Sigmund Freud

• 1. Introduction

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  Sigmund Freud was born with a caul, the thin membrane that sometimes covers a newborn's head, and his mother read it as an omen of a great future. The year was 1856, the place a rented room in a locksmith's house in the Moravian town of Freiberg. The boy in that room would grow up to insist that a slip of the tongue, a forgotten name, and a half-remembered dream were not accidents at all. He argued that beneath the surface of every waking mind runs a hidden current of desire, repression, and conflict. How does a neurologist who spent six years dissecting frog and lamprey brains come to write about the meaning of dreams? Why would his loyal circle of Wednesday-evening disciples fracture into rival schools? And how does a man whose books were burned in 1933 end his life by his own request, in exile, in a London suburb? The story moves from eels to the unconscious, from cocaine to the Oedipus complex, and finally to a quiet contract between a dying man and his doctor.

• 2. From Eels To The Mind

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  In 1876, the young Freud spent four weeks at a zoological research station in Trieste, dissecting hundreds of eels in an inconclusive search for their male reproductive organs. He had entered the University of Vienna at age seventeen, planning to study law before joining the medical faculty instead. His teachers included Franz Brentano in philosophy, Ernst Brücke in physiology, and the Darwinist Carl Claus in zoology.

  In 1877, Freud moved to Brücke's physiology laboratory, where for six years he compared human brains with those of frogs, lampreys, and crayfish. His work on the biology of nervous tissue proved seminal for the discovery of the neuron in the 1890s. A year of compulsory military service interrupted this research in 1879, and the long downtimes let him translate four essays from John Stuart Mill.

  Freud took almost nine years to finish his studies, slowed by neurophysiological research and his interest in philosophy under Brentano. He graduated with an MD in March 1881, at the age of twenty-five. In the 1880s, his concerns turned to the anatomy of the brain, particularly the medulla oblongata, and he intervened in the debates about aphasia with a monograph in which he coined the term agnosia.

  Freud was an early researcher of cerebral palsy, then called cerebral paralysis, and showed the disease existed long before others studied it. He challenged William John Little, the man who first identified the condition, arguing that a lack of oxygen during birth was not the cause. Instead, he proposed that birth complications were a symptom of a deeper problem.

• 3. The Cocaine Years

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  In his 1884 paper "On Coca," Freud extolled the virtues of cocaine, which he believed could cure many mental and physical ailments. Between 1883 and 1887, he wrote several articles recommending it, including its use as an antidepressant and as a stimulant.

  Karl Koller, a colleague of Freud's in Vienna, received the scientific distinction Freud narrowly missed. In 1884, Koller reported to a medical society how cocaine could be used in delicate eye surgery, claiming the priority for its anesthetic properties that Freud had noticed only in passing.

  Freud also recommended cocaine as a cure for morphine addiction, and he gave it to his friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow. Fleischl-Marxow had become addicted to morphine taken for years of excruciating nerve pain, the result of an infection from an injury during an autopsy. Freud's claim that his friend was cured proved premature. Fleischl-Marxow developed an acute cocaine psychosis, returned to morphine, and died a few years later, still in intolerable pain.

  Freud began smoking at age twenty-four, moving from cigarettes to cigars, convinced that tobacco enhanced his capacity to work. As reports of addiction and overdose filtered in from around the world, his medical reputation suffered. He stopped recommending cocaine publicly after the "Cocaine Episode," though he kept taking it himself for depression, migraines, and nasal inflammation until he discontinued its use in 1896.

• 4. The Talking Cure

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  In November 1880, Josef Breuer was called in to treat a highly intelligent twenty-one-year-old woman, Bertha Pappenheim, for a persistent cough and hallucinations. Known to history as Anna O., she had developed visual disorders, paralysis, and contractures while nursing her dying father. Breuer found that when she told fantasy stories in her evening states of absence, her condition improved. She would coin the phrase "talking cure."

  In October 1885, Freud went to Paris on a three-month fellowship to study with Jean-Martin Charcot, a neurologist researching hypnosis. Charcot specialized in hysteria and frequently demonstrated susceptibility to hypnosis with patients on a stage before an audience. Freud later recalled the stay as catalytic, turning him toward medical psychopathology and away from a less financially promising career in research.

  Once in private practice in Vienna from 1886, Freud adopted Breuer's method of hypnosis, which differed from the French approach in that it did not use suggestion. The inconsistent results of this early work eventually led him to abandon hypnosis altogether. He concluded that more consistent relief came from encouraging patients to talk freely, without censorship, about whatever ideas or memories arose. He called this procedure "free association."

  By 1896, Freud was using the term "psychoanalysis" for his new clinical method and the theories behind it. He had married Martha Bernays in 1886, the granddaughter of a chief rabbi in Hamburg, and the couple would have six children. From 1891 until they left Vienna in 1938, the family lived at Berggasse 19, near the Innere Stadt, where the work that followed would take shape.

• 5. The Fliess Affair

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  Wilhelm Fliess, a Berlin-based ear, nose, and throat specialist whom Freud first met in 1887, became the indispensable confidant of his formative years. Fliess developed eccentric theories of human biorhythms and a nasogenital connection now considered pseudoscientific. Freud once called him "the Kepler of biology."

  Freud referred his patient Emma Eckstein to Fliess for surgery, believing, according to Fliess's theories, that her pains were caused by habitual masturbation and curable by removing part of the middle turbinate of the nose. The operation proved disastrous. Fliess left half a metre of gauze in Eckstein's nasal cavity, and its later removal left her permanently disfigured, with profuse recurrent bleeding.

  Freud, aware of Fliess's culpability and regarding the remedial surgery in horror, could bring himself only to hint at the matter in his letters. He ultimately concluded that Fliess was "completely without blame," deciding that Eckstein's haemorrhages were hysterical "wish-bleedings" tied to an old wish to be loved in her illness. Eckstein continued her analysis with Freud, was restored to full mobility, and went on to practice psychoanalysis herself.

  Their friendship ended acrimoniously, with Fliess accusing Freud of collusion in the plagiarism of his work. After Fliess failed to respond to an offer of collaboration on the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the relationship came to an end in 1906. Freud later reflected that a homoerotic attachment and the residue of his "specifically Jewish mysticism" lay behind his overestimation of his friend's work.

• 6. The Architecture Of The Psyche

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  Freud's theory of the unconscious, he insisted, was built on the theory of repression. In his 1915 paper "Repression," he distinguished primary repression, linked to the universal taboo on incest, from repression acquired in the course of an individual's life history. He regarded the unconscious as already well known among poets, and saw it as his task to win it scientific recognition.

  Dreams, in Freud's account, are inspired by the occurrences and thoughts of everyday life. In what he called the "dream-work," the everyday thoughts become subject to the primary process of unconscious thought, governed by the pleasure principle and the repressed sexual scenarios of childhood. Because these thoughts are disturbing, the dream-work operates a censorship function, disguising them through distortion, displacement, and condensation to preserve sleep.

  Freud proposed that the human psyche divides into three parts: the id, the ego, and the superego. He elaborated this model fully in The Ego and the Id, published in 1923, having acknowledged that his term for the id, das Es, came from the writings of Georg Groddeck. The id operates on the pleasure principle, seeking immediate gratification, while the superego is the moral component, and the rational ego balances between them.

  Freud compared the relationship between the ego and the id to a charioteer and his horses, where the horses provide the energy and the charioteer the direction. His theory of psychosexual development held that the drives pass through oral, anal, and phallic phases before a latency stage from age five to puberty. The dissolution of the Oedipus complex, in this scheme, came when the child's rivalrous identification with a parent transformed into a pacifying one that acknowledged the other's autonomy.

• 7. Eros And Thanatos

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  In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1920, Freud inferred the existence of a death drive standing opposed to the life drive, or libido. He called the life drive Eros, while the death drive was later named Thanatos by Paul Federn, a term Freud himself did not use.

  Freud's key evidence for the death drive was the compulsion to repeat, which he saw in the dream life of traumatic neurotics and in children's play. He concluded that this compulsion was an effort to restore a state both historically primitive and marked by the total draining of energy, which is to say death. Some scholars have described this idea as "metaphysical biology."

  In his 1917 essay "Mourning and Melancholia," Freud distinguished mourning, painful but inevitable, from melancholia, his term for a mourner's pathological refusal to detach from the lost one. In normal mourning, he argued, the ego detaches the libido from the lost one for self-preservation, but in melancholia, prior ambivalence prevents this. In extreme cases, when unconscious conflict turns against the mourner's own ego, suicide could result.

  Freud's account of femininity traced an uneven transition through the castration complex, which followed different paths for the boy and the girl. In the boy's case it concluded the Oedipal phase, while in the girl's case it precipitated it. The normal outcome, he claimed, was the vagina displacing the clitoris as the leading zone of sexual sensitivity, leaving a legacy of penis envy and ambivalence he thought intimately related to the essence of femininity.

• 8. Prophets And Defectors

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  From the autumn of 1902, several Viennese physicians began meeting at Freud's apartment every Wednesday afternoon, a group called the Wednesday Psychological Society. The musicologist Max Graf, father of "Little Hans," described the atmosphere: black coffee and cakes were served, cigars and cigarettes were consumed in great quantities, and the last word was always Freud's. "There was the atmosphere of the foundation of a religion in that room," Graf recalled, with Freud as its new prophet.

  The early followers met formally for the first time at the Hotel Bristol in Salzburg on the 27th of April 1908, in what was later deemed the first International Psychoanalytic Congress. Forty-two people attended, half of whom were or became practising analysts. In September 1909, Freud sailed to the United States at the invitation of Stanley Hall, president of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he gave five lectures and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate.

  The inner circle did not hold. Alfred Adler, regarded as the most formidable intellect among the early group, resigned as society president in February 1911 and left altogether that June to form his own organization. Carl Gustav Jung, the Zurich psychiatrist Freud had begun corresponding with in 1906, published a work in 1912 making clear his views had diverged, and he resigned as president of the International Psychoanalytical Association in April 1914. The final defection came after Otto Rank published The Trauma of Birth in 1924, with his place on the committee taken by Anna Freud.

  In January 1933, the Nazi Party took control of Germany, and Freud's books were prominent among those they burned. Freud remarked to Ernest Jones: "What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books."

  After the Anschluss of the 13th of March 1938, the arrest and interrogation of Anna Freud by the Gestapo on the 22nd of March finally convinced Freud to leave Vienna. Ernest Jones, then president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, used his acquaintance with the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, to expedite immigration permits, seventeen in all.

  A Nazi-appointed Kommissar, Anton Sauerwald, had studied chemistry at Vienna University under an old friend of Freud's. Sauerwald read Freud's books, became sympathetic, and quietly removed evidence of Freud's foreign bank accounts to his own safekeeping rather than disclose them. Unable to access his own funds, Freud turned to Princess Marie Bonaparte, his wealthiest French follower, who made the necessary money available so the exit visas could be signed.

  Freud left Vienna on the Orient Express on the 4th of June 1938, arriving at London Victoria station two days later. His four elderly sisters could not get exit visas and were all murdered in Nazi concentration camps. In London, callers came to pay their respects, among them Salvador Dali, Stefan Zweig, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and H. G. Wells.

  By mid-September 1939, Freud's jaw cancer had been declared inoperable. The last book he read was Balzac's La Peau de chagrin. He reminded his doctor, Max Schur, of a previous contract: "Schur, you remember our 'contract' not to leave me in the lurch when the time had come. Now it is nothing but torture and makes no sense." Schur administered doses of morphine, and Freud died on the 23rd of September 1939. Three days later his body was cremated at Golders Green, with Harrods acting as funeral directors, and his ashes were placed in an ancient Greek bell krater that Marie Bonaparte had given him and that he had kept in his study for many years.