Continuity and Change in Psychoanalysis

Letters from Milan

Luciana Nissim Momigliano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781855750098
• eBook ISBN: 9780429912245
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book reflects certain continuity, dealing with the issue of how to be an analyst—through the different stages by which the author's psychoanalytic identity develops, from candidate to analyst and sometimes on to training analyst—in the continually changing world of our time.

CHAPTER ONE

A spell in Vienna—but was Freud a Freudian?

An investigation into Freud’s technique
between 1920 and 1938,
based on the published testimony of former analysands

… At my age life is not easy, but the spring is beautiful and so is love … Freud

[from a letter to H.D. dated 24 May 1936]

The Vienna to which I wish to invite the reader is not the carefree Vienna of our traditional conception, glorying sensuously in the graceful lightness of Strauss waltzes and delightful old cafés, new wine, and exquisite confectionery; nor is it the ‘Great Vienna’ of the remarkable cultural and artistic flowering of the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: the paradoxical, loathsome, yet beloved Vienna, which has become familiar to us from the nostalgic accounts of its writers—Franz Werfel, Stefan Zweig, and Robert Musil, to mention only the most famous—the Vienna whose agony had begun on a rainy day in July 1914, when, as Joseph Roth tellingly describes for us in Die Kapuzinergruft: ‘the proclamation was already posted at every street corner. It was the proclamation of our old Emperor Franz Joseph, and it read: ‘To my peoples!” …’ What at the time seemed to be no more than an arrogant declaration of war on Serbia was, in fact, the first stroke of the death knell for a world that was coming to an end.

The Vienna that I wish to bring back to life in this chapter is the one of the period between the wars; it was a rough, harsh time, full of fateful and dramatic events, not missed or yearned for by anyone, and therefore unfamiliar and seldom revisited. This is the Vienna that forms the background to my investigations.

In other words, I shall try to set in that historical period my account of Freud’s manner of working in his consulting room in his later years, as revealed by putting together and reading in parallel the small number of descriptions published later in the form of articles or books by some of the people who had been analysed by him between 1920 and 1938. I shall therefore begin with a brief outline—both of the general socio-political situation and of the more specific aspects of Freud himself as a man and of the development of the psychoanalytic movement—by means of brief indications intended mainly as an aid to memory and to link together information that, though already known from various sources, is sometimes partly forgotten.

I shall therefore confine myself to these few notes. After the defeat of the Central Powers, Austria was reduced at Versailles to a small and insignificant country of forests and mountains, dedicated mainly to tourism; it had virtually no agriculture (the fertile land having passed to Hungary) and almost entirely lacked industry (the mines having remained in the region now called Czechoslovakia), while the capital was overgrown and restless.

Vienna at the time was called ‘Red’, because the socialists, with their new values [Dr Otto Bauer, one of the leaders of the Austrian Socialist Party and the brother of Dora, was Foreign Minister for an eight-month period in 1918–19], had taken control of the government of the Republic in the initial post-war period of inflation, hunger, and cold (Freud worked in his study wearing gloves and an overcoat, and he and his family survived on food parcels from relations and friends). However, it was not long before the forces of reaction gained more and more power, sympathizing increasingly with the Nazis, who were to triumph at the time of the Anschluss. Over the years, the social and political struggles occasionally exploded in bloody street battles between the opposing groups (Elias Canetti was among those present at the attack on the Law Courts, burnt down in 1927). Events then followed thick and fast, working up to their ghastly climax: the assassination of Dollfuss, the arrival of the German troops, and the persecution of the Jews, followed by the emigration of Freud and his family and the dispersion of the psychoanalysts, nearly all of whom were of Jewish origin.

In a climate so full of ill omen, Freud and his followers continued their work and developed it, keeping a watchful eye on events but, with the exception of Wilhelm Reich, Bernfeld, and a few others, without taking any active part in them. These were the years during which Freud’s works were being translated everywhere, while the psychoanalytic movement, ‘the cause’, was spreading virtually throughout the world. The ‘Psychological Wednesday Society’, the little group of five or six people, sympathizers of various origins, who had begun in 1902 to meet once a week in Freud’s waiting room apparently at Stekel’s suggestion, gave birth in 1908 to the ‘Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society’. This was followed in 1911 both by the New York Society and by the American Psychoanalytic Society in Baltimore, at the instigation of Jones, who was living in Toronto at the time; the Hungarian Society was formed in 1913. The Swiss Psychoanalytical Society was formed after the war, in 1919, and more and more societies were gradually recognized as belonging to the International Association: the Indian Society in 1922 (at the Berlin Congress), the Russian Society in 1924 (at the Salzburg Congress), and the Italian Society in 1936 at the Marienbad Congress (the Italian Society had been founded at Teramo in 1925 by Levi Bianchini, but it had really got under way in Rome in 1932 under the leadership of Weiss).

Training was also formalized in the structure that is still considered to be the best: personal analysis, supervisions, and theoretical study. There had, in fact, been an animated debate for some time within the Vienna group on the desirability of future analysts themselves regularly undergoing a prior analysis; however, when this proposal was put forward by Nunberg in 1918 at the Budapest Congress, it was rejected, apparently owing to the resolute opposition of Tausk and Rank, who represented the first generation of analysts. The subject was not discussed again officially until the Hamburg Congress of 1926, where general agreement was eventually reached on the compulsory nature of the training analysis. [As we know (Schur, 1972), Jones was the first in Freud’s intimate circle to undergo ‘analysis’, with Ferenczi in 1912. It consisted of one or two hours a day on the couch, followed by interminable discussions which took place in the evenings in various Budapest cafés and extended over several months. All the others, first-generation pupils/followers, were also close friends of Freud, who was still the only analyst; they therefore not only turned to him for his opinion on the treatment of their own patients or for the development of their own research, but even went so far as to correspond with him as a substitute for a personal analysis. Muriel Gardiner (1983), discussing her analysis with Ruth Mack Brunswick, which began in 1926, reports: ‘… Dr. Brunswick sometimes told me that she had talked over some problems of mine with “the Professor”—as she always called Freud—and would quote his opinion. Whether this was good technique or not, I admit it pleased me. Though I cannot generalize about other analysts of that time, some of their patients have told me of similar experiences.’)

In the meantime, however—in 1921—the first psychoanalytical Institute had been founded, in Berlin; the Vienna Institute was established in 1924, followed by the British Institute in 1925, the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1931, and the Institut de Psychanalyse in Paris in 1934.

Meanwhile, despite the ostracism of official—especially medical and academic—circles and the defections and slanders, Freud became a world celebrity, even if he at times seemed to miss the splendid, glorious isolation of the early-days.… It is necessary to re-read some of the things written by members of his circle in order to gain an impression of what the atmosphere was really like at the beginning: for example, Max Graf, the music critic—future father of a boy who was to become famous, Little Hans—who had known Freud in 1900 and had soon become a member of the circle that had included his first followers, says in his Reminiscences (1942):

… There was an atmosphere of the foundation of a religion in that room. Freud himself was its new prophet who made the theretofore prevailing methods of psychological investigation appear superficial. Freud’s pupils—all inspired and convinced—were his apostles. Despite the fact that the contrast among the personalities of this circle was great, at that early period of Freudian investigation all of them were united in their respect for and inspiration with Freud….

Helene Deutsch (1950) describes the situation in similar terms:

… To this circle Freud was not only the great teacher, he was the luminous star on the dark road of a new science, a dominating force that brought order into a milieu of struggle.… All (the pupils) created the same atmosphere about the master, an atmosphere of absolute and infallible authority on his part.… The small circle around Freud grew with the years, and those who entered it later could now lay claim to professional and scientific motives. Furthermore the aims of the group changed with its growth….

Hanns Sachs (who was to move from Vienna to Berlin in 1920 to concern himself with the Institute, where he was to become the first training analyst) says right at the beginning of his book Freud, Master and Friend (1944) that what he was to write about the founder of psychoanalysis, whom he had known intimately from the time of the first steps of the new science until his death, would not be absolutely objective, because he ‘idolized’ Freud, a man who had for him been a part—and indeed the most important and absorbing part—of his own life. He writes:

My first opening of the Traumdeutung [Interpretation of Dreams] was a moment of destiny for me—like meeting the ‘femme fatale’, only with a decidedly more favourable result. Up to that time I had been a young man who was supposedly studying law but not living up to the supposition—a type common enough among the middle class in Vienna at the turn of the century. When I had finished the book, I had found the one thing worthwhile for me to live for….

However, it is important to remember the hostility of the outside world towards this little group of ‘irregulars’; we are familiar with the accusations and lies heaped upon Freud by medical and academic circles, but we may not perhaps realize how things really were. For example, in the article quoted above, Max Graf adds that in those days,

…Viennese Society laughed at him. In those days when one mentioned Freud’s name in a Viennese gathering, everyone would begin to laugh, as if someone had told a joke. Freud was a queer fellow who wrote a book about dreams …more than that, he was the man who saw sex in everything. It was considered bad taste to bring up Freud’s name in the presence of ladies. They would flush when his name was mentioned….

Now, however, the picture has changed completely; according to the account of Canetti, an unbiased witness, in his Die Fackel im Ohr (1980), there was in 1925 not a single high-society or intellectual salon where people were not asking each other about their Oedipus complex or interpreting each other’s slips or parapraxes. According to Clark (1980), Freud himself wrote to his nephew, Samuel, in 1926, around the time of his seventieth birthday:

I have continued to do some work. I give 5–6 hours treatment daily, and my pupils or patients feign not to note my defects. I write a paper from time to time, the complete edition of my works is finished up to one volume. I am considered a celebrity; writers and philosophers who pass through Vienna call on me to have a talk, Jews all over the world boast of my name, pairing me with Einstein. After all, I have no reason to complain and to look with fright at the near end of my life. After a long period of poverty I am earning money without hardship, and I dare say I have provided for my wife….

One is very struck by the almost ingenuous tone in this letter in which Freud tells his English relations how pleased he is with the course of his career and clearly shows his wish for them to be proud of the head of their family; this letter must, however, have been written at a rare moment of peace in the midst of several years of misfortune. He was now 70 years old, and it was three years since his cancer of the jaw had been diagnosed; for this he was to undergo some thirty operations, as well as suffer constant pain; there were also minor interventions for the fitting of his prosthesis, and over the years he was a prey to various other ailments and afflictions. He wrote to Ferenczi in 1928:

I have to devote most of my activity to preserving the quantity of health necessary to carry on my daily life. This involves a hotchpotch of therapeutic measures to compel the various organs to serve their purpose. My heart recently joined in as well, with an extrasystolic arrhythmia and attacks of palpitations….

Freud may have been tired, sometimes exhausted, and full of discomforts; he had difficulty in speaking owing to his prosthesis, and he was deaf in one ear as a result of the first destructive operations; and yet he continued to listen, understand, and investigate with all his former passion. He reduced the number of patients he saw each day from nine or ten around 1920 to four, five, or six at different times. He still had four after his emigration to London, until a few weeks before his death. He needed all his courage to cope with his personal drama, the physical pain, and the profound suffering caused by the many agonizing bereavements of these years (the deaths of his daughter Sophie, of his beloved grandson Heinerle, and of Abraham—a man ‘integer vitae scelerisque purus’), the separation from and then the break with Otto Rank, whom he had always regarded as his likely successor, and then the estrangement from Ferenczi, ‘my Paladin and secret Grand Vizier’. Yet at the same time something truly extraordinary occurred: in a rush of creativity, Freud poured forth books and articles with sensational developments to his theory. In particular, he introduced his structural theory and the concept of the death instinct, revised the one on anxiety, and continued to produce new ideas, giving rise to considerable resistance among the older group, although they were accepted with wonder and enthusiasm by his younger followers (Sterba, 1982).

In the dreadful post-war years, Freud resumed his work with British and American patients who were initially sent by Jones but subsequently came along of their own accord, in ever increasing numbers. From about 1920 onwards it became his custom to take as patients only people who intended to become analysts (Blanton, 1971), and he decided at the same time to avoid analysing his closest collaborators (Helene Deutsch was probably the last to enjoy this privilege). The reasons for this decision are obvious, but its consequences were sometimes dramatic (the case of Tausk is familiar, and there was also Reich, who was plunged into a deep depression, according to his wife, precisely in consequence of Freud’s refusal to take him into analysis).

‘I prefer a student to a neurotic ten times over’, Freud is reported to have said to Wortis at their second meeting. Again, when Kardiner asked him what he thought of himself as an analyst, Freud answered:

I'm glad you ask, because, frankly, I have no great interest in therapeutic problems. I am much too impatient now. I have several handicaps that disqualify me as a great analyst. One of them is that I am too much the father. Second, I am much too much occupied with theoretical problems all the time, so that whenever I get occasion, I am working on my own theoretical problems, rather than paying attention to the therapeutic problems. Third, I have no patience in keeping people for a long time. I tire of them and I want to spread my influence. [Kardiner, 1977]

This turning point in Freud’s clinical work thus belongs in the historic period that I have endeavoured to recall. While the psychoanalytic movement now seemed to be developing and, indeed, flourishing, Freud himself was almost completely taken up by the ‘cause’; yet he was confronted with the personal problem of continuing to work in order to earn a living. His eager desire to assure the future survival of his great discovery made it appear very important to him to have a large number of foreign students in analysis, who, on their return to their own countries, might become faithful champions of his ideas, while at the same time giving him a degree of economic peace of mind as they were able to pay his fees in much appreciated foreign currency.

We, the later generations who have followed Freud, wish to know him more and more intimately; we have a curiosity that is affectionate but is sometimes indiscreet to know how he actually worked with his patients (fuelled by reading his own notes taken at the beginning of the analysis of the Rat Man, which have recently been published); and we have our common problems of identification and de-identification with the founder of psychoanalysis. Today, we may find food for thought on these matters in the books and articles by a number of student-patients who had come to the Mecca of psychoanalysis to receive analysis and training and, on returning to their own countries—mostly across the Atlantic—in turn practised psychoanalysis, fortified by their experiences, to which they have borne witness.

The following books were written by persons who were in analysis with Freud; I have taken most of the information set out in this chapter from them:

Diary of My Analysis with Sigmund Freud (1971), by Smiley Blanton (an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, in analysis from September 1929 to June 1930 and for subsequent brief periods in the summers of 1935, 1937, and 1938).

Confrontations with Myself (1973), by Helene Deutsch (in analysis for about a year from autumn 1918).

Tribute to Freud (1956), by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, American poetess, who had an initial period of analysis from March to the beginning of July 1933 and a second period from the end of October to December 1934).

My Analysis with Freud (1977), by Abram Kardiner (an American psychoanalyst and cultural anthropologist, in analysis for six months from October 1921 to April 1922).

Fragments of an Analysis with Freud (1954), by Joseph Wortis (a young American psychiatrist, in analysis for four months from September/October 1934 to January 1935).

La dernière Bonaparte (1982), by Célia Bertin (biographer of the famous Marie Bonaparte, who spent a large number of periods of varying lengths in analysis between September 1925 and the beginning of 1929).

In addition to these books, I have taken into account the short and not particularly significant testimonies of o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER ONE A spell in Vienna—but was Freud a Freudian?
• CHAPTER TWO The analytic setting: a theme with variations
• CHAPTER THREE The psychoanalyst faced with change
• CHAPTER FOUR The supervisor at work
• CHAPTER FIVE On the candidate’s side
• REFERENCES
• INDEX