Sigmund Freud — The Inventor of Psychoanalysis

Hi there, and welcome to 8 Minute Lives. In the year 1900, a middle-aged Viennese doctor wrote a letter to a friend. He wondered, half joking, whether a marble plaque might one day hang on a certain house, reading: "In this house, the secret of dreams was revealed to Dr. Sigmund Freud." At the time, this seemed absurd. His big book on dreams had sold a few hundred copies. His colleagues thought his ideas were somewhere between eccentric and indecent. He was a Jewish doctor in an antisemitic city, running a private practice for nervous disorders, and convinced he had uncovered the hidden machinery of the human mind. Today, that plaque exists. And whether or not Freud actually found the secret of dreams, he changed forever how we talk about ourselves. Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in a small town in Moravia, in what was then the Austrian Empire. His family moved to Vienna when he was a boy, and Vienna would be his home for over eighty years. He was the eldest son of a struggling wool merchant, the adored favorite of his young mother, and ferociously ambitious from the start. He read Shakespeare at eight. He wanted to be a great man, a conqueror of some kind, and for a while he wasn't sure in what field. He settled on medicine, though he was never much drawn to the bedside. What fascinated him was research. As a young scientist he dissected eels and studied the nervous systems of fish, and he did solid, careful work. But research paid almost nothing, and Freud wanted to marry. He was engaged to Martha Bernays for four long years, writing her hundreds of love letters while he scraped together a career. So he became a practicing doctor specializing in disorders of the nerves. Along the way came an episode he'd rather have forgotten. In the 1880s, Freud became an enthusiastic early advocate of cocaine. He took it himself, praised it in print as a wonder drug, and recommended it to a close friend struggling with morphine addiction. The friend became addicted to both and died young. It was a painful lesson in how badly a brilliant man can be wrong. The real turning point came in Paris. Freud won a fellowship to study under Jean-Martin Charcot, the most famous neurologist in Europe. Charcot was treating patients with so-called hysteria — paralyses, seizures, strange symptoms with no physical cause — and demonstrating that hypnosis could switch these symptoms on and off. For Freud, this was electrifying. It suggested that ideas alone, ideas the patient wasn't even aware of, could make the body sick. Back in Vienna, an older colleague, Josef Breuer, told him about a remarkable patient known as Anna O. Her symptoms seemed to ease when she talked through the memories connected to them. She herself called it "the talking cure." Freud seized on this. He and Breuer published a book together in 1895, arguing that hysterical patients suffer from buried memories, and that bringing those memories into the open could relieve the suffering. Freud pushed further than Breuer was comfortable with. He dropped hypnosis and developed a new method: the patient lies on a couch, the doctor sits out of sight, and the patient says whatever comes to mind, without censoring anything. Free association, he called it. He became convinced that beneath consciousness lies a vast hidden realm — the unconscious — full of desires and fears we can't bear to acknowledge, many of them sexual, many rooted in childhood. This is where his most notorious idea took shape: that small children have erotic feelings, and that boys harbor an unconscious attachment to their mothers and rivalry with their fathers. He named it the Oedipus complex, after the Greek king who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. Some of this theory came from his patients. A surprising amount came from himself. When Freud's father died in 1896, he was shaken far more than he expected, and he began a strange project: a systematic self-analysis, conducted largely through his own dreams. Out of it came his masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900. Dreams, he argued, are disguised fulfillments of forbidden wishes — the royal road, as he put it, to the unconscious. Slowly, an audience gathered. A small circle met on Wednesday evenings in Freud's apartment at Berggasse 19, and grew into an international movement. Psychoanalysis crossed the Atlantic; Freud lectured in America in 1909, and later returned for a celebrated 1910 lecture tour. But the movement fractured almost as fast as it grew. Freud demanded loyalty to his core doctrines, especially the sexual ones, and gifted followers kept breaking away. The most painful rupture was with Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist Freud had treated almost as a son and chosen heir. By 1913 they were bitter enemies, and Freud experienced the split as a betrayal. The last decades of his life were shadowed by two enemies: cancer and Nazism. In 1923, Freud was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw, the price of a lifelong cigar habit he never gave up. He endured more than thirty operations and wore a painful prosthesis he called "the monster." Yet he kept writing, turning his theories on civilization itself, arguing that society survives by forcing us to repress our instincts, and that we pay for it in chronic unhappiness. Then, in 1938, the Nazis marched into Austria. Freud's books had already been burned in Berlin. Now the Gestapo searched his home and briefly detained his daughter Anna. Friends and admirers, including a French princess who paid what amounted to a ransom, arranged his escape. At eighty-two, frail and ill, Freud left Vienna for London. He lived just over a year in exile. In September 1939, weeks after the Second World War began, his doctor honored an old promise and gave him doses of morphine to end his suffering. Four of Freud's sisters, left behind in Vienna, would die in the Holocaust. So what did he leave behind? As science, much of psychoanalysis has fared badly. His theories were built on a handful of cases, resistant to testing, and some of his famous cures were less successful than he claimed. Yet judging Freud only as a scientist misses his real impact. He gave the modern world a language for its inner life. Repression, denial, Freudian slips, the idea that childhood shapes us, that our motives are murky even to ourselves, that talking to another person can heal — all of that flows from him. The poet W. H. Auden said it best after Freud's death: he was no longer a person, but a whole climate of opinion. We still live in his weather.