Freud, p.1
Freud, page 1
Sigmund Freud, about 1890
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Table of Contents
About the Author
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For good friends and Freud scholars:
Malcolm Macmillan, who set the highest standard
Han Israëls, who defied the censors
Allen Esterson, who has lived for truth
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My largest debt is to Han Israëls, both for providing me with vital documents and for posing brave and essential questions about Freud’s early career. His groundbreaking 1993 book, Het geval Freud. 1. Scheppingsverhalen, translated into German (1999) and Spanish (2002) but not English, inspired my project.
I have also been sustained and enlightened by exchanges, across many years, with other scholars who have shown us a more human Freud than the fabled one: Jacques Bénesteau, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Maarten Boudry, Louis Breger, Filip Buekens, the late Frank Cioffi, G. William Domhoff, Todd Dufresne, Allen Esterson, John Farrell, Adolf Grünbaum, J. Allan Hobson, Malcolm Macmillan, Peter Rudnytsky, Max Scharnberg, Morton Schatzman, Frank J. Sulloway, Peter J. Swales, Christfried Tögel, Hall Triplett, Alexander Welsh, and Robert Wilcocks.
To readers familiar with the literature, it will be evident that I owe more to Macmillan and Swales, in particular, than any number of citations could convey. I will be pleased if this book whets an appetite for Macmillan’s great Freud Evaluated and for Swales’s incomparable biographical studies, which I continue to urge him to gather between covers. And although Frank Sulloway has justly reconsidered the evaluation of Freud’s achievement posed long ago in Freud, Biologist of the Mind, that work has proved to be a treasure chest of important facts and inferences. I have also relied on meticulous research by some authors—most prominently Albrecht Hirschmüller—whose judgment of Freud and psychoanalysis bears little resemblance to my own.
Special thanks are due Stewart Justman, who patiently read my draft chapters and offered shrewd advice as well as encouragement. I doubt that I could have persevered for eleven years without his expressions of faith in the outcome. Jack Shoemaker, who published my most recent book, has shown me the generosity for which he is well known. It has been a pleasure to work once again with Andrew Franklin, who will be introducing this book to British readers. As always, my most tireless line-by-line critic has also been the nearest and dearest, Elizabeth Crews.
I wrote the manuscript, but it became a book only after receiving the expert shepherding of my agent, Michael Carlisle. Without him, the project would never have come to the notice of Sara Bershtel, the publisher of Metropolitan Books, who saw possibilities where others did not. Sara is also a legendary editor—the best alive, so it is said in New York. In her case, unlike Freud’s, the legend has proved to be true. And thanks to her, I was handed along to a truly brilliant copy editor, Prudence Crowther. I am also indebted to Connor Guy for his valuable editorial suggestions and many other services.
For help with (but not responsibility for) my German, I thank Katra Byram, Emily Banwell, Han Israëls, and Gerd Busse. And I am grateful for the support of friends, including Joan Acocella, William and JoAn Chace, Karel de Pauw, the late Denis Dutton, Pamela Freyd, Alan Friedman, Jacob Fuchs, E. D. Hirsch Jr., Susan Jacoby, Stephen Kennamer, Emily and William Leider, Jeffrey Meyers, Gary Saul Morson, Paul Nixon, Richard Pollak, Tom Quirk, James Samuels, the late Robert Silvers, James Wallenstein, and my daughters, Gretchen Detre and Ingrid Crews.
However far human beings may reach with their knowledge, however objective they may seem to themselves to be: in the end they carry away nothing but their own biography.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE*
It’s not a lie if you believe it.
—GEORGE COSTANZA, IN SEINFELD
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Frontispiece: Sigmund Freud, about 1890 (Photo © PVDE / Bridgeman Images)
1. Jacob Freud and his son Sigismund, age eight (Photo © Tallandier / Bridgeman Images)
2. Amalie Freud and her son Sigismund, age sixteen (akg-images / Interfoto)
3. Eduard Silberstein, Freud’s best friend in adolescence (© S. Fischer Verlag GmbH)
4. Martha Bernays and Sigmund Freud in 1885, during their engagement (Photo © PVDE / Bridgeman Images)
5. Minna Bernays, Freud’s future sister-in-law, age eighteen (Mary Evans Picture Library / SIGMUND FREUD COPYRIGHTS / Everett Collection)
6. Ernst Fleischl von Marxow, Freud’s teacher, friend, and fellow user of cocaine (akg-images / Imagno)
7. Freud’s colleague Carl Koller, who discovered cocaine anesthesia (Mary Evans Picture Library / SIGMUND FREUD COPYRIGHTS / Everett Collection)
8. André Brouillet’s 1887 painting A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière, depicting Jean-Martin Charcot’s induction of a hysterical fit (Private Collection / De Agostini Picture Library / Bridgeman Images)
9. Joseph Delboeuf, Charcot’s most incisive critic (Album Liébault, arch. dép. de Meurthe-et-Moselle. D.R.)
10. The psychiatrist Theodor Meynert, Freud’s mentor, later his foe (Mary Evans Picture Library / SIGMUND FREUD COPYRIGHTS / Everett Collection)
11. The master hypnotherapist Hippolyte Bernheim (Musée d’Histoire de la Médecine, Paris, France / Bridgeman Images)
12. Pierre Janet, Freud’s chief rival as a psychological theorist (Collection Dupont / akg-images)
13. Josef and Mathilde Breuer (akg-images)
14. Bertha Pappenheim, alias “Anna O.” (akg-images / Imago)
15. Anna von Lieben, the patient who most influenced Freud (The Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust / Tate Modern)
16. Freud and his dear friend Wilhelm Fliess, about 1895 (akg-images / Imago / k. A.)
17. Emma Eckstein, patient to both Freud and Fliess (Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-120561)
18. Otto Bauer and his sister Ida, alias “Dora” (Verein für Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung)
A NOTE ON SOURCES
For an understanding of Freud’s pre-psychoanalytic development and his character in general, the most revealing documents are his and Martha Bernays’s Brautbriefe, or engagement letters, exchanged between 1882 and 1886. Upon the death of Anna Freud in 1982, the letters were donated to the Freud Archives in the US Library of Congress, where, at her stipulation, they were hidden from view until 2000. That was not an exceptional measure. The first director of the archives, Kurt Eissler, saw to it that other papers would remain unavailable for many more decades, extending as far forward as the year 2113.
Nevertheless, some Brautbriefe have long been familiar, at least in part, to the reading public. Ernst Freud published 97 of them in his 1960 edition of his father’s selected letters, and Ernest Jones quoted or cited more than 200 in his authorized biography. That may sound like a lot, but 1,539 engagement letters of Freud’s and Martha’s have survived; and not surprisingly, those that fail to tally with his legend have until recently remained either unpublished or redacted.
Recently, however, German transcripts of all of the Brautbriefe have been made available on the Library of Congress’s website. Moreover, the full Brautbriefe have begun to be published, in five volumes, by a team of scrupulous German editors. Freud scholarship will be revolutionized when this slow-motion event has concluded. As of this writing, three volumes have appeared, taking the correspondence through September 1884. I have gratefully consulted those texts and the comprehensive notes that accompany them. And, with assistance, I have translated those letters not already published in English.
Because the Library of Congress transcripts contain errors, prudence might dictate that any new study of the early Freud be postponed until all five volumes of the definitive edition have appeared. For me at age eighty-four, however, another prudential consideration takes precedence. I must tell what I know about Freud, hoping that some inevitable mistakes and omissions won’t be so grave as to invalidate my inferences.
In quoting published materials that were translated from German, such as James Strachey’s Standard Edition of Freud’s complete psychological writings, I have occasionally preferred a more literal translation, especially where it makes a substantive difference of meaning. Every such change is indicated in the citation. Paragraph breaks have been inserted into a few lengthy passages.
Finally, readers may wonder why, in the chapters that follow, generic physicians are always he and generic patients are always she. This blunt solution to the always vexing pronoun problem recognizes, but isn’t meant to endorse, a historical reality: in Freud’s early career nearly all providers of psychotherapy and hypnotism were men, and most of their clients were women.
ABBREVIATED TITLES
CP
Sigmund Freud, Cocaine Papers. Ed. Robert Byck. New York: S tonehill, 1974.
FF
The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904. Trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard U., 1985.
FMB
Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays, Die Brautbriefe. 5 vols. (projected). Eds. Gerhard Fichtner, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, and Albrecht Hirschmüller. Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 2011—.
FS
Sigmund Freud, The Letters of Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein: 1871–1881. Ed. Walter Boehlich. Trans. Arnold J. Pomerans. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard U., 1990.
J
Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. 3 vols. New York: Basic, 1953–57.
L
Letters of Sigmund Freud. Ed. Ernst L. Freud. Trans. Tania and James Stern. [1960.] New York: Dover, 1992.
SE
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 24 vols. Trans. James Strachey, with Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson. London: Hogarth, 1953–1974.
SK
Sigmund Freud, Schriften über Kokain. Ed. Albrecht Hirschmüller. Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1996.
Preface
Among historical figures, Sigmund Freud ranks with Shakespeare and Jesus of Nazareth for the amount of attention bestowed upon him by scholars and commentators. Unlike them, he left behind thousands of documents that show what he was doing and thinking from adolescence until his death at age eighty-three. Although many of those records were placed under lengthy restriction by followers who felt both financial and emotional incentives to idealize him, that blackout has at least partly expired by now. More revelations will emerge, but they are unlikely to alter the outlines of Freud’s conduct and beliefs as they appear in the most responsible recent studies.
Nor, surely, will much more be learned about Freud’s intricate relation to the currents of medical, philosophical, political, and cultural thought that affected him, or about his own effect on later currents.1 We know that he was the beneficiary of various long-term trends that influenced his own thinking and then accelerated in the twentieth century. They include a backlash against scientific positivism; an Ibsenesque discontent with bourgeois hypocrisy; a current of Nietzschean “dark Romanticism,” celebrating the Dionysian element that Christian teaching had equated with sinfulness; the rise of a bohemian avant-garde, devoted to anti-establishment feeling and sexual license; increased urbanization and social mobility, accompanied by rejection of patriarchal authority; and a waning of theological belief, allowing psychotherapy to inherit some of religion’s traditional role in providing guidance and consolation to the unhappy. The disaster of World War I virtually guaranteed that Freud’s pessimistic, instinct-centered philosophy would prevail, at least among intellectuals, over sunnier models of the psyche.
If Freud’s career and its impact are so well understood, what justification could there be for another lengthy biographical tract? The question appears especially pertinent in view of the fall that Freud’s scientific reputation has suffered over the past forty-five years.2 In 1997, for example, the standard academic work on cognition and emotion referenced 1,314 texts, only one of which was by Freud.3 And in 1999, a comprehensive citation study in the flagship journal of American psychology reported that “psychoanalytic research has been virtually ignored by mainstream scientific psychology over the past several decades.”4 The situation has not improved in the twenty-first century. As one otherwise sympathetic observer put it in 2010, “the scientific standing of psychoanalysis and of its therapeutic claims has been severely compromised both by a lack of empirical support and [by] its dependence on an outdated biology.”5 It might be merciful, then, just to turn our backs on an increasingly deserted scene.
But Freud, even stripped of his scientific pretensions, is destined to remain among us as the most influential of twentieth-century sages. Without those pretensions, in fact, his cultural sway becomes a more intriguing phenomenon. Although the peers who knew his writings perceived the flaws in his system,6 intellectuals in later years were spellbound by his self-portrayal as a lone explorer possessing courageous perseverance, deductive brilliance, tragic insight, and healing power. Much can still be learned from that episode of mass infatuation, in which I myself naïvely participated fifty years ago. And the seriocomic history of the psychoanalytic movement itself is instructive as a cautionary demonstration of what can happen when a pseudoscience, lacking any objective means of adjudicating internal differences of judgment, becomes a worldwide enterprise whose outposts inevitably loosen their ties with the founding center and generate new vortices of dogma.7
My main concern here, however, is with Freud in person—and, indeed, with only one question about him. How and why did a studious, ambitious, and philosophically reflective young man, trained in rigorous inductivism by distinguished researchers and eager to win their favor, lose perspective on his wild hunches, efface the record of his mistakes, and establish an international cult of personality? The record from his years of obscurity and struggle can show how he was affected by clashing impulses: his sense of duty, his fear of disgrace and of prolonged poverty, his yearning for celebrity, his initial willingness to conform and to ingratiate himself, and his resentment of the institutional authority to which, for a while, he nominally bowed. As we will see, the balance among those factors was tipped by crucial experiences, between 1884 and 1900, whose import for psychoanalysis has been almost entirely overlooked.
It may seem odd that this part of the story has never been told in full detail. But lack of attention hasn’t been the problem. Rather, biographical Freud studies have been dominated by partisans of psychoanalysis with a vested interest in preserving the legend of epochal discovery. Nearly all of Freud’s apologists, heeding a tacit plea on his part to be exempted from dispassionate evaluation of his claims, have engaged in protective discourse: ascribing special acuteness to the master, always granting him the benefit of the doubt, and, when there appears to be no dodging the evidence of his illogicalities and ethical lapses, blaming them on the autonomous operations of his unconscious mind.
By exaggerating Freud’s competence in various respects, this Freudolatry has obscured the central drama of his career. His temperament and self-conception demanded that he achieve fame at any cost. His apologists tell us, as Freud himself did, that the cost was irrational opposition from a prudish world. As we will see, however, the cost was much steeper: it was nothing less than his integrity as both a scientist and a physician.
Although many readers expect a sensible book about Freud to manifest its objectivity by weighing certain hard-won contributions against certain errors or excesses, such predetermined evenhandedness renders him more puzzling than he actually was. We have been told, for example, that he disregarded every element of scientific prudence and that he achieved fundamental breakthroughs in psychological knowledge.8 How, then, did he do it? No one can say; the attempted explanations vaporize into the useless notion of “genius.” It is better, I suggest, simply to ask what the biographical evidence tells us at every juncture. If, as a result, we lose a former hero, we may at last gain a consistent picture of the man.
On one point, though, nearly all readers will want to insist upon a concession that won’t be made below. Believing that Freud, whatever his failings, initiated our tradition of empathetic psychotherapy, they will judge this book to have unjustly withheld credit for his most benign and enduring achievement. Still worse, they may judge the author to be a disbeliever in psychotherapy itself. I will show, however, not only that Freud had predecessors and rivals in one-on-one mental treatment but also that he failed to match their standard of responsiveness to each patient’s unique situation. As for my estimation of psychotherapy, I regard it as potentially helpful to the extent that it dispenses with a reductive style of explanation.
Nevertheless, analysts who believe that their discipline has now “gone beyond Freud” will find no comfort in my chapters. Whatever its recent improvements, psychoanalysis remains what Frank Cioffi sarcastically dubbed a testimonial science.9 That is, the evidence offered in support of its propositions consists almost entirely of assurances that Freud and others have found them to be true. A vast first-person literature, recounting what individual analysts have purportedly learned from their patients, can be selectively taken to prove one or another tenet. But regarded as a whole, the same literature cancels out to zero, because the anecdotes favoring one proposition are no better grounded than the opposing ones.
