Freud and the Émigré

Austrian Émigrés, Exiles and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis in Britain, 1930s–1970s

Elana Shapira, Daniela Finzi, Elana Shapira, Daniela Finzi

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030517861
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030517878
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book reconsiders standard narratives regarding Austrian émigrés and exiles to Britain by addressing the seminal role of Sigmund Freud and his writings, and the critical part played by his contemporaries, in the construction of a method promoting humanized relations between individual and society and subjectivity and culture. This anthology presents groundbreaking examples of the manners in which well-known personalities including psychoanalysts Anna Freud and Ernst Kris, sociologist Marie Jahoda, authors Stefan Zweig and Hilde Spiel, film director Berthold Viertel, architect Ernst Freud, and artist Oskar Kokoschka, achieved a greater impact, and contributed to the broadening of British and global cultures, through constructing a psychologically effective language and activating their émigré networks. They advanced a visionary Viennese tradition through political and social engagements and through promoting humanistic perspectives in their scientific, educational and artistic works.

© The Author(s) 2020

E. Shapira, D. Finzi (eds.)Freud and the Émigréhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51787-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Austrian Émigrés and Exiles and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis in Britain

Elana Shapira¹

(1)

University of Applied Arts Vienna, Vienna, Austria

Elana Shapira

Email: [email protected]

Prologue: “For Me Emigration Is Out of the Question”¹

“We Do Not Stand Here Empty Handed”²²

A Humanizing Method: How Viennese Psychoanalysis Produced a Sympathetic Language of Inclusion, Reclaimed Identity, and Inter-Cultural Engagement

Émigré Narratives, Networks, and Cultural Productions

Austrian Loss and British Gain: Psychoanalysis and British Cultural Renewal

Freud and the Émigré

End Abstract

Prologue: “For Me Emigration Is Out of the Question”¹

In a memorandum of Sigmund Freud written in November 1918, at the end of the First World War, the father of psychoanalysis reconsidered his sense of belonging to Austria: “Austria-Hungary is no more. I do not want to live anywhere else. For me emigration is out of the question. I shall live on with the torso and imagine that it is the whole.”² This allusion to the segmented body is an apt metaphor for how Austrian émigrés and exiles who arrived in Britain during the rise of Fascism in Austria and after the annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany in March 1938 perhaps saw themselves within a diaspora.³ Furthermore, it is possible that exiles referred to Freud’s writings as part of the remaining “torso” of their Austrian identity, seeing his contributions as a conduit for imagining the “whole” of a Viennese/Austrian identification that had been imperiled. As early as 1934, a year after the rise of Germany’s Nazi totalitarian regime that was followed by the systematic persecution of Jewish citizens and regime opponents, and around the time the Fascist conservative party was strengthening its totalitarian rule in Austria, Freud noted in a letter to German author Arnold Zweig that he was aware he might need to leave Vienna.⁴ More than a year later, in November 1935, gravely aware of the mounting German Nazi threat against Jews, Freud still had not come to terms with the emigration option. Yet in a letter to the dentist and patron of Jewish Moravian culture, Siegfried Fehl, he noted that in his family history the experience of moving from one place to another in Austro-Hungary repeated itself at least twice.⁵

Although thousands of Jewish refugees from Galicia and Bukovina had arrived in Vienna and received an unfavorable reception during and at the end of the First World War, and although Freud would have witnessed the rise of the National-Socialist party both in Germany and to a certain extent also in Austria since the end of the 1920s, he avoided theorizing the experience of emigration and its effects on the human psyche. This despite that the consideration of leaving Austria was always there for Freud, although as a rather romantic option. In a letter from August 1882, at the beginning of his career, he wrote to his fiancée Martha, “I am aching for independence, so as to follow my wishes. The thought of England surges up before me, with its sober industriousness, its generous devotion to the public will, […].” He concludes: “Must we stay here, Martha? If possible let us seek a home where human worth is more respected.”⁶ There was a close cultural affinity between intellectual Viennese Jews and the British culture and Freud’s romantic longing to find a home in Britain could be said to have developed in parallel to the broader cultural production of Vienna’s avant-garde and its Jewish perspective in the early 1900s.⁷ During this same period, however, while the psychoanalytic movement was taking off in Vienna, it is difficult to ascertain how Freud was registering “cultural belonging” in his city. There is some evidence that Freud was attentive to the possibility that he could be forced to leave at any minute in the face of persecution even while he resisted the term “emigrant.” His wife Martha Freud documents that Freud’s awareness of the threat of persecution and confiscation of property had influenced his choice not to possess land in Austria:

We Jews, we Jews, should have no possesion! [Sigmund] was therefore never going to buy land in his homeland, although he was recommended to, often. He refused with the words: A Jew has no possession, a Jew shall always carry packed suitcases.⁸

The possibility of “relocation(s)” became integral to Freud’s European identification, however, he framed his family’s migration narrative(s) and the threat of one day being forced to leave Austria within a biblical construct, where the Jew was “always” to be displaced in Europe. In fact, even as he demurred from engaging the idea of “emigration,” Freud referred to his experiences of European cities as different diaspora in plural. Freud’s (Western) Jewish self-identification within the context of Europe is a critical part of his writings.⁹ One of his well-known texts is an analysis of the statue of Moses by the Italian Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo (1914) wherein his identification with Moses forms part of the critical approach. He also imbued Jewish diasporic history with nostalgia. Above the treatment couch in his office, Freud kept a print of a nineteenth-century watercolor drawing by Ernst Körner of the Abu Simbel Temple in Egypt; he would make sure to bring it with him after his forced emigration to London in June 1938. Egypt was integral to the diaspora narrative, and he would return to its role in Jewish history in an attempt to confront antisemitism and contend with forced emigration in the years from 1934 to 1938.

Nostalgia played a significant part in Freud’s setting up his London office as a site of multiple converging tendencies within the life and experiences of the exile. Freud recreated his famous former studio after emigrating to London in June, 1938, with the help of his son, the architect Ernst Freud, and his daughter, Anna Freud. For Freud the office conveyed nostalgia while reasserting a Viennese European intellectual life. It can be associated with Freud’s confrontation of the “anxious projection” that emerged in the face of forced emigration. For Austrian émigrés his studio may have offered something to hold onto from their past lives, serving as a material antidote for other Viennese émigrés’ disorientation particularly. Indeed, the house in Maresfield Gardens 20 north London, purchased soon after the Freud family’s arrival, was in a neighborhood associated with the psychoanalytic scene (Fig. 1.1).¹⁰ Freud turned his former studio into an emblem and “display” of a cultural life that had faced extinction. Freud is a unique example of an immigrant who was able to reconstruct a semblance of a former cultural, intellectual, and historical richness in his new cultural context.

Fig. 1.1

Sigmund Freud’s study at 20 Maresfield Gardens © Freud Museum London

We can apply this exilic expression, his imagined continuation of a “Viennese life” in London, to how other émigrés adapted to change. Furthermore, the contention here is that psychoanalysis itself as a mode of expression, particularly as attached to Freud and his application of it, was a way for Viennese émigrés to reclaim their identity and voice.

The impact of Austrian émigrés’ and exiles’ science and artworks on the larger public through radio broadcasting, through teaching, as well as through participation in exhibitions has been acknowledged in recent years both in Britain and Austria.¹¹ The anthology Freud and the Émigré develops different aspects introduced thirty years ago in a groundbreaking anthology. In the book, Freud in Exile (1988), German studies scholars Edward Timms and Naomi Segal addressed critical aspe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Austrian Émigrés and Exiles and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis in Britain
• 2. The Promised Land: Freud’s Dream of England
• 3. Ernst L. Freud, Domestic Architect: Zuhause in Berlin, at Home in London
• 4. Intellectual Hero, Most Beloved Master: Stefan Zweig and Sigmund Freud in British Exile
• 5. Émigrés, Exiles and Strangers: Berthold Viertel and 1930s Cinema in Britain
• 6. “A Sea Ringed with Visions”—Oskar Kokoschka’s Reception of Sigmund Freud’s Theories in His London Years
• 7. Anna Freud Shaping Child Education and Promoting “Democratic Citizenship” in Britain
• 8. Whose/Which “Freud”? Social Context and Discourse Analysis of the “Controversial Discussions”
• 9. War Work and Integrated Analysis: Ernst Kris and E.H. Gombrich in Exile
• 10. Marie Jahoda Deconstructing Freud
• 11. Hilde Spiel’s Freud: Jews, Exile, and a Viennese Legacy
• Back Matter