The one aspect of Viennese life Freud could feel no ambivalence about, from which there was no escape, was anti-Semitism. This had grown markedly with the rise in the Jewish population of the city, which went from 70,000 in 1873 to 147,000 in 1900, and as a result anti-Semitism had become so prevalent in Vienna that according to one account, a patient might refer to the doctor who was treating him as ‘Jewish swine.’10 Karl Lueger, an anti-Semite who had proposed that Jews should be crammed on to ships to be sunk with all on board, had become mayor.11 Always sensitive to the slightest hint of anti-Semitism, to the end of his life Freud refused to accept royalties from any of his works translated into Hebrew or Yiddish. He once told Carl Jung that he saw himself as Joshua, ‘destined to explore the promised land of psychiatry.’12
A less familiar aspect of Viennese intellectual life that helped shape Freud’s theories was the doctrine of ‘therapeutic nihilism.’ According to this, the diseases of society defied curing. Although adapted widely in relation to philosophy and social theory (Otto Weininger and Ludwig Wittgenstein were both advocates), this concept actually started life as a scientific notion in the medical faculty at Vienna, where from the early nineteenth century on there was a fascination with disease, an acceptance that it be allowed to run its course, a profound compassion for patients, and a corresponding neglect of therapy. This tradition still prevailed when Freud was training, but he reacted against it.13 To us, Freud’s attempt at treatment seems only humane, but at the time it was an added reason why his ideas were regarded as out of the ordinary.
Freud rightly considered The Interpretation of Dreams to be his most significant achievement. It is in this book that the four fundamental building blocks of Freud’s theory about human nature first come together: the unconscious, repression, infantile sexuality (leading to the Oedipus complex), and the tripartite division of the mind into ego, the sense of self; superego, broadly speaking, the conscience; and id, the primal biological expression of the unconscious. Freud had developed his ideas – and refined his technique – over a decade and a half since the mid–1880s. He saw himself very much in the biological tradition initiated by Darwin. After qualifying as a doctor, Freud obtained a scholarship to study under Jean-Martin Charcot, a Parisian physician who ran an asylum for women afflicted with incurable nervous disorders. In his research Charcot had shown that, under hypnosis, hysterical symptoms could be induced. Freud returned to Vienna from Paris after several months, and following a number of neurological writings (on cerebral palsy, for example, and on aphasia), he began a collaboration with another brilliant Viennese doctor, Josef Breuer (1842—1925). Breuer, also Jewish, was one of the most trusted doctors in Vienna, with many famous patients. Scientifically, he had made two major discoveries: on the role of the vagus nerve in regulating breathing, and on the semicircular canals of the inner ear, which, he found, controlled the body’s equilibrium. But Breuers importance for Freud, and for psychoanalysis, was his discovery in 1881 of the so-called talking cure.14 For two years, beginning in December 1880, Breuer had treated for hysteria a Vienna-born Jewish girl, Bertha Pappenheim (1859—1936), whom he described for casebook purposes as ‘Anna O.’ Anna fell ill while looking after her sick father, who died a few months later. Her illness took the form of somnambulism, paralysis, a split personality in which she sometimes behaved as a naughty child, and a phantom pregnancy, though the symptoms varied. When Breuer saw her, he found that if he allowed her to talk at great length about her symptoms, they would disappear. It was, in fact, Bertha Pappenheim who labelled Breuer’s method the ‘talking cure’ (Redecur in German) though she also called it Kaminfegen – ‘chimney sweeping.’ Breuer noticed that under hypnosis Bertha claimed to remember how she had repressed her feelings while watching her father on his sickbed, and by recalling these ‘lost’ feelings she found she could get rid of them. By June 1882 Miss Pappenheim was able to conclude her treatment, ‘totally cured’ (though it is now known that she was admitted within a month to a sanatorium).15
The case of Anna O. deeply impressed Freud. For a time he himself tried hypnosis with hysterical patients but abandoned this approach, replacing it with ‘free association’ – a technique whereby he allowed his patients to talk about whatever came into their minds. It was this technique that led to his discovery that, given the right circumstances, many people could recall events that had occurred in their early lives and which they had completely forgotten. Freud came to the conclusion that though forgotten, these early events could still shape the way people behaved. Thus was born the concept of the unconscious, and with it the notion of repression. Freud also realised that many of the early memories revealed – with difficulty – under free association were sexual in nature. When he further found that many of the ‘recalled’ events had in fact never taken place, he developed his notion of the Oedipus complex. In other words the sexual traumas and aberrations falsely reported by patients were for Freud a form of code, showing what people secretly wanted to happen, and confirming that human infants went through a very early period of sexual awareness. During this period, he said, a son was drawn to the mother and saw himself as a rival to the father (the Oedipus complex) and vice versa with a daughter (the Electra complex). By extension, Freud said, this broad motivation lasted throughout a person’s life, helping to determine character.
These early theories of Freud were met with outraged incredulity and unremitting hostility. Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the author of a famous book, Psychopathia Sexualis, quipped that Freud’s account of hysteria ‘sounds like a scientific fairy tale.’ The neurological institute of Vienna University refused to have anything to do with him. As Freud later said, ‘An empty space soon formed itself about my person.’16
His response was to throw himself deeper into his researches and to put himself under analysis – with himself. The spur to this occurred after the death of his father, Jakob, in October 1896. Although father and son had not been very intimate for a number of years, Freud found to his surprise that he was unaccountably moved by his father’s death, and that many long-buried recollections spontaneously resurfaced. His dreams also changed. He recognised in them an unconscious hostility directed toward his father that hitherto he had repressed. This led him to conceive of dreams as ‘the royal road to the unconscious.’17 Freud’s central idea in The Interpretation of Dreams was that in sleep the ego is like ‘a sentry asleep at its post.’18 The normal vigilance by which the urges of the id are repressed is less efficient, and dreams are therefore a disguised way for the id to show itself. Freud was well aware that in devoting a book to dreams he was risking a lot. The tradition of interpreting dreams dated back to the Old Testament, but the German title of the book, Die Traumdeutung, didn’t exactly help. ‘Traumdeutung’ was the word used at the time to describe the popular practice of fairground fortune-tellers.19