The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (91 page)

him for what was left of his life. They had 22 warm years together. Françoise, keeper of the flame, died in 1974.

QUIRKS:
Ellis asked many of his new women friends for photographs of themselves in the nude.

At the age of 12, while accompanying his mother to the London Zoologi-cal Gardens, Ellis saw her pause and urinate on an isolated gravel path. Hearing of this, his favorite sister told him, “She was flirting with you.” Decades later, after lying down fully clothed to pet with Françoise the first time, he followed her into the bathroom to watch her urinate. He enjoyed having Françoise urinate when they went walking in the rain. She termed his interest in uro-lagnia a “harmless anomaly.”

—I.W.

It’s All In Your Head

SIGMUND FREUD (May 6, 1856–Sept. 23, 1939)

HIS FAME:
The father of psychoanalysis,

Freud established new directions for understanding and treating mental illness. His

theories concerning the development of personality and the sexual origins of neuroses

have been absorbed into our everyday speech

in such terms as “Oedipus complex,” “libido,”

“repression,” “penis envy,” and “death wish.”

HIS PERSON:
Sigmund Freud was his

mother’s firstborn and her favorite of eight

children; his father, however, had two sons

by a previous marriage. Always an excellent

student, Freud attended the University of

Vienna. It took him eight years to graduate

since he could not settle on one course of

scientific study. Ambitious as well as intel-

Freud and Martha Bernays in 1885

lectually curious, Freud finally chose

medicine because, as a Jew in Vienna, his opportunities in his first career choice—

politics—were limited. He was not religious, but he retained strong ties to his heritage and was a lifelong B’nai B’rith member.

His research into the nervous system led to the study of related diseases and their possible cures. He experimented with hypnosis, became enthusiastic about cocaine as a therapeutic substance, and in 1886 established a private

practice specializing in nervous disorders. That same year he married Martha Bernays. He was 30.

In the late 1890s Freud suffered a serious psychoneurosis, precipitated by the agonizing death of his father and his own fading interest in sex after the birth of his last child. In the process of analyzing his disturbing dreams at the time, he began making use of the “talking cure”—psychoanalysis—which had been developed by his teacher and friend Josef Breuer. For the next 40 years Freud lived a life of domestic stability and formidable achievement, gathering around him a circle of disciples, notably Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Sándor Ferenczi, Helene Deutsch, and Ernest Jones.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they burned Freud’s works as

“Jewish pornography,” but not until 1938 did he escape to London. Princess Marie Bonaparte of Greece, a friend and former patient, paid £20,000 ransom to the Third Reich for his safe passage. Freud spent his last year in London, deteriorating from cancer of the jaw and palate, and died there in 1939.

SEX LIFE:
Freud made a career of sifting through the sexual secrets of others, yet he took pains to conceal his own private life. He destroyed many letters; some that survived are in the Library of Congress, unavailable to scholars until the year 2000.

At 16 his first love, Gisela Flüss, rejected him; he responded by getting a crush on her mother. Until he was 26 he showed no renewed interest in women.

In 1882 Freud met Martha Bernays, a slim, pretty 21-year-old girl from a traditional Jewish family. They became engaged and remained so for four years, exchanging hundreds of letters and seldom meeting, although he was a resident at a nearby hospital. Freud was a passionate and jealous suitor in his correspondence. In 1884 he wrote, “Woe to you, my princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.”

They finally had enough money to marry in 1886, and eventually settled into the Vienna apartment they would occupy until 1938. Within nine years Martha had six children. In 1895 her sister Minna Bernays came to live with them. Evidently Freud was faithful, but he became a distant husband. He was devoted to his work, and Martha was absorbed by domestic duties deemed proper to a wife and mother. She arranged the entire household for her husband’s convenience, keeping children and servants out of his way, tending to his meals and wardrobe, even putting the toothpaste on his toothbrush. Looking back, Freud admitted that Martha never seemed at ease around him.

During Freud’s self-analysis he developed dramatic emotional ties to Dr.

Wilhelm Fliess, a Berlin ear, nose, and throat specialist. There was a strong attraction between the two men; they wrote constantly and met occasionally for

“congresses,” as they termed their out-of-town rendezvous. Freud wrote, “I am looking forward to our congress as to a slaking of hunger and thirst … I live gloomily … until you come and then I pour out all my grumbles to you, kindle my flickering light at your steady flame and feel well again.” Fliess was receptive

and caring. He tried to persuade his friend to give up smoking 20 cigars a day.

(Freud never analyzed his habit, although he had observed that smoking, drugs, and gambling were substitutes for the “primal addiction”—masturbation.) At one of their congresses Freud fainted, and later remarked about the incident, “There is some piece of unruly homosexual feeling at the root of the matter.” The friendship ended in 1903, largely owing to Freud’s complicated reaction to Fliess’

theory of a universal bisexual impulse. At first Freud rejected the idea, then claimed it as his own, and planned to write a major book on it, giving Fliess only nominal credit. Freud came to believe in a strong bisexual aspect to every personality and said, “Every sexual act is one between four individuals.”

It has been speculated that Freud and his sister-in-law Minna were lovers.

Indeed, for 42 years Minna’s bedroom was accessible only through that of Sigmund and Martha. Larger and heavier than her sister, Minna was, according to one neighbor, also prettier than Martha. Of the two she was considerably more intellectual, and Freud found her a good conversationalist and a sympathetic ear for his thoughts on psychoanalysis. Minna was known for her pungent wit and strict discipline with the children. Freud once described Minna as being like himself; they were both “wild, passionate people, not so good,” whereas Martha was “completely good.” Freud loved to travel, and when he took his extended summer vacations, Minna often accompanied him. Martha stayed home.

The main source for the story that Freud actually had a love affair with Minna was Freud’s disciple Carl Jung. Reportedly, Jung said that Minna and Martha had separately approached him about the problem of Freud’s passion for Minna. Jung told an American professor that on one occasion in 1907, when Jung had been Freud’s houseguest in Vienna, Minna came to him and poured out her secret. Said Jung, “From her I learned that Freud was in love with her and that their relationship was indeed very intimate.” Upset, Jung confronted Freud about the matter and suggested that he be analyzed by an outside thera-pist. Jung offered himself as the analyst. Freud coldly rejected the suggestion.

Freud had a huge appetite for sex, but mainly as an intellectual pursuit.

When he was only 41 he wrote to Fliess, “Sexual excitation is of no more use to a person like me.” He lived by a thoroughly Victorian moral code. Even though his theories stressed the power of unconscious sexual impulses, Freud edited such wishes out of his own behavior. He was, after all, a married man, and he had said that no marriage was secure until the wife had succeeded in making herself a mother to her husband. After six children in rapid succession, his desires may have been quenched by anxieties about contraception. In 1908 he said, “Marriage ceases to furnish the satisfaction of sexual needs that it promised, since all the contraceptives available hitherto impair sexual enjoyment, hurt the fine susceptibilities of both partners, and even actually cause illness.”

There was one instance when Freud admitted he dreamed about other women. In 1909 he traveled to the U.S. with Jung and other colleagues to deliver a series of lectures. One morning upon awakening, Freud confided to Jung he was having erotic dreams about American women. “I haven’t been able to sleep since I came to America,” confessed Freud. “I continue to dream of prostitutes.” “Well, why don’t you do something about it?” said Jung. Freud recoiled in horror. “But I am a married man!” he exclaimed.

Freud’s theories described the forces shaping human behavior as sexual. But culture siphoned off the instinctual energy of sex and sublimated it into social functioning. Freud’s own life epitomized the viewpoint he thought tragic but true: “The sexual life of a civilized man is seriously disabled.”

HIS THOUGHTS:
It is hard to imagine anyone having more thoughts on sex than Sigmund Freud. While some psychiatrists have observed the penis attached to the boy, Dr. Freud found the boy attached to the penis. Indeed, the penis was the axis of Freud’s universe. Not having a penis, he thought, implied lack of the masculine virtues of strength and rationality, and his view of women as inferior to men bears this out. “Penis envy” was the basic factor in Freud’s psychology of women; they could feel compensated for their deficiency only by having children. Woman’s highest role was that of “beloved wife” in a marriage based on sexual inequality.

Freud warned of “the harm that is inherent in sexuality, [it] being one of the most dangerous activities of the human being.” Since “our civilization is built up entirely at the expense of sexuality,” Freud concluded that the cultured individual was necessarily repressed. Sex, by its power to reassert primal urges, had the potential to undermine society. In spite of such dire views, Freud claimed to “stand for an incomparably freer sexual life,” but chose not to partake of that freedom. He saw no implications for himself when he said, “Sexual love is undoubtedly one of the chief things in life … apart from a few queer fanatics, all the world knows this.”

—K.P.

The Beloved Of The Jung-Frauen

CARL GUSTAV JUNG (July 26, 1875–June 6, 1961)

HIS FAME:
A German-Swiss contemporary of Sigmund Freud, Jung was the creator and father of analytical psychology, which incorporated many of his theories, including those of collective unconscious, the attitude types (extrovert and introvert), and the four function types (thought, intuition, feeling, and sensation).

HIS PERSON:
A strange and imaginative minister’s son, as a child Carl had visions, one of God defecating on a cathedral. He developed a lifelong interest in folklore from listening to peasants’ tales and claimed he had two personalities.

Though he wanted to be an archaeologist, he chose medicine as a profession for practical reasons. In 1903, married and practicing psychiatry at a Zurich clinic, he began a study of word association, which led him to correspond with

Sigmund Freud. The two met in 1907.

Jung thought Freud “the first man of

importance I had encountered”; Freud

thought Jung “magnificent.” They had

their differences; for example, Freud

wasn’t keen on Jung’s interest in parapsy—

chology, and Jung was not a total believer

in Freud’s sexual theories. Of Freud’s

“Little Hans” theory (which contended

that children believe that girls are castrated boys), Jung said, “Agatha [his little

daughter] has never heard of Little

Hans.” When their close collaboration

came to a bitter end in 1913, Sándor Fer-

Jung in 1912, just before his mental crisis

enczi, an associate of Freud’s, quipped,

“The Jung no longer believe in Freud.”

Jung went on to develop his own “school,” run his institute, write his books, and travel to New Mexico and Africa to study primitive cultures. From these studies he formulated his theory of mythological archetypes common to all cultures. At his retreat in Bollingen, on Lake Zurich, he himself built a tower-shaped house and annex to which he could withdraw. When there he led a simple life—cutting his own wood, carving stone, and meditating.

Jung was a bull of a man, 6 ft. 1 in. tall with rough-hewn features, visionary eyes, and an imposing physicality. His sense of humor was robust (Freud once defended its coarseness) and witty (“Show me a sane person and I’ll cure him for you”). He had a ferocious temper and a tendency to be callous; he once called a patient with a syphilis phobia a “filthy swine.” His leaning toward the grandiose may have inspired his initial admiration of Hitler (“a spiritual vessel”) and the Nazis (“the twilight of the gods”), which earned him just reproach from Jews; his reply was that they were paranoid. By 1939 he had changed his mind about Hitler and deemed him “more than half crazy.”