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The Vortex by Noel Coward (1924)

‘Oh, my God, look at that lampshade!’ (Pawnie is camp)

‘It’s never too early for a cocktail.’ (Florence is sophisticated)

‘We’re all so hectic and nervy.’ (Nicky is neurotic)

‘Mother’s impossible.’ (the crux of the play)

Executive summary

A self-centred mother and her spoilt unstable son are both jilted – she by their toyboy lover and he by his unsuitable fiancée – and, in a blistering final act, spend twenty minutes blaming each other for their failures and neuroses, amid tears and breakdowns.

Noel Coward

Obviously I’ve known the name Noel Coward for decades and seen a couple of his films, but never actually read any of his plays. So I was astonished, on reading this his breakthrough play, to discover the limits of its wit, that most of it is not funny at all, and that all attempts at comedy are swept away by the tsunami of overwrought melodrama in the third and final act.

Even in the earlier, lighter scenes, instead of wit it has posh upper-class attitude – ‘Oh darling, it was simply too super for words!’ This attitude is exaggerated for comic effect, exaggerated to make the characters seem absurd, exaggeration which passes for wit but isn’t actually witty.

To this end the dialogue is packed with too’s and perfectly’s and divine’s, and stuffed with exclamation marks! which largely only make sense when read on the page. How should an actor speak an exclamation mark, especially when the next sentence ends in an exclamation mark, and the one after that, and after that?

Too’s:

It’s too marvelous for words.
She’s too divine to be in any marked category.
She ought to have been a flaunting, intriguing King’s mistress, with black page boys and jade baths and things too divine—
Isn’t it too awful for him?
Oh, you’re really too tiresome for words!
she’s too, too marvelous.
Isn’t it too divine?
How too divine!
It’s too wonderful.
How too intriguing.

Perfectly’s:

How perfectly marvelous!
How perfectly sweet of you!
How perfectly fiendish!
Take off that perfectly divine cloak and have a cigarette.
How perfectly heavenly!
I adore her—she’s a perfect angel.

Divine’s:

He’s divinely selfish; all amusing people are.
You’re smelling divinely, Florence. What is it?
Isn’t it too divine?
Good-bye, Helen. It’s been divine—
You’re a divine creature, Florence.
Oh, is she coming down to the house? Divine!
What a divine thing to say!
She does say divine things—she’s supremely intelligent.
How too divine!

Somewhere regarding Coward I read the word ‘flippant’ and yes, that’s the word: ‘The Vortex’ betrays an attitude of sustained flippancy to everything. There are some lines which distantly echo Oscar Wilde but without the bite of his astonishing paradoxes. Instead all the supposed jokes build up, not to a punchline, but to the revelation of the same flippantly superior attitude.

PAWNIE: Oh, my God, look at that lampshade!
HELEN: I gave it to her last Christmas.
PAWNIE: Wasn’t that a little naughty of you?
HELEN: I don’t see why; it’s extremely pretty.
PAWNIE: Too unrestrained. Such a bad example for the servants.

Six lines to deliver what? A titter. Almost any modern sitcom you can possibly think of is better written.

Comedy is often triggered by unexpected reversals (such as Wilde’s paradoxes). In the discourse of this play this tone, this superior flippant attitude, is what you very quickly come to expect from the characters and so it comes as no surprise – there are no surprises – all the characters radiate the same smart-alec flippant attitude, with the result that it is all sort-of amusing without ever becoming actually funny.

Coward titled one of his later plays ‘A Talent To Amuse’ which Sheridan Morley then picked up as the title for his biography of Coward, and the phrase perfectly captures the way Coward was consistently amusing but gave few if any belly laughs, the kind of laugh when you are suddenly tricked into delighted hilarity and explode with laughter.

‘The Vortex’ contains a few sort-of bon mots or up-to-a-point words of wisdom – but no really shrewd insights, no real zingers, and so nothing very memorable. This is one of the most quoted insights from the play.

‘The great thing in this world is not to be obvious, Nicky—over anything!’ (Helen to Nicky)

I’m remembering now that maybe I did read some Coward when I was at school and just found him to be a cut-price Wilde, a supermarket Oscar.

(In Philip Hoare’s excellent 1995 biography of Coward I was amused to find that the office of the Censor, the Lord Chamberlain, agreed with me. Its reader, George Street, commented: ‘The theme of this play is grimly serious and painful in an extreme degree. Until the end, however, the atmosphere is that of frivolous people who speak in a tiresome jargon – everything is “too divine” etc – and attempt wit with rather poor results.’ Exactly. (Hoare, p.133) And so did Cecil Beaton. He saw the play on New Year’s Eve 1924 and wrote in his diary: ‘I thought the first act was amusing but very ordinary – it’s so easy to write those flashy remarks that are not absolutely brilliant’: (Hoare, p.137))

Cast

Preston – Florence Lancaster’s female servant

Florence Lancaster – mother to Nicky, about 40: ‘David’s always loved me and never understood me—you see, I’m such an extraordinary mixture. I have so many sides to my character’ — took me a while to realise that she is the ‘vortex’ of the title, everything caught up in her stormy narcissism, :

‘I can’t help having a temperament, can I?’

‘Thank God I’ve got instincts about people.’

David Lancaster – Florence’s husband, Nicky’s father – ‘an elderly gray-haired pleasant man’, manages a farm in the country (actual manager is a man named Peterson); doesn’t like dancing to beastly modern music.

Nicky Lancaster – their son, 24, classical musician, just back from Paris – ‘extremely well-dressed in traveling clothes. He is tall and pale, with thin, nervous hands’ – according to Tom, ‘up in the air—effeminate.’

Helen Saville – friend of Florence, bit critical. At first you think she’s needlessly critical but come to realise she’s a voice of common sense, for both Florence and Nicky. The understander. As she tells Nicky:

‘I’m one of the few people who know what you’re really like, and you won’t give me the credit for it.’

Pauncefort ‘Pauncie’ Quentin – friend of Florence, older and effeminate, camp, bitchy.

Clara Hibbert – friend, soprano i.e singer.

Tom Veryan – Florence’s boyfriend, ‘the very nicest type of Englishman’, in ‘the Brigade’.

Bunty Mainwaring – Nicky’s fiancée – ‘very self-assured and well-dressed. She is more attractive than pretty in a boyish sort of way’.

Bruce Fairlight – dramatist we meet in the second act.

Act 1

The scene is the drawing-room of Mrs Florence Lancaster’s flat in London.

Mrs Lancaster is an upper class lady who has tried her best to remain young at heart while her devoted husband, David, has let himself age.

‘I’m devoted to David—I’d do anything for him, anything in the world—but he’s grown old and I’ve kept young.’

David devotes a lot of energy to running their place in the country and its farm. Florence goes there for the spring and summer, enjoying the tennis parties, local cricket week etc.

Florence still loves London, with its high society parties and first nights at the theatre. And she has taken a young lover, Tom Veryan who is pretty much the same age as David and Florence’s son, Nicky.

The play opens with Florence at home to a rather effeminate male friend her own age, Pauncefort ‘Pauncie’ Quentin, and a woman friend, Helen Saville, ‘a smartly dressed woman of about thirty’.

Pleasant conversation turns a bit nasty when Helen is cynical about the lover, Tom, saying Florence loves him more than he loves Florence. Whereas Florence thinks that she has ‘awakened’ Tom and, as a result, he is devoted to her. Helen thinks he was infatuated but it’s starting to wear off. Florence says Helen is unsympathetic, in fact wonders whether they’re friends at all.

Enter Nicky, Florence and David’s son, a musician, who has been away in Paris. He’s surprising her by arriving a day earlier than he’d said. They chat, Florence shows him the latest photos she’s had done of herself. Narcissism.

They talk about friends then Florence tells Nicky about Tom; explains she and Tom are going out tonight, for dinner and then to see this new play, ‘The New Elaine’, then onto the Embassy (nightclub?). They slightly bicker about the actors in this play, more tiny examples of how Florence hates being contradicted.

Florence puts a record on the gramophone and invites Nicky to dance with her which is, maybe, the first sign of their unorthodox relationship.

Enter David who, seeing Nicky, gives him a hug and a kiss and invites him to his room for a chat (because he can’t stand the gramophone), goes out.

Nicky surprises his mother by announcing that he’s engaged to be married, to a lovely gel named Bunty Mainwaring. She’s come over from Paris with him, staying at her mother’s place round the corner, is going to call by any minute because Nicky wants to introduce them.

It becomes clear that Florence’s main reaction to the news is not that of a detached, objective parent, but of a middle-aged woman trying to hang onto her youth and disconcerted; her son’s engagement with marriage behind, makes her realise she is no longer young.

When Florence says she has to go and dress because Tom is picking her up at 7.30 Nicky replies ‘Damn Tom.’ He is nettled, jealous?

The doorbell rings and Preston the butler shows in Bunty. She is ‘very self-assured and well-dressed’ and ‘more attractive than pretty in a boyish sort of way.’ This boyishness, is it a reference to the play’s gender fluidity or simply reflecting the style of the 1920s was for slender boyish women?

Florence and Bunty shake hands and kiss and gush etc until Florence mentions that she’s going out tonight with Tom Veryan, which makes Bunty start a little. She knows him. Florence shows her a photo on the piano, which confirms it’s the same man. Aha. Do they have a history?

A friend phones for Florence, an Elsa who tells her she’s having a party, and Florence asks if it will be OK to bring Nicky and Bunty. She hands the phone to Nicky and exits to get dressed.

Only in the staged production do you realise how the several phone calls – five in all – add to all the banter in the first act designed to bring out how Florence keeps herself at the centre of her hurricane of activity and socialising.

After a bit of chat with Elsa Nicky ends the call and he and Bunty chat, reminiscing about how they first met. Nicky wishes they could do something romantic like elope. Bunty tells him he has so much temperament, and ‘so much hysteria’, and he agrees that ‘We’re all so hectic and nervy…’

They’re almost arguing when Preston announces Tom Veryan who has arrived to collect Florence. It immediately becomes clear that Tom and Bunty knew each other, at Sandhurst, during the war. Nicky is nettled and Bunty tells him to calm down and has to explain away his ‘nerves’ to Tom. Nonetheless, he announces he’s going to take up his father’s offer of going to his room to chat and so exits.

This leaves Bunty and Tom alone together. He is astonished when Bunty tells him she and Nicky are engaged. Tom doesn’t think Nicky is her sort at all, far too ‘effeminate’.

The butler brings cocktails and Bunty meaningfully says she’s just realised that they’ll both be going down to the Lancaster place in the country for the weekend. And with that, end of Act 1.

Act 2

The scene is the hall of Mrs Lancaster’s country house, about forty miles from London.

The Sunday of the weekend party, after dinner, the gramophone playing and a bunch of house guests. Florence, Helen, Pawnie, Nicky, Tom and Bunty and two new characters: Clara Hibbert, ‘an emaciated soprano’ and ‘Bruce Fairlight, an earnest dramatist, the squalor of whose plays is much appreciated by those who live in comparative luxury.’

Everyone is dancing and talking at once, though we only hear what they’re saying as they dance to the front of the stage. So the effect is a very modernist one of lots of fragments of speech.

We overhear Pawnie and Helen. Helen laments that Florence is so sharp about her husband in front of everyone at dinner. Pawnie calls Bunty ‘at stupid little fool.’

Nicky plays the piano to give the gramophone a break. Helen sits next to him on the stool and reaches into his pocket to find cigarettes. When she draws out a little box he leaps up and over-reacts, shouting, making everyone momentarily stop.

Moments later Florence is telling Tom off for dancing so badly, he tells her not to nag and she stops at once: ‘How dare you speak to me like that?’

Old Pawnie tries to break the tension by suggesting they play a game and after some debate they settle on Mah Jong and Clara, Bruce and Pawnie exit. But others are still bickering. Florence accuses Tom of being ‘exceedingly rude’ to her at dinner, which is revealed to be jealousy of when he talks to other women, and paranoiacally claiming that ‘everyone’ is setting him against her.

They manage to recover, he tells her her dress suits her, she forgives him, they remember first meeting at Oxford. But when she invites him to another theatre first night he says he can’t come, and hesitatingly says he’s promised to dine with his mother.

David enters and Tom makes the excuse of wanting to see how the others are getting on, to exit. Uneasy conversation with David then he exits and Nicky comes in to find his mother with her head in her hands.

Florence is temperamental, changeable, paranoid, unhappy. She tells Nicky to tell Bunty to stop contradicting her. He finds her unbearable, they argue, she storms off.

Enter Helen, the voice of reason. Slow beginning builds to her saying she realises that he takes drugs. He furiously denies it, she tells him to give it up, he says he only takes it once in a blue moon, but they’re interrupted by Nicky’s harmless old dad entering. When he asks why their voices were raised, Nicky says:

‘Helen and I have just had a grand heart-to-heart talk; we’ve undone our back hair, loosened our stays and wallowed in it.’

This is a good example of what I mean about the thinness of the play’s comedy. It’s not a joke, it’s not very funny. What it is capturing the exaggerated, mock heroic, over-dramatic pose of all the characters and by extension, of this class.

His Dad kindly asks after his health, says he looks worried, invites him to come down and stay quietly in the country and Nicky takes him up on it. David goes to bed and Nicky sits tinkling at the piano (remember all the other characters are in the other room playing games).

Bunty emerges and tells him she thinks the engagement should be broken off. She thinks it’s silly. She thinks he doesn’t love her. They argue about Florence who Bunty says hates her but Nicky insists that deep down she’s marvellous ‘in spite of everything’. He gives the longest speech in the play so far about how ghastly it must be to grow old, but Bunty thinks he’s being sentimental, maybe also unnerved by the depth of worship of his mother he reveals.

At this point their argument is broken up by Clara and Bruce entering from the back room where they’ve been playing Mah-jong, and then all the others including Florence who appears drunk. Nicky, mortally upset, listens to all their stupid banter until someone asks him to make the gramophone slower and he turns it down to crawling pace, makes some bitter remarks and storms out.

The others are all commenting on this when Bunty steps forward to explain that she’s broken off the engagement. That puts the dampeners on everything and the others all declare themselves tired and head off for bed, leaving just Tom and Bunty. Aha.

They clearly have some understanding. Tom knew she was going to break it off. They both agree they hate the atmosphere in the house and can’t wait to get away. He didn’t realise how much he hated it till she arrived, and she didn’t realise she didn’t really like Nicky till Tom arrived. They have triggered each other.

But he is ahead of her in his dislike of the Lancasters. Also he’s a dim soldier. He says Bunty is worth ten Nickys, how he’s useless, can’t play games, can’t be funny. Bunty tells him to stop then bursts into tears. He holds her then passionately kisses her.

It is, of course, at this moment that Florence has appeared on the gallery above leading to the stairs down to the lounge. She calls Tom’s name and demands to know what this means. Tom apologises but says he loves Bunty. Florence is outraged, tells Bunty to leave her house immediately – she says it’s too late and goes upstairs to bed.

At this point Nicky bursts in wondering what all the shouting is about and concerned that someone is hurt. He doesn’t understand why his mother is so furious but as the arguing continues sits at his safe space, the piano, and plays classical music while Florence has a massive showdown with Tom, you don’t know what love is, you lied to me all these months, get out of my sight etc while Nicky plays, rather madly, through it all.

Act 3

The scene is Florence’s bedroom 2 hours later the same night.

Florence is lying on her bed crying her eyes out, ‘I wish I were dead’ etc. Helen, the voice of reason, is with her, trying to comfort her. This goes on for some time, as Florence finally gets up, goes to her dressing table, sprays on some perfume. When Helen goes to the window she joins her and they admire the view.

Helen shrewdly points out that Florence is draping her feelings in her usual ‘worthless attitude of mind’. Nicky knocks and enters and Helen is relieved to get away.

There follows Florence and Nicky’s big scene. Nicky wants to know the truth about his mother’s life and reveals himself to be pretty dim when he says Tom Veryan has been her lover. She goes mad, wailing and begging him to stop. The reader/audience wonders what all the fuss is about – of course Tom was her lover!

Nicky makes a big claim that they’ve arrived at a crisis of their lives, and need to face it. He says he’s noticed lots of things about her but always suppressed them, heard lots of slander about her but always denied it etc.

The melodrama detector goes off the scale as Nicky warns that if they’re not careful something terrible might happen? What exactly? Finally, Nicky bullies Florence into admitting that Tom was her lover. And there were others before him. She’s in tears, he’s yelling. But she pleads that she’s different from other women, she has a ‘temperament’. But he says that’s just self-serving flannel.

‘You’re deceiving yourself—your temperament’s no different from thousands of other women, but you’ve been weak and selfish and given way all along the line—’

He blames her for the fact he’s ‘grown up all wrong’ and it’s all her fault. When she claims she’s provided him with a safe home he laughs bitterly and says it’s just a den for her endless amusements and distractions.

‘You’ve given me nothing all my life—nothing that counts.’

He in turn says that finding out about her philandering has all been a great shock (really?), but now he knows the truth he ‘means to get it right’. The speeches suddenly become substantial.

I’m not angry a bit. I realize that I’m living in a world where things like this happen—and they’ve got to be faced and given the right value. If only I’d had the courage to realize everything before—it wouldn’t be so bad now. It’s the sudden shock that’s thrown the whole thing out of focus for me—but I mean to get it right. Please help me!

You’ve wanted love always—passionate love, because you were made like that. It’s not your fault—it’s the fault of circumstances and civilization; civilization makes rottenness so much easier. We’re utterly rotten—both of us——

How can we help ourselves? We swirl about in a vortex of beastliness. This is a chance—don’t you see—to realize the truth—our only chance.

He accuses her of narcissism and delivers some withering home truths:

‘It isn’t that you love him—that would be easier—you never love anyone, you only love them loving you—all your so-called passion and temperament is false—your whole existence had degenerated into an endless empty craving for admiration and flattery.’

And then hits her where it really hurts: pointing out that she is no longer young or beautiful but a painted lady with fake blonde hair. She collapses and says she can’t bear it any more and tells him to leave.

At which point he produces the little box and confesses that he takes drugs. He doesn’t even specify which ones though everyone assumes the little box has cocaine in it. Florence hysterically over-reacts, as if it’s the end of the world. She tosses the box out the window and warns him to stop taking drugs now, at which he breaks down in terrible tears and begs her to be different, begs her to be his mother for the first time in his life. And they find themselves in an embrace, telling each other they love each other. He has become her little boy again as she calms and comforts him, stroking his hair. And that’s their position as the curtain comes down.

Thoughts

And this was the hit which made Coward’s name, his breakthrough work which led theatres to reconsider earlier plays he’d submitted and had rejected? Wow. I watched the Granada TV production (see below) and was embarrassed for all concerned. Fancy having to make a living performing rubbish like this! What a mad farrago of over-wrought melodrama.

Maybe it has Freudian, Oedipal undertones. Maybe the portrayal of a boozy washed-up adulterous alcoholic mother defied all the moral values of the older generation. Maybe it was shocking to make one of the characters a cocaine addict (if that’s what Nicky truly is). Maybe, as I’ve read in numerous places, the entire schtick of Nicky’s cocaine addiction was in fact a metaphor for Nicky’s homosexuality. Yes, I’m sure articles and reviews can be written to expand on these obvious interpretations at tedious length.

But the actual experience of either reading or watching ‘The Vortex’ is to submit to a farrago or overwrought tripe! My heart was with Tom and Bunty. Pack up and leave this house of madness and go and live happy well-adjusted lives together somewhere else, anywhere else.

Michael Arlen

The Wikipedia article tells us that most West End theatre managers considered the subject matter too controversial to handle and so Coward:

abandoned attempts to convince West End managements, and arranged to stage the play at the Everyman Theatre, Hampstead, a fringe venue in north London. When the money for the production threatened to run out during rehearsals, Coward secured the necessary funding from his friend the author Michael Arlen.

Arlen had had a tremendous success earlier the same year (1924) with his bestselling novel The Green Hat, which is also about the scandalous goings-on of the upper classes, and which also contains references to cocaine. The difference in the two works is instructive. Arlen’s novel builds to an equally if not more melodramatic climax than the Coward play but, before it gets there, it contains numerous vivid and brilliant sentences, and is often very funny. It also takes a relaxed and humorous attitude to drugs:

She never saw her parents, she would say, because of a funny idea they had that it was bad for her health to take cocaine on an empty stomach. (The Green Hat, chapter 7)

Coward has neither of these attributes; neither really well-turned phrases nor real humour. Just a snappily modish attitude which, during the first two acts often makes you smile, but which in the final act degenerates into hysteria.

Cocaine

I’m still reeling from Florence’s hysterical over-reaction to Nicky’s production of his little box of drugs in fact to the issue of drugs in the play. Whenever you read about it, on the cover, in online summaries, in reviews of productions, they often refer to it as a daring play about drug addiction, but it simply isn’t. It’s a play about two hysterically self-involved narcissists. The cocaine connection – if indeed it is cocaine – is peripheral to the hysterical accusations which mother and son fling at each other in the final act. It is emphatically not a work about drug addiction, but in which the cocaine thing seems bolted on as a transitory extra.

And why the hysterical over-reaction? In his long, detailed and extremely enjoyable biography of Coward, Philip Hoare makes two points: 1) cocaine and heroin use was surprisingly common in the theatrical-arty-Bohemian circles Coward moved in in the early 1920s, and had leaked out into parts of wider society. So much so that an author like Michael Arlen could conisder it a subject for jokes (see above) rather than hysterical over-reaction.

2) And The Vortex wasn’t even the first play to address the subject. The sensational death from a drug overdose of the starlet Billie Carleton in 1918 was not only front page news in all the newspaper, and triggered a moral panic about drugs, but also a little wave of plays including Dope by Frank Price, Drug Fiends by Owen Jones, and The Girl Who Took Drugs by Aimée Grattan-Clyndes (Hoare, p.75).

1964 Granada TV production

This production comes with an affable introduction by Coward himself in which he makes clear how transformative this, his breakthrough play, was for the young actor and playwright. It also demonstrates what I’ve realised, that nothing he says is particularly funny in and of itself, in fact some of it would sound sad if voiced by a normal person. What is funny is his entire attitude, the wonderfully flippant persona he invented, the verbal trills and flourishes which make everything he says amusing, because of the way he says it, and his droll attitude towards himself, the theatre, the whole world. The works are a triumph of attitude over content.

Philip Hoare’s view

In his biography Philip Hoare writes:

The Vortex is simplistic, naive and shallow but it is also entertaining and well written, albeit with the facility and brilliance of effect which often disguise a slight work. The play also evinced his increasing economy of language which, as with Hay Fever, he had come to recognise as essential. It was a reaction, whether conscious or not, against the flowery, polysyllabic language of the previous generation. Verbose Edwardian and Victorian speech and prose had been replaced by short abbreviations. 1920s slang worked on such principles (the dialect of youth, to confuse the elders) and Coward assimiliated it. The result was a dramatic language drawing on Wilde, Pinero and Shaw, but his own. Noel had found his voice, one which became recognisable as ‘Cowardian’. (Noel Coward: A Biography by Philip Hoare, page 131)

As usual with Hoare, good interesting points. It was the discovery of the voice which mattered, not the ludicrously over-the-top subject matter. And yet, for all that it appears a strange combination of under-cooked comedy in the first two acts, topped off with ridiculous melodrama in the third, it defined the era.

For the younger generation, the 1920s was a period of neurosis; lthey saw a foreshortened future and the search for new sensation – whether through dancing (as new and faster steps succeeded one another), alcohol (ever nore sophisticated cocktails) or drugs – induced a frenzied hedonism in poor little rich girls and boys for whom ‘the craze for pleasure’ steadily grew. The Vortex is more than a nod at this culture; it defined it. (p.130)

That’s the point. There had been previous plays on the subject of drugs or Oedipal themes. The nervy, thin, wired over-the-topness of The Vortex, the very qualities that make it seem ludicrous today, were the qualities which touched umpteen nerves at the time and propelled Coward to fame and notoriety, as the authors of works which crystallise the feel and anxieties of their time so often do. Overnight it became the talk of the town. Everyone claimed to have been at the first night (24 November 1924) or to have attended the after-show party. He had arrived.

Meeting the Lord Chamberlain

Hoare recounts the amusing story that the Lord Chamberlain’s office was on the verge of not giving the play a licence to be performed but when Coward heard about it he insisted on a face-to-face meeting with the Lord Chamberlain (Lord Cromer), where he gave a reading of key scenes and explained that the play delivers an extremely moral message: both the dissolute mother and the drug addict son are shown to be utter wrecks. In fact claimed it was ‘little more than a noral tract’.

Related reviews

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by Simon on May 16, 2025 • Permalink

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Posted by Simon on May 16, 2025

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Freud and The Problem of God by Hans Küng (1979)

Hans Küng (1928 to 2021) was a Swiss Catholic priest, theologian, and author. These are notes on his 1979 book, ‘Freud and the Problem of God.’

1. The genesis of Freud’s atheism

For the German tradition, ‘theology has been dissolved in the nitric acid of the natural sciences’, so said the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. Medicine and physiology were at the centre of German materialism, a movement which aimed to show that the activity of the mind was entirely the result of physiological changes in the brain.

Freud’s father, Jacob Freud, was an orthodox Jew who never converted to Christianity (unlike Marx’s father). Freud was taught Jewish doctrine by his mother and a schoolteacher. In his autobiography, Freud says that early Bible classes had ‘an enduring effect on the direction of my interest.’

Jacob and his first wife had two sons; by his third wife, Amalia, he had eight offspring! Freud was the eldest. A childhood aversion to his distant, forbidding father and the young beauty of his mother led to Freud’s recognition of the Oedipus Complex in himself.

Freud’s early religious experiences:

The Catholic nanny who took Freud to Mass and explained Heaven and Hell to him. Freud used to come home and parody the arm-waving of the priests to his family’s amusement (laying the basis of his later paper Obsessive Actions and Religious Rituals)
Antisemitism: from schooldays onwards Freud suffered persecution by antisemitic Catholics. A founding moment in his life was when, age 12, his father admitted to him how he had acquiesced in his hat being knocked into the mud by racist hoodlums.

When Freud entered university in 1873 there had just been a stock market crash and many in politics and the press explicitly blamed ‘the Jews’.

Freud entered university (aged 17) to study medicine with the aim of seeking answers to the riddles of life rather than merely curing people.

Student Freud fell under the influence of Ernst Brucke, head of the Institute of Physiology, a follower of Hermann von Helmholtz. Helmholtz was a genius who, aged 26, helped secure recognition for the First Law of Thermodynamics (the sum total of energy remains constant in an isolated system). Together with the law of Entropy (energy cannot be turned back into mass without some loss – the Second Law of Thermodynamics) these form the most fundamental of all laws of nature.

Helmholtz later went on to do pioneering work in eye-surgery, optics and physiology. A school grew around him committed to the positivist creed, confident that science would one day be able to explain all the activity in the universe, including all activities of the human mind, on the basis of purely physical and chemical laws.

Brucke was a founder-member of this school in Berlin. When Brucke came to Vienna to head up the Institute of Physiology, he brought this powerful materialistic ideology with him. Freud studied under Brucke for 6 years, years he later recalled as the happiest of his life.

Physicalist physiology got rid of the idealist philosophy of Nature and eliminated the vitalism of the Aristotelian and Scholastic tradition i.e. the belief that God created organisms with forms and purposes, higher goals and objectives of their own. No, said physicalist physiology: all life can be explained in terms of the purely causal, deterministic forces described by biochemistry.

Freud applied these metaphors to clinical psychological observation: he saw the psyche as a machine reacting to the increase and release of tension (the unpleasure-pleasure principle) as a result of the demands of internal instincts on the one hand and external stimuli on the other (the basic argument of An Outline of Psychoanalysis).

For Küng, Freud made the mistake of turning science – a method of investigation – into a worldview – an Idol, in the Baconian sense.

Freud set up his private practice in nervous diseases in 1886, aged 30, on Easter Sunday. His wife, Martha Bernays, came from an eminent orthodox Jewish family in Hamburg. Freud suppressed her religious practices ruthlessly (she later said nothing upset her so much in her life as Freud forbidding her to light the holy candles on the first Friday of their marriage).

They had three sons (Ernst, named after Brucke; Martin, named after Jean-Martin Charcot, the French pioneer of nervous diseases; and Oliver, named after Oliver Cromwell) and two daughters, Sophie and Anna (born in 1895).

In Küng’s opinion, Freud made two great breakthroughs:

a) A theory of the unconscious

Freud’s achievement was to differentiate between the Primary Process of the Unconscious, the vast majority of mental life – and the preconscious and conscious mind, very much the Secondary Process; and to devise a method for examining the workings of the Unconscious.

Freud’s theory that unacceptable wishes are repressed only to return as symptoms. These are expressed in free association so the patient comes to know himself to his depths. All this occurs through transference i.e. replaying the repressed feelings in the privileged arena of ‘the therapeutic alliance’.

Through transference the patient is led to a lasting restructuring of his mental processes, the abolition of morbid symptoms, and restored to the ability to love and work. Interpretation is also carried out on dreams and parapraxes.

b) A theory of libido

Freud’s theory of libido hugely widened the concept of sexuality, extending it far beyond the specifics of genital sexuality in the present, and extending it back in time to cover all of human existence from the earliest part of life i.e. the invention of the concept of childhood sexuality.

Doing this enabled explanations of almost all sexual activity, perversions, love, affection etc to be brought under the rubric of one theory, rather than simply being rejected as extrinsic to human nature, ‘degenerate’ or ‘immoral’, as previously.

The progression of Freud’s medical-scientific investigations can be summarised: cerebral physiology > psychopathology > depth psychology > theory of everything.

2. Freud on the origin and nature of religion

Freud’s critique of religion is twofold:

he tries to explain away the history of religion
he tries to undermine the psychological basis of religion

1. The history

There are two broad theological movements:

Degenerationist: pagan religions are distorted versions of the original pristine version of the True Religion clearly understood by Adam and Eve; then came the Fall, the Tower of Babel and it’s been downhill ever since.
Meliorist: religion is evolving into higher and purer spiritual forms from its early primitive, half-savage forms.

The 18th century Enlightenment philosophers were degenerationists. For them denominational religion was a distortion of the original clear light of Reason which God had given to Mankind, which had been distorted by popular custom and the inventions of priests.

The nineteenth century saw Enlightenment Nature-theism transmuted into a Science of Religion. Simultaneously, colonial discoveries and the improvement of philology and textual criticism, provided a number of tools for paring away the ‘nonsense’ which had accumulated around the pure creed. The high point of this tradition is the work of Ludwig Feuerbach, who sought to remove the superstitions and legends accumulated over time in order to get back to the original pure creed of Christ.

Darwin turned the theory of degeneration – religion starting from the divine heights – on its head. Evolution implied a struggle upwards of intellect and reason from the savage swamp. This prompted a revolution in the ‘Science of Religion’; instead of hypothesising about what the early and purest creed must have been, scholars now examined earliest religions to ‘get at the heart’ of belief.

It is as a result of this new model that specialists devised a developmental model of religions, speculating that all religions start with primitive animism – then proceed to pagan polytheism – and then evolve to an intellectual and spiritual climax in monotheism (with a possible pre-animistic stage of belief in a world-soul, or mana).

An ethnologist called W. Robertson Smith thought the key parameter was not spirits and gods but the development of ancient rites and rituals: totemism, always accompanied by systems of taboos (‘Thou shalt not kill the totem animal’, ‘Thou shalt not marry thy sister’ (exogamy) and so on). (Taboo is Polynesian for untouchable). Thus civilisations pass through a series of stages: Magic, Religion, Science. These kinds of theories were backed up by the tremendous encyclopedic systematisation of Sir James Frazer (whose masterwork, ‘The Golden Bough’, Freud was such a big fan of – see his own annotated copy included in the exhibition at the Freud Museum).

This was the background Freud drew on when writing Totem and Taboo (1912) – at the suggestion of Carl Jung (still in the Movement at the point).

In Totem and Taboo Freud tries to assimilate the underlying fear of incest expressed in so many taboos (i.e. primitive morality) with the developmental model of religions, and with the ubiquity of totemism based round a holy animal who is eaten in an annual festival. Freud tries to draw a parallel between the religious practice of ‘primitive’ man and the behaviour of modern, urban obsessional neurotics, and between the savage’s reverence for the totem animal, representing the Father, with the explicit rise of the Father to pre-eminence in monotheistic religions.

In explaining the rise of totem animals Freud points to the suggestive way that young children initially like animals but then develop fears of them as they unconsciously project their Oedipal feelings (feelings of rage and of reciprocal anger) onto them.

The classic example in Freud’s writings is the case study of Little Hans, who was petrified of horses. This irrational phobia analyses out into fear they will bite him; and soon enough it is discovered that the horses in fact stand for the father who Han is afraid will chop his penis off.

To revere a totem all the year round and then kill it and eat it in a festive meal is, for Freud, a beautiful demonstration of Oedipal ambivalence, love/hate, revere/kill.

For Freud the Oedipus Complex is at the centre of all religions. The difference with Christianity is that it is a Son-religion. We identify with the Son crucified to appease the guilt we all feel at the communal assassination of the primal Father. To identify with Christ is to be relieved of the guilt of the primal parricide which Freud posits as the basis of human society in Totem and Taboo. It is to become free, rather as the neurotic, after analysis, is freed from his irrational obsessions and becomes free and autonomous to work and love.

2. The essence

Religious belief is an illusion, the fulfilment of the oldest deepest wishes of Mankind, childish wishes for:

protection from an uncaring world
universal justice (recognition of our own deserts, punishment of those who have wronged us)
eternal life

Freud’s diachronic history of religion – comparing early religion with childhood stages of thought – is complemented by his synchronic analysis – comparing contemporary, modern religious belief and practice with the behaviour and motivation of neurotics.

Freud doesn’t really say this fulfilment of deep wishes makes religion wrong – only that all aspects of it can be explained away in other, more scientific terms. Now, he says, as we acquire more knowledge about its origins and nature, religion is gradually dying (just as their as neurosis disappears from a gradually enlightened patient).

By contrast with religion, which fosters and encourages illusions about reality, Freud sees Science as providing an education for reality, in order to abolish childish reliance on religion and rebuild morality and social institutions on a clearer, unillusioned understanding of human nature.

We must grow up, master our own resources for real life, concentrate on this earthly life, prepare to build the New Jerusalem here on earth.

3. Critiques of Freud

In his 1927 pamphlet, The Future of An Illusion, Freud said that attacking religion may do psychoanalysis harm and the book proceeded to do just that by rousing the wrath of churchmen and moralists against him and his movement.

So Freud tried to emphasise that psychoanalysis is a neutral scientific tool, like infinitesimal calculus, a specialised tool for examining the human psyche. It could equally well be used by the defenders of religion.

Eugene Bleuler

Eugene Bleuler was one of the first to take issue with Freud. Bleuler, head of the Bergholzli mental institute in Zurich, Jung’s boss and man who gave us the terms ‘depth psychology’, ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘ambivalence’ was an early convert to psychoanalysis, but he could not go the whole way with Freud.

He granted the discovery of the unconscious but asked, Is it right to consider it only negatively, as a reservoir of repressed wishes, of the dark side? Is it right to regard the psyche as a simple machine, a mechanism within which psychic forces trigger each other and energy is circulated as in a sophisticated steam engine? Is it right to see the human animal motivated only by sexuality (even in the special widened sense Freud gave the word)? Is it right to see the mind as entirely determined by events in the distant past and not as a creative, proactive organism capable of creating new meanings and goals?

Alfred Adler

In 1911 Adler published his Critique of the Freudian Sexual Theory of Mental Life and was expelled from the Psychoanalytic Movement as a result.

A convinced socialist and, later, friend of Trostsky, Adler believed in looking at the individual as a whole in relation to the social world and all his relations with it. The aim of therapy is to build up the individual’s integrity and wholeness. Neuroses start in inferiority (the inferiority complex) and maladjusted attempts to overcome it (“the Masculine Protest”). The patient must abandon these ‘egocentric’ positions and get involved with the group. Happiness is community-based (you can clearly see Adler’s socialist bias).

(Although he powerfully denied Adler’s views once he’d been booted out of the movement, Freud later accepted some of his ideas about aggression. Some critics say Freud’s 1922 revision of instinct-theory dividing instinct into two drives, Eros and the death drive, are indebted to Adler.)

Jung

In 1913 Jung left the Movement and refined his own theories into what became Analytic Psychology. Jung redefined the libido as undifferentiated psychic energy (effectively denying its sexual nature) and claimed that it produces four processes – thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. Each of these is governed by a dialectic, thus:

thinking – the rational evaluation of right and wrong
feeling – you divide feelings into pleasurable and unpleasurable
sensation – you divide into external and internal stimuli
intuition – according as it is effective or ineffective

The individual is governed by two modes of approach to these four processes:

extravert – influenced by objective factors
introvert – influenced by external factors

The two modes apply to each of the four processes thus giving you eight character types. Whenever the one mode of each process dominates, the opposite mode rules the unconscious, and you have to get to grips with this dark side of the soul, ‘the shadow’.

The psyche is also defined by whether it is dominated by anima (female) or animus (male). Whichever dominates, you have to accept the opposite into your life. And you have to reconcile the ‘persona’, the face we make to meet the outside world, with the demands of the ego.

The aim of Jungian therapy is to bring all these facets of the personality into alignment into one integrated personality. (This brief account leaves out all Jung’s theories of the individual and the collective unconscious, archetypes, myths and symbols etc.)

For Adler, religion is the expression of the will-to-overcome humanity’s perceived inferiority in the face of implacable reality: religion works towards an ideal future perfection. For Adler, God is the perfection of a thoroughly human ideal of overcoming. Adler sees a place for religion in the perfect human society since it reflects a thoroughly human wish – but he doesn’t believe in it.

Jung blamed Freud’s thoroughgoing rejection of religion on his being a child of the late-Victorian rationalist materialist worldview (as described above). For Jung, religion is true insofar as it is believed. Jung wanted to remain a Christian but thought denominational Christianity was chaotic and confused and stood in need of further clarifying about the human soul: and this is what his depth psychology could provide.

Neither Jung nor Adler answer the big question set by Freud: Is religion nothing more than a fulfilment of mankind’s oldest deepest wishes?

Küng’s critique

Freud’s developmental history of religion (animism >pantheism > monotheism > science) is nowhere now taken seriously. All these belief systems exist in various places in the world but have nowhere been found to follow this pattern. Sometimes they’ve gone ‘backwards’. In many places aspects of the supposed different levels of development exist happily alongside each other. Nowhere is there proof of development from one stage to the next.

Nowadays Freud’s optimistic scientism has been replaced by a belief that science may have reached its limits in explaining the origins of the human mind. We even consider that primitive peoples know better than us how to live in sympathy with their environment and that – far from leading us to a utopia cleansed of irrationalism – there may be something inherently destructive in scientific enquiry.

In 1912, the same year as Totem and Taboo was published, Emile Durkheim, the founder of modern sociology, refuted Freud’s idea of primitive religions as slavishly superstitious, but said that they contained a hard core of reality, in laying down codes of practice which had their origins in relationships in primitive society, the clan.

Durkheim was followed by most modern anthropologists and sociologists in looking no further for meaning than the internal rules of each individual tribe and culture. (Compare the anthropological structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss.)

Thus neither the degenerative or the evolutionary theory of religion can be proved or disproved. Modern ‘primitive’ peoples aren’t photographs of the early days of humanity, as Freud and his sources thought. They themselves are the result of immense histories and traditions, albeit unwritten.

(One modern theory to explain their lack of development is to assign a crucial role to writing; whoever learns to write can leave histories; histories can be compared with modern practice and so enable the beginnings of a rational critique of social practices.)

Today there is less historical speculation, less moral-drawing, more studying of patterns of culture in situ using the functionalist approach pioneered by Bronislaw Malinowski.

At the other end of the scale modern research shows that religion has always existed. 100,000 years ago Neanderthal Man made grave furnishings; 150,000 years ago Heidelberg Man apparently offered the first fruits to his gods. The question has become not to explain away the existence of religion but to understand that for primitive man everything was religious. The more modern challenge is to explain away the rise of the secular, the scientific worldview.

Even Freud’s facts are largely wrong: totemism is not found among the beginnings of religion; among hundreds of totemic tribes discovered and documented only four knew of a rite which even vaguely resembled killing and eating the father. For anthropologist Mircea Eliade, the triumph of Freud’s views for a while was due to fashion: he established a fashionable doctrine which explains nothing in history or the rest of the world but does help explain the western intellectual’s own sense of dissatisfaction with established religion but obscure sense of guilt at the prospect of overthrowing it.

Freud claimed that psychoanalysis was a neutral tool for the cure of souls, practicable by lay and pious alike.

All Freud’s actual arguments for atheism are old, taken from Feuerbach et al but given new impetus by being underpinned by this new method of exploring the psyche. For example, all ‘projection theories’ of God as fictional answer to suffering humanity’s wishes and fantasies stem back to Feuerbach.

But Feuerbach’s, Marx’s and Freud’s atheisms are hypotheses which have not been proved. Against the reality of experience they set theory; and in the end, for all the subtlety of their critique of the social, economic or psychological determinants of the formation of religious belief in individuals and societies, no conclusion can be drawn from their theories about the existence or non-existence of God.

All human believing, hoping, loving contain elements of projection. But its object need not therefore be merely a projection. (page 77)

From the psychological point of view, faith is always going to look like the projection of early father-figures but this does not mean that God does not exist. That’s to say, the mere existence of a wish for God does not throw doubt on the actual existence of God. Perhaps it’s true:

Perhaps this being of our longings and dreams does actually exist. (page 79)

Thus Freud’s atheism (which he professed long before the discovery of psychoanalysis) turns out to ‘a pure speculation, an unproved postulate, a dogmatic claim’, just as dogmatic as anything laid down by his hated Church.

Freud’s scientism

Nowadays it is Freud’s belief in the ability of science to tell us the truth about the world, and to tell us how to behave in the light of this truth, which seems dogmatic and irrational.

Oskar Pfister, prophetically enough, criticised Freud’s position as itself an illusion before the Second World War; and since the experience of National Socialism, communist totalitarianism and the forces unleashed by the Western development of atomic bombs, the promises of atheistic science have themselves come to look deeply compromised.

The nineteenth century positivistic tradition of science delivering a utopian future now seem ludicrous. (To be fair, Freud towards the end of his life became increasingly pessimistic about this). The ideology of total planning based on rational analyses of human nature and human needs now lies in ruins: we are resigned to living with our imperfections.

For many people it is godless technocratic progress which has become the monster from which we must free ourselves. Cannot religion in fact help here, by providing a morality, a synthesis with science to create a humanistic morality?

Or will society create a new space of total disillusion with both modes of thought, neither militantly atheist nor evangelistically believing – simply drifting from belief to belief in a vast supermarket of the soul?

Is psychoanalysis a Jewish science?

Yes, says Kung. Freud was a stern Jewish moralist in a long tradition of stern Jewish moralists. He taught that all decent human life, all civilisation, rests on the suppression of sexuality, instinct and childhood gratification.

Everywhere in Freud you sense the return of the repressed legalism of the Jewish tradition which he ostentatiously rejected. There is little talk of joy or pleasure in Freud (this is what the French brought to it in the ‘jouissance’ of Barthes et al, bringing actual sex into all Freud’s talk about sex).

No, Freud’s psychology is deeply indebted to the repressed heritage of ancient Mosaic legalism. And this helps explain his lifelong obsession with Moses and his embarrassing attempts to explain away, to master, to over-write the mystery of Moses and Monotheism in his last work.

4. Critique of the critique

From Freud onwards every sphere of human knowledge has had to take account of the vast new terrain of the unconscious which Freud uncovered, and its impact on our lives. What Feuerbach wanted to achieve by a ‘cleansed’ philosophy, what Marx wanted to achieve by a science of social relations, Freud wanted to achieve through depth-psychology: an emancipation, a revaluation of the humanity of Man.

Kung concedes Freud’s criticisms of the failings of denominational religion and agrees that psychoanalysis can help in counselling etc. Psychoanalysis can liberate us from neurotic guilt feelings and help the neurotic subject return to autonomy. But it can’t relieve us of the fact of sin.

It can eliminate illness but it cannot answer ultimate questions about meaning and meaninglessness, life and death. Its aim is to bring things into consciousness, not to forgive; it is healing not salvation.

Küng’s advice to therapists is to be more religious.

Küng’s advice to theologians is to take more account of depth psychology.

Freud thought all neuroses were the result of repressed sexuality. On the contrary, Jung thought all neuroses were the result of what used to be called religion; the lack in people’s lives of a system to give their lives meaning or purpose. Jung criticises psychoanalysis for thinking the ego can stand up to the ‘dark side’ of the soul without the help of some revealed superhuman agency. In Jungian analysis this actually becomes the therapist and the therapeutic alliance.

Erich Fromm in Psychoanalysis and Religion sees two kinds of therapist:

the adjustment advisers
the doctors of the soul, committed to the optimum development of the self

For Fromm psychoanalysis is adaptable to humanitarian religion. ‘Wonder, rapture, becoming one with the world,’ all these feelings are generated in analysis, in the proper acknowledgement of the power of the id and the assent to life with all its imperfections. Fromm is an assimilationist. There should be no enmity between psychoanalysis and religion.

One of Freud’s problems was that he concentrated on an Old Testament punitive, superego-led religion; he completely failed to understand the quality of rational assent to the New Dispensation. For example, Freud tends to see Jesus only in terms of a revision of Judaism – Jesus as the sacrifice of the Son to the Father which ends the thousand years of Jewish guilt. Despite railing against it all his life, Freud showed surprisingly little understanding Christianity and its new creed of Love, of salvation through Love. (This was Pfister’s complaint also).

In pre-War Vienna Victorian sexual repression led to sex, instincts and the id being at the centre of investigations of psychic life. But, Küng argues, since the middle of the twentieth century there has been a steady growth in indulgence of all these instincts. Nowadays (when he was writing, in the 1970s) Küng thought that our biggest problems were caused by the opposite of repression, but by the overindulgence of the instincts and all the addictions and moral anarchy they lead to.

Since repression is no longer the problem it was in Freud’s day (1880s to 1910s) modern psychology has become more ego-orientated: how to give people a meaning and purpose, existential questions. The problem nowadays is one of spiritual emptiness. Technology may be daily triumphing over every aspect of our existence but it cannot finally give that existence a meaning. Küng (like Pfister before him) argues for a rational religion to cure the ill, prevent regression, channel grief and fear, help control the unbridled pleasure principle and contribute to healthy individuation.

Very late in the day, in 1933, when Hitler took power, Freud and Einstein exchanged letters on how to prevent another war. Freud seems in this late exchange to have suddenly grasped the reason behind, and the need for, a socially approved creed of Love.

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by Simon on July 17, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Psychoanalysis

Tagged Alfred Adler, Amalia Freud, ambivalence, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Analytic Psychology, anima, animism, animus, anthropological structuralism, Antisemitism, archetypes, atheism, atom bomb, Barthes, Bergholzli mental institute, Berlin, Bible, biochemistry, Bronislaw Malinowski, Catholicism, childhood sexuality, Christ, Christianity, Claude Levi-Strauss, Communism, critique of the Freudian Sexual Theory of Mental Life, Crucifixion, Darwin, denominational religion, depth psychology, determinism, diachronic history, Einstein, Emile Durkheim, Enlightenment, Erich Fromm, Ernst Brucke, Eros, eternal life, Eugene Bleuler, Evolution, exogamy, extravert, Faith, father-figure, feeling, Feud, Feuerbach, First Law of Thermodynamics, free association, Freud, Freud and the Problem of God, functionalist anthropology, German materialism, God, Hans Küng, Heidelberg Man, Helmholtz, Hermann von Helmholtz, history of religion, Hitler, humanistic morality, incest, inferiority complex, instinct-theory, instincts, Institute of Physiology, introvert, intuition, irrationalism, Jacob Freud, Jean-Martin Charcot, Jewish moralist, Jewish science, jouissance, Judaism, Jung, Jungian therapy, libido, Little Hans, love, Ludwig Feuerbach, magic, mana, Martha Bernays, Marx, Mircea Eliade, monotheism, morality, Mosaic legalism, Moses and Monotheism, myths, National Socialism, Nature-theism, Neanderthal Man, neurosis, New Jerusalem, Obsessive Actions and Religious Rituals, Oedipal ambivalence, Oedipus Complex, Oliver Cromwell, origin of religion, Oskar Pfister, pagan religion, pantheism, parapraxes, persona, perversions, philology, polytheism, primal parricide, primary process, Psyche, Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis and Religion, psychological basis of religion, Psychology, psychopathology, religion, repressed sexuality, schizophrenia, Science, Science of Religion, scientism, Second Law of Thermodynamics, Second World War, secondary process, Sensation, sex, sexuality, sin, Sir James Frazer, Sociology, spiritual emptiness, symbols, synchronic history, taboo, textual criticism, the collective unconscious, the Death Drive, The Future of An Illusion, The Golden Bough, the id, the Masculine Protest, the psyche, the Psychoanalytic Movement, the Shadow, the therapeutic alliance, the unconscious, Theology, theory of libido, theory of the unconscious, Thinking, totalitarianism, Totem and Taboo, totemism, Trostsky, Utopia, Vienna, W. Robertson Smith, world-soul, Zurich

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Freud and His Followers by Paul Roazen (1975)

Paul Roazen (1936 to 2005) was a political scientist who became a leading historian of psychoanalysis. I first read this history of Freud and the psychoanalytic movement back in the early 1990s when it was only 15 or so years old. Now it’s getting on for 50 years old and, as I set off to read it again, I wondered about its value and relevance. Hasn’t it been superseded by more recent accounts with more modern perspectives?

Interviews

But, as I read on I discovered that this book has one really unique and enduring selling point which keeps it relevant. In 1964 Roazen set out to interview as many people as possible who had had direct experience and knowledge of Sigmund Freud. He managed to interview over 70 people who knew Freud personally; 40 or so who had taken part in the early movement or had a professional interest in its history; 25 of Freud’s actual patients; Freud’s sister-in-law, two daughters-in-law and three of Freud’s children.

(Roazen gives a full list of all those interviewed in an appendix. He also gives an extensive account of his interviewing methodology in the opening chapter.)

So even though this book is almost 50 years old, and the project itself began almost 60 years ago, the number and range of people he interviewed makes the book itself a unique historical record. While he was doing his research a steady stream of the interviewees, many in their 70s or 80s, passed away, slowly converting the book into a unique source of opinions from people who were patients of, trained under, or were directly related to Freud.

Having established his methodology, Roazen goes on to compare himself with the leading Freud biography of his day. From 1953 to 1957 Freud’s most loyal English disciple, Ernest Jones, wrote his epic three-volume biography of Freud. In this, as in all his other assessments and judgements, Roazen gives the impression of being thorough and balanced and fair. His view is that Jones was immensely thorough but, at many points, erred on the side of caution and discretion, not least to please Freud’s daughter Anna who, as early as the 1920s, had emerged as Freud’s heir and keeper of the flame and was to live on, protecting her father’s archive and reputation, until 1982.

So Roazen’s aim was to go beyond Jones, not by doing more work in the Freud archives (although he did gain unique access to the archive, as well as to the papers Jones acquired in researching his biography); but by using the method outlined above, by undertaking the most comprehensive possible set of interviews with people who knew Freud.

Context

This means that the book has much more context than a straight biography, in at least three distinct ways.

1. The followers

The most obvious way is indicated in the title of the book, which declares that it will treat Freud’s followers as thoroughly as the master. Hence, after spending 200 pages retelling the story of Freud’s early life, family, student days, tentative steps as a medical researcher, then covering the breakthrough into the invention of psychoanalysis and his development of it up to about 1910 – Roazen then devotes the remainder of this long book to a series of lengthy, in-depth chapters about ‘the followers’. These are:

Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Stekel (pages 187 to 233)
Jung (pages 235 to 300)
the followers who remained ‘loyal’, being Victor Tausk, Lou-Andreas-Salomé, Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi, JJ Putnam, HW Frink, AA Brill (pages 304 to 386)
another rebel, Otto Rank (pages 389 to 413)
a chapter devoted to women followers: Ruth Mack Brunswick, Anna Freud, Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein (pages 415 to 478)
a short section about Erikson and Hartmann (pages 499 to 505)

All this before finally returning to the man himself in the final chapter to describe Freud’s decline, flight to England, and death. Well over half the book’s 520 or so pages of text are devoted to ‘the followers’.

2. Using the interview material

Early on, when dealing with Freud’s parents and birth and boyhood and so on, all the interview material Roazen goes to some trouble to explain right at the start of the book, isn’t used very much. Even when we get to the time Freud spent in Paris studying under Jean-Martin Charcot (October 1885 to January 1886), or his ten-year collaboration studying the origins of neuroses with Josef Breuer (1890 to 1900), or his intense correspondence with sounding board Wilhelm Fliess (1887 to 1904) – Roazen gives some quotes and opinions from his interview material but not enough to change the already established stories.

The benefit of the interview project really kicks in when Roazen starts to explain the theory and practice of psychoanalytical therapy itself, the famous talking cure. This is because he now quotes extensively from many of the actual patients Freud treated, and so you he starts to depart from all the official, stiff and often pompous descriptions which Freud and his followers gave in their writings, and depicts actual practice which is far more irregular, ad hoc, unpredictable than you would have imagined. Suddenly the narrative becomes really gripping, and really human. Roazen’s interviewees’ testimonies build up a vivid picture of a flawed and deeply complicated person.

This account feeds off in two directions. It links up with the idea of the ‘followers’ because many of the patients not only describe their therapy with Freud himself, but were farmed out to what, by the 1920s, had become a sizeable number of disciples in what was now an international Psychoanalytical Movement. My point being you don’t have to wait till the later chapters to hear about the followers, you begin to get a sense of which patients Freud assigned to which of his followers, and why, and how they fared, and sometimes the conversations which went on between, say Ferenczi or Deutsch, about a patient he’d given them.

There’s a fascinating section about how long an analysis should last, with a wild variation, from one or two months to 3 or 4 or 5 years, with some patients requiring top-ups for the rest of their lives (p.145). He even admitted, on a rare occasion, that analysis could in fact, last a lifetime (p.146).

It’s here, about page 140, that the book suddenly opens up and starts giving you all kinds of insights and information you don’t get from a standard biography.

If Freud allowed himself privileges which were not for younger and more inexperienced analysts, it was because he was above all an investigator and would try almost anything once. (p.139)

Suddenly, you start seeing Freud in the wider context of the broad Psychoanalytic Movement, at first regarding treatment of patients, then other issues, and this prepares you for what’s coming up, which is the major disagreements which caused the schisms.

3. The American context

Lastly, Roazen is an American academic living on the East Coast familiar with New York and New York psychoanalysts. So a thread running through the book (once it gets warmed up about page 140) is continual comparisons between Freud’s official writings and the (sometimes wild variation in his actual) therapeutic practice on the one hand – and the staid, dull, conformist practice of the American psychoanalysts Roazen appears to know or writes confidently about.

In a nutshell, the early psychoanalytic movement included quite a few madly inventive, not to say screwed-up, individuals who rang all possible changes on Freud’s original ideas, from modifying them, to introducing new concepts, to rejecting the entire thing and walking away to set up their own movements (Adler, Jung, Rank).

But when the founding fathers and mothers fled Europe with the rise of the Nazis and then the Second World War, they found themselves in a completely different culture, far less anarchic and individualistic, far more intensely capitalist and professionalised than the old world. And so the next generation of analysts, American-born, tended to be much more professional and regular and strict and boring.

Psychoanalysis grew so fast as a movement that it has sometimes oversold itself as therapy; Americans in particular have been guilty of this. (p.186)

This decline was part of the general disappointment which came to characterise the movement, and which Roazen mentions again and again:

Psychoanalysis began with the bold hope of freeing us from mental conflicts. Its history, however, records a series of retreats in its claims for therapeutic efficacy. Originally Freud proposed to apply depth psychology to all the human sciences. But by now psychoanalysts are largely content to restrict their profession to a medical specialty. Whereas Freud and his immediate followers were radical in their expectations and their promises, and considered themselves at odds with conventional society, success has now bred a very different group of psychoanalysts … Psychoanalysis as a field is now incapable of attracting people as original and, it should be said, as undisciplined as those who joined it half a century ago. (p.32)

Compare with the repeated criticism of contemporary (1975) New York analysts for being cold and distant (p.147). But the real criticism of American psychoanalysis is that it lost its theoretical energy, its radical charge, and became just one depth therapy among many others (p.388).

(Compare with Helene Deutsch’s disappointment, in later life, at the relative failure of analysis as a therapy, p.465.)

A lot later, Roazen summarises that the trend in American psychoanalysis has been towards emphasising the ego and the healthy-minded aspects of Freud’s work. It ‘hinges on Heinz Hartmann’s concept of the “autonomous” ego to resist regressions’ (p.473)

Recap

To recap, then, this is far superior to a standard biography because it a) quite quickly places Freud amid the burgeoning, squabbling world of his followers; b) Roazen’s unique interview material provides amazing insights into the actual practice of therapy in the 1920s and 30s, as well as the complex network of therapists and patients which surrounded the great man; and c) Roazen is viewing the whole thing from 30 or so years later, when the initial, explosive creativity of the movement has fizzled out (in America, anyway) into professional conformity. It went from being a radical revolution to a conservative profession. Freud unhappily anticipated this and tried to prevent it:

‘Because of the rarity of such a combination of qualities as are needed to form the true master of mental healing by the psychoanalytic method, psychoanalysis should always remain a vocation, a mission, and should never become (as unhappily it often does today) a mere occupation or business.’ (Freud quoted on page 143)

Topics

Rather than summarise the whole book, I’ll highlight interesting topics.

The roles of Charcot and Breuer

Charcot discovered that by implanting an idea into the unconscious mind, via hypnotism, he could trigger hysterical symptoms in a patient.

Breuer discovered that if you extracted a pathological idea from the unconscious by making it conscious, then a pathological symptom disappeared.

Is psychoanalysis a Jewish invention or profession?

Personally, I think it’s obvious that psychoanalysis was a Jewish invention, something to do with:

close scrutiny of the self
a Talmudic attention to texts and words for hidden meanings
the outsiderness of Jews in antisemitic central Europe made it easier for them to take unorthodox risks
a certain type of neurotic intensity which seems to be part of Jewish culture (this may be wrong, but my views are based on the novels of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and the movies of Woody Allen, all of which tend to ridicule goyim for being so much simpler, cruder and less obsessively reflective than Jews)

But because its founder and earliest adherents were all Jewish doesn’t make it a ‘Jewish science’. Obviously, its teachings have been taken up and developed by plenty of non-Jews and it works as a therapy for all kinds of people. In the same way that soul music is indisputably the invention of Black people, comes out of black social and musical culture, but can be enjoyed by anyone and has led plenty of white people to develop their own variations.

For what it’s worth, here are some of Roazen’s references to Jews and Jewishness in the book:

Freud could be suspicious of non-Jews. (p.36)
A Viennese Jewish analyst, Hanns Sachs, on moving to America and treating more gentile patients than he had in Europe, was worried how he could continue to analyse without Jewish stories. (p.42)
Freud remained sensitive to antisemitism and wary of all gentiles. He believed that basically there was no-one who was not antisemitic. (p.49)
To accomplish a great intellectual (rather than military) achievement was not only far more in accord with Jewish culture but was also in itself enough to establish the superiority of the Jewish spirit over the philistine Gentile world. (p.55)
Freud founded a great movement by which, in a sense, he sought to undermine Gentile values. (p.55)
As a Jew, Freud felt keenly the need for the help of the Gentile Jung. The Viennese psychoanalytic group was made up almost entirely of Jews, and Freud wanted psychoanalysis to be something more than a Jewish sect. (p.238)
‘It is really easier for you than it is for Jung to follow my ideas, for in the first place you are completely independent, and then you are closer to my intellectual constitution because of racial kinship, while he as a Christian and a pastor’s son finds his way to me only against great inner resistances. His association with us is the more valuable for that. I nearly said that it was only by his appearance on the scene that psychoanalysis escaped the danger of becoming a Jewish national affair.’ Freud writing to Abraham (quoted page 239)
As a Jew trying to subvert and overcome Christian standards of morality, Freud had to break out of the constricting confines of Jewish circles in Vienna. (p.239)
Others in the movement regarded Freud’s reliance on Jung as currying favour with the Gentile world. (p.259)
Freud as a Jew sought Jung for the sake of breaking out of the constricting milieu of Viennese Jewry. (p.261)
In Freud’s movement Ernest Jones stood out as one of the few notable Gentiles. (p.347)
[Freud was] a master of Jewish anecdotes. (p.405)
Like Jung, [Heinz] Hartmann represented the world of academic psychiatry and was the Gentile Freud could rely on to keep analysis from being a completely Jewish affair. (p.505)

Why did psychoanalysis take off so quickly in America?

Roazen lists possible reasons:

core aspects of American culture – optimism and belief in individualism – chimed with a therapy which promised that the individual can cure themselves, through their own efforts
a child-centred culture liked the idea that all problems can be traced to childhood traumas or, to put it another way, we can develop new types of education to prevent those traumas ever taking place
a childish culture took to the idea of idealising child-like spontaneity over stifling ‘society’
America contained many rich people, specially in New York where the fleeing analysts arrived; before they knew it, they were treating the neuroses of the very, very rich
the rich like fashions and fads; psychoanalysis became steadily more and more fashionable in the 1920s and 30s
America, as a young nation, had a young unformed, malleable culture which this ‘radical’ new therapy could penetrate more easily than in hidebound European societies
America is a nation of immigrants who must carve out their own identities – psychoanalysis promises to help you do that, get in touch with your inner child, work through your problems, become successful etc
America, unlike France, Germany, Britain, lacked a psychiatric tradition of their own, so they, in effect, imported one and adopted it

In 1921 Freud had nine patients in analysis: 6 were new, of which 5 were Americans (p.145). By 1928 the majority of Freud’s patients were Americans (p.137).

American analysts in particular tended to be more orthodox than Freud, since European analysts were likely to have more regular contact with him. (p.142)

Later, discussing the influence of Putnam, Frink and Brill in America, Roazen suggests the US has an odd schizophrenia because its public rhetoric is all about individualism and self expression and yet in many ways it’s a deeply conformist society (shaped, although he doesn’t say this, by the all-pervasive effect of consumer capitalism).

American psychoanalysis quickly became professionalised, and well paid, talking among themselves the rhetoric of rebellion and radicalism, but in practice helping the mentally ill fit better into their society’s needs.

Although Freud loathed America…

Freud visited America along with Jung in 1909. He was quietly appalled at the lack of manners and ceremony surrounding, for example, barbecues, the lack of culture, the frenetic pace of life. Throughout the 1910s and 20s Freud’s dislike of America steadily grew. He called America ‘a gigantic mistake’. He denied ‘hating’ America, merely ‘regretted’ it.

America offended Freud ‘by its deference to numerical superiority, its belief in statistics, and its worship of brash wealth’. He called Americans ‘savages (p.406).

Roazen shrewdly points out this was partly due to Freud’s aversion to feeling dependent and, by the later 1920s, most of his patients were American i.e. he had become financially dependent on the Yankee dollar (p.382 ff.) Well into the 1930s his American patients paid Freud $20 an hour (p.419).

Is psychoanalysis based around Freud’s own personality?

Yes and no. If you’re not expecting it, it comes as a surprise to read Freud and discover just how much he refers to his own experiences and dreams and intuitions on every page. His collected writings are more like literary works than scientific papers, and literary works which are, moreover, continually, insistently autobiographical. As he himself wrote in his Autobiographical Study:

Two themes run through these pages: the story of my life and the history of psychoanalysis. They are intimately interwoven. (quoted p.507)

Or as Roazen puts it:

It would be impossible to overestimate how much of himself Freud put into his work. (p.103)

His founding text, the Interpretation of Dreams, is one of the most autobiographical works ever written, the general principles he writes about being extrapolated from an apparently endless stream of Freud’s own dreams – many, many dreams from other sources, historical, from literature, from patients or friends; buy many of Freud’s own personal ones, too. And this feels like a fundamentally literary strategy:

As with other great writers, it required a rich self to enable him to recreate a version of human experience out of his autobiography. (p.44)

Freud was aware this was a very weak spot for his theory, and touchy about suggestions that the entire theory was a huge extrapolation of his personal neuroses (p.150), so there’s weight to the attack.

But you can’t dismiss psychoanalysis as being the extrapolation of one man’s personality for two obvious reasons: one, Freud developed and evolved his ideas, quite drastically, over the 40 years he wrote on the subject; sure, these were based on his own changing beliefs, but they also reflected changes in the evidence: some the result of long analyses over decades with scores or patients; some from the evidence of other analysts in the growing movement; but the biggest change coming as a result of the First World War and the epidemic of shell shock it created.

And the second rebuttal is the way psychoanalysis was taken up and developed and fine-tuned by plenty of other people, initially in the shadow of Freud (from which some rebelled), but then, in the next generation, among analysts who’d never met him and took his teachings in whole new directions.

Especially the women analysts. Yes, you can critique some aspects of the original teachings as reflecting his personality and obsession, for example, his persistent denigration of women:

He thought that shame was a specifically feminine trait (p.49)
Freud tended in an old-fashioned manner to idealise and yet also denigrate women…In Freud’s world women are treated as objects, rarely as subjects. (p.67)

And the way his entire model of the mind privileged the experience and development of boys and men, and placed the son’s alleged struggle with his father (the Oedipus complex, p.119) dead centre of his first model of the mind. Yes, his theory had far less to say about girls and women, and when it did, was of a consistently insulting nature:

Freud’s resistance to religious ideas as akin to his more general rejection of dependence and passivity, which he associated with femininity. (p.260)

But his followers a) included leading women figures, such as Anna Freud, Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein and b) they developed, rejected, improved and changed his teachings in all sorts of ways, especially regarding the role of mothers in the child’s development (see below).

Above all, psychoanalysis survived, as a theory and a practice, down to the present day, which it could never have done if it had just been an elaboration of just one man’s idiosyncrasies.

Psychoanalysis eventually became something quite different from Freud personally. As the movement expanded, changes were introduced into psychoanalytic thinking which would have been utterly alien to Freud himself. Working with the method he gave them, later investigators revised some of his most cherished positions. (p.46)

Prophet of doom

An interesting aspect which ties together the issues of Freud personality and success in America was his strong personal sense that civilisation was doomed (p.53). He was a pessimistic old so-and-so. He took a ‘characteristically harsh view of human nature’ (p.162).

Freud was inclined to think that not much could help improve mankind. (p.311)

Personally, I find his gloomy pessimism about human nature appealing about his work – as opposed to the happy, smiley, religiosity of Jung, which I find off-putting.

But there are two points: in his gloomy sense that civilisation was going down the tubes, Freud was very much of his time and place. Central European thinkers had been lamenting The End of Western Civilisation since the 1890s, a process crystallised in Oswald Spengler’s famous book, ‘The Decline of the West’ (1918). Freud’s own, late work, ‘Civilisation and Its Discontents’, published in 1930, took its place in this tradition of hand-wringing lament.

But it goes to show how little his personal opinions were stamped onto psychoanalysis that, in America, this gloomy old European defeatism was completely rejected in favour of the shiny can-do positivism mentioned above.

How important was the practice of psychotherapy to Freud?

The answer which emerges very clearly is ‘not very much’. Roazen’s account quotes sometimes shocking passages from Freud’s own letters to highlight two running themes:

1. Freud quite frequently refers to his patients as scum and riff-raff.

‘I do not break my head very much about good and evil, but I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash…’ (quoted p.161)
‘In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.’ (quoted p.161)

2. Freud thought psychoanalysis could only really work with patients who were a) mature and b) well educated enough for the ego to be able to make sense of the revelations therapy throws up (p.152); he preferred patients from ‘the more educated classes’ (p.153). In fact he went so far as stating that the ‘optimum conditions for psychoanalysis exist where it is not needed – among the healthy’ (p.175). He hoped for far more than palliating the anxieties of the well-off.

He had in mind something more cultured and more elevated than the treatment of psychotics; he wanted people to be higher and better. (p.158)
He demanded that people grow up; he expected more of mankind. (p.178)

And anyway: ‘No one has ever been fully satisfied with therapeutic results, analytic or otherwise’ (p.363).

3. He increasingly thought the hard labour of spending years trying to help people with obstinate mental problems was for ‘the theoretical yield’. In other words, he thought treating patients was only really justified by the new theoretical insights it could give you.

Freud the wordsmith

It’s extremely obvious that Freud was one of the great writers of the 20th century, that he based his theory and practice on a very close attention to words (in free association, slips of the tongue, as they transmuted into images in dreams, the acting out of transference in the analytical situation) and spread his teachings very successfully through his charming and persuasive writings.

An interesting light is shed by the fact that he didn’t like music because there are no words for the rational mind to latch onto.

Of all the arts music is perhaps closest to the id, and without a guide from the more rational part of his mind Freud felt uneasy. Unable to analyse the effects of music on himself, Freud could not enjoy it. (p.57)
‘Music did not interest him because he regarded it as an unintelligible language.’ (Edward Hitschmann, quoted p.270)
‘I feel no need for a higher moral synthesis in the same way that I have no ear for music.’ (Freud, quoted p.377)

The limits of psychoanalysis

Among the most interesting passages in the book is Roazen’s discussion of whether psychoanalysis can help mental illness beyond mild neurosis. Can it help with the more severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, manic-depression, multiple personality disorder? Short answer: No.

Tellingly, Roazen digresses from Freud to point out that psychiatry as a profession still (well, in 1975) had no hard and fast method of distinguishing between neurosis and psychosis, and only a poor understanding of the combined organic and psychological causes of severe mental illness; and a limited range of treatments, which often don’t really work.

That is the biggest context of all. Psychoanalysis evolved into a system of hermeneutics or interpretation – of signs, symbols, literature, art, film etc – in the essentially well. That’s where it has ended up having the longest life and biggest significance.

In the real world of psychology, it takes its place among a range of other talking therapies, strategies and medical treatment, of mild disorders such as neuroses and depression. It has turned out not to be the complete revolution in psychiatry which Freud and the early disciples hoped for.

Transference

The key criterion for deciding whether a patient was treatable was whether they could establish transference to the analyst. Yes, and the patient can project stifled feelings and act out smothered wishes onto the figure of the analyst and both can use these to dig down and unearth the roots of the neurosis. But if no transference can be established, no treatment is possible (p.165).

Darwin

Paul Robinson implies that describing Freud’s theory as an outcrop of Darwin’s theory of evolution was errant or scandalous, but that’s how I’ve always approached Freud. If there is no God, no plan, no teleology, if we have evolved by accident through a vast series of untold contingencies, if we are just another type of animal, but admittedly with this astonishing ability of reflection and thought – how would this ‘thought’ develop in the infant, how would its developmental stages linger in adult thinking; what is thinking? I like Freud because he situates us firmly in the animal kingdom where we belong, with no special dispensation.

It may be difficult for many of us to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their development into supermen. I…cannot see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved. The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different explanation from that of animals. (p.261)

Its main legacy

Psychoanalysis has left a legacy too pervasive on twentieth century culture to be measured. But Roazen has a very simple paragraph which says that Freud’s greatest and indisputable discovery in psychology is the persistence of infantile remnants in the adult mind, to a greater extent and of a vastly more complex nature than anyone had ever realised before. (Mind you, he has Erik Erikson saying a sentence later that Freud’s ‘greatest contribution’ was the importance of psychosexuality, p.200).

Looked at another way, Freud’s main legacy is the widespread availability of depth psychological therapy in every country in the world. The basic idea that psychological problems and symptoms in any of us may have their roots in early infant experiences and that these can be recovered, remembered and resolved, may not be the universally recommended treatment of mental ailments, but is universally accepted as at least one of the main therapeutic strategies.

Titbits

Height

Freud was only just about five foot seven in height, whereas Jung, 19 years younger, was a strapping six foot two. If we adopt a heightist theory of history, trouble was inevitable.

The schism with Jung

After seven years of correspondence, during which Freud had adopted Jung as the Crown Prince of psychoanalysis, their relationship ended. On a lecture tour of America in 1912 Jung made his differences from Freud quite clear and throughout 1913 they argued, leading up to the Psychoanalytic Congress of September 1913 where battle lines were decisively drawn. Jung rejected the primacy of sexuality. He rejected the notion that children were in any sense sexual. He had the insight that the fact that so many patients in analysis brought up infantile sexual memories was in fact a screening device, a projection back into earliest memory, of problems the patient was facing in the present. That psychoanalysis presented many patients with the easy option of dwelling endlessly on the past rather than confront the difficult future. According to Roazen this insight is now generally accepted among contemporary psychoanalysts. In 1913 Jung delivered his paper announcing his concepts of introversion and extroversion, with Freudian psychoanalysis seen as merely a subset of the former.

He was, in short, developing an entirely different model of the psyche and Freud felt he had to make an absolute break in order to protect the integrity of his model and his movement.

Jung thought he was making common-sense adaptations to the evidence continually being thrown up by actual treatment of patient. But Freud thought the sexuality of children was the absolute bedrock of his theory and saw in Jung the same pattern he’d seen in Adler and, indeed, in most western medicine and psychiatry, which was inability to face the fact of childhood sexuality which was itself based on repression among the deniers. In a typically Freudian manoeuvre, he thought the more everyone around him denied the existence of childhood sexuality, the more true it must be.

Jung resigned his editorship of the movement’s magazine in late 1913 but hung on until April 1914 before resigning as president of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Freud had to see things in embattled oppositions, a dialectic; at first the conflict between conscious and unconscious, after the Great War the conflict between the Life Drive and the Death Drive. Above all Freud had a strict requirement to make everything rational and clear and understandable; anything which couldn’t be clearly explained was a neurosis which had to be brought into the light of explanation.

Jung had a different temperament: he saw unity in the human mind, which could incorporate these other elements. He thought the mystical and unexplained needed to be experienced and healing, wholing properties. Freud thought only the unhappy neurotic man has fantasies. Jung saw fantasy as an aspect of creativity, as a positive component in a healthy mind.

Freud was obsessed with the impact of the earliest infant and childhood experiences on the adult. Jung became increasingly interested in the problems of the elderly. Older people are less concerned about the vicissitudes of sexuality, but by a search for meaning in life.

Jung had much more clinical experience working with the seriously mentally ill. This opened him up to a far greater range of ideas of what therapy could consist of and what ‘well’ looked like. Freud had a far narrower view and thought therapy could only work with neuroses and obsessions, in other words with relatively minor mental illness. This was because Freud’s model relied on the patient’s ego or rational self being relatively intact. Once the repressed traumas of childhood sexuality were dragged into the light of day and accepted, the patient could be relied on to integrate these insights and get on with life.

Whereas Jung treated patients whose egos were splintered and needed help just getting out of bed or getting dressed. So his model of therapy was far more interventionist. Freud advocated an aloof detachment, giving rise to a tradition of cold and antiseptic therapists. Jung thought therapy should more like a collaboration and a journey.

‘The therapist is no longer the agent of treatment but a fellow participant in a process of individual development.’ (p.282)
‘The psychotherapist should be absolutely clear in his own mind that the psychological treatment of the sick is a relationship in which the doctor is involved quite as much as the patient.’ (p.283)

Mind you Jung was a bigot, too. He was notoriously intolerant of male homosexuality. And he thought university education had a disastrous impact on women’s personalities (p.278).

Science

It was very characteristic of Freud not to define ‘science’ in terms of methodology, hypotheses, experiments and data, but solely in terms of his own model of the mind. Thus:

To Freud, the essence of science was that it represented ‘the most complete renunciation of the pleasure principle of which our mental activity is capable.’ (p.245)

But Roazen points out that this metaphor is immensely autobiographical. It simply described Freud’s personality – tight-lipped, stoical, immensely self-contained, aloof. An entirely subjective autobiographical model which every other analyst and therapist has been free to ignore, not least Jung with his emphasis on a more humane therapeutic engagement.

According to Roazen, it was in the 1920s that Freud moved away the often literary basis of his writings in a bid to emphasise the scientific nature of psychoanalysis.

Superstition

Superstition derives from suppressed hostile and cruel impulses. Superstition is in large part the expectation of trouble; and a person who has harboured frequent evil wishes against others, but has been brought up to be good and has therefore repressed such wishes into the unconscious, will be especially ready to expect punishment for his unconscious wickedness in the form of trouble threatening him from without. (Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1901.)

Totem and Taboo

Roazen rubbishes Totem and Taboo as do all modern commentators. Freud projected his fairy tale ‘discovery’ of the Oedipus Complex back onto ‘primitive’ societies claiming that every society passed through the same developmental phase (just as he insisted all toddlers do), namely when the horde is dominated by a great Father who hogs all the nubile women, the young generation of men (all his sons) band together to kill and eat him, then are overcome with guilt and so institute a new religion around a great sacrificed god alongside complex taboos regarding incest and exogamy.

No anthropologist has ever found any evidence to support this story which amounts to a fairy tale, a projection by Freud of his pet developmental theory back into an invented prehistory. Totem and Taboo is Freud’s silliest book, though it has steep competition in the equally ludicrous Moses and Monotheism (Freud had the grace to describe Totem as a ‘novel’, though it is really the fantastical farrago of a very old man working out his obsessions in public) (p.301).

Famous analysands

‘Analysand’ means ‘someone undergoing psychoanalysis’. The most famous analysands would include composer Gustav Mahler, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and novelist Herman Broch.

Ego psychology

Freud’s emphasis was on decoding the repressed wishes of the unconscious via dreams, slips and free association. His focus was on the unconscious and repressed drives. From the 1930s the younger generation of analysts began to switch the focus to the conscious mind, the ego, specifically to understand the mechanisms of coping and defence which the ego deployed.

In 1936 Freud’s daughter, Anna, who had followed him into analysis, published ‘The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence’, a study of the ‘ways and means by which the ego wards off depression, displeasure and anxiety’. It became a founding work of ego psychology. By the 1950s this focus on ego psychology had become the main stream of psychoanalysis.

Two paradoxes

Calvinism, Marxism and Psychoanalysis are all deterministic ideologies, propounding iron laws of causation, and yet all relied very heavily on the achievements of zealous and energetic individuals (p.350).

Marx loathed Russia, its backwardness and brutality, and yet it was in Russia, of all the European countries, that his followers seized power and he was set up as a god. Similarly, Freud came to deeply loathe America and all it stood for (fake egalitarianism, lack of culture, surplus money) and yet it was in the single nation he hated most that Freud’s invention became most successful and lucrative (p.384).

A fine figure

Ernest Jones, the only Gentile in Freud’s close circle, a feisty defender of the Master, and very energetic organiser, the man who wrote the magisterial three-volume biography of Freud – was also an excellent figure skater and actually wrote a book about figure skating. (p.353)

Freud’s followers

Paul Federn (1871 to 1950)
Edward Hitschmann (1871 to 1957)
Victor Tausk (1879 to 1919) suicide after Freud told Helene Deutsch to stop analysing him
Lou Andreas-Salome (1861 to 1937)
Hanns Sachs (1881 to 1947)
Theodor Reik (1888 to 1969)
Herman Nunberg (1883 to 1970)
Karl Abraham (1877 to 1925) solid, reliable
Max Eitingon (1881 to 1943) Russian with enough private fortune to fund the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute; analysed by Freud on evening strolls
Georg Groddeck (1866 to 1934) disorganised, Freud stole the word das Es for the unconscious, Groddeck believed organic illnesses were the product of thwarted desires, he specialised in applying psychoanalysis to organically sick patients
Paul Schilder (1886 to 1940) as professor of psychiatry at University of Vienna did more than any other man to promote psychoanalysis
Herbert Silberer (1882 to 1923) suicide
Ernest Jones (1879 to 1958)
Sandor Ferenczi (1873 to 1933) delightful, popular; Freud wrote more letters to Ferenczi than anyone else (2,500); diverged from Freud in later years by thinking patients needed the parenting and motherly love they often lacked in childhood
James Jackson Putnam (1846 to 1918) a Gentile, professor at Harvard and early American adopter of psychoanalysis; disagreed with Freud’s emphasis on conflict and the dark side of the unconscious
Horace W. Frink (1883 to 1935) a Gentile, had 2 analyses with Freud but then suffered a complete mental breakdown
Abraham A. Brill (1884 to 1948) by end of the Great War the acknowledged head of psychoanalysis in America (p.380)
Sandor Rado (1890 to 1972) brilliant pupil who was sent to direct training at the New York Institute but the faithful felt he had deviated in some of his books and led attacks which ended in him being expelled
Franz Alexander (1891 to 1964)
Erich Fromm (1900 to 1980) politically committed (Marxist) Fromm tried to integrate psychoanalysis with contemporary social thought. Together with Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan, Fromm belongs to a Neo-Freudian school of psychoanalytical thought which is outside the scope of Roazen’s book
Erik Erikson (1902 to 1994) an intuitive child analyst with no medical or university training, Erikson was spotted and encouraged to become an analyst by Anna Freud. He found the atmosphere of the Vienna group stifling; after he fled the Nazis to America, Erikson worked on the formation of identity, postulating a sequence of identities which the developing must create in order to achieve ‘ego strength. Erikson coined the term ‘identity crisis’

Otto Rank

Otto Rank (1884 to 1939) from a very lowly background, was mentored and supported by Freud, became his indispensable secretary, expert on mythology, wrote The Myth of the Birth of the Hero which, in offering psychoanalytic interpretations of literature, was right up Freud’s street.

When the breach came it was about the role of the mother, and the aims of therapy. Up till the 1920s Freud’s theory focused almost entirely on the role of the father, specifically the boy child’s resentment and efforts to overthrow him, named the Oedipus complex. Mothers existed, but as the source of the succouring breasts or as objects of infantile sexual fantasy, rarely for themselves.

Rank greatly expanded the importance of the mother, the closeness of the mother-infant bond, and the importance of separation anxiety. Rank then sought the deep origin of that anxiety in the experience of the trauma of being born, a horrifying experience laid down in the unconscious and triggered by all kinds of later experiences. Therefore, he developed the idea that the patient relive the experience of being born; or at least act out the anxieties and terrors it gave rise to.

This was in flat contradiction to Freud’s notion that therapy be an entirely rational process whereby infantile issues were dragged into the light of day and calmly examined by the detached, clinical adult. Freud’s therapy was all about intellectual insight. Rank was suggesting emotional release. Insight was not enough; the patient needed active emotional support (something Jung had suggested before the war). All this was expressed in his 1924 book, The Trauma of Birth.

Wilhelm Reich (1897 to 1957)

Reich was one of the most extreme and radical analysts and Freud disliked him from the start. Where Freud thought therapy was predominantly about memory i.e. dredging up specific repressed memories which lay behind specific neurotic symptoms, Reich (like Jung and Adler) thought therapy should address the whole person.

He took a literalistic definition of sexuality as genital gratification, which Freud thought a massive step backwards to the traditional view of sex which his theory of libido was meant to expand and deepen. Reich thought mental illness was caused by sexual repression and therefore he promoted free expression of sexuality. In the 1960s this fed into the notion of ‘free love’ i.e. having sex whenever you wanted with whoever you fancied, leaving no sexual urge unexpressed.

Reich thought the family was the institution whereby each generation’s sexuality was defined, controlled, monitored and repressed and so he recommended abolishing the nuclear family, and having children raised by communities of adults (as later practiced in Israeli kibbutzim).

Finally, he was a Marxist, a rare political radical among the bourgeois analysts, who linked the overthrow of bourgeois society and taking ownership of the means of production, as cognate with overthrowing the nuclear family so that every individual could take ownership of their own sexuality.

In the late 1920s Reich went on a lecture tour of Bolshevik Russia where he claimed that without a full sexual revolution the Soviet state would degenerate into a repressive bureaucracy, the net effect of which was, amusingly, to prompt the Soviet authorities to shut down the until-then thriving Russian Psychoanalytic Society (p.493).

Reich was kicked out of the International Psychoanalytical Society in 1934. Reich moved to Norway where he carried out investigations into the nature of the orgasm (trying to measure electrical activity in the brain during sex). With the outbreak of war he fled to America.

Shortly after he arrived in New York in 1939 that Reich first said he had discovered a biological or cosmic energy, an extension of Freud’s idea of the libido. He called it ‘orgone energy’ or ‘orgone radiation’, and the study of it ‘orgonomy. (Wikipedia)

His increasingly wild experiments with orgone and erratic behaviour drew the attention of the authorities and, after a sequence of legal problems, he was sent to prison in Pennsylvania where he died of heart failure in 1957.

Women psychoanalysts

The penultimate chapter, chapter 9, (pages 415 to 478), is devoted to the key women in the movement, namely:

Ruth Mack Brunswick née Blumgart (1897 to 1946)

Brunswick worked closely with Freud to flesh out his theories, subtly bringing out the importance of the mother in the development of the child, and the importance of the pre-oedipal period, especially in women, which Freud admitted he had been unable to get at because his women patients always projected memories of their fathers onto him (p.424). Brilliant theorist but Roazen depicts her as working too closely with Freud, her extended analysis with him (1922 to 1938) turning into a psychological addiction. She became addicted to painkillers and died miserably.

Anna Freud (1895 to 1982)

Freud’s youngest child, an unwanted pregnancy, ended up becoming his primary carer after he was diagnosed with jaw cancer in 1923, and then jealous protector of the family archive, letters and so on. Nowhere near as intellectually brilliant or as good a writer as her father, she nonetheless developed into a leading figure in the next generation of the movement for her pioneering work with children. For five years before she thought about becoming an analyst, she worked as a schoolteacher with small children, and this experience fed into her therapeutic practice and then theoretical writing (p.433). She set up the Anna Freud Clinic which continues to this day.

Anna said that children couldn’t be directly analysed because their chief transference remained onto their parents. Therefore the analyst had to a) develop an educative relationship with the child i.e. stand in the relationship of teacher but also b) work through the parents. Often, changing the family situation was enough to cure a child’s symptoms (p.438).

But her key theoretical work was to pioneer the new focus from the 1930s onwards on ego psychology (see above). Her most famous book, ‘The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence’, listed these mechanisms: regression, repression, reaction-formation, isolation, undoing, projection, introjection, turning against the self, denial, identification with the aggressor – all strategies to help the ego cope, manage, survive.

With Dorothy Burlingham she set up a hostel for parentless children during the Second World War and noticed that if one of the women carers succeeded in forming a mothering bond with a child, the child’s halted development could resume. The importance of mothering. During the 1950s and 60s it became more obvious that relationships with the good or bad mother played as much or a greater role in child development as with the threatening father depicted in Freud’s version of analysis.

Helene Deutsch (1884 to 1982)

Pioneer of female psychology. Published The Psychology of Women (1945). Despite her emphasis on the importance of the mother in the child’s development, many of Deutsch’s views were, echoing Freud’s sexism, surprisingly conservative, and she has come in for criticism from feminists. For example, Deutsch’s belief that a woman only becomes fully a woman by transferring her agency onto a strong man to whom she willingly becomes a dependent. She must leave the initiative to the man; she must renounce her originality, etc. Roazen cites a critique by Germaine Greer. (Roazen gives a jaw-dropping compilation of Freud’s sexist assumptions, pages 462 to 465).

She was Freud’s golden girl in the early 1920s but they had a falling out and she never regained his trust, which hurt her for the rest of the life. She played a key role in setting up and running the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, but spotted the looming threat of the Nazis and emigrated to America in 1935, where she continued practicing and was held in high esteem.

Melanie Klein (1882 to 1960)

Klein was one of the next generation of women who emphasised the importance of the Mother in a child’s development, in Freudian terms focusing on ‘pre-oedipal’ layers of child development.

Freud, in his rationalist patriarchal way, had emphasised the importance of words and reason: the repressed material has to be dragged into the light of day in the form of words. The female psychoanalysts highlighted the pre-verbal communication of the really young infant.

Klein caused a lot of controversy because she moved a lot of Freud’s developmental schema much earlier, into the life of the pre-verbal baby. She sees the baby as seething with the rage and jealousies which Freud had attributed to the Oedipus complex about age 5.

Klein was a zealot. She believed that children responded to the same therapeutic environment as adults. She thought the child playing with toys as the exact equivalent of the adult’s free association with words, and both as direct channels into the unconscious. She thought every child without exception should be given analytic therapy as a prophylactic against later neurosis. Roazen calls Klein’s approach ‘crusading’ and ‘utopian’ (p.478).

In this stern inflexibility she was the opposite of Anna Freud’s more nurturing, mothering supportiveness. The differences between the two women were made explicit when they both gave papers on child psychoanalysis at a psychoanalytical congress in 1927, and remained the source of sometimes bitter enmity. Freud was prepared to leave a patient with some neuroses if they helped him or her cope. Klein was ferocious to pursue every single neurosis in order to effect a complete ‘cure’.

Freud came to disapprove of Klein as the 1920s went on but was wanted to avoid an open break as he had with the big male schismatics: partly because the big three schisms were with men he had overloaded with oedipal significance and seen as his ‘son and heir’, Crown Prince etc, whereas he never gave any female analyst the same significance; partly because Klein’s theory came from a place doubly removed from his own experience, analysing children and deep consideration of the female psyche, neither of which Freud had a feel for.

When, in 1926, Ernest Jones offered Klein a job at the British Psychoanalytic Institute in London in a bid to beef up its intellectual level, she accepted the offer, moved to London and lived there for the rest of her life. Her fierce character and intense convictions strongly influenced British psychoanalysis and Roazen speculates that the British wing might, eventually have been forced to secede from the international movement if it hadn’t been for the Nazis.

The advent of the Second World War brought a wave of Viennese analysts to London along, of course, with the Master himself and her daughter. The newcomers thought Klein’s focus on pre-oedipal experiences was yet another denial of and resistance to the centrality of the Oedipus Complex – the same crux which had forced out Jung, Adler and Rank.

This town ain’t big enough for the both of us describes the daggers drawn atmosphere that developed between the well-established Kleinians and the newly arrived, orthodox Freudians.

Reading about the way Freudian psychoanalysis developed, evolved and splintered, creating divergent heretics and sects, gives exactly the same pleasure as reading about the first few hundred years of Christian history. There are multiple levels of pleasure. One is watching the way a fundamental idea can be reinterpreted, expanded, followed to its logical conclusions in ways its founders never dreamed of – like watching a game of chess unfold, like watching the plot of a good novel develop in ways you never expected but seem logical as soon as they’re explained.

And the other pleasure is a soap opera-level enjoyment of watching very clever people fight like ferrets in a sack. Roazen’s descriptions of Ernest Jones’s political manoeuvrings are entertaining, but not as funny as his account of the way Jones’s number two in London, Edward Glover, was conducting an analysis on Klein’s daughter, Melitta Schmideberg, and used material thrown up by this to attack Klein in the name of orthodoxy and Anna.

In a phrase, these very clever, very subtle people, who liked to imagine they held the key to solving all the psychological problems of mankind, turn out to be just as underhand, devious, manipulative and vicious as a cellarful of rats.

Thus Roazen speculates the way Melanie Klein’s writings emphasise the goodness of the mother but the child’s vicious, negative emotions, its possessiveness and anger, can plausibly be mapped onto the way her own daughter, Melitta, attacked her, in writing and in public forums.

The war of words really broke out at the end of the bigger world war, in 1944 and 45. A compromise was proposed whereby two groups would have separate facilities, the B group (Anna and followers) and the B group (everyone else). Some members joined the A group, some the B group, but at least half rejected the idea of a split, and wanted peace.

These became known as the Middle Group or Independents, and it’s from their number that the most influential British theorists emerged, namely John Bowlby, Michael Balint and Donald Winnicott.

Other notable women in the movement included:

Dorothy Burlingham, American who left her disturbed husband to move to Vienna with her four children; worked closely with Anna
Marianne Kris
Jeanne Lampl-de Groot
Eva Rosenfeld
Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth
Princess Marie Bonaparte (1882 to 1962)

Thoughts – the widest impact

Reading this book through to the bitter end (Roazen’s apparently never-ending list of Freud’s followers eventually becomes quite exhausting) makes you realise it’s getting on for pointless to try and assess ‘the legacy of Freud’ because his biggest legacy was that he created an entire new field of human enquiry and medical practice, which has spawned scores, maybe hundreds, of followers, acolytes and heretics who have themselves gone on to develop or invent whole new sub-domains and new channels of investigation.

Without Freud an Adler, Jung, Rank or Erikson and some of his umpteen other followers might have gone into psychiatry, but many wouldn’t have because they didn’t have the strict medical training required. So Roazen’s book teaches us that alongside a consideration of Freud’s achievement in terms of his writings and theory, must go the obvious fact that just as important was his creation of such a league of followers.

And that it is often through the followers that major ideas have emerged which have percolated into popular consciousness and popular culture. The concepts of the inferiority complex, identity crisis, separation anxiety, are all products of the intellectual framework Freud created.

*****

Great men

The most dated thing about the book is that Roazen comes from a time and place where he still believes in ‘Great Men’ and ‘Great Thinkers’. Although he critiques multiple aspects of Freud’s character and theory, nonetheless his basic instinct is to place Freud firmly in the pantheon of Great Men.

‘Freud’s genius’ (p.13)
‘a revolutionary in the world of ideas’ (p.29)
‘Freud deserves to be a hero of our time’ (p.40)
Jones interpreted Freud’s credulity as part of the receptivity and open-mindedness that accompanies genius. (p.108)

He carries a 1940s/50s mental model of Great Men who Made the Modern World and are Heroes of Thought, Intellectual Giants etc. I don’t know exactly when this model died off – sometime in the 1980s? – giving way to a far more complex model which, for a start, includes lots more women, but more generally opened up the world of the mind to thousands more creative thinkers, across the full range of the arts and humanities and sciences, and also opened the doors to non-white people beyond the Anglosphere – till you arrive at the jostling, thronged, progressive and often dangerous, sometimes bewildering, multicultural intellectual world we live in today.

Americanisation

The second aspect I found odd was how conventional and conservative his view of psychoanalysis is. This might partly be because he’s American. Americans are (or were) notorious for their positive, upbeat, can-do attitude. Businesslike, have-nice-a-day consumer capitalism. It’s fairly well known that most of the first generation psychoanalysts, being Jewish, fled Europe with the rise of the Nazis and settled in America, especially in New York with its large Jewish population.

In America the questing, experimental, tentative, the Middle European and often quite bleak, pessimistic tone of Freud and his first followers, refugees from the land of Kafka and Musil, was converted into a positive, upbeat, we-can-fix-you procedure for the land of Walt Disney and Oprah Winfrey. You can achieve your dreams! You can be happy and healthy! You can have it all! Just sign up here for your starter course of psychotherapy at the very reasonable price of 25 bucks an hour and we’ll have you back on your feet and back in the office in no time.

So although Roazen pays lip service to Freud as discoverer of the unconscious blah blah, along with all the other stuff about libido, repression, transference and so on, it doesn’t really worry him. He doesn’t seem to take on board what is truly revolutionary about Freud which is that he destroyed the rationale of two and a half thousand years of philosophy, theology, legal and political theory which were all based on the notion that human beings have a capacity for objective reason.

No they don’t. We are terrified animals which, in the course of our infant development, develop a set of psychic defence mechanisms to mediate between the inner world of our raging drives/desires and the cold, brutal outside world which doesn’t give a damn about us. No wonder so many people are damaged and betray odd compulsions, obsessions and anxieties. It’s a very anxious position to be in!

But deeper and more subversive than that, Freud asserts that the rational mind isn’t a shining Greek god, isn’t a gleaming repository of reason and morality, but is made out of the same dark chaotic stuff as the unconscious. The so-called ego is just bits of the unconscious which are split off by the human organism, which can’t help itself developing strategies to try and cope with the ongoing frustration of nearly all its instinctual drives and fantasies.

This is a complete, radical and devastating break with the age-old tradition that all humans contain a fragment of the divine reason in their minds, are mostly capable of rational self-interest (as the economists ridiculously claim), of rational debate and political decisions (as political theorists absurdly claim). No. We are petrified animals subject to a bewildering variety of psychic mechanisms and strategies designed first and foremost to allow us to fulfil psychic wishes and desires, albeit often sublimated into socially acceptable forms.

Thus all the social labels and categories dished out by traditional psychology, ‘neurotic’, ‘obsessive’, ‘degenerate’ and so on, are all relative. We are all on the spectrums of weird behaviour. People don’t just have quirks and anomalies which are basically additions to a reliable core of common sense and reason. There is no common sense and reason. We are all made entirely out of quirks and weirdness. Freud hoped his therapy might, a little, ameliorate and lessen the quirks and weirdnesses which afflict all of us, which humans are, in fact, made of.

Credit

Freud and His Followers by Paul Roazen was published by Alfred Knopf in the USA in 1975, and by Allen Lane in the UK in 1976. References are to the 1979 Peregrine paperback edition.

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by Simon on July 14, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in America, Biography, Psychoanalysis

Tagged AA Brill, Abraham A. Brill, Adler, Alfred Adler, America, Anglosphere, Anna Freud, Anna Freud Clinic, anthropology, Antisemitism, anxieties, anxiety, Autobiographical Study, Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, Biography, Bolshevik Russia, Brill, British Psychoanalytic Institute, Calvinism, childhood sexuality, Civilisation and Its Discontents, compulsions, consumer capitalism, Darwin, das Es, death drive, Deutsch, divine reason, Donald Winnicott, Dorothy Burlingham, Edward Glover, Edward Hitschmann, ego psychology, Erich Fromm, Erik Erikson, Erikson, Ernest Jones, Eva Rosenfeld, exogamy, Ferenczi, First World War, Franz Alexander, Freud, Freud and His Followers, Freud archives, Frink, gentile, Georg Groddeck, Germaine Greer, goyim, Gustav Mahler, Hanns Sachs, Harry Stack Sullivan, Hartmann, Heinz Hartmann, Helene Deutsch, Herbert Silberer, Herman Broch, Herman Nunberg, Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth, history, history of psychoanalysis, homosexuality, Horace W. Frink, HW Frink, hypnotism, hysteria, identity crisis, incest, inferiority complex, International Psychoanalytical Association, James Jackson Putnam, Jean-Martin Charcot, Jeanne Lampl-de Groot, Jew, JJ Putnam, John Bowlby, Josef Breuer, Judaism, Jung, Kafka, Karen Horney, Karl Abraham, libido, Life Drive, Lou-Andreas-Salomé, manic-depression, Marianne Kris, Marx, Marxism, Max Eitingon, Melanie Klein, Melitta Schmideberg, mental illness, Michael Balint, Moses and Monotheism, multiple personality disorder, Musil, Nazis, Neo-Freudian school, neurosis, New York, nuclear family, obsessions, Oprah Winfrey, orgone energy, orgone radiation, orgonomy, Oswald Spengler, Otto Rank, Paul Federn, Paul Roazen, Paul Robinson, Paul Schilder, Philip Roth, primitive societies, Princess Marie Bonaparte, psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Congress, psychoanalytic movement, Psychoanalytical Movement, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, psychosexuality, psychosis, Putnam, Rainer Maria Rilke, Rank, repressed wishes, Russia, Russian Psychoanalytic Society, Ruth Mack Brunswick, Sandor Ferenczi, Sandor Rado, Saul Bellow, schizophrenia, Second World War, separation anxiety, sexism, sexuality, shell-shock, Sigmund Freud, sublimation, taboos, Talmud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, the Middle Group, the minds, The Myth of The Birth of The Hero, the Nazis, the Oedipus Complex, The Psychology of Women, The Trauma of Birth, the unconscious mind, Theodor Reik, Totem and Taboo, transference, Victor Tausk, Vienna, Walt Disney, Wilhelm Fliess, Wilhelm Reich, Wilhelm Stekel, Woody Allen

Posted by Simon on July 14, 2023

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Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud (1938)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other concepts have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his assumption of Western superiority over ‘primitive’ peoples, and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions over into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

‘Moses and Monotheism’ was Freud’s last published work, written when he was wracked by painful cancer of the jaw, and anxiety about the Nazis who had taken over his native Austria in March 1938. This relatively short pamphlet (just 50 pages in the Pelican Freud Library edition) is characterised by much hesitancy, repetition and apologies, most unlike Freud and unlike the ‘Outline of Psychoanalysis’ (1940)’ written at the same time, which is a masterpiece of confidence and brevity.

1. Moses an Egyptian (10 pages)

The Bible tells us Moses was born the son of poor Israelites in bondage in Egypt who abandoned him in a basket and let him drift down the river where he was found by a princess of the Egyptian royal family and adopted by Pharaoh. Freud says Moses was an Egyptian for two reasons:

1) his name takes the same form as the Egyptian suffix for child, ‘mosis’, frequently added to parental forms, thus Tuth-Mosis or Ra-Mosis (Rameses) mean child of Tut and Ra.

2) The second reason is longer. Otto Rank, Freud’s faithful amanuensis, in 1909 wrote ‘The Myth of The Birth of The Hero’ which shows a surprising similarity between ancient myths of heroes. Sargon, Cyrus, Oedipus, Paris, Romulus, Gilgamesh – according to Rank, a hero is someone who has the courage to stand up to his father. Almost always the hero is made the child of an aristocratic couple – then oracles or prohibitions lead the father to decide to abandon him – he is found and reared by a lowly family (or even animal, in Romulus’s case) – and returns in glory to take revenge on his father and become the leader of the people.

Rank/Freud psychoanalyse all these stories as fictional reworkings of every child’s prehistory. The child’s earliest years are dominated by an enormous overvaluation of his parents – they are the king and queen of fairy tale. Later, disappointed by their banality and weakness, the child figures himself the real son of an aristocratic family who have for some reason abandoned him to these two losers. This pattern of fantasy, repeated by all children, Freud names the Family Romance. Thus the two families of myth are one. (Freud doesn’t mention it but also this myth helps ratify the power of whichever strong leader arises to rule the tribe by linking him in a subterranean way with the established royal line.)

Fine. But the Moses myth actually stands out from this pattern because the process is reversed: his first family are lowly Israelites, his second family, from which he must rebel, royal. Freud says the other way of considering this myth is to realise that the first family (i.e. the long-lost aristocratic family which the angry child constructs for itself in the Family Romance) is always a figment. Why not apply this to the Moses myth? Thus, the lowly Israelite family is a figment added by later chroniclers, to explain the embarrassing fact that their national leader was in fact an Egyptian aristocrat.

2. If Moses Was An Egyptian… (40 pages)

According to Freud, Moses was a follower of the reforming Pharaoh Akhenaten. As a result of the military exploits of the great pharaoh Tuthmosis III, hero of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Egypt ruled a vast empire stretching from Sudan in the south as far as Syria and Mesopotamia in the East. Around 1375 BC, towards the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, the young Pharaoh Amenophis IV came to power. The Empire was dominated by a complicated theology involving hundreds of local gods – some of the most important of which were Ra, the sun god, Osiris, god of the afterlife, and Amon, god of life. Maybe no religion in history has been so obsessed with the afterlife and ensuring the safe passage of its leaders to Elysium (witness the Pyramids).

Amanhotep IV came to power and set about replacing the polytheism of his people with belief in one god, Aten. He changed his name to incorporate the new deity – Akhenaten. This is commonly held to be the first monotheistic religion in the world. But, as Freud dryly remarks, barely did you have monotheism before you had persecution. Akhenaten supervised the destruction of existing gods’ statues and struck the names of earlier gods off stelae.

The new emperor, obsessed with his religious reforms, ignored the state of the Empire which began to suffer from enemy incursions. The affronted priests, the frustrated generals and the common people angry at the loss of their traditional gods rose up and overthrew Akhenaten, whose end is obscure. He died in 1358 BC. Briefly his son-in-law ruled, a boy called Tutankhaten who was forced to change his name to remove the offending Aten-suffix and replace it with the name of the traditional god, Amun: Tutankhamen. The old gods returned and there was a time of civil war. Around 1350 BC the Eighteenth Dynasty ended. This much is historical fact. (cf Philip Glass’s opera, Akhenaten).

What we know of Akenhaten and his new religion is found at the ruins of the new capital he tried to establish around the new worship; after his fall this was sacked and plundered. But enough remains to give an indication of what his religion was like. Akhenaten’s was the first attempt at monotheism recorded anywhere in the world. It preached one sole god, creator of the universe. It proscribed magic and ritual; no visual imagery has been found of Aten. Lastly there is no mention of the dead, of an afterlife, of the all-powerful death god Osiris who dominates orthodox Egyptian worship. Suspiciously like what came to be called Judaism, eh?

In the Bible Moses is described as being a great Egyptian general before he discovers the truth about his Jewish lineage; surely it is clear, says Freud, that he was a great Egyptian general fighting for the new Pharoah, and that the chaos caused by the overthrow gave him the opportunity to take away a whole people and subject them to Akhenaten’s monotheism, now overthrown in the land of its birth. A clue is given by circumcision, a common Egyptian practice which Moses imposed on his new people.

But Moses’ beliefs never really caught on except among the narrow circle of his Egyptian soldiery. After years of tyrannical rule the Jews rose up and killed their leader, Moses (cf Freud’s fantasies about early human societies in ‘Totem and Taboo’, the Oedipus myth and the passion of Christ).

According to the historians Freud refers to, soon afterwards another part of the Jewish people, meeting at Kadesh near the Midianite kingdom, adopted belief in Yahweh, a volcano god from the Saudi peninsula.

(Freud observes the interesting correlation between Yahweh and Jove, ‘the thunderer’. A cult of the volcano god may have derived from the cataclysm which swept away ‘Atlantis’ i.e. the Minoan civilisation about 1300BC i.e. a generation or two after Akhenaten. Freud speculates that the cataclysm may also have swept away the prevailing matriarchies in favour of a powerful masculine thunder god.)

Some Jews, then, adopted the new religion of Yahweh; the others clung to the memory of their Egyptian exile and the great leader. At a further stage the two parts of the tribe became reunited. After negotiations it was decided to coalesce the two histories: the national liberator became a servant of Yahweh. This coalition explains discrepancies in the story, one Moses being violent and impatient (as you’d expect a great general to be) the other, the founder of the Yahweh cult, gentle and mild. Soon afterwards the Jews were ready to invade Canaan and set up a nation state.

The historical record is thus: The events of the Exodus c 1300 BC. Of the first four books of the Pentateuch the oldest part was written by J (since he refers to God as Yahweh or Jehovah) around 1000 BC; sometime later bits were added by E (so-called because he refers to God as Elohim). After the collapse of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BC a Jewish priest combined J and E and added some of his own material. In the seventh century the fifth book, Deuteronomy, is added. In the period after the destruction of the Temple, 586 BC, the revision known as the Priestly Code was made. The Jewish character and religion was finalised by the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah in the fifth century before Christ.

It is during this process that the teachings of Judaism are formulated, that Moses and his monotheism are given an honourable prequel in the lives of the Patriarchs, all of whom are given initial contacts with Yahweh and the special covenant devised. That retrospective fabrication parallels the prospective history as the Prophets call the people of Israel back to the pure monotheism of Moses and that tradition becomes more central.

(Freud then rehearses his earlier theory: the human family, i.e. early communities, underwent a similar history to individual families: early trauma, repression, latency, puberty and return of the repressed. Thus some early trauma occurred in prehistory and its resultant neurosis is religion – ‘Totem and Taboo’, the exiled brothers band together to overthrow the father of the horde, kill him, eat him. This is the origin of law and morality; law because they realise they can’t all have what the father possessed; morality because they create a ban on incest. The tribe sets up a totem animal as a representative of the father’s authority and a guarantor of the new morality. In the course of time the animal totem is humanised into a god, maybe with animal parts or accompanied by an animal. This involves into polytheism where the gods jostle under civil constraint (as the sons do). And eventually to the return of the repressed Father as a single god of unlimited dominion.)

The uniquely monotheistic tradition of the Jews accounts for their uniquely concentrated guilt. Their idea of being the Chosen of God gave them a unique sense of coherence and high calling. And the high spirituality and concern with morality associated with Jews is connected with their Advance In Intellectuallity:

their prohibition of all graven images (so you can only think about God)
the embodiment of religion in texts which have to be guarded and interpreted by sophisticated schools of rabbis
their diaspora after the destruction of the second temple in 70 AD which made preservation of the texts and their right interpretation essential

Finally, the repressed guilt returns in the figure of Paul of Tarsus, a Roman Jew who sets out a theology around the figure of an obscure Nazarene preacher. The Good News is that the (repressed) historic guilt is atoned for, says Paul, and we have entered a new era of Love. The Son has atoned for the primal guilt all of us sons feel, having inherited the guilt of the primal crime. Christianity was able to reintroduce many elements of the old Atum religion, and incorporated elements from its time – a mother goddess, lesser gods (the angels), a dark spirit (Satan) much magic and spells, an afterlife with a heaven and hell. It represents a step back intellectually from Judaism but – in analytical terms, in terms of dealing with guilt and the unconscious – it is a step forward.

Antisemitism

Is due to specific historic reasons: 1) the Jews’ outsiderness and 2) their surprising success at intellectual activities for their numbers. Also 3) a deep resentment among their ‘host’ populations, of their supposed arrogance, of their thinking they are the ‘Chosen’ people. And also due, Freud thinks, to 4) their not having consciously acknowledged responsibility for killing the Father. The Christians can say we killed our Father-returned-as-the-Son, we acknowledge it, we live in a new era, redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice on behalf of all of us; but the Jews won’t face it. Paul reformed Judaism by re-enacting its repressed secret and in so doing made Judaism a fossil.

How does all this work?

Freud gives a resume of the topographical theory of the psyche: ego, id and the repressed. He then says analysis has shown that children appear to remember an archaic heritage, composed of memory traces of the childhood of the race ‘memory traces of the experiences of earlier generations!’ (volume 13, page 345)

If we assume the survival of these memory traces in the archaic heritage, we have bridged the gulf between individual and group psychology: we can deal with peoples as we do with an individual neurotic…Men have always known in this special way that they had a primal father and that they killed him.

The crucial premise is that these events are stored in the unconscious; because only unconscious forces are capable of generating the amount of irrational compulsion we see produced by religion. A rational response to clearly perceived events would lead to discussion etc. Only the unconscious can produce such forces. And after a period similar to the latency period in individuals, the Prophets mark a pubescent revival of the original fervour. Freud then goes on to explain the mechanism of pride associated with advances in intellectuality. Renouncing instinctive wishes is, in a sense, automatic for the ego. But it can bring definite affects from the superego. The superego of the Jews is the memory of Moses; with every renunciation of the life of the spirit, the Jews acquired more pride.

The superego is the successor and representative of the individual’s parents who supervised his actions in the first period of his life. It keeps the ego in a permanent state of dependence and exercises a constant pressure on it. Just as in childhood the ego is apprehensive about risking the love of its supreme master; it feels his approval as liberation and satisfaction and his reproaches as pangs of conscience. When the ego has brought the superego the sacrifice of an instinctual renunciation, it expects to be rewarded by receiving more love from it. The consciousness of deserving this love is felt as pride. (13:364)

So, according to Freud, the Jew’s pride is based on:

renunciation of primitive wishes by the adoption of monotheism and becoming the Chosen people
the evident growth in ethical and intellectual superiority this led to

Both achievements, alas, only generated more resentment of the Jews in the less psychologically advanced populations they found themselves living among, whether that was first century Romans, nineteenth century Russians or twentieth century Germans.

Thoughts

Freud was right to adopt a tentative and hesitant tone in this, his last published work, because pretty much every expert in ancient history, the history of the Jews or Egyptians, regards the book as a farrago of distortions, fantasy and wild speculations. I enjoyed the judgement of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who described Freud’s theories about the origins of Judaism as ‘painfully absurd’.

Freud’s speculations about early history (Totem and Taboo, Moses), and to some extent his naive and obsessive attacks on religion, demonstrate what a fool a clever thinker can make of themselves when they stray well beyond their field of expertise, especially when they start dabbling in big cultural and historical speculations. Stick to what you know.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. ‘Moses and Monotheism’ was first translated into English by James Strachey in 1964 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. My quotes are from the version included in volume 13 of the Pelican Freud Library, published in the 1985.

Freud and religion reading list

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907)
Totem and Taboo (1913)
On Transience (1915)
A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis (1923)
The Future of An Illusion (1927)
Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930)
Group Psychology (1930)
Question of a Weltanschauung (1933)
Moses and Monotheism (1939)

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by Simon on July 10, 2023 • Permalink

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Three Essays on Sexuality by Sigmund Freud (1905)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian or bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

Introduction and overview

Freud’s aim was to show the ubiquity and the strangeness of sex and use the sex instinct, massively expanded and redefined, as the basis of an entire new theory of human psychology.

According to historian of psychoanalysis Frank Sulloway, Freud found the sex instinct most suitable as the central vehicle or basis for the new and emphatically physiological type of psychology he wanted to devise, because it is a) so strong and b) so flexible.

In these three ground-breaking essays on sexuality, Freud set out to widen the concepts of sexuality, the sex instinct, libido, so as to encompass a much broader sphere of activity than ever previously imagined in order to make them underpin almost every aspect of human nature.

In Freud’s psychology people’s characters are like complicated family trees, all descended from the same one huge fountain of libido which is channelled and rechannelled into ever-smaller rivers and streams.

It is these rechannellings, the repressions and redirections and reaction-formations and sublimations and so on which come to make up your character – a collection of habits based on infantile pleasures, of disgust or shame (reaction-formations) or heroic ambition (sublimation) or guilts and anxieties (the neuroses).

Thus the Three Essays On The Theory of Sexuality (1905) is Freud’s second most important book after The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

Essay 1 begins with a detailed look at the state of Victorian knowledge about homosexuality and perversions, because they reveal:

the infinite malleability of the sex instinct
how easily the sex instinct can be rerouted away from its ‘proper’ channel of ‘normal’ sexuality
how even ‘normal’ sexuality is in fact built up of a network of pretty weird behaviour (Freud’s most striking example is kissing, which doesn’t make any sense the more you look at it)

In Essay 2 Freud shows that sexuality is not only present but vitally important in the life of infants and children. This idea was the biggest single cause of opposition to Freud’s theories in his lifetime, from Church and State, from commentators and populist politicians, and from decent people everywhere. It still is.

Freud is not very much interested in ‘love’. Love is the psychological effect of the ‘overvaluation of the sexual object common to almost all manifestations of the libido’:

It is only in the rarest instances that the psychical value set on the object as being the goal of the sexual instinct stops short at the genitals. The appreciation extends to the whole body of the sexual object and tends to involve every sensation derived from it. The same overvaluation spills over into the psychological sphere: the subject becomes, as it were, intellectually infatuated (that is, his powers of judgment are weakened) by the mental achievements and perfections of the sexual object and he submits to the latter’s judgments with credulity.

For Freud sex and love are interchangeable terms. He contrasts the overvaluation of the love-object found in the Western tradition with the more relaxed approach of the ancient world:

The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasise its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.

The Greeks held Bacchic orgies and had a god, Priapus, dedicated to the male organ; by contrast we in our time appear to fear the penis more than ever and instead reverence the idealised object of libido, the dream partner of the opposite sex (or the same sex), and the institution of Marriage.

And despite all the rhetoric from feminists and LGBTQ+ activists about interrogating and subverting this, that or the other stereotype and convention, we still appear to be in thrall to the narrow concept of finding ‘love’ in a faithful, monogamous, committed relationship, every bit as much as our Victorian forebears – very narrow and limited compared to the polymorphous, open and pluralistic attitudes of the 30 or so ancient Roman authors I read last year.

THREE ESSAYS ON THE THEORY OF SEXUALITY (1905)

This long work sets out to show the importance of sexuality in all human achievements, to establish a wider-than-usual definition of sexuality, and to prove the existence of infantile sexuality.

Freud’s recurring tactic is to make the ordinary, the everyday, look strange; to look again without conventional blinkers at things we think we know, and to show that our attitudes are complacent, superficial and contradictory.

1. The sexual aberrations

Popular opinion credits two universal instincts, Hunger and Sexuality. Sex is supposed to set in at the time of puberty and manifest itself in irresistible attractions between adults of the opposite sex with the ultimate end of genital sex, itself with the purpose of reproduction (as taught in Christianity and most of the other world religions).

Let us call the desired one the sexual object, the act towards which the instinct tends, the sexual aim.

(1) Deviations in respect of the sexual object

If popular opinion is true and God made sex solely for reproduction, how do we account for homosexuals?

(A) Inversion

Behaviour of ‘inverts’. For a start there are different types:

a) absolute inverts, totally repelled by the opposite sex
b) amphigenic inverts i.e. bisexuals
c) contingent inverts, depending on circumstances

Some inverts accept their condition as natural; others feel it a torment. Some were gay as far back as they remember; for others, homosexuality cropped up at puberty; others only ‘come out’ as adults, sometimes after they’ve followed a straight career with wife and kids.

Nature of Inversion

The first observers thought inversion the result of nervous degeneracy because it was first found among mental patients studied in asylums.

Degeneracy

But then it was late-Victorian fashion to blame anything you didn’t understand on ‘degeneracy’: criminals are degenerate, the working class is degenerate, Africans are degenerate etc.

Freud defines degeneracy in rigorous Darwinian terms as the actual impairment of an organism’s efficiency and survival probability. In these, practical, terms inversion is not degenerate. Not only is it found in people otherwise perfectly normal, but it is found in people ‘who are indeed distinguished by specially high intellectual development and ethical culture.’

Innate character

Some gays insist homosexuality is absolutely innate. But the existence of the late-developers or of contingent homosexuals argues against this. Far from being innate, much evidence suggests that homosexuality is acquired:

the case of many ‘inverts’ in whom an early impression left a permanent gay after-effect
later influences and life experiences which have fixed contingent gayness e.g. the army, prison, monastery etc

Almost all ‘inverts’ will be found to have been subjected to some experience like this (for example, public school). But on the other hand, so were many people who went on to be perfectly hetero. So it remains hard to say whether homosexuality is acquired or innate.

Bisexuality

Havelock Ellis says a clue might be that homosexuality is a form of psychical hermaphroditism, a mental equivalent of having the organs of both sexes.

Richard von Kraft-Ebing says that the brain contains female and male brain centres which are activated by a ‘sex gland’. (It wasn’t only Freud who was having batty, speculative ideas at this time.)

Whoever is right, it seems that most authorities accept the idea of an innate bisexuality in everyone, and that ‘inversion’ owes something to early disruption of development.

Later, Freud would write:

It is well known that at all times there have been, as there still are, human beings who can take as their sexual objects persons of either sex without the one trend interfering with the other. We call these people bisexual and accept the fact of their existence without wondering much at it … But we [psychoanalysts] have come to know that all human beings are bisexual in this sense and their libido is distributed between objects of both sexes, either in a manifest or a latent form.

Sexual object of inverts

Popular opinion holds that ‘inverts’ simply desire the qualities of the opposite sex. An inverted man is like a woman in desiring the qualities of the opposite sex, of masculinity, in his sex object.

But what about gays who love pretty boys, boys who demonstrate all the qualities of a girl, being beautiful, hairless, young and coquettish?

What about transvestites who do a good trade dressing up as women for gay clients? In ancient Greece older men regularly looked after shy, young, girlish boys.

So the sex object is a compromise between an impulse that seeks for a man and one for a woman (in the same way that a symptom is a compromise between a wish and reality).

Psychoanalysis’s explanation is thus: in his childhood the future ‘invert’ passes through a brief but intense attachment to a woman (normally his mother). After leaving this behind he identifies himself with this woman and take himself as his sexual object. Invoking infantile narcissism, ‘inverts’ identify themselves with a woman and set out to find a boy whom they can mother and love as their mother loved them.

The situation will be exacerbated by the absence of a strong father. Think of Oscar Wilde and his imperious mother; of W.H. Auden’s father away at the Front while his mother dressed him in girl’s clothing; of the plays of Joe Orton.

So, says Freud, being gay is being in endless flight from women.

But, Freud emphasises, this isn’t weird. Psychoanalysis has established that everyone makes homosexual object choices in their unconscious mind; that the freedom to range wide over male or female objects is found in childhood, in primitive societies, in early history and in the ancient world, and is the original basis of sexuality.

It is only as a result of later, Victorian social restrictions that people are forced into one fixed, standardised and regimented mould, heterosexual or homosexual, or their modern equivalent which demands that people be in monogamous committed couple relationships.

In reality a person’s final sexual orientation is not decided until after puberty, and then only as the result of innumerable obscure influences. That there is a multiplicity of determining factors is indicated by the extraordinary range of sexual practices and attitudes to be found in mankind.

Thus psychoanalysis regards so-called ‘normal’ sexuality as achieved only under intense pressure and great restriction of the original wider options for pleasure. In fact it’s so-called ‘normal’ sexuality, the genital attraction between man and woman, which is historically problematic and just as much in need of explanation as any other form.

Sexual aim of ‘inverts’

No one single aim can be laid down for the sexuality of ‘inverts’, as it can for the ‘normal’ behaviour of straights; there is too great a variety.

Conclusion

We have been in the habit of regarding the link between the sexual aim and the sexual object as more solid than it is. In fact the object appears to be no more than soldered onto the instinct, and which aim takes which object is a great deal more problematical than previously thought, because the sexual instinct is more free-flowing and independent than we previously suspected.

(B) Sexually immature person and animals as sexual objects

Light is thrown on the sexual instinct by the fact that it permits of so much variation in its objects and such a cheapening of them.

That children can be the objects of sex, or even animals, tells us about the vicissitudes of the sex instinct (along with rapes, sexual assaults and perverse murders). It seems as if the sex instinct will do almost anything to achieve satisfaction.

The impulses of sexual life are among those which, even normally, are the least controlled by the higher activities of the mind… In the process of human cultural development, sexuality is the weak spot.

(2) Deviations in respect of the sexual aim i.e. perversions

Popular opinion says the sexual aim is the union of the genitals in copulation which leads to the release of sexual tension. But a moment’s reflection tells you that, even in ‘normal’ sexuality, people kiss – bringing together two parts of the digestive system – for pleasure. And most people linger to some extent over intermediate stages, such as looking and touching. So the seeds of ‘perversity’ are all around us.

Perversions are sexual activities which either:

extend in an anatomical sense beyond the parts of the body designed for sexual union
linger or halt at the intermediate stages on the path to sexual union

(A) Anatomical extensions

Overvaluation of the sexual object

The first and prime perversion of sex from its object is the overvaluation of the object i.e. ‘love’. For all practical purposes ‘love’, for Freud, is this (potentially pathological) overvaluation of the love object.

It is only in the rarest instances that the psychical value set on the object as being the goal of the sexual instinct stops short at the genitals. The appreciation extends to the whole body of the sexual object and tends to involve every sensation derived from it. The same overvaluation spills over into the psychological sphere: the subject becomes, as it were, intellectually infatuated with (that is, his powers of judgment are weakened) by the mental achievements and perfections of the sexual object and he submits to the latter’s judgments with credulity.

This sexual overvaluation is something that cannot easily be reconciled with [society’s] restriction of the sexual aim to union of the actual genitals and it helps to turn activities connected with other parts of the body into sexual aims.

Once a sexual object has been chosen, the ordinarily effective higher activities of the mind – judgment and civilised restraint – all too often go out of the window. In most people this results in crushes, infatuations, sometimes in grands amours: once the libido sees an opening, it tends to pour forth like a flood.

How the subject (carried away by powerful libido) and the (perhaps reluctant) object cope with the situation is the theme of most of Western literature from Hero and Leander to Madame Bovary.

(I can see an evolutionary explanation for all this which Freud doesn’t mention, which is that: having made a sexual choice, overvaluation follows from a) opening the floodgates of an instinct otherwise fiercely repressed b) to ensure a strong libidinal attachment to the woman who you’re planning to impregnate – so it is a blind Darwinian instinct designed to make the impregnator bond with their mate and remain to look after their offspring; but, as all of human history tells us, this often clashes with the other biological imperative affecting men which is impregnating as many women as possible, hence the many men who eat, shoot and leave.)

Sexual use of the mucous membrane of the lips and mouth

Freud proceeds with his agenda of making everything about sex and love look strange and uncanny.

The use of the mouth as a sexual organ is regarded as a perversion if the lips (or tongue) of one person are brought into contact with the genitals of another, but not if the mucous membranes of the lips of both of them come together.

Why do people find kissing acceptable and cunnilingus or fellatio disgusting? Freud here points to the purely conventional, culturally-determined nature of our feelings.

Has ‘disgust’ (a powerful reaction-formation) played a large part in forming our cultural conventions – or is it simply a product of the increasing self-repression which characterises us in the West (unlike other contemporary civilisations, primitive cultures and the cultures of the ancient world, which were and are much more liberal in their sexual practices)?

Freud seems to think the ancients were more honest in this, as in so much else.

The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasise its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.

The progress of civilisation seems to require a steadily increasing restriction of the sexual instinct, bought at the price of a growing sense of disgust. Hence the genitals of men and women, worshipped by the Greeks as holy, are now banned as dangerously corrupting.

There is no doubt that the genitals of the opposite sex can in themselves be an object of disgust and that such an attitude is one of the characteristics of all hysterics.

One thinks of John Ruskin (allegedly) driven into paroxysms by the discovery on his wedding night that, unlike the Greek statues which he adored, his wife had pubic hair. Or, more up to date:

Indecent exposure, sometimes known as ‘flashing’, is a serious sexual criminal offence, which carries a custodial sentence of up to 2-years at its most severe. (Old Bailey solicitors)

Does ‘disgust’ drive the repression of sexuality i.e. is disgust natural, a ‘God-given’ reaction of the ‘God-given’ conscience to the spectacle of fallen sexuality? A question related to: is conscience ‘God-given’ and so universal? Or is ‘conscience’ created by culture and therefore morally relative across different cultures? Morality and disgust on the one side, pragmatism and sexual libertarianism on the other.

Or is disgust an entirely material, biological reaction-formation to the compulsory repression of sexuality enforced by a coercive society, no God or morality required?

Sexual use of the anal orifice

People who think sodomy is disgusting because we defecate through the anus are as correct as women who say the penis is disgusting because men urinate through it or men who think the vulva is disgusting because women menstruate through it.

Which is to say, all these opinions are correct in their own terms, but missing the point. These organs can (clearly) be put to various uses. Should they be? Or should they be restricted to their ‘God-given’ purposes? But then who is to say what their correct usage is? A bunch of old men wearing purple dresses in the House of Lords? Imams and rabbis? Agony aunts? TV shows. Gender studies lecturers? Where is the authority for this?

Significance of other regions of the body

What seems to be common to all human sexuality is:

overvaluation of the sexual object
a versatile ability on the part of the sexual aim to use any part of the body as the sexual object for gratification

Unsuitable substitutes for the sexual object: fetishism

In fetishism the sexual instinct replaces the primary object (the genitals) and the overvalued secondary object (the person attached to the genitals) with unlikely tertiary objects – parts of the body, locks of hair, feet – or linked objects, such as underwear or other items of clothing.

A certain amount of fetishism is habitually present in normal love, especially of those stages of it in which the normal sexual aim seems unattainable or its fulfilment prevented.

A lock of your true love’s hair. Or as Goethe put it in Faust:

‘Get me a kerchief from her breast,
A garter that her knee has pressed.’

These objects can justifiably be likened to the fetishes of primitive peoples. Inscribed in fetishes is a primitive symbology, comparable with the symbolism of dreams. For example, the foot is an age-old symbol for the penis. Fur is linked to the hair of the mons Veneris. The shoe or slipper is a symbol of the female genitals (as in Cinderella) into which the male foot neatly slips, and so on.

(B) Fixations of preliminary sexual aims

Appearance of new aims

External factors (danger, unavailability of a sexual object, risk of disease) tend to fix libido at the preparatory activities. Truly, every normal aspect of ‘love’ carries the seeds of a perversion.

Touching and looking

Seeing is an evolutionary derivative of touching. A look can be as exciting as a touch.

Both seeing and touching are ‘ordinary’ parts of ‘normal’ sexual activity – unless lingered over, or unless they become ends in themselves, in which case we have voyeurism/exhibitionism and various types of masturbation.

Freud thought exhibitionism the result of either wishing for a reciprocal showing of the other person’s genitals; or a triumphant assertion against the Castration Complex: ‘Look, I’ve still got my willy!’

He doesn’t seem to take into account the sadistic urge to offend or scare women, a kind of sublimated form of rape, visual rather than physical rape.

The power of vision is shown by just how upset some women can feel, how physically defiled, just because a strange man showed them his penis. I’m not downplaying the offence or upset caused.

The concealment and revelation of the sexual parts of the body go hand in hand with the rise of civilisation and progressive sexual repression. It is unlikely that the Greeks had strip clubs; instead they had orgies, the real thing. We have strip clubs because of the immense repression to which our sexuality has been subjected.

For Freud the concept of ‘beauty’ itself originates in sexual excitement but is sublimated away from the genitals onto the body as a whole, which is perceived as ‘beautiful’, a concept or feeling which can then be transferred onto other types of object, and then onto objects created and enjoyed for their ‘beauty’ alone i.e. works of art.

This explains why women are more often the object of art than men – even in women painter’s paintings – because men are more sexually predatory than women. And why the sight of the genitals themselves is rarely ‘beautiful’; all pleasure has been sublimated out of them leaving only the reaction-formation of ‘disgust’.

Sadism and masochism

These were given their names by Richard von Kraft-Ebing (Viennese) in the 1890s, after the Marquis de Sade (French) and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (Viennese) As with the other perversions, a moderate amount of sado-masochism is generally regarded as ‘normal’:

The sexuality of most male human beings contains an element of aggressiveness – a desire to subjugate. The biological significance of it seems to lie in the need for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by means other than the process of wooing. Thus sadism would correspond to an aggressive component of the sexual instinct which has become independent and exaggerated and, by displacement, has usurped the leading position.

Many types of sexual relationship which are regarded as ‘normal’ contain a high amount of aggression; sadism becomes an actual perversion when pleasure is derived from violence alone.

Masochism is sexual excitement aroused purely by receiving pain or humiliation. Later in his career, after he’d outlined the new theory of the superego, Freud distinguished between purely physical masochism and moral masochism, the desire to be found guilty of sins, to be punished for them and so on, an internal submission of the ego to the overbearing superego which plays such a large part in religious life.

Freud thinks masochism is secondary, a deflection of primary sadism – which the subject is too weak to inflict onto others – back onto the self. Masochism is for weaklings; or for the weakling part of even strong people.

The history of human civilisation shows beyond any doubt that there is an intimate connection between cruelty and the sexual instinct.

But nobody really knows why. Some people think aggression is a development of the primal desire to eat, to master objects by putting them in the mouth – an instinct seen in children and in the holy meals at the centre of many religions. Others think there is some intimate biochemical link between pleasure and pain.

Suggestive for Freud’s bisexual thesis – the mingling of the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’ in all of us – is Havelock Ellis and Kraft-Ebing’s agreement that masochism and sadism are often found in the same person.

(3) The perversions in general

Variation and disease

Medical men first identified perversions in the insane and perversion was blamed (like homosexuality) on ‘degeneracy’. What Freud has shown is that the perversions are implicit in even ‘normal’ love.

No healthy person, it appears, can fail to make some addition that might be called perverse to the normal sexual aim; and the universality of this finding is enough to show how inappropriate it is to use the word ‘perversion’ as a term of reproach. In the sphere of sexual life we are brought up against peculiar and, indeed, insoluble problems as soon as we try to draw a sharp line to distinguish mere variations within the range of what is physiological from pathological symptoms.

On one side the liberal Freud, on the other a vast army of censorious Christians, trying to draw precisely that line, trying to tell people exactly just which type and forms of ‘love’ are permissible and which aren’t, from the Pope to Mary Whitehouse.

For the Moral Majority it is always other people who are degenerate, other people who are the helpless prey of, for example, homosexual men in the homosexual age of consent debate.

Freud is saying, if you only look at the acts themselves you may be tempted to define them as unchristian or degenerate, pathological or perverted etc. But if you look at the instinct which carries so many people to such lengths, it is the same instinct and it is in all of us – it is what our minds are made of.

The mental factor in perversions

Despite the sometimes disgusting ends to which the love instinct is put, all these behaviours are to some extent idealisations of the libido, in the sense of abstractions of it away from its normal role.

The omnipotence of love is perhaps never more strongly proved than in such of its aberrations as these. The highest and the lowest are always closest to each other in the sphere of sexuality.

Two conclusions

Every individual plays a double existential role:

to reproduce, to pass on its genes and preserve the species
to preserve itself while it does this

Sometimes the two purposes clash and this is the basis of Freud’s psychology, the clash between the unconscious libidinal drive to have sex, all the time, with everyone and everything; and the rational ego’s struggle to redirect this blind drive into socially acceptable forms which help the individual survive and help it be at peace with itself. So the origins of any person’s sexuality must be looked for in two places: in the history of the species and the accidents of the individual.

Our study of the perversions has shown us that the sexual instinct has to struggle against certain mental forces which act as resistances, and of which shame and disgust are the most prominent. It is permissible to suppose that these forces play a part in restraining that instinct within the limits that are regarded as normal; and if they develop within the individual before the sexual instinct has reached its full strength, no doubt they then determine the course of its development.

These forces, which act like dams upon sexual development – disgust, shame and morality – must also be regarded as historical precipitates of the external inhibitions to which the sexual instinct has been subjected during the psychogenesis of the human race. We can observe the way in which, in the development of individuals, they arise at the appropriate moment, as though spontaneously, when upbringing and external influence give the signal.

In the second place we have found that some of the perversions are only made intelligible if we assume the convergence of several motive forces. If such perversions admit of analysis, that is, if they can be taken to pieces, then they must be of a composite nature. This gives us a hint that perhaps the sexual instinct itself is no simple thing but put together from components which have come apart again in the perversions.

(4) The sexual instincts in neurotics

Psychoanalysis

Here Freud reiterates his belief that all the psychoneuroses are based on sexual instinctual forces and that the psychoneuroses can only be investigated using the method perfected by Josef Breuer and himself – psychoanalysis. He gives a useful summary of the famous cathartic method:

By this I do not merely mean that the energy of the sexual instinct makes a contribution to the forces that maintain the pathological manifestations (the symptoms). I mean expressly to assert that that contribution is the most important and only constant source of energy of the neurosis and that in consequence the sexual life of the persons in question is expressed in these symptoms. The symptoms constitute the sexual activity of the patient!

The removal of the symptoms of hysterical patients by psychoanalysis proceeds on the supposition that those symptoms are substitutes – transcriptions, as it were – for a number of emotionally cathected mental processes, wishes and desires which, by the operation of a special psychical procedure (repression) have been prevented from obtaining discharge in psychical activity that is admissible to consciousness.

These mental processes, being held back in a state of unconsciousness, strive to obtain an expression that shall be appropriate to their emotional importance – to obtain discharge; and in the case of hysteria they find such an expression (by means of the process called conversion) in somatic or bodily phenomena, that is, in hysterical symptoms [cf Anna O’s inability to drink water, choking sensation etc].

By systematically turning those symptoms back (with the help of psychoanalysis) into emotionally cathected ideas – ideas that can now become conscious – it is possible to obtain the most accurate knowledge of the nature and origin of these formerly unconscious psychical structures.

Findings of psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis has shown that:

Symptoms represent a substitute for impulses the source of whose strength is derived from the sexual instinct… The character of hysterics shows a degree of sexual repression in excess of the normal quantity, an intensification of resistance against the sexual instinct (which we have already met with in the form of shame, disgust and morality), and what seems like an instinctive aversion on their part to any intellectual consideration of sexual problems.

In the case of someone predisposed to hysteria, the onset of his illness is precipitated when, either as a result of his own progressive maturity or of the external circumstances of his life, he finds himself faced by the demands of a real sexual situations. Between the pressure of the instinct and his antagonism to sexuality, illness offers him a way of escape. It does not solve his conflict but seeks to evade it by transforming his libidinal impulses into symptoms.

(See Jensen’s Gradiva, written two years later, which is a textbook example of hysteria as the self-deluding flight into illness. The archaeologist Norbert’s escape from the reality of an emotionally demanding sexual situation – his awakening love for Zoe – into delusions about the light-tripping woman on the antique frieze whom he names ‘Gradiva’, and then Norbert’s actual fleeing to Italy, to Pompeii, to escape the sexual situation, only to meet Zoe magically transformed into the woman in the frieze –– from the heart of the reaction-formation returns the repressed. In the novel Norbert is then cured through love, by the redirecting of his libido – unhealthily cathected onto the Gradiva-delusion – back to the reality of his flesh-and-blood love, Zoe, by the love object herself.)

Neurosis and perversion

Moreover, neurotics’ symptoms, upon psychoanalysis, often turn out to be conversions not just of ‘normal’ sexuality, but to include what are called the perversions i.e. neurotics’ unconsciousnesses are often raging with perverse wishes deflected into symptoms. Hence Dora’s persistent cough is a (transmuted) wish for oral sex with Herr K.

a) The unconscious life of all neurotics shows inverted impulses, fixation of the libido on persons of their own sex.

b) The unconsciouses of neurotics show tendencies to every kind of anatomical extension of sexual activity, particularly oral and anal.

c) An especially prominent part is played by the fact that the instincts involved are component instincts. Thus the perversions often come in opposing pairs: exhibitionism and voyeurism; the active and passive forms of the instinct for cruelty.

It is through such an opposition, a component tying together of libido and cruelty, that the transformation from love into hate takes place, the transformation from affectionate into hostile impulses.

(You can see here the embryonic shape of Freud’s later division of all the instincts into Sex instincts and Death instincts, Eros and Thanatos which would formulate nearly 20 years late, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.)

(5) Component instincts and erotogenic zones

If we trace back the positive and negative aspects of the perversions (masochism/sadism, voyeurism/exhibitionism) they appear to derive from component instincts which themselves admit of further analysis.

When sexual excitement derives from a particular organ or area of the body we refer to that as the erotogenic zone.

Thus, under the right circumstances, the anus or the mouth can become an erotogenic zone. Or the surface of the skin in touching. Or the eye itself in voyeurism where, through the eye alone is felt excitement comparable to that of sex in a ‘normal’ person.

(6) Reasons for the apparent preponderance of perverse sexuality in the psychoneuroses

But just because neurotic symptoms often contain a perverse wish doesn’t mean that neurotics are closer to perverts than to ‘normal’ people. Neurotics are normal people whose libido, either because of innate predisposition or due to accident, has been dammed up.

Most psychoneurotics fall ill after the age of puberty as a result of the demands made upon them by normal sexual life. Or else illnesses of this kind set in later, when the libido fails to obtain satisfaction along normal lines. In both these cases the libido behaves like a stream whose main bed has become blocked. It proceeds to fill up collateral channels which may hitherto have been empty.

Where the constitution is predisposed to illness maybe no external factor will be required. On the other hand, a great shock in real life may tip a robust constitution into neurotic illness.

Might there be a link between the perversions wished for by the neurotic’s unconscious, between the erotogenic zone it highlights, and innate constitution?

In a word, can you define personality types by predisposition to a particular perversion/erotogenic zone? (This is what Freud does in the following essay, about childhood sexuality, defining and describing the oral, anal types and so on.)

(7) Intimations of the infantile character of sexuality

“By demonstrating the part played by perverse impulses in the formation of symptoms in the psychoneuroses, we have quite remarkably increased the number of people who might be regarded as perverts. It is not only that neurotics in themselves constitute a very numerous class, but it must also be considered that an unbroken chain bridges the gap between the neuroses in all their manifestations and ‘normality’….

Thus the extraordinarily wide dissemination of the perversions forces us to suppose that the disposition to perversions is itself of no great rarity but must form a part of what passes as the ‘normal’ constitution…

There is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions but it is something innate in everyone, though as a disposition it may vary in its intensity and may be increased by the influences of actual life. What is in question are the innate constitutional roots of the sexual instinct. In one class of cases (the perversions) these roots may grow into the actual vehicles of sexual activity; in others they may be submitted to an insufficient suppression (repression) and thus be able in a roundabout way to attract a considerable portion of sexual energy to themselves as neurotic symptoms; while in the most favourable cases, which lie between these two extremes, they may by means of effective restriction and other kinds of modification bring about what is known as ‘normal’ sexual life.

Thus the germs of our character, the way our sexual instincts will be channelled, are probably laid down in childhood. In the next essay Freud looks at the play of influences which govern the evolution of infantile sexuality until its outcome in perversion, neurosis or normal sexual life.

Essay 2. Infantile sexuality

Neglect of the infantile factor

In Essay 2 Freud sets out to smash the popular opinion that children have no sexual feelings; that sexual feelings only set in with puberty. On the contrary, all the literature, and a chat with any nurse, will tell you that many babies play with their willies or fannies and suck various bits of themselves, but these stories are generally only mentioned as exceptions and monstrosities.

Why do we not remember our sexual feelings from our own childhood years?

Infantile amnesia

We definitely behave lively in every respect during childhood, giving every evidence of feeling joy, love, rage, delight. Why do we forget so much of this? Freud says that under analysis patients often remember events from their earliest years. Therefore the memories are stored somewhere – but are repressed from everyday access. Why? Nobody knows.

(1) The period of sexual latency in childhood and its interruptions

Based on a) scattered reports of the so-called exceptional behaviour of infants in the literature and b) the memories of neurotics revealed by psychoanalysis, Freud will sketch out a theory of infantile sexuality.

Freud thinks of the sex instinct as being innate in the child; that it grows as the child grows; that it is overtaken by suppression at the age of 5 or 6; then it revives and develops further at puberty, developing in a pattern of fits and starts. Childhood sexuality only emerges into the light of observable day in the third or fourth year of life.

Sexual inhibitions

It is during this same period that the mental forces are built up which are later to impede and block the flow of the sexual instinct – feelings of disgust (at an object), feelings of shame (at oneself) and moral and aesthetic ideals (as it were, objective guidelines we build for ourselves).

Reaction formation and sublimation

These are the two methods by which these dams are erected to prevent the return of repressed material into the conscious mind.

Sublimation is a widely reported phenomenon, the diverting of instinctual sexual energies into ‘higher’, more socially acceptable ones.

A reaction formation is:

a defence mechanism in which emotions and impulses which are anxiety-producing or perceived to be unacceptable are mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency

Freud thinks that reaction formations are the result of a series of unpleasurable experiences, either of internal unpleasure (excessive playing with the genitals leads to unpleasure) or external tellings-off, which create, as it were, a psychological allergic reaction to the erotogenic zone and experiences in question. Told off for touching his winkle enough times and the small boy genuinely come to believe it is dirty and disgusting.

[A digression on Freud’s final theory of sexual development

A lot later, Freud was to elaborate and fine-tune the notion that the human infants evolve through a set number of stages, namely:

polymorphous perversity – undifferentiated pleasure in the whole body
oral phase (0 to 1 year) – the infant gets most of their pleasure from their mouth, for example eating and thumb-sucking: if an infant’s oral needs aren’t met it can develop an develop oral fixation which continues into adult life
anal phase (1 to 3 years) – controlling bladder and bowel movements, potty training, when successfully accomplished leads to praise from parents and a sense of achievement and independence; but if parents take an approach that is too lenient, Freud suggested that an ‘anal-expulsive personality‘ – could develop whereby the adult has a messy, wasteful, or destructive personality, while if parents are too strict, he believed this could lead to an ‘anal-retentive‘ personality which is over-strict, rigid, and obsessive.
phallic stage (3 to 5 years) – focus of the libido is on the genitals and children begin to discover the difference between boys and girls
- in boys this gives rise to the Oedipus complex as boys view their fathers as a rival for the mother’s affections: the Oedipus complex describes these feelings of wanting to possess the mother and replace the father. But at the same time the little boy worries that his father will punish him for having these feelings, a fear Freud termed castration anxiety
- other Freudians suggested the term Electra complex to describe a similar but mirror set of feelings experienced by small girls, namely the wish to be possessed by their father and rid of their mother, accompanied by parallel feelings of guilt and anxiety
- Freud, however, believed that instead of the Electra complex, girls experience what he notoriously called penis envy i.e. the wish to be a boy, the lack of a penis forever leaving girls feeling inadequate. Even in Freud’s own day female psychoanalysts deplored this idea, and female followers have denied it and overwritten it ever since]
latency phase (6 to puberty) – the superego or conscience gains in power, the libido and memories of all those early physical pleasures are suppressed; instead boys or girls enter school and become more concerned with peer relationships, hobbies, and other interests; a time of exploration in which the sexual energy repressed or dormant, still present but sublimated into other areas such as intellectual pursuits and social interactions
genital stage (11, 12, 13 onwards) – at puberty the libido becomes active again and teens develop a strong sexual interest in the opposite sex: if all the previous stages have been successfully navigated, the person becomes a rounded, balanced individual]

Freud therefore thinks that the development through the oral, anal and phallic stages is partly achieved by the erection of these reaction formations which act as ‘dams’ or road blocks saying ‘No Going Back’.

That this may be the origin of feelings of ‘shame’ and ‘disgust’ is an interesting theory to ponder; that this process is the basis of all civilised morality, as Freud claims, was clearly a provocative thing to say, and which sparked much outraged opposition to him and his theories.

Interruptions of the latency period

Not all children’s sexuality goes underground at about five years old. There may be all sorts of exceptions, single strands of sexual pleasure continuing into the latent period.

(2) The manifestations of infantile sexuality

Thumb-sucking

This emerges early and often persists into adolescence. Sometimes accompanied by the rubbing of an erotogenic zone it can act as an introduction to masturbation. Because it is accompanied by pleasurable rubbing, and sometimes even by orgasm-type physical reactions, Freud makes thumb-sucking the prototype of infantile sexuality.

Auto-erotism (coined by Havelock Ellis in 1898)

Infants initially derive pleasure from their own bodies. Sucking thumbs or lips or any other part of the body is a repetition of the initial oral activity, sucking at the breast.

No-one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as the prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.

As the child grows it experiments with enacting the sexual pleasure of sucking when the breast is absent: sucking any part of its own body, taking itself as a source of pleasure. In later life the pleasures of lingering kissing re-enact this primal sexual experience. In some children there is a constitutional intensification of the labial region (lips):

If that significance persists, these same children will grow up to become epicures in kissing, will be inclined to perverse kissing or, if males, will have a powerful motive for drinking and smoking. If, however, repression ensues, they will feel disgust at food and will produce hysterical vomiting.

Thus, for Freud, entire character types and types of adult behaviour can be traced right back to earliest childhood behaviour.

(3) The sexual aim of infantile sexuality

Characteristics of erotogenic zones

Erotogenic zones are a moveable feast. Particular parts of the body seem predisposed to resonate with sexual pleasure (the genitals, lips, nipples, anus, the surface of the skin generally) and if an infant, in its auto-erotic stage, chances on one of these to suck or play with, that part easily becomes the model of sexual pleasure, of reassurance etc in later life.

Any part of the body can acquire the same susceptibility to stimulation as is possessed by the genitals and can become an erotogenic zone.

It is hard to think of a view more contrary to the popular, conventional view that a) infants have no sex life and that b) sex appears only at puberty and is exclusively confined to the genitals.

The infantile sexual aim

Although all the body is susceptible to sexualisation, certain zones seem predisposed to be especially erotogenic, generally zones which are physiologically designed for other activities and pleasures which the child can then repeat by auto-erotic stimulation: the lips for eating, the penis for peeing, the anus for defecating can all be co-opted by the libido.

(4) Masturbatory sexual manifestations

Activity of the anal zone

Psychoanalysis of patients has revealed the surprising extent to which the anus is not only a source of pleasure in infancy but retains its pleasurable power throughout life.

Children who are making use of the susceptibility to erotogenic stimulation of the anal zone betray themselves by holding back their stool till its accumulation brings about violent muscular contractions and, as it passes through the anus, is able to produce powerful stimulation of the mucous membrane. In so doing it must no doubt cause not only painful but highly pleasurable sensations.

One of the clearest signs of subsequent eccentricity or nervousness is to be seen when a baby obstinately refuses to empty its bowels when he is put on the pot and holds back that function till he himself chooses to exercise it. He is naturally not concerned with dirtying the bed, he is only anxious not to miss the subsidiary pleasure attached to defecating.

Faeces come to have another important meaning for the child.

They are clearly treated as part of the infant’s own body and represent his first ‘gift’: by producing them he can express his active compliance with his environment and, by withholding them, his disobedience…

The retention of the faecal mass, which is thus carried out by the child intentionally to begin with, in order to serve, as it were, a masturbatory stimulus upon the anal zone or to be employed as a weapon in his relation to the people looking after him, is also one of the roots of the constipation which is so common among neuropaths.

Activity of the genital zone

The glans of the penis in boys and the clitoris in girls:

The anatomical situation of this region, the secretions in which it is bathed, the washing and rubbing to which it is subjected in the course of a child’s toilet, as well as accidental stimulation, make it inevitable that the pleasurable feeling which this part of the body is capable of producing should be noticed by children even during their earliest infancy, and should give rise to a need for its repetition.

Girls often masturbate simply by rubbing their thighs together. Boys tend to use hands.

The preference for the hand which is shown by boys is already evidence of the important contribution which the instinct for mastery is destined to make to masculine sexual activity.

Second phase of infantile masturbation

In this early essay Freud posits three periods of sexual activity: a first phase of infantile sexuality; a second phase flourishing around the fourth year; then the eruptions of puberty.

The second phase of infantile sexual activity may assume a variety of different forms which can only be determined by a precise analysis of individual cases. But all its details leave behind the deepest unconscious impressions in the subject’s memory, determine the development of his later character, if he is to remain healthy, and the symptomatology of his neurosis, if he is to fall ill after puberty.

Return of early infantile masturbation

The return of infantile sexuality at around 4 and 5 years is determined by all sorts of factors, internal and external. But Freud is careful to mention the external factor of infantile seduction (or child abuse, as we would say) as a way many of his patients recall being jolted, as it were, into sexual life, and made aware of the erotogenicity of the genitals.

Polymorphously perverse disposition

In and as a result of sexual abuse, children can be induced to all manner of perversions thus revealing, for Freud, an innate disposition to polymorphous perversion.

The same, he asserts, is true of many women, as witness the large number of prostitutes who can accommodate any type of sexual taste for their clients.

It becomes impossible not to recognise that this same disposition to perversions of every kind is a general and fundamental human characteristic.

[At one and the same time this notion is typical of Freud’s throwaway sexism, but also of the immense tolerance and acceptance of a huge variety of sexual predilections implicit in his theory.]

Component instincts

Exhibitionism, voyeurism and cruelty are all apparent as perversions in potentia in children. Small boys proudly display the thing which gives them so much pleasure and which they pee through, their penis, which thus symbolises at least two types of infantile ‘mastery’.

Looking is the child’s earliest way of relating to the world. Once it has established its own erotogenic zones it is curious to see them in others: voyeurism.

Cruelty comes relatively easily to the childish nature, since the obstacle that brings the instinct for mastery to a halt at other people’s pain – namely a capacity for pity – is developed relatively late…

It may be assumed that the impulse of cruelty arises from the instinct for mastery and appears at a period of sexual life at which the genitals have not yet taken over their later role…

Children who distinguish themselves by special cruelty towards animals and playmates usually give rise to a just suspicion of an intense and precocious sexual activity arising from erotogenic zones…

The absence of the barrier of pity brings with it a danger that the connection between the cruel and the erotogenic instincts, thus established in childhood, may prove unbreakable in later life.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions show that early beating on the buttocks can easily be linked with erotogenic pleasure and form the basis of a fusion of the instincts of sex and cruelty in later life.

(5) The sexual researches of childhood

The instinct for knowledge

At the same time as children reach an early peak of sexuality (3 to 5 years) they display an instinct for knowledge. For Freud this is a sublimated form of the instincts for mastery and of seeing, voyeurism.

Psychoanalysis has shown that the first problem to awaken the childish thirst for knowledge are sexual problems, where do I come from? why does my wee-wee make give me pleasure?

The Riddle of the Sphinx

Freud gave this typically grandiose title to the core question of infancy: where do babies come from?

Sex differences aren’t important at this stage since boys assume all babies have penises.

Castration complex and penis envy [this section was added in 1915]

Only painfully do boys realise there’s a whole category of person who doesn’t have a penis and become petrified that they too might lose their mighty weapon. This he calls the castration complex.

The discovery that girls don’t have one gives many boys an enduringly low opinion of girls. For girls, the discovery that boys have this toy which they can play with induces in them penis envy and an enduring sense of being second-rate. Penis envy culminates in the girl’s wish to be a boy.

[The whole concept of ‘penis envy’ is probably the single most outrageous example of Freud, despite being a revolutionary on one level, nonetheless often reinscribing the sexist prejudices of his Victorian times in a new language.]

Theories of birth

All children speculate about where babies come from, especially if their mother is pregnant again. The central feature of most theories is that the baby is got by eating something (as in many fairy tales) and delivered through the anus.

Sadistic view of sexual intercourse

Many children see or overhear their parents making love. Children feel intense curiosity about it. It seems to have to do with some joint activity involving peeing or defecating. But many children pick up on the apparent violence involved (hard physical movements, screaming) and this is another way in which cruelty may attach itself to a child’s fantasy world and resurface in a person’s adult attitudes to sex.

Typical failure of infantile sexual researches

No matter how subtle the sexual theories of children they are invariably wrong; for how could they know about semen and ovaries? But the whole attempt is important to Freud as a symbol of the growing independence of the child. These researches:

constitute a first step towards taking an independent attitude in the world, and they imply a high degree of alienation of the child from the people in his environment who formerly enjoyed his complete confidence.

(6) The phases of development of the sexual organisation

Infantile sexual pleasure is the opposite in every way of ‘normal’ adult sexuality. It is essentially auto-erotic, and its component instincts are generally disconnected and scattered over all manner of activities: this is the meaning of polymorphous perversity.

Compare and contrast with adult sexuality aims at genital contact with some external object.

Pregenital organisations

I.e. sexual patterns before the instinct settles on the genitals:

1. The oral or cannibalistic phase: the aim is the incorporation of the sexual object, to eat it, to master it by ingesting it and stimulating the mucous membranes of the lips at the same time.

This is the origin of cannibalism in primitive peoples; of the primitive relic of a holy meal found in most religions; and of the higher intellectual activity of identification with a hero figure.

The primitive and intellectual functions are brought together in the Eucharist where we eat the body of Christ at the same time as we acknowledge Him lord and master.

2. The sadistic-anal phase: it is at this early stage that the sex instinct can be seen dividing into the active-passive division which characterises all later sexuality: the masculine drive to mastery, of defecating at our own time and pleasure; and the feminine pleasure derived from the anus; a sadistic and a passive pleasure intermingle.

Ambivalence

This duality is the basis of later ambivalence, a word coined by the Swiss psychiatrist Paul Eugen Bleuler (Bleuler was a prolific coiner of neologisms; he also invented the terms ‘schizophrenia’, ‘schizoid’ and ‘autism’).

Ambivalence became central to Freudian theory. It describes the holding of contradictory feelings, classically love and hate, towards the same object. Thus the child can both love but be terrified by their father.

Phallic phase

Freud distinguishes one last phase of infantile sexuality, where a love-object has emerged but the instinct in both boys and girls focuses on the penis alone, when boys develop pride in their penis and girls develop a painful sense of lack of penis, giving rise to penis envy (see comments above).

Diphasic choice of object

To summarise, Freud can claim that, completely contrary to the popular view, the distinctive thing about human sexuality is:

that it is present, in various forms, in infants from the earliest time
that it develops through a series of stages
that each of these stages carries the risk of arrest or error which deforms the child’s feelings and emotions around libido
that infantile sexual choices and activity are progressively repressed by reaction-formations (guilt, shame) by the age of about 5
that the entire set of experiences goes underground during the latency period (5 or 6 to puberty), is repressed and forgotten
that it resurfaces in a more explicitly sexual mode at puberty but with shapes and flavours conditioned by those earliest experiences

These infantile longings become the basis of later ‘affectionate’ feelings:

Their sexual aims have become mitigated and they now represent what may be described as the ‘affectionate current’ of sexual life. Only psychoanalytic investigation can show that behind this affection, admiration and respect there lie concealed the old sexual longings of the infantile component instincts which have now become unserviceable.

(7) The sources of infantile sexuality

These conclusions have been reached by the psychoanalysis of adult patients and the observation of children. Sexual excitation in children seems to arise from:

a) repetition of satisfaction achieved in normal organic processes (sucking, defecating)
b) through external stimulation of erotogenic zones
c) as the expression of fundamental instincts

Mechanical excitations

Children love swinging and being thrown and caught. Psychoanalysis has shown the recurrence of these sensations in adult dreams i.e. that they lay down patterns of the earliest pleasures, for example, fantasies of flying, air blowing against the skin and genitals.

It is well known that rocking is habitually used to induce sleep in restless children. The shaking produced by driving in carriages and later by railway travel exercises such a fascinating effect upon older children that every boy, at any rate, has at one time or another in his life wanted to be an engine driver.

It is a puzzling fact that boys take such an extraordinarily intense interest in things connected with railways and, at the age at which the production of fantasies is most active (shortly before puberty), use those things as the nucleus of a symbolism that is peculiarly sexual. A compulsive link of this kind between railway travel and sexuality is clearly derived from the pleasurable character of the sensations of movement.

In the event of repression, which turns so many childish preferences into their opposite, these same individuals, when they are adolescents or adults, will react to rocking or swinging with a feeling of nausea, will be terribly exhausted by a railway journey, or will be subject to attacks of anxiety on the journey.

Muscular activity

Many patients report their first memories of sexual excitation when romping, fighting and playing with playmates. Organised games are done at school to keep the body healthy and divert adolescent attention away from sexuality: Freud says what this is doing is channel sexuality back into one of its specific components.

Affective process

Powerful emotions have sexual effects. Terrified or anxious children may touch their genitals for reassurance. The erotic aspect of terror, fright and so on may become intimately associated with sexuality so that adults find fear and terror thrilling; either in real life, in fantasies of rape or masochistic punishment; or in imaginary worlds of books or the cinema.

Pathways of mutual influence

If the taking in of food gives rise to sexual pleasure then the reverse may be true. If healthy sexuality accompanies healthy eating, then disturbance of sexuality may lead to disturbance of nourishment. Thus a sexually disturbed hysteric may cease eating.

We can speculate about a whole network of pathways by which sexual instincts may be channeled both towards basic organic functions (for example, eating) and also rerouted towards higher functions (that is, sublimated, into thinking, planning, deciding).

Essay 3. The transformations of puberty

Infantile sexuality is polymorphously perverse and auto-erotic, finding pleasure as it learns to control and play with its own body.

The latency period sees the repression of sexuality in the name of various reaction-formations and sexuality’s sublimation into all kinds of games and fantasies.

With puberty the genitals become active and the subject actively seeks a love object outside itself. The new sexual aim of genital union appears and all the scattered erotogenic zones with their sex impulses become focused on, and subordinate to, genital union. Hopefully.

‘Normal’ sexuality consists of the uniting of the affectionate current (the sublimated remains of childhood sexuality) and the sensual current (mainstream libido).

So proper human sexual development is the coming together of affection/love and sex/pleasure, focussed on the genitals, to produce the ‘normal’ healthy adult. But, as always, there can be all kinds of hiccups along the way.

(1) The primacy of the genital zones and fore-pleasure

At puberty the sex organs grow and become ready for use. They can be excited in three ways:

excitation of the erotogenic zones from outside
from the organic interior
from mental life, the storehouse of impressions and ideas

Sexual excitement is felt in two ways:

perception of a mental tension of an extremely compelling type
physical preparation: erection of the penis, lubrication of the vagina

Sexual tension

How come sexual excitation is perceived as both pleasurable but also as an unpleasurable tension?

The mechanism of fore-pleasure

Touching or seeing clearly give rise to a) pleasure in themselves b) a perceived raising of sexual tension.

It is as if the fore-pleasure derived from stimulating the erotogenic zones is designed to increase the incentive to move onto the act of sexual union.

Initial pleasure thus disguises increasing tension (unpleasure) so you are led relentlessly on towards copulation, the aim of the entire organism.

The whole pattern leads up to orgasm and the release of the appropriate sexual substances. It would seem that orgasms are designed to extinguish libido, if only temporarily. They are the height of pleasure, the abrupt release of tension by the blood thronging the penis or clitoris rushing back into the body as the scrotum or vagina undergoes a series of muscular contractions perceived as pleasurable.

And this release of tension takes you right the way back to square one i.e. normal bodily function; the overwhelming compulsion towards sex evaporates, the rational mind returns to full control.

Freud divides the two stages into fore-pleasure and end-pleasure.

A distinction similar to the fore-pleasure offered by the telling of jokes which prepare you for the greater release of libidinal pressure (laughing).

[He uses the same division in his essay Creative Writers and Daydreaming to describe the fore-pleasure afforded by aesthetic or formal literary techniques which prepare the way for the deeper pleasure of sharing unconscious fantasies (tales of damnation and salvation, risk and adventure, Ian Fleming and Barbara Cartland).]

Dangers of fore-pleasure

But fore-pleasures are clearly yet another balancing act; the incentive of pleasure must be balanced by an increase of tension which successfully propels you towards sex. If the yield of orgasmic pleasure doesn’t live up to the growth in tension, you may become stuck at the fore-pleasure stage.

Obviously enough, you may be predisposed to this through any number of accidents which emerge in infancy. Extreme attachment to various types of fore-pleasure, to a particular erotogenic zone or to the mental equivalents of them (stimulation of the anus – masochism/inversion) may develop into full-blown perversion.

But these very complex combinations will have some influence over the shape of even the most healthy adult sexuality.

Not only the deviations from normal sexual life but its normal form as well are determined by the infantile manifestations of sexuality.

Again, if this is an accurate account of the growth of sexuality, it shows that it will be very hard to police, to draw a hard and fast line between ‘normal’ and perverse.

Freud is making the controversial claim that ‘the normal’ is built on ‘the perverse’ and most of its activities contain the seeds of perversity.

(2) The problem of sexual excitation

Part played by the sexual substances

Maybe sexual tension is produced, in men, by the accumulation of semen in the testicles? Kraft-Ebing thought so. But if so, how can this account for sexual excitation in children and women?

Importance of the internal sexual organs

Arguing against that theory, observation of castrated men shows that sexual excitement continues to operate with no semen at all.

Chemical theory

Freud speculates that the key role is played by substances released by the sex glands. In his day there was no convincing biological theory of sex.

The discovery of the class of chemicals called ‘hormones’ (at around this time, 1905, in England) paved the way to our present understanding of how sex works.

It’s worth pointing out, though, that even today one of the great mysteries is: Why Sex? And, as Steve Jones says, If Sex, why only two sexes?

(3) The libido theory

Libido is:

a quantitively variable force which serves as a measure of processes and transformations occurring in the field of sexual excitation

A kind of electricity. Freud imagines that libido is distinguished from the other main instinct, hunger, chemically. Libido is a chemically unique force. Psychoanalysis has shown that libido is derived not just from the genitals but from all sorts of organs, including the skin.

We thus reach the idea of a quantity of libido, to the mental representation of which we give the name of ego-libido, and whose production, increase or diminution, distribution and displacement should afford us possibilities for explaining the psychosexual phenomena observed.

Psychoanalysis can only observe ego-libido as it becomes attached to objects i.e. becomes object-libido, as it is attached to, detached from, swapped around various objects (for example, images, fixations, words and ideas) directing the subject’s activity towards sex. For the act of sex, in particular orgasm, results in the temporary extinction of libido.

Psychoanalysis observes the outflowing of libido from the ego and its return thereto.

The ego acts as a psychic reservoir for libido.

In the earliest phases every ego is narcissistic, that is, focusses libido on itself (during the auro-erotic stages of infantile sexuality). Only later does the ego develop the ability to project energy onto external objects and Freud (or his English translators) label these object-cathexes.

The slightest damage to the organism (for example, illness) results in a return to infantile narcissism, as do psychic wounds.

Narcissism is also evoked by particularly self-contained objects, by aloof women, by cats, and by babies (see Freud’s 1914 essay On Narcissism).

In later editions of the Three Essays Freud attacks Jung for watering down libido to make it mean psychical instinctive forces in general.

But the whole point of having a distinct sexual instinct, chemically differentiated from all other instincts, whose special operations can be studied through observation and analysis, in fact all Freud’s efforts and theories, are destroyed if you thus throw out the distinguishing sexual element of libido theory.

(4) The differentiation between men and women

Libido is masculine i.e. active, in character.

In levels of autoerotism and masturbation boys and girls are similar, though girls develop the reaction-formations of shame and disgust more easily than boys (i.e. mental forces which damp down their libido).

Freud suggests three meanings of masculine and feminine:

passive versus active personalities
biological i.e. defined by sex organs
sociological i.e. observing the actual behaviour of men and women

Freud uses masculine and feminine to denote active and passive. To say libido is masculine means it is, in this value system, always active. As to the sociological aspect:

Such observation shows that in human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense. Every individual, on the contrary, displays a mixture of the character-traits belonging to their own and to the opposite sex and shows a combination of activity and passivity…

Without the fundamental idea of innate bisexuality I think it would scarcely be possible to arrive at an understanding of the sexual manifestations that are actually to be observed in men and women.

Leading zones in men and women

The clitoris is what little girls masturbate, as boys the penis. Both become erect i.e. engorged with blood during excitation. But Freud thinks that at puberty, whereas boys receive a fresh wave of sexual excitement, girls undergo a profound sexual repression; this takes the form of moving their chief erotogenic zone from the clitoris to the vagina.

The ‘normal’ woman has thus repressed her masculine active organ (the clitoris) in the name of vaginal excitation designed for sex and procreation:

The fact that women change their leading erotogenic zone in this way, together with the wave of repression at puberty which, as it were, puts away their childish masculinity, are the chief determinants of the greater proneness of women to neurosis and especially to hysteria.

[This is, of course, complete rubbish. Women retain their chief sexual excitation through the clitoris. The rediscovery and widespread publicisation of clitoridal sexuality was one of the great achievements of the feminists in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s I was well aware that many women cannot orgasm through vaginal stimulation alone but need clitoral stimulation as well and I think (I hope) this has now become common knowledge. Thus Freud’s theorising away of the clitoris, along with all his theories about the inevitable inferiority of women, are the grossest example of his simply recasting the patriarchal prejudices of his time in a new language.]

(5) The finding of an object

[Expanded in the 1915 essay On Narcissism.]

A person may love:

1. according to the anaclitic (attachment) type:

the woman who feeds him
the man who protects him

2. according to the narcissistic type:

what he himself is
what he himself was
what he himself would like to be i.e. an idol
someone who was once part of themselves i.e. a baby

Suckling at the breast is the prototype of all pleasure and love.

From 1915 Freud introduces the idea of narcissism into his theory. The physical pleasure of suckling at the breast is now accompanied by the psychic pleasure of self-love, the earliest attachment of libido to the ego, the ego to itself, as it grows and comes to consciousness.

After puberty all love objects will partake of these two earliest loves; all love objects will have an element of narcissism and of attachment (cupboard) love.

The finding of a love-object is always a refinding of this original pleasure. A recapturing of what we once had. Falling in love is always a return to lost happiness.

The sexual object during early infancy

Everyone’s first love is for their mother. Freud goes further to say everyone’s first sexual object is their mother. Mothers stroke and kiss and caress babies, thus awaking the erotogenic zones and sex instincts. There is nothing perverse in this. The mother is only fulfilling her task in teaching the child how to love. Later in life, the former baby will itself stroke and kiss and caress a love object. How else does it learn to do this except by unconscious recall of its own childhood caresses?

Infantile anxiety

Infantile anxiety is caused by the loss of the person the infant loves. They are afraid of the dark because in the dark they cannot see the person they love. An infant who turns his love/libido into anxiety when it cannot be satisfied is behaving exactly like an adult neurotic.

The barrier against incest

‘Normal’ development means the transmutation of the early sexual attachment to the mother into ‘affection’ i.e. aim-inhibited libido. One of life’s great tasks is overcoming this love and learning to reattach it to socially acceptable objects.

This happens partly due to internal psychic development but is hugely reinforced by social and moral pressures. In Totem and Taboo (1913) Freud writes about the fundamental taboo against incest which is, in his view, the beginnings of society and morality.

Nonetheless, incest remains a possibility in the unconscious mind, in dreams and fantasies.

Puberty is particularly rich in fantasies as the adolescent tries out various combinations of object and experiments with its new strong feelings obsessively in the mind, before attempting to put them into practice.

Some fantasies are particularly common: the adolescent’s fantasies of overhearing his parents having sex; of having been seduced in infancy; of having been threatened with castration; fantasies of life in the womb; and the so-called Family Romance, the fantasy of being the abandoned child of rich beautiful parents – a rationalisation of infantile perception of parental omnipotence.

In overcoming renewed childhood sexual fantasies about his parents the adolescent also has to make the crucial break with them; to rebel against parental authority, particularly the father.

Some people never make it and remain in thrall to their parents. Many women never properly escape and remain as loving and passive as they were in childhood. Girls have a tendency to rebel against their sexual destiny, against sexuality itself and to flee into exaggerated affection for siblings or parents. To become virgin carers.

It falls to some men to become the complete rebels against authority which are required by the furtherance of the race.

After-effects of infantile object-choice

These powerful loves of childhood cast a pall over the rest of our lives. Women often look for older, more mature, authoritative husbands who are quite obviously father-substitutes. Men, even more often, are looking for the unconditional love of their mothers.

Prevention of inversion

It seems that the presence in our childhood of the same sex parent as a figure of a) resented authority and b) sexual rivalry, contributes to our early love for the opposite sex parent, all of which is motivated by the hormones at puberty.

But if the family unit is disturbed, if one of the parents is lacking, this is a powerful accidental stimulus to homosexuality (innate predispositions aside).

SUMMARY

* Neuroses are the mirror image of perversions: both represent aberrations from normal sexuality. Neurotic symptoms are generally a reinvoking of infantile perversions, at least in fantasy and transferred symptoms, as libido flees an unbearable sexual situation.

* Perversions are the fixation of the libido onto particular components of sexuality at the expense of normal heterosexual genital union.

A disposition to perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct and ‘normal’ sexual behaviour is developed out of it as a result of organic changes and psychical inhibitions occurring in the course of maturation.

* Any departure from established sexuality is therefore an instance of developmental inhibition and infantilism, a regression.

* The sexual instinct is put together from various factors and, in the perversions, these components fall apart.

* ‘Normal’ sexuality integrates these instincts and submits them to socially-condoned genital aims.

* Children bring sexuality into the world with them. After an efflorescence of sexuality from ages 2 to 5 the sex instinct undergoes a repression, entering the latency period. Sexual feelings continue during this period but rerouted:

a) to develop secondary characteristics such as affection and friendship (aim-inhibited libido)
b) into ‘reaction-formations’ to sexual activities, which are now perceived as dirty, shameful, disgusting and so on, into a predisposition to receive moral education. These reaction-formations will be critical in establishing the channels along which libido can flow after puberty; too strong and they will react badly to the arrival of puberty and real sexual situations, causing all sorts of havoc, not least the flight into illness which characterises neurosis.

* Children develop through three phases: oral (breastfeeding), anal-sadistic in which ambivalence emerges, and phallic, part of which is the Oedipus complex. Then it is all buried in the latency period.

* The diphasic onset of sexuality i.e. in two stages, allowing for a latency period during which the socialising process can get going, seems to be a precondition for humanity’s civilised achievements. But, being so long and precarious, the latency period also explains mankind’s predisposition to neurosis and mental illness, and to the various failures and perversions of the sex instinct.

* The perversions of infancy, the finding of pleasure in erotogenic zones, returns with puberty but subordinated, as fore-pleasures, to the great act of copulation itself.

* Children find their first sex object in the opposite sex parent but this lust is repressed and redirected by the primeval psychological taboo against incest.

Factors interfering with development:

Every step on this long path of development can become a point of fixation, every juncture in this involved combination can be an occasion for a dissociation of the sexual instinct.

Constitution and heredity

Nature/nurture, which comes first? Imponderable. Except to say that in families with a predisposition to sexual failure, the men will tend to be perverts, the women, “true to the tendency of their sex to repression”, will become negative perverts i.e. hysterics.

Further modification

Whatever the hereditary predisposition, it is clear the sex instincts undergo further modifications:

Perversion: at puberty the libido may find the genital zone too weak for the tasks asked of it, and so revert to fixation on earlier infantile perverse zones.

Repression: the instincts in question are repressed and travel underground until they can find their expression disguised as hysterical symptoms. They can have perfectly normal sex lives but accompanied by psychological problems.

Sublimation: excessive sexual dispositions can be redirected into socially acceptable fields, thus yielding greater psychic efficiency and providing a strong evolutionary advantage. Maybe this is the reason why sublimation is the basis of much human mental life.

Reaction-formation: the building up during the latency period of strong counter-forces to perverse instincts, abetted by education which is designed to channel sexuality into ‘normal’ ends.

What we describe as a person’s character is built up to a considerable extent from the material of sexual excitations and is composed of instincts that have been fixed since childhood, of constructions achieved by means of sublimation, and of other constructions, employed for effectively holding in check perverse impulses which have been recognised as unutilisable.

Credit

All Freud’s works have complicated histories in translation. The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality were first translated into English in 1953 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. References in this blog are to the revised version, published in 1977 as part of ‘On Sexuality’, Volume 7 of the Pelican Freud Library.

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by Simon on June 19, 2023 • Permalink

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Tagged Affective process, allergic reaction, ambivalence, anal phase, anal-expulsive personality, anal-retentive personality, ancient Greece, ancient Greeks, Anna O, anxiety, auto-erotic stage, auto-erotism, Bacchic orgies, Barbara Cartland, Beyond The Pleasure Principle, bisexuality, bisexuals, Bleuler, cannibalism, castration anxiety, castration complex, cathartic method, character, childhood sexuality, Christ, Christianity, Cinderella, clitoridal sexuality, clitoris, conscience, copulation, cruelty, cunnilingus, Darwin, defecating, defence mechanism, degeneracy, deviations, Diphasic choice of object, dreams, Electra complex, end-pleasure, Eros and Thanatos, erotogenic zone, erotogenic zones, erotogenicity, Eucharist, exhibitionism, Fairy Tales, Fantasy, father-substitute, fellatio, Feminism, fetishism, flight into illness, fore-pleasure, Frank Sulloway, Freud, gay, genital stage, genital union, genitals, glans, Goethe, Gradiva, guilt, Havelock Ellis, heterosexuality, history, homosexuality, homosexuals, hormones, human psychology, hysteria, hysterical symptoms, Ian Fleming, incest, incest taboo, infantile amnesia, Infantile anxiety, infantile masturbation, infantile narcissism, infantile object-choice, infantile sexual aim, infantile sexuality, instincts, internal sexual organs, Inversion, inverts, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jensen, Joe Orton, John Ruskin, jokes, Josef Breuer, Jung, kissing, latency phase, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, LGBTQ+, libido, libido theory, Literature, love, Lust, Marquis de Sade, marriage, masculine sexual activity, masochism, masturbation, mons Veneris, morality, neuroses, neurosis, normal sexuality, Oedipus Complex, oral fixation, oral phase, Oscar Wilde, overvaluation of the love object, Paul Eugen Bleuler, penis, penis envy, perversion, perversions, perversity, Phallic phase, phallic stage, phases of development, physiology, polymorphous perversion, polymorphous perversity, polymorphously perverse disposition, Priapus, primitive societies, procreation, psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, psychoanalysts, psychogenesis, psychological taboo, Psychology, Puberty, rape, reaction-formation, reaction-formations, religious life, repression, Richard von Kraft-Ebing, sadism, sadistic-anal phase, sado-masochism, seduction theory, semen, sex, sex instinct, sex organs, sexual energy, sexual excitation, sexual inhibitions, sexual intercourse, sexual latency, sexual objects, sexual tension, sexuality, shame, Sigmund Freud, Sociology, sodomy, Steve Jones, sublimation, sucking, suckling, Superego, the diphasic onset of sexuality, the ego, The Interpretation of Dreams, the latency period, the libido, The Riddle of the Sphinx, Three Essays On The Theory of Sexuality, thumb sucking, Totem and Taboo, transformations of puberty, transvestites, vagina, vaginal excitation, Victorian age, voyeurism, W.H. Auden, Western literature

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An Autobiographical Study by Sigmund Freud (1925)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian or bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

This essay was one of 27 commissioned for a series called ‘Contemporary Medicine in Self-Portrayals’ i.e. less a strict autobiography than a ‘my life and my contribution to science’.

It comprises a sketchy historical review of the events leading up to Freud’s ‘discovery’ of psychoanalysis, then an exposition of psychoanalysis’s central tenets, an explanation of the technique, and a sketch of its applications to other spheres of human knowledge.

Early life

Sigmund Freud was born on 6 May 1856 in Freiberg in Moravia, in the modern Czech Republic, the youngest of 9 children of the bankrupt wool-trader Jacob Freud (facts also mentioned in The Interpretation of Dreams, page 284).

The family moves to Vienna when Freud is 4. He is consistently top of his class at the Gymnasium (junior school).

His father, Jacob, though poor, said, ‘Follow whatever career you wish, son’. Freud didn’t especially want to become a doctor:

I was moved rather by a sort of curiosity which was directed more towards human concerns than towards natural objects.

At higher school he was caught up in the intellectual excitement generated by the theories of Darwin and, after listening to a reading of an inspiring essay on Nature by Goethe, he decides to study medicine (as recounted in The Interpretation of Dreams, page 572).

1873: Starts attending University of Vienna. Encounters antisemitism for the first time. Unsure what to specialise in until he attends classes by Ernst Brucke, Professor of Physiology, who becomes his hero.

1876 to 1882: Researches physiology of the nervous system of fish and eels. Takes a long time to win his Degree as Doctor of Medicine, in 1881.

1882: Brucke tells him, ‘You are poor. There’s no money in pure research; best to take up the actual practice of medicine.’ So Sigmund enters the Vienna General Hospital but continues with his theoretical interests, now concentrating on disorders of the human nervous system.

From the anatomy of the brain – still a very theoretical subject, i.e. no cash – Freud moved on to study nervous diseases. Almost nothing was known about nervous diseases in the 1880s, there were no specialists and few texts in Vienna. Far away in Paris shone the beacon of Jean-Martin Charcot, a leading light in treating mental illness.

1885: Appointed Lecturer on Neuropathology due to his research. Soon afterwards awarded a bursary and set off to Paris to study under Charcot. Here Charcot had proved that hysteria existed as a definite and distinct diagnosis. Contrary to received opinion it could be found in men as well as women. It resulted in physical symptoms. It could be brought on by hypnotic suggestion. But as to the psychological origins of hysteria – nothing.

1886: On the way back from his winter stay in Paris he stopped at Berlin to study the disorders of childhood. Via the prestigious Kassowitz Institute for Children Freud published a string of learned studies of cerebral palsy.

1883 to 1884: Freud experiments with the new drug cocaine as a possible anaesthetic, but others do the definitive work.

1886: Freud marries Martha Binnays, his fiancée for 4 long, frustrating years due to his lack of money or prospects. Now, aged 30, with no real achievements to his name, Freud really needs money to set up the kind of bourgeois household he wants.

1886: When Freud lectures in Vienna on Charcot’s discoveries he is largely ridiculed and excluded from research laboratories. So he sets up as a private consultant on nervous diseases. How does he treat people? With electrotherapy (which he soon drops) and with the method of hypnotism which he had witnessed in Paris.

1889: Freud visits Nancy in France, to watch the great Hippolyte Bernheim perform hypnosis. It was Bernheim who developed the notion of suggestibility under hypnosis. Freud had translated Bernheim’s On Suggestion and its Applications to Therapy in 1888. He took along some of his private patients. Pondering hypnosis hints that there are forces operating on the mind of which we are normally unconscious. But in practice it rarely cures real neurotics.

1880 to 1882: While all this went on Freud befriended Josef Breuer, a physician 14 years his elder, who lives and practices in Berlin. Breuer tells him about his treatment of Anna O. This clever young woman was afflicted with a colourful array of neurotic symptoms. Breuer discovered that if he hypnotised her, she was capable of explaining the origins of the symptoms in real-life events of which she was unaware in waking life. Not only that, but once she explained the cause, the symptom disappeared! Clearly neurotic symptoms have meaning; they are related to real life events, so they are memories but they are buried somewhere inaccessible to waking consciousness. Freud replicates Breuer’s results with many of his private patients.

1895: Freud publishes Studies On Hysteria, a list of case studies with some theory of the ‘cathartic’ method of cure i.e. hysteria is caused by suppressed memories but if these memories can be brought into the conscious minds, the symptom disappears. Breuer is happy to leave his findings at that.

1895 to 1900: The Heroic Period. Freud sets out on a voyage of discovery building on the insights gained so far. Above all, he begins to suspect a sexual factor in the aetiology of hysteria. He moves on to confirm a similar sexual motive lying beneath neuraesthenics. He realises that much of the success of hypnotism is due to the patient’s trust in the hypnotist. After a while he realises that he can get comparable results in his patients (i.e. the release of a flood of memories) by just asking the patient about their experiences. Slowly he evolves the technique of free association.

1896: Freud’s father dies and this triggers a pitiless self-analysis in which he reviews his whole life, his aims and achievements to date. He comes to realise the importance of little-suspected motives, of early fears and anxieties in his adult life, choices and behaviour. At the same time he is examining his patients for similar origins to their obsessions and symptoms.

All the thoughts of this turbulent period are recorded in his epic correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess, an ear-nose and throat specialist based 500 miles away in Berlin. Nowadays dismissed as a crank, Fliess nonetheless provided an invaluable sounding board for Freud’s experimental speculations at a time when respectable opinion in Vienna increasingly shunned him.

Psychoanalysis

1899: publishes The Interpretation of Dreams which contains all Freud’s major discoveries, either explicitly or in embryo:

Neurotic symptoms are the return of repressed memories of desires or feelings too shameful for the patient to cope with, which is why they are repressed.
The amount of effort needed to recall them to conscious thought is a measure of resistance.
Free association helps the patient approach the dangerous memory.
But a quicker way to get there is through dream interpretation.
Dreams are the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish.
Dreams use the language of the unconscious in which everything is eternally present, persons are interchangeable, logic is forgotten and the vilest desires are expressed.
Desires are distorted by the dream-work which consists of condensation, overdetermination, displacement – so that a dream has two layers, the manifest content (what we remember and tell upon waking) and the latent content (the distorted wish).
‘Dream interpretation is the royal road to the Unconscious.’

An instinctive wish wells up in us. The ego forbids it entrance to consciousness. It is repressed but it must have expression. So it emerges, disguised, in dreams and in neurotic symptoms. Therefore, mental illness is a message from the unconscious; when the painful message is deciphered by the common work of analysis, the wish is discharged with an ‘affective release’ i.e. emotion; the patient bursts into tears etc.

Following on the Release of Tension there is the Act of Judgement or Sublimation. You consciously come to terms with this shameful part of your personality; or, less consciously, you sublimate its energy into a new understanding of your life, your motives, your agenda, into higher goals.

The essence of the Psychoanalytical Revolution is this: Everything mental is in the first instance unconscious; the attribute of consciousness may be present or it may be absent. Consciousness, this precious mind and the clever thoughts we value so much, are, then, almost irrelevant to the truth about what we are and to how we actually behave as human animals.

This is a departure from all previous theories of the mind which, reasonably enough, had concentrated on asking how Reason and Intellect work, what is the role of language in thought etc etc? Two thousand years of philosophers worrying away at the nature of the links between sensations and concepts and the words we express them in.

Freud says this is all irrelevant. Consciousness is a puny, secondary, almost irrelevant secretion – a rationalisation, a justification – of decisions and wishes and desires and strategies which are fully worked out in a part of the mind which can by its nature never be accessible to us. We can only guess at its activities by inference, from the misshapen tip of the iceberg which is all we can see.

Human mental activity is almost entirely unconscious.

The sexuality of children

1905: Three Essays on Sexuality. The other major component of the theory is the sexuality of children. Through analysis, through dreams and free association, most of Freud’s patients traced their problems back to infantile sexual experiences. Though not sexual in the standard meaning (erection, ejaculation etc) Freud found that children are excited and gain pleasure – gratification – of the sexual instinct, through different parts of their bodies as they grow. He called these the erotogenic zones.

He hypothesised a developmental model:

Years 0 to 1: pleasure through the mouth, sucking on the breast, the oral phase
Years 1 to 3: pleasure in acquiring control over peeing and defecating, the anal-sadistic phase
Years 3 to 5: pleasure in playing with the little penis or clitoris, the phallic stage

At this point the sexual drives are clearly in approximately the right place for the purposes of reproduction to which they will be called at the onset of puberty.

The actual pleasure is derived from the operation of a whole number of instincts which steadily sort themselves out into their component parts as the child grows, often resulting in pairs of opposites: masochistic and sadistic urges; the urge to show and to look.

Small children’s play amounts to continuous experimentation with a steadily growing range of instinctual drives and satisfactions, applied to the child’s steadily growing awareness, first of parts of its body, then of their functions, then of the body’s relationship to the outside world, and finally to other people, to its siblings and parents.

The sexual impulse overall can be called the libido. The libido does not develop smoothly.

As a result either of the excessive strength of certain of the components or of experiences involving premature satisfaction, fixations of the libido may occur at various points in its development. If subsequently a repression takes place, the libido flows back to these points (a process described as regression) and it is from them that the [frustrated] energy bursts through in the form of a symptom.

The Three Essays set out to schematise all human sexual experience.

‘Normal’ heterosexual genital intercourse undertaken for the procreation of children – the only form of sex allowed by the Catholic Church of Freud’s time – is a product of the most strenuous repression of other desires and the pinnacle, the furthest highest peak, of socially acceptable sexual development. In reality, the overwhelming majority of the population are unable to adhere to this incredibly restricted target and indulge in various forms of ‘perversion’ (in the Catholic sense).

The Three Essays turn 2,000 years of theories about sex and our relationship with our bodies on their heads. In Freud’s model the gratification of physical instincts is the bedrock of human existence; in his view, children, far from being sexless innocents, from the earliest age are indulging these desires, and none of us ever really gives them up; they are merely repressed. They can be repressed in numerous ways, if the process is done badly, resulting in us becoming twisted or neurotic; or they can be sublimated into ‘higher’ activities acceptable to society.

The structures of society, the institutions of civilised life which we like to pride ourselves on – its laws and morality and religion and philosophy and art – are constructed in order to hide our true animal nature from ourselves.

Back to the theory of human development. The developing instincts must have an object: to begin with it is the infant’s own body, in a state of permanent auto-erotism (thus the small infant is said to be polymorphously perverse, simply meaning that it finds pleasure in every aspect of physicality).

Later, the infant develops an awareness of the breast it is suckling from and develops an image of the Good Mother (who suckles it) and the Bad Mother (who goes away).

Later still the child becomes aware of the complementary roles played by its mother and father, and the boy-child wants to take his father’s place and take possession of his mother. This is the Oedipus Complex, which Freud placed slap-bang at the centre of his theory of childhood development, of the aetiology of the neuroses, of the origins of culture and society, and of the way existing societies are run.

All a boy child’s puzzles about its little willy and about where it came from, everything becomes centred on this grand obsession: 1) terror of the all-powerful Father, and the reverse side of terror, aggression, the wish to kill him; and 2) love of the mother who suckled us and is affectionate.

Like Oedipus, we wish to kill our father and sleep with our mother. These are the only people in the child’s life; onto them he projects models of all the possible relations human beings can have. No surprise, then, that in later life so many of our attitudes to authority figures, love objects, other citizens, work-mates etc will be found to derive from the primitive stratum of emotional webs which are centred on the Oedipal Complex.

Once the child has overcome these feelings, he lapses into years of amnesia, the latency period from 5 to the onset of puberty at 11, 12, 13. The storm and stress of infancy are largely forgotten while the child’s faculties are concentrated outwards onto social activity, on learning from parents, teachers and other authorities, what rules to obey, how to read and write and judge, how to handle your peers: the vital work of acculturation, of learning the ancestral wisdom which separates us from the simple beasts who repeat in each generation their timeless instinctive activity.

The latency period seems to be a phenomenon of advanced societies. During this period the child develops reaction-formations (equal and opposite reactions against the sexually intense years), meaning emotions such as disgust and shame.

These, for Freud are the origins of morality. You are indoctrinated into thinking that the acts of defecating, peeing, playing with your genitals are ‘dirty’. You react with shame. Encouraged by your parents, your teachers and everything you read, you develop an idea that sex is ‘wrong’, ‘dirty’.

A strong body of tradition originating from the highest possible authority (God) goes to confirm all these feelings and to encourage you to sublimate them into socially-acceptable forms. Thus religious believers themselves display many interesting examples of perversions, neuroses and various types of abnormal behaviour but under the protection of piety.

The child introjects all of these injunctions from their parents and other authority figures, and constructs an ego-ideal, a model way to live and behave and think. They hero-worship idealised figures, from Jesus to Hollywood stars to the latest soccer players.

The naive child want to live up to their standard, to impress them with selflessness and devotion to an ideal. Thus the growing child lays down in their mind a superego or conscience, the internalised laws of their culture which now supersede the rules of the parents (who are, in any case, beginning to seem all-too-human and fallible).

Puberty

The onset of puberty with its rush of hormones and the development of primary and secondary sexual differentiation is a traditional time of turmoil in all societies and a time when the young have to be forcibly, sometimes painfully, initiated into full adult membership of society.

In more advanced cultures this means the early sexual patterns are revived but come into fierce conflict with the reaction-formations of disgust and shame and the powerful strictures of the introjected superego.

But the ideal, mature grown-up is as much of a myth as the ideal, model, married heterosexual. Freud’s theory helps to explain what a chaos of complexes and obsessions and instincts and desires and repressions and terrors and self-punishment we have to pass through to emerge as anything like the responsible grown-ups which society requires.

I hope it will be easy to gather the nature of my extension of the concept of sexuality. In the first place sexuality is divorced from its too close connection with the genitals and is regarded as a more comprehensive bodily function, having pleasure as its goal and only secondarily coming to serve the purposes of reproduction. In the second place the sexual impulses are regarded as including all those merely affectionate and friendly impulses to which usage applies the exceedingly ambiguous word ‘love’.

The detaching of sexuality from the genitals has the advantage of allowing us to bring the sexual activities of children and of perverts into the same scope as those of normal adults. The sexual activities of children have hitherto been entirely neglected and though those of perverts have been recognised it has been with moral indignation and without understanding. From the psychoanalytic standpoint, even the most eccentric and repellent perversions are explicable as manifestations of component instincts of sexuality which have freed themselves from the primacy of the genitals and are now in pursuit of pleasure on their own account as they were in the very early days of the libido’s development. The most important of these perversions, homosexuality, scarcely deserves the name. It can be traced back to the constitutional bisexuality of all human beings and to the after-effects of the phallic primacy. Psychoanalysis enables us to point to some trace or other of a homosexual object-choice in everyone…. Psychoanalysis has no concern whatever with any judgements of value.

The second of my alleged extensions of the concept of sexuality finds its justification in the fact revealed by psychoanalytic investigation that all of these affectionate impulses were originally of a completely sexual nature but have become inhibited in their aim or sublimated. The manner in which the sexual instincts can thus be influenced and diverted enables them to be employed for cultural activities of every kind.

Psychoanalytic therapy

Freud then moves on to explain the technique of analysis. This is based on the concept of transference. The typical psychoanalytic patient soon forgets the wish to be cured of unhappiness or troubling thoughts and symptoms. He begins to project onto the analyst his deepest feelings. These may be of love and affection for the great healer of souls – in which case the analyst can work with them to continue towards catharsis.

But transference may become entirely negative, the patient projecting aggression and defiance onto the analyst. This makes things difficult, sometimes impossible. The centrality and the limitation of transference explains why analysis works with some patients and not with others; and also why whole categories of patient are beyond its help, namely schizophrenics and paranoiacs, who are too detached from reality to form the realistic relationship with the analyst which transference requires in order to work.

The transference is made conscious to the patient by the analyst and it is resolved by convincing him that in his transference attitude he is re-experiencing emotional relationships which had their origin in his earliest object attachments during the repressed period of his childhood.

The history of the psychoanalytic movement

1900: Freud’s discoveries were either ignored or dismissed. Freud came to attribute this to the resistance of the wider world to the truth, resistance which is modelled on and derives from the original work of repression carried out during the latency period. The denial from the wider world resembles the denial Freud encountered from individual patients who disbelieved his interpretations until they were finally persuaded and cured.

1902: Interested physicians begin to meet at Freud’s house.

1906: Interest in Freud stirs in Zurich, at the renowned Bergholzli Sanatorium run by Eugene Bleuler and his rising assistant Carl Gustav Jung.

1908: All interested parties, from Austria, Germany and Switzerland, meet at Salzburg for the first Psychoanalytic Congress.

1909: Freud and Jung are invited to America, to lecture at Clark University, Worcester, Massachussetts, at the invitation of President Stanley Hall. In the States Freud meets Harvard neurologist James J. Putnam and the ‘pragmatic’ philosopher William James. James in his classic text, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), had set out to draw a limit to the kind of scientific positivism espoused by Freud, and to reserve an exclusive area of experience open only to intuition: more or less corresponding to religious experience.

1910: The Second Psychoanalytical Congress in Nurenberg sets up an the International Psychoanalytical Society and appoints Jung the first President.

1911 to 1913: Two secessionist movements. Alfred Adler leaves to set up Individual Psychology based on the ‘masculine protest’, the idea that neuroses are formed by the drive to overcome perceived organ inferiorities. (This is the origin of the inferiority complex). Jung leaves to set up Analytical Psychology, emptying Freud’s libido of its sexual content, rejecting the Oedipus Complex and importing ideas like a ‘racial unconscious’, ‘the oceanic feeling’, ‘archetypes of behaviour’ – in every instance abandoning the specific discoveries of Freud for vaguer, more mystical interpretations of personality.

1914 to 1918: The Great War brings psychoanalytic practice and publications to a halt.

1920: Psychoanalytical Congress at the Hague. The War helped spread psychoanalysis by bringing home the reality of the psychogenesis of mental illness to the general population. Previously sceptical doctors, put off Freud’s theories by their sexual aspects, were forced to take into account ‘the flight from reality’, ‘the flight into illness’, in the form of the ‘shell-shock’ which had afflicted so many combatants.

Freud says the history of psychoanalysis breaks into two periods: the Heroic Period 1895 to 1906 when he was substantially alone; and the period from 1906 – when the Swiss came on board – to the time of writing (1925), when a body of analysts has grown in its own right and contributed many new ideas.

Narcissism

One major new addition to the theory made during the war was the theory of narcissism. Before the ego has identified external objects, it takes itself as an object and an element of narcissism never really leaves us.

All through the subject’s life his ego remains the great reservoir of his libido, from which object-cathexes are sent out and into which the libido can stream back again from the objects. Thus narcissistic libido is constantly being transformed into object-libido, and vice-versa. An excellent instance of the length to which this transformation can go is afforded by the state of being in love, whether in a sexual or a sublimated manner, which goes so far [in self-love] as involving a sacrifice of the self.

In 1925, at the period of writing this pamphlet, Freud had entered a new phase. The new concept of narcissism had disrupted the simplicity of the old theory. Previously Freud had divided the instincts into sex-instincts and ego-instincts; into a conflict between sex – operating on the Pleasure Principle – and the ego – working on the Reality Principle. The conflict between these two opposed forces explained repression, neurosis etc.

But if the ego could also be the object of libido, which is what narcissism amounts to, then the two supposedly antagonistic forces are closer together than was previously thought.

Second theory

In 1922 to 1923 Freud wrote Beyond The Pleasure Principle, The Ego and The Id, and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Between them these works tried to resolve the contradictions thrown up by the theory of narcissism with two further innovations:

First, a new topographic theory of the mind incorporated the unconscious drives and instincts into the new and bigger concept of the id; the id provides the energy for the ego, which grows out of it by a process of repression and having to come to grips with the external world i.e. the ego is formed by the clash between the inner Pleasure Principle of the human creature and the harsh unyielding world compressed into the Reality Principle; at a later stage, as we’ve seen above, the child develops the superego or conscience.

But Freud also posited a major new force, the Death Drive. He grouped together all the positive instincts of the earlier theory, all the drives towards satisfaction which seek unity and binding-together, the drives propelling us forwards through life, under the name Eros. In opposition to them, as the drive which seeks dissolution and a return to the inorganic, he posited the existence of a death drive or Thanatos.

The death drive wishes the organism to return to stasis, to achieve peace. The death drive is made up of components which include the wish to suicide – the death wish – a wish to return to the peaceful, unstrife-ridden world of the womb. That’s the death drive turned inwards, against the self. But it can also be directed outwards, sublimated and projected, in the form of aggression towards others.

Freud was well aware that these new developments were highly speculative but the impact of the Great War had shown everyone that as well as sexual or libidinal satisfactions a great deal of vicious violent barbarism made up a major part of the human animal. The death drive is Freud’s attempt to bring together all these anomalies under one roof.

These innovations proved fruitful for future developments in psychoanalysis. The new way of thinking of the ego as the zone of protection for the animal, the place where it learns to mediate between its wild lusts and the restrictions of outer reality, led to research which views many mental activities as essentially defensive.

These psychic mechanisms of defence which the human animal erects were to be investigated in detail by Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud. And the understanding of aggression, of the hate and rage which the tiny animal feels against its parents in the earliest years and which it later projects outwards onto society, these were to be investigated by Melanie Klein.

Social theory

Lastly, Freud turns to psychoanalysis’s applications to other spheres of knowledge. Here he refers to the way psychoanalysis has taken off in France mainly in the arts. (As Roy Porter among others has pointed out, in France many of Freud’s discoveries in the realm of the unconscious and developmental theory already existed in the work of Charcot and Janet and Piaget, so he was not seen as such a ground-breaking pioneer.)

1. Literature and myth

In the final sections of this essay Freud outlines how he applies the insights of psychoanalysis to other areas. Central is the Oedipus Myth which has haunted all the ages because it is a perfect representation of a universal law of the human mind. Hence the mystique of Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, which is a more refined application of the same insight. Hamlet is unable to revenge his father because Claudius (his father’s murderer) has already acted out Hamlet’s own deepest (repressed) fantasy: he has killed his father and is sleeping with his mother.

Freud’s loyal English disciple Ernest Jones wrote a full-length study of Oedipus and Hamlet. Otto Rank, Freud’s loyal secretary, wrote a compendious book on the Incest Theme in literature and went on to compile an encyclopedic analytical interpretation of ‘The Myth of The Birth of The Hero’.

Thus was born a whole new way of relating to, thinking about and interpreting literary and artistic creations, a method of analysing out the hidden or repressed analytical material contained in a novel or painting, an academic tradition which continues to the present day. Freud in various works devised theories and insights into art, literature and the imagination, which gave them a special privileged place in his theory:

The realm of imagination is a ‘reservation’ made during the painful transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle in order to provide a substitute for instinctual satisfactions which had to be given up in real life. The artist, like the neurotic, had withdrawn from an unsatisfying reality into this world of imagination; but, unlike the neurotic, he knew how to find a way back from it and once more to get a firm foothold in reality. His creations – works of art – were the imaginary satisfactions of unconscious wishes, just as dreams are; and like them they were in the nature of compromises, since they too were forced to avoid any open conflict with the forces of repression. But they differed from the narcissistic asocial forces of dreaming in that they were calculated to arouse sympathetic interest in other people and were able to invoke and satisfy the same unconscious wishful impulses in them too.

Freud himself applies these insights in his book-length studies of Leonardo and of Michelangelo’s famous statue of Moses.

2. Freudian slips and jokes

Freud had also expanded the application of psychoanalysis into ‘the psychopathology of everyday life’, clearly showing the continuity of the wish-principle in everyday slips of the tongue and accidents which, also, turn out to be messages from the unconscious realm, the so-called ‘return of the repressed’.

In addition, there was his study of jokes in Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious (1905) which similarly points to the return of embarrassing repressed material in the socially acceptable form of comedy.

3. Religion

Religion was a major obsession of Freud’s throughout his writing life. In the short early essay, Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907) Freud showed that obsessive actions amount to a private religion and that religion amounts to ‘a universal obsessive neurosis’.

Freud then gives a useful summary of Totem and Taboo (1913) in which he had tried to show how the universal taboo on incest and the worship of taboo animals supposed to have fathered the tribe were reducible to primitive attempts to control the Oedipus Complex.

Bearing in mind that many of these tribes every year kill and eat the totem animal (which is otherwise feared and revered) in a special feast, Freud hypothesises:

The father of the primal horde, since he was an unlimited despot, had seized all the women for himself; his sons, being dangerous to him as rivals, had been killed or driven away. One day, however, the sons came together and united to overwhelm, kill and devour their father, who had been their enemy but also their ideal. After the deed they were unable to take over the father’s heritage since they stood in one another’s way.

Under the influence of failure and remorse the learned to come to an agreement among themselves; they banded themselves into a clan of brothers by the help of the ordinances of totemism, which aimed at preventing a repetition of such a deed [the Primal Parricide], and they jointly undertook to forgo the possession of the women on whose account they had killed their father.

They were then driven to finding strange women, and this was the origin of the exogamy which is so closely bound up with totemism. The totem meal was the festival commemorating the fearful deed from which sprang man’s sense of guilt (or ‘original sin’) and which was the beginning at once of social organisation, of religion and of ethical restrictions.

Now whether we suppose that such a possibility was a historical event or not, it brings the formation of religion within the circle of the father complex and bases it upon the ambivalence which dominates that complex.

After the totem animal had ceased to serve as a substitute for him, the primal father, at once feared and hated, revered and envied, became the prototype of God himself.

The son’s rebelliousness and his affection for his father struggled against each other through a constant succession of compromises, which sought on the one hand to atone for the act of parricide and on the other to consolidate the advantages it had brought.

This view of religion throws a particularly clear light upon the psychological basis of Christianity, in which, as we know, the ceremony of the totem meal still survives, with but little distortion, in the form of Communion.

Totem and Taboo is among the most discredited of Freud’s works, based on nineteenth century anthropology which has been superseded. Seen from another angle, it is among his most ambitious, and florid, attempts to apply his theory to every aspect of human society past and present.

Summary

Thus Freud has tried to show how psychoanalysis is able to throw light on the origin of everyday slips, dreams, jokes and humour, morality, art, religious belief and practice, myths and folktales, and shows them all to be different ways of dealing with the same psychological material.

Psychoanalysis has also led to investigations and clarifications of symbolism, building on the symbolism of dreams to look at symbolism in art and religion.

In the field of education Freud singles out Oskar Pfister, author of pedagogical books (and his great interlocutor on religious issues) and, for the analysis of children and greater theorisation of childhood, Freud refers to the work of his devotee, Melanie Klein, and of his daughter, Anna.

Postscript (1935)

Freud concludes that with the announcement of the topographical structure of the mind (id, ego and superego) and the division of instincts into classes (Eros and the death instinct) he has finished his theoretical contribution. Others are carrying on where he left off.

My interest, after making a lifelong detour through the natural sciences, medicine and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which had fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking….

I perceived ever more clearly that the events of human history, the interactions between human nature, cultural development and the precipitates of primeval experiences (the most prominent example of which is religion) are no more than a reflection of the dynamic conflicts between the ego, id and the superego, which psychoanalysis studies in the individual – are the very same processes repeated on a wider stage.

Thoughts

Freud was a politician to his fingertips. In a letter to Fliess he described himself as a ‘conquistador’ and he wasn’t exaggerating. The word indicates the grandiose scale of his ambition and his self-image.

For example his late work, Moses and Monotheism, can be seen as an attempt to rewrite Jewish history the better to place himself as its logical conclusion. Freud is the new Moses leading the Chosen People of the new science, psychoanalysis, into the Promised Land of scientific understanding and psychological health.

Most of the dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams are analysed to reveal a mammoth ambition and self-confidence, clearly in part derived from the wish to overcome, to supersede, his weakling father Jacob.

Everything he wrote was written with a political aim. The History of the Psychoanalytical Movement (1914) is a case in point, containing as it does a fierce polemic against the acolytes who had recently seceded from the Movement: Alfred Adler who went on to found ‘Individual Psychology’ and Jung who founded ‘Analytical Psychology’.

Seen in this light i.e. as part of Freud’s relentless ‘political’ aim to publicise and establish his theories, The Autobiographical Study is interesting because:

It goes to such great lengths to insist on the strictly scientific nature of his research before he conceived psychoanalysis, and to demonstrate the continuity of psychoanalysis with mainstream science.
It seeks to put the record straight on his relations with Janet. Pierre Janet, a disciple of Charcot’s, was the founder of modern psychology in France and the French (with typical chauvinism) claimed that Freud had come to France, purloined all their ideas, then dressed it up in heavy Germanic philosophical terms.
Freud reproves the entire profession of philosophy for not being capable of fitting his concepts into their intricate systems of words, which is why he had a lifelong indifference or dismissal of philosophy as irrelevant to his discoveries which he always, of course, were based on facts not mystifying word games.

Credit

All Freud’s works have complicated histories in translation. An Autobiographical Study was first translated into English in 1959 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. References in this blog are to the revised version, published in 1986 as part of Volume 15 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘Historical and Expository Works on Psychoanalysis’.

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by Simon on June 14, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Psychoanalysis

Tagged Alfred Adler, anal-sadistic phase, Analytical Psychology, Anna Freud, Anna O, Antisemitism, archetypes of behaviour, Austria, auto-erotism, autobiography, Beyond The Pleasure Principle, bisexuality, Carl Gustav Jung, Catholic church, cerebral palsy, Claudius, condensation, conscience, consciousness, Czech Republic, Darwin, death drive, depth therapy, displacement, dream interpretation, dream-work, ego-ideal, Ernest Jones, Ernst Brucke, Eros, erotogenic zones, essay, free association, Freiberg, Freudian slips, Goethe, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Hamlet, Hippolyte Bernheim, History of the Psychoanalytical Movement, hypnosis, hysteria, incest, Individual Psychology, instincts, introjection, Jacob Freud, Jean-Martin Charcot, jokes, Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious, Josef Breuer, Jung, latency period, latent content, Leonardo, libido, Literature, manifest content, Martha Binnays, Melanie Klein, mental illness, Michelangelo, morality, Moravia, Moses, Moses and Monotheism, myth, narcissism, Neuropathology, neuroses, neurosis, neurotic symptoms, Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices, oceanic feeling, Oedipus, oral phase, Otto Rank, overdetermination, parricide, phallic stage, Pleasure Principle, polymorphously perverse, projection, Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic therapy, Psychology, Puberty, racial unconscious, reaction-formations, Reality Principle, regression, religion, repressed memories, repression, Resistance, Roy Porter, sexual drives, sexual instinct, sexuality, Shakespeare, Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, sublimation, Superego, Symbolism, Thanatos, the Death Drive, the ego, The Ego and The Id, the flight from reality, the flight into illness, the Great War, the id, the inferiority complex, The Interpretation of Dreams, The Myth of The Birth of The Hero, the Oedipus Complex, the sexuality of children, the unconscious, Theology, Three Essays on Sexuality, Totem and Taboo, transference, Vienna, Wilhelm Fliess, William James

Posted by Simon on June 14, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/06/14/an-autobiographical-study-sigmund-freud/

Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire @ the Freud Museum

The Freud Museum

The Freud Museum is located at 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX, a six or seven minute walk from Finchley Road tube station.

It’s the house which Freud’s English colleagues and supporters bought for him and his family to come to after the Nazis annexed Austria and Freud’s lifelong home town of Vienna in March 1938, forcing him to flee the country.

Freud himself was already very ill with the throat cancer which would kill him 18 months later in September 1939. But after his death Maresfield Gardens remained the Freud family home until his daughter, Anna Freud, herself a pioneer of child psychoanalysis, died in 1982. The house opened as a museum four years later.

It’s a fascinating place to visit at any time, light and clean and airy, with a comprehensive bookshop at the back, opening into a modest, leafy London garden.

But the centrepiece of the museum is the ground floor where Freud recreated the study from his house in Vienna and which has been lovingly restored to how it was in his time. You can see the desk where he wrote so many great works, his bookshelves packed with leather-bound volumes of psychology, history and literature.

Freud’s desk at the Freud Museum, London (photo by the author)

You can see the famous couch, smothered in dark patterned rugs, where his patients came and lay and free associated their thoughts, projecting their hopes and fears and fantasies onto the inventor of psychoanalysis, who sat quietly listening.

Freud’s couch at the Freud Museum (photo by the author)

So far, so Victorian, in décor and furnishings.

But maybe the most striking and unexpected aspect of the room is the astonishing number of antiquities scattered everywhere. There are half a dozen or more glass cases packed with ancient statuettes and figurines, vases and jugs, there are busts on platforms and stands, lined up along shelves all round the room, and a double row of small antique figurines on his desk right in front of him, in his field of vision every day as he either wrote or listened to his patients.

Freud was an obsessive collector of ancient figures and antiquities all his life, building up a collection of several thousand by the time he died, and literally hundreds are stacked on shelves, in cases, on mantlepieces and stands. Everywhere you look, in every direction, hundreds of ancestral presences sit silently, looking out at you with a cold timeless regard, from very angle.

Another view of Freud’s study, showing desk (in the foreground), shelves and glass cases packed with antiquities

And that’s what this exhibition is about. It’s a small but powerful exploration of Freud’s lifelong fascination with archaeology and antiquity and the role they played in his writings, his practice, in his deepest formulations of the new ‘science’ of psychoanalysis which he invented and developed through 40 intensely productive years, and in the successive models of the human mind which he developed, refined and publicised.

Freudian reservations

Let me explain my position regarding Freud. Very like the other two world-shattering geniuses, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, Freud’s influence is so enormous and all-pervasive, so underpins almost everybody’s modern notions of human nature and our behaviour in the world, that it’s more or less irrelevant whether most or all of it is ‘true’ or not.

The various versions of his theories and the hundreds of insights they generate have provided mental maps, sociological constructs amounting to an entire worldview which we all now inhabit, thronged with insights, phrases and terminology (Freudian slip, the unconscious, the ego, being repressed, ‘anal’ behaviour, Oedipal conflict) which are freely used in newspapers, magazines and conversation.

With regard to the psychoanalytical method – the talking cure – my understanding is that many scientific trials have been undertaken to assess the efficacy of psychoanalytical therapy compared with other depth psychologies, with more orthodox psychiatric treatment, with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and with drugs. But the attempt is problematic for quite a few reasons. For a start no two people are alike so what works for one patient might simply not work for another. It’s impossible or very challenging to set up a double-blind, controlled study.

For another thing, Freudian psychoanalysis doesn’t necessarily aim at a fixed outcome. CBT may cure a symptom which is preventing you from living your life happily, but Freudians would say it’s only addressed a symptom, not the underlying cause. Freudian psychoanalysis can be open-ended, can indeed last the whole of the rest of your life – which leads cynics and critics to attack it as a money-making scam, hooking the vulnerable into an endless sequence of sessions, at an exorbitant fee.

I was offered and took depth therapy on the NHS in my 20s, and know lots of people who’ve had extended psychotherapy of one sort or another. It didn’t cure me of anything but it certainly helped to be listened to, at length, discussing issues and memories which became quite painful to recall.

Nut even then, in the 1980s, there were lots of varieties and schools and flavours of psychotherapy and my understanding is that the range of practices and theories underlining them has continued to grow. But my understanding is that Freud invented the paradigm of counselling, of extended therapy which aims to dig deep to resolve deep psychological problems, on which all other schools of therapy are based.

Another line of attack is the number of scandals which have come to light about abusive analysts, drunk analysts, power-mad analysts, and so on. The analyst-analysand (therapist-patient) relationship does give the therapist an unprecedented amount of power to steer and control the emotional lives of the very vulnerable. But my understanding is that this kind of thing, like the abuse of power in many other positions (in the church, in sports coaching) can be reported and handled by the relevant professional bodies as well as the police and legal system.

Another line of attack comes from feminists who, right from the start, pointed out the hair-raisingly sexist nature of almost everything Freud wrote and protested his engrained view of women as biologically, physically and mentally inferior to men. You can’t deny it, it’s there on almost every page, along with entire essays dedicated to proving women’s inferiority. Feminist Freudians have tried to overwrite concepts like the notorious ‘penis envy’ which he thought girls and women suffered from, but in this and many other concepts and assumptions, Freud remains rebarbatively sexist.

Then there’s the earliest and most unimaginative argument against Freud, that his obsession with sex, sexual drives, libido, anal eroticism, fetishism and so on prove that he himself was a sex maniac, a pervert, and so discredit the theory. You can see why a one-sided reading of his earlier theory, especially the early focus on the sexuality of children, would trigger this attack. But, for me, it betrays ignorance of the wider context of the theory which, especially in its later, expanded form, is just as interested in aggression, anger, depression, group psychology, and spends a lot of time exploring the idea of the conscience, the part of the mind which holds us to high standards and punishes us for our failures.

And most powerful of all is the accusation that, although many of his patients in the 1890s told him they had suffered real, physical sexual abuse as children, he was so disturbed by its apparent ubiquity that he couldn’t countenance it, couldn’t accept it; and that one of his central claims – that children fantasise about sexual activity (sex with the parent of the opposite sex, while hating the parent of the same sex, the insight he named the Oedipus complex) – was a denial of the reality of child abuse; that Freud made what we now regard as the cardinal sin when treating child abuse, which is to refuse to listen and refuse to believe what his patients were telling him.

If true, this was obviously shameful for a physician, sworn to help his patients; but, more powerfully, successive critics have argued that this rejection of actual real-world abuse compromises his entire theory, leading to the accusation that the entire theory is based on a self-serving lie. His rejection of the fact of child abuse and transformation of it into the realm of infantile fantasy may be the most difficult accusation to counter and one which resonates to this day.

So I hope I’m aware of the battery of arguments which can be brought against Freud the man, against his theories, against his personal attitudes, against the inefficacy and/or luxury nature of his type of therapy, of the disproveability of the efficacy of the talking cure, along with plentiful historical examples of its abuse.

But, in my opinion, although many of these attacks deserve to be taken seriously, especially the final one, none of them can really dent the incalculable impact, for good or ill, which Freud has had on the vast shared set of values, ideas, concepts, phrases and ideas which we call Western culture.

Ancient figurine of the sphinx, central player in the legend of Oedipus, symbolising for Freud, as for generations of thinkers before him, the riddle of human existence, but which Freud boldly (arrogantly) thought he had solved

Until Freud’s time most psychologists, most philosophers and lawyers and, following them, most people thought of the human mind as basically Rational, a thinking machine which is aware of its own thoughts, can order and control them, home to Reason which guides our behaviour to rational, definable ends.

If people behaved irrationally then experts directly involved with human nature, such as philosophers or theologians or lawyers, developed explanations and excuses for this falling away from Ideal reason, ideas of possession by outside forces, or temporary madness and so on, notions which explained away people’s irrational behaviour in such a way as to preserve the basic premise that man is the Rational Animal.

In the Christian tradition which dominated western thought for a thousand years, and which in fact predates Christianity, going back through Stoic philosophy for centuries before Christ (cf Cicero and Seneca) – in this immense tradition, human beings have been endowed with reason by the Creator of the universe and, although this spark of Divine Reason may sometimes be clouded by ‘passions’ or frenzy or extreme emotion or drink or drugs, these are temporary aberrations from the basically rational soul which God has given each of us.

Freud’s theory blasts this model to smithereens. By the 1890s there had been plenty of secular thinkers, especially in the life sciences which were swiftly converted to Darwin’s revolutionary theory of evolution by natural selection, but no-one who undermined the old models of a God-given, rational mind so completely.

For Freud the mind is a battlefield, a site of endless conflict between conflicting psychological forces, drives, urges, instincts, wishes, dreams, fantasies, angers, anxieties and many more. His fundamental insight was that the human mind, far from growing into a stable, mature and reliable tool for managing our way through the world, is a dynamic, ever-changing site of tremendous psychic conflict.

Because – second big idea – the majority of mental activity is unconscious. We are only dimly aware or not aware at all, of the tremendous forces, urges, drives and so on which motivate us every waking moment and haunt us in our dreams. Why do so many people behave so irrationally? Why are so many people in the grip of compulsive behaviour which they know is self-destructive (smoking, alcohol, over-eating, drugs, risk-taking, outbursts of psychopathic anger or helpless despair) yet feel powerless to change?

Because we are driven by tremendously powerful unconscious forces which we repress and prevent ever emerging into full consciousness.

As Freud stumbled deeper into these discoveries in the 1980s, trying to make sense of what his clinical patients were telling him, engaging in the slightly dubious ‘self analysis’ of his own dreams and memories and feelings, and corresponding with his friend and intellectual confidant Wilhelm Fliess, he threw again and again used metaphors around the idea of having to dig down below the level of conscious thought, having to excavate layer after layer to get down to the basic fears, anxieties and so on which seemed to be driving his patients.

“Thus it came about that in this, the first full-length analysis of a hysteria undertaken by me, I arrived at a procedure which I later developed into a regular method and employed deliberately. This procedure was one of clearing away the pathogenic psychical material layer by layer, and we liked to compare it with the technique of excavating a buried city.”
(Studies on Hysteria, 1895)

Again and again Freud referred to the work he was doing with his patients to try and rediscover their childhood memories in order to free them of their adult illnesses, and the parallel work he was doing on himself, digging deeper and deeper into his own repressed memories, as forms of archaeology.

And it’s this, the meeting place between Freud’s continua use of the metaphor of excavation and archaeology, and the ancient objects derived from the actual practice of real world archaeology which Freud obsessively collected and packed into his study and invoked in his writings from the start to the end of his career as a thinker and writer – which this exhibition addresses and explores. Which it excavates.

The exhibition

The exhibition space is upstairs. It’s only one room but, considering the ideas whose origin it describes and investigates went on to transform all human culture and to underpin how almost everyone alive today conceives of human nature and of themselves, it feels like it contains an entire world. An atom bomb of ideas.

Installation view of ‘Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire’ at the Freud Museum, showing three of the six themes and their display cases, being Oedipus, Charcot and Dreams. Note the small number of items on display. But it isn’t the number of artefacts, it’s the ideas behind them that fill the room.

Exhibition structure

The exhibition selects twenty-five key objects – antiquities, figurines and statuettes, books and prints – each normally hidden from view, extracted from the clutter of Freud’s study for special attention and investigation at close range, to illustrate how Freud’s collecting was bound up with his development of the concepts and methods of psychoanalysis.

The exhibition is divided into six themes, which I’ll briefly list here then explore in greater detail:

Oedipus:
Charcot
Dreams
Gradiva
Totem and Taboo
Moses

1. Oedipus: the riddle of desire

Inevitably the narrative must start with Oedipus who gave his name to Freud’s notion of the Oedipus Complex. This is in fact just one part of the process of growth and maturing which Freud thought all boys go through. At around the age of 5 all boys have grown enough, and experienced enough pre-pubescent sexual feeling, to sense that they want to be very close to their mother and come to resent their father’s possession of her. In the unconscious mind, the boy wants to have sex with his mother and kill his father. Freud introduced the idea in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and coined the term in his paper A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men (1910).

The Oedipus story is super well-known ad previous thinkers had interpreted it and its symbolism. Freud used it to dramatise what he saw as a universal condition, a universal experience of all growing boys which they have to completely suppress in order to mature properly, but whose repression leaves its marks on the adult and, in some men, is constantly threatening to return, so that it has to be staved off with harsh mental defences which sometimes result in florid mental beliefs, patterns and behaviour.

But early on in the myth of Oedipus he has to solve the riddle put to him by the sphinx and so the story had another significance for Freud: for trying to excavate down into the psyche of each patient could also be described as solving their riddle.

Objects on display

On display from Freud’s collection are six objects connected with Oedipus, three vases, a statuette, an amulet and a print of Ingres’ classic painting of Oedipus and the Sphinx.

2. Charcot: from iconography to archaeology

Jean-Martin Charcot was a French neurologist and professor of anatomical pathology. Freud went to study with him in Paris in 1885 (when Freud, born in 1856, was 29). Charcot used hypnosis to treat patients who displayed physical symptoms with no organic cause, a class of patients categorised as ‘hysterics’. His work made the subject of ‘hysteria’ a popular one for doctors interested in psychology across Europe. A book was published containing comprehensive descriptions of Charcot’s work and numerous prints of his hypnosis of hundreds of patients.

A Clinical Lesson at the Salpetriere. Print of engraving by E. Pirodon after the oil painting by Andre Brouillet (1888)

But this stuff about Charcot is really here because Charcot was about the surface. There was a fair amount of showmanship in Charcot’s demonstrations, made to auditoriums full of admiring students, and Freud came to dislike the way Charcot exaggerated the patient’s superficial symptoms in order to cure them.

In reaction against Charcot, Freud set off in the opposite direction. His cures would be conducted not in public but in private; they would not be wonder cures achieved in one flashy demonstration, but the result of sustained engagement over a prolonged period of time. And above all they would not work by bringing florid symptoms (hysteria, weeping, sobbing, moaning, screaming) to the surface of the human mind, but quite the opposite, entail a systematic, extended, and ever-deeper excavation down through layer after layer of the human psyche.

Which is why the exhibition places next to the Charcot print a copy of the big leather-bound volume of Ilios, the huge work in which the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann described his discovery of the legendary city of Troy (in western Turkey). Freud was going to be an archaeologist of the human psyche.

3. Dreams: decoding the way to the wish

From ancient times through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, dreams were given a special place as omens, as warnings from the gods, as indicators of good or bad fortune for the dreamer, and thousands of books had been written interpreting the universal symbolism of dreams. In 1880s and 1890s scientific circles the view was the opposite: that dreams are the meaningless by-products of physiological processes of the mind.

In his breakthrough book, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud proposed a middle way: that dreams do have a meaning, a symbolic purpose, but that they are not universal to mankind. Each dream has a meaning which is specific to the dreamer. Each dreamer’s mind selects images which symbolise individual and specific hopes, fears etc.

Each dream is a wish fulfilment but what exactly the wish is, and how it is converted into particular images, can only be established by lengthy, in-depth excavation down through the layers of the conscious mind and into each patient’s unconscious.

The display case shows an ancient wine jug, a bust and a warrior figurine. The Interpretation of Dreams includes scores of Freud’s own dreams. In one of them his wife Martha gives him a drink from an Etruscan cinerary urn like the one on display here. The urn represents satisfaction of a basic instinct (thirst) but also symbolises the wished-for return of an object like it which he had given away then regretted.

It’s a fairly simple demonstration of the way we humans give objects multiple everyday or conscious meanings, and then how images of the objects are recombined in the unconscious to emerge in strange combinations, accompanied by sometimes haunting, sometimes terrifying, sometimes blissful emotional feelings, in our dreamlife.

4. Gradiva: tracing the pathways of archaeological desire

Gradiva plays a special role in the history of Freud’s writing about writing i.e. about literature, which he was to come to have such a seismic influence on. In 1907 he published his first full-length analysis of a literary text, a novel by the German writer and poet Wilhelm Jensen titled Gradiva: A Pompeian Fantasy which had been published in Vienna in 1902, so it was quite a current work.

Straightaway the word Pompeii should alert us to the fact that the book is going to play straight into Freud’s fascination with ancient ruins. Freud refers to the relevance of Pompeii, where secrets had been long buried and were now being excavated and restored to the light, to his own concepts of psychoanalytical therapy, in his letters to Fliess in the mid-1890s, and he actually visited Pompeii itself in 1902.

In this novel the hero, Norbert Hanold, who is studying archaeology, ‘falls in love with’ (becomes obsessed with) an ancient bas-relief of a young woman striding along in a Roman toga.

Cast relief of ‘Gradiva’ (1908)

Since the relief was found as part of the excavation of the buried city of Pompeii (just recently being unearthed) the hero decides to travel to Italy, and to the archaeological site, to find this woman, or her spirit, or her reincarnation.

So you can straightaway see how the novel is about a man in the grip of a delusion and a compulsion, psychological territory Freud was striving to make his own during the later 1890s and early 1900s.

In the end, after failing to find the modern avatar of the beautiful statue anywhere in the real world and after some painful self-analysis, Hanold comes to realise that who the woman reminds him of is a childhood friend who lives opposite him back home, returns, tells her of his love etc.

For Freud the novel is rich in confirmations of his theories. The hero had youthful erotic feelings for this neighbour but his strict upbringing forbade him from acknowledging them. Instead he repressed them and sublimated them i.e. redirected his psychic energy into the socially acceptable medium of studying archaeology and ancient history.

When he came across the bas relief as part of his studies, he was seized, possessed by something about it which he couldn’t define. Well, that’s because he had completely repressed his childhood longing for his sweetheart. the feeling remained but divorced from its source. So the bas relief became what Freud calls a compromise formation i.e. a real-world object which can ‘satisfy’ his libidinal drive and desire, but in a socially acceptable mode (i.e. a perfectly natural part of his adult studies).

The obsession he develops with it, however, obviously goes beyond the bounds of the ‘normal’ and this is like the patients who came to see Freud, people in the grip of obsessive, compulsive, neurotic thoughts or behaviour which they couldn’t explain and couldn’t shake off.

It also plays right into Freud’s hands that the hero is depicted as having numerous florid and bizarre dreams, thus allowing Freud to apply the insights he’d recorded in The Interpretation of Dreams to show how Hanold’s dreams were continually urging acknowledgement of his real-world love, but were blocked from doing so by the forces of repression and so emerged in complex combinations of symbols and imagery.

And the way the heroine, Zoe, cares for Hanold after his breakdown, slowly coaxing him back to health and to accept his love for her, is comparable to the psychoanalytic method Freud had devised, the famous listening cure.

Objects on display

On another level, the novel is about the journey of a repressed north European to the warm south which has, for centuries, symbolised release into and acceptance a world of sensual pleasures which we uptight northerners deny ourselves in order to function in our advanced capitalist economies.

The excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii had unearthed a surprising number of explicitly sexual objects, specifically depictions of the erect penis, often with wings, a magical object worthy of veneration or kept as a lucky charm or amulet. The fact that this is still regarded as shocking or bizarre shows you how far we are from the ancient world’s frank acceptance of the facts of sex.

Six phallic objects and amulets from various cultures of antiquity, part of Freud’s collection. You are free to regard these as sinister, sexually suggestive, funny (as I do), or as examples of the ancient world’s frank acknowledgement of the importance of sexuality in human life, which had to be censored, suppressed and policed in industrialised, capitalist societies. At the same time, this or any other view you have is quite obviously a projection of your own personal ideas, memories, associations and patterns of thought onto simple, cold, inanimate objects, and it is this power of mental projection onto objects which it is part of the aim of the exhibition to both explore and to demonstrate.

5. Totem and Taboo: the search for origins

Another criticism of Freud is that he quite early on strayed beyond his area of supposed expertise i.e. psychology (theory of the mind) and psychiatry (practical cure of mental illness) into subjects quite beyond his speciality. And it’s true. He not only produced a substantial body of literary and art criticism (essays and book-length studies) but did the same in anthropology and theology.

In 1913 he published Totem and Taboo. It was partly a response to his protegé Carl Jung who was rebelling against Freud’s insistence on the centrality of repressed sexuality and the Oedipus Complex in all human development. Therefore it ups the stakes by asserting that the Oedipus Complex is not only a part of the normal development of every boy, but explains a founding event in actual, real-world history.

Freud asserted that the founding event of ancient societies was an actual parricide, where the sons of the chief rose up and killed him, then claimed access to the queen or women of the harem. A sexual rebellion. But, crippled by guilt at murdering their father, the sons then set about repressing all memory of it, denying and blocking anything which would indicate their great crime. And this is the origin of the compulsive taboos which contemporary anthropologists observed in so many ‘primitive’ societies.

Freud then goes on to make the grandiose claim that this Primal Event was the foundation stone of all religion, morality, society and related art.

Objects on display

On display are copies of ‘The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion’, the hugely influential compendium of myths, legends gathered from all round the world by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer, which influenced a generation of writers and thinkers. A two-volume edition had been published in 1890 but Freud owned the twelve volumes of the third edition, published serially from 1906 to 1915. His copies, some of which are on display here, are covered with pencilled notes and he incorporated much material from the book into Totem.

Amusingly, Freud sent a copy of Totem and Taboo to Fraser, who didn’t deign to reply.

The curators don’t mention this but my understanding is that almost every aspect of Totem and Taboo has been disproved. It very obviously represents a kind of imperial ambition by Freud to move his theory out of the world of private practice and discreet papers written for specialist journals, and stake a claim to making major discoveries in history, anthropology, the origins of religion, morality and so on.

Although the specific claims made about ‘primitive’ societies being comprehensively rejected by actual anthropologists, Freud successfully made a new myth about himself and his role as explainer of everything. It was the kind of grandiose ambition which drove one-time followers like Jung, and others like Adler and Rank, to secede from the official psychoanalytic movement and set up their own variations.

A digression on Freud’s sociological writings

This world-claiming ambition, this tendency to stray way beyond his area of expertise and set himself up as a master explainer of society is evident in many of Freud’s later works. In The Future of An Illusion (1927) he sets out to disprove religious belief by rewriting every religious belief and practice in terms of psychoanalytic terminology (repression of sexual urges, ‘sublimated’ into love of an all-powerful father, accompanied by a world of obsessive-compulsive rituals and ceremonies).

In 1930’s Civilization and Its Discontents Freud applies psychoanalysis to sociology, arguing that modern, mass, industrial, capitalist societies need to enforce widespread suppression and control of people’s libidinal urges, not just to sex but to express other needs and drives, and it is this systematic repression of human needs which makes so many people unhappy in modern society. In many ways this turned out to be Freud’s most influential work, because it influenced social reformers and would-be revolutionaries, especially in the utopian 1960s.

Anyway, this final display is about Freud’s deepest foray into myth, legend and so on as he took on the roots of Christianity and, behind it, of Christianity’s parent, Judaism.

Freud was a Jew who accepted his secular inheritance but rejected the religious aspects of Judaism. Running alongside the obsessive references to archaeology throughout his writing career, which this exhibition focuses on, was Freud’s parallel obsession with denying and debunking religious belief and practice at every opportunity.

There are quite a few Freudian explanations of this noticeable obsession. One is that he was guilty about rejecting the religion of his forefathers and so spent his entire life trying to deny its reality. A subtler one is that Freud didn’t so much deny the reality of the Jewish religion as attempt to rewrite it in his own terms. In his imperial way, he attempted to overwrite religion, to write it away. Coming from a different angle, you could say that this ‘obsession’ was a response to the lifelong anti-semitism which he and his family and Jewish friends and colleagues suffered on an almost daily basis, in personal encounters but also in the press and culture of turn of the century Vienna.

Everyone mentions the fact that from 1897 to 1910 Vienna was run by the unusually powerful mayor, Karl Lueger, who oversaw the transformation of the city into a modern metropolis but at the same time exploited populist and anti-semitic feeling, legitimising widespread and semi-official antisemitism which some historians think established a model for the psychotic racism promoted by Adolf Hitler who was, of course, Austrian and an impressionable teenager during Lueger’s time in office.

You can take your pick of interpretations or mix and match all of them and this, also, is a Freudian idea which he called over-determination. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud speculated that individual dream images or narratives can operate on multiple levels or be representing more than one wish or drive. Same with the symptoms his patients presented with. Overdetermination occurs when a single-observed effect is determined by multiple causes any one of which alone would be sufficient to account for the effect.

Thus I routinely describe historical events as ‘over determined’, such as the First World War, for which historians have proposed a vast number of causes. The Freudian notion of over-determination i.e. multiple cause for one event, frees you up, allows you to accept a number of different explanations, allows you to experiment with apportioning different levels of responsibility for different events.

It’s an example of the way Freud’s theory gives conceptual definition to the complexity of life, motivation, simple and complex events which we all know are multi-levelled and multi-motivated. Freud’s theory provides a theoretical underpinning for this multiplicity of viewpoints, about anything.

6. Moses: the return of the repressed

Freud’s last published work was not a grand summary of his theory (although he was working on one, which remained unfinished). It was the long, densely argued and eccentric work of religious sociology, Moses and Monotheism. In it he applies the Oedipus story to the entire history of the Jewish people, his people, in an attempt to dethrone the founder of Judaism, Moses. It was itself a nakedly Oedipal attempt to overthrow the father and assert his (Freud’s) moral and intellectual independence.

For Freud makes the scandalous assertion that Moses was not himself Jewish. Freud argues that Moses was in fact an Egyptian prince, but one who followed the heretical teachings of the pharaoh Akhenaten. From what we can tell, Akhenaten, the tenth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, who ruled from 1353 to 1336 BC, attempted to overthrow the Egyptians’ traditional polytheism i.e. belief in a large and florid pantheon of gods, and replace it with worship of the One True God.

Tasked with overseeing the Israelite captives in their slave tasks, this Egyptian prince, Moses, tried to impose Akhenaten’s strict monotheism on them but they rose up and, as in the classic Oedipal narrative, murdered their father figure. But, like all good Oedipal actors, they then couldn’t cope with the guilt of their deed and repressed it, wiping out all memory of the historical event, and instead reinventing Moses as one of their own and a wise and good teacher.

Following the basic model of the mind he had postulated as long ago as 1897, Freud speculated that knowledge of their collective murder kept threatening to leak out and so the Jews, as a people, instituted a comprehensive system of taboos and restrictions, the most famous being not to eat pork, but there are hundreds of others. As time went by these taboos were expanded and elaborated until they dictated almost every aspect of everyday life, as well as a host of religious rituals.

This last display takes Moses and Monotheism to be not only the climax of Freud’s career as a writer but of his vaulting ambition to establish a psychoanalytical version of human history, society, and the origins of religion and morality. Like Totem and Taboo there’s something slightly mad about this book, disreputable about its theories and the interpretations which Freud applies to history and strain to breaking point. It’s absurd. But there’s also something awe inspiring about the man’s grandiose ambition.

If you stop thinking about it as a serious piece of archaeology or sociology and consider it as simply a piece of imaginative writing, the ambition and the ingenuity with which Freud attaches his theory to every aspect of Jewish history, theology and practice are dizzying.

Objects on display

A small statuette of the Egyptian god Amon-Ra, who Akhenaten promoted as the one true God. A print of Rembrandt’s famous painting of Moses coming down from the mountain holding the tablets of the law. An edition of the Philippson edition of the German Bible. And a small hannukah lamp, associated with domestic Jewish ritual.

The end wall and right-hand wall of the exhibition, showing the section about Gradiva (at the end) and Totem and Moses, on the right

Objects and meanings

The title of the exhibition includes the word ‘objects’ because among Freud’s many insights is the way all of us project wishes, desires, anxieties onto all the objects around us all the time. We not only relentlessly anthropomorphise the world – that’s level one psychology; we also personalise the world by investing all manner of objects around us with value and meaning. And these meanings alter over time, over very short periods as our moods or memories change, as events invest them with new auras of meaning, some of them over lifetimes.

In other words, all the objects around us are invested with some measure of significance, we can’t stop ourselves. And so the exhibition’s attention to the objects which Freud a) collected obsessively b) positioned all around him in his working environment c) described, discussed, referred to and invoked endlessly in all his writings from start to finish is both an ‘exploration’ of the significance of some of the objects, but also the evocation of all kinds of associations and feelings in us, the visitors.

H.D.’s interpretation

Freud arrived in London before his belongings. When these arrived, especially the crates containing his carefully wrapped antiquities, his friend and former patient, the American poet H.D., sent Freud a bunch of gardenias with a note ‘to greet the return of the Gods’.

HD is also represented by a short but powerful quote on the main introductory wall label. Here she is recorded as noting, in her memoir of Freud and her psychoanalytical treatment, what we’ve already observed, that his rather staggering array of figurines, statuettes and antiquities were intimately bound up with his development of the concepts and methods of psychoanalysis. But she goes on to say something more. She has the insight that they helped Freud to ‘stabilise the evanescent thought’ that was continually at risk of dissipation.

This is a new and powerful insight. I’ve already mentioned the idea of ambivalence, which follows from Freud’s dual structure of the mind (conscious mind struggling to repress all kinds of unconscious urges). Once developed, this explains how we can all have ambivalent or contradictory feelings about objects, because there is so much going on in the unconscious which we’re not aware of, and because the human psyche’s tendency to project these feelings, moods, anxieties, desires onto all manner of inanimate objects around us.

So much for ambivalence. And so much for the notion that Freud used the antiquities to inspire his ideas about excavating and archaeology. It’s a typically voodoo, Freudian, psychoanalytical insight, one which appears absurd on the surface but slowly makes more sense the more you ponder it, that the figurines littering his desk and study, also in some sense, limited and controlled his thought.

Because if there’s one thing about Freud’s achievement as a writer, it’s that he was so very fecund with ideas. From the initial insights around 1900 were to spring an exploding, ever-ramifying, ever-more complex system or network or matrix of ideas and insights and categories and theories and terminology which he never ceased developing and refining, and which he consciously amplified and spread beyond psychology into disciplines far removed from his area of expertise, as this exhibition makes abundantly clear.

So maybe the figurines not only inspired his writing (and his treatment) but also brought him back to the thing he started writing about, focused things back on the project in hand. They were instruments of inspiration and control.

Who’s to say whether this is ‘true’ or not, but by this stage, hopefully, you have joined me in not being so concerned about the truth of a lot of this so much as its interpretive and, above all discursive power. It enables the imagination. Psychoanalysis’s uncanny combination of scientific phraseology applied to ideas which sometimes seem acute, sometimes way off beam, sometimes suck you in and make you see the world in a completely different way, this all leaves the pragmatic world of truth values far behind as we go romping through a wild and shaggy, dense and huge, huge and fascinating imaginative realm.

Three figurines from Freud’s collection. Which one – smooth elegant Egyptian, primitive fertility figure, or happy dancer – do you identify with, and why?

Digital archive

The exhibition is accompanied by a digital multimedia resource, containing video recordings, podcasts, photos of rarely seen objects from the collection, and a list of suggested reading.

Digital archive accompanying the exhibition

Related books

The Museum has produced a comprehensive catalogue for the exhibition, with essays expanding the themes raised in the wall labels. But, unsurprisingly, there also turn out to be quite a few book-length academic studies of Freud’s fascination with antiquity and obsession with collecting:

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by Simon on June 12, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Archaeology, Biography, Psychoanalysis

Tagged A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men, Adolf Hitler, Akhenaten, Amon-Ra, ancient Egypt, Anna Freud, Anschluss, antiquities, Archaeology, Carl Jung, CBT, Charcot, Charles Darwin, Christianity, Cicero, Civilization and its Discontents, cognitive behavioural therapy, collecting, compulsion, depth therapy, desire, dreams, exhibition, Fantasy, figurine, Freud, Freud's couch, Freud's desk, Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Freudian psychoanalysis, Freudian slip, Gradiva, Gradiva: A Pompeian Fantasy, H.D., HD, Heinrich Schliemann, history, hypnosis, hysteria, Idea, Ilios, Judaism, Karl Lueger, Karl Marx, libido, Literature, monotheism, Moses, Moses and Monotheism, Nazis, neurosis, Norbert Hanold, Oedipus, Oedipus Complex, penis, penis envy, polytheism, projection, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Rembrandt, repression, Seneca, sex, Sigmund Freud, Sir James George Frazer, statuette, Stoic philosophy, Studies on Hysteria, The Bible, the ego, The Freud Museum, The Future of An Illusion, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, The Interpretation of Dreams, the Jews, the Salpetriere Hospital, the Sphinx, the unconscious, therapist, Therapy, Totem and Taboo, Troy, Vienna, Western culture, Wilhelm Fliess

Posted by Simon on June 12, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/06/12/freuds-antiquity-object-idea-desire-the-freud-museum/

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Act 2

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Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud (1938)