IN 1922, A DISTRAUGHT husband framed a challenge for Sigmund Freud: “Great Doctor, are you savant or charlatan?” Though he had interviewed her only briefly, Freud had advised the man’s wife to leave him and marry her former analyst, a patient and protégé of Freud’s. The injured party, Abraham Bijur, was a person of means. He intended to make his grievance public in the New York Times. But Bijur died just after the letter was composed. Nearly seven decades would pass before its contents were shared with the Times’s readers.
For most of those years, Freud was very much Bijur’s “savant”—a towering intellectual figure. He was, to begin with, the greatest psychiatrist of the age. He appeared to possess special powers of observation that allowed him to turn his work with patients into innovative science. Using methods he had himself developed, Freud had discovered and mapped the unconscious. He had named the components of the mind and explored the principles by which they operated. He had charted the sequence of human psychological growth, from infancy to mature adulthood. He had identified the causes of most mental illnesses and invented a method for treating them.
Freud was more than the parfit physician. He was also a wise man, whose account of the diseased mind had profound implications for our understanding of the human condition. Beneath apparent rationality, Freud had discerned dark impulses and contradictory yearnings that coalesced into predictable patterns he called complexes. He had demonstrated that, in the culture and in the lives of individuals, hidden symbols abound; our customs and behaviors simultaneously hide and reveal sexual and aggressive drives incompatible with the requirements of civilized society. Freud’s theories seemed to update ancient philosophies, casting our lives as tragic dramas of a distinctively modern sort. It was as if, before Freud, we had never known ourselves.
Then, a quarter of a century ago, Freud’s status began to change. Forgotten documents came to light. They showed that Freud had regularly misrepresented the development of his ideas and the details of his own life story. The new understanding of Freud’s clinical work was particularly troubling. He had altered fact to fit theory, conducted therapies in ways that bore scant relationship to his precepts, and claimed success in treatments that had failed. How damaging were these findings, in light of Freud’s contributions? The answer to that question might depend in part on the status of Freud’s ideas, which were themselves falling from favor. Freud’s supporters and his detractors took opposing positions, in the controversy known as “the Freud Wars.” Bijur’s challenge moved to center stage: savant or charlatan?
The case that so pained Abraham Bijur contributed to the reassessment. Bijur, a financier, was married to a younger woman, Angelika, who was wealthy in her own right. Angelika Bijur had entered into a sexual relationship with her former analyst, the prominent American psychiatrist Horace Frink.
Frink was married, with two young children. He had long been prone to mood disorder, and in the course of the affair, he became emotionally disturbed. Uncertain how to proceed, Frink traveled to Vienna at Angelika Bijur’s expense to undertake a course of analysis with Freud.
Frink had a difficult history. When he was eight, his father suffered a business failure. The father moved in search of work, taking his wife with him and leaving Frink in the care of grandparents. When Frink was fifteen, his mother died of tuberculosis. In his mid-twenties, Frink succumbed to depression. Despite psychoanalytic treatment, he became depressed again in his thirties. Frink understood himself to be subject to mood swings.
In 1921, at age thirty-eight, Frink consulted Freud. Frink was in an agitated, sometimes euphoric state. He was waking at three in the morning. He described himself as “more talkative and full of fun than ever before in my life,” though he also experienced a “sense of unreality.” In retrospect—and in the eyes of the doctor who took over after Freud withdrew from the case—Frink was entering the manic phase of a long-established manic-depressive disorder.
In the first hours of treatment, Freud leaped to a formulation grounded in one of the less well-developed aspects of his own theory: Freud decided that Frink had latent homosexual tendencies. Apparently it was Frink’s admiring posture in the consulting room and his indecisiveness in private life that led Freud to this conclusion. Frink resisted this train of thought. Freud was adamant. Any delay in pursuing vigorous heterosexual satisfaction would endanger Frink’s psychic health.
In a matter of weeks, Freud had Frink insist that Angelika Bijur join them. In a letter, she later reported: “When I saw Freud, he advised my getting a divorce because of my own incomplete existence…and because if I threw Dr. F. over now he would never again try to come back to normality and probably develop into a homosexual though in a highly disguised way.”
This forceful intervention—cure through action rather than insight—was at odds with the principles of psychoanalysis, and Freud moved to keep his role hidden. In a letter to Frink, Freud noted that he had cautioned Angelika Bijur not to “repeat to foreign people I had advised her to marry you on the threat of a nervous breakdown. It gives them a false idea of the kind of advice that is compatible with analysis and is very likely to be used against analysis.”
Neither Frink nor Angelika Bijur was fully persuaded. Still, at Freud’s suggestion, the lovers met with Abraham Bijur in Paris to break the bad news. Bijur was outraged. Addressing Freud in writing, Bijur asked: “How can you give a judgment that ruins a man’s home and happiness, without at least knowing the victim so as to see if he is worthy of the punishment, or if through him a better solution cannot be found?” Shortly after, Bijur died of cancer.
Doris Frink appears to have been a concerned and compliant wife. To her husband in Vienna, she wrote: “I feel that you have had great unhappiness and I am anxious that you should have just as great happiness. I cannot feel that it lies where Freud thinks it does.” Placated by a hundred-thousand-dollar inducement from her husband’s mistress, Doris Frink headed to Reno for a divorce, writing loving letters along the way. She would die less than a year later, in 1923.
Meanwhile, Horace Frink became delusional, saying that Angelika Bijur looked “queer, like a man, like a pig.” Still Freud made the case for sexual fulfillment. In late 1922, Frink and Bijur married. Frink’s condition worsened immediately. The marriage collapsed, and Frink became actively suicidal, requiring repeated hospitalization. The couple divorced in 1925.
Frink never fully recovered, but by his children’s account, he had some good years before his psychosis recurred, just before his death in 1936. In terms of what choice was likely to benefit Frink, Freud had been astonishingly mistaken. The months between the divorce from Doris Frink and the divorce from Angelika Bijur were the worst of Horace Frink’s life. Causation is hard to gauge, but in the wake of Freud’s intervention, two spouses died, Frink suffered a breakdown, Angelika Bijur entered and left a hopeless marriage, and two children found their lives gravely disrupted.
Though its outlines were known to some psychoanalysts, the Frink case came to public attention only in the 1980s, when a daughter of Doris and Horace Frink sorted through documents relating to Frink’s mental illness. The Freud who emerged had nothing of the sage counselor about him.
With Frink, Freud was an incompetent diagnostician. He seemed scarcely to have taken a medical history. He utterly misjudged his patient’s capacities. It was as if Freud, famed for his humane insight, was primarily a systematizer, someone who approached people through theory rather than natural understanding. And what a peculiar theory, if it suggested that sexual stimulation would offer a fragile, mercurial patient better protection against psychosis than life in an intact family with a devoted wife.
What made the Frink debacle particularly disturbing, when word of it emerged, was the possibility that Freud had ulterior motives. Frink had helped found the New York Psychoanalytic Society. In the midst of Frink’s turmoil, Freud urged the members to accept Frink as head of the organization. Freud believed that the predominance of Jews in the profession limited its acceptability; he had expected that Frink, who was not Jewish, would legitimate psychoanalysis in the United States. Freud may have entertained yet more concrete hopes—that once married, Frink would direct Angelika Bijur’s resources to the movement. Freud had written Frink: “Your complaint that you cannot grasp your homosexuality implies that you are not yet aware of your phantasy of making me a rich man. If matters turn out all right let us change this imaginary gift into a real contribution to the Psychoanalytic Funds.”
Equally distasteful was Freud’s response to the treatment’s disastrous outcome. Freud had always been contemptuous of Americans. As Frink’s sanity unraveled, Freud referred to the case as if it confirmed national character flaws, ingratitude, and immaturity. Of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, Freud wrote, “My attempt at giving them a chief in the person of Frink which so sadly miscarried is the last thing I will ever do for them.”
Freud appeared impossibly narcissistic—focused single-mindedly on his own interests, prone to self-deception, and not beyond deceiving others. And this was not the young Freud, feeling his way toward the methods of psychoanalysis, or the elderly Freud beset with ill health. In 1923, Freud began to age rapidly, in the face of repeated operations for oral cancer. But in 1921, Freud was at the height of his powers—in his middle sixties, famous, and far along in the development of his life’s work.
Not only character was at issue. If Freud was more selfish and peremptory than he had once seemed, those shortcomings might be overlooked, in a man of genius. But the Frink case also raised questions about methods and conclusions.
One of Freud’s important contributions was a particular posture in the face of the unknown. Freud asked of his patients that they let their thoughts flow freely, without regard to ordinary considerations of logic. The analyst would then listen with what Freud called “evenly-suspended attention,” withholding judgment and remaining open to hints that might reveal the patient’s inner life. When the analyst discerned concealed thoughts or desires, he would interpret them to the patient neutrally, taking care not to favor one impulse or aspect of mind over another. The therapist claimed some of the “negative capability” that Keats attributed to Shakespeare, tolerance for uncertainty, free of any “irritable reaching” after pat conclusions. When promising material emerged, the analyst would subject it to a sort of literary analysis, looking for ambiguity in particular words and seeing where an alternative reading might lead.
This approach constituted a form of empirical research, in which the doctor resisted any inclination to inject himself into the patient’s flow of thought. It was also a means of cure, since precise awareness of unconscious conflict would lead to freedom from the symptoms that the conflict had created and sustained. These two functions, investigative science and clinical medicine, supported each other. The insights led to recovery, and the recovery validated the insights. That was Freud’s form of proof for his ideas—they arose from observation, and they worked.
This method was part of what made Freud and psychoanalysis attractive. Implicit is the notion that humans are mysterious, delicate, multifaceted creatures, best approached with tact and curiosity. Details and differences matter. Freudianism claimed to be objective, but the objectivity revealed values, among them respect for individuality, self-understanding, and reason. In bullying a patient, in dogmatically applying theory, in placing action before awareness, Freud had betrayed ethical principles attached to his work.
And of course, he undercut his credibility as a scientist. Could a man so driven to impose his own views have engaged in the decades of quiet inquiry he described in his writing?
When the Frink matter came to light, Freud’s defenders wrote it off as an aberration. But then researchers looked at other therapies in which there was external evidence about the way Freud worked. In forty-three cases, patients had described their analyses with Freud, via essays, diaries, correspondence, or interviews. In thirty-seven of these therapies, Freud had given advice, expressed opinions, or urged the patient in a particular direction. In the remaining six cases, he had broken other of his stated rules for the proper conduct of treatment. This supplemental testimony, independent of Freud’s own accounts, suggested that Freud rarely conducted “Freudian” psychoanalyses.
Nor was the particular intrusion that dominated the Frink case unique—advice that an analyst and his former patient wed. In one instance, Freud was so certain of what was required that he conveyed the proposal himself, on behalf of an ambivalent male colleague. Freud assured the prospective bride: “I have taken on this mission of trust because I, too, know of no other and better solution for both of you.”
None of the missteps in the failed treatment of Frink was an isolated instance. Freud often ignored obvious diagnoses. Quite regularly, he set aside commonsensical explanations of symptoms in favor of recondite ones that advanced a cherished theory. Often this theory emphasized the role of sex, at the expense of needs such as emotional support. When patients objected to his interpretations, typically Freud turned a deaf ear to the protests. As a patient’s condition worsened, Freud would make no midcourse correction but would stick to his initial formulation. Instead of reassessing his theory in light of treatment failures, Freud focused on controlling the information released to the public. And then, rather than beg the pardon of those he had injured, Freud indulged in angry self-justification.
The new evidence extended to the well-known cases of patients whose histories, as recounted by Freud, form the basis for psychoanalysis. Everywhere one looked in the Freud corpus, there were mistakes and misrepresentations. He had written biographies based on false premises and attempted anthropology grounded in untenable assumptions.
For those who loved and admired Freud—and I count myself in that group—the Frink matter and the revelations that surrounded it were unsettling. It was not a matter of bashing—rather of feeling deceived and let down. Freud’s stature arose from his opposition to deception, hypocrisy, and authoritarianism. Now his behavior seemed to exemplify those very vices.
Nowhere is the change in Freud’s status greater than within academic medicine, in the United States especially. I trained at Harvard Medical School in the 1970s. Harvard was then such a bastion of orthodoxy that the faculty had no need to style itself Freudian. There was no distinction between studying psychiatry and following Freud.
His influence was not limited to one department. Early in my training in pediatrics, a senior physician opened the instruction in child development by asking why four-year-old boys fidget in shoe stores. It had been years since this professor had updated his routine, and an upperclassman had clued me in. I supplied the answer: “Castration anxiety.”
The teacher glared at me. I had telegraphed the punch line of his shaggy dog story, which went like this: Four-year-olds (as Freud had taught) are in the Oedipal phase of development, in which a boy competes with his father for the mother’s affection. Worried over retaliation, and aware that his sisters are anatomically deprived, a boy will come to fear for the safety of his “widdler.” When the salesman slips a shoe on him, the boy experiences distress primed by the sexual phobia. Will the foot reappear?
Thirty years down the road, how misguided this chain of reasoning sounds! Do young boys have more trouble in shoe stores than in other strange places where they are asked to sit quietly? Isn’t it natural to dislike a stranger’s shoving your foot into a stiff, new shoe? If they are worried that a foot has disappeared, can’t kids wiggle their toes or kick the sales clerk? And why bring in the penis? Isn’t losing a foot bad enough? Have all boys drawn the same conclusion about girls, that they have been mutilated? Nothing in the setup for the lesson is plausible.
The medical students of my day looked past the homely example because we knew we were being introduced to the principles of psychology, which is to say that we were “learning Freud.” Freud’s conclusions were discoveries. That was how standard textbooks referred to them. Just as William Harvey, in the seventeenth century, had discovered the circulation of the blood, Sigmund Freud, toward the start of the twentieth, had discovered the Oedipus complex, castration anxiety, and a host of other phenomena. These particulars were elements in a larger discovery, of the unconscious and the principles that guided its operations.
Freud was a hero on the order of Copernicus and Darwin, an explorer whose findings revolutionized humanity’s understanding of its place in the cosmos. Freud himself had made the comparison repeatedly. By showing that man is not at the center of the universe or created in any privileged way, Copernicus and Darwin dealt blows to our self-esteem. Freud’s deflating discovery—that the rational mind is not master in its own house, but subject to unconscious forces—placed him on a similar plane. Among his contemporaries, Freud’s only peer was Einstein.
Freud’s status eroded gradually, but by the late 1980s, when his character was being reassessed, he had parted company with the giants of science. The Earth rotates around the sun yearly. Natural and sexual selection act across the generations. Mass converts into energy. There is no astronomy without Copernicus, no biology without Darwin, and no physics without Einstein. But mere decades after Freud’s death, his laws had disappeared from the scientific canon. Pediatricians no longer greet students with a reference to Freud’s version of child development. Indeed, in medical schools, Freud’s name might never be mentioned, except as a purveyor of outmoded beliefs.
A standard defense of Freud had to do with the nature of innovation. Yes, went the argument, Freud was prone to misreporting his methods and results, but much groundbreaking research is sloppy in this way. Freud’s contemporary, the physicist Robert Millikan, won the Nobel Prize for experiments that characterized the charge of electrons. Millikan’s laboratory notebooks suggest that he discarded inconvenient data. Similar suspicions have been raised about Gregor Mendel’s work in the 1800s and the physicist Charles Coulomb’s work in the 1700s. For centuries, pioneers have seen the truth in spite of messy observations.
But this rationalization works best for a scientist whose innovations stand the test of time. Historians of science have demonstrated that “the unconscious” was a commonplace for almost the whole of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Freud’s addition was a set of claims about workings of the mind—that it represses sexual impulses whose mark, however, remains evident in the symptoms of mental illness. Freud’s conclusion about Frink, that his deference and indecisiveness reveal homosexual tendencies, runs along these lines. It was these dramatic additions to the general wisdom that proved least durable. Psychology no longer recognizes a category that resembles “latent homosexuality.”
Most of Freud’s particular contributions—such as castration anxiety in boys and its counterpart, penis envy in girls—have faded in similar fashion. Some of Freud’s ideas have been disproved. But for most, the problem is yet worse. The concepts are too distant from current belief to merit any research effort. Freud’s framework of understanding seems simply wrong.
It can be argued that today’s medicine displays a reasonable continuity with medicine as it stood before Freud intervened. Now, doctors might formulate the Frink case in terms of genetics and stress. The little we know about Frink’s father—the failed business and abandoned family—suggests the possibility of manic-depressive illness. Perhaps Frink inherited some liability in that direction, a weakness that was then exacerbated by adversity in childhood and complicated pressures in adult life. Those same concepts—the idea that heritage, early trauma, and later stress lead to mental illness—were common in the nineteenth century, as was “moral treatment,” the use of a calming environment, to ease the lot of the afflicted. When not in Freud’s care, Frink spent time at a ranch in the American Southwest, an experience that seems to have settled him down. Freud’s most cherished addition to the prevailing theory, the notion that attention to sexual matters will always prove central to the discussion, is the element that faded in importance.
This combination of changes has proved destructive to Freud’s reputation. He was more devious and less original than he made himself out to be, and where he pioneered, he was often wrong. Freud displayed bad character in the ser vice of bad science. And yet, Freud remains influential. What is most remarkable about Freud is the combination of ephemeral discoveries and lasting impact. Freud is sui generis precisely because he has turned out not to resemble Copernicus, Darwin, or Einstein.
It is impossible to imagine the modern without Freud. Consider a single area, literature. The inner monologue or stream of consciousness, in the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, bears the mark of Freud’s method of psychoanalysis, with its reliance on the patient’s flow of associations. In their use of dense symbolism and wordplay, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Vladimir Nabokov pay unwilling homage to Freud’s account of the complexly encoded effects of hidden desires.
Even after the limited “modern” era of the last century, we remain Freudians in our daily lives. We discuss intimate concerns in Freud’s language, using words like ego and defensiveness. We listen and observe as Freudians. As others address us, we make note of telltale incongruities that simultaneously hide and reveal unacceptable thoughts and feelings. When a lover forgets a rendezvous, we fear that otherwise unexpressed hostility may be at issue. In Freud’s graceful prose: “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” Our belief about the layering of mind has social and moral implications. In ourselves and others, we may seek a level of responsibility that transcends easily accessed thoughts. Beyond sincerity, we may demand the self-scrutiny required to reach a state Lionel Trilling called authenticity. We will ask the neglectful lover to dig deeper, to discover reasons for selective forgetting, and then to enter into the relationship with less psychological ambivalence. If this way of thinking about human motivations existed before Freud, still, he brought it to the fore.
This Freud is our Freud, a man mistaken on many fronts whose work provided the stimulus for the making of the modern. Was Freud a visionary or a huckster? In our time, Abraham Bijur’s question, savant or charlatan, is hard to avoid. If we are all Freudians, we have reason to try to make sense of the flawed and brilliant thinker who, in the words of W. H. Auden’s eulogy, often “was wrong and, at times, absurd,” but who became and has remained “a whole climate of opinion under whom we conduct our different lives.”