Freud on the Couch

A Critical Introduction to the Father of Psychoanalysis

Beverley Clack

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781780742632
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

A major new, myth-busting introduction to one of the 20th century's greatest thinkers Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), founder of psychoanalysis, is one of the most famous thinkers of modern times. But despite (and perhaps because of) his notoriety, his work is frequently encumbered by mistranslations, clichés, and misconceptions.In this landmark assessment of the great theorist, Professor Beverley Clack reveals a more complex Freud than the one with whom we are commonly presented. Casting new light on a man often unfairly derided as obsessed with sex and rigid theory, Clack argues that he was as concerned with "the death drive" as the "sex drive" and that his fierce critique of religion masked a fascination with spiritual, existential, and philosophical questions.Revealing how the work of philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche influenced Freud far more than he cared to admit, Clack explains his key ideas and case studies in the context of his eventful life. Including a detailed exploration of hysteria and its foundational role in his theories, this myth-busting introduction is a vital insight into why Freud's thought is still so relevant today.

1

Freud’s life and work

Sigmund Freud’s ideas are familiar even if we have never read anything he has written. Most of us will have heard of the ego, the id, and the superego. When speaking of the actions and attitudes of others, we may use these terms for the conscious self, the unconscious that affects behaviour, and the internalized voice of societal norms. When someone makes a slip of the tongue and reveals what they really feel or think, we may well accuse them of making a ‘Freudian slip’. If someone is overly concerned with order and keeping things tidy we may call them ‘anal’. And if we suspect that one of our friends is ill at ease with their sexuality, we may find ourselves describing them as ‘repressed’. These commonplaces go directly back to the work of Freud, drawing on key categories that shape his theory for understanding human behaviour: psychoanalysis.

Yet despite the way in which his language informs everyday conversation, few of us are likely to have read his books and fewer still will have read all of them. Most of us come to be aware of his ideas through popular culture. This might be in classic thrillers like Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964), a film that uses psychoanalytic categories to trace a young woman’s fear of sex to childhood abuse. Or in an altogether lighter vein, we might be introduced to Freud through the films of Woody Allen. Allen makes frequent, comic references in his films to the theories and practices of psychoanalysis. The best example of this is probably Annie Hall (1977), in which Allen explores the on–off relationship between comedian Alvy Singer and nightclub singer Annie. Much of the humour is drawn from relating Freud’s ideas to the lives of these characters. At one point, Alvy describes Annie as ‘polymorphously perverse’, applying Freud’s description of the child’s ability to find pleasure in any part of the body: ‘if I stroke your teeth or your kneecaps, you get excited’. Later, Alvy describes how he would have killed himself ‘but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian and if you kill yourself they make you pay for the sessions you miss’. As this form of psychotherapy can involve meeting with an analyst five times a week, you get some sense of how expensive this would be!

Freud’s image is immediately recognizable: a man in late middle age, grey-haired, bearded, with a steely gaze, self-possessed, wearing a heavy woollen three-piece suit, holding a cigar. Such is his fame that a range of tasteful (and sometimes tacky) memorabilia reflects this image, while at the same time enshrining our idea of who he is. There are numerous Freud dolls, all wearing neat and sombre suits, all bearded, all replicating that penetrating look. My favourite is a cuddly Freud that plays the Barbra Streisand song, ‘The Way We Were’. This is an apt choice of tune for Freud; the line ‘what’s too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget’ mirrors Freud’s claim that the mind forces painful feelings and experiences from consciousness. Freud has even been turned into a plastic action figure, his ‘special power’ apparently lying in the cigar that he holds.

Freud is such a well-known figure, his image so iconic, that writing an introduction to his ideas is somewhat difficult. We may well think that we know what Freud has to say, whether or not we’ve actually read his books. Even if we have read them, our impression of what he says may have been gleaned from one or two of his major works: we might have read The Three Essays on Sexuality, The Future of an Illusion, or The Interpretation of Dreams. The problem with reading Freud in this way is that it can lead us to think of Freud as someone who is reducible to a few key ideas.

At the start of this book it is worth putting aside any preexisting ideas about Freud so that a rather different, rather more complicated Freud can emerge. This Freud, I shall argue, has the power to speak to us, our world, and our concerns. To discover this Freud, we must consider some of his less familiar claims as well as those ideas that we may well have already encountered.

Freud wrote extensively: his books and articles fill some twenty-three volumes. Yet rediscovering Freud involves more than simply considering a greater number of these texts. It also involves paying attention to Freud’s method as he goes about his endeavour to understand what it is to be human. This is a project that is not just about theoretical understanding but is also concerned with establishing methods for ameliorating the suffering that arises from human experience.

Freud is first and foremost a medical practitioner, who sought to cure those suffering from various forms of mental illness. His theories emerge from his practice. Moreover, these theories emerge at – and are shaped by – a particular point in history. At the end of the nineteenth century, psychology and the investigation of the brain are in their infancy. As such, he has no option but to attempt – tentatively – to create a vocabulary for the phenomena he is encountering.

This attempt to describe the processes behind mental illness is in itself a considerable undertaking. But this is not all that Freud does. He also relates his investigations of mental illness to a more general account of mental processes. Neither of these activities is easy; what makes reading Freud exciting are the places where we encounter the Freud who is not certain about his conclusions, who wishes to play with ideas and see where they lead him. It is this Freud that we will encounter here; the Freud who makes it his business to grapple with the pleasures and pains of human existence. As a result, this Freud continues to have much to offer his twenty-first century readers.

Here’s an example. Freud is often portrayed as overly concerned with sex and, as we shall see, he has much to say about that subject. But he is also concerned with death. One of his most controversial suggestions is that just as humans are shaped by the sex-drive that leads to the creation of new things, to growth and expansion, so there is a ‘death-drive’ that draws them towards destructive cycles of repetition, disintegration, and eventually the welcome simplicity of not-being. While Freud is fascinated by this possibility and keen to explore it, he is also critical of it, unsure as to its merit and whether it is possible to give good evidence for such a notion:

It may be asked whether and how far I am convinced of the truth of the hypotheses that have been set out in this paper. My answer would be that I am not convinced myself and that I do not seek to persuade other people to believe in them. Or, more precisely, that I do not know how far I believe in them (Freud, 1920: 59).

Here is an altogether more human Freud than the one we might expect from those iconic images; a mature individual at the peak of his powers. Spanning a period of some forty years, his writings show us someone who may not be ‘making it up as he goes along’, someone who is drawing upon the ideas of others but ultimately trying to develop a completely new way of talking about what it is to be human. This openness to disagreement along the way is not, it should be said, the only stance that he takes. The history of the founding of psychoanalysis as a discipline is full of instances when Freud dismisses those who disagree with what he takes to be fundamental aspects of his theory. But the more-hesitant Freud of this passage suggests something of the pleasure of reading him: he invites us to engage with his thought processes, recognizing the limitations of some of the speculative claims that he makes. He asks us to accompany him on a journey into the human mind. If we are prepared to go with him, it can be both an illuminating and challenging adventure.

The seventy-fifth anniversary of his death, in 2014, offers an opportunity to revisit the man whose work we think we know. If we approach Freud’s work with fresh eyes, we can see, alongside his first readers, the innovation as well as the strangeness of his work. In a culture that is so familiar with ‘Freudian’ ideas, we have largely lost that sense of surprise. In attempting to regain it we might recover the controversial nature of his thought for an age that has rather lazily accepted his ideas with little sense of what Freud actually said.

We start to get some sense of the creativity of Freud’s approach if we consider the way in which key developments in his thoughts emerge from the backdrop of his life. To adopt this approach is to bring to the fore Freud’s starting point for reflection. The personal and the individual are placed firmly at the centre of his attempt to understand human life and culture. Ideas and values are not abstract; they do not drop ready-formed into the human world but emerge from the experience of the individual. This does not mean, as we shall see, that it is impossible to make general claims about what it is to be a human being: far from it. It simply requires us to think more deeply about the different experiences, processes, and events that have shaped the way in which we, as individuals, engage with our world. Considering Freud’s life – and particularly his early life – allows us to grasp something of the personal struggles and concerns that influence the shape his practice and theory take. Just as he encouraged his patients to lie on a couch and tell him their stories, so there is no better way to proceed than by asking the same of Freud.

Freud’s early life

Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born on 6 May 1856 in Freiberg in Moravia, the first son of Jacob and Amalia Freud. Amalia had seven more children but Sigi remained her favourite and most favoured child. Freud was viewed as something of a child prodigy by his doting mother, who did everything she could to cultivate a sense of her beloved boy as a fledgling intellectual. Family life was adapted to his needs: when the family’s piano disturbed his studies, it was quickly removed.

Amalia, Jacob’s third wife, was an attractive young woman some twenty years younger than her husband. Sigmund (the name he adopted, first at school and then, permanently, at university) was therefore born into an extended family with a complicated network of interrelated, cross-generational relationships. The children of Jacob’s first marriage were considerably older than Sigmund. The eldest, Emanuel, was older than his stepmother, Amalia. One of Emanuel’s sons – Sigmund’s nephew, despite being a year older than his uncle – was Sigi’s first little friend. Describing these overlapping relationships gives us a good sense of just how complicated was Freud’s family life.

The lack of a clear distinction between the generations in Sigmund’s first experiences of life no doubt contributed to his fascination with the peculiarities and complexities of human relationships. In later life, he recalled his sense of confusion about the identity of his younger sister Anna’s father. Was Anna’s father the elderly Jacob or Sigi’s dashing half-brother Philipp?

Financial problems compelled the family to move, first to Leipzig and then, in 1860, to the Leopoldstadt, in Vienna. Here, Freud found himself at the heart of the Jewish ghetto. Vienna was an ambivalent city for Jews. Anti-Semitism was rife but, at the same time, liberal reforms meant that Jewish boys like Sigmund could dream of ‘making it’. Freud recalled being told by a fortune teller that he would ‘probably grow up to be a Cabinet Minister’ (Freud, 1900: 193). Yet, living in the ghetto, he could not escape his awareness of being a Jewish boy in a society that, at best, looked on Jews with suspicion and, at worst, made sure that Jews firmly knew their place in the life of the city. The family was not religious but was still castigated for being Jewish, confronting Sigmund with the deep-rooted nature of such prejudices.

These prejudices had very personal consequences for the young Sigi. When Sigmund was twelve, his father told him a disturbing and dispiriting story that revealed his apparent acceptance of the limitations of being Jewish. Out walking, Jacob was confronted by a Gentile, who knocked his hat from his head and yelled at him to get off the pavement because he was a Jew. Sigmund was dismayed when he asked, ‘what did you do?’ and his father replied that he had, of course, picked up his hat. What alternative was there? (Freud, 1900: 197) Sigmund’s hero at the time was the great military commander Hannibal. The contrast between his father’s (apparent) cowardice and his hero’s willingness to fight must have been disturbing, to say the least.

Jacob’s lack of heroism may have been pragmatic but it had a lasting effect on Freud’s sense of his father. It seems to have influenced the shape taken by the most controversial of his theories, the Oedipus complex. As we shall see in Chapter 3, when we consider the complex in depth, the Oedipus complex takes a variety of forms but at its heart is simply defined. Between the ages of three and five, each child experiences the desire dramatized in the story of the mythical Greek King Oedipus. Oedipus, an adopted child, inadvertently kills his father and marries his mother. Freud claims that in the phantasies of every child, there lies a similar desire: they wish to kill the parent of the same sex in order to have sex with the parent of the opposite sex.

Before we go much further we should consider what Freud means by that word ‘phantasy’, not only because it affects what Freud means when he claims that the child ‘desires’ these shocking outcomes but also because it becomes a key concept in the work of the psychoanalysts who followed him.

Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis point out that in German, ‘phantasie’ refers to the world of the imagination, both in terms of ‘its contents and the creative activity which animates it’. We may think of phantasy as less significant than reality but the psychoanalyst’s intention is to show how phantasies have a powerful effect upon the way in which the ‘real’ world is perceived.

What does Freud mean when he claims the child has murderous and incestuous feelings? His focus is not on the ‘real’ relationship between parent and child but with the desires or wishes of the child. These are shaped by the child’s ignorance of what sex and death actually involve. When the child thinks of sex with the parent, they wrap this up with the desire to possess totally the parent of the opposite sex. Likewise, when they think of the death of the parent of the same sex, their desire is for their absence, rather than the physical destruction of that parent. This does not mean that we should think of such imaginings as powerless or trivial: far from it. Such phantasies might be forgotten as we age but they leave their imprint on the kind of adult sexual relationships we have, as well as forming the bedrock for one’s character.

When Freud refers to the Oedipus complex, he does so to establish his theory of sexuality. However, it is not simply a theory that emerges from his intellectual investigations; it also owes much to Freud’s personal battles with and range of feelings towards his own father. If his young, glamorous mother, who clearly preferred Sigi to her other children, was his father’s property, this fallible (dare one say cowardly?) father could be overcome. In adulthood, Sigmund felt that he had, indeed, surpassed the less-than-heroic Jacob. In his writings, there are intimations of this difficult relationship with his father that suggest something of the way in which his personal struggles influence the shape his theories take.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud describes an embarrassing childhood experience in which he urinated in his parents’ bedroom while they were present. Jacob’s frustrated response to this annoying and messy intrusion was: ‘the boy will come to nothing!’ (Freud, 1900: 216). Not surprisingly, Freud wants to prove his father wrong. But the determination to challenge his father’s ideas about him is not all that he derives from this experience. Rather than see his personal struggle with a less-than-sympathetic father as precisely that – personal – Freud moves from his own experience to consider the tensions between all children and their parents. As he conceives it, the parent–child relationship is never straightforward. Our relationships with our parents are always ambivalent, for the parent is both loved and hated. If Freud hadn’t loved his father as well as despised him, he may have found it easier to deal with his feelings. He could simply have rejected him.

These personal tensions affect the way in which Freud constructs his theory of the Oedipus complex. Freud’s focus is invariably upon the relationship between the son and his father; the relationship between mother and daughter is less-explicitly addressed. Undoubtedly this reflects his less troubled relationship with his mother. She is adored; she adores him: what more is there to say? But such personal struggles are not without impact, for they go on to shape the theory that Freud formulates. Feminist commentators like Christiane Olivier and Angela Carter suggest that this leads to a weakness in his theory, for he fails to deal adequately with the role the mother plays. Emphasising the paternal at the expense of the maternal leads him to focus on male rather than female experiences and relationships. It takes the theories of the later psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and her reflections on the importance of the mother, in the 1940s, to redress the balance.

The ambivalence felt by the son towards the father is further personalized in an incident that takes placing during Freud’s first visit to Athens. Seeing the Acropolis for the first time, Freud is overcome with emotion. Analysing this emotion, he discovers that it is guilt. Why guilt? Because when he sees the Acropolis, he not only sees an ancient building, he understands the significance of this place for western culture. It is the place where the roots of western democracy, philosophy, and art were established. His ill-educated father would not have made this connection but his better-educated, more cultured son can. Here is the source of Freud’s guilt: he has surpassed his father by being better-educated and more cultured. But feeling that sense of victory does not simply bring pleasure: it also reminds him that the all-powerful image of his father – his first hero – has been lost, and lost because of Freud’s own actions (Freud, 1936). A painful truth about the nature of life has been grasped. Life is never just about growth and development; it also involves disillusion and loss.

Doctor Freud

A precocious, bookish childhood, pampered as his mother’s favourite, was followed in 1873 by medical studies at the University of Vienna. Taught by the noted physiologist Ernst Brücke (1819–92) and the scientist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94), Freud wanted to be a research scientist, rather than a medical practitioner. His plans were disrupted when he fell in love with Martha Bernays. Wanting to marry (they did so in 1886) and recognizing that being Jewish would make advancement difficult, because of the prejudices of his day, he had to think pragmatically about a career that could finance the marital home. This meant pursuing a medical career with paying clients rather than the hand-to-mouth existence of the scientific researcher. However, Freud was to establish no ordinary medical practice. His interest lay in treating mental diseases and he particularly wanted to explore the roots of the most discussed mental illness of his day: hysteria.

Hysteria is a troubling and troublesome diagnosis with which to engage. Today, it has largely disappeared as a medical diagnosis; its symptoms have been subsumed into a number of different mental conditions and disorders. In Freud’s day, hysteria was identified according to a range of symptoms whose origins could not be traced to any physical ailment. The sufferer might exhibit feelings of suffocation, nervous coughing, dramatic fits, paralysis of the limbs, fainting spells, an inability to speak, loss of hearing, forgetting their own language, speaking in an unfamiliar language, vomiting, and an inability to eat or drink. The hysteric cut a disturbing figure, as we can see from photographs collected by one of the main investigators in Freud’s time, Jean-Martin Charcot (see Figure 1).

Most sufferers were female but Freud courted controversy by arguing that men, too, could be hysterics. In Charcot’s photographs we see women ‘out of control’, caught up in a private reverie. These images are deeply disturbing and we may feel uncomfortable looking at their intimate depictions. The women’s contorted bodies suggest that they are caught up in a private passion; it is difficult not to feel like a peeping Tom as we look at them. Depictions of the out-of-control hysteric both fascinate and repel us, leaving us feeling deeply uneasy.

Freud’s method for treating such women came from his collaborations with other medical practitioners. (It also, as we shall see in Chapter 2, emerged from the relationships he forged with the hysterics who attended his practice.) Early influences from the medical profession were Theodor Meynert (1833–92), director of a psychiatric clinic in Vienna and Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–93), director of the...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• About the Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• 1. Freud’s Life and Work
• 2. Hysteria and the Development of Psychoanalysis
• 3. Oedipus and Sexuality
• 4. Dreams, Development, and the Psyche
• 5. Religion and Fate
• 6. Freud in the Twenty-First Century
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index