We’re bringing them the plague, and they don’t even know it.
—ATTRIBUTED TO SIGMUND FREUD, ON LANDING IN AMERICA
In the battle between inhibition and release, both sides might with some justice lay claim to Freud, who insisted that “living freely” was never the goal of psychoanalysis, and that conflicting desires are “not resolved by helping one side to win a victory over the other.” In fact, Freud was a near-perfect specimen of nineteenth-century Austrian Homo bourgeois, with its strange blend of Puritanism and aestheticism, and he admired both the cool, self-possessed, gratification-deferring English gentleman and his rational-seeming, lawmaking, and law-abiding society.
Self-control was Freud’s great topic. Liberation was a goal, but the point of it was not license but choice. Nonetheless, over time Freud’s ideas proved empowering mainly to the liberationist view, which gained serious traction in the twentieth century. Ever since Freud, and in some ways even in spite of him, social critics and popular culture have leapfrogged one another in full flight from constraint, denigrating self-control even as the widening scope of human freedom made it ever more important that we exercise it.
It must be said that Freud’s timing was impeccable; in the twentieth century there would be much to give credence to any who doubted human rationality. After the shocking madness of the Great War, which blew up Victorian ideals in the trenches along with millions of disillusioned men, psychoanalysis quickly suffused the consciousness of the age. The doctor in Rebecca West’s first novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), explains it all for us—with some exasperation—when he arrives to treat an amnesiac home from the front. Speaking to the soldier’s wife and cousin, he says:
“The mental life that can be controlled by effort isn’t the mental life that matters. You’ve been stuffed up when you were young with talk about a thing called self-control, a sort of barmaid for the soul that says, ‘Time’s up, gentlemen,’ and ‘Here, you’ve had enough.’ There is no such thing. There’s a deep self in one, the essential self, that has its wishes. And if those wishes are suppressed by the superficial self—the self that makes, as you say, efforts, and usually makes them with the sole idea of putting up a good show before the neighbors—it takes its revenge. Into the house of conduct erected by the superficial self it sends an obsession.”
Freud was especially a sensation in America, where his renown spread from the moment he delivered his famous Clark University lectures of 1909. His talks sold well in book form and psychoanalysis erupted as a hot topic in popular magazines, quickly becoming a prominent aspect of the culture. By 1924, when the murder trial of Leopold and Loeb was in the headlines, the Chicago Tribune’s flamboyant publisher Colonel Robert McCormick cabled Freud with an offer of $25,000 (a princely sum in those days) “or anything he name come Chicago psychoanalyze” the killers. McCormick even offered to charter a steamship for the trip.
Freud declined, but later that year was beseeched by the Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn with the staggering offer of $100,000 to write for the screen or come to America as a kind of consultant. The idea apparently was that Freud was an expert in Hollywood’s two main concerns, romance and laughter; Goldwyn characterized him as “the greatest love specialist in the world.” The New York Times memorialized the great man’s response in early 1925: FREUD REBUFFS GOLDWYN. VIENNESE PSYCHOANALYST IS NOT INTERESTED IN MOTION PICTURE OFFER. But playing hard to get probably only amplified his renown. “By the mid-1920s,” his biographer Peter Gay reports, “Freud had become a household name.”
In the decades to come, Freud’s ideas would grow into orthodoxy here, becoming the core of medical training in psychiatry and subtly permeating the larger culture. By the 1950s, Freudian therapy was firmly established in this country, and its basic doctrines were familiar even to those who had never reclined on an analyst’s couch. For literary critics, the encounter with Freud was practically “transference” at first sight; classics such as Moby-Dick were subjected to psychoanalytic review, and psychobiography became a trendy approach to writing lives. Popular culture was perhaps more ambivalent, offering laymen’s explanations in paperback but mocking Freud and his ilk in New Yorker cartoons and Hollywood movies. The Chad Mitchell Trio even made musical fun in their “Ballad of Sigmund Freud.”
It’s probably true that Freud’s momentous (and only) visit to America opened the door to the self-indulgent culture of therapy and victimization so often decried in this country today, but it would be foolish to lay all the blame on Freud, who in some ways merely helped us get where we were determined to go. Americans were already obsessed with the unconscious, faith healing, mesmerism, “mind cure,” and other such inner mysteries when he got here. These had been percolating through society since before the Civil War, when Americans who might once have worried over the condition of their souls became increasingly interested in their psyches. By the time Freud arrived, Eric Caplan writes, “mental therapeutics was already integrally woven into the fabric of American medicine and culture.”
Yet there’s no doubt that Freud had a big impact. It was Freud, after all, who gave us the psychopathology of everyday life, and a hundred years later we’ve come to see everyday life as pretty darned psychopathological. In particular we now regard extreme forms of appetite as diseases, a notion once largely reserved for drug and alcohol abuse but since expanded to so many other forms of excess. Without Freud, too, it’s hard to believe that shyness could have become “social anxiety disorder,” sadness could be medicalized as depression, and society’s most fortunate members—rich, well-educated white people—would feel the need to take so much Prozac, Paxil, and other drugs to help them get through their privileged days. The American Psychiatric Association already considers 48 million of us to be mentally ill, and while it may often seem that the correct number is closer to 300 million, the sheer magnitude of the official diagnosis gives one pause. Isn’t it possible we are confusing human diversity with disease? More subtly, what is the price we pay in lost agency when we are so ready to abdicate an important chunk of ourselves to illness, experts, and pharmaceuticals?
Doctor, Heal Thyself
What makes Freud especially interesting for our purposes is the way in which his life and thought bring together so many of the issues involved in grappling with the problem of self-control in the modern world—a world his ideas have done so much to shape. Freud himself, at least superficially, was a paragon of unwavering self-mastery. Yet his iron grip on himself often looks like a form of overcompensation. His fixation on sex—indeed, his life’s work—suggests the wish fulfillment dream of a sexually repressed Victorian paterfamilias.
The two appetites that consistently defeated his self-control were his hunger for renown and his lust for tobacco. For Freud’s patients, of course, the bigger problem was his inability to rein in his boundless longing for fame and fortune. We now know, for instance, that he couldn’t resist massaging the facts of his cases until they took the form that most suited him—until they looked like a “cure,” even if in fact none had been effected. And he seems to have had little control over his anger and impatience at criticism; on the contrary, he was quite ready to pathologize dissent and if necessary shun the incorrigible. “It appears over and over,” writes Peter Gay, that Freud’s life “was a struggle for self-discipline, for control over his speculative impulses and his rage— rage at his enemies and, even harder to manage, at those among his adherents he found wanting or disloyal.”
In many respects he was quite successful at subduing himself. As a boy he was a superb student, and as an adult he pursued success by singleminded devotion to work. Although Freud’s ideas were unconventional, he always desperately craved recognition and social status; he even managed to feel disappointment at not having been awarded the Nobel Prize. In his personal life, the good doctor was a classic nineteenth-century bourgeois, presiding patriarchally over a Viennese household full of women and children whom he dominated. But Freud was also a man aboil with his own powers, and more conscious than most people of his own lusts and dark impulses. There was plenty for him to keep under control, including a ferocious temper and his own sexual desires. (His self-restraint was surely tested, in those early and less ethically rigorous days of analysis, by attractive female patients who sometimes tried to seduce him.) But he managed. In fact, in the full flower of adulthood, he ran his life with the kind of efficiency and attention to schedule worthy of a Teutonic railroad.
He had “an air of power disciplined,” Gay tells us. “Even Freud’s mustache and pointed beard were subdued to order by a barber’s daily attention. Freud had learned to harness his appetites—his volcanic emotions, his lust for speculation, and his restless energies—to the single-minded pursuit of his mission . . . His heroic effort at self-mastery in the service of concentrated work had chained him to a most precise timetable. Like the good bourgeois he was, and was not ashamed of being, ‘he lived’ in his nephew Ernst Waldinger’s words, ‘by the clock.’ ”
In a typical day, Freud would rise by seven a.m. and see patients until noon. At the stroke of one p.m., as Gay tells it, “the family assembled around the dining-room table; Freud appeared from his study, his wife sat down facing him at the other end, and the maid materialized, bearing the soup tureen.” After lunch there was a walk, then more work and patients, often until nine p.m. Supper would be followed by a brief card game or a walk, perhaps a stop in a café, and then writing, reading, and editorial work. He went to sleep at one a.m. Even recreations were scrupulously planned and scheduled, and on weekends there was a program as well, which included university lectures, letter writing, and a visit to his mother. Is it any surprise the very idea of America was repugnant to him? It must have been painful for such a deeply cultured and rigorously self-programmed person, one so very rooted in the cozy cosmopolitanism of Vienna, just to think about such a vast, unruly, improvisatory sort of place.
Although Freud used cocaine right up into the 1890s to treat his own psychic demons, which must have been fearsome, he doesn’t seem to have been hooked. But his obsessive smoking was something else again—an addiction of choice if ever there was one—and would blight his old age, eventually taking his life.
Freud started smoking when he was twenty-four, influenced by his heavy-smoking father, and by the time his love affair with tobacco was in full bloom, he was consuming an astonishing twenty cigars daily. Smoking was central to his life and work; he claimed not to trust men who abstained. It was the topic of the very first session of Freud’s Wednesday Psychological Society, the Viennese cabal that built psychoanalysis into a movement. Meetings of this circle were conducted in a room “so thick with smoke,” Freud’s son Martin recalled, “it seemed a wonder that human beings had been able to live in it for hours, let alone speak in it without choking.”
Freud was urged to stop for health reasons as early as 1894, when, at the age of thirty-eight, he developed heart troubles. He quit, but only for seven weeks. Cigars were just too important for sustaining the energy and concentration he depended upon. Without them, he felt, he could not write or think. “I ascribe to the cigar,” he wrote, “the greatest share of my self-control and tenacity in work.”
At one point Freud quit for fourteen months, far beyond the reach of the most serious cravings, thereby proving he could abstain if he wanted to. But he didn’t want to, which is why he went back after all that time—and kept smoking even as surgeons removed more and more of his lower face. Even at the end of his life, racked with pain from the oral cancer that was killing him, he insisted that cigars had “served me for precisely fifty years as protection and a weapon in the combat of life . . . I owe to the cigar a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self-control.”
For a long time the good doctor’s attitude toward smoking embodied his own ideas about resistance. Or perhaps it was an example of what he called “knowing and not knowing,” in an echo of the Greeks who talked about having knowledge (smoking is killing me) that is deactivated by pleasure. Or maybe it was just a death wish. It’s noteworthy that in Freud’s day, suicide was a popular option for accomplished Viennese, particularly Jewish ones. “Between 1860 and 1938,” William Johnston tells us, “an astonishing number of Austrian intellectuals committed suicide,” including Otto Weininger and three of Wittgenstein’s seven siblings (the Wittgensteins were Catholic but of Jewish descent). It was the ultimate rebellion against the future-mindedness otherwise so characteristic of Vienna’s accomplished Jews, since suicide obliterates the future altogether. And a timely suicide played an important role in Freud’s life. When, in 1883, a promising young Jewish neurologist (and friend of Freud’s) named Nathan Weiss hanged himself in a public bath, it created an opening in neurology on the medical faculty at the University of Vienna, which Freud applied for and got.
Freud was shocked by Weiss’s suicide but was on the same course himself, albeit in slow motion, thanks to his cigars. In 1923, at the age of sixty-six, Freud detected a growth in his mouth. In all likelihood he knew what it was; he had first noticed a painful swelling on his palate in 1917, but it went away—supposedly after lighting up a cigar from a coveted box presented by a patient. This time, when he consulted a physician friend about the problem, Freud warned him: “Be prepared to see something you won’t like.” This doctor recognized the growth as malignant but told Freud it was a nasty leukoplakia—a benign growth, although often a precursor of cancer.
Despite Vienna’s wealth of medical talent—and Freud’s connections— he chose to have a superficial outpatient procedure performed by an inept rhinologist named Marcus Hajek, who botched even this limited operation. In the hospital, owing to lack of space, the dazed and bloodied analyst was compelled to lie on a cot in a tiny room shared with a mentally retarded man—a man who happened to be a dwarf. There Freud commenced hemorrhaging. He tried ringing the bell to summon help, but it was out of order. Fortunately, his roommate raced out of the room to summon a nurse, and Freud’s life was saved. He would live through thirty-two more operations relating to his cancer before finally, in agony, asking his doctor to help him terminate his life. The suicide of his friend Weiss launched Freud’s life’s work, and his own suicide would end it.
Freud’s Self-control Legacy
Although much of his life’s work hasn’t stood the tests of time or science, one of Freud’s ideas in particular has proved quite durable: the idea that we don’t—and can’t—know what goes on in our very own minds. Freud didn’t invent the idea of the unconscious; on the contrary, it was well established, by Schopenhauer and others, long before Freud came along. But with his thrilling emphasis on sexuality and dreams, he was surely its greatest popularizer, however uncomfortably. (He later wrote that psychoanalysis in America “suffered a great deal from being watered down,” and “many abuses which have no relation to it find a cover under its name.”) And to the extent we came to believe our subconscious was in the driver’s seat, we lost some faith in our own agency.
Another effect of the Freudian enterprise was to help overthrow the power of received morality—what might be called the morality of taboo—and to free us, for better or worse, from the automatic identity and authority of family. At the same time it sought to awaken us to the drives we didn’t know we had—particularly sexual drives. By lifting the burden of shame under which these were buried while questioning received morality about them, Freud’s work made us both more and less free, and in this way it jacked up the pressure on the self in self-control. To the extent we find ourselves free from arbitrary-seeming social constraints, we need only to constrain ourselves. But to the extent we can’t control—or even know—what’s in our own minds, the unanalyzed masses are left less capable of the job after Freud. Freud’s legacy is liberating, but with its focus on dreams, childhood trauma, and murky impulses, it undermined the power of the only thing left to take the place of Victorian social constraint and received taboo, and that is the power of the rational self.
Although Freud’s emphasis on primal guilt might have resonated with the Puritans, he nonetheless gave religion a good hard shove out the door, and despite all its failings, it can be a useful inhibiting force. Freud was a classic patriarch, yet he did as much as anybody to overthrow patriarchy, including the patriarchy of God; in Freudian mythology, the father was for boys a terrifying figure, always threatening castration, and frustrating their desire for their mothers. We no longer take the Oedipus complex very seriously, but we do seem to have thrown over patriarchal strictures right along with the patriarch (who may not any longer be living with his children anyway).
We also got from Freud (and psychology in general) a much more nuanced view of transgression, one that takes account of various personal and social forces and is more likely to see “wrongdoing” as illness. The result is a more refined sense of justice—along with a new willingness to see ourselves as victims. As Willard Gaylin has observed, “the extension of sociological and psychological exculpation will essentially prove self-defeating if it becomes all-inclusive. The law demands some acknowledgement of self-control.”
Freud probably accelerated the easing of sexual mores—which was one of his main goals—and his ideas may have played a role in reforming treatment of the mentally ill. Nor is it altogether his fault that where he proposed autonomy, we derived license. But even if he didn’t mean to, he propelled us toward the individualism that we insist upon in modern life, at the expense of the social fabric that individuals must depend upon. Freud’s focus on disinhibition is only to be expected; his patients came from the Viennese bourgeoisie, were often women, and had to cope with stifling layers of social constraint. “The great majority of his patients,” wrote the psychologist Robert R. Holt, “were probably overcontrolled people (as he was himself) whose problem with respect to moral constraints was not to get control over unethical behavior but to learn to relax their too-severe self-discipline.”
Psychology today is still disinhibiting, and one reason is the nature of the confidant. Once upon a time, confiding meant spilling the beans to a friend or clergyman, but the rise of therapy as a market-oriented specialty has given the affluent a class of willing professional confidants who can be hired with all the advantages of a commercial transaction. Therapists are paid not to tell and not to judge. At the very least they affect a certain moral neutrality—the moral neutrality of the marketplace, which is oddly enough the therapeutic milieu. Aside from the expense, which is often covered by health insurance, we seem to like the new system—so much that in a 2008 Harris poll nearly three in ten American adults reported having received treatment or therapy from a mental health professional.
For all the ways Freud’s legacy might have undermined self-control, there was one hugely important way in which he had the opposite effect. If the goal of psychoanalysis was autonomy—in Freud’s words, “to uncover repressions and replace them by acts of judgment”—then the mission of Freud’s enterprise was to get us to recognize our desires and decide what we think of them. Doing this means forming desires about our desires, or the second-order preferences we spoke of earlier in this book. Forming and upholding these is what self-control is all about. In Harry Frankfurt’s terms, Freud wanted each of us to become a person rather than a mere wanton—a noble goal indeed, even if it means accepting a large additional burden on the self in self-control. Seen in this light, the intent of Freud’s bizarre enterprise (aside from making him famous) was to give each of us the power to say yea or nay to our own impulses as well as to the received constraints that might have bound them.
In a sense, Freud sought to banish Aristotle’s thoughtless form of akrasia. In Freud’s holy trinity of id, ego, and superego, the ego represents a middle way, the part of ourselves beholden neither to instinct nor taboo, the part whose job is to balance drives, ethics, and the needs of others. And it was this part that Freud tried to exalt. For all his failings, Freud gave us a shorthand that enabled him to say in a single sentence—his explanation of psychoanalysis—what’s taking me an entire book: “Where id was, there ego shall be.”