In 1913 the chief problem of psychoanalysis, and therefore of its founder, continued to be its own internal rifts. The one between Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler kept Freud away from Adler's Cafe Central, and therefore Trotsky (himself predestined to become one of the century's great schismatics) never met Freud.
Yet the two had a good deal in common. Both Trotsky and Freud were full-blooded subverters of burgher pieties, both liked to play chess, and both relaxed by reading novels not in their mother tongue (Freud's English, as against Trotsky's French). Trotsky's love-hate relationship with Russia matched Freud's with Austria. Furthermore, the Trotsky of the year 1913 was no less than Freud an autocrat in command of an embattled sect, one that did not hesitate to lacerate its own allies. For example, Trotsky's Vienna Pravda often attacked the Pravda of St. Petersburg for its "disruptive 'egocentral- ism,' " which undercut all original and independent Socialist initiatives.
At the same time Freud started a purge within his own movement. Two years earlier he had gotten rid of Alfred Adler, until then one of his principal disciples among psychiatrists; Adler and his coterie had become un-Freudian by tracing neuroses not to sexual maladjustment but to general inferiority feelings. Now in 1914, a Swiss group of psychoanalysts led by Dr. Carl Jung was straying toward heresy; they no longer viewed the libido as Freud's erotically centered concept; to them it was the vehicle of a more multi-faceted psychic energy. In other words, they were undermining an article of faith.
On occasion the master of the Berggasse seemed capable of tolerating dissent. But this patience was a stratagem. His instinct was to show no mercy to antagonists in his fold-a trait he openly discussed. Only someone seeing so deeply into others could, when he wished, unmask himself so well. "I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador," he wrote to a friend, "… with all the inquisitiveness, daring and tenacity of such a man." And with just such a man's ruthlessness he referred to Adler as "a loathesome individual… that Jew-boy out of a Viennese backwater." This was contempt as stinging as any in Trotsky's polemics. Trotsky would have understood why Freud never patronized the Jew Boy's favorite establishment, the Cafe Central.
In 1913 Freud had his own favorite coffee house, the Cafe Landtmann, a fifteen-minute walk from his house. Though close to the University, it was of an upper bourgeois, not of a literary persuasion. The Landtmann featured softer upholstery, cleaner spittoons, more financial journals and fewer avant-garde magazines than the Centraclass="underline" a pleasant place for Freud, who had come to accept, almost with a gloat, his insulation from the city's mainstream intellectuals.
He visited the Landtmann most often on Wednesday nights, after the weekly meeting of his Psycho-Analytical Society (from which Alfred Adler had been forced to resign two years earlier in 1911). Here he would pick a table at the cafe's Ringstrasse terrace overlooking the Gothic tracery of City Hall and the Renaissance loggias of the Court Theater; he would order einen kleinen Braunen, light a cigar, exchange Jewish jokes with favorite followers, and exhale smoke rings into the mellowness of the evening air. In May of 1913 they were leisured hedonist's smoke rings: He had just finished Totem and Taboo. "When my work is over," he had confessed in a letter, "I live like a pleasure-loving philistine."
He took care to add that these pleasures were limited and that he was "vegetating harmlessly." However, his character was too robust, the Viennese ambiance too seductive, and the doctor's own view of human nature too libidinal to keep meaneyed observers from speculating. Just a few months earlier, in 1912, the American psychiatrist Moses Allen Starr had gone beyond speculation in remarks to the New York Academy of Medicine's Section on Neurology. "Vienna is not a particularly moral city," Dr. Starr had said, "and working side by side with Freud… I learned that he enjoyed Viennese life thoroughly. Freud is not a man who lives on a particularly high plane. He is not self-repressed. He is not an ascetic. I think his scientific theory is largely the result of his environment and the peculiar life he leads."
Later, faced with this charge, Freud would sigh a rather Freudian sigh: "If it were only true!" Jung insisted it was true on the basis of, to him, unmistakable clues. While still friendly (Jung told an interviewer) the two doctors had often analyzed each other's dreams, and Freud's had exhibited evidence of his carnal relationship with Minna Bernays, his wife's younger, very attractive sister, who lived with the Freuds in their Berggasse apartment. "If Freud had tried to understand consciously the triangle," Jung said, "he would have been much better off."
Of course that statement was made after Jung had broken with his mentor. And of course the picture of Freud as a Viennese libertine fits the polemic of an enemy, not authenticated fact. It is a picture that conflicts with Freud's digs at his city for combining the frivolous with the narrow-minded. But during the spring of 1913 all this didn't keep him from tasting the joys of the season with Viennese gusto.
Every Sunday, every holiday, Freud acted like any of the capital's countless hiking enthusiasts. His children were ordered to "get ready for the meadows!" This meant getting into the dirndls and gallused shorts of peasant lasses and lads. He himself threw on leather knickers, a green jacket, a loden cape, and a Tyrolean hat with chamois brush. Off they went all together, to the Vienna Woods or beyond-off on one of the mushroom hunts he delighted in leading. The zest he showed on such occasion was-to borrow from his self-descriptionalmost conquistadorial. He had an indomitable thirst for booty. It was always Papa Freud himself (his son Martin would recall) who spotted the prize specimen. "He would run to it and fling his hat over it before giving a piercing signal on the silver whistle he carried in his waist pocket to summon the platoon. We would all rush toward the sound of the whistle, and only when all of our concentration was complete, would father remove the hat and allow us to inspect and admire the spoil."
In the town itself, Freud led the 1913 spring outing of the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society. The event took place after dark and involved the doctor's professional rather than personal family. Members of Freud's flock (some passing near Hitler's lodgings in the adjacent district) converged on the Prater. This was Vienna's favorite pleasance-a huge, exuberant park combined with a midway. Having met at the main entrance, the psychiatrists trooped in the twilight up the in cline of a jasmine-laced path to a terrace. A huge table, lavishly set, awaited them.
So did an ex-patient of Freud's; he paid homage to the master by presenting him with a figurine from ancient Egypt. A witness records that Freud placed the gift in front of his plate, at the head of the table, "as a totem." Then two dozen bearded soul-doctors began to feast the night away under the moon, the stars, and the multicolored glow of Chinese lanterns.
The restaurant providing the banquet was called "Con- stantinhugel" after the man-made hill ("hugel") whose top it occupied; and the hill received its name from Prince Constantine von Hohenlohe, late First Lord Chamberlain to His Majesty; under his aegis the hill had been created at the opening of the Vienna World Exhibition of 1873. Now, in 1913, the perfumes of real blossoms brimmed from an artificial slope and mingled with the bouquet of Gewurztraminer from the psychoanalysts' goblets.
The moon waned but not the doctors' gemutlichkeit. Their chief kept lifting his "totem" to their toasts. All along a ballet of fireflies danced through a vernal nocturne quintessentially Viennese: nature and culture in ceremonious fusion.
On a night like this, who would suspect civilization of discontent?