Sigmund Freud: pocket GIANTS

By Alistair Ross

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jul 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9780750969123

Book preview

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

Introduction

Sigmund Freud died aged 83 in London on 23 September 1939, three weeks after the start of the Second World War. Having lived through the traumas of one world war he knew he could not endure another. Freud chose his own destiny of a longed-for rest of ‘eternal nothingness’ by ending his life through an overdose of morphine administered by his doctor. This released him from the excruciating pain caused by cancer of the jaw, which was first diagnosed in 1923.

Freud had endured cancer for sixteen years yet he never gave up smoking his beloved cigars. Although it is popularly thought that Freud said ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’ – with reference to his view that objects symbolise deep sexual desires so a cigar becomes a phallic object – there is no evidence to support this. There are many myths relating to this complex and contradictory man. Some he created himself as he rewrote and reinterpreted his own personal history when he began to see himself as a scientific pioneer opening up a philosophy of the mind for the first time. He compared himself to a conquistador, those Spanish and Portuguese adventurers who ventured across oceans to discover new lands, open up new trade routes and acquire fame and fortune. Freud believed he undertook this intellectual endeavour entirely on his own, making psychoanalysis uniquely his. In doing so the Jewish neurologist had to overcome many obstacles experienced by Jews as a despised religious minority expected to play a subservient role by ruling establishments. Freud supported the image of himself as the outsider and it was precisely this position that enabled his revolutionary ideas to emerge, fuelled by the resilience brought about by anti-Semitic opposition. He was also determined that psychoanalysis should not be dismissed as merely a Jewish science. Early on Freud promoted Jung as his heir apparent who, with his Swiss Protestant heritage, would take psychoanalysis beyond a Jewish world. Freud, however, tailored his life story to fit with this picture of being the outsider who courageously discovered the continent of the psyche. It is this picture the psychoanalytic movement has perpetuated, regarding all other versions of the ‘truth’ as heresy.

The significance of Freud and psychoanalysis grew throughout the twentieth century, to the extent that he could ‘be credited as a key architect of the social and psychological’ identity found in the contemporary Western world.¹ There was a backlash as a counter trend challenged this view of Freud. Detractors sought to dismantle Freud, and expose him as a fraud who used other people’s ideas and claimed these as his own. Some argued his ideas had no relevance, as they were not rooted in science, medicine or philosophy.² Others believed he was a flawed genius and viewed his ideas with scepticism.³ Some explicitly rejected both the person and his ideas,⁴ indulging in character assassination.⁵

Given these polarities, where does Freud sit? Was he an astounding genius who invented psychoanalysis ex nihilo like a nineteenth/twentieth-century god? Was he the world’s best salesman promoting a product that doesn’t work? The truth is rarely so clear-cut. Freud irrevocably changed our understanding of the nature of the self, and psychoanalysis opened up new ways of seeing and thinking about our humanity. In doing so he ‘disturbed the sleep of the world’.⁶ ‘In my youth I felt an overpowering need to understand something of the riddles of the world … even to contribute something to their solution.’⁷ Freud’s youthful ambition was to become a reality through his later endeavours to understand his dreams. The solution to the riddles was a way of understanding the inner workings of the human mind that explained human development, human actions and inactions, and the age-old, but often denied, fascinations with sex and death. The centuries-old allure of dreams and the accompanying belief that they offer forms of knowledge and revelation found a unique advocate in Freud. Dreams were for him the ‘royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind’.⁸

What makes Freud a giant is his placing of the unconscious processes as the centre of his philosophy of the mind. Descriptions of what we now see as the unconscious existed long before Freud and can be found in Shakespeare, Keats and other literary sources. While von Hartmann wrote The Philosophy of the Unconscious in 1869 and the general idea of the unconscious had been developing for at least a hundred years before that, it was Freud who first expressed this concept in a systematic way that people could think about and see at work in their own lives. But what does the term the ‘unconscious’ mean?

During the Enlightenment – the intellectual and cultural movement that shaped modern Europe – an understanding emerged that human beings possess a distinct self that can be known through thought, reflection and observation. Freud’s revolution was to take this a step further by suggesting that, in addition to this ‘Enlightenment self’, there is another aspect to that self that we cannot fully know but which profoundly influences us; and he evolved a method of identifying and working with this ‘unconscious self’. Freud found a way of seeing the unconscious at work through dreams, slips of the tongue, ‘forgetting’, jokes and experiencing other people emotionally as if they were significant people from our past. In a world where everyone speaks fluent Freudian, his words and concepts have become a part of our everyday language. After Freud we understand that the slip of the tongue, pen, keyboard or text message can reveal what a person really thinks or feels but are unaware of or cannot consciously acknowledge. Psychoanalytic words and ideas, therefore, form part of the very fabric of our everyday language and culture.

Freud’s ideas expanded to influence: philosophy and the philosophy of the mind; art, especially surrealism; literature and literary criticism, where new ways of writing and reading texts emerged; films, which offer visual representations of psychoanalytic ideas; and advertising with its subliminal communication that can influence an unconscious desire to buy in order to gratify one’s desires. There is a breadth to Freud’s thinking that touches on almost every aspect of life. Twentieth-century popular culture is therefore indelibly stamped with images of Freud, his cigar and his famous couch. (It really does exist and can be seen at the Freud Museum in Hampstead, London.)

Psychoanalysis is relevant to everyone, but it should never be forgotten that Freud started out to relieve people