Freud: The Making and Unmaking of an Illusion

Sigmund Freud very nearly did not become a psychiatrist. Before he was the father of psychoanalysis, he was a neurologist desperate for a win. Freud’s early journals document a tremendous amount of study in varied topics he saw as likely breakthroughs to bring him renown. He was not just looking for truth; he was looking for immortality.

Much of his early work was dedicated to the study of cocaine as a treatment for various medical conditions. Freud mentioned some of his preliminary theories on the use of cocaine for anesthesia to his colleague Karl Koller before going away on a trip. When Freud returned home, Koller had already conducted an experiment using cocaine as a topical anesthetic for surgery on a frog’s eye. Koller became famous overnight.

This discovery—that cocaine could make patients numb to surgery—became the leading advance in surgery for the next decade. Freud had held the keys to the kingdom and dropped them. It was a narcissistic wound that festered. Not long after Koller stole this achievement, Freud decided to enter neuroscience. Freud became obsessed with creating a new breakthrough in a new area of medicine. After narrowly avoiding achieving greatness in the physical realm, he turned to the invisible realm of the mind. He used a relatively unknown area of medicine to make himself great.

The Golden Child: Born in a Caul

To understand Freud’s theories, you must understand his mother. Freud was born in a caul, which his mother Amalia took as a sign that he was destined for greatness. It helped that he was a genius with tremendous obsessive energy. His mother delighted in his intelligence and told him from an early age that he would bring their family fame. He was her “little golden Siggy.”

She doted on Freud more than all of her other children. While his siblings studied by candlelight to save money, the family bought a gas lamp specifically for Sigmund. Freud never doubted his greatness. He records in one letter, just before he entered the field of psychiatry, that he had destroyed all his journals and records to hide them from his own future biographers. He was curating his legend before he had even begun his work.

The Passive Father and the Hat

Freud developed an amenable affect that made it easy for him to succeed and connect with people. Despite the reality of anti-Semitism in Vienna, his intelligence and genial personality made him many friends in the medical community. But beneath this charm lay a deep well of shame regarding his father, Jacob.

Freud recalled being shocked as a boy when his father told him a story about being mocked and insulted by an anti-Semite on the street. The man had knocked Jacob’s new fur hat into the mud and shouted, “Jew! Get off the pavement!” When Freud asked his father what he did, Jacob replied, “I stepped into the gutter and picked up my cap.”

Freud was humiliated. He watched his father remain implacable and positive in the face of degradation. Freud’s father was a hard worker, but he never strove to be a great man, and was never able to lift the family far out of poverty. This passivity terrified Freud.

He remembered from his schooling that Hannibal’s father had made his son promise to avenge himself on Rome when Carthage was slighted. Freud imagined what a “great man” like the men in his ancient history books would do. Even in childhood, the idea of greatness that Freud saw within himself began to clash with the way that his father lived.

The Theory of Repression as Autobiography

Whether or not we like, or even notice, the things that we learn from our parents, we still learn them. Freud learned from his mother that becoming renowned made him lovable. He learned from his father to be complacent in confrontation and avoid conflict. The extreme passivity that Freud learned from his father made Freud repress the competitive and aggressive energies that often arrive in life; and thus the idea of a repressed aggressive drive became one of the major tenets of Freud’s psychology.

It is no accident that Freud’s central theory—the Oedipus Complex—involves a son who wants to kill his father and marry his mother. Freud felt he had to “kill” the passive father inside himself to be worthy of his ambitious mother’s love. He projected this specific family drama onto the entire human race, assuming that every boy wanted to murder his father. In reality, perhaps only Freud did.

The Somatic Collapse: Fainting at Jung’s Feet

Freud was not an assertive man and avoided conflict to an extreme degree in life. When he had disagreements with close friends and mentors, Freud cut off contact with them entirely instead of trying to assert himself, communicate his differences, or compromise. So often was this true, that it is difficult to find a case in Freud’s biography where conflict with an equal does not result in the dissolution of the relationship. Jung, Adler, Rank, and others were first placed on a pedestal and then knocked aside.

Freud’s early students were drawn to his intellect and his theory of the unconscious forces beneath cognition. One by one these pupils developed their own theories and brought them to Freud for discussion. One by one Freud cut off communication with his students.

The most dramatic instance occurred with Carl Jung. Jung recounts in his autobiography that after he told Freud that his interpretation of a dream they were discussing differed from Freud’s interpretation, Freud began looking at him fearfully. Finally, becoming terrified, Freud fainted on the floor. Jung, the former student now turned rival, had to pick him up and carry him to a sofa.

Freud later told others that Jung had a “death wish” for him, and cut off all contact with his pupil. In reality, Freud’s nervous system likely short-circuited. He had built a life on being the unquestioned patriarch (to avoid being the passive father), and when his authority was challenged, his body shut down.

Puppets with Strings on the Inside

Freud was a great man. His framework for the mind later proved too rigid, but his theories were wildly innovative. Most notably, he was the first to try to see behind the thing that sees. He was the first to speculate that the things that move us are not exterior gods or destiny we had to divine, but forces inside the mind that escape our notice until we are taught to perceive them. His theories were controversial because they called men puppets, but puppets with strings on the inside.

Freud made himself great in order to become lovable, and yet he could not be an assertive man. Freud badly wanted recognition from others but needed their approval without a fight. Freud repressed his own aggressive and sexual tendencies, and his theories describe him observing the repression of these impulses in others.

The Character Sketch: A Man at a Party

Now, whether or not you agree with my portrayal of the historical Freud, think of the Freud that I have drawn as a character in a piece of fiction. Imagine this person at a party of other distinguished and renowned men. Imagine what he says to them in order to make them see the dormant greatness within him. He must make them see it, but he also cannot fight with them. He cannot call attention to himself, he cannot challenge them. Yet still, desperately he needs them to accept him amongst them as genius.

Can you see what this person would say? What his posture would be when he approaches these men, reaches for a drink, is misunderstood in conversation? This is a man who must talk passively, but who also badly needs to force others to understand his dominance and recognize his genius.

Think about a character that feels someone disagreeing with them as such an attack that they have fainting spells. Can you feel this character as a complex being? You could outline Freud as a character and write him as jealous, power hungry, or as a misunderstood genius. Neither of these, admittedly interesting, concepts capture the intricacy or layered nature of a Freud that is understood as this powerful passive nature and repressed aggressive drive interacting within the same man.

Learning what to be from one parent but how to live from another can result in any numerous combinations of character dynamics that add layers to our understanding of ourselves. If we were to make a character sketch of Freud’s traits, his history, his motives; it would not capture the dynamic of a character whose manner of being in the world is so drastically different than what he thinks makes him matter. Freud’s own process of living made him both repress and experience powerful aggressive energies, that he became obsessed with mapping in himself and others.

Bibliography

• Gay, P. (1988). Freud: A Life for Our Time. W. W. Norton & Company.
• Jung, C. G. (1961). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Vintage Books.
• Curtis, A. (2002). The Century of the Self. BBC.
• Breger, L. (2000). Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision. Wiley.
• Phillips, A. (2014). Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst. Yale University Press.
• Curtis, A. (1992). Pandora’s Box. BBC.
• Curtis, A. (2011). All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. BBC.