Sigmund Freud

Michael Jacobs

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780761941101, 9780761941095
• eBook ISBN: 9781446230534
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Praise for the First Edition:

`This is the Second Edition of a book first published in 1992 as part of the Key Figures in Counselling and Psychotherapy series edited by Windy Dryden. It has proved a successful introduction to the life and work of Sigmund Freud: in this present edition Michael Jacobs takes the opportunity of the new translation of Freud now appearing to offer more suggestions about reading, particularly the papers of technique available through Virago?s 2001 publication of the Standard Edition? - The Journal of Analytical Psychology

In refreshing contrast to most other books on Sigmund Freud, this is a highly accessible account of his life and ideas, which focuses on the relevance of Freud?s work for contemporary approaches to counselling and psychotherapy.

The book provides an overview which is based firmly on Freud?s own writings, but which goes far beyond a recapitulation of the existing literature, to offer fresh insights and some surprises, both about Freud the man and his theories. Written by bestselling author, Michael Jacobs and now fully updated for its Second Edition, Sigmund Freud presents and responds to the criticisms that Freud?s work attracted, and charts his continuing influence in the 21st century.

This is highly recommended reading for those training in counselling and psychotherapy as well as those studying Freud in other contexts.

Michael Jacobs is a retired lecturer in Counselling Studies and bestselling author whose publications include (in the same series), D W Winicott (SAGE, 1995) and Psychodynamic Counselling in Action, Second Edition (SAGE, 1999).

1

The Life of Sigmund Freud

For every day they die among us, those who were doing us some good, who knew it was never enough but hoped to improve a little by living.

W.H. Auden: ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’

An Independent Existence?

‘Get it out, produce it, make something of it – outside you, that is; give it an existence independently of you.’ Such was Freud’s advice to Joan Riviere, one of his English translators, and at one time his analysand (Riviere, 1958: 146). He was referring to a psychoanalytic explanation which she had shared with him. In saying this, Riviere felt that he was referring to his own approach to thinking, to put it on paper or, again in his words, to ‘get it out of your system’.

Freud certainly got much out of his system, in more senses than one, since it can fairly be claimed, by supporter or critic alike, that much of what he ‘discovered’ came from his attempts to understand himself. But both the volume of what he got out, as well as the very nature of that enterprise of which he hinted to Riviere, leads the present author to wish it was as straightforward as that to write about a man whose ideas are so bound up with his own and with our own existence. To give Freud an independent existence in the mind of the reader is certainly my aim; but the task presents a number of dilemmas which cast necessary doubts upon the independence of the enterprise.

That there should be complexities in studying the life and work of Freud is appropriate for an understanding of a man who, in his own words, desired ‘to understand some of the mysteries of this world’ (Freud, 1927a/2002: 165). Some of these complications are not peculiar to Freud, and indeed face the student of any major contributor to scientific or artistic culture. The volume of material by Freud and on Freud is sufficient to make the task of independent assessment impossible but for the single-minded academic. The British Standard Edition contains twenty-three volumes of Freud’s Collected Works plus an index and bibliography, and there are a further five volumes of his short papers. The correspondence between Freud and Fliess, between Freud and Jung, and between Freud and many others fills a further number of books (for example, McGuire, 1974; Masson, 1985; Freud, E., 1961). There are comprehensive and ever more fully resourced biographies, perhaps the best of which is by Peter Gay, most of which run to hundreds of pages (Jones, 1964; Roazen, 1979; Clark, 1980; Gay, 1989). Books written by both followers and critics of psychoanalysis and Freud run into thousands. Even the average university library, where academic psychology is more likely to be critical of Freud than concerned with studying him at any depth, displays more yards of Freudian spine than that generated by the work of any other psychologist. Since this literature – what one might almost call this literary phenomenon – continues to grow year by year, it is no wonder that the potential student of Freud, looking for a pathway through the intellectual industry spawned by this man and his thought, opts for any slim volume that seeks to summarize the central points; and so is encouraged the production of yet more books on Freud.

This volume cannot stand independently of that vast corpus of knowledge and hypothesis. One of my aims is to introduce the reader to literature which could take as much of one’s time to absorb as one may wish, including Freud’s collected work in the Standard Edition. But even if acquaintance with Freud will be for most readers relatively small, some knowledge of him is essential for any student of the human mind. It is impossible for counsellors or therapists particularly to ignore the influence of this vast amount of material, often understood only in popular form, upon those who come as clients. A historian does not have to be a Catholic, Protestant or even a Christian to study sixteenth-century Europe, but he or she would be a poor scholar without knowledge of reformation and counter-reformation theology, so important was its influence on the culture of that era. Similarly, therapists do not have to be Freudians to practise therapy; but they will be poorly informed if they remain unaware of the impact of Freudian thinking, right or wrong, for good or ill, on twentieth-century Western culture, and therefore upon their clients as well. Indeed, one of the difficulties we now experience, especially when we find apparent confirmation of Freud’s ideas in what clients say, is that we can never be sure whether what we observe is genuinely the same as that which Freud also identified, or whether people have been so influenced by his writing (even through the popular press) that they have unconsciously come to express themselves using his concepts. Momigliano (1987) recounts how ‘there was [in Vienna] in 1925 not a single high-society or intellectual salon where people were not asking each other about their Oedipus complexes or interpreting each other’s slips or parapraxes’. Such informal self-or mutual analysis is no less prevalent in even wider circles today.

I believe that, despite their inevitable shortcomings, Freud’s observations, his theories and his guidelines for practice can still make a significant contribution to current counselling and therapy. This is obvious to any psychodynamic therapist, but I have sufficient confidence in Freud to think that some of his ideas can also enlighten other schools of therapy, most of which have in large part developed out of, or in differing degrees in reaction to, Freudian theory and practice. I trust I introduce enough of Freud’s own writing, albeit selectively, to take the reader behind my own understanding of him, so that I can cut a swathe through the millions of words written for or against Freud, in order to try and reach the man himself. It is this aspect of Freud, the thinker who strove to get his ideas out of himself and to give them independent existence, which is probably the most important aspect of him, as much today as when he wrote. It is that quest for understanding – even though his understanding has in some respects since been shown to be time-bound – which still appeals to many therapists and clients, who likewise may puzzle about what makes them the persons they are. It is that aspect of puzzling over mysteries that remains his lasting legacy in the field of therapy. Others have contributed significantly to the development of therapeutic relationships and to a variety of alternative techniques, but few have persistently asked questions about the nature and origins of persons. Counselling and therapy are often so concerned with the immediacy of the here-and-now, and with cure and relief, that deeper implications for understanding persons often receive little attention. Although Freud developed a series of techniques which have proved generally valuable in the conduct of therapy, he himself came to feel that the importance of psychoanalysis was much more in its attempts to discover the working of the human mind and of the world than in its effectiveness as a means of therapy (Freud, 1924f: 181; 1940a: 416).

We know that Freud began on the path to this large canvas by puzzling long over the smaller and more personal one of his own thoughts, dreams, fantasies and life history. It was ‘hard work, at once exhilarating and frustrating’ (Gay, 1989: 98). Through all that he wrote – even if at first much of it seems to be couched in quasi-scientific terms – there is something of his own life to be read. There remain, of course, many mysteries about some of Freud’s more private inner experiences. As Barron et al. (1991: 143) suggest, ‘Freud’s passionate attempts to uncover secrets ran like a leitmotiv throughout his life’ and as such are linked to his character, which ‘reveals paradoxical attitudes: openness towards sharing information of a personal nature in order to advance psychoanalysis yet pronounced secretiveness about his private life, in particular his personal history and his marital life’. But as Freud writes we catch glimpses both of him, and at times what it might have been like to be with him in his consulting room. Certainly there is nowhere else quite like his essays and lectures for finding such a fresh, witty, clear and persuasive picture of his thinking and his style.

It is partly because Freud tried in his many papers and books to give his ideas an ‘independent existence’ that his writing to some extent hides the inner Freud from us. His wish to be remembered more for his ideas than for himself has led to obvious difficulties for his biographers, since he was eager to destroy some of the private documents which might otherwise have added to the biographer’s resources. In 1885, for example, ‘I have destroyed all my notes of the last fourteen years, as well as letters, scientific extracts and manuscripts of my works’ (Gay, 1989: xiii). This exercise was repeated several times in his life. Some of his correspondence and many other papers must have been lost. Furthermore, some of his private letters and papers were embargoed at the request of their donors, although by 1992 over 80 per cent of the Freud Archives had been derestricted, and made available to scholars at the Freud Museum, London, or the Library of Congress, Washington (Blum, 1992).

Freud may appear to offer assistance to those who would understand him as a person in his short work An Autobiographical Study (1925d), but its title is something of a misnomer. It is more (in his own words, in which the reader will note his use of the third person) ‘an account of his personal share in the development of psychoanalysis’ (1925d: 186). There are some dates, some places, and there are names of those who influenced his intellectual development. But personal material, such as the influence of his upbringing and his family relationships, is kept to a minimum. Riviere refers to Freud as a man of ‘dignity and reserve’, although not retiring or withdrawn. There was a modesty about him that one might expect of one living in an age which had tried to keep under wraps much that he later uncovered through his meticulous work with his patients. Although he at times appeared to refer to such great leaders as Napoleon or Moses as if in some way he wished to identify with them, Riviere comments that ‘he did not appear especially interested in impressing himself on people or seeking to convince others of his views’. Nevertheless she adds that he ‘developed this special capacity for presenting his conclusions as if he were bent on enabling the reader to take them in’ (1958: 145–6). Her feeling is that he did this by creating a body of knowledge outside himself, independent of himself, but (we may add) sometimes at the expense of our knowing him better.

Yet there is another side to this apparent modesty and reluctance to reveal himself. In the autobiographical study Freud rejects any claim the public may have ‘to learn any more of my personal affairs – of my struggles, my disappointments and my successes’ (1925d: 258). In the next sentence he points out that he has ‘in any case been more open and frank in some of my writings … than people usually are who describe their lives for their contemporaries or for posterity. I have had small thanks for it, and from my experience I cannot recommend anyone to follow my example.’ He was referring here especially to The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a) and to The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b/2002), where many of the examples he gives are drawn from his own dreams, from his own past and his own daily experiences. It is easy to forget the many years which Freud spent in self-analysis: it was from himself that he drew the material with which he created his first interpretations of human experience, although his stress on the value of the analyst, as a second person interpreting resistance in the patient inevitably leads us to question the degree of objectivity that can be achieved in and through self-analysis. Not surprisingly, biographers also draw upon those same dreams and memories in their own attempts to analyse Freud. Thus there have been different attempts by writers (particularly those who are also analysts) to reinterpret Freud’s famous dream of ‘Irma’s injection’, to understand for example the significance and nature of Freud’s relationship with his close correspondent and friend in the 1890s, Wilhelm Fliess. Or the biographer who turns Freud’s own methods upon Freud can inevitably find examples of Freud’s own slips of the pen, such as the letter to Jung where Freud turns a lower case ‘i’ into a capital ‘I’ (in German). Gay suggests that this turns Freud’s wish to ‘thrash them [opponents]’ into a ‘thrash you’, showing his ‘suppressed uneasiness’ to his younger associate (1989: 213).

The discriminating reader is therefore presented with frequent opportunities of insight into the apparently self-contained Freud, even though the references are abbreviated and at times self-censored versions of the more rigorous analysis that Freud brought to his past memories and present experiences. What makes the study of Freud peculiar is the way we use his own ideas and theories to study him, as if we had totally absorbed his method, whatever our reservations about the lengths to which he appears to take some interpretations. Just as his studies of great figures such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo demonstrate the impossibility for him of separating art from the artist, so we cannot, even if Freud desired it otherwise, give his ideas independent existence; nor can this chapter on his life be seen as straightforward factual biography. He has taught us a particular type of enquiry: who or what made him the man he was, producing the ideas which he did?

In asking such questions (as most biographers now do, whoever their subject) we may therefore appear to play straight into Freud’s hands: we immediately seem to affirm the correctness of his ideas by using them to gain deeper understanding of his life and of his theories. Such circularity of thinking is displeasing to the philosopher, the logician and the scientist, even if it makes some sense to the artist. It is a form of narcissism, holding a mirror to Freud in which he reflects himself. There is even a kind of incestuousness inherent in the exercise – although by using such terms as ‘narcissism’ and ‘incestuous’ I here again betray the way Freud’s thinking, whether it is right or wrong, has got under our collective skin, and emerges in much of our critical language. Although we have to make a conscious effort to avoid uncritical dependence upon Freudian terms, it is impossible to escape the particular insight he has stressed, that there is a dynamic between a person’s life and a person’s attitudes, and between their work and their inner needs. Another dynamic is the way in which past experience, and the interpretation we put upon such experience, influences our current interpretation of present experience.

It is not my brief or my intention to convince the reader of the correctness of any or all of Freud’s theories. There is no reason to assume that particular interpretations which Freud put upon his own and others’ experiences are accurate. But I am aware that it is impossible for me even to embark upon a summary of his life and work without looking for explanations of the kind which Freud’s influence has taught our present culture to seek.

Biographies of Freud often interweave details of his theory and practice as they developed chronologically, together with accounts of the other major figures around him. His developing theory I reserve for the second chapter, and his technique for the third. I intend to say little about other major figures, although some of them merit their own volumes in this series (Segal, 1992; Jacobs, 1995; Casement, 2001). In this chapter, bearing in mind the reservations already expressed, I describe Freud’s childhood and his professional life, asking how those early years might have influenced his later thinking. It is important to remember that the cultural background also plays a major part: there is the question of Freud’s Jewishness as well as the anti-Semitic climate in Vienna; but again I reserve these and many of the major intellectual influences on Freud for the next chapter.

His Early Life

Freud describes his origins thus: ‘I was born on 6 May 1856, at Freiberg in Moravia, a small town in what is now Czechoslovakia. My parents were Jews, and I have remained a Jew myself’ (1925d: 190). His family moved to Vienna when he was four years old, and he remained there until 1938, when he and his psychoanalyst daughter Anna were given permission to leave the Nazi-occupied city. He died in Hampstead, London, on 23 September 1939.

The early reference to his Jewish parentage, as well as another soon afterwards referring to his experience at University of being ‘expected to feel myself inferior and an alien because I was a Jew’ (1925d: 191), illustrate the importance Freud attached to this aspect of his background, and indicate one of the reasons for his readiness to see rejection of his ideas when the reaction was not in fact always as strong as he made out. He writes of himself: ‘The question may be raised whether the personality of the present writer as a Jew who never sought to disguise the fact that he is a Jew may not have had a share in provoking the antipathy of his environment of psychoanalysis’ (1925e: 273). Being Jewish featured equally strongly in a recollection of his father telling him, when Freud was about eleven years old, of walking in Galicia when a Christian knocked Freud’s father’s cap into the mud and shouted ‘Jew, get off the pavement.’ When Freud asked his father what had happened, his father said that he had gone into the road and picked up his cap. Freud’s shame at his father’s reaction he later contrasted with his own wish to take vengeance. This memory provides rich material for all kinds of interpretations, one of which is Freud’s wish to create a system acceptable to the gentile world. ‘From his childhood days on, an assertive display of intellectual independence, controlled rage, physical bravery and self-respect as a Jew coalesced into a highly personal, indestructible amalgam in Freud’s character’ (Gay, 1989: 12). Some even suggest that ‘the incident with its emotional swing against the father may well help to explain the genesis of the Oedipus complex’ (Clark, 1980: 13).

Other snapshots of Freud’s childhood similarly give rise to speculation about the influence of various incidents upon his later theories, although some of his memories have since been shown to be inaccurate, and based largely upon his dreams in later life. Among the memories are feelings of real infantile jealousy upon the birth of his baby brother, born just over a year after Freud yet dying within a few months, leaving Freud feeling the seeds of guilt; a recollection of himself aged about two years old with a boy cousin stealing a bunch of flowers from a little girl; and an oblique hint that it was a nursemaid who initiated Freud in sexual matters when he was about two and a half, ‘the primary originator’ of his neurosis (Bonaparte et al., 1954: 219). Freud lost the love of this nursemaid when she was arrested for theft and sent to prison, at about the same time that Freud’s mother was confined in pregnancy with his sister; and in ‘losing’ two mother figures at the same time he was confused about what might have happened to them.

At around the same time as Freud remembered it (although we know that it must have been later, when he was about four), Freud remembered his sexual wishes being aroused towards his mother, when he saw her naked in their sleeping compartment during an overnight railway journey. If that seems to our own enlightened age scarcely a startling experience, a measure of just how forbidden such a sight was is conveyed by Freud’s use of Latin terms instead of German – Freud writes the words ‘matrem’ and ‘nudam’. Bearing in mind that this incident was recorded in a private letter to his friend Fliess, ‘it is no less telling that even at forty-one, already the most unconventional of explorers in the forbidden realms of sexuality, Freud could not bring himself to describe this exciting incident without lapsing into safe distancing Latin’ (Gay, 1989: 11). One final example: when Freud was about seven or eight he urinated in his parents’ bedroom, in their presence, and was severely reprimanded by his father, who told him that he would never amount to anything. But this blow to his ambition, or perhaps spur to ambition, was untypical. Freud was a favourite son who could do little wrong.

There are other facets to his family of origin which may be relevant to understanding his later ideas. His father, for example, was old enough to be his grandfather, and Freud was the first son of his father’s third wife. This young woma...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Acknowledgement
• 1 The Life of Sigmund Freud
• 2 Freud’s Major Theoretical Contributions
• 3 Freud’s Major Contributions to Practice
• 4 Criticisms and Rebuttals
• 5 Freud’s Influence on Therapy and the Wider World
• Appendix: Reading Freud
• References
• Index