Sigmund Freud* (10 page)

Freud could see that his ideas would endure. He had achieved his longtime goals, but his remaining years were bleak.

During the last sixteen years of his life, he lived and worked in a state of pain. In 1923 he was diagnosed with mouth cancer, which doctors attributed directly to his cigar smoking. He had part of his jaw removed in one major operation, with thirty more surgeries to follow. A metal device was inserted in his mouth; he called it the “Monster,” and afterward had trouble eating and speaking. Everyone who knew him during this time commented on his heroic courage in the face of perpetual pain. Wanting to keep his mind focused, he refused painkillers, except aspirin toward the end, and he continued to smoke.

When his ninety-five-year-old mother, Amalia, died in 1930, his main reaction was one of relief—she would not be able to watch him die.

His writing became grander, more abstract. He came to view psychoanalysis not purely in terms of individual results (often it wasn’t successful, he conceded, or else was required for years and years), but as an investigation into human behavior and society as a whole.

In 1930 he went global, with
Civilization and Its Discontents.
Trying to answer the question “Why are people so unhappy?” his book applied psychoanalysis to the structure of civilization since the beginning of time. It was not a cheery read, but rather an account of how personal drives were incompatible with the demands of society. Irrationality lurks behind the facade of civilization. Whole cultures can grow mentally ill. One way people try to lessen their own unhappiness is by finding some other group they can turn their hatred on. (And he was still lamenting the weaknesses he saw in his father Jacob: “I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.”)

Scholars point out that Freud’s bleak perspective was confirmed by what was going on in the world. World War I was supposed to be “the war to end all wars.” It wasn’t. Events were leading to the outbreak of World War II, with death and destruction on a level never before seen. Sixty million people were about to die.

In 1933, one-third of Austrians were out of work. Germans suffered as badly. The extreme hardship people endured contributed to the rise in Germany of the Nazi Party and its leader, Adolf Hitler. The main thing would-be artist Hitler had learned during his seven years in Vienna was not how to paint, but how to turn anti-Semitism into an official policy of government. Many Jews, including most psychoanalysts, feared what was coming and started leaving the areas coming under Hitler’s control. All of Freud’s friends urged him to get out of Vienna—soon. Perhaps to go to America, where glittering notables had honored him on his seventy-fifth birthday at a banquet in New York City. They’d sent him a telegram praising “the intrepid explorer who discovered the submerged continents of the ego and gave a new orientation to science and life.”

Ill and old, Freud didn’t want to leave Vienna, the comfort of his routine. Several times during his life, even as an elderly man, Freud had physically confronted anti-Semitic harassment, waving his cane, yelling back at tormentors. Unlike his father, he wanted to fight back. Somehow he had the idea that he could take on the Nazis.

The danger got ever closer. Freud’s books were burned publicly by the Nazis in Berlin, along with those of Einstein and other Jews, and other psychoanalytical works. “What progress we are making,” he mused bitterly. “In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.” It was a joke, one that he needed to take more seriously.

In 1938, the Nazis took over Austria and immediately began persecution of Jews. The Gestapo, the Nazi political police, kept Berggasse 19 under constant surveillance. At one point police raided the house until an outraged Martha ordered the men to get out. Then Anna was summoned to the local Gestapo headquarters. Though she was later released without harm, Freud was finally frightened enough to leave.

Not without considerable difficulty, he managed to get exit visas for himself and his immediate family. Despite his best efforts, he had to leave four of his sisters behind (the fifth had already moved to New York). All four later died in Nazi concentration camps.

During his last year and a half, he lived and worked in London. Supporters helped create a near-exact replica of his Berggasse office, including the legendary couch, sent by friends. Famous writers and artists streamed in to visit. By now he was one of the most celebrated men in the world, a tragic hero in exile. British doctors hailed him as the most controversial scientist since Darwin. The scientific Royal Society named him an honorary fellow, whose signature was put alongside Newton’s and Einstein’s.

He never stopped writing. He began to speculate that psychoanalysts might someday use “particular chemical substances” to help patients, understanding that chemical imbalances in the “mental apparatus,” or brain, could be stabilized through medicine. Cocaine had turned out to be a disastrous blind alley, not a medicine after all. But he was correct in predicting a growing emphasis on brain chemistry and the use of medications, prevalent so many years later in treating mental illness.

Freud fought his cancer as long as he could, but finally it began attacking the flesh of his cheek. The smell was so strong that his beloved dog Jofi avoided him. When the pain became unbearable, he asked his longtime doctor for an overdose of morphine. On September 23, 1939, Sigmund Freud died at age eighty-three.

In one of his last letters, he wrote, “I have spent my whole life standing up for what I have considered to be the scientific truth, even when it was uncomfortable and unpleasant for my fellow man.”

His ashes are kept at the Freud Museum in London—in a Greek urn from his own collection.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Freud’s Friends and Foes

FREUDIAN TENDRILS HAVE crept into all aspects of society.

Throughout the twentieth century, advances in science kept making life more comfortable, more modern, increasingly industrialized. Many people had more education and money, more free time to look inward and think about their place in the world.

Today we take it for granted that there is meaning underneath surface behavior, there sometimes are hidden motives for what we do, physical symptoms of illness can have emotional roots, childhood experiences mold our later life, dreams can have meaning, therapy can be helpful, sex can be openly discussed.

All this is because of Sigmund Freud. Perhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to modern thought was that the unconscious has a coherent structure. Thanks to him, most of us accept that there is a lot of important stuff going on beneath the conscious level.

The practice of psychoanalysis in the United States grew and grew, especially once hundreds of refugee analysts arrived, fleeing Nazi persecution. By the 1950s, psychoanalysis could do no wrong. Talk therapy was seen as an amazing improvement over alternatives like rest cures or electroshock therapy.

New ideas bloomed in relation to—and also in opposition to—Freud’s work. The ways people were portrayed in art, books, and movies became more psychologically based. Parents changed the ways they raised children. Freud became part of everyday language—everyone thought they understood the constant references.

Those who treated mental illness climbed aboard Freud’s broad shoulders and took psychoanalysis in directions he might or might not have liked. Eventually there were numerous kinds of talk therapy, variations on Freud.

Freud’s theories affected all of medicine. Instead of focusing solely on physical aspects of diseases, doctors began taking into account the relationship between emotions and health.

Then, in the 1970s, Freud’s reputation took a tumble. Some of his theories were withstanding the test of time, and some weren’t. In particular, American feminists were appalled by what they deemed Freud’s debasing attitudes toward women. Most of what he said about women seemed so outdated that it cast doubt on his other ideas.

New technological advances threw some of his theories into question. Dreams as wish fulfillment, for example. By hooking up sleeping patients to machines that show the cycles of sleep, scientists discovered which part of the brain triggers dreaming. It’s a primitive area of the brain called the pons, which seems to indicate that dreams are not high priority for the brain, of no great psychological significance. Maybe dreams aren’t wish fulfillments, as per Freud, but a way of processing information encountered during the day, or just random recycled scraps with no meaning.

And then there’s the scientific method and the trouble it causes for Freudian theories. Where is the hard data to back them up? No brain scan can detect a Superego; no X-ray can capture a dream; no MRI can translate a Freudian slip. Anecdotal information—what he amassed by analyzing his patients—doesn’t count as scientific law. His famous case studies, as perceptive as they may be, are subjective, idiosyncratic. (In one sense, they’re an example of how far writing skill can take someone—he was eloquent, convincing, logical. Even when he was wrong.) Much as he tried to remain detached and not “contaminate” the process, his theories were based on
his
perceptions, and his alone, of a tiny segment of humanity. How can they be classified as “universal”—a criterion for any scientific law?

Freud’s theories cannot be tested. No one else can repeatedly produce the same results he got. His work is not so much a rigorous system as it is a compelling hypothesis that can be woven around and pertain to just about any situation. He was not systematic enough, but prone to circular thinking. More of a poet, perhaps.

Then there is that problem of not being open to criticism. As Albert Einstein pointed out, “He had a sharp vision; no illusions lulled him to sleep except for an often exaggerated faith in his own ideas.” One of the requirements of a scientist is considering evidence that points to the truth of other theories or the flaws in one’s own—not one of Freud’s strengths.

The harshest critics see his work as mumbo jumbo, pseudoscience, a joke. “Freud was as nutty as could be,” said the founder of a rival form of talk therapy. In 2004 a newspaper editorialized, “Arguably no other notable figure in history was so fantastically wrong about nearly every important thing he had to say.”

Headlines show the ongoing duel over his work: “Is Freud Dead?” (1993) versus “Why Freud Isn’t Dead” (1996) versus “What Freud Got Right” (2002). Many psychiatrists today would agree that some aspects of Freudian psychoanalysis may be useful, but only as one of many treatments.

As Freud himself predicted, by the mid-twentieth century, scientists discovered drugs that could provide dramatic help for mental illness by adjusting the brain’s chemistry. Thorazine for schizophrenia went on the market in the United States in 1954, then lithium for manic depression, now referred to as bipolar disorder. In the 1980s, antidepressants such as Prozac were first prescribed for people with less severe illnesses. Brain-altering chemicals are today a multi-billion dollar business. Doctors and patients value them as a less expensive, less time-consuming, and often more effective treatment than talk therapy.

Take obsessive-compulsive disorder. A symptom might be constant hand-washing because of an overpowering fear of germs. Freud thought that meant a patient was fixated in the anal stage of infancy. The cause, however, as many scientists now believe, may lie with unbalanced biochemicals in a part of the brain called the caudate nucleus. Rather than spending hours on a couch, a patient may simply take a medication to correct the imbalance.

Freud did unlock doors for others, open up channels for thought, pave the way for modern psychology—even neurochemistry. Medical doctors and neuroscientists all see further—and have a much different view of emotional terrain—because of standing on his shoulders.

Many questions he tried to answer
still
go unanswered. How much is still left to understand about the physical brain versus the invisible mind? New insights and treatments for mental illness are certain to come from the study of genetics, the field of brain imaging, and yet-to-be-discovered technologies. A new journal has been established that combines Freud with contemporary neuroscience, claiming that the more scientists learn about the physical structure of the brain, the more support there is for some of his theories.

Meanwhile, the diagnosis of hysteria—initially the basis for Freud’s career—quietly went away. As psychiatrists learned more, they realized the label was way too broad. A wide range of specific mental illnesses and disorders (hysteria was excluded) were categorized in 1952. The American Psychiatric Association published
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM), and revises it every few years.

But Freud himself never goes away—a flawed but stubborn visionary. As the poet W. H. Auden wrote, “to us he is no more a person/now but a whole climate of opinion.” Psychoanalysis continues to be practiced. His theories of childhood development are still taught in universities. In 1999 he was named one of
Time
magazine’s 100 Most Important People of the Century. Any tome about human behavior will include endless references to Freud. He is responsible for how we understand ourselves.

You can see an exact replica of the famous couch and his office at the Freud Museum in London. If jokes are a barometer, you can laugh at more jokes about Freud than about any other scientist. And if you want, you can even buy a pair of cozy shoes with fuzzy Sigi heads on them. They’re called Freudian slippers.

APPENDIX

Major Works by Sigmund Freud

 

Studies on Hysteria
, 1895
The Interpretation of Dreams
, 1900
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
, 1901
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
, 1905
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
, 1905
Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis
, 1910
Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic
Lives of Savages and Neurotics
, 1913
On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement
, 1914
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
, 1917
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
, 1920
The Ego and the Id
, 1923
Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety
, 1926
The Question of Lay-Analyses
, 1926
The Future of an Illusion
, 1927
Civilization and Its Discontents
, 1930
New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
, 1933
Moses and Monotheism
, 1939