individual has not learned to distinguish himself from his mother, or from the external world.
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Although he had a tendency to generalize on the basis of very slim evidence, Freud claimed to be offering scientific explanations for his ideas about religion; this is rather ironic, considering that he was very dismissive of religious teachings because they were not scientific! He was not very interested in philosophy either, saying dismissively that it was mere playing with words. He argued that people should always try to be down to earth in their thinking and view the world objectively – curiously, he seems here to overlook the role of the unconscious in human thinking.
SUMMARY
Today we have learned about Freud’s ideas about how the structure and workings of the human psyche might be reflected in the development of civilization and could be used to explain a wide range of phenomena such as war, art and religion.
Freud lived through one of the most tumultuous and bloody periods in human history – encompassing World War I and the development of totalitarian ideologies such as fascism and communism, and an intensification of anti-Semitism that, shortly after Freud’s death, would culminate in the Holocaust. Little wonder, then, that Freud would seek to ‘explain’ such traumatic events through the prism provided by psychoanalysis. Freud’s insights can be both illuminating and bleak – for example, in explaining how people could be led to commit the most terrible atrocities in the name of ‘civilization’ and ‘order’.
Tomorrow we will return to psychoanalysis itself, tracing how it developed as both theory and therapeutic practice in the hands of Freud’s colleagues and successors.
FACT-CHECK (ANSWERS AT THE BACK)
1. It is hard for people to be happy, Freud thought, because…
a) They are simply not hard-wired to be happy
b) Civilization demands the suppression of their instinctual urges
c) They easily come into conflict with one other
d) They are not civilized enough
2. Freud considered movements such as Nazism to be caused by…
a) An eruption of the id
b) The collapse of civilized values
c) A kind of mass neurosis
d) None of the above
3. How might we best describe the development of Freud’s ideas about society?
a) He became more optimistic
b) He came to see that the answer to war lay in religion
c) He believed that societies needed to become more authoritarian
d) He became more pessimistic
4. The fascist dictator Adolf Hitler…
a) Supported Freud’s ideas
b) Tried to stamp out Freud’s ideas
c) Disliked Freud’s ideas because he was Jewish
d) None of the above
5. Freud believed that all art was the result of…
a) Sublimation
b) Self-expression
c) Regression
d) Introspection
6. Which artistic movement was influenced by psychoanalysis?
a) Expressionism
b) Impressionism
c) Futurism
d) Surrealism
7. The ‘stream of consciousness’ technique used by writers has similarities with the psychoanalytic technique of…
a) Dream analysis
b) Free association
c) Word play
d) None of the above
8. Freud was…
a) Agnostic
b) A religious Jew
c) Atheist
d) None of the above
9. Which of the following is not one of Freud’s books about religion?
a) The Golden Bough
b) Totem and Taboo
c) Moses and Monotheism
d) The Future of an Illusion
10. Which of the following describes Freud’s understanding of religion?
a) Regression
b) Consolation
c) Illusion
d) All of the above
While Freud’s ideas initially met with widespread hostility, he nonetheless soon attracted a group of followers, who, from 1902, met regularly at his home. In 1908 this group, originally called the Wednesday Society, was renamed the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society. Its first president was Alfred Adler.
By 1909 Freud was well known internationally and the first International Journal of Psychoanalysis was published. The following year the International Psychoanalytic Association was formed. Right from the start, there tended to be arguments and rifts within the psychoanalytic movement. However, many influential psychologists and psychiatrists have been inspired by Freud and have developed his ideas further.
Methods that have their roots in Freud’s basic techniques are still used by many therapists today. He was a prolific writer and his style is easy to follow. His original case histories, such as those of the ‘Rat Man’ and the ‘Wolf Man’, make particularly interesting reading.
EARLY BEGINNINGS OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC MOVEMENT
In 1902 Freud was appointed as a professor at the University of Vienna. This was mainly because of his work in the field of neurology. People in the medical and academic world were still reacting with hostility and suspicion to his controversial ideas about psychoanalysis. Freud carried on with these ideas more or less alone, but gradually a small band of followers began to gather around him. He began a little group of like-minded people called the Wednesday Psychological Society, and they would meet in his waiting room. Each week one of the members would give a talk about new ideas, followed by refreshments and then a discussion.
The group soon expanded by word of mouth and by 1906 there were 17 members. Eventually, the group evolved into the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society. Otto Rank was appointed secretary and he kept minutes of the meetings and accounts. By 1907 the group was getting more cosmopolitan – a Russian named Max Eitingon joined them, followed by some Swiss recruits from the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Zurich. These were Ludwig Binswanger, Carl Jung and Karl Abraham. Freud and Jung got on especially well and a kind of father–son relationship developed between them, Freud being nearly 20 years older than Jung. Freud was particularly pleased that Jung was a Gentile because this rescued the psychoanalytic movement from accusations that it was an all-Jewish organization.
Over the next year, the Hungarian doctor Sándor Ferenczi joined the group, and then Ernest Jones, a young Welsh neurologist, and Abraham Brill from the United States. Eitingon and Abraham went on to establish psychoanalysis in Berlin and Ferenczi in Budapest. Jones and Brill were the first to introduce psychoanalytic thinking into the English language. The first International Congress of Freudian Psychology took place in Salzburg in 1908.
By 1909 Freud was well known internationally and he went with Jung and Ferenczi to America to lecture. The first issue of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis was published the same year, and Freud was awarded an honorary degree from Clark University, Massachusetts. The next year the International Psychoanalytic Association was formed. International progress was fairly slow until the end of World War I. In 1920 the Institute of Psychoanalysis was opened in Berlin, followed by ones in London, Vienna and Budapest. Courses were held for students and free treatment offered for people who could not afford the fees. Institutes were opened in the United States in New York (1931) and Chicago (1932).
RIFTS IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC MOVEMENT
Right from the start, there tended to be arguments and disagreements within the psychoanalytic movement. People were keen to develop their own theories and some accused others of inventing case histories to fit their theories. Arguments arose about the way the society should be organized, and about psychoanalytic methods and concepts such as the unconscious. To make matters worse, the group was constantly under outside attack, from the scientific establishment and the press.
OTTO RANK
Otto Rank (1884–1939) had been a protégé of Freud, who had encouraged and supported his education. For a long time he was loyal to Freud, but eventually he was thrown out of the group. His main complaint was that he felt the p
eriod of analysis was too long and he suggested that it should be shortened. He also saw childhood traumas, especially the Oedipus complex, as being less important than Freud made out. For him, it was the trauma of birth itself that mattered.
CARL JUNG
Carl Jung (1875–1961) was Freud’s favourite for some years. Freud treated him like a son and wanted him to be his successor. In 1910 he was appointed as the President of the newly formed International Psychoanalytic Society. However, there had already been suggestions of problems in his relationship with Freud before then.