Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Fliess, and the Urge to Truth
He who has eyes to see and ears to hear becomes convinced that mortals can keep no secret. If their lips are silent, they gossip with their fingertips; betrayal forces itself through every pore.
SIGMUND FREUD
Where will we find examples of this mirroring function? Well, virtually everywhere. History is littered with them.
One of the most fateful mirroring relationships in Western history was the deep friendship between Sigmund Freud and Dr. Wilhelm Fliess. Many of us, even those of us who know quite a bit about Freud’s theories, do not appreciate the extent to which psychoanalysis itself was born out of this mirroring friendship. Wilhelm Fliess was Freud’s essential “Other,” his Soul Friend and the midwife of his work. Fliess was, in many ways, Freud’s own unofficial psychoanalyst. He was, without question, the door through which Sigmund Freud walked into a new world.
No Mara, no Buddha. No Fitzroy, no Darwin. No Fliess, no Freud.
“An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensible my emotional life,” Freud wrote in his Interpretation of Dreams. As we will see, in Dr. Fliess he found both. Freud took the Night Sea Journey to be sure, but let’s understand clearly that he took it with Wilhelm Fliess as his sacred companion.
For over a decade, these two young scientists were deeply joined in a personal and professional friendship of great intensity. As we will see, the friendship had components of all of the foundational work we’ve discussed: there was containment, alignment, attunement, twinship, and adversity. And they were all wrapped up together in this friendship. But there were altogether new components as well: Recognition. A new kind of intense interest. And mirroring to an exceptional degree.
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Sigmund Freud was a thirty-one-year-old lecturer in neuropathology at the University of Vienna. Pictures of him at that age reveal a stunningly intense, dark-haired, and bearded young man—with the same commanding gaze we know from pictures of him in old age. He had just married the woman who would be his lifelong partner, Martha Bernays. And he had recently returned from six months of study in Paris with the famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot.
Freud was young, passionate, and brilliant, and his mind was on fire with Dr. Charcot’s revolutionary views about the psyche and hypnosis, and particularly about the fascinating problem of hysteria. (More on this soon.) Freud wanted to model himself on Charcot, exclaiming upon his return from Paris, “Charcot, who is one of the greatest physicians, a genius and a sober man, simply uproots my views and intentions. After some lectures I walk away as from Notre Dame, with a new perception of perfection.” (He saw Charcot, didn’t he?)
Wilhelm Fliess was twenty-nine years old at the time of his first meeting with Freud. The two men had much in common. Pictures of Fliess at the time show a similarly dark, bearded young man, intelligent, alert, but with perhaps less of Freud’s magisterial intensity. Fliess was already a successful ear, nose, and throat doctor in Berlin, well known for his interest in the relationship between the mind and body. He, too, had studied with Charcot in Paris.
In the fall of 1887, young Doctor Fliess travelled to Vienna to study with specialists there, and while in Vienna, he happened upon one of Freud’s lectures at the university. It was a life-changing event. Fliess was completely taken with Freud, and with his brilliance, and his wide range of interests—interests which took both Freud and Fliess well beyond the contemporary domain of medicine into the then-shadowy area of the relationship between mind and body.
It is clear that there was between these two young men an immediate recognition of the genius and importance of the other. They were each fascinated, compelled, and drawn to the other—as to a mysterious letter that must be opened. Freud’s first letter to Fliess, written shortly after their initial meeting, reveals the depth of his fascination: “My letter of today admittedly is occasioned by business; but I must introduce it by confessing that I entertain hopes of continuing the relationship with you and that you have left a deep impression on me which could easily lead me to tell you outright in what category of man I place you.”
This would begin a passionate relationship between the two men that would last for over a decade, and would include hundreds of letters, commingling the personal and the professional. Alas, today we have only Freud’s side of the correspondence; it appears that Fliess’s letters to Freud have been lost, possibly destroyed on purpose by Freud himself. (Freud admitted, toward the end of his life, that he could not recall whether he actually destroyed Fliess’s letters to him “or only hid them ingeniously.”)
But no matter: Freud’s side of the correspondence alone is so vivid that it leaves very little to the imagination. The letters are intensely personal and revealing—a love affair of minds and hearts. Indeed, late in his life, Freud was horrified at the thought that his letters to Fliess might be published. He wrote in alarm to the friend who had purchased the letters on Freud’s behalf—precisely in order to keep them from the public eye: “Our correspondence was the most intimate you can imagine. It would have been highly embarrassing to have it fall into the hands of strangers.” Freud was clearly troubled by the possibility that the depth of his intimacy with another man would be exposed.
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By the time Fliess met him, Freud was already launched on his own Night Sea Journey. It was not just professional. It was deeply personal as well. In fact, it was the deep investigation of his own psyche, mind, and heart that culminated in the development of psychoanalysis. The science of the unconscious was the fruit of Freud’s travels in the basement and attic of his own mind.
At the time Fliess first encountered the young Sigmund Freud, Freud was already deep into his investigation of the puzzling group of psychological symptoms that were then designated “hysteria.” Indeed, the hysteric of early twentieth-century Vienna presented a series of fascinating dilemmas for a young neurologist like Freud. The hysteric patient suffered from symptoms of psychological stress that had been converted into strange and unaccounted-for physical symptoms—a process psychologists came to call “conversion.”
There was, for example, the case of Baroness Anna von Lieben, who had been one of Freud’s earliest and most instructive cases. She was a wealthy, intelligent, and extremely well-educated young woman from an Austrian Jewish family. She had been bedeviled for many years by a variety of puzzling symptoms: hallucinations, random spasms, and the awkward automatic response of converting insults or criticisms into severe facial neuralgias. Her entire face flinched dramatically whenever she felt she had been insulted—a series of spasms that seemed, remarkably, to exactly replicate a slap in the face.
What did von Lieben’s strange symptoms mean?
Freud started to dig. Slowly, he began to see that Baronness von Lieben and the many other hysteric patients whom he treated suffered from hidden memories. In many cases, Freud believed these to be repressed sexual experiences—what Freud’s colleague, Josef Breuer, came to call secrets d’alcove (“secrets of the bedchamber”). Breuer believed that these hidden memories were almost always organized around sexual conflicts that were hidden from the very sufferers themselves. They were, thought Breuer and Freud, sexual experiences that were so unacceptable at the time—or so traumatic—that they were exiled to the basement of consciousness to fester and create problems in life “above stairs.”
In their first “joint communiqué” on hysteria, Freud and Breuer wrote a phrase that would resonate in the history of psychology: “the hysteric suffers mainly from reminiscences.”
The hysteric suffers mainly from reminiscences. That is to say, the hysteric suffers from memories that he or she cannot bear to bring into consciousness, but also that he or she cannot escape. The patient unconsciously converts these unbearable memories and the feelings that accompany them into a whole array of bizarre symptoms.
What was the evidence for this? It was simple, but dramatic: When the patient remembered the repressed material—brought it into consciousness, into the light of day—her symptoms often simply vanished. Sometimes the symptoms disappeared dramatically, overnight, and sometimes only after a process of slow, deliberate uncovering.
Freud discovered—astonishingly enough—that in simply talking about their distress in great detail in a kind of uncensored stream of consciousness to an attentive listener, the difficult material (what Freud called “pathogenic psychological material” or “the reminiscences”) were brought to the surface of consciousness and “cleared away.”
So, the cure for these cases was simply a process of uncovering—and of remembering? Yes. Said Freud, “We liked to compare [it] to the technique of excavating a buried city.”
The “reminiscences” Freud discovered were, in our terms, very much like implicit memories, memories that had not been brought into consciousness, nor integrated into a true autobiographical narrative. Memories whose central conflict could not be made explicit, and so was acted out through a variety of strange symptoms.
Freud discovered something fascinating: in the process of psychoanalysis, the human psyche actually assists the therapist, precisely because that selfsame psyche is not, indeed, capable of keeping these deep secrets. This is crucial to understand: These secrets want out! They want out in any way possible—even in unpleasant symptoms, if absolutely necessary. Wrote Freud (and I repeat for emphasis), “He who has eyes to see and ears to hear becomes convinced that mortals can keep no secret. If their lips are silent, they gossip with their fingertips; betrayal forces its way through every pore.”
Psychoanalysis, as Freud developed it, simply cooperates with this “urge to truth.” Truth, suppress it as you might, forces its way through every pore. This is what was happening between John and me. Truth was forcing its way to the surface. Now that I had a friend who could bear to see me, I could bear to look. Because he would look with me. John was, we might say, the Fliess to my Freud. I was the one doing the much-needed digging. He was the irreplaceable mirror.
It is difficult for us to exaggerate the mental and physical work that went into Freud’s investigations at the early stages of what would become psychoanalysis. The process of working with hysterics was painstaking: two steps forward, one step back. It was a hall of mirrors. And Freud was still wandering alone in the dark with these patients. Insights would arise, and then be lost—both in Freud’s mind, and in the patient’s. Very often these same insights had to be uncovered over and over again, and then worked through in a process Freud himself did not even yet understand.
Freud was diving deep into an understanding of the neuroses, and he was doing it, remarkably, quite alone. “I am pretty much alone here in the elucidation of the neuroses,” he wrote to his dear Fliess. “They [the mainstream scientific establishment] look upon me as pretty much of a monomaniac, while I have the distinct feeling that I have touched upon one of the great secrets of nature.”
His friendship with Fliess provided the only container in which Freud could share his revolutionary insights. Freud explored all of his new theories in detail in his letters to Fliess. Freud deeply needed his own revolutionary and creative work to be seen, to be examined at depth, and to be commented upon by a trusted colleague. He also needed it—and this is extremely important—to be appreciated, understood, and admired. These are all components of mirroring.
Fliess responded to Freud’s work in rapid-fire letter after letter, and in occasional well-planned meetings between the two men, which they called “congresses.” Fliess cajoled Freud, he preached to him, he encouraged him. And more than anything, he actively and openly admired Freud. He valued, praised, and even adored Freud. The gist of his responses to Freud must have been this: “You must continue your brilliant and important work at all costs. Let me help you. Let me be your sounding board. Let me be your partner in this exploration in every way.”
Fliess’s praise was, as Freud himself later wrote, “nectar and ambrosia” to Freud. “You are my Only Other,” Freud wrote to Fliess. And Freud desperately needed an Other. He needed to be seen in order to feel his own realness.
Fliess, too, was in desperate need of the other. And in need of the mirror. It was gratifying to him that the great Sigmund Freud so admired his work. These two men had developed a mutual mirroring friendship.
Fliess’s respect for Freud gave Freud the energy to go on, to persevere in his climb to the top of his professional mountain. Without it, Freud always showed signs of withering. In 1890, for example, Freud wrote to Fliess of his distress in not being able to meet often enough in person. He was hungry for what Fliess gave him. He began this letter by declaring his pain in not seeing his friend, and then explained precisely how Fliess’s recognition, his love, affection, admiration, and mirroring affected him: “When I talked with you and saw that you thought well of me, I even used to think something of myself, and the picture of absolutely convincing energy that you offered was not without its effect on me.” (The selfobject, remember, actively transmits both energy and information.)
The letters from this point on in Freud and Fliess’s friendship become deeper and more personal. One can feel the increasing depth of the friendship, the love, the respect, by simply reading the evolution of the salutations Freud uses to his friend. They begin with “Esteemed Colleague,” and through the course of the first several years move on to “Esteemed Friend,” then to “Dearest Friend,” and finally to “Dearest Wilhelm,” or “My Dearest Friend.”
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Having begun to sort out the root of the hysteric’s dilemma—“repressed memories”—Freud now turned his attention to refining his technique for uncovering this repressed material.
How, precisely, was the “buried city” of the mind to be excavated?
The technique itself was the soul of simplicity: It amounted to uncensored talking. Freud would instruct his patients: Say whatever it is that comes into your mind. Just speak it, without judgment and without any censorship at all. (This method, of course, came to be called “free association.”)
Freud often said to his patients, “Let your criticism rest!” He taught them to let their minds roam freely from association to association. (“This memory reminds me of another memory,” the patient might say. “A dream. And for some reason now I’m thinking about Herr . . .” And the tide of free associations would flow on.)
Freud discovered that when the patient was free to roam with his or her own mental associations, he or she inevitably bumped into a repressed memory, or a painful or difficult subject that had been in the shadows. And when this happened, resistance would arise. The patient would fall silent. Or would obviously censor or cover up. The patient would have physical symptoms. Or would make slips of the tongue. (This latter phenomenon, as we know, came to be called “a Freudian slip.”)
Freud now understood: it was precisely where resistance arose that the psychic gold was to be found.
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Freud learned through trial and error that a certain kind of relational container assisted the patient in the sometimes-daunting work of free association. He found that he must do everything in his power to create a situation in which the patient felt quiet, safe, and comfortable (reclined on the famous couch) in order to facilitate regression. And Freud knew that the most important component of this formula was his own soothing presence—the soothing and containing presence of the analyst—both physical and mental. (Here again, we have the primitive need for proximity of the selfobject.)
Freud discovered that his total physical and mental presence was the key. He found that the depth of his presence was conveyed to the patient through the quality of his listening. Freud was an active listener. He learned to tune his own mind to a quality he came to call “evenly hovering attention.” This was really a version of what we would now call “mindfulness”: Freud’s awareness was intensely present, witnessing, attuned, empathic, and entirely nonjudgmental.
Within this safe environment, the patient inevitably began to reveal—at times unwittingly—what was hidden in the basement of consciousness, what was not acceptable to him, and what could not be borne. Locked doors eventually simply unlocked themselves.
Over time, then, Freud found, with “close observation, apt interpretation, free association . . . and working through” that the patient himself brought to light the root of his own suffering, and, through the process of knowing it fully, was eventually freed from it.
Again, the archeologist metaphor: “The psychoanalyst,” wrote Freud, “like the archaeologist in his excavation, must uncover layer after layer of the patient’s psyche, before coming to the deepest, most valuable treasures.”
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Freud’s early work with hysterics led inexorably to the discovery of the unconscious. We—living in a post-Freudian world—take this for granted. But it is hard to exaggerate how revolutionary it was—the idea that many mental operations happen entirely outside our awareness.
Freud found that the unconscious is full of mechanisms to defend the fragile self against seeing too much. The desire to recall is often opposed by the equal and opposite force of the desire to forget. So, Freud, like the great classic playwrights before him (think Sophocles, think Euripides) laid bare for us the fact of our epic capacity to deceive ourselves. Writes Freud biographer Peter Gay: “Self-deception and hypocrisy, which substitute good reasons for real reasons, are the conscious companions of repression, denying passionate needs for the sake of family concord, social harmony, or sheer respectability” (emphasis added).
In the neurotic patient, then, says Freud, memory loses out to the forces of repression.
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As I have said, Freud’s work was intensely personal. Many of his insights came directly out of his own self-analysis. In many ways, he was his own primary psychoanalytic patient—“patient number one”—with Fliess as his mirror and analyst.
Freud was stunned by what he found in his own unconscious. He wrote in one of his daily letters to Fliess: “Beloved shades [ghosts] were emerging like an old, half-faded myth, bringing with them friendship and first love,” (and he was here conjuring up images from Goethe’s Faust). “Also first scares and dissensions. Many a sad life’s secret here goes back to its first roots; many prides and privileges become aware of their modest origins.”
Freud was himself becoming a kind of Seer. A shaman. All who met him in these years discovered an intense and compelling humanity. Friends commented on his “deeply seeking eyes.” An English psychoanalyst—Joan Riviere—who met Freud described him as having “enchanting humor.” She went on to comment that his compelling presence was marked by “the forward thrust of his head and critical exploring gaze of his keenly piercing eyes.” Writes Peter Gay: “If looking . . . is a civilized substitute for touching, his penetrating gaze . . . was most appropriate for him.” Freud’s métier was looking, seeing, touching.
Freud found this work exhausting, but also exhilarating, comparing it to climbing a mountain. It is clear, too, that he felt terribly alone in the work, except for Fliess.
“[Freud] kept Fliess fully informed of his ideas as they developed and changed,” says Peter Gay, “sending to Berlin a barrage of case vignettes, aphorisms, dreams, not to forget the ‘drafts,’ those rehearsals for papers and monographs in which he recorded his findings and experimented with ideas—drafts on anxiety, on melancholia, on paranoia.”
Fliess wrote back: praise, scrutiny, exhortation, emotional support, and occasionally real intellectual confrontation with Freud’s ideas. He was by turns tender and tough with Freud. He did not back down from conflict. Freud could only feel the realness of his journey through the constant emotional presence of Dr. Fliess.
As his work heated up, Freud’s letters to Fliess became longer, more intense. He wrote of personal issues, medical issues, and relationship issues—all bound up together with his thinking about neuroses, the unconscious, dreams, and the psychoanalytic technique. As late as 1899, Freud wrote to Fliess, just after one of their intimate meetings:
“Look at what happens,” wrote Freud. “Here I live morosely and in darkness until you come; I scold myself, kindle my flickering light at your calm one, feel well again, and after your departure, I have again got eyes to see, and what I see is beautiful and good.”
I have again got eyes to see!
In order to continue his own deep seeing, Freud desperately needed to be seen and appreciated himself. He came back from these meetings refreshed, recharged with new energy.
Freud did, in fact, do what he called a “self-analysis,” but in the end he argued that being analyzed by someone else is by far the most effective path to self-knowledge. The critical factor in psychoanalysis, he found, is the deep connection between two human beings.
“No matter how one-sided, the psychoanalytic situation is a dialogue,” writes Gay. “ . . . the analyst . . . offers himself as a kind of screen onto which the analysand projects his passions, his love and hate, affection and animosity, hope and anxiety. This transference, on which so much of the curative work of the psychoanalytic process depends, is by definition a transaction between two human beings.”
The psychoanalyst, in short, is to his analysand what Freud elevated Fliess into being: The Other. How could Freud—no matter how bold or original—become his own Other?
Freud recognized that the Night Sea Journey cannot not be successfully undertaken alone. He needed Fliess—whom he respected deeply as a scientist—as his audience; and to his infinite delight, Fliess continued to give him the present of being that exceptional Other, a critic and reader of the highest quality. Freud understood that he could not do his work wholly without a public, but found that he would have to do with a public of one. “I am content,” he told Fliess, to be “writing only for you.”
“Your kind should not die out, my dear friend,” wrote Freud to Fliess. “The rest of us need people like you too much. How much I owe you: solace, understanding, stimulation in my loneliness, meaning to my life that I gained through you, and finally even health that no one else could have given back to me.”
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Freud and Fliess held their last congress, their last face to face meeting, in August 1900, near Innsbruck. By all accounts, they quarreled violently. Over what, precisely, we do not know. But they never met again, though their correspondence continued spottily for another two years or so.
We do, in fact, have some understanding of what happened: It’s clear that Fliess could not bear Freud’s increasing fame, as Fliess’s own career languished in the back alleys of science. Marie Bonaparte, one of Freud’s pupils, left an account of the deterioration of their friendship in her notebook:
“The friendship with Fliess began to decline as early as 1900 . . . when Freud published the book on dreams . . . Fliess could no longer bear the superiority of his friend. Nor could he tolerate, this time according to Freud, Freud’s scientific criticisms [of Fliess’s wild theories about periodicity]. Ida Fliess [Fliess’s wife], moreover . . . out of jealousy, did everything possible to sow discord between the two friends, whereas Martha Freud understood very well that Fliess was able to give her husband something beyond what she could.”
What happened here? The idealized part of the friendship was seen through, finally—and Freud no longer needed the idealization of his friend to keep him from seeing the truth.
Writes biographer Peter Gay about the final split: “As the true contours of Fliess’s mind, his underlying mysticism and his obsessive commitment to numerology, dawned on Freud at last, and as Freud came to recognize Fliess’s passionately held convictions to be hopelessly incompatible with his own, the friendship was doomed.” Gay tells us, “Fliess, the midwife of psychoanalysis, had done his duty and soon he could go.”
Intense mirroring relationships—just like twinship relationships—can have, and often do have precisely such explosive endings. They may serve us deeply for a time, and then, as we grow apart, no longer. As we see through the inevitable idealizations of The Other and as we see the whole truth of things, we sometimes need to move on. And at times, we do so dramatically—as Freud moved on dramatically from Fliess. Paradoxically, it is possible that the completion of Freud’s work itself made it inevitable that the friendship that gave birth to it should languish or die.
Nonetheless, Freud’s debt to his “essential Other” is almost incalculable, and he carried Fliess with him—inside—until the end of his days. After all, Fliess’s own mind, body, psyche, heart, had been the door through which Dr. Freud had walked into his revolutionary new landscape.
In our appreciation of Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Fliess rarely gets his due. But we know the truth of the matter: No Fliess, no Freud.