Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

36

Modernism and the Discovery of the Unconscious

As a youth Sigmund Freud did not lack for ambition. Though he had a reputation for being a bookworm, his dark eyes and lush dark hair gave him an air of assurance to which the adjective ‘charismatic’ has been applied.¹ He fantasised himself as Hannibal, Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon, Heinrich Schliemann – the discoverer of Troy – and even Christopher Columbus. Later in life, after he had made his name, he compared himself less fancifully with Copernicus, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo and Darwin. In his lifetime he was lionised by André Breton, Theodore Dreiser and Salvador Dali. Thomas Mann thought he was ‘the oracle’, though he later changed his mind. In 1938, the United States president, Franklin Roosevelt, took a personal interest in Freud’s protection, as a Jew under the Third Reich, and eventually induced the Nazis to let him leave Austria.²

Perhaps no figure in the history of ideas has undergone such revision as Freud – certainly not Darwin, and not even Marx. Just as there is a disparity today between professional historians and the general reading public, concerning the Renaissance and what we might call, for shorthand, the Prenaissance – the period 1050–1250 when the modern world began – so there is a huge gap now between the general public’s understanding of Freud, and that of most psychiatric professionals.

The first act of revision, as it were, is to remove from Freud any priority he may ever have been credited with in the discovery of the unconscious. Guy Claxton, in his recent history of the unconscious, traces ‘unconscious-like’ entities to the ‘incubation temples’ of Asia Minor in 1000 BC where ‘spirit release’ rituals were common. He says that the Greek idea of the soul implied ‘unknown depths’, that Pascal, Hobbes and Edgar Allen Poe were just three who had some idea that the self has a double that is mysterious, half-hidden, yet somehow exerts an influence over behaviour and feelings. Poe was by no means isolated. ‘It is difficult – or perhaps impossible – to find a nineteenth-century psychologist or medical psychologist – who did not recognise unconscious cerebration as not only real but of the highest importance.’ This is Mark D. Altschule in his Origins of Concepts in Human Behavior (1977). The terms ‘psychosis’ and ‘psychiatric’, as we now use them, were introduced by Baron Ernst von Feuchtersleben (1806–1849) in Vienna after 1833. Among novelists, the nineteenth century was known as ‘our century of nerves’, and the word ‘neurasthenia’ was coined by George Beard in 1858.³ The British philosopher Lancelot Law Whyte says that around 1870 the unconscious was a topic of conversation, not merely for professionals, but for those who wished to show they were cultured. The German writer Friedrich Spielhagen agreed: in a novel he published in 1890, he described a Berlin salon in the 1870s where two topics dominated the conversation – Wagner and the philosophy of the unconscious. But not even this does justice to the extent to which the unconscious, as an idea, had developed in the nineteenth century. For that we need to turn to Henri Ellenberger and his massive, magisterial work, The Discovery of the Unconscious.⁴

Ellenberger divided his approach into three – what we might call the distal and proximate medical background to psychoanalysis, and the nineteenth-century cultural background. They were equally important.

Among the distal causes, he said, were such predecessors as Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), who was at times compared to Christopher Columbus, for he was believed to have discovered ‘a new world’, but in his case an inner world. Mesmer treated people with magnets attached to their bodies, after swallowing a preparation containing iron. After noting how some psychological symptoms varied with the phases of the moon, his aim was to manipulate ‘artificial tides’ within the human body. The method appeared to remove the symptoms in some instances, at least for several hours. Mesmer believed he had uncovered an ‘invisible fluid’ in the body, which he could manipulate: this coincided with the discovery of other ‘imponderable’ fluids, such as phlogiston and electricity, and partly accounts for the intense interest in his innovations, which were built on by the marquis de Puységur (1751–1825). He developed two techniques known as ‘perfect crisis’ and ‘artificial somnabulism’, which appear to have been forms of magnetically-induced hypnotism.⁵

Jean-Martin Charcot (1835–1893) was perhaps the first proximate precursor of Freud. The greatest neurologist of his time, who treated patients ‘from Samarkand to the West Indies’, he was the man who made hypnotism respectable when he used it to distinguish hysterical paralysis from organic paralysis. He proved his case by having patients produce paralyses under hypnosis. Subsequently he was able to show that hysterical paralyses often occurred after traumas. He also showed that hysterical memory loss could be recovered under hypnosis. Freud spent four months at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, studying with Charcot, though doubt has recently been thrown on the Frenchman’s work: it now seems that his patients behaved as they did to accommodate their therapists’ expectations.⁶

Hypnosis was a very popular form of treatment throughout the nineteenth century, linked also to a condition known as ambulatory automatism, when people seemed to hypnotise themselves and perform tasks of which they were unaware until they recovered. Hypnosis likewise proved useful with a number of cases of what we now call fugue, where people suddenly dissociate from their lives, leave their homes and may even forget who they are.⁷ As the nineteenth century progressed, however, interest in hypnosis waned, though hysteria remained a focus of psychiatric attention. Because there were, roughly speaking, twenty female cases for every male one, hysteria was from the beginning looked upon as a female disease and although the root cause had originally been conceived as in some mysterious way having to do with the movement or ‘wandering’ of the uterus, it soon became clear that it was a form of psychological illness. A sexual role was considered possible, even likely, because hysteria was virtually absent among nuns but common in prostitutes.⁸

Arguably the first appearance of the unconscious as we now understand the term came after the magnetisers noticed that when they induced magnetic sleep in someone, ‘a new life manifested itself of which the subject was unaware, and that a new and often more brilliant personality emerged’.⁹ These ‘two minds’ fascinated the nineteenth century, and there emerged the concept of the ‘double ego’ or ‘dipsychism’.¹⁰ People were divided as to whether the second mind was ‘closed’ or ‘opened’. The dipsychism theory was developed by Max Dessoir in The Double Ego, published to great acclaim in 1890, in which he divided the mind into the Oberbewussten and the Unterbewussten, ‘upper consciousness’ and ‘under consciousness’, the latter, he said, being revealed occasionally in dreams.

Among the general background factors giving rise to the unconscious, romanticism was intimately involved, says Ellenberger, because romantic philosophy embraced the notion of Urphänomene, ‘primordial phenomena’ and the metamorphoses deriving from them.¹¹ Among the Urphänomene were the Urpflanze, the primordial plant, the All-Sinn, the universal sense, and the unconscious. Another primordial phenomenon, according to Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert (1780–1860), was Ich-Sucht (self-love). Von Schubert said man was a ‘double star’, endowed with a Selbstbewussten, a second centre.¹² Johann Christian August Heinroth (1773–1843), described by Ellenberger as a ‘romantic doctor’, argued that the main cause of mental illness was sin. He theorised that conscience originated in another primordial phenomenon, the Über-Uns (over-us).¹³ Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–1887), a Swiss, promulgated the theory of matriarchy, publishing in 1861 The Law of Mothers.¹⁴ He believed, he said, that history had gone through three phases, ‘hetairism, matriarchy and patriarchy’. The first had been characterised by sexual promiscuity, when children did not know their fathers; the second was established only after thousands of years of struggle, but women had won out, founded the family and agriculture and wielded all the social and political power. The main virtue at this time was love for the mother, with the mothers together favouring a social system of general freedom, equality and peace. Matriarchal society praised education of the body (practical values) above education of the intellect. Patriarchal society emerged only after another long period of bitter struggle. It involved a complete reversal of matriarchal society, favouring individual independence and isolating men from one another. Paternal love is a more abstract principle than maternal love, says Bachofen, less down-to-earth and leading to high intellectual achievement. He believed that many myths contain evidence of matriarchal society, for example the myth of Oedipus.¹⁵

A number of philosophers also anticipated Freudian concepts. The following list of books is instructive but far from exhaustive (Unbewussten means ‘unconscious’ in German): August Winkelmann, Introduction into Dynamic Psychology (1802); Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious (1868); W. B. Carpenter, Unconscious Action of the Brain (1872); J. C. Fischer, Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewussten (1872); J. Vokelt, Das Unbewusste und der Pessimismus (1873); C. F. Flemming, Zur Klärung des Vegriffs der unbewussten Seelen-Thätigkeit (1877); A. Schmidt, Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der Philosophie des Unbewussten (1877); E. Colsenet, La Vie Inconsciente de l’Esprit (1880).¹⁶

In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer conceived the will as a ‘blind, driving force’. Man, he said, was an irrational being guided by internal forces, ‘which are unknown to him and of which he is scarcely aware’.¹⁷ The metaphor Schopenhauer used was that of the earth’s surface, the inside of which is unknown to us. He said that the irrational forces which dominated man were of two kinds – the instinct of conservation and the sexual instinct. Of the two, the sexual instinct was by far the more powerful, and in fact, said Schopenhauer, nothing else can compete with it. ‘Man is deluded if he thinks he can deny the sex instinct. He may think that he can, but in reality the intellect is suborned by sexual urges and it is in this sense that the will is “the secret antagonist of the intellect”.’ Schopenhauer even had a concept of what later came to be called repression which was itself unconscious: ‘The Will’s opposition to let what is repellent to it come to the knowledge of the intellect is the spot through which insanity can break through into the spirit.’¹⁸ ‘Consciousness is the mere surface of our mind, and of this, as of the globe, we do not know the interior but only the crust.’¹⁹

Von Hartmann went further, however, arguing that there were three layers of the unconscious. These were (1) the absolute unconscious, ‘which constitutes the substance of the universe and is the source of the other forms’; (2) the physiological unconscious, which is part of man’s evolutionary development; and (3) the psychological unconscious, which governs our conscious mental life. More than Schopenhauer, von Hartmann collected copious evidence – clinical evidence, in a way – to support his arguments. For example, he discussed the association of ideas, wit, language, religion, history and social life – significantly, all areas which Freud himself would explore.

Many of Freud’s thoughts about the unconscious were also anticipated by Nietzsche (whose other philosophical views are considered later). Nietzsche had a concept of the unconscious as a ‘cunning, covert, instinctual’ entity, often scarred by trauma, camouflaged in a surreal way but leading to pathology.²⁰ The same is true of Johann Herbart and G. T. Fechner. Ernest Jones, Freud’s first (and official) biographer, drew attention to a Polish psychologist, Luise von Karpinska, who originally spotted the resemblance between some of Freud’s fundamental ideas and Herbart’s (who wrote seventy years before). Herbart pictured the mind as dualistic, in constant conflict between conscious and unconscious processes. An idea is described as being verdrängt (repressed) ‘when it is unable to reach consciousness because of some opposing idea’.²¹ Fechner built on Herbart, specifically likening the mind to an iceberg ‘which is nine-tenths under water and whose course is determined not only by the wind that plays over the surface but also by the currents of the deep’.²²

Pierre Janet may also be regarded as a ‘pre-Freudian’. Part of a great generation of French scholars which included Henri Bergson, Émile Durkheim, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Alfred Binet, Janet’s first important work was Psychological Automatism, which included the results of experiments he carried out at Le Havre between 1882 and 1888. There, he claimed to have refined a technique of hypnosis in which he induced his patients to undertake automatic writing. These writings, he said, explained why his patients would develop ‘terror’ fits without any apparent reason.²³ Janet also noticed that, under hypnosis, patients sometimes developed a dual personality. One side was created to please the physician while the second, which would occur spontaneously, was best explained as a ‘return to childhood’. (Patients would refer to themselves, all of a sudden, by their childhood nicknames.) When Janet moved to Paris he developed his technique known as ‘Psychological Analysis’. This was a repeated use of hypnosis and automatic writing, during the course of which, he noticed, the crises that were induced were followed by the patient’s mind becoming clearer. However, the crises became progressively more severe and the ideas that emerged showed that they were reaching back in time, earlier and earlier in the patient’s life. Janet concluded that ‘in the human mind, nothing ever gets lost’ and that ‘subconscious fixed ideas are both the result of mental weakness and [a] source of further and worse mental weakness’.²⁴

The nineteenth century was also facing up to the issue of child sexuality. Physicians had traditionally considered it a rare abnormality but, as early as 1846, Father P. J. C. Debreyne, a moral theologian who was also a physician, published a tract where he insisted on the high frequency of infantile masturbation, of sexual play between young children, and of the seduction of very young children by wet nurses and servants. Bishop Dupanloup of Orléans was another churchman who repeatedly emphasised the frequency of sexual play among children, arguing that most of them acquired ‘bad habits’ between the ages of one and two years. Most famously, Jules Michelet, in Our Sons (1869), warned parents about the reality of child sexuality and in particular what today would be called the Oedipus complex.²⁵

Two things of some importance emerge from even this brief survey of nineteenth-century (mainly German and French) thought. The first is to dispense thoroughly with any idea that Freud ‘discovered’ the unconscious. Whether or not the unconscious exists as an entity (an issue we shall return to later), the idea of the unconscious predates Freud by several decades and was common currency in European thought throughout most of the 1800s. Second, many of the other psychological concepts inextricably linked with Freud in the minds of so many – such ideas as childhood sexuality, the Oedipus complex, repression, regression, transference, the libido, the id and the superego – were also not original to Freud. They were as much ‘in the air’ as the unconscious was, as much as ‘evolution’ was at the time Darwin conceived the mechanism of natural selection. Freud had nowhere near as original a mind as he is generally given credit for.

Surprising as all this is, for many people, it is still not the main charge against him, not the main sin so far as Freud’s critics contend. These critics, such figures as Frederick Crews, Frank Cioffi, Allen Esterson, Malcolm Macmillan and Frank Sulloway (the list is long and growing), further argue that Freud is – not to beat about the bush – a charlatan, a ‘scientist’ only in quotation marks, who fudged and faked his data and deceived both himself and others. And this, the critics charge, completely vitiates his theories and the conclusions based on them.

The best format to convey the new view of Freud is first to give the orthodox view of the ways in which he conceived his theories, and their reception, and then to give the main charges against him, showing how the orthodox view now has to be altered (this alteration, it should be said one more time, is drastic – we are talking here about critical scholarship over the last forty years but, in the main, the last fifteen years). Here, to begin with, is the orthodox version.

Sigmund Freud’s views were first set out in Studies in Hysteria, published in 1895 with Joseph Breuer, and then more fully in his work entitled The Interpretation of Dreams, published in the last weeks of 1899. (The book was technically released in November 1899, in Leipzig as well as Vienna, but it bore the date 1900 and it was first reviewed in early January 1900). Freud, a Jewish doctor from Freiberg in Moravia, was already forty-four. The eldest of eight children, he was outwardly a conventional man. He believed passionately in punctuality and wore suits made of English cloth, cut from material chosen by his wife. He was also an athletic man, a keen amateur mountaineer, who never drank alcohol. He was, on the other hand, a ‘relentless’ cigar-smoker.²⁶

Though Freud might be a conventional man in his personal habits, The Interpretation of Dreams was a deeply controversial and – for many people in Vienna – an utterly shocking book. It is in this work 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 Charcot, who at the time 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, 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 Breuer’s importance for Freud, and for psychoanalysis, was his discovery in 1881 of the so-called talking cure.²⁷

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 case-book purposes, as ‘Anna O’. She had a variety of severe symptoms, including hallucinations, speech disturbances, a phantom pregnancy, intermittent paralyses, and visual problems. In the course of her illness(es) she experienced two different states of consciousness, and also went through extended bouts of somnambulism. Breuer found that in this latter state she would, with encouragement, report stories that she made up, following which her symptoms improved temporarily. However, her condition deteriorated badly after her father died – there were more severe hallucinations and anxiety states. Again, however, Breuer found that ‘Anna’ could obtain some relief from these symptoms if he could persuade her to talk about her hallucinations during her autohypnoses. This was a process she herself called her ‘talking cure’ or ‘chimney sweeping’ (Kaminfagen). Breuer’s next advance was made accidentally: ‘Anna’ started to talk about the onset of a particular symptom (difficulty in swallowing), after which the symptom disappeared. Building on this, Breuer eventually (after some considerable time) discovered that if he could persuade his patient to recall in reverse chronological order each past occurrence of a specific symptom, until she reached the very first occasion, most of them disappeared in the same way. By June 1882, Miss Pappenheim was able to conclude her treatment, ‘totally cured’.²⁸

The case of Anna O. impressed Freud deeply (he had been distinctly unimpressed by George Beard’s arguments about neurasthenia). For a time Freud himself tried electrotherapy, massage, hydrotherapy and 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 which 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 his concept of the unconscious and with it the notion of repression. Freud also realised that many of these early memories which were 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 refined 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 not what had happened but what people secretly wanted to happen, and confirmed 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.²⁹

These early theories of Freud were met with outraged incredulity and unremitting hostility. 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.’³⁰ 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’.³¹ Freud’s central idea in The Interpretation of Dreams was that in sleep the ego is like ‘a sentry asleep at its post’.³² 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.

The early sales for The Interpretation of Dreams indicate its poor reception. Of the original 600 copies printed, only 228 were sold during the first two years and the book apparently sold only 351 copies during its first six years in print.³³ More disturbing to Freud was the complete lack of attention paid to the book by the Viennese medical profession.³⁴ The picture was much the same in Berlin. Freud had agreed to give a lecture on dreams at the university, but only three people turned up to hear him. In 1901, shortly before he was to address the Philosophical Society he was handed a note which begged him to indicate ‘when he was coming to objectionable matter and make a pause, during which the ladies could leave the hall’. The isolation wouldn’t last and in time, and despite fierce controversy, many people came to consider the unconscious the most influential idea of the twentieth century.

So much for the orthodox view. Now for the revised version. There are four main charges. In increasing order of importance they are that, one, Freud did not invent the ‘free association’ technique. This was invented in 1879 or 1880 by Francis Galton and reported in the journal Brain, where the new technique is described as a device to explore ‘obscure depths’.³⁵ The second charge is that it is a myth that Freud’s books and theories met with a hostile reception – recent scholarship has revealed the extent of this myth. Norman Kiell, in Freud Without Hindsight (1988), reports that out of forty-four reviews of The Interpretation of Dreams published between 1899 and 1913 (which is in itself a respectable number), only eight could be classified as ‘unfavourable’. Hannah Decker, herself a Freudian, in her book Freud in Germany: Revolution and Reaction in Science, 1893–1907 (1977), concludes that ‘an overwhelming percent of the [published] lay response to Freud’s theories about dreams was enthusiastic’.³⁶ Though The Interpretation of Dreams may not have sold well, a popular version did do well. The history of the unconscious, reported earlier in this chapter, and the evolution of such ideas as the superego, childhood sexuality, and repression, show that Freud was not saying anything that was completely new. Why, therefore, should people have taken such exception? He never had any problems getting his views published. He never published his views anonymously, as Robert Chambers did when he introduced the idea of evolution to a wide range of readers.

The third charge is that the picture Freud himself painted of one of Breuer’s most famous patients, ‘Anna O.’, or Bertha Pappenheim, was seriously flawed and quite possibly based on deliberate deceit. Henri Ellenberger himself traced the clinics where Pappenheim was treated and unearthed the notes used by Breuer. Since some of the wording in these reports is identical with the later published paper, we can be sure that these are indeed the original notes. Ellenberger, and others since, found that there is no evidence at all that Pappenheim ever had a phantom pregnancy. This is now believed to be a story Freud invented, to counter the apparent lack of sexual aetiology in the Anna O. case as recounted by Breuer, which was completely at odds with Freud’s insistence that sexual matters lay at the root of all hysterical symptoms. In his biography of Josef Breuer (1989), Albrecht Hirschmüller goes so far as to say that ‘The Freud–Jones account of the termination of the treatment of Anna O. should be regarded as a myth.’³⁷ Hirschmüller himself was able to show that many of Pappenheim’s symptoms went into total or partial remission spontaneously, that she went through no catharsis or abreaction – in fact the case notes end abruptly in 1882 – and that, following treatment by Breuer, she was hospitalised in the next years no fewer than four times, each time being diagnosed with ‘hysteria’. In other words, Freud’s claim that Breuer ‘restored Anna O. to health’ is false and, moreover and equally important, Freud must have known it was false because there is a letter of his which makes clear that Breuer knew Anna O. was still ill in 1883, and because she was a friend of Freud’s fiancée Martha Bernays.³⁸

The significance of the Anna O. case, or at least the way Freud reported it, is threefold. It shows that Freud exaggerated the effects of the ‘talking cure’. It shows that he introduced a sexual element when none was there. And it shows that he was cavalier with the clinical details. We shall see that these tendencies all repeated themselves in important ways throughout the rest of his career.

The fourth charge against Freud is by far the most serious but stems from the case of Anna O. It is that the entire edifice of psychoanalysis is based on clinical evidence and observations that are at best dubious or flawed, and at worst fraudulent. Perhaps the single most important idea in psychoanalysis is Freud’s conclusion that infantile sexual wishes persist in adults, but outside awareness, and can thus bring about psychopathology. ‘At the bottom of every case of hysteria,’ he reported in 1896, ‘there are one or more occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood but which can be reproduced through the work of psychoanalysis in spite of the intervening decades.’ What is strange about this is that, although in 1896 he had never before reported a single case of sexual abuse in infancy, within four months he was claiming that he had ‘traced back’ unconscious memories of abuse in thirteen patients described as hysterical. Allied to this was his argument that the event or situation that was responsible for a particular symptom could be revealed through his technique of psychoanalysis, and that ‘abreacting’ the event – reliving it in talk with the associated emotional expression – would result in ‘catharsis’, remission of the symptom. He became convinced that this was, in his own words, ‘an important finding, the discovery of a caput Nili [source of the Nile] in neuropathology . . .’³⁹ But he then went on to add – and this is what has brought about the great revision – ‘these patients never repeat these stories spontaneously, nor do they ever in the course of a treatment suddenly present the physician with the complete recollection of a scene of this kind’. For Freud, as he presented his findings, these memories were unconscious, outside the patient’s awareness, ‘traces are never present in conscious memory, only in the symptoms of the illness’. His patients, going into therapy, had no idea about these scenes and, he confessed, they were ‘indignant as a rule’ when they were told. ‘Only the strongest compulsion of the treatment can induce them to embark on reproducing them’ (the early circumstances of abuse). As Allen Esterson and others have shown, Freud’s techniques in the early days were not those of a sensitive analyst sitting quietly on a couch, listening to what his patients had to say. On the contrary, Freud would touch his patients on the forehead – this was his ‘pressure’ technique – and he would insist that something would come into their heads – an idea, image or memory. They were made to describe these images and memories until, after a long stream, they would alight on the event that caused the (supposed) hysterical symptom. In other words, say the critics, Freud had very fixed ideas about what lay at the root of various symptoms and rather than passively listen and let the clinical evidence emerge from observation, he forced his views on his patients.

It was out of this unusual approach that there came his most famous set of observations. This was that the patients had been seduced, or otherwise sexually abused, in infancy, and that these experiences lay at the root of their later neurotic symptoms. The culprits were divided into three: adult strangers; adults in charge of the children, such as maids, governesses or tutors; and ‘blameless children . . . mostly brothers who for years on end had carried on sexual relations with sisters a little younger than themselves’.⁴⁰ The age at which these precocious sexual experiences were alleged to have taken place occurred most commonly in the third to fifth year. To this point, what the critics chiefly argue is that Freud’s allegedly ‘clinical’ observations are no such thing. They are instead a dubious ‘reconstruction’, based on symbolic interpretation of the symptom. It is necessary to repeat that a close reading of Freud’s various reports shows that patients never actually volunteered these stories of sexual abuse. On the contrary they vehemently denied them. Invariably, it was Freud who ‘informed’, ‘persuaded’, ‘intuited’ or ‘inferred’ these processes. In several places he actually admitted to ‘guessing’ what the underlying problem was.

However, and this is another event of some significance, within eighteen months Freud was confiding to his colleague Wilhelm Fleiss (but only to Fleiss) that he no longer believed in this theory of the origins of neurosis. He thought it improbable there should be such widespread perversions against children, and in any case he was failing to bring any of his analyses based on these ideas to a successful conclusion. ‘Of course I shall not tell it in Dan, nor speak of it in Askelon, in the land of the Philistines, but in your eyes and my own . . .’ In other words, he was not prepared to do the scientifically honourable thing, and acknowledge publicly that he was withdrawing his confidently-claimed ‘findings’ of the previous year. It was now that he began to consider the possibility that these events were unconscious fantasies rather than memories. However, even then this new variation took time to coalesce fully, because Freud at first thought that infants’ fantasies occurred in order to ‘cover up the auto-erotic activity of the early years of childhood’. In 1906 and again in 1914 he said that, around puberty, some patients conjured up unconscious memories of infantile ‘seductions’ to ‘fend off’ memories of infantile masturbation. In 1906 the ‘culprits’ of the fantasies were adults or older children, while in 1914 he did not specify who they were. In that report, however, he did at last fully retract his seduction theory. Even so, it was only in 1925, nearly thirty years after the events in question, that he first said publicly that most of his early female patients had accused their father of having seduced them. The size of this volte-face cannot be overstated. In the first place, there is no question but that he radically changed the scenario of seduction – from real to fantasised, and further, he changed the identity of the seducers from strangers/tutors/brothers to fathers. The important point to take on board is that this change occurred as a result of no new clinical evidence: Freud simply painted a different picture, using the same ingredients, except that this time he was a quarter of a century away from the evidence. Second, and no less important, during the long years between the late 1890s and 1925, during which time he treated many female patients, Freud never reported that any of them mentioned early seductions, by their fathers or anyone else. In other words, it seems that once Freud stopped looking for it, this syndrome ceased to show itself. This is surely further evidence, say the critics, that the seduction theory, and by extension the Oedipus and Electra complexes, perhaps the most influential aspect of Freudianism, and one of the most important ideas of the twentieth century, in both medical and artistic terms, not to say common parlance, turns out to have the most unusual, tortured – and quite frankly improbable – genealogy. The inconsistencies in the genesis of the theory are blatant. Freud did not ‘discover’ early sexual awareness in his patients: he inferred or intuited or ‘guessed’ it was there. He did not discover the Oedipus complex from careful and passive observations of clinical evidence: he had a pre-set idea which he forced on the ‘evidence’, after previous ‘impositions’ had failed even to convince himself. Furthermore, it was a process that could not be reproduced by any independent, sceptical scientist, and this is perhaps the most damning evidence of all, the final nail in the coffin so far as Freud’s claim to be a scientist is concerned. What sort of science is it where experimental or clinical evidence cannot be replicated by other scientists using the same techniques and methodology? Anthony Clare, the British psychiatrist and broadcaster, has described Freud as a ‘ruthless, devious charlatan’ and concluded that ‘many of the foundation stones of psychoanalysis are phoney’.⁴¹ It is hard not to agree. Given Freud’s ‘pressure’ technique, his ‘persuading’ and ‘guessing’, we are entitled to doubt whether the unconscious exists. Essentially, he made the whole thing up.

This concept, the unconscious, and all that it entails, can be seen as the culmination of a predominantly German, or German-speaking, tradition, a medico-metaphysical constellation of ideas, and this genealogy was to prove crucial. Freud always thought of himself as a scientist, a biologist, an admirer of and someone in the tradition of Copernicus and Darwin. Nothing could be further from the truth, and it is time to bury psychoanalysis as a dead idea, along with phlogiston, the elixirs of alchemy, purgatory and other failed notions that charlatans have found useful down the ages. It is now clear that psychoanalysis does not work as treatment, that many of Freud’s later books, such as Totem and Taboo and his analysis of the ‘sexual imagery’ in Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings, are embarrassingly naïve, using outmoded and frankly erroneous evidence. The whole Freudian enterprise is ramshackle and cranky.

That said, the fact remains that the above paragraphs describe the latest revision. At the time Freud lived, in the late nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth, the unconscious was regarded as real, was taken very seriously indeed, and played a seminal role underpinning the last great general idea to be covered by this book, a transformation that was to have a profound effect on thought, in particular in the arts. This was the idea known as modernism.

In 1886 the painter Vincent van Gogh produced a small picture, The Outskirts of Paris. It is a desolate image. It shows a low horizon, under a grey, forbidding sky. Muddy paths lead left and right – there is no direction in the composition. A broken fence is to be found on one side, a faceless dragoon of some kind in the foreground, a mother and some children further off, a solitary gas lamp stuck in the middle. Along the line of the horizon there is a windmill and some squat, lumpish buildings with rows of identical windows – factories and warehouses. The colours are drab. It could be a scene out of Victor Hugo or Émile Zola.⁴²

The dating of this picture, which shows a banlieue on the edge of the French capital, is important. For what Van Gogh was depicting in this drab way was what the Parisians called ‘the aftermath of Haussmannisation’.⁴³ The world – the French world in particular – had changed out of all proportion since 1789 and the industrial revolution, but Paris had changed more than anywhere and ‘Haussmannisation’ referred to the brutality of this change. At the behest of Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann had, over seventeen years, remade Paris in a way that was unprecedented either there or anywhere else. By 1870 one-fifth of the streets in central Paris were his creation, 350,000 people had been displaced, 2.5 billion francs had been spent, and one in five workers was employed in the building trade. (Note the nineteenth-century passion for statistics.) From now on, the boulevard would be the heart of Paris.⁴⁴

Van Gogh’s 1886 picture recorded the dismal edges of this world but other painters – Manet and the impressionists who followed his lead – were more apt to celebrate the new open spaces and wide streets, the sheer ‘busy-ness’ that the new Paris, the city of light, was the emblem of. Think of Gustave Caillebotte’s Rue de Paris, temps de pluie (1877) or his Le Pont de l’Europe (1876), Monet’s Le Boulevard des Capucines (1873), Renoir’s Les Grands Boulevards (1875), Degas’ Place de la Concorde, Paris (c. 1873) or any number of paintings by Pissarro, showing the great thoroughfares, in spring or autumn, in sunshine, rain and snow.

It was in the cities of the nineteenth century that modernism was born. In the later years, the internal combustion engine and the steam turbine were invented, electricity was finally mastered, the telephone, the typewriter and the tape machine all came into being. The popular press and the cinema were invented. The first trades unions were formed and the workers became organised. By 1900 there were eleven metropolises – including London, Paris, Berlin and New York – which had more than a million inhabitants, unprecedented concentrations of people. The expansion of the cities, together with that of the universities, covered in an earlier chapter, were responsible for what Harold Perkin has called the rise of professional society, the time – from roughly 1880 on – when the likes of doctors, lawyers, school and university teachers, local government officers, architects and scientists began to dominate politics in the democracies, and who viewed expertise as the way forward. In England Perkin shows that the number of such professions at least doubled and in some cases quadrupled between 1880 and 1911. Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert were the first to put into words what Manet and his ‘gang’ (as a critic called them) were trying to capture in paint: the fleeting experiences of the city – short, intense, accidental and arbitrary. The impressionists captured the changing light but also the unusual sights – the new machinery, like the railways, awesome and dreadful at the same time, great cavernous railway stations, offering the promise of travel but choking with soot, a beautiful cityscape truncated by an ugly but necessary bridge, cabaret stars lit unnaturally from footlights underneath, a barmaid seen both from the front and from behind, through the great glittering mirror on the wall. These were visual emblems of ‘newness’ but there was much more to modernism than this. Its interest lies in the fact that it became both a celebration and a condemnation of the modern, and of the world – the world of science, positivism, rationalism – that had produced the great cities, with their vast wealth and new forms of poverty, desolate and degrading.⁴⁵ The cities of modernism were bewildering, full of comings and goings, largely contingent or accidental. Science had denuded this world of meaning (in a religious, spiritual sense) and in such a predicament it became the job of art both to describe this state of affairs, to assess and criticise it, and, if possible, to redeem it. In this way, a climate of opinion formed, in which whatever modernism stood for, it also stood for the opposite. And what was amazing was that so much talent blossomed in such bewildering and paradoxical circumstances. ‘In terms of sheer creativity, the epoch of modernism compares with the impact of the romantic period and even with the renaissance.’⁴⁶ There grew up what Harold Rosenberg called ‘the tradition of the new’. This was the apogee of bourgeois culture and it was in this world, this teeming world, that the concept of the avant-garde was conceived, a consecration of the romantic idea that the artist was ahead of – and usually dead against – the bourgeoisie, a pace-setter when it came to taste and imagination, but whose role was as much sabotage as invention.

If anything united the modernists – the rationalists and realists on the one hand, and the critics of rationality, the apostles of the unconscious, and the cultural pessimists on the other – it was the intensity of their engagement. Modernism was, more than anything, a high point of the arts – painting, literature, music – because cities were an intensifier: by their nature they threw people up against one another – and better communications ensured that all encounters were accelerated.⁴⁷ As a result exchanges became sharper, louder, inevitably more bitter. We take this for granted now but at the time stress increased, and people found that was a creative force too. If modernism was often anti-science, this was because its pessimism was sparked by that same science. The discoveries of Darwin, Maxwell and J. J. Thomson were disconcerting, to say the least, seeming to remove all morality, direction and stability from the world, undermining the very notion of reality.

Of the many writers who struggled to find their way in this bewildering world, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) is as reasonable a starting-point as any, for he clarified a good part of the confusion. Von Hofmannsthal was born into an aristocratic family, and blessed with a father who encouraged – even expected – his son to become an aesthete. Despite this, Hofmannsthal noted the encroachment of science on the old aesthetic culture of Vienna. ‘The nature of our epoch’, he wrote in 1905, ‘is multiplicity and indeterminacy. It can rest only on das Gleitende [the slipping, the sliding].’ He added that ‘what other generations believed to be firm is in fact das Gleitende’.⁴⁸ Could there be a better description about the way the Newtonian world was slipping after Maxwell’s and Planck’s discoveries? (These are covered in the conclusion.) ‘Everything fell into parts,’ Hofmannsthal wrote, ‘the parts again into more parts, and nothing allowed itself to be embraced by concepts.’⁴⁹ Hofmannsthal was disturbed by political developments in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in particular the growth of anti-Semitism. For him, this rise in irrationalism owed some of its force to science-induced changes in the understanding of reality; the new ideas were so disturbing as to promote a large-scale reactionary irrationalism.

In addition to Hofmannsthal, Ibsen, Strindberg and Nietzsche together represent the final northwards movement of European thought, after the centre of gravity had shifted, following the Thirty Years War. These latter three owe quite a lot of their prominence to Georg Brandes, a Danish critic who, in 1883, in his book of that title, identified Men of the Modern Breakthrough.⁵⁰ The ‘modern minds’ that he highlighted included Flaubert, John Stuart Mill, Zola, Tolstoy, Bret Harte and Walt Whitman, but above all Ibsen, Strindberg and Nietzsche. Brandes defined the task of modern literature as the synthesis of naturalism and romanticism – of the outer and inner – and cited these three men as supreme examples.

The Ibsen phenomenon burst in Berlin and then spread to Europe. It began in 1887, with Ghosts, which was banned by the police (a perfect modernist/avant-garde occurrence). Closed performances were given and heavily oversubscribed. (The book, however, sold very well and had to be reprinted.⁵¹) An Ibsen banquet was held where the ‘dawn of a new age’ was declared. This was followed by an ‘Ibsen Week’, which saw The Lady from the Sea, The Wild Duck and A Doll’s House playing simultaneously. When Ghosts was finally allowed on to the open stage, later that year, it provoked a sensation and was an important influence on James Joyce, among others. Franz Servaes had this to say: ‘Some people, as though inwardly shattered, did not regain their calm for days. They rushed about the city, about the Tiergarten . . .’ Ibsen fever raged for two years.⁵² ‘The most important event in the history of modern drama,’ it has been said, ‘was Ibsen’s abandonment of verse after Peer Gynt in order to write prose plays about contemporary problems.’⁵³ Many other authors – Henry James, Chekhov, Shaw, Joyce, Rilke, Brecht and Pirandello among them – owed a great deal to him. The new territory which he made his own included contemporary politics, the growing role of mass communications, changing morals, the ways of the unconscious, all with a subtlety and intensity unmatched by anyone else. It is a tribute to Ibsen that he made modern theatre so much his own that we have difficulty these days seeing what all the fuss was about, so pertinent were his themes: the role of women (A Doll’s House), the generation gap (The Master Builder), the conflict between individual liberty and institutional authority (Rosmersholm), the threat of pollution brought about by commerce that yet provides jobs (An Enemy of the People⁵⁴). But it was the subtlety of his language and the sheer intensity of his characters’ inner lives that attracted many people; critics claimed they could detect ‘a second unspoken reality’ below or behind the surface drama or, as Rilke was to put it, Ibsen’s works together comprised ‘an ever more desperate search for visible correlations of the inwardly seen’.⁵⁵ Ibsen was the first to find a dramatic structure for the ‘second self’ of the modern age, and in doing so illuminated for everyone the central incoherence of man’s predicament ever since Vico. He showed how that predicament could be tragic, comic, or merely banal. Just as Verdi (and Shakespeare of course) had realised that the most profound form of tragedy concerns the non-hero (as Joyce would again show so perfectly in Ulysses, 1922), Ibsen showed that banality, absurdity, meaninglessness – or the threat of them – was the unstable bedrock of modernism. Darwin had done his worst.

Where Ibsen’s strength was his intensity, Strindberg’s was his versatility. He had, in the words of one observer, a ‘mind on horseback’, a multi-faceted genius that, for some people, put him on a par with Leonardo and Goethe.⁵⁶ A novelist, a painter, but above all a playwright like Ibsen, he himself lived the great convulsions of the modern world. In an early book, such as By the Open Sea, completed in June 1890, his theme was, as he put it, ‘the ruin of the individual when he isolates himself’.⁵⁷ Borg, the central character, ‘has been forced to live too rapidly in this era of steam and electricity’, and is turning into a modern human being, deranged and full of ‘bad nerves’. These were the symptoms, Strindberg said, of an increased ‘vitality’ (stress) in life, which was making people increasingly ‘sensitive’ (psychologically ill). It resulted in ‘the creation of a new race, or at least of a new type of human being’.⁵⁸ Later, in the plays that he wrote after his own breakdown in his forties (what he called his ‘Inferno crisis’), he became more and more interested in dreams (To Damascus, A Dream Play), by what one critic called ‘an assertive inner reality, the sense of the illogical’s inner logic and the recognition of the supremacy of those forces (both within and without the individual) which are not wholly under conscious control’. He took a great interest in the new stage technology, to create ‘expressionist’ theatre.⁵⁹ In To Damascus, it is not even clear whether the unnamed characters are characters or else psychological archetypes representing mental or emotional states, including the Unknown, like one of Ellenberger’s Ur-phenomena. As Strindberg himself said, ‘The characters split, double, multiply; they evaporate, crystallise, scatter and converge. But a single consciousness holds dominion over them all; that of the dreamer.’⁶⁰ (This could be Hofmannsthal talking of Das Gleitende.) The play is quite different from By the Open Sea: here Strindberg is saying that science can tell us nothing about faith, that sheer rationality is helpless in the face of the most fundamental mysteries of life. ‘Dreams offered a means for giving form to apparent randomness – mixing, transforming, dissolving.’ And again: ‘Sometimes I think of myself as a medium: everything comes so easily, half unconsciously, with just a little bit of planning and calculation . . . But it doesn’t come to order, and it doesn’t come to please me.’⁶¹ Rilke said much the same about the ‘arrival’ of the Duino Elegies and Picasso spoke of African masks acting as ‘intercessors’ in his art.⁶²

The fact that Strindberg was so many things, and not one thing, his experimentalism (in other words his dissatisfaction with tradition), his turning away from science after his breakdown, his fascination with the irrational – with dreams, the unconscious, the stubbornness of faith in a post-Darwinian world – all this marked him as quintessentially modern, a focus of the many forces pressing in on individuals from all sides. Eugene O’Neill said Strindberg was ‘the precursor of all modernity in our present theater . . .’ He was, as James Fletcher and James McFarlane have said, the unique sensor of the age.⁶³

He and Ibsen were joined in this concern with the intensity of the inner life by the Russians, by Tolstoy, Turgenev, Pushkin, Lermontov and above all Dostoevsky. Some of the most original investigations of what J. W. Burrow has called ‘the elusive self’ were Russian, possibly because Russia was so backward in comparison with other European nations, and writers there had less standing and were more rootless.⁶⁴ Turgenev went so far as to use the term, ‘superfluous man’ (Diary of a Superfluous Man, 1850), superfluous because the protagonists were so tormented by their self-consciousness that they achieved little, ‘dissipating their lives in words and self examination’.⁶⁵ Rudin, in Turgenev’s 1856 novel of that name, Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), Stavrogin in The Devils (1872), Pierre in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) and Levin in Anna Karenina (1877) all attempt to break out of their debilitating self-consciousness via crime, romantic love, religion or revolutionary activity.⁶⁶ But Dostoevsky arguably went furthest, in ‘Notes from Underground’ (1864), where he explores the life – if that is what it is – of a petty official who has come into a small inheritance and is now retired and lives as a recluse. The story is really a discussion of consciousness, of character, selfhood. Although at one stage, the official is described as spiteful, vengeful and malicious, at other times he confesses to the opposite qualities. This inconsistency in personality, in character, is Dostoevsky’s main point. The petty official ends up confessing: ‘The fact is that I have never succeeded in being anything at all.’ He doesn’t have a personality; he has a mask and behind the mask there are only other masks.⁶⁷

The link to William James’ and Oliver Wendell Holmes’ pragmatism is clear. There is no such thing as personality, in the sense of a consistent entity, coming from within. People behave pragmatically in a variety of situations and there is no guarantee of coherence: in fact, if the laws of chance are any guide, behaviour will vary along a standard distribution. Out of that, we draw what lessons about ourselves that we can, but the Russian writers were apt to say that we often make these choices arbitrarily, ‘just in order to have an identity of some kind’.⁶⁸ Even Proust was influenced by this thinking, exploring in his massive masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past, the instability of character over time. People in Proust are not only unpredictable, they assume incompatible characteristics in a disconcerting manner, while others are the complete opposite.⁶⁹

Finally, there was Nietzsche (1844–1900). He is generally thought of as a philosopher, though he himself claimed that psychology occupied pole position among the sciences. ‘All psychology has so far got stuck in moral prejudices and fears; it has not dared to descend into the depths . . . the psychologist who thus “makes a sacrifice” [to explore such depths] . . . will at least be entitled to demand in return that psychology shall be recognised as the queen of the sciences, for whose service and preparation the other sciences exist.’⁷⁰ Walter Kaufmann called Nietzsche ‘the first great (depth) psychologist’ and what he was referring to was Nietzsche’s ability to go beyond a person’s self-description ‘to see hidden motives, to hear what is not said’.⁷¹ Freud also acknowledged a debt to Nietzsche but that debt was far from straightforward. In showing that our feelings and desires are not what we say they are, Freud arrived at the unconscious, whereas for Nietzsche it was instead the ‘will to power’. For Nietzsche, the elusive or second self wasn’t so much hidden as insufficiently recognised. The way to self-fulfilment, self-realisation, was through the will, a process of ‘self-overcoming’ or breaking the limits of the self. For Nietzsche, one didn’t find one’s inner self by looking in; rather one discovered it by giving an outward expression to the inner, by striving, by acknowledging that such motives as pride existed and were nothing to be ashamed of but entirely natural; one discovered oneself when one ‘overcame’ one’s limits.⁷²

Nietzsche thought the scientific cult of objectivity irrelevant, that – as the romantics had said (though for him they were often hypocrites too) – one made one’s life, one created one’s values for oneself – only by acting did one discover one’s self. ‘The self-discipline and constant self-testing which concentrated and intensified life . . . were at the opposite pole from the self-denial and repression which . . . diverting the will to power inwards against the self, breed as in Christianity, self-hatred, guilt, rancour towards the healthy, fulfilled and superior . . . In a world characterised by the flux of consciousness and bare of any metaphysical guarantee of moral meaning, the idea of vocation offered an obvious way of testing, forging, stabilising the self in a social context, through chosen, regulated, disciplined activity, and self-chosen acceptance of its obligations.’⁷³

Underneath it all, modernism may be seen as the aesthetic equivalent of Freud’s unconscious. It too is concerned with the inner state, and with an attempt to resolve the modern incoherence, to marry romanticism with naturalism, to order science, rationalism and democracy while at the same time highlighting their shortcomings and deficiencies. Modernism was an aesthetic attempt to go beyond the surface of things, its non-representationalism is highly self-conscious and intuitive, its works have a high degree of self-signature, yet another climax of individuality. Its many ‘-isms’ – impressionism, post-impressionism, expressionism, fauvism, cubism, futurism, symbolism, imagism, divisionism, cloisonnism, vorticism, Dadaism, surrealism – are a sequence of avant-gardes, understood as revolutionary experiments into future consciousness.⁷⁴ Modernism was also a celebration that the old regimes of culture were gone and buried, and that art, alongside science, was taking us into new concepts of mental and emotional association, its experimental forms – both absurd and meaningless at the same time – redeeming ‘the formless universe of contingency’.⁷⁵ There was too an impatience for change, amid the belief of the Marxists (still a new ‘faith’ at the time) that revolution was inevitable. Nihilism was never far beneath the surface, as people worried about the impermanent nature of truth, as thrown up by the new sciences, and by the very nature of the human self in the new metropolises – more elusive than ever. The doctrine of ‘therapeutic nihilism’, that nothing could be done, about the ills either of the body, or of society, flowered in metropolises like Vienna. The apposite work here is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a fantasy ostensibly about a work of art that functions as a soul, which reveals the ‘real’ self of the main character.

Which is what made The Interpretation of Dreams such an important and timely book and set of theories. Freud (according to non-specialists inhabiting a ‘pre-revisionist world’) had introduced ‘the respectability of clinical proof’ to an area of the mind that was hitherto a morass of jumbled images.⁷⁶ His wider theories brought a coherence to the apparently irrational recesses of the self and dignified them in the name of science. In 1900 this appeared to be the way forward.