Freud and the Imaginative World

Harry Trosman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138872097
• eBook ISBN: 9781134875771
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The current resurgence of interest in the scientific origins of psychoanalysis has overshadowed the artistic and literary models to which Freud had recourse time and again in the development and presentation of his theories. It is this neglected aesthetic wellspring of psychoanalysis to which Harry Trosman calls attention in Freud and the Imaginative World.

Trosman enriches our understanding of psychoanalysis by demonstrating how Freud's cultural and humanistic commitments guided his pursuit of a science of mind. Toward this end, he undertakes a number of challenging tasks: to situate Freud in the formative culture of his time, to adumbrate the human concerns that infromed his work in the natural sciences, and to delineate the multiple "modes of influence" that fostered his creativity. The second part of the book moves from the cultural sources of Freud's creativity to the psychoanalytic contribution to our understanding of art and literature. Here, Trosman focuses on the consumer of art and literature, tracing psychoanalytic perspectives on aesthetic responsiveness from Freud to the present. Trosman's critical review of the da Vinci and Hamlet literature illustrates the limitations as well as the explanatory potential of the two principal genres of applied psychoanalytic work, and leads naturally to the reflective estimation of psychoanalysis and creativity that concludes the work.

Throughout, Trosman is a well-informed and engaging guide, both to the imaginative Freud and to the abundant literature on psychoanalysis and the arts. He documents Freud's continuing indebtedness to the literary models that nourished his theorizing and gave shape to his narrative clinical expositions, even as he takes pains to show how psychoanalysis has, in many ways, outgrown Freud's own reductive explanations of aesthetic phenomena. A skillfully crafted overview, Freud and the Imaginative World is an exemplary introduction to a crucial aspect of the Freudian legacy.

Part I
The Claims of Humanism —
Influence and Identity

1
Freud and the Formative Culture

It may be no exaggeration to claim that psychoanalysis "has detonated throughout the intellectual, social, artistic and ordinary life of our century as no cultural force . . . since Christianity" (Malcolm, 1981, p. 22) —a comparison Freud might well have found apt. If, indeed, psychoanalysis has had such an impact, it must have been seeded in rich soil, whose varied nutriments were remarkably energizing. This was the case. Although psychoanalysis was shaped primarily by one man and is even today best understood through his writings, Freud drew on a cultural background of great breadth and complexity. He managed to integrate a diversity of intellectual influences, and his work bears witness to his antecedents.

Attempts at a retrospective examination have already begun. Choosing to highlight the scientific nature of psychoanalysis, some have focused on how Freud's thought derived from the biological thought of the nineteenth century. Particular emphasis has been placed on what is loosely called "the Helmholtz School," the group that highlighted mechanical forces as expressed through physical and chemico-physiological processes (Bernfeld, 1949a, 1949b; Sulloway, 1979). Other investigations have traced the origins of Freud's thinking in the psychological thought of the day, specifically that of Herbart, Fechner, and Brentano (Dorer, 1932, Merlan, 1945; Jones, 1953; Barclay, 1959a, 1959b; Fancher, 1977). I propose to add components of the cultural and humanist tradition to which Freud was indebted.

Already in his pre-scientific days Freud was exposed to a broad cultural and humanist tradition. His classical education provided a complex substratum upon which universals concerning the human mind could be tested. Through his interest in German literature and particularly the writings of Goethe, he became conversant with the romantic tradition and its regard for the irrational and unconscious. Although intrigued by the romantic concern with the powers of nature, he responded, not philosophically, but with an interest in observation. Vienna, his native city, provided an environment that did not interfere with this interest in observation and even encouraged an openness and acceptance of learning and innovation. On a different note, from his early political aspirations, he gained an attitude of independence and an unwillingness to bow to authority, supplemented by the strength to tolerate prejudice and opposition, as well as a tenacity that he associated with the Jewish tradition.

These influences on Freud occasionally emerge as deliberately intended autobiographical remarks; more often they are revealed in a context other than conscious self-disclosure. Indeed, such unintended autobiographical fragments are more likely to divulge humanist than scientific influences. As he considered the clinical situation and examined his own psychological experineces, the literary tradition came readily to mind. His own work thus provides access to the intermingling of the personally significant and the imaginative world of the arts. The roots of this humanist influence lie early in Freud's life, before he immersed himself in the scientific work of Brücke's physiological laboratory during his early twenties.

The Impact of Romanticism

In the late eighteenth century, finding a universe increasingly emptied of God, men of thought tried to fill the conceptual void. They required some manner of accounting for order and energy, a regulatory agency — preferably impersonalized and inoffensive to empiricism. With the passing of a theological point of view and the coming of romanticism at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Nature was credited with the power previously attributed to a deity.

As an adolescent, Freud showed an early interest in the study of nature. Yet this interest vied with another derivative of the romantic movement — the pull of revolutionary politics. The revolutions of 1848, the subsequent concessions to bourgeois demands, the tottering monarchies and stirring nationalist movements made a political career a promising choice for young men in the early 1870s. Nature and politics — the first a field for learning something of the world, the second a means for changing it — became the twin enthusiasms of the young Freud. In this, we see the impact of romanticism. Indeed, Trilling (1950) goes so far as to state: "Psychoanalysis is one of the culminations of the Romanticist literature of the nineteenth century" (p. 44). Beres (1965), too, points to common elements in the romantic tradition and psychoanalysis.

Romanticism as a current of thought stresses spontaneity and emotional expressiveness. As a stylistic movement in the history of literature and art, it can be viewed as a revolt against the neoclassicism of the late eighteenth century. Increasing concern was shown for ordinary people and everyday speech. Forms became more experimental, previously taboo themes were taken up, Nature and the individual were glorified, and a heightened emphasis was placed on passion and sensibility — as we find in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. A positive value was attached to the irrational; unconscious psychological processes were regarded as routes to higher truths. Man was seen as complex; his nature as conflicted and ambivalent. An appreciation for the value of early childhood experience and the conception of an unconscious, hidden nature were accompanied by a focus on imaginative over logical mental processes.

Historically, the romantic movement is associated with the political upheavals at the end of the eighteenth century. Both the American War of Independence and the French Revolution produced declarations of the rights of man. Concerned with human dignity, literary figures supported movements of national and personal liberation. The exploration of private mental states encouraged an interest in introspection, the dream, the uncanny, and the supernatural. "Feeling is all," stated Goethe. In its more extreme forms, romanticism led to suspicion and depreciation of reason, knowledge, and rationality.

The romantic movement gained impetus from German writers of the early nineteenth century, with whom Freud was quite familiar. The influence of the lyric poetry of Goethe and Heine, the writings of Jean Paul Richter and E. T. A. Hoffmann, of Herder and other folklorists, spread throughout Europe. Their view of Nature is expressed in a theme from Wordsworth (1798, p. 377):

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Although it is not my intent to highlight the romantic influence at the expense of the positivist and rationalist side of Freud's heritage, it can hardly be minimized. Freud encountered this literary and philosophic tradition not only in writings of German origin but generally in the half-dozen languages he read. The influence is clear with Goethe's German translation of Diderot's work, The Nephew of Rameau, which contains an explicit and unambiguous statement of the Oedipus complex. Freud quoted the passage several times: "If the little savage were left to himself, preserving all his foolishness and adding to the small sense of a child in the cradle the violent passions of a man of thirty, he would strangle his father and lie with his mother " (1916-1917, p. 338). Diderot's suggestion of a hidden element in human nature and the dangers in blunting the emotional life are also prominent in the writings of Byron — another author Freud read (Jones, 1953, pp. 55-56; Reik, 1968, p. 648).

The romantic influence even permeated the psychiatric writings of the nineteenth century (Ellenberger, 1970a, pp. 210-215). Indeed, it was in part as a counterromantic reaction against over reliance on poorly conceptualized and vaguely understood subjective states that psychiatry moved into a more organic and objectively descriptive phase in the second half of the century (Zilboorg and Henry, 1941).

In its excesses, romanticism tended toward one-sided repudiation of rationality and reason, a rejection of all artistic norms, a glorification of force, and a revival of pantheism. The latter became identified with Naturphilosophie and the German philosopher Schelling. But most significantly, the romantic movement produced an essential shift in the mentality of the nineteenth century by changing previously held views of nature.

On Nature

What is nature? Nature may be characterized as anything that exists, anything apprehended by the senses but not created by man. In its simplest sense (omitting capitalization), nature refers to landscape and the world of growing things — to mountains and valleys, trees, grass, flora and fauna. Nature (often capitalized) also denotes the creative and controlling force of the universe. Nature is distinct from culture and society, if not opposed to both. It may be benign or indifferent to man, but also cruel and attacking. Occasionally, manmade artifacts such as castles and cathedrals, which have some initial charm or beauty and show the ravages of time, are considered a part of nature. The ruins of Tintern Abbey in the eyes of Wordsworth became transformed into a natural object.

To the romantics, the natural state was simultaneously primordial and the fullest expression of man's being; a growing person's subsequent involvements with the world were anticlimatic, if not corrupting. Civilized man could only strive for the reattainment of original unity with natural forces. The Naturphilosophie promulgated by Schelling supported a belief in the indissoluble unity of natural and spiritual forces. Nature, it was suggested, could not be understood in terms of mechanical or physical concepts. The visible, organic world arose from a common spiritual principle, a world soul, which produced matter, living nature, and the human mind.

At the risk of casting too wide a net, one may note links between the ideas of the romantic philosophers and more abstract theorizing in psychoanalysis. Naturphilosophie affirms a law of polarities, stipulating a dynamic interplay between the antagonistic forces that govern natural phenomena. This dualistic principle finds an echo in the bipartite instinct theory of psychoanalysis.¹ The notion of a primordial state followed by a series of metamorphoses evokes the genetic and developmental approaches. To the romantic philosopher, the unconscious is a true bond linking man with nature and permitting an understanding of the universe through mystical ecstasy or dreams.

A romantic interest in Nature appears early in Freud's development. He stated that his choice of a career as a natural scientist was decided at seventeen, after he heard Goethe's essay on Nature read at a public lecture.²

Nature! [exclaimed Goethe]. We are surrounded by her and locked in her clasp: powerless to leave her, and powerless to come closer to her. Unasked and unwarned she takes us up into the whirl of her dance, and hurries on with us till we are weary and fall from her arms. . .

She has thought, and she ponders unceasingly. . . . The meaning of the whole she keeps to herself, and no one can learn it of her. . . .

She has placed me in this world; she will also lead me out of it. I trust myself to her. She may do with me as she pleases. She will not hate her work. I did not speak of her. No! what is true and what is false, she has spoken it all. Everything is her fault, everything is her merit [1782, pp. 207-213].

The essay is a challenge to uncover the hidden secrets of Nature, to find knowledge through a pantheistic mysticism. Man is powerless and submissive. Nature is pictured as an omnipotent mother — unfathomable, creating and destroying, changing and eternal. No one can comprehend her fully, and love is the only means of even partially understanding her.

Although Freud's initial enthusiasm for science soon suffered because he felt he could not find an arena in which to use his natural gifts (1925a, p. 9), he never lost his enthusiasm for the Goethe essay. More than twenty-five years after first hearing it, he referred to it as unvergleichlich schön (incomparably beautiful) (1900b, p. 443).³ By this time, however, he had begun to see additional meanings in the Nature of the essay. He cited a patient whose mental illness was attributed to the reading of Goethe's essay. The young man, who cried "Nature! Nature!" and later castrated himself, was referring, stated Freud, to the sexual sense of the word.

Freud's references to Nature are extensive. Echoing Goethe, he wrote of the secrecy of Nature. Discovering the sexual etiology of neuroses, he told Fliess: "I have the distinct feeling that I have touched one of the great secrets of Nature" (1887—1902b, p. 83). Elsewhere, he announced that it is one of the "constraints of Nature to which mankind is subject," in that procreation is entangled with the satisfaction of the sexual need (1898, p. 277). Leonardo da Vinci's interest in Nature was viewed as a sublimation for the kindly mother who nourished him (1910b, pp. 122-123). In another context, Nature was credited with keeping love fresh and guarding it against hate (1915, p. 299). Further, Freud combined Nature with the power of Eros, the power to create and multiply life. Our bodily organism thus becomes a minute part of the superior power of Nature. "Oh, inch of nature," he quoted without recalling the source, in reference to the helpless infant at birth (1930a, pp. 86, 91, 121; Reik, 1968, p. 648).

But Nature, for Freud, was also cruel and terrorizing. The task of civilization was to defend us against Nature, which brought earthquakes, floods, storm, diseases, and death. Man first responded to the inexorable power of Nature by humanizing what he had little control over. When he found, however, that the natural forces conformed to independent and autonomous law, these forces lost their human traits. They were the Moira (Fates) above the gods (1927, pp. 15-19).

Perhaps one of the most revealing references to Nature occurs in a repeated misquotation. Commenting on the advisability of not deceiving patients about their terminal illnesses, Freud stated, "Shakespeare says: 'Thou owest Nature a death'" (1887— 1902b, p. 276), counseling submission to the inevitable. The quotation, a remark of Prince Hal's to Falstaff from Henry IV, Part I, actually reads: "Thou owest God a death." Freud made the same error on two subseqent occasions, once in association to a dream, later referring to the belief that death is the necessary outcome of life (1900a, p. 205; 1915, p. 289). He thus partially impersonalized and deanimated those forces to which man must submit, deprived the powers of their masculine identity, and removed the conception from a religious framework.

The idea of God was too close to a conception of a regulatory agency — tied in Freud's mind to obedience to authority and adherence to the will of an arbitrary father. A deity was not observable and thus not subject to examination and study. Nature, on the other hand, was eminently observable, feminine, and thus less threatening. In addition, there was the hope that an immersion in the world of Nature would increase man's storehouse of truth.

Thoughts concerning Nature accounted for the immutable in the human condition. Nature might be a source of endless fascination, a font of wisdom and creativity; still, man could do little but submit to its inexorable laws or fend off its destructive effects. Politics, on the other hand, dealt more with the man-made and so held out the promise, at least during Freud's adolescence, of bringing about incisive changes. As a boy of six, Freud recalled, his mother rubbed her hands together to show him we are made of earth. When he saw the blackish scales of epidermis, he acquiesced in the belief of our inevitable return to Nature (1900a, p. 205). But as a boy of eleven or twelve, he shared in the hope of social reform promised by the first bourgeois ministry formed after the ratification of the new Austrian constitution in 1867. Indeed, until a few months before entering the university in 1873, he aspired to a political career, and even after matriculation he maintained his political interests.

On Politics

In the latter half of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Dedication
• Preface
• Part I The Claims of Humanism — Influence and Identity
• Part II Psychoanalysis and the Arts
• Conclusion
• References
• Index