Brother Animal

The Story of Freud and Tausk

Paul Roazen

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000676020
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psicologia
• Categoría: Storia e teoria della psicologia

A major figure among pre-World War I psychoanalysts, Victor Tausk was perhaps Sigmund Freud's most brilliant pupil—"the most prominently outstanding" in the opinion of Lou Andreas-Salome. Tausk craved recognition for the originality of his work, and a fierce rivalry developed between pupil and mentor. Tausk. who felt a deep and neurotic dependence on Freud, was totally consumed in the struggle. Freud's final rejection of his follower, and the particularly unfortunate manner in which it was carried out, was followed by Tausk's bizarre suicide—and by an official silence that has all but obliterated his name from the annals of psychoanalysis.

CHAPTER I

The Struggle of the Human Creature

1 Victor Tausk was one of Freud’s most talented early supporters, yet history can be capricious. For although he was a towering figure among pre-World War I psychoanalysts, he has since been completely forgotten, without ever having been established as part of the past at all. Tausk’s tragedy is a moving human document, as rich as that from any novelist’s imagination. The only danger lies in summarizing it in melodramatic terms. Tausk entered the world of psychoanalysis in 1908, and was dead by 1919. Within those years he made an enduring scientific contribution, and then killed himself as the climax of a frustrating struggle with Freud.

When Tausk lived he was considered a problem, and fifty years after his death he remains an enigma. There can never be a “solution” to understanding a life as tormented as Tausk’s. But his inner difficulties as well as his psychological contributions can be made known. Fascinating as he was to contemporaries, Tausk’s name is known today only among psychiatrists interested in early psychoanalytic papers. His rightful historical place, though, and the way in which he was finally crushed powerfully illustrate the timeless theme of how a man’s struggle to liberate himself can end in his own undoing.

Any suicide may evoke horror and awe, as well as guilt in those who might have helped. In Tausk’s instance all the normal reactions are intensified by his having been so well-trained a psychiatrist, one of Freud’s most brilliant pupils. Tausk died at forty, in the midst of his most productive period. He had such immense capacities and was still so promising—concern with his story grows because of the incompleteness of his life. We can never know what he would have made of the rest of it. In the course of growing older each of us closes out many options and lives one life at the expense of others which are inconsistent with it. Contemplating another cut off in midstream, as we speculate on the alternative courses his life might have taken, we are tempted to imagine the variety of destinies that might once have been possible for ourselves as well.

This tale gives a fresh dimension to the past conflicts in psychoanalysis, for it helps us to understand what those dissensions meant from the point of view of Freud’s pupils. The development of psychoanalysis cannot be told only from the perspective of Freud’s own reactions to “defect-ors.” Too often these struggles have been oversimplified and blamed solely on the difficulties of Freud’s students.

To the extent that Tausk’s place in history now exists, it is mainly as one of Lou Andreas-Salome’s lovers. They had a short affair in Vienna, during her stay there in 1912—13. Years earlier in Lou’s life the philosopher Nietzsche had reputedly proposed to her, and she had subsequently been intimate with the poet Rilke. When she came into Freud’s circle to learn psychoanalysis, a woman like Lou would hardly waste herself on a nobody. Since she could not have Freud himself, Tausk, who had considerable talent and standing in Freud’s eyes, represented second best. And in her Journal on Freud Tausk plays a key role. She in fact wrote the most penetrating comments on Tausk’s character. Yet only if one knows the whole story are her observations on him comprehensible. Without all the background material, her dark and misty prose remains impenetrable.

The oral tradition on Tausk is fragmentary. To the generation of psychoanalysts who came after the First World War, Tausk is known as a genius who failed.¹ Of course any in-group does tend to overestimate its own members, though some were more confident than others in their extremely high estimation of Tausk’s abilities. Still, for those who became analysts in the 1920’s and 1930’s, while Freud was still alive, Tausk looms as a mythical figure from the past who died at the height of his powers. More rumors exist about how Tausk died than about why. Many know virtually nothing else about him except that he is supposed to have castrated himself.²

Among the older psychoanalysts who were already intimate with Freud at the time of Tausk’s suicide, none can understand at all how he has been forgotten today. He figured so much in their own experience that they can scarcely believe his name may now mean absolutely nothing, even to someone relatively well-versed in psychoanalysis. One elderly analyst bragged about knowing Tausk. He stressed his acquaintance with Tausk and his knowledge of Tausk’s career as a way of making himself more important to me as a source of information about the whole history of the movement.

Those who knew Tausk personally are still shocked at his suicide. Tausk was such an alive man, with so much imagination, and he had so many interests—there was a human life. To those who knew Tausk professionally, his suicide was very sudden and surprising. Freud himself composed the official obituary of Tausk.^* “No one,” he wrote, “could escape the impression that here was a man of importance.” Freud’s final judgment has become ironic: “He is sure of an honorable memory,” Freud proclaimed, “in the history of psychoanalysis and its earliest struggles.”³ This three-page obituary is the lengthiest Freud ever penned. Although sheer quantity of words is no sure sign of someone’s importance in Freud’s eyes, he did write shorter obituaries about Karl Abraham, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Josef Breuer, and Sandor Ferenczi—each assuredly known to history books. It seems all the more remarkable that a figure like Tausk could have disappeared so completely.⁴

* Freud’s obituary appears in full here in Chap. v, pp. 135—8.

No one in particular has been actively responsible for suppressing a full account of the difficulties between Freud and Tausk. But, as we shall later see, the letter from Freud to Lou Andreas-Salomé after Tausk’s death has been tendentiously edited. It is not surprising if Freud’s disciples in Vienna kept this story to themselves. We should remember their reverence for Freud, as well as their guilt over a fallen rival. A suicide under any circumstances is a fearful act. But coming after his fight with Freud, Tausk’s suicide helped give a sense of reality to the powers that Freud’s pupils magically attributed to their leader.

Quarreling with Freud was the most dreadful possibility imaginable. To be cast out by him meant expulsion from the chosen few, psychic death. The book would be closed, the candle snuffed out. Tausk’s death substantiated all the fantasied consequences of struggling with Freud. It is easy to understand why events worked to keep this episode obscure.

Tausk’s family had no inkling of his fight with Freud. It must have been a frightful business for Tausk, and he was apparently discreet about so important a matter in his life. Half a century later it proved news to his family to hear the first outlines of the controversy. They had, however, letters at their disposal. With the help of these documents, added to what could be learned from interviewing Tausk’s family and colleagues, it has now become possible to reconstruct a reliable sequence of events.

Unearthing Tausk’s story has had the fascination of a clinical riddle. The material unfolded as gradually as it might about a patient, and presenting it for readers poses essentially the problem of writing a case history. If only this detective work were not about Freud, he would have sympathized with it; the revolutionary in him always sought fresh interpretations of accepted knowledge. Moreover, besides upsetting conventional wisdom and solving a puzzle, the Tausk story also clarifies in a humanly satisfying way Freud’s whole career.

2 This is not a full-scale biography of Victor Tausk, but rather an examination of his life in relation to psychoanalysis. What aspects of Tausk’s early life would be relevant to his involvement with Freud? He was born in Slovakia on March 12, 1879, in a town then called Zsilina. Shortly after birth he was taken to Croatia, now a part of Yugoslavia but in those days an outlying province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of which Vienna was the cultural center.

Victor was the eldest of nine children, with six sisters and two brothers. His German-speaking family was technically Jewish, but completely nonpracticing.⁵ His father, Hermann Tausk, had worked first as a schoolteacher and then as an editor of a weekly newspaper in Zagreb. Hermann seems to have been highly intelligent and gifted, and soon became an internationally known journalist. He wrote in favor of the monarchy, attempting to explain the problems of Vienna to the Croatians and those of Croatia to the Viennese. Hermann delighted in adventure and could not live for a long time in the same way; so around 1892 he moved his family to Sarajevo, becoming chief of the press office of the Government of Bosnia and Herzegovina. (Bosnia, today a part of Yugoslavia, then had only recendy been taken from the Turks.) A full-time journalist in addition to his official duties, Hermann Tausk was editor of his own journal and a correspondent for several foreign newspapers and periodicals.

Victor’s mother, Emilie Roth Tausk, seems to fit the archetypal pattern of the masochistic Jewish mother who gives everything for others. To her aggressive and even tyrannical husband she responded with self-sacrifice and family devotion. Hermann was not a good provider, so she always had to accept money from her own mother. Although Emilie is reported to have been beautiful, her constant anxieties and demands for her children left her tired and cheerless, and her husband was unfaithful. Hermann was a restless man, sometimes in need of a journey to quiet his spirits. Yet he could be quite charming and women found him fascinating.

Victor was on the whole a tender and thoughtful son to his mother, and in later years she followed his psychoanalytic writings. Emilie appears to have been as large-hearted as Hermann was authoritarian—and Victor took something from both into his personality. His relationship to his father was strained and antagonistic. Victor later wrote that he was forever embarrassed to be called by his father’s name. Hermann, a hard-working and popular man, found he always had opposition at home, and it was led by his eldest son.

Whatever Hermann’s own sexual behavior, he expected his children to be hypermoral. On moralistic grounds, for example, he broke up his eldest daughter’s engagement to a fine young man, with whom she was very much in love. (The suitor—out of generosity and correctness—was paying support for an illegitimate child whose true father was indeterminate.) Hermann loved scenes and sentiment, using his theatricality to support his own need for authority at home. He would dramatize self-pityingly his family’s impertinent treatment of him as an outsider. Victor grew up, then, with the model of a father who misbehaved toward his own wife, and who as a Bosnian official opposed the growing national feeling for Yugoslavia among the young.

In school Victor learned to speak perfect Croatian, although his mother had never deigned to learn it at all. He studied Latin, Greek, became a talented linguist, and later displayed a good command of French and Italian. Admired by his fellow students, he was a leader among them in behalf of justice and intelligence. He had a row with a teacher of religion whose principles conflicted with his own atheism; just before graduating he led a strike over religion at school, and so finished getting his matura at Varaždin. A period of ill health—lung trouble—did not interfere with his plans to attend the University of Vienna. At first he had wanted to study medicine, but since his family could not afford it, he settled on the less expensive prospect of becoming a lawyer.

In 1897 Tausk went to Vienna, where the next year he met his future wife, Martha Frisch, a distant relative of Martin Buber, the theologian and philosopher. Although Victor’s family was cultured by Viennese standards he was still a raw provincial. His hostile relationship to his father apparently extended to his future father-in-law, a printer in Vienna; they passionately hated each other.

Martha fell in love with Victor over her family’s objections. Like Victor she was ambitious. Intellectual women were rare in those days, and Martha seems to have felt that as an intellectual and convinced Marxist she had to despise her femininity, not dress well, and in general she downgraded the importance of sexuality. She was very intelligent, though rather theatrical, and later on became an active socialist, speaking, debating, writing articles, and attending conferences. But she was a more rigid person than her future husband, with fewer capacities. At any rate she loved Victor deeply, became pregnant, and they were married in 1900.^* Victor was twenty-one, and Martha almost two years younger. Together they went back to Yugoslavia, where the baby died at birth.

* As Martha was a Christian, though her father a Jew, Tausk was baptized before his marriage. He always continued later on, however, to acknowledge his Jewishness; and few people knew of his formal conversion.⁶

In Sarajevo Victor continued his training as a lawyer. When Martha gave birth to a son (Marius) in 1902, Victor already had his doctorate in jurisprudence. A little less than two years later they had another son, Victor Hugo. The names of the two children represent the way Martha, and to some extent Victor, felt about being in Sarajevo. She did not want to give her sons German names, lest they suffer while in Croatia; nor did she want to give them Croatian names, since she hoped someday to return to what she considered a civilized country. Meanwhile, as part of his training, Victor had begun to act as a judge.

In 1904 Tausk took his family to Mostar, where he practiced as a lawyer’s assistant. Tausk enjoyed defending the penniless, especially murderers. In one case, a Moslem girl had been arrested for killing her illegitimate child. Although the prosecutor asked for the death penalty, Victor was so eloquent in defending her that she was acquitted. Reactionary ideas, he argued, had been at fault, and these false notions had forced her to kill her child. In the spring of 1905 he attained a “stalum agendi,” which meant that he could serve as one of the limited number of full-fledged lawyers. Had Tausk gone on in the law, he would have been sent to Derventa, where he was assured of a lucrative practice.

But instead, late in the spring of 1905, Martha and Victor decided to separate. With the two children they went to Vienna, where Martha eventually got a job as a bookkeeper in her father’s firm. By early 1906 Victor had setded in Berlin. From that time on numerous letters exist from Victor to Martha, which she faithfully preserved until her death in 1957. He sent her money whenever possible, always inquired about their boys, and sometimes bitterly reproached her for the failure of their marriage.

One letter in particular strikingly communicates Tausk’s feelings at this stage of his life. It sounds almost like an entry meant for a diary. Tausk was then twenty-six, married and the ...