I shall only go where you tell me to and shall be very grateful for the guidance. After all, Freud is only rediscovering Man’s “total-depravity” and as this is the one doctrine I have always held with the same firmness that I hold man’s divinity, it will not be as hard for me to consider this fact in detail as it is for people who really believed man to be by nature good.
Blow to Putnam, June 26, 1910
EVER SINCE PUTNAM missed a visit to Cazenovia on account of the Clark Conference, Blow had been suspicious of Freud. By the time Putnam settled back into Boston in the late autumn of 1909 she’d already begun interrogating him about Freud and putting forward her own views about where Freud fell short. “Can we not influence the affections most effectively through educating the intellect and will?” she asked him in late November. Rejecting the idea of a purely etiological approach to healing, she insisted that “to change abnormal impulses” one had to offer up “ideals to the intellect” and help in the formation of new habits. But she was equally opposed to classic suggestion theory. “I am inclined to believe that this [the effort to form character through suggestion] is an assault upon freedom and I react with indignation at all efforts of another person to use his Consciousness to influence my subconsciousness,” she wrote. “Let me make over my subconscious self by thinking true thoughts and willing true deeds. If there is a muddy reservoir somewhere in me let me send into it constantly a pure stream from the fountain of my self-activity.”
With all her doubts, she also consistently expressed curiosity to learn more about Freud’s work. And in a familiar lament she sighed over the fact that they couldn’t join together in the sort of ethical reading circle to which her heart would always respond most strongly: “I wish you and I could study Dante’s Purgatorio together. It is (aside from being great poetry) the greatest book on Moral Education in the world.”
Just before Thanksgiving, she told Putnam that she was making plans to acquire a copy of Freud’s Traumdeutung so that she could be an “intelligent listener” when they next got together to “talk about the subject in which you are so much interested.” But his fascination could not intimidate her from challenging Freud’s theories. Whereas she was able to accept “the value of getting patients to scrutinize their own consciousness and to become aware of their experiences which had caused their morbid or diseased state of mind,” along with the idea that some experiences could be “rejected by the main personality and persist as subordinate centers of association,” she viewed these as factors of diagnosis, not treatment. She could not understand why “the recall of the experience which created the secondary center is itself curative.” She circumscribed the utility of psychoanalysis well beyond Putnam’s own misgivings: “I can see that it may be preliminary to cure,” she wrote.
A further difficulty Blow had with psychoanalysis related to the inconsistency with which Freudian neuroses affected different individuals. Why, she mused, should “certain suppressed experiences produce nervous states in one person when similar experiences have no effect on others.” After all, it wasn’t only remembered experience that stimulated psychological change: “I know in my own experience that an imperative ideal can have just the same effect as an imperative emotion,” she argued. Blow would not countenance the notion that an urge to saintliness could itself be a neurotic trait. “Some of my worst suffering has come from the fact that I have realized that given my attained state of character I was bound no matter how hard I tried to make mistakes through which others might be hurt,” she argued. “Were I wiser and better I should see ways of acting which the most earnest effort will not now reveal.”
For Blow as for Putnam, although it might be possible to accept the idea that it was detrimental to torture oneself over sexual desires that were part of biological being, no criteria could be too stringent in assessing the worthiness of one’s social character.
Another stratum of Blow’s doubts about Freud reflected her conviction that the best aspects of his theories were already in circulation. Froebel’s philosophy of education was designed to nurture “unification of life,” which seemed to her to be the goal of psychoanalysis. Of course, she acknowledged, if Freud could help people get over the strain of this effort to make themselves whole that would be “a great blessing.” She concluded, “I am writing you frankly my difficulties and if you show me they are simply due to ignorance I shall be most grateful. We must have some good talks this winter. And we must study Dante for when it comes to psycho-analysis of emotional states he is the ‘great master of them that analyze.’ ”
With time, her doubts proliferated. When Putnam was about to deliver his paper in Washington, she read his essay and struggled to understand his overview of Freudian theory in the language of their existing philosophy. There were precedents for Freud’s point “that a wrong thought must not be pressed or shoved aside but consciously faced and inhibited,” but in order for the analyst to help the patient to recognize the evil or blind impulse so that it might be inhibited, the two had to achieve a frightening closeness. “I rather shrink from the intimacy it necessitates,” she wrote Putnam. “It seems to me that any form of the confessional should be between an unknown and an unknown. The priest in his box—the sinner on his knees—There seems almost an attack on the modesty of the soul in its unveiling itself to the gaze of any known and knowing person.”
Perhaps, in thinking about the patient–physician relationship Freud had structured, Blow was comparing it to the one she and Putnam forged over the years. Their exchange might not have penetrated the darkest corners of her mind, but it yet managed to plumb depths of real sadness in ways that brought vital solace. Their dialogue was based on slowly building trust, which made her feel free to speak without feeling dogmatically obligated to reveal. It was, above all, a true conversation in which Putnam paced the room with her and engaged her with his own thoughts and his own intellectual, emotional, and spiritual needs, so that she did not feel alone with her demons. The fundamental equality of the talk between Putnam and Blow put it at a great remove from the Freudian dynamic with its inevitable hierarchical cast.
The circumstances of her own fruitful treatment with Putnam may have given Blow an intuitive sensitivity to the dangers of a transference. A full analytic treatment with Putnam would have culminated in gradual disclosures of a nature fatal to the garden they cultivated together. The grace of their bond depended on a balance of openness and inhibition—inhibition in the name of speculative thought, of higher purpose, of the fundamental morality that applied equally to the dictates of divine obligation and human civilization.
However much she longed for Putnam, she knew Putnam’s own vulnerability to her, and she protected him willfully in a self-sacrificing manner through the years of their friendship. “My second doubt is twofold,” she wrote him, “whether the hearing of these self-revelations is good for the physician himself and whether until all great physicians become also great casuists they can be safe guides.” The critique of what we would call countertransference is general, but it began, as did all her intellectual arguments, with an analysis of her own charged emotional experience.
THE LETTERS AND conversations that Blow exchanged with Putnam in the first years of his involvement with analysis struck him with sufficient force that he interpolated them into what he wrote Freud. Putnam was already dependent not just on Blow’s example but on her actual ideas in articulating his side of the debate with Freud. Indeed without Blow’s help, Putnam might well have been unable to sustain his relationship with Freud, as he could never accept the idea that to promote analysis it was incumbent upon him to let go of his faith. The way to keep his conversion to Freud’s views on psychology from being a betrayal of his spiritual beliefs was to constantly battle to incorporate Blow’s philosophy into the analytic perspective. This was also an act of loyalty to his wife and the larger Boston world they inhabited. By refusing to abandon his stake in philosophical exploration as an integral component of psychological investigation, Putnam was demonstrating that in taking up Freud he had not abandoned the “City of Beautiful Ideals.”
Blow was always eager to do anything in her power to help Putnam, but it involved a strain on her psyche that he only intermittently acknowledged. “This morning I am suffering conviction of sin,” she wrote him after failing to immediately answer one of his letters. “It hurts me that I have been so dilatory. Still I know when I have explained you will know there is no cause for the fear expressed in your letter and will cover my epistolary shortcomings with the copious mantle of your charity.”
However sympathetic Putnam was to Blow’s plight, his own exhilaration about the prospects of redemption through analysis outweighed everything. He entered a new era of personal and global optimism, even as Vienna descended into a new period of dangerous uncertainty with the death of Karl Lueger, the first mayor of Vienna to manipulate a modern form of anti-Semitism for political purposes. Lueger was buried with honors no sovereign could match and hailed as Vienna’s “most beautiful corpse.” Shops shut, mourning flags fluttered, and sausage stands sprang up all over town while a phalanx of almost 50,000 men framed the slow march to the cemetery. Hitler wrote of having been among the vast crowd “looking out at the tragic spectacle.” On hearing of the mayor’s demise, Freud wrote Ferenczi, laconically, “Lueger died yesterday. You see, all kinds of things are happening.” Few people had any illusions that the attitude toward Jews would improve in consequence of Lueger’s death. Throughout the spring, Freud worried about rumblings among Germany’s most prominent neurologists concerning a planned boycott of clinics in which psychoanalysis was practiced.
IN EARLY JUNE, Putnam and Jones lectured at a conference in Toronto. Putnam’s latest paper, “On the Etiology and Treatment of the Psychoneuroses,” although again thoroughly rehearsing the arguments in favor of Freud’s theories, went farther than any previous one in suggesting the need for an admixture of something distinct from analysis in treatment.
In his initial defense of Freud, Putnam made an interesting departure from the popular take on the problem of mental health in the era, as expressed in many theological tracts deploring the effects of society’s industrialization on individual psychology. Putnam wrote that the strains of modern living, “the telephone, the morning paper, the noise of crowded streets, the seething competition and the pressure for a narrow and exclusive individualism such as everywhere makes itself manifest,” appeared greater than they were. In a lucid vein that doesn’t always characterize his writing, Putnam observed, “The pace set is set, after all, by men for men, and while it is too fast for some it is not certain that on the whole it increases faster than the power of adaptation of the majority.” At the least, Putnam continued, “the strains of modern living are mostly obvious and open enemies, whereas the enemies which we have most to fear are those which, in our ignorance, we do not see. If we could but secure all the power of meeting hard conditions that belongs to us by birthright we should not have to strive so hard to make these conditions easier.” This latter line is, indeed, classic Emerson with a slight twist: “the man is as it were clapped into jail by his unconsciousness.”
Much of Putnam’s lecture was dedicated to unqualified promotion of Freud’s work. But Putnam also struck a cautionary note. The skill and natural aptitude of analysts needed to be exceptionally high. If the physician lacked the most rigorous dedication and talent, he might “find himself standing aghast at the task before him, as Faust stood before the Earth Spirit which his magic arts had summoned.” The line points to the Faustian problem to which Freud was most vulnerable: the seduction inherent in human theory making. Once the process takes off, the theory maker discovers further validation everywhere he looks. Once Fliess began to perceive the operation of bisexuality in nature, it became an all-pervasive structure. Once wish fulfillment was seen as a key explanation of dream material—once sex was seen as a great trigger of neuroses—there was no room for other causes.
Blow was plainly in Putnam’s mind as he made this charge. He went on to invoke her analogy of the affinity between the psychoanalytic process and the one Dante traced in the Divine Comedy. “The familiar sins of ‘incontinence, violence and malice’ which Dante punishes in his Inferno as attacks upon social stability and progress might justly be described in medical terms as equivalent to psychoneurotic symptoms; and in the sufferings and joys of those whom this great student of human nature sets toiling up the hill of Purgatory it is possible to read the symbolized history of that typical and desirable sort of convalescence from the miseries of nervous illness which leads not only to a better personal health but to a wider sense of social opportunity and obligation.” This, in a nutshell, is Putnam’s perspective on the psychoanalytic mission filtered through Blow: the justification for the focus on individual psychology and personal history is as a prelude to enabling individuals to fulfill their profound social duty. Indeed, Putnam went on to say, “the community is the individual written large.”
IN MID-JUNE, FREUD made a strategic decision that he knew would pay Putnam the highest compliment possible. “It has occurred to me,” Freud wrote, “that only you and only Boston could be the starting point for the formation of a psycho-analytic group to be joined by our friends in America.” In what may be one of the last such compliments paid to the city, Freud added, “I understand that all important intellectual movements in America have originated in Boston. I also know that no one else is as highly regarded as you; because of your unimpeachable reputation for integrity, no one else could protect so well the beleaguered cause of psychoanalysis.” Putnam was clearly moved by Freud’s invitation and immediately wrote to thank him for his “welcome note.” But this was hardly his most ebullient letter. Why didn’t he leap to respond to the proposal that he become the founding member of America’s first psychoanalytic society?
THE SUMMER OF 1910 was an especially demanding one from a fatherly standpoint. Elizabeth was graduating from Radcliffe in June, and Jamie had begun to suffer unexplained attacks of vertigo. Jamie’s suffering increased later in the summer when his dearest friend, Tom Bowles, a young man from whom he was inseparable, died abruptly on a trip to Germany from an attack of pneumonia. (It appears that Jamie’s loss of equilibrium coincided with Tom’s absence.) Most of the summer was spent at Cotuit, where Putnam also had to worry about the health of the elm trees in his beloved garden, overseeing a major spraying operation as the plague of elm disease invaded their part of Cape Cod.
And then there was the endless succession of outings to pay visits to acquaintances, as well as sailing trips to favorite shores for oyster picnics and bonfires. Each summer at Cotuit witnessed the mounting of at least one major theatrical production. In 1910 it was Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring with a combined cast and audience of 114, ranging in age from “Mr. Ropes, 86 years old, to Thornton Coolidge, 3 years old.” All day long the different families were busy making costumes and rehearsing, when they weren’t organizing elaborate boat races and swimming parties. Relatives and friends were constantly passing through Putnam’s Cotuit home. A large cluster of Lee cousins arrived mid-summer and didn’t leave. Aunt Amy returned from Italy and descended on the Putnam household, distributing Venetian beads and silver necklaces as though she were the spirit of Old World carnival come to Cape Cod.
It was all, in many ways, the picture of a delightful life, and it’s astonishing that Putnam managed to get any professional work done whatsoever. Yet in this same period he was writing voluminous essays on Freudian theory, on top of maintaining his extensive practice and related medical association commitments. The tendency of his philosophical writing to lurch into abstractions has to be juxtaposed with the fact that his life couldn’t have been more rooted in people and earth-bound duties. Putnam’s speculative musings only make sense contextualized with the copious stuff of his day-to-day life, in which he was encased like a debutante in corset and endlessly layered billowing gown.
Freud’s ideas—Freud himself—did not fit into the local community. Yet Putnam’s ideal community was defined by knightly fealty to the cause of principled truth. If Putnam really felt that Freud’s was the more honest, penetrating understanding of human psychology, there would ultimately be no way he could refrain from choosing to align himself with his movement. Most torturesome of all was the question of how he could present the decision to Marian. She had already expressed displeasure at her husband’s interest in psychoanalysis. To have him then found the first American organization of the movement would be a transgression without precedent in their life together. Freeing himself from Marian’s nagging needs was a challenge under the best of circumstances. Yet how could Putnam’s aspiration to be a warrior for truth permit him to recuse himself from the call?
After the initial acknowledgment of Freud’s offer, Putnam didn’t write him again until mid-summer, when he was candid about the struggle he was undergoing. “I wish I was nearer either you or him [Jones] or some reflecting source of light.” He described having read Freud’s “Leonardo” with pleasure, and though he understood “that the religious conception of God is an idealized paternal complex,” he still clung “to the teachings of philosophy and metaphysics as adding something indispensable to such a genetic theory.… I find myself compelled to ask what is the fundamental nature of the universe, and compelled to answer that it is in some sense ‘eternal,’ and also that the mental life is the most real thing we know.” Putnam dug himself into ever deeper abstractions. “If a scheme is really eternal it must as a scheme have already fulfilled its possibilities and be a perfect scheme,” he pleaded. “Otherwise it would have fulfilled its defects and have gone to pieces.” Finally he had to break off. “I suppose all this sounds nonsense to you, but one must say what one thinks.” And then, helplessly, he started up the speculative motor again: “I think there is a ‘science’ which works by certain presuppositions [laws of nature; assumption of causation, etc., i.e. by presuppositions which are arbitrary and conventional] and a ‘philosophy which works by certain other sorts of presuppositions [essential laws of thinking]. Why should we discard the latter, and why should we strive to silence our instinctive desire to know the essential nature of things?” By this point, Putnam must have been staring in alarm at the Stygian stable of concepts mounded up around him, wondering why he couldn’t just say what he meant when it all seemed so brilliantly clear every time he talked to Miss Blow?
At last, in what was for him the most muted, lukewarm manner possible, at the close of the whole long-winded letter, he tentatively accepted Freud’s offer. “Dr. Jones and I will bring about the Branch Association meeting, but it seems to both of us that it would best take place in connection with the next meeting of our new American Psychopathological Association.”
WEARY AFTER THE strains of Nuremberg and the obviously greater crises of dissension looming on the horizon, Freud made plans to take an exceptionally long summer hiatus from Vienna. He decided to take the whole family to Holland for six weeks, from where he would travel onward with Ferenczi to make a tour of southern Italy. Jones met him in Noordwijk and described how the two men took long walks along the beach: “I noticed he had to poke every bit of seaweed with his stick, his quick eyes darting here and there all the time.” Jones asked him what it was exactly he expected to find in his probing to which Freud answered, “Something interesting. You never know.” The trip to the seaside was one of only three he took to the beach in his entire life.
The men discussed Putnam and his noncommittal response to Freud’s offer, and afterwards Jones wrote Putnam in a tone of mild needling to repeat the Master’s wishes. After reporting that Freud was in excellent form (“He talked continuously and illuminating on every subject I put to him, so you may imagine it was highly instructive treat to me”), Jones observed, “Freud was a little puzzled at not having got an answer from you.” Clearly Putnam’s effort to finesse the subject at the end of July had failed. “He was very clear about our forming a local branch of the Verein, and produced the following argument which struck me forcibly in America,” wrote Jones. “We are so likely to have the work damaged by amateurs and charlatans that it becomes necessary to protect our interests by enrolling those with some proper knowledge of the subject in a rather official general way.”
The implication was clear. If Putnam wanted to continue to be considered an integral part of the Movement, he would have to consent to play the role not just of a defender, but of a leader as well.
Freud seemed to have resolved that the philosophical element in Putnam’s letters was too inchoate to be dangerous. In late August, he thanked Putnam for his “promise” to found an American branch, adding that he was nonetheless “grieved that you should believe that I possibly could consider your idealist views as nonsense because they differ from mine. I am not so intolerant as to wish to make a law out of a deficiency in my own make-up. I feel no need for a higher moral synthesis in the same way that I have no ear for music.” Was Freud merely being condescending here? Or could it be that he was striking a true note of humility?
He was undoubtedly in an unusually reflective mood. Martha’s mother was dying and he felt haunted by unfinished work and lingering exhaustion. Against his expectations, his situation on the Dutch coast, with its “primitive luxuriousness” was growing on him. Yet there was a hint of irony in Freud’s tone of studied self-abnegation. “I console myself with this reflection: the idealistic truths which you are not willing to give up cannot be so certain if the basic principles of the science on which we do agree are so difficult to determine,” he informed Putnam. It’s a savvy, backhanded insult. Given that our mutually endorsed psychoanalysis itself is so murky, how much stock can I be expected to put in your idealism? “Although I am resigned to the fact that I am a God forsaken ‘incredulous Jew,’ I am not proud of it and I do not look down on others,” he wrote in a plume of acrid cigar smoke. “I can only say with Faust, ‘There have to be odd fellows like that too.’ ”