Sigmund Freud* (8 page)

The Wednesday Psychological Society was born in 1902, a small but cosmopolitan group of Freud’s supporters. They were mostly Jewish doctors and other intellectuals from Vienna, plus invited guests from other cities.

Each Wednesday between nine and midnight, future stars of the psychoanalytic movement would gather at Berggasse 19. Early members were Max Kahane, Rudolf Reitler, and Alfred Adler, later joined by others such as Sándor Ferenczi, Carl Gustav Jung, Otto Rank, Ernest Jones, and A.A. Brill. These men were to become the first psychoanalysts after Freud. “So, now you have seen the gang!” he said one night to a guest.

One of them said, “We were like pioneers in a newly discovered land. . . . A spark seemed to jump from one mind to the other.” The group was a unique community, questing for the meaning of existence in terms that weren’t religious, seeing life as a psychological journey.

The topic of the very first meeting was the psychological urge to smoke—a subject close to the heart of Freud and everyone else in the group. Next to each chair the maid would place an ashtray that was always filled by meeting’s end. Freud’s children described the atmosphere as “choking” and wondered how the men could even breathe. But in later years, his youngest, Anna, often sat on the stairs nearby, listening, taking in the discussion.

Smoking, munching pastry, and drinking black coffee, the men would mull over case histories, talk about forthcoming publications, analyze public figures or fictional characters. Many also had personal problems of their own they were trying to work out. Meetings became a scientific exhibition of their inner selves—analyzing one another’s dreams, revealing embarrassing moments. Nobody dared analyze Freud, once he made it perfectly clear his own problems had already been resolved through his self-analysis. The group would discuss the topic of the night, with Freud making sure he
always
had the last word. He was “hard and relentless in the presentation of his ideas,” one said.

This was Freud’s personal fan club, a semi-secret society like the Spanish club with Eduard, his best friend from childhood. It had special knowledge, a private language, and stormy relationships. Pleasing Freud was tricky. If you disagreed with him he hated it; if you agreed with him he worried that you might steal his ideas. Admiration was recommended—he was, after all, golden Sigi. But at the same time he didn’t really want worship: “I am unsuitable to be a cult object.” He settled into the role of benevolent father figure, everyone addressing him as “The Professor.” The other men—all younger—competed for Freud’s approval and even his patronage—he referred patients to them at his discretion.

Emboldened, perhaps, by his new Wednesday evening support system, in 1905 he published what many consider his most controversial book, all about sex.
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
contained his ideas about sexuality in infant behavior such as thumb-sucking, and in events like toilet-training. Freud worked on the
Sexuality
book at the same time as his
Joke
book, keeping the two manuscripts on tables next to each other.

In explaining children’s sexual impulses—still today considered a highly inflammatory subject—Freud was influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwin demonstrated that human beings did not simply appear on earth in their final form. They were the biological result of many millions of years of change or evolution. Earlier, people (even Freud) had assumed that children had no sexual feelings, and that sexuality simply appeared when a person hit puberty. Freud, however, substituted the idea of an evolving sexuality. He theorized that human sexuality (as well as other aspects of a mature person) had its beginnings in early childhood. From infancy, it grew and evolved. Infants were actually very interesting—Freud saw them as “polymorphously perverse,” meaning they got pleasure from any kind of stimulation.

Not everyone agreed—then or now. Some of his first followers parted company with Freud over the very idea of childhood sexuality. But this book was a springboard from which later researchers could refine or oppose his theories. The biggest fans called it a landmark work that freed the twentieth century once and for all from the straightlaced Victorian Age.

If he was looking for fame, he got it. His book on sexuality placed him smack in the limelight. But was he famous or infamous? Now Freud’s name was a something of a dirty joke to many respectable folks in Vienna, one not to be mentioned when ladies were present.

Over the next several years, the atmosphere on Wednesday nights, often testy, grew hostile. The members didn’t necessarily think alike. Alfred Adler had some important insights—he introduced the notion of “sibling rivalry” (the idea that brothers and sisters are competitive and jealous), the idea that birth order within a family has a significant effect on personality, and the “inferiority complex” (a feeling of unworthiness that he called a result of bad parenting). But he clashed with Freud in many areas—most notably in his assertion that it wasn’t the sex drive but aggression, the desire for power, that was the crucial factor in human development.

Adler up and left the society, taking nine men with him and promptly forming another group. Freud was dead set against the two groups sharing ideas, even though sharing ideas is a fundamental part of the scientific process.

Freud eventually broke—usually bitterly—with virtually all his supporters, for a host of reasons. He could be combative, or sometimes chillingly abrupt. “Dear Sir,” he might write to a colleague, “I no longer desire personal contact with you.” His rift, particularly brutal, with his former friend, mentor, and earliest collaborator, Josef Breuer, set up a pattern: When, as an old man, Breuer ran into Freud on a Vienna street and opened his arms to give him a warm greeting, Sigi pretended not to see him and walked on.

By 1906 the Wednesday group had seventeen argumentative members. For his fiftieth birthday they pitched in and gave him a medal engraved with Oedipus. Two years later the group moved beyond days of the week and renamed itself the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. With forty-three men attending, the first international pyschoanalytic conference was held in Salzburg, Austria. The conference highlight was Freud speaking for three hours about “The Rat Man.”

This case study was about a twenty-nine-year-old patient mortally afraid of his father or girlfriend being tortured by rats. The only way he was able to get through the day was by performing complicated rituals. (This came to be known as obsessive-compulsive behavior.) Freud attributed the Rat Man’s problems in part to his love-hate relationship with his father. This patient, whose real name was Ernst Lanzer, completed his analysis with Freud and went on to live a more or less normal life before dying in World War I.

Freud, as always, was a relaxed, entertaining speaker, talking without notes. When he stopped, the audience insisted he keep going . . . for another riveting two hours. He often lectured about this case—in fact, more than any other, and listeners were always awed at the skill with which he interpreted his patient’s disturbing condition. A witness said he gave “one the feeling of being let out of a dark cellar into broad daylight.”

The conference was a hit. It led directly to publication of the first psychoanalytic journal. New Wednesday group-type societies began popping up in Berlin, Zurich, Budapest, and much farther afield—the United States.

Freud’s fame was growing—as the head of what was becoming an international movement.

CHAPTER NINE

America Goes Freudian

AT PRECISELY ONE P.M. on an early March day of 1907, Carl Jung arrived at Berggasse 19 for lunch. Actually it was a thirteen-hour nonstop talkfest—and typical of his intense relationship with Freud.

Freud, at fifty-one, was looking for an heir. Jung, at thirty-one, seemed to fit the part. A big-time admirer of Freud, Jung was a doctor on the staff of a well-known mental hospital in Switzerland. Jung worked with Eugen Bleuler, a brilliant Swiss psychiatrist famous for labeling a confusing set of symptoms—including delusions and a withdrawal from reality—as schizophrenia (he coined both the terms “schizophrenia” and “autism”). Jung was applying Freudian ideas of talk therapy to patients with this newly discovered mental disorder. Rather than shutting such patients away for life, he and Bleuler believed that they could be treated.

Freud saw in Jung a link to greater credibility in scholarly circles outside psychoanalysis. Jung as well as Bleuler had a solid reputation in the world of traditional medicine, while Freud knew his work was still on the fringes of accepted practice. “It is absolutely essential that I should form ties in the world of general science,” he wrote. He also chafed at the prospect of psychoanalysis being labeled an “Austrian-Jewish cult.” Jung, neither Jewish nor Austrian, was exactly the man he’d been looking for, my “eldest son . . . my successor . . . crown prince.” Here—come stand on my shoulders, Freud seemed to be saying.

The two men kept up their lengthy conversations, and in 1909 traveled together to America, still talking, talking, talking. Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, had invited Freud to give the first American lectures on psychoanalysis. Always travel-phobic, he looked for excuses to say no. (Travel frightened him; when leaving on a trip, he would say, “Good-bye—you may never see me again.”) At first he said Americans were so prudish about sex that his visit would be pointless, but when the university raised its fee he finally agreed.

As the ship sailed into New York harbor, legend has it that Freud turned to Jung, his young protégé, and said, “If they only knew what we are bringing to them.” If the statement is true, Freud wasn’t being overly dramatic. America was home to some of the nuttier theories concerning mental illness. At this time, one popular theory held that little nests of germs clustered in the roots of teeth caused insanity. The director of a mental hospital in New Jersey had recently pulled all his own children’s teeth as a preventative measure.

Physically and mentally, Freud was now way outside the comfort zone of his orderly life in Vienna. Perhaps that’s why he hated America, dismissing the entire country as a “big mistake.” It was commercial, vulgar, shallow. The food upset his stomach—especially those crude charcoal-grilled hunks of meat (steaks)—and he was always having trouble finding a bathroom. The people were too informal and lacked respect for his authority, daring to address him as Sigmund!

Even worse, his relationship with Jung deteriorated during the trip. Perhaps a “pretend” son could also harbor an Oedipal death wish toward his “pretend” father. At least that’s how Freud interpreted Jung’s behavior. The day before they set sail for America, Jung started talking about prehistoric mummies. Freud got so upset that he fainted—he thought Jung was indirectly voicing a desire to be rid of Freud.

On the other hand, as much as Freud complained about the “savage” New World, the United States proved to be a surprisingly fertile field for Freud’s seeds.

He made a sterling impression on G. Stanley Hall, a psychologist who had founded the American Psychological Association in 1892 (initial membership: twenty-six). Also on William James, a professor who had set up a psychology lab at Harvard and written
The Principles of Psychology
. He especially impressed James Putnam, a Harvard neurology professor treating hysterics at Massachusetts General Hospital, who now became convinced that psychoanalysis was the best treatment.

Freud was exhilarated that in “prudish America one could, at least in academic circles, freely discuss and scientifically treat everything that is regarded as improper in everyday life.” He felt validated. “Psychoanalysis was no longer a project of delusion, it had become a valuable part of our reality,” he said. “It was like the realization of an incredible daydream.”

Americans, and not just those in medical circles, were particularly mesmerized by his well-written case studies, with their vivid titles like “The Rat Man” and “The Psychotic Dr. Schreber.” Freud’s most famous, still-talked-about case was known as “Dora.” This was an eighteen-year-old girl whose real name was Ida Bauer. Her symptoms were typical of hysteria—headaches, a constant cough, depression. Her father insisted on treatment after Dora began accusing one of his friends of molesting her. Freud repeatedly dismissed her reports of abuse as an example of repressed desire. “This case has opened smoothly to my collection of picklocks,” he boasted. Not that smoothly. Dora angrily broke off treatment after three months. With much more known now about sexual abuse, most therapists today disagree with his handling of her case and believe he should have taken her accusations seriously.

A more successful case study involved “Little Hans,” a five-year-old boy with an overpowering fear of horses. To Freud it was a classic example of the Oedipal complex at work, expressing Hans’s fear of his father. (Hans’s real name was Herbert Graf—he went on to become a stage director of the New York Metropolitan Opera.) In “The Wolf Man,” Freud helped a wealthy Russian with depression and obsessions that made it difficult for him to function. Freud traced his patient’s problems to a dream, from age four, of seven wolves staring at him menacingly. (Although this man, Sergei Pankejeff, never fully recovered and continued to suffer breakdowns, he took pleasure in answering his phone “Wolf Man here.”)

Meanwhile, Freud’s old Wednesday group made one final change. In 1910 the group, now the official International Psychoanalytic Association, imposed the first standards and qualifications for analysts—so far anyone analyzed and trained by Freud or one of his followers could advertise himself as one. Freud believed that an analyst should be educated, but not that a medical degree was necessary—doctors were too apt to look at biological causes, not psychological: “I want to protect analysis from the doctors.”

In 1911 the first book
on
him appeared. Other psychologists were starting what became known as the Freud industry—in honor of the man who was finally bringing some respectability to psychology. No longer was it viewed as speculation but as a body of knowledge. “My scientific expectations are slowly materializing,” he exulted.