On Symbolism and Symbolisation

The Work of Freud, Durkheim and Mauss

Éric Smadja

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815357209
• eBook ISBN: 9781351124829
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In On Symbolism and Symbolisation: The Work of Freud, Durkheim and Mauss, Éric Smadja returns to the end of the 19th century and explores how the concepts of symbolism and symbolisation have been discussed among theorists, and how this discussion has developed and revolutionised the human sciences as we know them today. Uniquely, he connects three key thinkers of psychoanalysis, sociology and ethnology – Freud, Durkheim and Mauss – and discusses how their diverse epistemological paths blend and have consequently shaped our representation of humanity, society and culture in the 20th and 21st centuries.

In this innovative work, Smadja provides a complete biographical journey of these three influential founders, beginning with a dedicated chapter on Freud, followed by Durkheim and then Mauss. He explains each of their revolutionary creations – Freud's psychoanalysis, Durkheim's French school of sociology and Mauss's modern French ethnology – before exploring their ground-breaking, yet differing, conceptions of symbolism and symbolisation, offering a discussion of specific and common aspects detected between these conceptions. In his conclusions, Smadja focusses on France to examine what became of their thoughts after the second half of the 20th century. He inspects the fields of French anthropology, sociology and psychoanalysis: Lévi-Strauss and his structuralist revolution, his colleagues Françoise Héritier and Maurice Godelier, Pierre Bourdieu, who was an ethnologist before becoming a sociologist, and, of course, Lacan.

On Symbolism and Symbolisation: The Work of Freud, Durkheim and Mauss is a pioneering work that will appeal to psychoanalysts in practice and in training, and to academics and students of psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy and the history of ideas. It will also be of interest to anyone wanting to learn more about the life and work of these three major theorists and the connections between the human and social sciences.

1

Freud

Biographical journey

Inspired by Sigmund Freud: Life and Work by Ernest Jones. ¹

Sigmund Freud was born in Freiberg, Moravia, on May 6, 1856.

Family

His father, Jakob Freud, had been born in Tysmenitz, in Galicia, on December 18, 1815 and died on October 23, 1896. He was a wool merchant and married twice, the first time at 17; two sons were born of his first marriage. They were Emmanuel, born in 1832, and Philipp, born in 1836. Widowed at the age of 40, he married Amalia Nathansohn on July 29, 1855 in Vienna. By that time, Jakob Freud was already a grandfather, and his more than 20-year-old son already had a 1-year-old son himself.

Sigmund’s mother came from Brody, a town located northeast of Galicia, near the Russian border. Her parents moved to Vienna when she was still a child. Less than 20 years old at the time of her marriage, at the age of 21, she gave to birth to her first child, Sigmund, followed by five daughters and two sons: Julius, who died at the age of 8 months; Anna, two-and-a-half years younger than Freud; Rosa, Marie, Adolfine, Paula and Alexander, who was ten years younger than Sigmund. They all married except Adolfine, who remained with her mother.

Freiberg (Pribor in Czech) was a peaceful little town located in southeast Moravia. Czech was the language most used, but among themselves Jews spoke German or Yiddish. Economic hard times combined with Czech nationalism, which increasingly rejected Jews, made the Freud family decide to leave Freiberg in October 1859 for Vienna via Leipzig, while Emmanuel, his wife and their two children, as well as his brother Philipp, left for Manchester, England.

Childhood and adolescence

Sigmund was 3 years old when he arrived in Vienna with his family, who settled down in Leopoldstadt, a neighbourhood principally inhabited by Jews. His first years in his new home were difficult. He already missed country pleasures which he would only come to know again thirteen years later.

At the age of 9, Freud took an exam allowing him to enter Sperl Gymnasium a year early. Particularly studious, reading and schoolwork took up most of his time, which enabled him to remain at the head of his class for several years. From the age of 13, he often accompanied his father on his excursions in the area surrounding Vienna. Hiking, notably in the mountains, was his principal sport and source of physical exercise and would remain so for his whole life.

Almost nothing is known of his religious education. His father had very obviously been raised in the Jewish tradition, which he imparted to his son. However, although Sigmund grew up without any religious belief, he felt Jewish all the same and did little to befriend non-Jews. He must have suffered a great deal at school, and even more at university, from the anti-Semitism rampant in Vienna.

At the age of 17, he passed his exams with an honourable mention. He had not come to any decision about the choice of a profession, and his father left him entirely free. It must be pointed out that the only careers open to Viennese Jews were in industry or business, law and medicine. Freud’s intellectual mind easily made him disinclined to pursue the two first professions, while he was not particularly attracted to medicine. He was curious about both nature and its enigmas and humanity and its origins. Moreover, as he was very steeped in the belief in science which peaked during the 1870s and 1880s and was strongly attracted to Darwinian theory, then in vogue, as well as to Goethe’s essay on Nature, he finally decided to enrol in medical school.

Medical studies

He was only 17 years old when he entered the Vienna medical school in the fall of 1873. There he took courses in zoology, botany, anatomy, mineralogy and anatomical dissection, alongside which he attended philosophy courses taught by Franz Brentano, a Catholic priest, who was also the teacher of the father of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl. At the end of his third year of university, in 1876, he was admitted to the Viennese Physiological Institute of the German scientist Ernst Brücke as famulus, that is, as a research assistant. This Institute pursued the ideas of Hermann Helmholtz’ school, in which physico-chemical forces were at work in the organism.

Brücke, who had a particularly strong and lasting influence on Freud, an object of veneration, was assisted by Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow and Sigmund Exner. From the time he arrived, he asked Freud to study the histology, inchoate up to that point, of the nerve cells of the spinal ganglia and spinal cord of a fish called Petromyzon. Through his early work, Freud contributed to opening the way to the theory of neurons, having very early and very clearly detected the physiological and morphological uniqueness of nerve cells. But unlike Waldeyer, who is generally credited with the definitive creation of the theory of neurons (1891), Freud would not carry his research out to its logical conclusion.

The only lectures which really interested him during his university years were those of Meynert on psychiatry. He was granted his medical degree on March 31, 1881, and then continued to work at Brücke’s Institute; he was appointed assistant at that time for fifteen months, until July 1882. However, owing to his serious material difficulties and those of his father, who had helped him financially during all those years, Brücke strongly advised him to abandon his laboratory work in order to practice medicine, all the more so because the laboratory offered no future prospects. It was quite painful for him to give up physiology at that time.

Besides, a happy event occurred to hasten things. Shortly before, Freud had met Martha Bernays from Hamburg, with whom he fell in love. They celebrated their engagement on June 17, 1882.

Then, on July 31, he went to work at Vienna General Hospital. In fact, to earn his living by practicing medicine, he absolutely had to acquire some clinical knowledge, both medical and surgical, at the hospital, which was something he totally lacked. Circumstances therefore obliged him to remain there for three whole years. He worked in particular in the psychiatric ward of Meynert, considered to be the greatest brain anatomist, where he was immediately appointed medical intern. He obtained Meynert’s authorisation to work in his laboratory and spent two years there, until the summer of 1885. Inclined towards microscopy, Freud proposed that Meynert’s assistant Holländer work with him on the in-depth study of the brain of new-born babies. He was already attracted to neurology and asked the opinion of his friend Breuer, whom he met at Brücke’s Institute, about his orientation towards this specialty, of which the latter would approve. He then applied for a post in the ward of nervous illnesses and, in the meantime, in that of syphilitics.

Helped by different colleagues, Freud tried his hand at various kinds of research involving electric treatments, which were very much in favour in neurology at the time, but also engaged in research devoted to cocaine, which he would complete on June 18, 1884. He in fact considered cocaine to be an analgesic and not an anaesthetic, and was on the whole much more interested in its internal use than in any of its external applications. It was the ophthalmologist Koller who discovered its anaesthetic properties and published a paper on this in September 1884.

The year 1885 was a happy one for Freud. Besides his being named Privat Dozent, he obtained a grant enabling him to go to Charcot’s neurology clinic in Paris for nineteen weeks, from October 13, 1885 to February 28, 1886. La Salpétrière hospital was the Mecca of neurologists, and Charcot was at the height of his fame. Freud had obtained a letter of introduction to him from Benedikt, the Viennese hypnotist. What most impressed Freud about Charcot’s teaching were his revolutionary views about hysteria. In this way, he awakened in Freud a strong attraction to psychopathology.

Before his departure, the paediatrician Max Kassowitz offered him a position as the director of a new neurology ward which had just been inaugurated in the first public paediatric institute, a position Freud would occupy for several years.

At the end of February 1886, Freud left Paris to spend some weeks in Berlin so as to acquire deeper knowledge of childhood illnesses from Adolf Baginski.

As a neurologist in private practice

Upon his return, starting in April 1886, Freud began practicing as a neurologist and building up a private clientele principally composed of neurotics. During this same year, after a long engagement, he married Martha on September 13 at the City Hall in Wandsbeck, Germany. She had just turned 25, and he was 30. They would have six children. The first three, Mathilde (October 16, 1887), Jean-Martin (December 7, 1889) and Oliver (February 19, 1891) were born in their first flat. Then, the Freud family moved to 19 Berggasse in August 1891, where the three other children were born one after the other: Ernst (April 6, 1892), Sophie (April 12, 1893) and Anna (December 3, 1895).

The therapeutic question then became urgent. Freud began by applying orthodox electric treatment as described by Erb, but Charcot’s reticence contributed to bringing him to abandon it fairly quickly, although he was also familiar with Breuer’s cathartic method. However, he used electric treatment for several months, accompanied by diverse adjuvants such as baths and massage. But, in December 1887, he turned to hypnotic suggestion and continued to use it for the next eighteen months. This method often met with encouraging success. Charcot used it, but most physicians and psychiatrists thought of it as mystification or even worse. Meynert was fiercely opposed to it, considering it degrading to the patient’s dignity. Nevertheless, Freud found that his hypnoses were not always successful. So, in view of perfecting his technique, in the summer of 1889 he travelled to Nancy to meet with Liebault and Bernheim, representatives of this school opposed to that of the hospital of La Salpètrière.

Although he had little liking for clinical neurology, he was keenly interested in clinical psychopathology, which he sensed would become a way of approaching general psychology, even the best way. His ideas brought him increasingly into conflict with his respectful colleagues and mentors, notably with regard to his serious approach to hysteria, in men in particular, but also with regard to the importance accorded to trauma, his interest in hypnosis and, later, his assessment of the role of sexual factors in neurotics (1895). Within this difficult context, he sought support from colleagues enjoying well-established, recognized positions, like Josef Breuer, who had made significant discoveries and had not hesitated to use hypnosis. So, between 1885 and 1890, and even more so between 1890 and 1895, Freud attempted to reawaken in Breuer that interest which problems of hysteria had inspired in him and to encourage him to make the case of Anna O. known.

I shall return to this at a later point.

During these years, Freud published his first book, On Aphasia (1891), which was dedicated to Breuer and was subtitled A Critical Study – a well-justified qualification, because it essentially contained a radical, revolutionary critique of the nearly unanimously accepted theory of aphasia defended by Wernicke-Lichtheim. And Freud was the first to make similar criticisms. This book was not very successful, despite the later recognition of its conclusions. Between 1891 and 1893, he also published articles on infantile paralysis, which brought him renown in this domain.

Between 1889 and 1892, familiar with the cathartic method, Freud observed that many patients rebelled against hypnosis. That was the first reason that led him to look for methods that did not depend on patients’ aptitude to hypnotism. He would discover others, among them the dissimulation of resistance phenomena and transference, essential characteristics of psychoanalytical theory and practice. That was certainly his main reason for abandoning hypnosis and going from Breuer’s cathartic method to the method of free association, which became the “psychoanalytical” method and evolved little by little between 1892 and 1896, becoming purified and ridding itself more and more of the adjuvants – hypnosis, suggestion, pressure – which had accompanied its beginnings. All that would be left of hypnosis was the couch.

But let us go back to the collaboration with Breuer. Despite some resistance, Breuer accepted, and together they published in January 1893 “The Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena”, which still retains a historical value. Breuer already recognised the importance of transference. Then, in “The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence” (1894), Freud brought up the importance of sexual troubles in their aetiology for the first time.

Studies on Hysteria,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• By way of introduction
• 1 Freud
• 2 Durkheim
• 3 Mauss
• 4 Symbols, symbolism and symbolisation
• By way of conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index