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<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>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.)
</p>
<p> The riddle that entranced Sigmund Freud was the same that
had entranced man through the ages--What am I?
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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>
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.")
</p>
<p> An inveterate rubberneck, he passed his long summer
vacations in almost constant touring, often through Italy and
occasionally Greece, but usually without his wife.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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.
</p>
<p> 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."
</p>
</body>
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