ONCE MORE, FREUD WAS bitter over the response to his new book, though it had been respectful. An Austrian journalist wrote of Freud’s “uncommonly honest search for the truth.” The reader’s response, he said, was an “uncanny feeling of being, for the large part of his life, delivered over to a dark power that arbitrarily does what it will with us.” The Interpretation of Dreams sold only seventy-five copies a year for eight years, but a short précis, On Dreams, did better. Together the two books elicited twenty-eight reviews. Freud was gaining attention and beginning to attract followers, Viennese physicians interested in pioneering a new form of treatment and open to discussing their own sexual development with colleagues.
Meanwhile, Freud attempted to integrate his dream theory into what had been the main body of his prior work, on the origins of hysteria. In the mid–1890s, he had promised to pre sent detailed clinical material that would substantiate his views. He proposed to do so now by employing his method of dream interpretation in clinical practice.
Freud wrote about an engaging young woman, whom he called “Dora.” Dora was Ida Bauer, the daughter of a successful manufacturer who had consulted Freud for psychological symptoms resulting from syphilis. It was a family friend and a contemporary of the parents, Hans Zellenka (in the report, “Herr K.”) who had sent the father to Freud. As the daughter became increasingly neurotic—with depression, a nervous cough, and attacks of an inability to speak—the father referred her first for electrotherapy and then for psychoanalysis. At age fifteen, Ida Bauer had decided against work with Freud. Now, in 1898, when she was seventeen, her father forced her into treatment.
The origin of the daughter’s anxiety was apparent to the father. She had told her mother, an ineffectual woman, that on a lakeside summer walk, Zellenka had made a “proposal”—though he denied it. This approach would have taken place when Bauer was fifteen years old. (In his report, Freud adds a year to her age throughout.) In the analysis, Ida Bauer revealed an earlier approach. When she was thirteen, Zellenka forced a kiss upon her. In the interval leading up to the analysis, Zellenka’s attentions had become constant—but they were ignored by the father, who was carrying on an affair with Zellenka’s wife. Freud wrote that Bauer “used to be overcome by the idea that she had been handed over to Herr K. as the price of his tolerating relations between her father and his wife…”
There would seem to be no mystery here. Abandoned by her parents, imposed on sexually, and having (as Freud documented) been born into a family where psychiatric symptoms were common, Bauer developed what Freud called a “case of petite hystérie.”
But Freud hoped to explain the particular symptoms on his own terms, as repressed sexual wishes. By Freud’s account, when embraced by Zellenka, the thirteen-year-old Bauer should have experienced genital excitation. Freud believed that Bauer had felt Zellenka’s penis pressed against her. Rather than acknowledge her desire, she had displaced the sensation upward, reversing excitation into disgust. The result (mediated also by a schoolgirl’s awareness of oral sex) was mouth and throat symptoms, such as the cough and voice loss. Freud would not accept Bauer’s insistence that she harbored no romantic sentiments toward Zellenka. “And how,” Freud asks regarding the lakeside proposition, “could a girl who was in love feel insulted by a proposal which was made in a manner neither tactless nor offensive?” It was Bauer who was an accomplice in her father’s affair, allowing it to continue so that she could not be reproached for her closeness to Zellenka!
This detective work is laid out in a typically masterful narrative involving the usual characters, not excluding a governess smitten with Bauer’s father. Bauer’s dreaming involves a jewel case, which Freud interprets as a vagina. (“I knew you would say that,” is Bauer’s response. Freud parries, “That is to say, you knew that it was so.”) Freud suggests that the dream reveals a deep love for Zellenka—which Bauer again denies. Indeed, Freud imagines a trio of men for whom Bauer harbors desire: the father (Bauer declines this interpretation as well), the father’s friend, and the psychoanalyst. Freud writes, “I came to the conclusion that the idea had probably occurred to her one day during a session that she would like to have a kiss from me.” When Bauer’s symptoms fail to improve, and when after three months she terminates the treatment, Freud attributes the problems to this sexual wish and to a consequent intent to frustrate him by leaving the analysis incomplete.
So annoyed was Freud that, when his young patient approached him sixteen months later over a facial neuralgia, he refused to tend to her. In the interim, Bauer had made progress on her own, by confronting the Zellenkas. She got the husband to admit to having propositioned her, while the wife tacitly acknowledged the affair with Bauer’s father. Freud wrote that though he would not treat Bauer further, he “promised to forgive her for having deprived me of the satisfaction of affording her a far more radical cure for her troubles.”
In no case history does Freud look worse. Bauer turns to Freud for help, and he tells her that she must recognize her desire for her molester. Patrick Mahony, an analyst who has contributed admiring books about Freud, wrote that the Dora report is “one of the most remarkable exhibitions of a clinician’s published rejections of his patient; spectacular, though tragic, evidence of sexual abuse of a young girl, and her own analyst’s exoneration of that abuse; an eminent case of forced associations, forced remembering, and perhaps several forced dreams…” Freud’s narcissism is on display at a distressing level. He fails his patient and makes it out that he is the injured party. It is a tribute to Freud’s skill at storytelling that this example of blaming the victim stood more or less unchallenged between its appearance, in 1905, and the mid–1960s, when Freud’s developmental theories and his attitudes toward women came under new scrutiny.
But as in each of Freud’s train wrecks, there is much worth salvaging. Freud’s self-justification relies on a new concept, transference. During the therapy, the analyst will find that he has been placed in the role of other persons important to the patient, most often the father as he was perceived in the patient’s early life. Though transference can interfere with treatment—here, Freud says it caused the patient to flee—it presents an opportunity. Transference brings the neurotic attitudes into the consulting room, where they can be interpreted.
Freud acknowledges that the transference presents special difficulties. It is subtle, so that in seeking it out, the therapist runs “the risk of making arbitrary inferences.” Freud believed that Bauer had turned him into a variant of Zellenka. The therapy might have been saved, Freud believed, if the transference had been interpreted: “[H]ave you been struck by anything about me…which has caught your fancy, as happened previously with Herr K.?” Freud wrote that it was because of his failure to interpret the transference that Bauer “acted out an essential part of her recollections” and left the treatment as she had left Zellenka’s house—vengefully, because her repressed sexual impulses had been frustrated.
How wrongheaded Freud seems! Bauer can hardly transfer a desire she does not have. She leaves the therapy because Freud is one more authority figure who has failed in his duties to listen and to protect. The interpretation Freud wishes he had used would have added insult to injury.
But if transference is misapplied here, still the idea is groundbreaking. Part of what makes the therapeutic encounter valuable is that it elicits feelings and attributions that get the patient into trouble elsewhere. Often enough, Freud pulls off this trick, juxtaposing blindness to the patient before him with vision regarding people in general. The notion of “acting out”—the expression in behavior, rather than words, of fantasies and conflicts—arrives in similar fashion.
By the time of his work with Bauer, Freud had moved past the “onion-peeling” attention to symptoms and begun asking his patients to say whatever came to their minds. In theory if not in practice, Freud had established the consulting room as a forum for free self-inquiry. And with the Dora case, the model of a psychoanalytic interpretation had been set. It links pathogenic conflict (by Freud’s account here, desire for the family friend), with its infantile precursor (similar sexual love for the father), and its recrudescence in the therapy (the wish to be kissed by the doctor). Again, Freud seems entirely in the wrong. Still, he had a genius for imagining the platonic ideal of a therapy. Freud’s reports of flawed treatments contain a progressively richer account of psychoanalysis.
The Dora monograph represented a new level of openness, in Freud’s work, about sexual thoughts and practices. Beyond incestuous fantasies and fellation, homosexuality enters the discussion, via a consideration of Bauer’s supposed feelings for Zellenka’s wife—and it does so as an ordinary concomitant of puberty, as a psychosexual phase. Unacceptable sexual drives are not just the raw material of dreams. They are present constantly, as motivators in every stage of life.
And Freud’s work with Bauer may have had a saving grace. She appears spunky—a fighter. It is possible that the encounter with Freud did some good, emboldening Bauer to confront other self-interested adults.
The Interpretation of Dreams had been a breakthrough in Freud’s thinking. The Dora case extended its reach to clinical practice. Freud had other territory in mind as well. After all, it was not the dream but its interpretation that was the royal road to the unconscious. A similar process, Freud argued, might be applied to other seemingly absurd mental phenomena: forgetting, slips of the tongue, bungled actions, and jokes.
Two extensions of The Interpretation of Dreams bear mentioning: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which appeared in 1901, and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, from 1905. For all its generalizations, The Interpretation of Dreams dealt with an odd state, dream sleep, and many of its examples came from patient care. The Dora case likewise concerned illness. The new books laid claim to the natural and the normal.
Word substitutions, for example, are universal. Instead of opening what promised to be a stormy session, the president of an Austrian house of parliament, Freud reports, declared that since a quorum was present, the meeting was now closed. Like dreams, Freud concludes, slips of the tongue embody wishes.
Freud’s lead example concerns his own mental lapse. On a trip in southern Europe, Freud had been reaching for the name of the painter of an Italian fresco, Four Last Things. Unable to recall Signorelli, Freud instead thought of Botticelli and then Boltraffio, a more obscure artist.
The conversation in progress had concerned the confidence that Turks living in Bosnia and Herzegovina place in their doctors. Given a hopeless diagnosis, the patients reply, “Herr, what is there to be said?” But then, Turks are also especially interested in sexual potency. A Turkish patient had told his doctor, “Herr…if that comes to an end then life is of no value.” The discussion threatened to cause Freud to recall an uncomfortable fact. A patient of his with an incurable sexual disorder had recently committed suicide. Freud had received the news at a small village named Trafoi.
It was to deflect the conversation that Freud had turned the discussion toward Signorelli. But the repressed thought about death and sexuality reemerged in a forgetting and substitution. The –elli was maintained (in Botticelli), but the Signor—Italian for Herr—was lost and a Bo from Bosnia was inserted. The error is a sort of symptom. This one was formed by compromise, between the word Freud wished consciously to remember, Signorelli; the chain of syllables, beginning with Herr, that caused mental conflict; and finally the syllable traf (taken from Trafoi into Boltraffio) that gave away the source of the difficulty. The form of this example is quite typical. In dreams, in small errors, and in jokes, the mind works through the structure of language. Primitive energy drives the unconscious, but the brain makes its self-revealing compromises largely through puns.
Our response to the Signorelli example of a “Freudian slip” will depend on what we are inclined to believe about the mind. It might just be that “brain overload” results in jumbled speech. True enough, if as you become flustered you try to push aside Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Trafoi, and simultaneously you reach for Signorelli, you get Botticelli and Boltraffio. But the slip of the tongue hardly demonstrates that the mind contains an active element, the unconscious, that creates tricky condensations. Freud is aware that his treatment of a sexually impaired patient has failed grievously. What is at issue is not repression but selective inattention to conscious anxiety.
Freud never indicates how sex and death—in the meaning that he intends, as elements of the Oedipus complex—shape the confusion. He can hardly claim to be conflicted over his patient’s sexual disease. Patients’ sexual inadequacies were both a starting point for psychotherapy and a subject of open collegial conversation. Nor does Freud suggest that he felt guilt over the “melancholy event.” The Signorelli slip resembles the Irma dream. What is most evidently at stake is current professional embarrassment.
But then, the Psychopathology is less an independent contribution than a long footnote to The Interpretation of Dreams, a further practical illustration of a theory of mind that Freud considers to be well established. Jokes serves a similar purpose, perhaps less successfully. It is an encyclopedic collection of humor, largely wordplay, that has not stood the test of time. Freud’s explanation of the purpose and technique of jokes contains familiar themes. Jokes are often tendentious. They deal in hostility, especially over sexual issues. Like dreams, jokes embody or reveal workings of mind, such as displacement. Our pleasure in the joke arises from its ability to evade the censor, in the manner of symbols in dreams, so that insults break through into consciousness.
There is something wonderful about a great mind stooping to consider mundane material. Freud tells smutty jokes and Jewish jokes—a great many Jewish jokes, flaunting every slur made against Jews. (They take a bath once a year, whether they need it or not.) Come, come, he is insisting—we do speak of these matters, daily.
These minor works cast a long shadow. They legitimate intellectual attention to the trivial and mundane. We see in them the seeds of the modernist sensibility, in which bicycle seats can become art and tag-team wrestling is material fit for structural analysis.
At the same time, there is excess here—as with a relative who tells jokes incessantly and then explains them. Going beyond what is required for his theory, Freud catalogs varieties of humor. Are we dealing with a man who comes to his pleasure in obsessive, even mechanical fashion? Counteracting this strangeness is a sense that the pleasure is genuine. The collecting and arranging is a labor of love.
More generally, Freud is full of contradictions—loving and stiff, free-wheeling and anxious. He is a devoted family man, writing Fliess almost daily about the accomplishments of the Freud children as they mature. But he spends little time with the children during the workweek. They see him mainly at meals, where he appears last, once the rest are at table. The great time of contact with the children is during vacations—except, as in these early years, when Freud is immersed in a project. Freud is devoted to Martha, but his closest confidante is her younger sister, Minna—she lives with them—whom Freud considers livelier and more intellectual than his wife. It is only on trips to the mountains that Freud takes his immediate family. (He is an expert hiker and a skilled hunter of mushrooms.) When he goes to the Mediterranean, Freud travels alone, or with select companions, like Minna or his brother Alexander. (Swimming, Freud favors the breaststroke, to keep his beard dry.) Destinations can be the subject of phobias. Freud will not visit Rome until—on completion of The Interpretation of Dreams—he feels himself a conqueror. Though he loves travel and sees himself through its metaphors, Stanley exploring Africa, Freud is so anxious that he arrives at station platforms an hour in advance, and still he often loses luggage or misses a train.
At home, Freud’s routine admits of few variants. Freud rises at seven and sees patients starting at eight. Sessions last fifty-five minutes, with five minutes between for tea. Freud takes no notes. The first set of sessions ends at one. At five past the hour, Freud joins his family, already seated, for the midday meal. After lunch, he walks in the city, often dropping off a manuscript. The cigar shop is on the route. Scrupulous about his appearance, Freud stops daily to have his beard barbered. Antiquities are his passion. Every other week, a dealer brings him objects for inspection. At three, Freud offers consultations to patients without appointments. At four, psychoanalytic hours resume. Dinner with the family is at seven, followed again by a walk, sometimes with Martha or a child. Then comes more office time, for correspondence. Serious writing—books and articles—begins at eleven P.M. and ends at two. Freud composes fluently. He does not revise, but discards unsatisfactory drafts. When a book is finished, he starts on the next. He falls asleep when his head hits the pillow and wakens spontaneously five hours later.
Saturdays, Freud lectures at the university. He thinks through the talks while walking and delivers them extempore, in perfect paragraphs. The one constant amusement is Freud’s Tarockexzess, devotion to a Saturday evening card game, tarok, with friends from the B’nai B’rith. Sundays, the six children get attention, perhaps with a walk to a museum. Freud calls his books “Sunday children,” meaning that he will write only what he wants, for pleasure, and without a deadline, a phrase that reflects back on the release he finds in the time set aside for family.
The actual B’nai B’rith meetings are on Tuesday. Often Freud attends, to be with “a circle of picked men of high character who would receive me in a friendly spirit in spite of my temerity.” Altogether, his private life shields him from the controversies his writings arouse.
To this routine, in 1902, was added the Wednesday Psychological Society. It was established at the suggestion of a colleague who had recently been treated by Freud for impotence. The society corresponded to a dream of Freud’s. He had always imagined psychoanalysis as a movement. When he and Fliess were sharing their ideas about the structure of the mind, Freud referred to their meetings as “congresses,” as if the two were representatives of an international body. As the relationship with Fliess cooled—it would end in 1904, in a dispute over Fliess’s claim to sole ownership of a theory of universal bisexuality—Freud substituted a circle of admirers.
Freud’s ideas were well known locally. When the Viennese Medical Society produced a pastiche of Molière’s Le Malade Imaginaire, the performance included a parody of Freud, in the form of a quack who proclaimed:
If the patient loved his mother, it is the reason for this neurosis of his; and if he hated her, it is the same reason for the same neurosis. Whatever the disease, the cause is always the same. And whatever the cause, the disease is always the same. And so is the cure: twenty one-hour sessions at 50 Kronen each.
Freud’s notoriety was due to his public speaking as much as his writing. A diverse audience attended his university lectures. (The future radical leader Emma Goldman sat in, when she studied midwifery in Vienna. Here she gained her first insight into “the full significance of sex repression and its effect on human thought and action.”) Freud’s manner was engagingly quirky. He was alternately wry and pompous, and always deferential to the straw men he would demolish. Holmesian brilliance was in evidence. Once, a listener rose to discuss a word association experiment, choosing an example in which horse evoked the response library. Freud interrupted: “If I am not mistaken, you are a former cavalry officer and have written a book on the psychology of the horse?” When the man confessed as much, Freud went on to discuss psychic determinism. No product of the mind is random.
The Wednesday group was drawn largely from the lecture audience. The society began as five, all physicians. The most eminent was Alfred Adler. A social activist known for his work in industrial medicine, he had written on ailments common to tailors. The membership soon expanded to twenty. The intelligentsia were welcome: musicians, artists, publishers, and educators.
We know from his letters that Freud felt contempt toward many of the members. He was nonetheless a genial host. Max Graf, a musicologist, remembered an invariant routine for the meetings: presentation of a paper; a break for cakes, coffee, and cigarettes; discussion; and a decisive last word from Freud. “There was an atmosphere of the foundation of a religion in that room. Freud himself was its new prophet who made the heretofore prevailing methods of psychological investigation appear superficial.”
The topic discussed at the first meeting was the psychological meaning of smoking. Sex was the most frequent subject, with many members contributing autobiographical accounts. Social issues were as important to the discussion as theories of mind. The tenor was not uniformly progressive. As late as 1907, the members listened to a critique of women as psychiatrists, with Freud concurring, “it is true that a woman gains nothing by studying.”
Freud soon became uncomfortable with the democratic tone of the meetings. In 1908, he dissolved the group, reestablishing it as the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. He used the opportunity to remind members that the function of the organization was to promulgate his own views. With so many ambitious men in attendance, conformity was impossible to enforce. Adler, for instance, came to see the Oedipus complex as symbolic, a proxy for a more general account of a child’s need to achieve autonomy from his parents.
And then there was the matter of Carl Jung. Tall, blond, handsome, socially connected, Swiss, and Gentile, he aroused in Freud hopes of an international movement that would spread beyond its Viennese Jewish origins. Freud tended to attach strongly to one male friend at a time—Breuer and Fliess are examples. In due course, Freud would feel ill-used and end the relationship in a huff. Twenty years Jung’s senior, Freud imagined he would elicit the allegiance due a father from a grateful son. Still, the friendship followed the template.
Jung had differed with Freud from the start. He never believed that the origin of hysteria was entirely sexual. And he understood serious mental illness, like schizophrenia, to arise from biological abnormalities in the brain that then unmasked the unconscious—a significant deviation from Freud’s inclination, in most instances, to say that unconscious conflict caused the psychosis. Freud’s ambitions led him to overlook these shortcomings, and more.
In 1909, Freud learned that Jung had begun a romantic liaison with his first psychoanalytic patient, a talented but psychotic young woman. Jung blamed the patient, Sabina Spielrein, for having seduced him. Freud concurred. Jung then confessed that he had been the seducer. Freud demurred, writing, “It was not your doing but hers.” Once women were admitted to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society—starting in 1910, under Adler’s leadership—Spielrein was inducted. Her presentations, which advanced Jung’s biological theories, displeased Freud.
Meanwhile, also in 1910, Freud organized the International Psychoanalytic Association, to be headed by Jung, a choice that outraged the members of the Vienna group. Adler resigned, taking colleagues with him and forming an independent association. Freud was obsessed with Jung, seeing him alternately as the future of psychoanalysis and a traitor.
Freud was a poor judge of character and a bumbling politician. Jung proved unstable and self-interested, and yet Freud entrusted him with power and then expected absolute loyalty. In time, Jung would suffer a psychotic break, adopt another psychotic patient as a mistress, and finally, in the Nazi era, dabble opportunistically in anti-Semitism. (He wrote, “The Aryan unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish.”)
In general, Freud’s subalterns tended to be bright and erratic. Most had recurrent mood disorders, depression or manic depression. Not only Jung but a number of members of Freud’s inner circle became involved with their patients.
Freud’s influence spread in part because of the dedication of his acolytes, who took it as their mission to proselytize and to stifle dissent. But even the colleagues who turned against Freud expanded the scope of psychoanalysis. Adler’s focus on the “inferiority complex,” a theory about the dialectic between grandiosity and low self-esteem, proved attractive, as did Jung’s more mystical approach, centered on the role of myth. His competitors’ success positioned Freud as the first among many in a profession with a widening sphere of influence.