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'This is a very, very smart book. It makes Freud accessible, interesting and relevant.' - Ruby Wax
Sigmund Freud is rightly called the godfather of psychoanalysis. He forever changed the way we view ourselves and developed our understanding of human nature. His concepts have become part of our psychological vocabulary: unconscious thoughts and feelings, conflict, the meaning of dreams, the sensuality of childhood. He dared to try new methods and treatments. Everyone knows the term Freudian slip and has a basic understanding of his theories, however, Freud gave us a great deal more. From education to critical theory he changed the way we think. His ideas and clinical practices offer psychological insights that bring help and healing. Freud's work has suffused contemporary Western thought and popular culture. He is the epitome of a pocket GIANT.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780750969123 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 07/07/2016 |
| Series: | Pocket GIANTS |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 293 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Sigmund Freud: Pocket Giants
By Alistair Ross
The History Press
Copyright © 2016 Alistair RossAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7509-6912-3
CHAPTER 1
Early Years, Adolescence and University (1856–75)
If a man has been his mother's undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it'
Freud, A Childhood Recollection
From the very beginning Freud's life was marked by dislocations and contradictions. He was born in 1856 in Freiberg, a small Moravian town near the forests and foothills of the Carpathian Mountains when Moravia was an Austrian crown land and part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the First World War, however, Freiberg was transferred to the newly created nation state of Czechoslovakia and renamed Príbor, shuffled like a pawn in the endless game of European politics. This change to Freud's birthplace raises an important question: 'Where did he belong?' Clearly there is more to belonging than a place of birth, but this highlights how Freud came to understand his identity; he found belonging not in a physical location but in his Jewish origins. His Autobiographical Study states boldly, 'My parents were Jews, and I have remained a Jew myself' albeit as 'a completely godless Jew'. Even this did not allow him to feel fully at home, so another answer to this question of belonging relates to Freud's unique ideas about the nature of the mind and the evolution of a self. The psychoanalytic movement was to transcend national boundaries and become recognised throughout the world; it was this nation state of the mind called 'psychoanalysis' that formed the unique place where Freud felt he belonged.
Freud's parents, Jakob and Amalia, married at a synagogue in Vienna but maintained few Jewish customs in their home. Like many of their generation, they faced the dilemma of living in Jewish ghettos or becoming part of mainstream society through assimilation. Biographers argue over how much Freud was influenced by his parents' Jewish heritage. Despite his lifelong ambivalence about his Jewish identity, he seems nevertheless to have been fascinated by aspects of Judaism. His final book, Moses and Monotheism (1939), was a psychoanalytic rewriting of the origins of Jewish identity.
Jakob was a small-scale importer of wool, tallow and honey whose family business relied on his sons from his first marriage, Emanuel and Philipp. Despite Jakob's respectability as a local businessman, the family lived in near poverty in just one rented room above the premises of the local locksmith. In this room Freud witnessed the whole of life – sex, birth and death – all before the age of 3. His mother Amalia (who was Jakob's second or third wife, the records are unreliable) was twenty years younger than Jakob and, despite Freud being 'mein goldener Sigi', a further seven children born between 1857–66 demanded her attention. Consequently, Freud spent time with a 'nanie' who probably acted as a wet nurse and took care of him from infancy. Freud describes her as an 'ugly, elderly but clever woman' who had been his 'teacher in sexual matters'. It is difficult to know what to make of his adult recollection of this early memory and it may have been an unconscious influence in his later seduction theory. This is a telling reminder that he does not make it easy for a biographer sifting through his words and judging what can be confirmed, what sounds plausible and what appears to be implausible. Freud experienced her sudden departure for theft in 1859 as a deep loss, but one that he buried in his unconscious and only recollected later in dreams. Her influence on him was profound; she gave him a foundational belief in his own abilities but also introduced him to her Catholicism expressed through guilt, God Almighty and hell. Freud's later religious unbelief and hatred of the Catholic Church has been linked to this early relationship. He loved her and in his later dreams he confuses her with his mother, and he confuses his half-brother Philipp with his father (his mother and half-brother were a similar age). Despite such vicissitudes, Freud recalls, 'I left Freiberg at the age of three ... It is not easy for the now seventy-five-year-old man to recall those early days of whose rich content only a few fragments reach into his memory, but of one thing I am certain: deep within me, although overlaid, there continues to live the happy child from Freiberg ... the boy who received from this air, from this soil, the first inedible impressions.' Note Freud is already revealing his way of thinking through the terms 'deep within me' and 'overlaid'. The task of biography after Freud is to get to these deeply hidden aspects that shape each person.
Freud was part of an extended family, as Emanuel and his wife Maria lived nearby, and so he spent most of his time playing with his nephew John (nine months older) and niece Pauline (six months younger). This family broke up when his half-brothers moved to Manchester in 1860 (possibly to escape military service in the Austrian Army), which signalled the end of Jakob's business. It meant that Freud experienced yet another loss, of his best friend John, and Pauline whom he called his 'first love'. Clearly his feelings for 'nanie' had been discarded or, as we shall later discover, 'repressed'. Freud recalls his capacity to love and hate becoming conscious from this time: 'An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensable to my emotional life ... and not infrequently ... have coincided in the same person.' This pattern is one that recurs throughout Freud's life and which influenced the development of psychoanalysis. These complex family relationships transcending generations attuned Freud to issues of male and female roles, competition and rivalry, the experience of love and hate, multiple losses, unavailable mothers, disappearing figures that still reside in a part of one's self, and the unspoken but very present role of sexuality.
Jakob sought new business opportunities in Leipzig, 350 miles away. This journey was of major significance for a young and impressionable Freud, aged 4. He recalls travelling by train from Breslau to Leipzig where the gaslights on the station reminded him of 'spirits burning in hell'. At some stage in this journey Freud recalls seeing his mother naked, thus awakening his libido towards her; this later informed his thinking about desire, rivalry, competition, possession and threat, which he called the Oedipus complex.
Despite his efforts, Jakob's import business was not successful enough for him to be granted permanent residence in Leipzig, despite its access to established trading routes. Consequently the family moved to the Jewish district of Leopoldstadt, Vienna. Amalia's parents lived here and gave some financial support, but Jakob also relied on money from England. Freud recalls this move as 'the original catastrophe' that profoundly affected him as 'long and difficult years followed'.
The family existed in various overcrowded rented rooms and, while his sister Anna claims 'golden Sigi' always had his own room, this did not happen until Freud was aged 19 and at University in Vienna. His privileges did, however, include books, the use of the family's only and much-prized oil lamp, and his sister being forbidden to use the piano while he was studying. Phillips argues that Freud compensated for the unavailability of his mother due to her frequent pregnancies by acquiring knowledge. He was a highly intelligent child who excelled at school; he came first in class for six of the eight years and passed the entrance exam to the local gymnasium a year early. By this stage, aged 9, Freud was a voracious reader whose range increased each year to encompass the Bible, Shakespeare, Schiller, Cervantes, Goethe and many others. The fruit of this can be seen in the wealth of quotations he uses throughout his life in his writing, which forms the twenty-four volumes of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1956–74, often referred to as the Standard Edition or the abbreviation SE). Freud discovered a facility with languages and was able to read Latin, Greek, Hebrew (which he claims he later forgot – how Freudian is that!), English, French, then later Spanish and Italian. He also developed an interest in ancient cultures – Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Babylonian and Mesopotamian – all of which fuelled his adult desire to collect ancient artefacts. Later, when he had his own home, he lined up these small gods and artefacts at the front of his writing desk and then on every available space in his study (replicated at the Freud Museum in London). In his final Greek exam, Freud translated passages from Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, little realising where this would take him in the future.
In the face of the everyday anti-Semitism rife in Vienna, Freud's adolescent outrage turned on his unsuccessful, passive father, and his supportive but Yiddish-speaking mother. Freud wanted to escape from the limitations of both parents and from their ghetto-like existence. He dreamt of becoming a hero like Hannibal or Alexander the Great, the conqueror of new lands. His adolescent desires became focused on a family friend's daughter, Gisela, back in Freiberg, although letters to his friend Eduard Silberstein reveal that Freud was at least as much in love with Gisela's mother as Gisela herself. Here we can see the stirrings of an idea he was later to describe as transference. However, he repressed these adolescent feelings – another important clinical observation for Freud – as he focused on his university career.
In 1873 Freud began medical training at the University in Vienna where he experienced the pervasive and toxic influence of anti-Semitism. As a Jew he was expected to feel inferior, and yet Freud embraced the modern world in Vienna with its political and social reforms. He was not a ghetto Jew, nor was he an assimilated Jew; Freud was a modern Jew drawing on the Enlightenment to commit himself to science as a way of evolving a new future beyond racial or religious origins. While medical training normally took five years, Freud took eight, in part because of his initial interest in philosophy (Brentano, Feuerbach and Aristotle), but more importantly due to his focus on scientific research fuelled by the desire to make a name for himself.
Freud visited England in the summer of 1875; this was a reward from his father for gaining a place at university, but delayed due to financial circumstances. He stayed with his half-brothers in Manchester and renewed acquaintance with his childhood friends, John and Pauline. Freud visited Blackpool and Lytham St Annes, and in a letter home there is a boyish excitement for adventure, discovery and relaxing by the seaside. He wrote of his dream that England would be the place 'to influence a large number of people instead of a small number of readers or fellow scientists ... if only he [Freud] were enough of an explorer to strike out on new therapeutic paths ... I would sooner live there than here [Vienna], rain, fog, drunkenness and conservatism notwithstanding'. Freud made a great impression on his English family and Emanuel wrote back to Vienna: 'He is a splendid specimen of a fine human being, and if I had a pen of a Dickens, I could well make a hero of him.' No doubt Freud would have been heartened by this reception and recognition. It was this visit that caused him to reflect on his childhood relationships with John and Pauline, sensing how formative these had been and how profound the loss was when they left Freiberg and his family splintered.
So the scene is set for Freud's development of psychoanalysis, drawing on many strands of his confusing and dislocating early experiences. Despite being adored by his mother, he was left in the care of others in his formative years. He experienced multiple losses including his infant brother, his nanny, his best friends, and the woods and mountains of Freiberg, yet this covers deeper issues. As an adult, Freud looks back and tells us he encountered sexuality in many guises: being present in the room of his parents' intercourse, his nanny's 'instruction', his innocent exploration with Pauline, his mother's nakedness, and his adolescent passions for Gisela and her mother. So simmering just below the surface for Freud is the enduring presence of sexuality.
Freud understood and experienced the continual threat of poverty and the inordinate struggle to survive. He saw his father as a dreamer whose big ambitions never materialised. Freud's solution was to achieve greatness by becoming a heroic pioneer of new ideas and discoveries. He sought out new worlds, ancient and modern, through languages, literature and the great civilisations of the past captured in ancient artefacts he would one day avidly collect.
He saw being a Jew as both a blessing and a curse. The young Freud was disdainful of his father for not standing up to the anti-Semitism that infected Vienna. In 1875 he shortened his name from Sigismund to Sigmund, since Sigismund was 'Vienna's favourite name for abuse in anti-Semitic jokes'. Freud resolved he would never be treated as inferior and this led to a forceful personality that could be autocratic or unforgiving to those who disagreed with him. He sought out an identity as a burgeoning adventurer eager for a challenge, and this manifested when he was invited to engage in further scientific research.
CHAPTER 2Research, Medicine and Marriage (1876–86)
Work in the laboratory is giving me great pleasure ... I also have another therapeutic idea, which I shall try out very soon
Freud, Letters
Freud returned from England with a renewed interest in Darwin, empirical science, and an increasing distrust of philosophy. At university he came to the attention of Carl Claus, head of the Institute of Comparative Anatomy and an advocate of Darwin. Claus sent Freud to do research on the testes of eels at an experimental station for marine biology in the Italian port of Trieste. By day he dissected eels, thus learning the skills of detailed and precise observations, as well as patience, fortitude and a strong stomach. He later used these same skills in dissecting the psyche of human subjects to discover their sexual impulses. By night Freud, who had rarely been outside Vienna, experienced Italian women as 'goddesses' in the way only adolescents can. He recounts wandering into a red-light district where he ends up becoming lost and returns to the same spot three times before finding his way out. Freud's emerging sexuality was clearly both conscious and unconscious with this 'compulsion to repeat', an idea he later developed. His correspondence with his school friend, Eduard Silberstein, was a vehicle for Freud to express his developing ideas for which he needed an audience.
Back at university Freud started working with the renowned physiologist Ernst Brücke. Forty years his senior, Brücke was the first of a succession of 'father-figures' that Freud sought out in his career. Brücke so enthralled Freud that he named a son after him. A brilliant teacher, Brücke influenced Freud's emerging philosophy of science and instilled an understanding that scientific proof is the only acceptable criterion of knowledge. Through Brücke's Physiological Institute, Freud met Josef Breuer, who was to play a major role in his story. Freud gravitated towards influential and successful men who helped him in his career, in contrast to his ineffective and unsuccessful father.
Freud's research for Brücke was on locating nerve cells in a primitive fish (published 1877); this led to research on nerve cells in crayfish (published 1882), which contributed to the neurone theory that underpins neuroscience. Freud's promising research career was, however, interrupted by three events. The first was a year of military service from 1879 to 1880 when he was based in a military hospital in Vienna. He relieved the tedium by translating essays by the British philosopher John Stuart Mill into German. Whilst he enjoyed Mill's ideas, Freud disagreed with his acceptance of the equality of women. The second interruption was Freud's completion of his medical degree in 1881, at which point Brücke advised him to pursue medicine rather than research. Research posts necessitated a stable financial background which Freud did not have, as well as wide support from the academic community, which would be problematic for Freud because he was Jewish. In July, Freud became a clinical assistant at the General Hospital in Vienna, which was a necessary step since medical training did not provide the direct clinical experience that Freud needed to earn a living as a doctor. Breuer (from Brücke's Physiological Institute) – who knew first-hand the restrictions encountered by Jews – welcomed Freud into his home and helped him financially. The third and most significant interruption was that Freud fell head over heels in love with Martha Bernays. Gone were his childhood and adolescent love objects; all were swept aside by his powerful feelings for 'Marty'. They met in April 1881 and by June they were secretly engaged. He dreamt of providing a proper home for a wife (and future family) while haunted by his father's poverty and pressurised by the social and financial expectations of Martha's family. Martha came from a successful, middle-class, orthodox Jewish family in which there were clear expectations for a suitable match in marriage.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sigmund Freud: Pocket Giants by Alistair Ross. Copyright © 2016 Alistair Ross. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title,Introduction,
1 Early Years, Adolescence and University (1856–75),
2 Research, Medicine and Marriage (1876–86),
3 Hysteria and the Discovery of Psychoanalytic Technique (1887–95),
4 Death and Dreams – The Birth of Psychoanalysis (1896–1903),
5 The Psychoanalytic Movement – Theories and Followers (1904–13),
6 A World at War – Outside and Inside Psychoanalysis (1914–19),
7 Endings and New Beginnings – Cancer and Anna (1920–29),
8 Nazism, Moses, London and Death (1930–39),
9 Freud's Legacy,
Timeline,
Further Reading,
Web Links,
Copyright,