One of my first reactions while reading the biography of Sigmund Freud (author H.-M. Lohmann) was the desire to change the photo on the cover. After all, Freud didn’t start out as his own stern portrait!
Why not place there, for example, an image of the fourteen-year-old boy who received a collection of Ludwig Börne’s works as a gift. The only book he kept from his youth. One of the essays had a title in the spirit of modern “motivators”: “The Art of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days.” It contained a passage like this: “Take a sheet of paper and for three days write without falsity or hypocrisy everything that comes to mind. Write everything you think about yourself, about… — and in three days you yourself will be amazed by the new, original thoughts you had” (c). Of course, Sigmund forgot about this episode. But many years later, the method of free association “emerged.”
Perhaps it would also be appropriate to include a photo of 21-year-old Sigmund Freud, who called philosophy “speculative constructs” and immersed himself in zoological research. Two named scholarships from the Ministry of Education funded scientific trips for further study. In this work, Freud first expressed the idea of intersexuality (the results were published).
Or maybe a picture of the 26-year-old poor and in-love Freud? For the sake of marrying Martha, whom he “immediately fell madly in love with,” and to support a family, he abandoned his ambition. His “theoretical career” and professorship. You won’t believe it — for Sigmund Freud, medical practice was merely a means of earning money. An unloved means.
Or perhaps the 30-year-old Freud, experimenting with an unknown alkaloid — cocaine. The five works he published on it during this period are today considered “early studies in modern pharmacology.” Unfortunately, he also “prematurely noted the possibility of cocaine addiction forming.” Meanwhile, his fellow student Karl Koller discovered cocaine’s anesthetic properties. Guess who earned scientific fame and who got a stain on their biography?
To see the mature Sigmund Freud, an honorary doctor of Clark University (Worcester, Massachusetts), delivering lectures by invitation.
The noble academic portrait sets a certain expectation for the biography’s text. But Lohmann doesn’t give the reader a chance to follow the usual measured path. He describes Freud’s life as full of life — forgive the tautology. That is, full of contradictions and unexpected outcomes.
Sigmund Freud had no intention of practicing therapy and saw no place for psychoanalysis in the clinic. He considered psychoanalysis a science that universities must study and develop. The result? Psychoanalysis evolved from practice.
Freud believed that psychotherapy could and should be practiced not by doctors. That it would work effectively in tandem with a physician. The result? Only today is psychoanalysis beginning its difficult path toward recognition as a separate profession.
Freud had a perfect command of the German language and respected German culture. Yet he experienced firsthand how this culture descended into barbarism. This story — most people would choose as their leader “a man with the soul of an artist”…
In his theory, Freud viewed women as “inferior men” and treated them accordingly, based on his upbringing (and personal history). Yet in an article for a women’s bourgeois movement journal, he openly defended “the relaxation of repressive sexual morality.” It was also Sigmund Freud who first introduced women as separate subjects into scientific discourse.
Freud supported the exclusion of women from higher education and found no intellectual equal in his wife. Yet he sought communication with the most intelligent and educated women of his time. As for his wife, the modern reader might smile ironically. Indeed, what could be expected of a woman raised under rigid patriarchal norms, whose peak intellectual plasticity coincided with childbirth and childcare? Six children. Roughly every two years — a child. Who had to manage the household so that the family maintained its social standing. Who did not experience “positive discrimination” in terms of personal development. Why should she have been a worthy conversational partner, Madame?
While openly declaring his atheistic views (in bourgeois Austria!), Freud simultaneously declared his Jewishness and defended his right to it.
Freud dreamed of scientific recognition and a Nobel Prize. Yet the highest award he received was for a literary work. The Goethe Prize, with which he was honored, “was considered the highest literary distinction in the Weimar Republic” (c).
Today we know the results of his work. From a distance, it often seems that everything happened “on its own.” But how many times could the course of Freud’s life and the history of psychoanalysis have taken a different turn? The book also has a chapter, “Psychoanalysis After Freud.” Here, too, there are contradictions.
Interestingly, for the back cover, the author provided his own smiling photo. What would Freud have said about that?
