It is everything at the same time—sexual, innocent, natural, and the rest. I scarcely dare believe it yet. It is as if Schliemann had once more excavated Troy, which had hiterto been deemed a fable.
Freud to Fliess, December 21, 1899
FREUD HAD HIS own project of synthesis. But its targets could not have been more dissimilar from the ones Putnam tried to unite. Freud’s dream was not of integrating the various people who made up his world with each other and the cosmos, but of configuring a collection of historical fragments (cultural, psychological, and biological) to establish his work as the culmination of anthropomorphic science.
IT’S DIFFICULT TO go to Vienna today and not experience something like vertigo when confronting the density of museums that crowd the circumscribed city center. The monumental Kunthistorisches Museum, built in the era of the Ringstrasse to exhibit the masterpieces of the Habsburg monarchy, serves as a kind of axis between the two poles of display that dominate the city. On one side are endless halls of imperial and ecclesiastical loot occupying floors and flanks of the immense Hofburg complex, along with cathedrals and other palaces studding the winding streets of Vienna. Here, all that glitters is gold and the luster never subsides.
Though there are extraordinary secular riches in the State Apartments and Treasuries, the swag amassed under the auspices of the Holy Roman Empire and subsequent Catholic regimes is what takes the breath away. Everything is encrusted with jewels, threaded with gold, and festooned with silk, rubies, emeralds, pearls and more gold—case after case after case. One wing of the State Apartments is devoted exclusively to opulently embroidered clerical vestments, each spread wide in its own glass case like the dream of a butterfly become an emperor. Elsewhere, a series of rooms displays reliquaries that create a kind of grand ball of dismembered splendor.
How was it that the Habsburgs became so well endowed? They didn’t, after all, make anything. But the period in which the bulk of the imperial plunder was accrued corresponds with that of the discovery and despoliation of the Americas. So much gold flooded the European markets at the height of the conquistadorean enterprise that gold suffered perhaps its longest and most sustained depreciation in history.
Though Freud never expressed much interest in gilded Vienna, and despite the fact that much of the treasure was cordoned off from the public eye in his day, the volume was so great that it leaked and pressured the city’s baroque stone walls, engendering a two-fold relation to fantasy. First, the objects are so spectacularly lavish that they partake of the fantastical. Second, the inaccessibility of Vienna’s imperial treasures provoked a wealth of fantastical wishes on the part of those for whom the treasures were only mythological attributes.
The inaccessibility of this vast realm aligns it with the forces driving the creation of Freud’s dream book. In a work that lays blame for the encoded character of dreams on the repression of erotic material, the actual subject of most of the dreams Freud reveals from his own self-analysis in fact concern ambition and the murderous drive to power.
The epigraph to The Interpretation of Dreams (“If I cannot move the heavens, I will raise hell”), like the famous aliquis incident from Freud’s self-analysis recorded in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (based on Freud forgetting a word in Dido’s curse of Aeneas), is from The Aeneid. In both cases, Freud spoke from within an enraged female character. For The Interpretation, it was Juno who Freud “channeled.” Juno’s line expresses the fury by which she becomes possessed at the frustration of her ambition for power. Because she has been unable to destroy Aeneas, founder of Rome, she conjures the spirits of hell to enact her vengeance. Juno’s promise of revenge includes the destruction of the erotic realm as collateral damage in the war for power. After summoning hell and acknowledging that she can neither stop Aeneas from one day taking his throne in Latium nor from eventually marrying Lavinia, Juno swears, “Maid, your dowry shall be blood, Trojan and Rutulian blood. War’s Goddess.” The idea of a dowry of blood would relate for Freud to the idea of supernatural male menstrual transmission of which Fleiss was persuaded and by which Freud was intermittently tantalized. It’s the ultimate counterpoint fantasy to the one embodied in the dazzling collections of translapsarian Roman Catholic Vienna. Freud’s act of interpretative violence to Habsburg psychology interrupted the process of hierarchical dissemination of power. Now what passes between father and son is stained with the universal blood of Oedipus which Freud, in the orphic capacity of interpreter, can dam. If I cannot stop the consolidation of higher powers, Juno says, yet I may prolong it “and cause delay in events so momentous; yes, and tear up by the roots the nations of both the kings. That is the price which they will have to pay in their subjects’ blood before the bride’s father and her lord can unite.”
A narrative fascination with the power to shed blood, and a theoretical one with menstruation as a badge of fertility, are both examples of the ways Freud treated blood symbolically, as an archaic guarantor of transmission. Notwithstanding the limits to his Jewish education, Freud was certainly aware of the central biblical injunction to the Jewish people, “In thy blood thou shalt live.” Against the empowering properties of blood he ranged the by-products of digestion. The waste that would not stay inside revealed a loss of control that signified, ultimately, impotence (burning ambition converted into an Icarus-style spill to earth).
The challenge Freud faced was one of self-control—of managing not to be dethroned by his own theories. Freud never himself constellated the scene in The Interpretation in which he “disregarded the rules which modesty lays down and obeyed the call of nature in my parents’ bedroom while they were present,” with the embarrassing moment by the side of Jung on the Palisades. Yet although, in America, Freud denied Jung’s charge that there was a link between his enuresis and ambition, in narrating the incident of urination in his parents’ bedroom ten years earlier Freud noted that his father, in reprimanding him, “let fall the words: ‘The boy will come to nothing.’ This must have been a frightful blow to my ambition, for references to this scene are still constantly recurring in my dreams.” Further tying this scene to the story of Oedipus, Freud relates that in a dream based on the episode an old man must have represented his father because the former figure, like his father, was losing his sight.
AT THE OTHER antipode from the crypts of Imperial Vienna, with their representation and conjuration of straightforward desire for earthly power, lies the record of artistic endeavors associated with Viennese modernism. And here, as well, Vienna gives out with a frightening, lascivious prodigality. Within the Museum Quarter alone there are some 20 cultural institutions, including, in the most prominent of them, the Leopold Museum, 5,000 master works of the Jungendstidl and Secession movements. Klimt, Schiele, and Kokoschka dominate the space. If these works exist theoretically at the opposite pole from the ogle-inducing objects of Habsburg majesty, they’re no less magnetic, and the physical placement of the museums housing newer art, as well as the masterpieces of Vienna’s avant-garde architecture, relative to the old, is provocatively intimate. Wandering the streets of Vienna, passing between the different cultural exhibition spaces, one is caught in a magical revolving door between future and past. The abruptness of transitions seems itself of a piece with anti-naturalist elements of the modernist aesthetic.
The explosion of fine art, architecture, and applied art that took place in Vienna in the years when Freud was formulating his theories constituted a true renaissance. Though the Secessionists drew inspiration from new artistic movements in other countries such as, notably, the French Impressionists, Impressionism now appears as a period piece in ways that much Secessionist work does not. The extreme, self-involved sexuality of Schiele’s work is only one vivid instance of this phenomenon. On a very different plane, Ikea would be inconceivable without the advent of functional aesthetics pioneered by leaders in the realm of fin de siècle applied art like Josef Hoffman. Architecturally, the foundations for Bauhaus were laid by Adolf Loos and his followers, whereas the unbelievable Secession Building, completed the year before Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, looks like a climactic work of post-Modernism. It’s as though, in this building by Joseph Olbrich, a gold-filigreed UFO designed by Frank Gehry has crashed into an art noveau-inflected mausoleum for Oscar Wilde.
In Freud’s day, even more than was the case with the spoils of Habsburg Vienna, the aesthetic progeny of the city’s modernist forces pressured the old façades and pervaded the visual field. Art wasn’t neatly gathered as in the signature museums of today. Exhibitions in the Secessionist Building occurred simultaneously with displays in less formal settings. New paintings by artists like Klimt were unveiled in major public spaces. The sense of scandal surrounding the appearance of many of these works provoked front-page debates in the popular press.
The relationship of artistic modernism to the printed word exposed the complexity of fault lines scoring the culture sphere in Vienna. Though Karl Kraus in Die Fackel developed Habsburg journalism’s most effective voice of opposition to the hypocritical, war-mongering, patriarchal Viennese bourgeois culture, he also aligned himself in opposition to the Secessionists, who had set themselves up as violent foes of the same enfranchised, conservative powers that Kraus devoted many essays to ridiculing. On the unveiling of Klimt’s masterpieces “Philosophy” and “Medicine” for the University of Vienna, Kraus wrote that the new movement was “in danger of completely losing any sense of purpose.” This was a notable contradiction to the old adage in which the enemy of one’s enemy is one’s friend.
Freud, in his circumambulations of Vienna, could not avoid coming up against the visual icons of the new aesthetic movement. Conversely, much of this work appears influenced by mature Freudian categories, even when the date of creation precedes the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams. This is most true in the realm of sexuality. Whereas Schiele’s masterpieces were being painted contemporaneously with the composition of Freud’s foundational essays in the first years of the twentieth century, many of Klimt’s important erotic works predate Freud’s annunciation of the primal role of sex in psychology. Turning to second-tier artists, one discovers a profusion of work concerned with the convergence among sex, fantasy, and the outside world—contemporary-feeling not just in being sexually explicit but in the candid fluency with which the realm of the perverse and the fundamental perversity of sex in society is rendered. What stares out at us like a billboard in Times Square in the work of the Secessionists concerned with sex is often an erotic vision that flashes the viewer a far more convoluted, socially self-conscious lewdness than anything genitals can promise in themselves. Where Manet’s Olympia defiantly confronted society with the fact that sexuality exists, the Secessionists went one step further, confronting sexuality itself with the inescapability of mind—of trauma, imagination, and memory—in defining what constitutes the erotic.
However, it’s not only in respect to the sphere of sex that this work evokes the father of psychoanalysis. Secessionist and Jugendstil art also relies heavily on the realm of dreams. This connection indicates the bedrock from which Viennese Modernism explicitly drew inspiration: the kingdom of the unconscious. The name of the Secessionist journal, the first edition of which was published in 1898, one year before the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, a name also inscribed on the façade of the Secessionist Building, was Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring). The source is primal nature: a wellspring located far back in time before the conservative generation controlling Vienna’s cultural hierarchy ever appeared, back to humanity’s origins, when art and life were conjoined in total harmony. In fact, the Secessionist slogan, “Back to the beginnings,” referred specifically to a return to “the fertility of the subconscious.” The unconscious was conceived as a feminine realm, largely defined by feminized eroticism. Hence the title page of the first edition of Ver Sacrum by the graphic artist, Alfred Roller, which depicts a tree planted in a container barrel in the process of splitting apart the pieces of wood to snake its thirsty roots into Mother Earth.
If the source of Secessionist energy was a feminine fertility, the primary object toward which this energy was directed was the overthrow of the rule of the fathers in the name of the new generation’s right to self-determination. The rallying cry of the Secessionists, inscribed over the entrance door of Olbrich’s building after a remodeling in 1901 was, “Der Zeit ihre Kunst. Der Kunst ihre Freiheit.” (To the Age its Art, to Art its Freedom.) At the core of the Secessionist endeavor was a bluntly oedipal aspiration: Liberate Us from the Older Generation; Liberate us to Liberation.
The particular division of male-female responsibility in the Secessionists’ self-definition of truth came closer to the operative paradigm of psychoanalysis than Freud would acknowledge. From the very beginning of his work, in Studies on Hysteria, a significant aspect of the psychoanalyst’s work involved a kind of ventriloquism from within the body of the female analysand. Major portions of the first case histories are literally narrated by women through the medium of Freud and Breuer’s pens. Charitable feminist assessments of this process have suggested that the early female patients who were willing to give themselves over to the “talking cure” actually taught psychoanalysis to the analysts themselves. Less generous appraisals have charged that Freud simply stole the voices of these women and then reflected their words in the funhouse mirror of his own neurotic imperative.
Regardless, psychoanalysis used the verbally fertile, feminized state of hysteria as the grounds of inspiration in a manner evoking the Secessionist self-declared roots in a field of visually fertile feminized sensuality. Clearly, the subject realm of the Secessionists, dominated by fantastical dreams, invocations of myth, the unconscious, sexuality, and the embodiment of and nourishment by feminine principles, is akin on many levels to the one Freud explored. The artists were his natural allies. Yet, Freud had no more overt relationship with the individuals laboring in the contemporary visual arts than with the Habsburgs. Why did he refuse that connection?
IF FREUD WAS forbidden entry to the sphere of imperial power by exterior authorities, he denied any solidarity with the Secessionists and their cohorts out of his own internal fears. He knew perfectly well that his greatest challenge lay in convincing people that psychoanalysis was a science, not a speculative, art-style conjuring act of the imagination. Even though Freud clearly soaked up the representations of sex, dreams, and the unconscious, which played such an important role in Secessionist work—despite the fact that his own theories show every sign of having been stained with the imagery of the age—this was not an association he could afford to acknowledge. The whole psychoanalytic endeavor collapses once Freud gets grouped with the purveyors of fantasy, as opposed to the emancipators therefrom.
Freud was never searching for a Nietzschean balance of the Apollonian and Dionysian principles. He was concentrated on achieving the sublimated Apollonian ideal. On any number of cultural, ethnic, and personal professional levels, Freud would have been made uneasy then by artists who seemed to be valorizing the very forces in the unconscious his therapeutic practice was fashioned to tame. Where was he supposed to turn?
VASES, AMULETS, EROS figures, goddesses, mummy portraits, coffin masks, Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, steles, flasks, engraved mirrors, warrior figures, sphinxes and royal seals, jade lions, rings, scarabs, iridescent bottles and marble fragments from sarcophagi—Freud’s collection of antiquities is astonishingly catholic. It’s also enormous.
The compression of exotic display in Freud’s study and consulting room evokes the cabinets of curiosity, or Wunderkammern, that became important mediums of display in the late renaissance. Often, the Wunderkammern would present both marvels of nature and of art, placing exotic specimens of plant and animal life alongside wondrous products of artisan workshops. There were also objects in which art and nature were fused, such as two famous pieces in the Kunthistorisches Museum with which Freud would have been familiar: an oil painting of Phaeton’s Fall on a slice of alabaster in which the artist used the variegation of color and line occurring naturally on the stone to define the topography and sky of the scene, and a natural formation of precious ores that a Bohemian goldsmith transformed into Calvary by positioning tiny figures around the outcrop in a procession ending with the Crucifixion.
Both in the case where a single object merged natural and artificial elements, and in the overall constellation of articles within the cabinets of curiosity, the purpose was to provoke wonder that led to meditations, light hearted and grave, on the relationship between nature and art. In many instances, the ultimate purpose of this exercise was to suggest a reconciliation between the two, or at least to subvert viewers’ understanding of what the distinction actually consisted in.
The exhibition of antiquities to the exclusion of almost all else in Freud’s cabinets was not unprecedented in the tradition of Wunderkammern. But the range of type of antiquity and of provenance in his collection was unusual and suggests the complexity of what he was trying to unify. The aura of his exhibition rooms suggests that Freud may have had in mind the thesis of the sixteenth-century Flemish doctor, Samuel Quicchelberg, whose philosophy of the Wunderkammern and the art of collecting in general continued to hold sway in Freud’s day. Quicchelberg had posited that the museum ought to function as a “universal theater.”
Freud’s consulting room does feel very much like a stage—and a profound microcosm. Freud’s subject is history, but he traces it back so far, to a point at which humanity was so embedded in myth, that natural history and human history come close to merging. In Freud’s ideal museum the realms that he seems determined to reconcile are the east and the west; the objects he collected graft memory and fantasy in the same way that a Wunderkammern display might conjoin nature and history. But wonder was also the emotion Freud intended to provoke. His retrospective play of the past, in which fragments and figurines of cultures, gods, desires, historical events, and ghosts were all confabulated in a universal drama, constituted a version of the sublime—the antithesis of Putnam’s, which was directed piously toward an idealized future.
FREUD’S ANTIQUITIES ALSO convey the impression of an archeological dig from some fantasy civilization at a crossroads of east-west trade routes. His personal bildung occurred concurrently with the evolution of modern archaeology. The most striking instance of this development was the transformation of Troy from mythical icon in Freud’s childhood to historical truth by the time of his university days. Freud was eighteen when Heinrich Schliemann was making his first breakthrough discoveries at Troy. The labyrinth of Minos on Crete was being excavated the same year that Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud bought Ilos, Schliemann’s own book on the excavation at Troy, in 1899. The idea that the great legends of classical history had historical grounding and that, in effect, the antiquity of Western civilization’s common cultural origins could be physically verified had massive interdisciplinary resonance.
Any number of remarks by Freud make explicit the ways in which heroic archeology served as his model for the psychoanalytic process. In the midst of his own self-analysis, and the confirmation of his theories provided by the case history of a young man, Freud wrote Fliess with an ecstatic comparison of his own work to that of Schliemann’s discovery of Troy. Indeed, the core premise of psychoanalysis involves a deeply archaeological concept: the contours of our current psychologies are defined by the subterranean pressure of long-buried memories from our past. By digging at the site of memory one not only confirms the actual childhood roots of adult behaviors, one also dispossesses the artifacts of their purely mythological force.
This is not to discount the role of fantasy at the point of origin. The discovery of the maze at Minos was not the discovery of the Minotaur. Similarly, when Freud abandons the seduction theory he is still left with a palpable framework—the ruins of a family architecture—over which fantasies of seduction could be draped. Furthermore, the two-fold process whereby trauma becomes neurosis evokes the start of the archeological dig. In Freud’s schema, a trauma suffered in childhood only flares up as an adult symptom when a second, contemporary event triggers a memory flash that penetrates (albeit unconsciously) the layers of personal history. In archaeology, at least in Schliemann’s day, the process of reconstruction could only begin with the discovery of a visible fragment of the past in the here and now. This might be a chunk of marble from a ruin that the archaeologist stubs his toe on, or just a suggestive topographical distortion.
However, Freud’s general fascination with archaeology and antiquity doesn’t explain the specific ways in which the theater he fashioned resembles a polyglot cosmopolitan center. Why was it that Freud’s display proffered almost equal time to Semitic objects and to objects of the Hellenic world?
IN 1908 FREUD wrote a brief essay entitled “Family Romances,” which described the protoneurotic daydream of some children who imagine that their real parents are different, more exalted characters than the individuals who claim to be their progenitors. Eight years earlier, in the Interpretation of Dreams, he recounted a scene in which his father’s cap was knocked off by a gentile shouting “Jew! Get off the pavement!” Freud’s father told him that he responded to the insult by going and picking up his hat and getting off the pavement just as he was instructed. “This struck me as unheroic conduct of the big, strong man who was holding the little boy by his hand,” Freud wrote. “I contrasted this situation with another which fitted my feelings better: the scene in which Hannibal’s father, Hamicar Barca, made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans.” This family romance involving the displacement of his father by a figure of Carthaginian ancestry also comprises Freud’s embodiment of the voice of Dido in the aliquis incident. A clue to the special, catholic quality of his art collection can be found in the essay’s mention of the “child’s longing for the happy, vanished days” when his parents are the pinnacle of humanity. This golden age is one that predates, in fact, the division of ancestors into Jew and non-Jew.
Freud’s doggedly heterogeneous collection of art works, in which Rome intermingles with Greece, which interbreeds with Egypt, Mesopotamia, Babylonia, and China, can be viewed as an objectified family romance. With these objects, Freud hearkens back to a point in time when the genetic division of west and east was not yet complete. The thematic cross-currents are so complex in these works that they express above all the shared ethnic and historical origins of mankind’s foundational myths.
The Secessionists looked back before the dawn of civilization to the primal energy struggles out of which culture arose. That’s a gesture to which an American could relate. The Habsburgs associated themselves with the start of civilization in Europe through the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire.
Freud rejected the idea of a return to a truly primal state; for him this was only to invoke the condition of mob power and of the terrible helplessness of childhood that was the womb of all trauma. Freud would surely have agreed with Kafka’s aphorism about humanity in a letter to Brod: “They could not put the determining divine principle at sufficient distance from themselves; the whole pantheon was only a means by which the determining forces could be kept at a distance from man’s earthly being, so that human lungs could have air.”
However, if Freud rebuffed the call to return to a point before the beginning, he was equally unwilling to accept that the beginnings of European civilization stopped in Catholic Rome. All the myriad objects in Freud’s collection can be seen on some level as a plea for the joint Semitic and Western legacy found in antiquity.
To walk into Freud’s recreated rooms in London, with their dense exhibits of antiquities, is to enter a Wunderkammern of family romances. Everywhere one turns there’s an object to which both the visitor and Freud are related in the primal past—the very past that it is the purpose of psychoanalysis to expose, even if the sight of it, as was the case with Oedipus once he’d bared his mother by removing the pins from her dress, would blind the gazer to the exterior world, leaving him unable to see anything but the cabinet of curiosities composed by his own interior fantasies.