By 1927 both Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud had become household names, the pinnacles of the powerful Jewish element in German-speaking culture: Freud, aged 70, was the world’s leading psychologist, Einstein (a sprightly 47), was the world’s leading physicist, indeed scientist. Albert and Elsa Einstein heard that the Vienna-based Sigmund and Martha Freud were also in Berlin to visit family at the end of 1926, and arranged a visit in the New Year.
The Einsteins stayed for two hours. Freud said afterwards to a friend that he and Einstein had a very pleasant chat together, though their fields of study were mutually incomprehensible: Einstein, said Freud, understood as much about psychology as he in turn understood about physics.
For Einstein, in fact, psychoanalysis just didn’t make sense; he didn’t see how it could be useful. Not long after the meeting, a friend suggested to Einstein that psychoanalysis might be useful for him, and Einstein responded with ‘regret’ that he would not be taking up the suggestion and he would like to remain in the ‘darkness’ of having never been psychoanalysed; Einstein’s own son, Eduard, was mentally ill, and he and Elsa seem never to have even considered the possibility of seeking advice from Freud. Einstein told a friend that he had no need for help from the ‘medical side’ for Eduard’s condition and judged it best to ‘let nature run its course’. Freud himself had a son, Oliver (named after Oliver Cromwell), whom he diagnosed as having ‘obsessional neurosis’.
What Happened Next
The two remained in contact after their 1927 meeting. Einstein was driven out of Berlin by the Nazis in 1929, and when, in 1932, the League of Nations asked Einstein to pick a partner with whom to reflect on a great issue of the day, Einstein choose the question ‘Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?’, and the partner he chose (as a correspondent) was Freud. Freud’s response surprised everyone by being quite cheering: we are aggressive so we hunger for war, but we also love, so we want peace – and peace would win out in the end, Einstein looked to international action and laws to solve the war problem. The discussion resulted in a book called Why War?, published in 1932 by the League of Nations. The Nazis came to power in 1933, and the book was publicly burned in the streets of Berlin. Freud was eventually driven out of Vienna following the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938. See 1938: Salvador Dali sketches Sigmund Freud.