TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century / TIME, Almanac of the 20th Century.ISO / 1950 / 50freud.000 < prev next >

Wrap

Text File | 1994-02-27 | 28KB | 517 lines

<text> <title> (1950s) The Explorer:Freud </title> <history>TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1950s Highlights</history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> MEDICINE The Explorer April 23, 1956 </hdr> <body> The dark, intense young man ambling through the great arcaded court at the University of Vienna was caught in fantasy. He was still a student, a nobody, a Jew in Franz Josef's Austria. Yet, as he admired the statues of great professors in the university's hall of fame, Sigmund Freud dreamed of a day when his own likeness would be there among the great; he even envisaged the inscription for it. Today, 80 years since the dream and 100 years since Freud was born, his bronze image stands in that dusty hall of fame, and below, just as he had conceived it, is the inscription from Sophocles: "Who divined the famed riddle and was a man most mighty." (Said of Oedipus by the chorus at the close of Oedipus Tyrannus. Finding his native Thebes terrorized by a Sphinx that slew all who could not answer her riddles, Oedipus answered her correctly, and the Sphinx destroyed herself. He then married Jocasta, by whom he had four children, not knowing she was his own mother, or that he had killed his own father.) The riddle that entranced Sigmund Freud was the same that had entranced man through the ages--What am I? Freud did not divine it. But he penetrated so deeply and so disturbingly into its dark recesses as to earn permanent membership in that small fraternity of men who, by thought alone, have shaken and shaped man's image of himself. Day of Eulogy. Sigmund Freud's membership in that fraternity will be formally recognized a fortnight hence, on May 6, when ceremonies at seats of learning in the Western world will commemorate the centennial of the birth of the man who devised psychoanalysis--the exploration of the Unconscious- -and thereby opened the way to modern psychiatry and the treatment of man's aberrations. In Vienna, where Freud made his great exploration, there will be three memorial meetings, and wreaths will be laid at the base of his statue. From the University of Chicago some of Freud's most earnest disciples, among them his devoted follower and biographer, Britain's Dr. Ernest Jones, will broadcast talks on the impact of Freud on psychiatry and medicine. (A brilliant Welshman who is now 76, Jones studied under Freud during visits to Vienna, has written in the first two volumes of a projected three-volume work, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, one of the most penetrating biographies of modern time (TIME, Oct. 19, 1953; Sept. 19, 1955). A firm admirer, Analyst Jones also is responsible for placing Freud's bust in the great hall of the University of Vienna with the inscription Freud confessed having imagined in the 1870s.) A transatlantic hookup will join London and New York in a commemoration of Freud's impact on the arts, literature and science. No day of eulogy is needed, however, to dramatize the legacy of Sigmund Freud to his generation and generations to come. Christianity brought to Western civilization the conviction that man is governed by his God through his deathless soul. Along came the Renaissance and then the 18th century rationalists to counter this doctrine with another faith: man is responsible to reason alone; there is no God, no immortal soul. Then came Sigmund Freud to champion a newer hypothesis: man, without a God, is largely governed by a strange, little-known power called the Unconscious. It was a startling, indeed a discomfiting theory (though it had been hinted at even before Oedipus confronted the Sphinx), for it asked man to alter his vision of himself and almost everything that he valued, from his religion to his mode of dress. Today the Freudian hypothesis is only 60 years old (and has been widely known for only half that time), and its author is 17 years dead. To a few thousand intellectuals concentrated most heavily in the English-speaking world and especially in the U.S., Freud survives as a great liberator who freed the human mind from medieval bondage. To millions his name and the terms he has willed to the language are things to be used, half in jest, to cover up a lapsus linguae ("a Freudian slip") or to explain a character defect ("Don't blame Johnny; it's just a defense mechanism"). His theories are a high-assay lode for the pickaxes of cartoonists and cocktail-party wits. To more millions who have heard of him only from the pulpit, Freud is the spade-bearded Anti-christ, who debased mankind by insisting that all man's works, whether he desires it or not, are inspired by SEX. His teachings, while never susceptible to the kind of proof that physical science demands, have set the direction of much of 20th century social sciences--psychology, anthropology, sociology--and they have drawn the charts for modern medicine's progress into the diagnosis and cure of mental illness. But he was in essence less a scientist than a philosopher, perhaps less a healer than the maker of a system of thought--and a mythos--acceptable to his time. His ideas, defying harness and too soaring to rest within the narrow confines of hospital ward and doctor's office, flared out to all compartments of 20th century life--religion, morals, philosophy, the arts, even commerce and industry, and the assembling of armies. The poet, W.H. Auden, captured him thus: <qt> <l>If often he was wrong and at times</l> <l>absurd</l> <l>To us he is no more a person</l> <l>Now but a whole climate of opinion</l> </qt> Family Tangle. As is its wont, destiny picked an unlikely setting to bring forth one of its to-be-favored sons. Sigmund Freud was born on May, 1856, eldest of eight children in his wool-merchant father's second brood. The place was Freiberg, in Moravia (now in Czechoslovakia and renamed Pribor). Jakob Freud was 41, his new wife 21. By his first marriage he had two sons; Emanuel, the elder, had already made him a grandfather by the time Sigmund was born, so the new arrival had a nephew who was older than himself. This was not the only relationship that proved puzzling to the infant Sigmund: his other half brother, Philipp, was almost exactly his mother's age. So, according to psychoanalytic hindsight, his infant mind paired them off and "blamed" Philipp for his mother's pregnancies. The next baby, Julius, arrived when Sigmund was only eleven months old, and died at eight months. By an extraordinary reach, Analyst-Biographer Jones credits Sigmund with having wished Julius' death, and then having suffered unbearable guilt when the wish was fulfilled. More solid is the evidence that Sigmund suffered pangs of jealousy when, at 2 1/2, he again had to share his mother's warmth and love, this time with his first sister, Anna. He never liked or forgave her. There can be no doubt that because of the tangled age-sex relationships in his family, Sigmund Freud was early preoccupied with the riddles of sex. Yet it was not all damaging. He was breast-fed and, as first-born, remained his mother's favorite throughout her long life (to 1930). Freud wrote: "A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success." Mother was indulgent: it was not she but his father who scolded him at the age of two for bed-wetting. Father was firm without being harsh. There is no reason to believe that he ever threatened Sigmund with mutilation for masturbating, though this seems to have been a common threat in Europe then. Yet Freud was eventually to decide that every man suffers from a fear of being castrated. Sigmund's constant companion was his nephew John, and (says Jones with unanalytical British understatement) "there are indications that their mutual play was not always entirely innocent." Their lack of innocence extended to play with John's sister Pauline, and Freud (as he told later) had fantasies of her being raped by both John and himself. Outstanding in his early relationship was his attitude toward a father old enough to be his grandfather. By putting him on a pedestal of eld and aloofness, and absolving him of "blame" for his mother's pregnancies, little Sigmund had few or no conscious wishes to replace his father in his mother's affections and/or bed. His Oedipal feelings were displaced upon Philipp. This may have made it easier for him to see Oedipus in others--perhaps to the point of exalting the notion beyond its true value. It was a shock when, subjecting himself to history's first psychoanalysis at 41, he discovered that he had had unconscious Oedipal feelings like any other patient. Delayed Degree. When Sigmund was four, the family moved to Vienna. A bookworm, he graduated from high school summa cum laude at 17. It was then the fashion in polite strata of most European society to lock sex in a darkened bedroom and pretend that otherwise (except for haut-monde libertines and the licentious "lower classes") it did not exist. For whatever inner need, the adolescent Freud accepted this viewpoint, once even warned his sister Anna off Balzac and Dumas. There is no clear explanation of Freud's choice of medicine as a career. His own best version (one of several) is that "I felt an overpowering need to understand something of the riddle of the world in which we live, and perhaps even to contribute something to their solution." Even after he had finished his medical course (at 22), he remained in the laboratories with zoology, chemistry, physiology and neurology. In the end it was no mission to relieve suffering humanity that took him out of the lab into practice as an M.D., but a combination of romance and economics. At 25 he fell in love with Martha Bernays. To marry and raise a family, he had to earn a living instead of continuing to live off his aged, impoverished father and on loans. So Freud plunged into the practice of neurology, and then, after four years of penny- pinching and passionate correspondence with his fiancee, he married. No Bath, No Apple. A traveling fellowship to study in Paris under the famed Jean Martin Charcot in 1885 turned Freud's mind upon the inner workings of the human mind, and especially upon hysteria and the hypnosis that Charcot used in treating it. It was a long series of hesitant and even devious steps from there to psychoanalysis. Freud was no Archimedes rushing from the bath and shouting "Eureka," not even a Newton, blasted into wakeful inspiration by the fall of an apple. He was a plodder. The case of hysterical Anna O. (real name: Bertha Pappenheim, 1859-1936), a patient of his friend and colleague, Josef Breuer, gave Freud the first hint of how a troubled person may ease or banish symptoms by talking about them. From Patient Emmy von N., Freud realized that a victim of hysteria becomes emotionally attached to her (or his) physician. It occurred to him that there was a sexual basis for emotional upsets, so they could be resolved by analysis in a laboratory- style emotional attachment. When Freud interrupted the "stream of consciousness" recital of Patient Elisabeth von R., she complained and said that it was better to let her ramble on, because one idea led to another in her mind. Thus another insight, free association, came to Freud. The couch, with its comfortable encouragement to talkativeness, became the workbench of psychoanalysis. The world stirred only fitfully at first. Freud's key book, The Interpretation of Dreams, in which he set forth his gospel, sold only 600 copies, netted the author $250 in royalties in the eight years after its publication in 1900. He had the ear of only a small group of devoted admirers among Vienna psychologists and psychiatrists (among them Alfred Adler), who met weekly at his home on the Berggasse as the "Psychological Wednesday Society." A few tentative references to Freud's work were beginning to appear in English (more in Britain than the U.S.): he was ridiculed in Germany. From Switzerland came better tidings. At Zurich's famed Burgholzli Mental Hospital Carl Gustav Jung had learned Freud's methods from his writings and had begun to apply psychoanalysis to patients, including a few suffering from psychoses. Better yet, he had developed a set of word-association tests that seemed to him to confirm some of Freud's basic views. Then early in 1907 there came to Vienna in pilgrimage the first of the few disciples who were to remain loyal to Freud through all the storm and stress of later years: Max Eitingon, Sandor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Hanns Sachs and Ernest Jones. In 1909 recognition crossed the Atlantic: Freud and Jung, Ferenczi and Jones attended the 20th anniversary celebration of Clark University in Worcester, Mass. on the invitation of Psychologist G. Stanley Hall, For all his favorable reception in the U.S., Freud detested the country and expressed his feelings in petty ways. Tobacco, he once sneered, was the only excuse for Columbus' great mistake. An Appendage. It was not surprising, in an adventure so heady, intense and trackless, that dissension developed among the explorers. Largely because he thought that inferiority feelings and power drives were more important than sexuality in emotional growth, Adler broke with Freud in 1911 amid wrangling and recriminations; they were antagonists until Adler's death in 1937. Another reason for Adler's defection was Freud's immoderate admiration and affection for Carl Jung, the only non-Jew (aside from Jones) in the inner circle, and the man clearly designated by Freud as the heir apparent to the couch- throne of psychoanalysis. But by 1913 Jung denied the predominantly sexual nature of the libido, or life energy, and turned his back forever upon Freud. "The brain is viewed as an appendage of the genital glands," he once bitterly summed up Freud's theory. Jung (TIME, Feb. 14, 1955) lives in Zurich today, a ripe 80, contentedly delving into dreams, yoga, Buddhism, ancient superstitions, tribal rites and other mystic areas. So the cult of psychoanalysis began to develop its schismatic sects and diametrically opposed dogmatists. But Freudian dogma remained its core, and it began to win acceptance among the unhappy, the emotionally distressed and dispossessed. It found its place--not among the poor but among the intelligentsia of the West--not among the deeply ill psychotics (Freud felt that psychoanalysis did not appear to be applicable to the psychoses) but among the maladjusted. The Freudian couch was primarily crafted for them. Psychoanalytic institutes sprang up in Vienna and Geneva, Paris and London, New York and Chicago. Man of Contradiction. At 19 Berggasse in Vienna Freud plodded on to refine his theories. Having divided the mind into Conscious and Unconscious, he now divided it again into Id, Ego and Superego. He repeatedly modified his theories about man's basic instincts and, in the '20s, suggested that there may really be only two: a life-and-love instinct (Eros) (The Greek god of love, better known these days as Cupid.) and an equally strong death-and-aggression instinct (Thanatos). His self-analysis had left him with few neurotic cares (among them: an anxiety about missing trains and some irregularity of his bowels, or, as he called them, his Konrad). He worked prodigiously, for nine months of the year, received patients from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., with only an hour out for lunch, took little longer over dinner with his family (wife, three sons, three daughters and sister-in-law Minna Bernays) before burying himself in the task of assembling data and writing down his theories. He regularly worked until 1 or 2 a.m. (His favorite child was always daughter Anna, now 60 and a practicing child psychoanalyst (modified Freudian) in London. By no Freudian slip her father, who so overshadowed his three sons that none ever attained eminence, once referred to her as "my only son, Anna.") An inveterate rubberneck, he passed his long summer vacations in almost constant touring, often through Italy and occasionally Greece, but usually without his wife. He was a contradictory character. A cold scientist in the days when he was dissecting the nervous system of crayfish, he gave play to another side of his personality when he took his plunge into the Unconscious; even some of his ardent followers concede than in psychoanalysis Freud was unscientific. By nature both tolerant and reflective, he could also be both impatient and intolerant. A searching student of human nature who saw it in all its shades of grey, he yet had a naive way of seeing all acquaintances as either black or white--with the added complication that white friend could turn into black foe overnight. Freud could be charming. His penetrating, attentive eyes inspired confidence. Relatively short (5 ft 7 in.) and slight, he was unaffected and simple in demeanor. Not literally a wit, he had a lively sense of humor, and often threw his head back and laughed softly in a way that impressed U.S. Journalist Max Eastman as "quaint and gnomelike." Freud's voice, too, was gentle. But the master of psychoanalysis could be as imperious as a Habsburg in defense of his rights or his realm. And the man who listened to the most intimate secrets was not good at keeping them; he was often embarrassingly indiscreet. Stricken with cancer of the jaw in later years, Freud was an uncomplaining patient. Often invited to leave Vienna (which he insisted he hated, so his staying there through 60 years of adult life cried aloud for a candid Freudian explanation), he stuck it out through the inflation after World War I and the advent of the Nazis. He even tried to stay when the Nazis marched in (March 1938). With such ill-assorted allies as the British Home Office (unanalyzed) and Princess Marie Bonaparte (analyzed to a fare-thee-well by Sigmund Freud himself), Ernest Jones flew in after the Anschluss and plucked Freud to the safety of London. One day, 18 months later--on Sept. 23, 1939--Sigmund Freud died. He was 83. With Gum & Jive. If measured by the narrowest gauge, Freud today is a prophet with little honor in his own country. Among Vienna's 65 psychiatrists, 14 are Freudians (including six who practice psychoanalysis); Adler's adherents number four, and Jung's two. In Germany Freud's influence on psychiatry is resisted; in other walks of life it is omnipresent but hidden. Says a German-Jewish sociologist: "Naziism and anti-Freudianism have the same deep roots in the German people. Why, if they accepted Freud, they would have to stop beating their children." In Switzerland the Calvinist conscience stands in adamant resistance to Freud. In France le Freudisme was little more than an intellectual fad between world wars, but took a spurt when it was reimported in 1945, along with jive and chewing gum from the U.S. The spurt has died; so, almost, has an offshoot psychanalyse existentielle, developed by Jean-Paul Sartre. Britain has been made Freud-conscious by the championship of Dr. Jones, the masterly translations of James Strachey, the polemics of Partisan Edward Glover, and the fatal fascination--plus plot ideas--Freud held out to all fiction writers. Yet all of Great Britain (pop. 51 million) has half as many analysts as New York City. There are Englishmen who still like to quote Punch's burlesque "explanation" of Freud back in 1934: "Without psychoanalysis we should never know that when we think a thing the thing we think is not the thing we think but only the thing that makes us think we think the thing we think we think." Pickers & Choosers. "All good theories go to America when they die." In the case of Freud this was at least half right. With a thoroughness unmatched elsewhere in the world, psychoanalysis has found its citadel in the U.S. its founder despised. Most of the nation's 750,000 mental patients in understaffed state hospitals still are not reached by modern theory or practice. But the progressive states making radical and energetic attacks on the problem of mental illness are doing so under the leadership of psychiatrists who owe most of their orientation to Freud. Even among psychiatrists who confine their practice to analysis, it is now the practice to avoid complete allegiance to Freud and be an eclectic--a picker and chooser among all the theories and systems of psychology. But psychiatrists trained in the last quarter century and virtually all those now in training have an outlook that is rooted at least 70% in concepts and practices springing straight from Freud. Though most do not practice "classical analysis"--because they believe it uneconomic to devote an hour a day three or four more days a week for two or more years to a single neurotic patient (There is also the cost: three or more hours a week, at $10 to $25 or more an hour--from $3,000 to $20,000 or more for an analysis.)--they practice psychotherapy on analytic principles, try to reach something like Freud's goal by a short cut--often in one or two hours a week for three to six months. Among the 9,000 psychiatrists in the U.S., only 619 are hard-core analysts. Several hundred psychologists also practice analysis (and are slightingly referred to as "lay analysts"). Perhaps 15,000 patients are in analysis at any one time; the estimated total of Americans who have tried analysis (though many did not stay the full course) is well over 100,000--more than in the rest of the world. Who's Better? What does analysis do for patients? Says Hans Jurgen Eysenck, a bright, up-and-coming British psychologist: "I have yet to meet a Freudian who can prove that there is a higher [improvement rate] among neurotics who are psychoanalyzed...What evidence they do offer is anecdotal...In mental cases of all types about three-quarters will recover in about the same period whether they have treatment or not." On the analysts' side, there is case after case in which patients who undergo analysis are relieved of their symptoms of neurosis. The analysts are trying to gather figures to prove the worth of their methods, but the usual criterion of success is that analyst and analysand shall agree on the outcome. Naturally, the analyst is biased, and the patient may be the victim of the Freudian mechanism of wish fulfillment. It is useless to go by the opinions of unbelievers, because most of the unanalyzed tend to feel superior to those who have succumbed sufficiently to life's stresses to pay heavily to go to a "talking doctor," "head-shrinker," or "witch doctor," and have their "heads candled." On the other hand, it is all but impossible to argue with an orthodox Freudian (as with an adherent of any other "one true faith") because anybody who rejects the dogma is instantly accused of doing so only because he has an inner, unconscious "resistance" against unpalatable truth. Guilty But Traumatized. Far more important than the relative handful of patients treated by the thin cohort of psychoanalysts centered mostly in New York and Hollywood are the millions who are daily influenced, often unknowingly, by the penetration of Freudian theory. A social worker visiting a family with health and welfare problems looks for unhealthy father-son or mother-daughter relationships. The probation officer reporting on a juvenile delinquent discusses the family background with the court in terms of aggression and compensation. So does a truant officer. In Wheeling, W. Va. last week, Thomas Williams Jr., 14, was found legally sane, sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of a nine-year- old boy after two psychiatrists appointed by the court had declared him insane. He had a romantic attachment to his mother and a desire to kill his father (straight Oedipus complex) that exploded on the young victim instead. Benjamin Spock's Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, by which millions of U.S. children are now being raised, is no Freudian text by a long shot, but most of its prescriptions, from feeding and toilet training to "play with peers," are solidly rooted in Freud's concepts. In nursery schools, self- expression owes almost all to Freud. Picking a vocation or choosing a college course, countless U.S. youths submit themselves to aptitude tests and other psychological gimmicks based on Freudian interpretation of personality structure; e.g., the Rorschach ink-blot tests may reveal hidden hostilities which would make a career as a salesman unprofitable, or dependency yearnings which would bar promotion as a foreman or executive. A firm of consultants is doing big business providing psychologists to industry. Its biggest client: Chicago's case-hardened Inland Steel Co., which employs 15 psychologists part-time to help in picking new employees and to improve old hands for promotion. It is a measure of psychiatry's maturity as well as its penetration that religion, slowly and within stoutly defined limits, has come to accept and even to cooperate with it. Sigmund Freud, an atheist, found no place in his vision of the riddle of man for the "mass obsessional neurosis" called religion, except for its occasional help as an opiate to stifle a neurosis. For all his own scruples, he deplored society's religion-based concept of morality, saw the root of modern man's problems in the concept of sin. Declared the Bulletin of the Catholic Clergy of Rome in 1952: "It is difficult to consider free of mortal sin anyone who uses psychoanalysis as a method of cure or who submits to such a cure." Forthwith, Pope Pius XII took pains to correct the Bulletin, and added that with certain stiff reservations, e.g., no encouragement of the idea that there can be sin without subjective guilt, psychoanalysis is a legitimate method of treatment. Protestant and Jewish faiths have lent their support to joint enterprises in psychiatry and religion, such as the national Academy of Religion and Mental Health (TIME, April 9). Jesuits take part in seminars at the famed Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kans. Next fall Union Theological Seminary will install Psychoanalyst Earl Loomis Jr., 35, as its first professor of psychiatry. Arguments Over. If Sigmund Freud were still alive, he might be surprised and even put out to discover how calmly the revelations that shocked Vienna in the 1900s are now accepted and fitted to the varied beliefs, yearnings and works of religion and modern society. "They may abuse my doctrines by day," he once declared, "but I am sure they dream of them by night." In a sense he was right. Freud as philosopher and counselor to man will be the subject of argument and doubts for many days and nights to come. But over Freud as the bold explorer of the dark side of the mind, there is no argument left. Said one psychiatrist last week, Swiss Catholic Charles Baudoin: "All modern psychology must be based on the exploration of the unconscious which must allow us to understand the human soul and to influence it in a fashion never before attempted or imagined. Modern man cannot conceive of himself without Freud." </body> </article> </text>