THE MOMENTUM OF THE psychoanalytic movement would be evident first in America. Freud had contempt for the United States. He considered Americans prudish, immature, and unsubtle. But leaders in American medicine took an early interest in Freud’s writings. It was here that psychoanalysis would have its greatest success, moving from the fringe to become the twentieth century’s predominant psychological theory and a standard method of medical practice.
Historians have tried to make sense of this phenomenon. At the moment of Freud’s first and only visit across the Atlantic, in the fall of 1909, American psychiatry was ripe for change. Doctors were concerned over reports showing an increase in mental illness and a dramatically declining cure rate. Where once half of cases responded to treatment, the proportion was now down to one in five. A number of explanations had been proposed: the influx of immigrants with their defective mental constitutions, new stresses due to rapid social change, and complications arising from constraints on women’s expression of their emotions. Observers of the culture had noted a rising age of marriage and a new strictness in morality. There was debate about whether sexual repression might be harmful to the mind and talk of better sexual education of children, as a preventive, along with proposals for a liberalization of divorce laws. Within American psychiatry, increasingly scientists were moving from somatic to psychological explanations of disease. The ground had been readied for a new comprehensive theory that would focus on causes and cures related to sexual and psychological development.
In particular, New England was a site of ferment. A quasi-religious movement, New Thought, had popularized the idea that ill health results from subconscious mental turmoil. In academic settings, the “Boston School” of psychology debated such up-to-the-minute topics as the formative influence of genital impulses in childhood. At Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, G. Stanley Hall and Lewis Terman wrote about early sexual drives, abnormalities arising from arrests in psychological development, the role of the unconscious, and limitations in human rationality. It was Hall, the president of Clark, who, as an occasion for a series of lectures, had proposed the awarding of an honorary degree. Freud called it “the first official recognition of our endeavors.”
Accompanied by Jung and Ferenczi, Freud traveled on the steamer George Washington. Freud had been anxious in anticipation of the trip. In Bremen, waiting for the boat, Jung had spoken about the excavation of prehistoric bones. Interpreting the choice of topic as a death wish directed at him, Freud fainted. But on board, to his pleasure, Freud saw that his cabin steward was reading The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Freud warmed to the adventure. In New York, he toured Chinatown, Coney Island, Central Park, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he viewed the antiquities, before heading north to the ceremonies. Emma Goldman, who had once run an ice cream parlor in Worcester, was in attendance when Freud received his degree.
Freud delivered five lectures, in German, to a rapt audience of doctors and lay people. Freud summarized psychoanalysis through a historical review, starting with a dramatic version of Breuer’s Anna O. case in which her symptoms sounded graver and her recovery more definitive than in the original report. In the second lecture, he explained how conflict between desire and social or moral values results in repression. He compared the repressed wish to a rowdy audience member who has been removed from the lecture hall but continues to pound on the door. The wish remains active, forcing compromises—giving rise to symptoms whose form alludes symbolically to the material relegated to the unconscious mind. Then came dream interpretation, succeeding via the reversal of condensation and displacement. Next were infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex, as the basis for neurosis. Along the route, Freud familiarized his audience with such concepts as free association and transference.
The final lecture was a global defense of psychoanalysis as a practical and ethical enterprise. When unconscious libidinal wishes are made conscious, the mature patient can simply reject them or he can sublimate, turning desires into creative endeavors. Alternatively, he can, and probably should, indulge some of his impulses, pursuing sexual pleasure. The peroration featured social criticism: “Our civilized standards make life too difficult for the majority of human organizations. Those standards consequently encourage the retreat from reality and the generating of neuroses, without achieving any surplus of cultural gain by this excess of sexual repression.”
In this summary form, Freud’s ideas must have sounded both fresh and familiar—and reasonably convincing. Not all Americans were persuaded. The great psychologist William James took a walk with Freud. James was at the end of his life, and an impending attack of angina interrupted the conversation. James wrote, “I confess that he made on me personally the impression of a man obsessed with fixed ideas. I can make nothing in my own case with his dream theories, and obviously ‘symbolism’ is a most dangerous method.”
But the nation embraced the new theory. The lectures sold well in book form. In magazines, psychoanalysis became a popular subject. By World War I, it eclipsed hypnosis and even divorce as topics of interest. In 1918, in an introduction to a book by Horace Frink, the neurologist James Jackson Putnam wrote, “You feel a sense of lack, if on looking through a volume or a magazine where human motives are discussed, one does not find some reference to the doctrines here at stake.”
In America, the focus on the unconscious had an optimistic slant. Retrieved memories could cure disease. Hidden aspects of mind should be put to work for the self, in the ser vice of conformist success. If these notions extended and distorted Freud’s claims, still, they might find a basis in the Clark lectures. Certainly the terms Freud had introduced there entered the language. Freud’s American translator, A. A. Brill, defended new dances, the tango and the turkey trot, as “excellent sublimations.” Dream interpretation became an investigative tool in detective fiction. This popular success corresponded to an increasing official acceptance of Freud’s ideas. By 1917, the Johns Hopkins Medical School was offering courses in psychoanalysis.
In seeing Freud as an optimist, Americans were not entirely mistaken. He had hinted at the corrosive effect of sexual repression, imposed by civilization. But in the prewar years, his emphasis was on the more favorable outcome, sublimation. In geniuses, repression does not only foment neurosis. It inspires science and art. To illustrate this premise, Freud intended to examine the psyche of Leonardo da Vinci.
The Leonardo essay, Freud’s first extended effort at psychobiography, makes its own claim to genius, on the part of the author. Given a man’s hat, Sherlock Holmes could, by combining forensic science and a knowledge of Victorian social norms, deduce that the wearer was intellectual, sedentary, middle-aged, formerly flush, currently down at the heels, and suffering from the loss of his wife’s affections. In the Leonardo book, published in 1910, Freud suggested that the psychoanalyst has similar powers. Freud took a single personal sentence in Leonardo’s scientific writing and, applying his own theories and a devoted amateur’s knowledge of art and history, reconstructed the great man’s childhood and inner life. Simultaneously, Freud explained the workings of the drives and traced the development of homosexuality. Because Leonardo’s notebooks and paintings were available for all to examine, Freud was demonstrating that analysis could be practiced in the open, rather than through clinical cases whose true content and results were known only to the therapist.
In the passage Freud scrutinizes, Leonardo recalls an early memory. When he was in his cradle, a bird flew down, opened his mouth with its tail, and repeatedly struck the tail between his lips. Freud believed that the bird in question was a vulture. In ancient Egypt, the vulture symbolized motherhood. The bird’s name was pronounced Mut, a sound that resembles the German Mutter (mother)—a sign perhaps of a natural symbolic linkage. Vultures were assumed to be uniformly female, impregnated by the wind. In the Middle Ages, this belief had been used to defend the notion of virgin birth. Freud argues that this myth would have been known to Leonardo. At the same time, in Egyptian iconography, the vulture was sexually androgynous, as are mothers in children’s fantasies. Since a tail is a phallic symbol, Freud concludes, what was at issue for Leonardo was a combined image of suckling and fellation.
Freud notes that Leonardo had a special reason to be interested in accounts of virgin conception. He was a bastard. Freud surmises: “His illegitimate birth deprived him of his father’s influence until perhaps his fifth year, and left him open to the tender seductions of a mother whose only solace he was.” Children raised by single mothers are more likely to become homosexual: “Indeed it almost seems as though the presence of a strong father would ensure that the son made the correct decision in his choice of object, namely someone of the opposite sex.” A son doted on by a mother will fear heterosexuality as infidelity to her and instead come to identify with women in their desire for men. What the homosexual loves in men is his childhood self as that self was loved by the mother. At the same time, a person’s curiosity about childbirth can become the basis for scientific curiosity later in life and for scopophilia, an erotic investment in observation that predisposes to participation in the graphic arts.
As for Leonardo’s preeminence in science, it arises also from his impulse to challenge his father in favor of his mother. The father is linked imaginatively to authority; the mother, to nature. Rejecting received wisdom, the scientist explores nature, under the impetus of libidinous drives from infancy. In Freud’s view, religious belief arises from a failure to rebel against fatherly tradition. In contrast, art and science are successful solutions to the problem of repressed conflicts. Work can provide some of the pleasure that, in a less restrictive culture, would be found in sex.
In the course of his essay, Freud treated the vulture memory as if it were a dream, using it to reveal repressed drives that might explain Leonardo’s homosexuality and his creativity. Freud took special pride in this tour de force. He called the Leonardo book “the only beautiful thing I have ever written.” His performance was extraordinary in its range, synthesizing, as it did, archaeology, iconography, art criticism, Renaissance and ancient history, developmental psychology, and textual sleuthing.
But the whole rests on a shaky foundation. Freud was working with a faulty translation of Leonardo’s notebooks. In the original, the recollected bird is not a vulture but a different raptor, a kite—which has no ancient association with motherhood. In these very notebooks, Leonardo had made note of the symbolic function of both birds. The vulture represents gluttony, the kite, envy—because mother kites will starve their fat chicks in the nest and peck at their sides. The comforting, suckling mother is nowhere in evidence.
Moreover, Freud’s account of the artist’s childhood was based on a historical novel rife with inaccuracies. In reality, Leonardo’s mother married soon after his birth, and he moved in with his father and stepmother. Leonardo’s mother had a daughter when he was two, so he did not have his mother’s undivided love. More generally, Freud had projected Viennese fin de siècle norms onto the Italian Renaissance. Leonardo’s upbringing had been reasonably conventional.
To Freud’s critics, the Leonardo essay is a smoking gun, proof that Freud arrived at his theories by grasping at faulty data and then speculating wildly. The conclusions Freud drew were wrong. Single mothers do not raise a disproportionate number of homosexual sons. Curiosity is not lacking in children who learn the facts of life early. Drives for attachment and competence have their own developmental tracks, interactive with but reasonably independent from the progress of the sex drive.
And even in a biographical essay, where the case history cannot be invented, Freud appears subtly dishonest. It was his custom to update his writings periodically. Freud fiddled with details of the Leonardo piece as late as 1925. Along the way, he added numerous footnotes. In one, he presents a sketch revealing the form of a vulture hidden in the famous painting Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. In another, he speculates that the vulture episode occurred in fact and was interpreted as a favorable omen, and so was repeated to Leonardo by his mother. Its status as family myth partly explains its suitability for interpretation, like a dream. But the vulture-for-kite mistranslation was discovered in Freud’s day and discussed in print by 1923. When Freud revisited the essay, why did he not admit his mistake and revise his theory accordingly?
The notion of omen-as-family-legend has a telltale familiarity. Freud had written Jung, “I am wholly Leonardo.” The reverse seems more nearly true. Freud’s Leonardo reads as wishful autobiography, an account of how the loss of a mother’s exclusive love, in confusing family circumstances, is transmuted into scientific genius. Repeatedly, Freud seems prone to recasting his own history in glorified terms.
The Leonardo experiment does show how to Freud any stimulus at all looked like confirmation of his ideas, especially about Oedipal drives as the basis for behavior. But then it is also an example of the continuing paradox of Freud’s reach. He could be mistaken about facts and theories and still wield enormous influence. The Leonardo essay inspired endless debate about art and neurosis. It transformed the writing of history and biography. It opened psychology to the study of the drives in childhood. And it spotlighted identification as an element in the formation of personality. We do seem to take on the views, and often the manners, of those we admire, love, or fear.
These observations may understate the essay’s influence. Freud’s claim to be able to locate the whole in the part, the man in the detail, the secret in the public, gave rise to novel ways of attending to art and literature. The new criticism, in which a close reading of fragments of text discloses hidden intentions, reflected Freud’s model. And audience shapes art. Whether or not particular authors agreed with Freud—many said they did not—modernism in literature responded to expectations Freud created. Along with The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud’s Leonardo inspired a trend in literature for the proliferation of details ripe for decoding. James Joyce’s fiction and T. S. Eliot’s poetry owe something to the vulture’s tail. So, in their resistant ways, do abstract expressionism and the nouveau roman, with their efforts to avert symbolization and erase history. Freud pointed to the possibility of a new density of meaning in texts and canvases when he presumed to find the whole of Leonardo in a sentence and a smile.
Freud’s other major case study in these productive years was an exploration of paranoia, through an analysis of the memoirs of Daniel Schreber, a jurist who had descended into psychosis. The project was misguided, and in the usual ways—suppressed evidence and the preference for theory over fact. Paranoia was the disease Freud did worst with. His earliest speculations concerned a woman who broke down after she was molested. Freud assumed that she had been sexually excited by the attack, considered herself a bad person, and then attributed this badness to others. Repressed lust caused her paranoia. Though more convoluted, the analysis of Schreber rests on similar reasoning.
The report is of lasting interest because in it Freud explains a particular defense mechanism, projection. Here, defenses are forms of repression—ways of avoiding awareness of unacceptable impulses. Freud attributes homosexual Oedipal drives to Schreber. These become transformed into paranoia. “I (a man) love him (a man)” morphs into “I do not love him—I hate him,” and then “He hates (persecutes) me, which will justify my hating him.” This sequence may or may not apply to Schreber, but it describes a mechanism of thought in which a person takes shameful feelings or their inverse and attributes them to others. To a friend who unexpectedly questions our motives, we may say, “No, I don’t hate you, but I wonder whether you’ve become uncomfortable with me.” When we do, our reasoning resembles Freud’s here.
Freud hardly invented the notion of projection. In 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The youth, intoxicated with his adulation of a hero, fails to see that it is only a projection of his [own] soul which he admires.” But Freud emphasized the frequency with which projection distorts ordinary thought.
Likewise for narcissism, a term coined in the 1890s by researchers into sexual perversion. Writing about Leonardo and Schreber, Freud traced homosexuality to a stage in normal development when a child’s own body becomes his love object. This experience, Freud believed, lay at the root of a tendency in adult life to seek attachments to others who resemble the self. In the midst of a shaky explanation of homosexuality, Freud picked out a posture and a sort of love we recognize as common. Some people never see the other, only the self.
Along with identification, the supposed source of Leonardo’s homosexuality, projection and narcissism form a triad of related concepts that describe distortions in perspectives and relationships. While pursing false leads regarding homosexuality, paranoia, and genius, Freud gathered a set of concepts that allows discussion of a broad range of social interactions. Freud’s strength was always in the categorization of normal behavior. Many people take on the traits and values of those they admire. Few people find it easy to see beyond the self and enter into the distinct lives of others.
Of course, some do find it easy. Freud missed a good deal about humans’ capacities to care and connect. But in these prewar years especially, Freud provided tools for addressing a core problem of modernity, difficulty in transcending an isolated perspective.
Freud’s writings in the first decade of the century were not notably pessimistic. His concern was limited to the issue he had raised in his lectures in America, worry that group and family life might diminish men’s sexual vigor and so lead to neurosis. He set out to characterize this problem in detail. Here, Freud was working with the material he knew best, heterosexual romance in his own era. Freud’s social observation may be the aspect of his work that has aged best. Certainly, his conclusions have formed the basis for decades of popular self-help.
As early as 1906, Freud told the Wednesday group that he was investigating the psychology of love. In 1909, he presented his findings. He had observed that his neurotic male patients followed bewildering rules in the choice of a love object. She must be already attached, and she must have some stain on her character or have the cachet of extensive sexual experience. This woman will be loved compulsively, but she will prove to be one in a series of similar mistresses. The man’s attachment will relate to an urge to rescue these women from the very immoral tendencies that first made them alluring.
This series of conditions would present no special challenge to an evolutionary psychologist today. Freud is describing the appeal of females who have demonstrated their sexual worth and availability through previous liaisons. In his involvement with them, at first the male will protect his investment jealously. Later, he may hedge his risky bets through serial monogamy.
Freud saw the syndrome in terms of a mother fixation. A key link in his logic concerns a phenomenon that was local to his historical moment. Along with governess duties, prostitution was one of the few forms of employment fully open to women. Its visibility was bound to color a boy’s sexual reawakening in adolescence. At the same stage of life, a boy would experience his mother’s attachment to his father as infidelity to him, her son. These polar opposites, whore and mother, were in imagination desirable and faithless in parallel ways. Young men were bound to equate the two. Repressed, this idea of equivalence, between whore and mother, led to a fixation on an attached and licentious woman who might be seduced and rescued.
Freud returned to the question of debasement in an essay about psychogenic impotence, by his account the most common reason patients turn to psychoanalysis. Failures of sexual performance, Freud wrote, can be traced to fixations on the mother or a sister. What is at issue is a separation of drives that Freud had not previously considered distinct, the affectionate and the sensual. Because of the incest taboo, it is difficult to intertwine these strains. In effect, the man has permission to succeed sexually only with women who do not remind him of family members, while he can value only women who do. The result is what has been called the Madonna-whore complex, an overvaluing of the wife’s moral qualities and the mistress’s immoral ones.
This pathology blends into the normal imperfections of romantic life, so that, in Freud’s view, “we cannot escape the conclusion that the behaviour in love of men in the civilized world to-day bears the stamp altogether of psychical impotence.” To Freud, this result is inescapable: “it is quite impossible to adjust the claims of the sexual instincts to the demands of civilization.” Because of the incest taboo and the obstacles to erotic freedom demanded by family life, passion will always remain alienated from affection. Good sex will always be forbidden, secret, naughty, and kinky.
Freud did treat two colleagues for impotence, but whether it was really the most common problem in his practice is unclear. Once again, we are probably in the territory of autobiography presented as science. Freud found marriage sexually stultifying. More generally, Freud seemed sometimes to be writing on behalf of conventional, small-town Jewish immigrants exposed to the sexual bazaar that was turn-of-the-century Vienna.
In asking why a husband can’t have it all, stability and passion both, and in one relationship, Freud was setting an ideal that would fascinate the culture for a century: fulfillment. Fulfillment is animal and intellectual. The unattainable ideal is sexuality with the zing of perversion, in the life of the morally aware and socially integrated man.
Freud proposed what he saw as a minimally satisfactory response to this problem, his partial cure for impotence. A man must come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister, restoring something of the whore to his Madonnas. Self-fulfillment, and a return to potency, begins with a willingness to take the wife off her pedestal and favor her with degradation.
There is a degree of optimism in this resolution. A man does not need to pursue, rescue, and abandon scarlet women. If he is self-aware, if he embraces his Oedipal urges, a man can combine creative sublimation with active sexuality, by marrying a respectable woman and adorning her with his lascivious fantasies.