Sigmund Freud* (7 page)

Freud found that his own bouts of depression vanished during sessions with patients. He admitted sometimes feeling too “weary and apathetic” to talk when he entered the consulting room, but then his spirits would lift. Outside the office, his interests were narrow. He did like to collect jokes and had a large store of them. As for new developments in the arts, he usually disapproved—putting quotes around art when referring to modern “art.” He boasted that he was incapable of carrying a tune, and no one who heard him humming Mozart’s operas disagreed. The telephone and, later on, the radio, held no interest for him.

Mainly he worked, typically putting in a sixteen-hour day. “I find amusement in nothing else,” he admitted.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Dreaming about Dreams

THE DEATH OF his father Jacob in 1897 affected forty-year-old Freud more profoundly that he’d expected. “I now feel quite uprooted,” he mourned (even though his mother was still alive). His response was to immerse himself even more in his work, writing several major books, and beginning a bold—and highly questionable—new experiment.

He put himself into psychoanalysis, in the role of both analyst and analysand. It sounds bizarre. But for one thing, there was no other psychoanalyst—Freud was it. And so far, his theories were primarily a result of treating women with hysteria. He felt that, to be universal, the principles of psychoanalysis would also have to include the male mind—a relatively normal one, namely his own. Only in this way could psychoanalysis develop into a complete theory of the mind.

Ever since he had tested cocaine on himself, Freud had always considered his own mind and body suitable for science experiments. Now he spent part of each day on the couch, examining his own childhood and events that had shaped him, analyzing his own dreams and memories. “The chief patient I am preoccupied with is myself” and “my little hysteria,” he wrote. Into middle age he was still plagued with depression and irritability, dizzy spells, feelings of worthlessness. He was attempting to take a giant step toward self-understanding.

But Freud himself wondered if he was doing the right thing—his self-analysis was both the first and the last in the history of psychoanalysis. After all, how can one person serve as analyst, remaining detached, while at the same time be the patient remembering highly emotional, often disturbing experiences? It was just too circular to be useful. Too illogical to be considered a part of the scientific process. (All future analysts would undergo analysis with someone else—who had been analyzed by Freud or someone he had trained.)

Still, Freud felt his own analysis led to certain discoveries. Chief among them was something he called the Oedipus complex. He was convinced, thinking back, that as an infant he had felt an attraction to his young mother and an impulse to get his father out of the way. He interpreted his feelings in terms of the play that had always struck such a deep chord in him—Sophocles’ tragedy
Oedipus Rex
. He saw the story as universal: Every little boy desires his mother and wants to remove the one obstacle (his father) that keeps him from his heart’s desire. “Removing,” according to Freud’s Oedipus complex, means an unconscious wish for the father’s death. He wasn’t suggesting that little boys act out this wish, merely that the wish existed. In normal development, the complex could be mastered by separating from the mother, growing independent, and later finding a suitable replacement: a wife.

Most scientists agree that Freud was now traveling away from science—the study of mental illness—and into different territory—the study of the human condition. In identifying core experiences like the Oedipus complex, he sought a new way of thinking about growing up. His scientific method was starting to resemble storytelling. And as with the unconscious, he was describing things you couldn’t see or test. You can’t put an Oedipus complex under a microscope—you can’t prove it exists. Yet as a core experience it was immediately compelling—a road-map for every son’s journey to adulthood.

What about girls? Freud went on to describe another complex, later named the Electra complex after another figure from Greek mythology. After her father is murdered, Electra avenges his death by slaying her mother and her mother’s lover. According to Freud, every girl prefers the affection of her father and subconsciously wants to take her mother’s place.

While investigating this complex, Freud’s attitudes toward women also steered him into the highly controversial concept of “penis envy,” whereby every girl experiences the wish to be male and blames her mother for not giving her a penis. The complex could be resolved only when a girl renounced her desire to be a boy, repressed her attraction to her father, and identified with her mother. Free of feeling inferior, a girl would develop into a healthy woman.

“What does a woman want?” Freud famously asked in later life—and clearly, he was clueless in many ways. In his research, Freud always relied on the male as the “norm” of development. And he accepted the male and female stereotypes of his day. “Anatomy is destiny,” Freud insisted in one sweeping statement. What he meant was that gender was the most important factor in shaping a person’s life. One of the early female psychoanalysts, Karen Horney, disagreed with him right from the start, the first of many women—and men—to do so.

Another important outcome of his self-analysis was his reliance on dreams as keys to unlocking a person’s state of mind. He’d written down his own dreams ever since childhood. Now he studied hundreds of dreams in addition to his own, eagerly seeking descriptions from all his patients, from Martha and his children.

Dream interpretation goes back thousands of years. Dreams were once thought to predict the future or reveal ways to cure the dreamer’s illnesses. Educated Europeans of Freud’s time believed that dreams were meaningless bits of trivia, a result of indigestion perhaps. Even in “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” Freud had called dreams “simply hallucinations motivated by the small residues of energy that are ordinarily left over” from the day and come out during sleep.

But now he became convinced that dreams had an important purpose: to shed light on unconscious desires or wishes. In 1900, he published
The Interpretation of Dreams
, a landmark study of why dreams originate and how they function.

Freud pictured the human mind as an energy system, like a machine. The mind’s energy he called “libido”—the biological urge to reproduce, seek stimulation, and achieve goals. This energy would seek whatever outlet it could find. If denied physical expression by the person in everyday waking life, the energy would seek release through dreams, through stories we tell ourselves while sleeping. Wishes sprout like mushrooms in our unconscious sleeping minds. In the language of
The Interpretation of Dreams
, a wish can be satisfied by an imaginary wish fulfillment, or dream. According to Freud, even nightmares are the disguised expression of wish fulfillment. Dreams were a link to the unconscious—in fact, they were “the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.”

In a dream, he believed, everything is in disguise, every object or event stands for something else. His book provides a guide for the decoding of the symbols, or dreamwork, as Freud called it. In the first paragraph he states: “Every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life.”

That common dream about being in a public place, among strangers, with no clothes on? We might feel shame and anxiety, but Freud pointed out that the strangers don’t seem to notice. “Dreams of being naked are dreams of exhibiting,” taking us back to the “unashamed period of childhood. . . . We can regain this Paradise every night in our dreams.” We are wishing to be an uninhibited child again.

Or that dream about taking an important exam for which one has not studied? This expresses an uncertainty about passing some sort of test coming up in real life. And that dream about being in danger but unable to move—it means we are stuck between two opposing desires.

Freud saw dreamwork as a valuable code that could help millions of people discover and understand wishes they couldn’t face when awake. And interpreting dreams was just “the starting point of a new and deeper science of the mind.” In the future, science would explain how normal minds worked, and by extension abnormal minds.

Through dreamwork, valuable long-lost memories from the first few years of life could be retrieved. Freud always advocated more focus on childhood events, believing that the experience of early childhood related to adult psychology in the same way that the nervous systems of lower animals (like crayfish) showed a connection to the neurology of humans. Children “evolved” into grown-ups. He became a notable contributor to the field of child psychology, the study of children’s psychological processes and how they differ from adults’.

Today, even if they reject many of its details, most experts consider
The Interpretation of Dreams
Freud’s most important contribution to psychology. He, too, thought it was his most groundbreaking book. “Insight such as this falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime,” he said in an instance of being both full of himself and modest at the same time. He was hoping his book would have the same instant success as Darwin’s
Origin of Species
, almost exactly forty years earlier. Darwin’s book had sold out (1,250 copies) its first day of publication. But Freud’s took six years to sell 351 copies.

His first lecture on dreams was attended by only three people. “I have not yet seen a trace of anyone who has an inkling of what is significant in it,” he complained. He thought of this as his greatest contribution to science. As for the dismal response, he deemed it an utter rejection of golden Sigi. Critics “may abuse my doctrines by day, but I am sure they dream of them by night,” he tried to joke about his disappointment.

The next year he published another book now considered a landmark,
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
. Unconscious desires inform not just our dreams, he announced, but all kinds of everyday acts and behavior. Solving human mysteries, searching for clues, Freud had disciplined himself into a master observer. “He who has eyes to see and ears to hear,” he wrote, “becomes convinced that mortals can keep no secret. If their lips are silent, they gossip with their fingertips; betrayal forces its way through every pore.”

Secret wishes even show up in mistakes we think we are making accidentally. He popularized the notion of what became called the “Freudian slip”—a seemingly insignificant error, a slip of the tongue or pen, a misreading. Saying “sex” when you meant to say “six,” for example. These “errors” are important and purposeful, he explained, because they can be interpreted and tell us about ourselves.

In
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,
he applied his science to what people find funny. (An unfunny book, it was a scholarly tome complete with footnotes.)

Why do we laugh? Freud asked. Because jokes, like dreams, satisfy deep, unconscious desires. They’re a socially acceptable means of expressing the often “unacceptable”—mocking authority, voicing politically incorrect statements, revealing things we’re inhibited about, expressing feelings we deem “inappropriate” or may not even consciously be aware of. We think we’re using humor purely to be playful or to note the absurdity of life—but really we are giving ourselves away, revealing personal truths in the guise of jokes. “Joke-work,” or the analysis of what strikes people as funny, was to Freud a process as serious as dreamwork.

Freud also applied his theories to great artists like Michelangelo and their works of art. Here he analyzed paintings and sculptures as symbolic expressions of their creators’ minds, exploring what dreams and childhood events may have played a part. He devoted a whole book to his hero Leonardo da Vinci, calling him “the first modern natural philosopher,” or scientist, for his achievements in other areas besides art. That riddle of Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile? Freud claimed to have solved the mystery, attributing the smile to Caterina, the mother Leonardo barely knew. The artist had lost his mother’s smile and was constantly trying to reproduce it.

By 1902, Freud had laid the foundations of Freudianism, his heroic life’s work. He was ready for people to support him. For to truly be a hero, a leader, one needs followers.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Wednesday Psychological Society

SO FAR, IN turn-of-the-century Europe, the medical establishment had been slow to accept Freud. Many referred to him as a “witch doctor” or “the Viennese quack.” Critics called psychoanalysis a “scientific fairy tale”; anti-Semitic ones referred to it as a “Jewish swindle.”

But
Interpretation of Dreams
hadn’t been completely ignored, as Freud claimed. Wilhelm Stekel, a doctor who wrote for a city newspaper, had reviewed it favorably. One day Stekel came to Freud and suggested they form a group to discuss psychoanalysis.