The Freud Files Read online

  Freud to Marie Bonaparte, 3 January 1937: The matter of the correspondence with Fliess has affected me deeply . . . Our correspondence was the most intimate you can imagine. It would have been highly embarrassing to have it fall into the hands of strangers . . . I do not want any of them to become known to the so-called posterity.8

  Diary of Marie Bonaparte, entry of 24 November 1937: But when later, at the end of February or the beginning of March 1937, I saw [Freud] in Vienna and he told me he wanted the letters to be burned, I refused . . . One day he told me: ‘I hope to convince you to destroy them.’9

  Freud to Martha Bernays, 28 April 1885: One intention as a matter of fact I have almost finished carrying out, an intention which a number of as yet unborn and unfortunate people will one day resent. Since you won’t guess what kind of people I am referring to, I will tell you at once: they are my biographers. I have destroyed all my notes of the past fourteen years, as well as letters, scientific excerpts, and the manuscripts of my papers . . . As for the biographers, let them worry, we have no desire to make it too easy for them. Each of them will be right in his opinion of ‘The Development of the Hero’, and I am already looking forward to seeing them go astray.10

  Freud to his ‘unsolicited biographer’11 Fritz Wittels, 18 December 1923: Needless to say, I would never have desired or promoted such a book [Wittels (1924)]. It seems to me that the world has no claim on my person and that it will learn nothing from me so long as my case (for manifold reasons) cannot be made fully transparent.12

  Fair enough, one could say. No one likes anyone rummaging around in their private life. Who would criticise Freud for wanting to resist the indiscrete curiosity of biographers and historians? With Freud, however, this reserve (this censure) was combined with a very active and highly public autobiographical writing, which, moreover, he merged with the presentation of the psychoanalytic theory itself. From this perspective, one cannot reduce Freud’s manipulation of his biography to a simple private affair, without consequence for psychoanalysis. The presentation of the theory was intimately bound to the the founder’s self-presentation, and what affects one inevitably affects the other.

  Freud: History. – The best way of understanding psycho-analysis is still by tracing its origin and development.13

  It was very early, from his first synoptic presentation of psychoanalysis, the ‘Five lectures on psychoanalysis’ presented at the Clark conference in 1909, that Freud started to present his doctrine in the form of an autobiographical narrative. Even if the first sentence attributed the paternity of psychoanalysis to Josef Breuer, the rest of the text retraced Freud’s own evolution, from the abandonment of cathartic hypnosis up to the application of psychoanalysis to the problem of artistic creation, passing by the successive discoveries of repression, the meaning of dreams and infantile sexuality. This mode of autobiographical exposition was only accentuated in his ‘History of the psychoanalytic movement’ and the ‘Short account of psychoanalysis’, and culminated in his ‘Autobiographical study’, which had been requested by L. R. Grote for the fourth volume of his Die Medizin der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen [Contemporary Medicine in Autobiography].

  Freud: I have already more than once published papers upon the same line as the present one, papers which, from the nature of the subject, have dealt more with personal considerations than is usual or than would otherwise have been necessary . . . Since I must not contradict myself and since I have no wish to repeat myself exactly, I must endeavour to construct a narrative in which subjective and objective attitudes, biographical and historical interests, are combined in a new proportion.14

  But why, we may ask, does ‘the nature of the subject’ require such an emphasis on ‘personal considerations’? We have become so used to this autobiographical presentation of psychoanalysis that we no longer notice the oddness of this statement. After all, why should there be any intrinsic link between psychoanalysis and Freud’s person?

  It is not so much the autobiographical form as such which is a problem, for Freud was not the first pioneer of psychology and of psychotherapy to have adopted it – one thinks of the memoirs of Wundt, Stanley Hall, August Forel, Emil Kraepelin, Albert Moll, Havelock Ellis and later Jung.15 There was also, from the 1930s, a systematic collection of autobiographical accounts from the principal figures in psychology, such as Pierre Janet, William McDougall, James Mark Baldwin, J. B. Watson, William Stern, Edouard Claparède, Jean Piaget and Kurt Goldstein. One need only peruse the volumes of this monumental History of Psychology in Autobiography,16 initially published under the editorship of Carl Murchison, to see that a number of the autobiographies of Freud’s contemporaries were no less ‘subjective’, tendentious and lacunary than his.17 That of Watson in particular cedes nothing to Freud in terms of aggressive invective.

  John Broadus Watson: The War played havoc with my work . . . I returned to Washington and was transferred to the Aviation Medical Corps to work under Colonel Crabtree on oxygen deprivation. Did some work of an unsatisfactory nature, got into trouble because my own Corps asked me to write them, directly and not through military channels, what I thought of the famous ‘Rotation Test.’ I was nearly court-martialed for doing so. I was returned by Colonel Crabtree to Aviation with the notation ‘that he be not allowed to serve his country in his scientific capacity, but he be sent to the line’; in other words, the wish was implied that I be killed speedily . . . The whole army experience was a nightmare to me. Never have I seen such incompetence, such extravagance, such a group of overbearing, inferior men. Talk of putting a Negro in uniform!18

  However, none of Freud’s contemporaries appear to have linked their theories to their own person, and for a good reason: that would have meant putting into doubt the objectivity of the theory, in making it an expression of the theorist’s subjectivity.19 By contrast, Freud never ceased to affirm the objective and subjective, universal and local character of psychoanalytic theory.

  Freud: No one need be surprised at the subjective character of the contribution I propose to make here to the history of the psycho-analytic movement, nor need anyone wonder at the part I play in it. For psycho-analysis is my creation . . . I consider myself justified in maintaining that even to-day no one can know better than I do what psycho-analysis is, how it differs from other ways of investigating the life of the mind, and precisely what should be called psycho-analysis and what would better be described by some other name.20

  Freud, regarding Jung and the Zurich school: They are unwilling to give up their connection with psycho-analysis, as whose representatives they became known to the world, and prefer to give it out that psycho-analysis has changed. At the Munich Congress I found it necessary to clear up this confusion, and I did so by declaring that I did not recognize the innovations of the Swiss as legitimate continuations and further developments of the psycho-analysis that originated with me.21

  Here, Freud inscribes psychoanalysis within a patrilineal descent: what is not of his lineage, what does not descend directly from him, the father of psychoanalysis, should not bear the name of psychoanalysis. But if psychoanalysis is Freudian, this should by no means be understood in the manner in which one speaks of ‘Newtonian’ physics or ‘Pasteurian’ medicine. Whatever the historical role of Newton or Pasteur in the theories which bear their name, their subjectivity and personality do not play a role in the theories themselves or the debates and controversies to which they gave rise. That it was Sir Isaac Newton or another who formulated the laws set forth in Principia is not important to the physicist who proposes to test, extend or contest them. The movement of the modern sciences, in as much as they have put forward theories or general ontologies capable of creating a universal consensus, is linked to what Merton called scientific ‘communism’, i.e., the rejection of the idea of private property in matters of knowledge. The critique of the argument from authority, understood either in the rationalist perspective of Descartes or in the empiricist perspective of Boyle, amounts to the same thing: in
each instance it is a matter of appealing to a ‘clear and distinct idea’ or to a ‘matter of fact’ whose evidence is binding on everyone and can be repeated by anyone, independently of the personage of the scholar. For moderns, knowledge is only legitimate when it is impersonal enough for everyone to agree about it, in other words: when it belongs to no one in particular. As Steven Shapin has noted, extending the works of Niklas Luhmann and Anthony Giddens,22 one of the most critical features of the ‘scientific revolution’ under way in the seventeenth century was the progressive abandonment of the trust placed in the individual testimony of persons judged to be of integrity and virtue in favour of neutral and anonymous institutions, founded on mechanisms of transindividual verification and self-regulation.

  Steven Shapin: Modernity guarantees knowledge not by reference to virtue but to expertise. When we give our trust to – ‘have faith in’ – modern systems of technology and knowledge, our faith is now widely said not to be in the moral character of the individuals concerned but in the genuine expertise attributed to the institutions. The expertise of individuals is itself considered to be vouched for by the institutions from which they speak and which are the ultimate sources of that expertise.23

  By contrast, Freud seems to return to a premodern position when he insists on the moral qualities which enabled him alone to reveal that which had remained hidden until then to all other mortals. Indeed, if the psychoanalytic ‘nature of the subject’ and Freud are so inseparable, then it is because it wasn’t sufficient to stumble on the unconscious to ‘discover’ it. Courage and a staunch heart were necessary to be able to confront the somber truth of sexuality and the innumerable resistances which it aroused. Only a man without fear and above reproach could face such a daunting task, namely Freud.

  Freud to Marie Bonaparte, 16 December 1927: If you had known Breuer, he was a great mind, a mind quite superior to me. I had only one thing: courage to stand up against the majority, faith in myself.24

  Freud: I treated my discoveries as ordinary contributions to science and hoped they would be received in the same spirit. But . . . I understood that from now onwards I was one of those who have ‘disturbed the sleep of the world,’ as Hebbel says, and that I could not reckon upon objectivity and tolerance. Since, however, my conviction of the general accuracy of my observations and conclusions grew even stronger, and since neither my confidence in my own judgment nor my moral courage were precisely small, the outcome of the situation could not be in doubt.25

  But this isn’t all. Freud still had to surmount the internal resistances to the truth, otherwise he would never have been able to confront the external obstacles which he met with along the way. This is a central element in the story that Freud tells us, which explains why it was he alone who ‘discovered’ the unconscious. No one was capable of confronting the truth of unconscious without the aid of analysis. Consequently, the primal analyst had to have been a self-analyst. Freud, we are told, was the first in the history of humanity who analysed himself and it was thus that he could lift the repressions which prevented his predecessors and contemporaries, indeed all of humanity, from seeing the truth. In his ‘History of the psychoanalytic movement’, Freud claimed that it was thanks to the analysis of the dreams of his patients and his own that he found the courage to proceed despite the opprobrium which he was subject to.

  Freud: It was only my success in this direction that enabled me to persevere . . . Moreover, I soon saw the necessity of carrying out a self-analysis, and this I did with the help of a series of my own dreams which led me back through all the events of my childhood; and I am still of the opinion to-day that this kind of analysis may suffice for anyone who is a good dreamer and not too abnormal.26

  The theory impeccably wraps around itself, explaining its own discovery. The indissoluble linkage which Freud established between his object and his own person now becomes clear: he himself was the ‘royal road’ to the unconscious. Henceforth, there would be no other route to it. In place of the ideal of a replication of an objective experience, independent of the experimenters, was substituted the mimetic emulation of the master, of the primal analyst who alone knew what others didn’t. Psychoanalysis was indeed Freud’s science.

  The politics of self-analysis

  Sándor Ferenczi to Freud, 17 March 1911: There has certainly never been any intellectual movement in which the personality of the discoverer has played such a great and indispensable role as yours has done in psychoanalysis.27

  Harry K. Wells: Psychoanalysis proper is essentially the product of Freud’s self-analysis.28

  Ernst Kris: The first and perhaps most significant result of Freud’s self-analysis was the step from seduction theory to full insight into the significance of infantile sexuality . . . In the summer and autumn of 1897 his self-analysis revealed the essential features of the Oedipus complex and enabled him to understand the nature of Hamlet’s inhibition. Insight into the role of the erotogenic zones in the development of the libido followed.29

  Ernest Jones: In the summer of 1897 . . . Freud undertook his most heroic feat – a psychoanalysis of his own unconscious . . . Yet the uniqueness of the feat remains. Once done it is done forever. For no one ever again can be the first to explore those depths . . . What indomitable courage, both intellectual and moral, must have been needed!30

  Eissler: Here we return to the enigma of Freud’s personality . . . His findings had to be wrested in the face of his own extreme resistances – the self-analysis being comparable, in terms of the danger involved, to Benjamin Franklin’s flying a kite in a thunderstorm in 1752, in order to investigate the laws of electricity. The next two persons who tried to repeat his experiments were both killed.31

  The self-analysis, always described by Freud’s biographers as heroic, unprecedented and superhuman, is at the core of the Freudian legend. It is therefore instructive to trace how and why it acquired this centrality. At the outset, there was nothing unique or original in practising self-analysis, conceived as introspective self-observation. Freud’s self-analysis was only slowly and gradually elevated to the presently quasi-mythic place at the heart of the psychoanalytic movement.

  Thomas Hobbes: Whosoever looketh into himself, and considereth what he doth, and when he does think, opine, reason, hope, feare, &c, and upon what grounds; he shall thereby read and know, what are the thoughts, and Passions of all men, upon like occasions.32

  Immanuel Kant: The wish to play the spy upon one’s self . . . is to reverse the natural order of cognitive powers . . .The desire for self-investigation is either already a disease of the mind (hypochondria) or will lead to such a disease and ultimately to the madhouse.33

  Auguste Comte: The thinker cannot divide himself into two, of whom one reasons whilst the other observes him reason. The organ observed and the organ observing being, in this case, identical, how could observation take place? This pretended psychological method is then radically null and void.34

  William James: Like most psychologists . . . he makes of his personal peculiarities a rule.35

  Placed back in the wide frame of psychology at the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth, Freud’s self-analysis is only a chapter in the history of introspection. It is important to recall that throughout the nineteenth century, despite the strictures against it expressed by figures such as Kant and Auguste Comte, introspection continued to be the main method of philosophical psychology. Initially, this hardly changed with the advent of the new ‘scientific’ psychology. Franz Brentano maintained that psychology, like any other natural science, had to be based on perception and experience, straightforwardly including self-perception in this.

  Brentano: Above all, however, its source is to be found in the inner perception of our own mental phenomena.36

  For the new psychology, inner experience appeared as the prize domain for exploration. Thus it was natural that psychologists would practise self-observation and self-experimentation (which was still used in medicine at this
time). The identically titled works of Alfred Maury and Joseph Delbœuf, Sleep and Dreams,37 are good examples of this introspective genre. At the same time, which seems strange to us today, the first ‘subjects’ of the new experimental psychology were the experimenters themselves – Fechner, Hering, Helmholtz and Ebbinghaus.38 Even in Wundt’s laboratory, where the experimenters also acted as subjects, the experimental procedures were essentially intended to render introspection more reliable and replicable, and in no respect to eliminate it. It was only later, with the famous debate on ‘imageless thought’, that introspection was gradually abandoned as a method in psychology, notably in favour of the third-person experimentation promoted by behaviourism, with its methodological rejection of all private mental states. From this perspective, Freud’s decision at the end of the summer of 1897 to take himself as his investigative object was not exceptional in the context of the time. On the contrary, it was perfectly routine and predictable.

  Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 14 August 1897: The chief patient I am preoccupied with is myself. My little hysteria, though greatly accentuated by my work, has resolved itself a little further . . . The analysis is more difficult than any other. It is, in fact, what paralyzes my psychic strength for describing and communicating what I have won so far. Still, I believe it must be done and is a necessary intermediary stage in my work.39