FREUD WAS BORN IN 1856 in Freiberg, a Moravian market town in what is now the Czech Republic. A backwater in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Freiberg had forty-five hundred residents, of whom something over a hundred were Jews. For centuries, the Jews had been subject officially to restrictive laws and unofficially to humiliations and periodic violence. It was only in 1849 that the emperor had granted extensive rights to Jews, and certain commercial constraints remained in place.
Freud’s parents came from Galicia, now in the Ukraine, and grew up speaking Yiddish. Freud’s father, Jakob, was a marginally successful wool merchant, running a business handed down in the family. His first wife had died, and the two sons from that marriage, Emanuel and Philipp, worked with him. When Jakob Freud married Amalia Nathansohn, he was forty and she was twenty—about the same age as her stepsons.
When Amalia gave birth to Sigismund Schlomo, or Sigmund, the immediate family lived in a single room above a blacksmith’s shop. Amalia’s pregnancies followed hard upon one another. Julius, born a year after Sigmund, died before he was eight months old. Julius had been named after Amalia’s brother, who died at age twenty, during her pregnancy, so Freud’s mother experienced two closely spaced losses in his early childhood. She became profoundly attached to her firstborn. He, for his part, suffered from anxiety dreams throughout his childhood years. He would later associate these dreams with fears that his mother, too, might die.
Sigmund was two and a half when a sister, Anna, was born. At the time, Philipp was the dominant figure in the household. Freud had been especially close to his Czech nursemaid, whom he later called “my teacher in sexual matters.” While Amalia was off giving birth to Anna, Philipp fired the nursemaid for stealing.
Sigmund’s anxiety was substantial. He worried that his mother’s absence during her confinement paralleled the banishment of the nursemaid. Crying for his mother, Freud had Philipp unlock a wardrobe, or Kasten; the boy had taken literally Philipp’s joking explanation that the nursemaid had been “boxed up,” or eingekastelt—that is, jailed—and feared that the same fate had befallen his mother.
Freud’s mother would be absent or preoccupied continually throughout his childhood. Over the next seven years, Amalia had four more daughters and another son. She had meanwhile developed a lung disease, probably tuberculosis, that took her from home for rest cures.
Freud’s father was a mild man, kindly, with a gentle sense of humor. Freud found Jakob ineffectual and obsequious. One story that the father told when Freud was ten or twelve made a deep impression on the son. As a young man, Jakob had gone walking on the Sabbath, wearing a new fur cap. A Christian knocked the hat in the mud and shouted “Jew.” When the son asked the father what he had done, Jakob replied: “I picked up the cap.” Jakob’s point was that the conditions of the Jews had changed substantially. Freud had been born into the new freedoms, and the account left him disappointed in his father and determined to surpass him in courage.
By 1859, when Freud was three, his father had driven the family business into the ground. The half brothers would establish themselves in England and thrive financially, sometimes subsidizing their stepfather. Jakob, Amalia, Sigmund, and Anna headed to Leipzig, and then to the imperial seat, Vienna. En route, Freud worried that he would be forgotten as the train carried his parents away. Freud later recalled that on the final journey to Vienna, he saw his mother naked. She would then have been pregnant with a daughter, Rosa.
We know these details because early historians, taken with Freud’s methods, wanted to psychoanalyze the master and so cataloged every available fact about his development. One researcher has written that, despite Freud’s repeated destruction of his notes and letters, there is more salient documentary data available about Freud than about any other figure in history. Salient refers to material Freud would define as telling, such as dreams and recollections from childhood.
Now that Freud’s ideas are understood as opinions rather than discoveries, it may make sense to proceed in the opposite direction, exploring the theory via the life. We have a good deal of experience with psychotherapies. In the middle years of the twentieth century, schools of treatment flourished in abundance. What became apparent was that often psychotherapy is memoir. A psychiatrist (Murray Bowen) born into an emotionally entangling family constructed a treatment designed to enhance psychological autonomy, which he equated with mental health. Another psychiatrist ( Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy) whose relatives were eminent jurists developed a therapy that nudges patients into equitable behavior, his own version of fulfillment. What innovative doctors believe about humankind often reflects what they discover in the course of their own struggles toward maturity.
Freud is the model of the type. To take the smallest of examples: For the whole of his life, Freud was nervous on trains, even subject to panic attacks. On family vacations, he traveled apart from his wife and children, both because he feared injury to the entire family and because he did not want his anxiety observed. In theoretical essays, Freud tried to explain train phobias. He wrote that those who in early life develop a “compulsive link” between rail travel and sexuality will later repress their desires and become “subject to attacks of anxiety on the journey and will protect themselves against a repetition of the painful experience by a dread of railway-travel.” Repeatedly, Freud turned his private experience into universals. This example also points to Freud’s tendency to ignore alternative, nonsexual explanations for behavior. We know that his anxiety in childhood actually preceded the glimpse of what he called “matrem nudam.”
Once we entertain this viewpoint, we will see Freud’s distinctive childhood reflected throughout his work. Freud would hypothesize—often over the objections of a patient or his family—about the neurosis-inducing effects of “primal scenes,” when a young child observed his mother and father in the midst of intercourse and mistook affection for aggression. But Freud’s wealthy clients were raised in nurseries far from their parents. It was Freud who spent his early years in the same bedroom as his mother and father. On the basis of scant evidence, Freud would suggest that the creative lives of great men—Moses and Leonardo da Vinci—were shaped by ties to dual mother figures. But it was Freud who began life with his care divided between a sexually provocative nursemaid and a lively mother married to a husband twice her age.
Altogether, the structure of the family in Freiberg was unusually stimulating and confusing. Freud’s favored playmate was his nephew, Emanuel’s son John, who was a year older than his young uncle Sigmund. As Emanuel later remarked, the Freud family’s two generations really counted for three—with the father, Jakob, assuming the role of grandfather. A few biographers have suggested that Philipp was Amalia’s lover and that the affair led to the dispersal of the families.
Freud would later make his mark by proposing fear of the father, competition with the father over the mother’s favors, and guilt over any victory in these struggles as central motivators in every man. But in an autobiographical footnote written in 1924, Freud lets slip the observation that hostile and jealous feelings ordinarily directed at the father were in his own case turned toward his half brother. At issue was a phenomenon recognized since Genesis: sibling rivalry. Beyond the friction between the half brothers, there appears to have been competition between Jakob and Philipp—but here it would have been adult, and not infantile sexuality, that was at issue. It is amusing to speculate how Western thought may have been transformed by the confusing environment of Freud’s earliest years and his amalgamation of two mundane conflicts, sibling rivalry and marital jealousy, into one dramatic story, the Oedipus complex.
In Vienna, Freud’s family lived in a crowded Jewish quarter. In various autobiographical accounts, Freud would characterize the family as poor. But the family had servants, summer vacations, exposure to plays and opera, and, though the apartments were always modest, more living space than had been available in the country. The move to Vienna was liberating for Freud.
Most importantly, Vienna offered a sophisticated public education. Freud’s brilliance was apparent. By age seven, he was reading with his father the family Bible. He entered the Gymnasium early, at age nine. “I was at the top of my class for seven years,” Freud later wrote. “I enjoyed special privileges there, and had scarcely ever to be examined in class.” The move to Vienna had entailed a change in language from Czech and Yiddish to German, although throughout his life Freud might slip into Yiddish in private. Soon Freud could read in Greek, Latin, French, and English, immersing himself in Shakespeare. He later learned Italian and Spanish. Freud had substantial instruction in Hebrew, though as an adult he claimed to have forgotten all he knew.
Aspects of Freud’s childhood are obscure, in part because he wished for them to be. Freud began destroying his papers as early as age twenty-eight, when he had as yet accomplished nothing of note. He wrote his fiancée, “As for the biographers, let them worry, we have no desire to make it too easy for them. Each one of them will be right in his opinion of ‘The Development of the Hero’…”
What survived intact is a line of anecdotes related to Freud’s sense of his own importance. A story, recounted repeatedly throughout Freud’s childhood, had it that at his birth, an old peasant woman “prophesized to my mother…that she had given the world a great man.” Such a family myth, Freud speculated when he considered the story in The Interpretation of Dreams, may have been “the source of my thirst for grandeur.”
When he was four, Freud soiled a chair and reassured his mother that he would grow up to be a great man and buy her another. Then a stranger in a bakery told the mother, “Some day the whole world will talk about this little fellow.” When Freud was eleven or twelve, a strolling poet in the Prater, Vienna’s grand park, declared to Freud’s parents that the boy would become a cabinet minister.
All these incidents involved Amalia. A similar collection of stories involving Jakob tilts in the other direction. When Freud was about seven, he urinated in his parents’ bedroom, and Jakob told his son that he would never amount to anything. Freud said that this episode piqued his ambition. Similarly, the episode with the fur hat caused Freud to vow revenge. He adopted as his hero the Semite Hannibal, who fought the Romans despite long odds, as a Jew might stand up to the Catholic culture in Vienna. These stories give an impression of a boy set on achievement in fulfillment of his mother’s dreams and in opposition to his father’s prophecy and example.
Certainly Freud was Amalia’s favorite, her “golden Sigi.” However small the lodgings, Freud always had a room of his own. His genius would redeem the family, and so his needs came first. When Freud complained that Anna’s piano lessons interfered with his studies, the piano went. Although fathers generally reserved for themselves the privilege of naming children, it was Freud, at age ten, who chose Alexander (after that other outsider hero, a Macedonian among Greeks) for his baby brother.
In adulthood, Freud made repeated comments to the effect that “people who know that they are preferred or favored by their mother give evidence in their lives of a peculiar self-reliance and an unshakable optimism which often seem like heroic attributes and bring actual success to their possessors.” Freud wrote that the relationship to a son is unique in the satisfaction it brings a mother: “This is altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships. A mother can transfer to her son the ambition which she had been obliged to suppress in herself.”
But then, Freud was not, in modern terms, outstandingly resilient. He was phobic, obsessive, and prone to depression. Whether his mother’s favoritism constituted support or pressure—whether it produced confidence or self-doubt—is unclear. Either way, Freud was taken with a “thirst for grandeur.” Certainly the appearance of heroism was crucial to Freud. One of the effects of research over the past half century has been to reveal how far Freud went in the mythmaking enterprise. Almost as a matter of reflex, he would exaggerate the obstacles he overcame. This tendency is evident in his account of his school days. He depicted himself as spirited and rebellious. Available documents suggest that he was a disciplined student who tended to side with authority.
Freud does not sound like an especially likable child—and here the most substantive evidence comes from a eulogy by his sister Anna. She characterizes him as pompous, pedantic, and priggish. Freud lectured his brother and sisters on academic matters and passed judgment on their taste. (He disapproved of Anna’s reading Balzac and Dumas.) Anna recalls that her brother had not playmates so much as study companions. In Anna’s version, Freud sounds like a child who came to social interactions mechanically, who relied on reason as much as fellow feeling to understand his peers.
How one takes this testimony depends on how one sees Freud altogether. Anna’s reminiscence can be written off as libel by a jealous sibling. But the eulogy is otherwise kindly, and its details mesh well with a view of Freud as a man who had little automatic rapport with others—whose private experience resembled one version of psychoanalysis, a gathering of information to be evaluated mechanically, on the basis of fixed theories. Freud himself recognized a problem in his “expression or temperament” that caused others to hold back from him. In a letter to his fiancée, he would confess, “I consider it a great misfortune that nature has not granted me that indefinite something that attracts people.”
In his writings, Freud almost never referred to empathy, insisting that knowledge came through reason. Famously, Freud counseled his fellow analysts: “I cannot advise my colleagues too urgently to model themselves during psycho-analytic treatment on the surgeon, who puts aside all his feelings, even his human sympathy, and concentrates his mental forces on the single aim of performing the operations as skillfully as possible…. The justification for requiring this emotional coldness in the analyst is that it creates the most advantageous conditions for both parties…” This posture of cool assessment may have been one that was congenial to Freud.
Freud was capable of infatuation. On a return trip to Freiberg at age sixteen, he developed a crush on a “half-naïve, half-cultivated girl”—she was eleven, though he thought she was older—whose more sophisticated mother he particularly admired. We know of the event because Freud wrote about it at length to a companion, in terms that are either priggish or charmingly youthful. For example, the girl’s family name was Fluss, which means river, so Freud dubbed her “Ichthyosaura.” Overall, Freud seems less interested in Fluss than in the correspondence, as an occasion for trying out romantic tropes.
Here is Freud, then, as a young man on the brink of entry into a career. He is stuffy, nerdy, and conformist, despite holding ideals of rebellion. He is deeply attached to his admiring mother. The family hopes rest on the boy’s shoulders. These expectations reside in him as ambition. He is brilliant, well educated, and positioned at the heart of a culture that, for all its formality and prejudice, is newly open to the talents.