Sigmund Freud's Discovery of Psychoanalysis

Conquistador and thinker

Paul Schimmel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134596003
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Sigmund Freud's discovery of psychoanalysis explores links between Freud's development of his thinking and theory and his personal emotional journey. It follows his early career as a medical student, researcher and neurologist, and then as a psychotherapist, to focus on the critical period 1895-1900. During these years Freud submitted himself to the process that has become known as his 'self-analysis', and developed the core of his psychoanalytic theory. Drawing on Freud's letters to his friend and confidant Wilhelm Fliess, and on selected psychoanalytic writings in particular his 'dream of Irma's injection', Paul Schimmel formulates psychoanalytic dimensions to the biographical 'facts' of Freud's life.

In 1900 Freud wrote that he was 'not a thinker' but 'a conquistador'. In reality he was both, and was engaged in a lifelong emotional struggle to bring these contradictory sides of his personality into relationship. His psychoanalytic discoveries are conceptualized in the context of his need to achieve integration within his psyche, and in particular to forge a more creative collaboration between 'conquistador' and 'thinker'.

Sigmund Freud's discovery of psychoanalysis will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, academics and teachers of psychoanalysis, and to all serious students of the mind.

1

Conquistador and Scientist

I was moved, rather, by a sort of curiosity, which was, however, directed more towards human concerns than towards natural objects.

(Freud 1925b: 8)

Sigmund Freud was born to Jewish parents in 1856, in the Moravian town of Freiberg, now part of the Czech Republic. When he was 3 years of age the family moved from his birthplace and soon settled in Vienna, where Freud would grow up, and live almost all of his life. Whatever the constellation of contributing factors, it was clear from early on that the young Freud had special abilities. His parents appear to have had belief, and a sense of confidence, in those abilities. As the oldest and obviously gifted child, it seems he was accorded a privileged position in the family and freedom to pursue his intellectual interests. Biographer Peter Gay writes, ‘Ambitious, outwardly self-assured, brilliant in school and voracious in his reading, the adolescent Freud had every reason to believe he had a distinguished career before him’ (Gay 1988: 22).

Freud entered medical school in Vienna in 1873, aged 17; when he published The interpretation of dreams at the turn of the century he was 43. In the space of 26 years, he had gone from medical student to interpreter and theorist of dreams. In The interpretation of dreams Freud recalled that it had been his intention to study law right up to the time that he entered the University, and that he had changed his mind only at the last moment (Freud 1900: 193). Instead he chose the path of medicine and science. Later, in his Autobiographical study, he would write:

Neither at that time, nor indeed in my later life, did I feel any particular predilection for the career of a doctor. I was moved, rather, by a sort of curiosity, which was, however, directed more towards human concerns than towards natural objects.

(Freud 1925b: 8)

Freud appeared to have chosen medicine freely. His knowledge of Darwin was one powerful source of inspiration and influence. At the time, Darwin’s revolutionary theories remained topical and strongly attracted Freud; such thinking epitomized the potential for science to reshape man’s conception of the world (Freud 1925b: 8). The person of Darwin represented the type of the powerful intellectual conqueror, or ‘conquistador’, from which Freud would take inspiration, and from the beginning of Freud’s intellectual career a pattern of identification with powerful male figures was established.

In his Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis, Freud would write that Darwin had delivered one of science’s ‘two major blows’ to the ‘naïve self-love of men’ (Freud 1917b: 284). The first blow, associated with the figure of Copernicus, was to show that the earth was not the centre of the universe. Darwin’s second blow was to demonstrate that human beings were not intrinsically different from, and superior to, the other animals. Freud considered he was in the process of delivering the knock-out blow himself:

human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind.

(Freud 1917b: 284)

Freud would later take evident satisfaction in placing himself in the tradition of such iconoclastic thinkers; those who have ‘disturbed the sleep of the world’ (Freud 1914b: 21).

The intellectual conquerors that Freud came to admire as a young man would seem to have been the inheritors of the boy’s passion for his military heroes. Ernest Jones, Freud’s ‘official’ biographer, commented that, as a boy Freud passed through an ‘unmistakable militaristic phase’ (Jones 1953: 25). Jones documents Freud’s childhood idealization of heroes such as Napoleon and Hannibal. Hannibal’s father Hamilcar had made his son swear vengeance on the Romans, and Jones interprets Freud’s idealization and identification as an expression of his ambivalence towards his own father, consequent upon Freud’s perception of his father’s lack of courage in defence of their Jewish identity. As will be considered in Chapter 7, it would take the experience of the First World War for Freud to come to a less idealized position in relation to the military ‘solution’.

At the time of entering medical school Freud recognized that his vocation remained undefined. He sought both a depth and a breadth of learning, as evidenced by his eclectic interests as a student. He was more than willing to gather disparate elements of knowledge, having some confidence that this would contribute to discovering a future path, but without a clear understanding of how. In a letter to his friend Eduard Silberstein, he announced that he would devote his first year at university ‘to purely humanistic studies, which have nothing to do with my later field but which will not be unprofit-able for all that’ (Boehlich 1990: 24).

Freud spent three years longer than requisite in obtaining his medical degree. Gay comments that Freud’s ‘sweeping curiosity and his preoccupation with research kept him from obtaining his medical degree in the usual five years’ (Gay 1988: 28). Jones notes that, not content with the courses in zoology for medical students, from his second year Freud took courses in zoology proper, requiring fifteen hours’ attendance a week. He similarly took two physics classes, one more than required in the medical curriculum, and, from his second year, philosophy courses with Franz Brentano, also supplementary to the curriculum (Jones 1953: 41). A letter to Silberstein recorded that his weekly schedule for the 1875 summer semester included five hours of seminars or lectures with Brentano (Boehlich 1990: 101).

Medicine, with its promise of great discoveries to be made, offered a place for both scientist and conquistador. A respected medical man, wrote Freud, could ‘do wonders in alleviating physical ills, if only he were enough of an explorer to strike out on new therapeutic paths’ (Boehlich 1990: 127). However, from the beginning, Freud’s ‘sweeping curiosity’ and his willingness to take up ‘humanistic studies’ point to the presence within him of a latent ‘thinker’ searching, not so much for success in scientific research and conquering illness, but for understanding. The classes with Brentano are of particular significance because it seems clear, as Neville Symington has suggested (Symington 2004), that Freud was much influenced by Brentano’s thinking, although it was an influence that would remain latent for many years.

Brentano was a gifted and highly influential philosopher, who has been called the ‘grandfather of phenomenology’ by Gilbert Ryle (Honderich 1995: 104). Of Freud’s university teachers Brentano is the only one who featured regularly in his letters to his friend Silberstein. Brentano, wrote Freud, was a,

remarkable man (a believer, a teleologist (!) and a Darwinian and a damned clever fellow, a genius in fact), who is, in many respects, an ideal human being. For now, just the news that under Brentano’s fruitful influence I have arrived at the decision to take my Ph.D. in philosophy and zoology.

(Boehlich 1990: 95)

It was an intention Freud did not follow through, but it seems likely that Brentano’s non-reductionist and non-materialist focus on psychology and the phenomenology of consciousness had a considerable impact on Freud’s receptive mind. Brentano was concerned to establish a conceptual framework for an empirical approach to the phenomena of the mind, of equivalent validity to the empirical approach to the investigation of phenomena in the natural sciences. Brentano also insisted that knowledge of inner mental phenomena was direct, immediate and indubitable, and therefore more reliable than our necessarily indirect knowledge of the external material world (Brentano 1973). Brentano’s empiricism combined with his assigning a ‘priority’ to mental phenomena posed a considerable challenge for the young Freud.

Freud was always occupied with the question of the relative natures of the phenomena of the mind on the one hand, and the material phenomena of the nervous system on the other. His early career would reflect his avowed ‘materialist’ wish to be able to formulate an explanation of the former in terms of the latter. As will be suggested in Chapter 4, Freud’s development would gradually take him from his initial ‘materialist’ position to one much closer to that of Brentano’s thinking. Although Brentano’s influence was never acknowledged by Freud later in his career, it is clear that the young Freud had assimilated Brentano’s philosophical analysis, and learned much from him: ‘So sharp a dialectician requires one to hone one’s own wits on his before challenging him’ (Boehlich 1990: 107).

On the other hand, Freud demonstrated his dogged capacity for persistence in research of a biological and material kind early. In 1876, after having been two and a half years at the university, a research project was suggested to him by Professor Carl Claus, head of the institute of comparative anatomy (Jones 1953: 41). Over the centuries, all efforts to identify the testes of the male eel had failed, until, a few years earlier, a researcher had discovered structures suggestive of the male gonads. The findings remained inconclusive and in need of confirmation, and Freud’s task would be to dissect eels in search of the testes of the male. To do so he made two trips to Trieste, altogether dissecting some 400 eels, and found this suggestive anatomical structure in many of them. The paper he wrote as a result was the first of a series confirming the original findings. It was a trial run in scientific conquest, and Freud’s driving need to make an original discovery was beginning to make itself felt. We might also wonder about another factor contributing to Freud’s commitment to this particular project: perhaps the search for, and discovery of, the hidden testes, represented Freud’s soon to be fulfilled need to rediscover his own highly ‘sublimated’ sexuality.

Having returned to Vienna, and at the end of his third year of medicine, aged 20, Freud joined the physiology laboratory of Ernst Brücke, where he was accepted as a famulus, a sort of research scholar. In Brücke’s laboratory he found the sense of direction and focus that he had begun to feel he was lacking. He would later write of the sense of rest and satisfaction he experienced there, and of encountering men ‘whom I could respect and take as my models: the great Brücke himself, and his assistants, Sigmund Exner and Ernst Fleischl von Marxow’ (Freud 1925b: 9). Brücke was to become not just a role model as Darwin had been, but a living mentor and paternal figure, who exercised an enormous influence upon Freud. He was the driving force of the laboratory. In Siegfried Bernfeld’s description, he was small of stature, but ‘with a large and impressive head, a balanced gait, and quiet, tightly controlled movements; small lipped, with the famous “terrifying blue eyes”, rather shy, but stern and exceedingly silent’ (Bernfeld 1944: 350). The reference to Brücke’s ‘terrifying blue eyes’ is taken from Freud’s self-analysis of his ‘Non vixit’ dream. Freud’s association to the content of the dream was an occasion when he was reprimanded by Brücke for lateness:

It came to Brücke’s ears that I sometimes reached the students’ laboratory late. One morning he turned up punctually at the hour of opening and awaited my arrival. His words were brief and to the point. But it was not they that mattered. What over-whelmed me were the terrible blue eyes with which he looked at me and by which I was reduced to nothing.

(Freud 1900: 422)

By Bernfeld’s account, Brücke could be intimidating in the extreme. He was generally regarded as a cold, rational man, and was ‘one of the most dreaded of examiners’. A certain ‘violent force against himself and his emotions’ was revealed in his reaction to the death of his son in 1873: ‘He forbade his family and friends to mention his son’s name, put all pictures of him out of sight, and worked even harder than before.’ At the same time: ‘To the student who proved his ability he was like a most benevolent father’ (Bernfeld 1944: 351).

A benevolent mentor, but emotionally constrained, Brücke was both a gifted scientist and a quiet conquistador. His exacting and scrupulous personality was, as Jones has commented, a good match for ‘the uncompromising idealistic and almost ascetic outlook’ that characterized the school of Helmholtz (Jones 1953: 48). The ‘school of Helmholtz’ had begun as a collaboration between Brücke and Emil Du Bois-Reymond, who were subsequently joined by Hermann Helmholtz and Carl Ludwig. These four eminent scientists were determined to do away with the then influential notions of vitalism; the belief in the existence of mysterious and obscure animating forces within the natural world. Symington describes vitalism as ‘the belief that living organisms are animated by a soul, or at least a special principle not reducible to physics and chemistry’ (Symington 1986: 55). These four men would become crusaders for a cause; the belief that the common physical and chemical forces were sufficient to explain the full range of natural phenomena, although Helmholtz would later become something of a defector to the cause (Makari 2008: 68).

It was a positivist materialist philosophy, designed to conquer metaphysical speculation and to place matter over mind; it had no time for the subtleties of a thinker like Brentano. In 1842 Du Bois-Reymond wrote:

Brücke and I pledged a solemn oath to put in power this truth: No other forces than the common physical chemical ones are active within the organism. In those cases which cannot at the time be explained by these forces one has either to find the specific way or form of their action by means of the physical mathematical method, or to assume new forces equal in dignity to the chemical-physical forces inherent in matter, reducible to the force of attraction and repulsion.

(quoted in Bernfeld 1944: 348)

The school of Helmholtz was a child of Enlightenment rationalism, but the intellectual culture in which the young Freud found himself was a complex one. Germany, and also Austria, had undergone a profound cultural change; Romanticism had swept through the culture of the Enlightenment, but now the ‘Romantic’ influence was in decline, and a new mood of scientific rationalism in ascendance. The educated person was confronted on the one hand with the perspective of scientific rationalism and the belief in progress embodied by the traditional Enlightenment views, and on the other with the powerful, but less easily articulated, views of German Romanticism. A unitary scientific and cultural vision could no longer be assumed (Blanning 2010). Reason and the head easily became pitted against feeling and the heart. In philosophy, the Enlightenment seemed to have widened the division of body and mind into a conceptual chasm, which the Romantics sought not so much to bridge as to transcend. This was the cultural and intellectual climate that was Freud’s inheritance.

Symington has identified both the scientist and the Romantic in Freud. He has delineated the ‘Romantic’ Freud in terms of his valuation of the individual and ‘self’ above the collective, in his investment in the concept of the unconscious, and his belief in the creative imagination (Symington 1986: 72). Freud’s genius, suggests Symington, ‘was due to his capacity to integrate two traditions, the Romantic and the scientific, which had previously been antagonistic to each other’ (Symington 1986: 83). From a cultural perspective, Freud’s psychoanalysis can be viewed as an attempt to reconcile scientific and Romantic positions; an attempt to synthesize the Enlightenment thesis of objectivity and analysis with the Romantic antithesis, as formulated by Hegel, of ‘absolute inwardness’ (Blanning 2010: 21). From a personal and ‘psycho-analytic’ perspective, Freud’s discovery of psychoanalysis can also be understood, as Symington suggests, as reflecting Freud’s own need to reconcile such differing positions within himself.

The idea of the conquering hero is linked to the ‘Romantic’ in Freud, but Freud’s description of himself as ‘conquistador’ adds a further dimension, capturing the force and vigour of an inner drive, potentially aggressive and not completely subsumed in the division scientific/Romantic. From the beginning of his medical career Freud was also engaged in a struggle to integrate this powerful, but in essence unknown, inner force, or forces, the strength of which would seem to link to the centrality of his later formulation, adapted from Groddeck, of the ‘it’ or id within the psyche (Freud 1923b: 23).

When Freud joined Brücke’s laboratory the school of Helmholtz had, in the 35 years since Du Bois-Reymond and Brücke’s ‘oath’, established itself as preeminent, and become a dominating force upon the thinking of German physiologists and medical teachers (Bernfeld 1944: 349). Brücke himself seemed to have represented an embodiment of Enlightenment rationalism and materialism, and while Freud remained in Brücke’s laboratory this side of his own mind would be in ascendance. It was as if Freud had found a master to emulate, and goals towards which to channel his drive and determination. Brücke initially assigned Freud the task of neuroanatomical and histological research into the spinal cord of one of the ‘lowest of the fishes’, the lamprey (Freud 1925b: 10). As an outcome of his research projects in Brücke’s laboratory, Freud would publish two papers on the neuroanatomy of the lamprey, a study on the nerve cells of the crayfish, and a paper outlining a new method for the preparation of tissues for microscopic examination (Sulloway 1979: 15).

Although Freud was ambitious and a promising candidate, there was little prospect of promotion for him in the hierarchy of the laboratory, as the two available ‘assistantship’ posts were already occupied by relatively young men, Sigmund Exner and Ernst Fleischl von Marxow. Sulloway has remarked, ‘Freud seems to have done his best to overlook the limited future of his own situation in Brücke’s laboratory’ (Sulloway 1979: 15). One reason was his lack of enthusiasm for the practice of clinical medicine. He would later write that at the time, apart from psychiatry, he had never envisaged his vocation might lie in any of the other specialties of medicine (Freud 1925b: 10).

In 1881 Freud eventually sat and passed his final exams. In Jones’s assessment, gaining his medical qualification was not regarded by Freud as a turning point, nor indeed an event of great importance (Jones 1953: 63). Fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• May 6th, 1895
• Introduction
• 1. Conquistador and scientist
• 2. Freud’s hypnotic trance
• 3. Through suggestion to free association
• 4. Freud’s brain and Freud’s mind
• 5. The dream of Irma’s injection
• 6. Seduction or self-analysis
• 7. From melancholia to mourning
• Conclusion
• Crossing the Alps
• Freud Bibliography
• General Bibliography
• Index