chapter twelve
Turn of the Century
The title of this chapter is an act of quiet desperation. Many really good books were written by men and women who were born in the last half of the nineteenth century but who lived through the First World War and did their best-known work after it, or at least after the turn of the century. More importantly, most of them were deeply affected by that terrible “War to End Wars,” which, of course, turned out to be nothing of the kind, instead being—as we see now—only the first part of a world conflict that dominated the entire century just past. The twentieth century—we have finally arrived at it, and it is hard to view it with anything but tears. As some of these authors make abundantly clear.
Some of them were world-historical figures: Freud, Yeats, Mann, Shaw, to name only four. The latest of these to depart was Thomas Mann, who died in 1955. That is a long time ago, now—more than half a century. In half a century many people and events can be forgotten, more or less, but these four survive, in some of our memories, at least, and also, perhaps, more concretely in film and other modern recensions of their stories and lives. At the same time the world we live in now is so very different from the one they knew that it is not surprising if many readers of this book will know little more about these figures than about Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare. That is precisely the reason I have written it—to keep alive and warm the memory of some very great people. And ideas. And books.
SIGMUND FREUD
1856–1939
The Interpretation of Dreams
An Outline of Psychoanalysis
Civilization and Its Discontents
Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Freiburg, Czechoslovakia, and moved to Vienna when he was four. He was educated in Vienna and only decided to become a physician at the end of his gymnasium course, when he read Goethe’s “beautiful essay ‘On Nature.’” He received his medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1881, became an intern at the General Hospital, and began to study nervous diseases in children. He went to Paris, where he studied under the neurologist Jean Charcot, and returned to Vienna to do further work with Josef Breuer, who was just beginning to treat hysteria, or conversion neurosis, with hypnosis. Freud published with Breuer the first of his many books, Studies in Hysteria (1895). Soon, however, he parted from Breuer, deciding that treating hysteria with the method of “free association” was more effective. At the same time he began to study intensively his patients’ dreams, and out of this grew his first truly distinctive book, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).
The year 1900 was a symbolic one in which to publish this revolutionary work; Freud had been educated in the nineteenth century and in some respects remained a nineteenth-century man throughout his life, but his doctrines, as first set forth in The Interpretation of Dreams, would help to shape the utterly different world of the new century. Few paid attention to this at the time. The book was largely ignored; Freud had worked in isolation for years, having as yet no following, and the main response to his ideas was mockery. Within hardly more than a decade, however, The Interpretation of Dreams and its author were world famous.
The book is fascinating. The interpreted dreams are in themselves of great interest, the interpretations even more so; and we can see, as we read, Freud developing his theory of dreams and coming himself to understand it. The book is not Freud’s final statement on dreams, nor on psychoanalysis, but he never wrote anything more fresh, youthful, and enthusiastic; he was in his forties and still had hopes for the world, hopes that he later lost.
You do not have to read all of The Interpretation of Dreams. It is one of those books that you can safely read in, unless of course you are studying to become an analyst. At the same time the book is hard to put down. Holding it in your hand, you are aware that it is the beginning of something important, that it is about a set of ideas that are fundamental to our modern view of the world. Trying to imagine the world without Freud is like trying to imagine it without electricity, petroleum, or nuclear weapons.
Most of the technical terms that Freud uses in his later, more formal presentations of his theory of psychoanalysis appear in The Interpretation of Dreams, together with the insights into human behavior that mark all of his later work. A basic assumption of the book is that there is an unconscious, and that unconscious mental activity is even more important than conscious. In the 1880s it would have been hard to find anyone willing to accept the notion of the unconscious; in the 1980s it was hard to find anyone to deny it. Today, I am not so sure. Nevertheless, it is one measure of the influence of the author of The Interpretation of Dreams.
By 1910 Freud was not only famous but also controversial. He recognized the need to make himself understood by ordinary people, and several times he attempted to sum up his doctrines for a lay audience. The first attempt was in 1909, when he was invited to Clark University, in Massachusetts, to give a series of lectures that became The Origin and Development of Psycho-Analysis. At the University of Vienna between 1915 and 1917 he again explained his theories in a series of lectures to a lay audience, and these became A General Introduction of Psycho-Analysis. He was, however, dissatisfied with all of these attempts, and in 1938, shortly before his death, he wrote a short book, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, in which he attempted to convey his ideas in the most succinct fashion. Nothing Freud wrote is clearer, I think, than this work; although it is too small to be definitive, there is nonetheless no better way to begin trying to understand Freud.
The work is in three parts. The first, “The Mind and Its Workings,” sets forth the basic assumptions about the mental apparatus that constitute Freudian theory. Part Two, “The Practical Task,” deals with the techniques of psychoanalysis. Part Three, “The Theoretical Yield,” is unfinished, but it must have been very nearly complete when Freud abandoned the book only a few months before he died. It touches on the relations between the psychical apparatus and the external world, and attempts to describe the character and workings of the internal world—that of the mind itself.
The book is dense, compact. Each sentence is crucial to the argument; the book cannot be read quickly (even though it is less than 125 pages long). But it is enormously rewarding. Here is the final statement of the man who invented psychoanalysis and who may almost be said to have discovered the mind. Certainly no one before him ever understood it!