Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud began as a laboratory neurologist, cutting and staining nervous tissue. A winter in Paris changed the scale of the problem he thought medicine had to solve. At the Salpêtrière hospital he watched Jean-Martin Charcot demonstrate that paralysis and other physical symptoms could appear without visible damage to the brain or ner[2]ves. Freud returned to Vienna asking how an idea, memory or fear could act on the body. Psychoanalysis grew from that question.

From Freiberg to Vienna

Freud was born on 6 May 1856 in Freiberg in Moravia, now Příbor in the Czech Republic, into a Jewish family of wool merchants.[3] The family moved to Vienna when he was four. He entered the University of Vienna in 1873, trained in medicine and spent years in Ernst Brücke's physiology laboratory.[3] His earliest published research concerned the nervous systems of eels and crayfish; the later theorist of dreams first learned to argue from anatomy.

He qualified as a doctor in 1881, worked at Vienna General Hospital and became a lecturer in neuropathology. In 1886 he married Martha Bernays after a four-year engagement conducted largely by letter. They had six children. The youngest, Anna Freud, became a major psychoanalyst in her own right.[3]

The Paris winter

A travel grant took Freud to Paris in the winter of 1885–86 to study under Jean-Martin Charcot, the celebrated neurologist at the Salpêtrière.[2] Charcot's public Tuesday lectures were part clinic and part theater. Through hypnosis he could induce, move or temporarily remove symptoms diagnosed as hysteria.[2] The performances convinced Freud that a genuine bodily symptom could have a psychological cause.

The six months did not instantly create psychoanalysis, but they turned Freud from the anatomy of the brain toward the life of the mind. Back in Vienna he opened a private practice for nervous disorders, translated Charcot's lectures into German and began using hypnosis. His colleagues reacted with hostility. The Paris training that had made his new direction possible also marked his departure from respectable Viennese neurology.

The talking cure becomes psychoanalysis

Freud worked first with the physician Josef Breuer, whose patient Bertha Pappenheim—known in their published case as Anna O.—had described the relief of speaking as a 'talking cure.' Studies on Hysteria appeared in 1895.[3] Freud gradually set hypnosis aside for free association: the patient said whatever came to mind while the analyst listened for repetitions, evasions, slips and the emotional force transferred onto the analyst.

The Interpretation of Dreams, dated 1900 though printed in late 1899, was his first large map of a dynamic unconscious. It argued that dreams transform hidden wishes through condensation, displacement and visual substitution. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and later works extended the claim: ordinary mistakes, jokes, symptoms and attachments could carry meanings the conscious mind had not authorized.

A movement, and its arguments

A small Wednesday discussion group in Freud's waiting room became the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Sándor Ferenczi, Ernest Jones and others helped turn a disputed Viennese method into an international movement, then broke with Freud over theory and authority. Psychoanalysis never became a single settled doctrine. Its ideas about childhood, sexuality, repression and interpretation were influential precisely because they were argued over in clinics, novels, films and political theory as well as medicine.

Many of Freud's clinical claims and universal theories have been challenged, and some do not meet the evidentiary standards of contemporary experimental psychology. His historical importance does not depend on treating every proposition as established science. He gave twentieth-century culture a vocabulary for conflict inside the self and a dramatic model of speech as evidence.

Freud, Surrealism and Dalí

André Breton and the Surrealists treated Freud's unconscious as permission to bypass conscious taste through dreams, chance and automatic writing. Freud did not return the admiration. He regarded the group with suspicion and resisted Dalí's repeated attempts to meet him.

The meeting finally happened in London on 19 July 1938. Stefan Zweig arranged it, and Salvador Dalí arrived with his patron Edward James, a copy of his essay on Millet's Angelus and Metamorphosis of Narcissus. Dalí sketched Freud's head while trying to explain his paranoiac-critical method. The next day Freud told Zweig that Dalí's technical mastery had made him reconsider his opinion of the Surrealists, though not in the terms Dalí had hoped.

Exile

Nazi Germany annexed Austria in March 1938. Freud's home and publishing house were searched, and his daughter Anna was interrogated by the Gestapo. With help from friends and from the French psychoanalyst Princess Marie Bonaparte, the family escaped Vienna in June. They stopped in Paris at Bonaparte's house before reaching London, where Freud settled at 20 Maresfield Gardens.

He had endured cancer of the jaw and repeated operations since 1923 but continued writing and receiving visitors. He died at home on 23 September 1939, three weeks after the Second World War began. The London house is now the Freud Museum; his Vienna apartment at Berggasse 19 is also a museum.

How Freud worked

The physical arrangement was part of the method. The patient lay on a couch, covered with a Persian rug, and Freud sat behind the head of it, out of sight. His reason was practical: a patient who can watch the analyst's face will read it and adjust what they say, and he wanted the talk to run without that correction. He also admitted he could not bear being stared at for eight hours a day.

Patients came most days of the week, for an hour at a time, often for years. The instruction was to say everything that came to mind without selecting or tidying, which sounds easy and is not; the points where a patient stopped, changed the subject or went quiet were the ones Freud treated as significant.

The consulting room was crowded with antiquities. Freud collected Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Chinese objects for forty years and kept some two thousand of them, ranged along shelves and across the desk he wrote at. He drew the comparison himself: the analyst works like an archaeologist, clearing layer after layer of a buried site, and what has been buried longest lies deepest.

Cancer, morphine, and the end

Freud was diagnosed with cancer of the upper right jaw in 1923, at sixty-seven, after years of smoking twenty cigars a day. It cost him more than thirty operations over the next sixteen years, most performed by the Viennese oral surgeon Hans Pichler, and a prosthesis fitted between his mouth and nasal cavity to replace what had been cut away. The device made eating and speech difficult and had to be forced back into place when it slipped.

He refused painkillers for most of that time, on the grounds that he would rather think clearly than be comfortable, and he kept working and seeing patients almost to the end. By September 1939 the cancer was inoperable and had broken through the skin of his cheek.

Years earlier Freud had asked his personal physician, Max Schur, to promise not to let him suffer needlessly when the time came, and Schur had agreed. On 21 September 1939 Freud told him the pain had become senseless and held him to it. Schur injected a dose of morphine, repeated it about twelve hours later, and Freud lost consciousness. He died at three in the morning on 23 September 1939, at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, aged eighty-three, three weeks after the Second World War began.

He was cremated at Golders Green in north London. His ashes were placed in an ancient Greek urn that Marie Bonaparte, the analyst and Bonaparte descendant who had helped buy the family out of Vienna the year before, had given him from her own collection.