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Freud and The Problem of God by Hans Küng (1979)

Hans Küng (1928 to 2021) was a Swiss Catholic priest, theologian, and author. These are notes on his 1979 book, ‘Freud and the Problem of God.’

1. The genesis of Freud’s atheism

For the German tradition, ‘theology has been dissolved in the nitric acid of the natural sciences’, so said the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. Medicine and physiology were at the centre of German materialism, a movement which aimed to show that the activity of the mind was entirely the result of physiological changes in the brain.

Freud’s father, Jacob Freud, was an orthodox Jew who never converted to Christianity (unlike Marx’s father). Freud was taught Jewish doctrine by his mother and a schoolteacher. In his autobiography, Freud says that early Bible classes had ‘an enduring effect on the direction of my interest.’

Jacob and his first wife had two sons; by his third wife, Amalia, he had eight offspring! Freud was the eldest. A childhood aversion to his distant, forbidding father and the young beauty of his mother led to Freud’s recognition of the Oedipus Complex in himself.

Freud’s early religious experiences:

  1. The Catholic nanny who took Freud to Mass and explained Heaven and Hell to him. Freud used to come home and parody the arm-waving of the priests to his family’s amusement (laying the basis of his later paper Obsessive Actions and Religious Rituals)
  2. Antisemitism: from schooldays onwards Freud suffered persecution by antisemitic Catholics. A founding moment in his life was when, age 12, his father admitted to him how he had acquiesced in his hat being knocked into the mud by racist hoodlums.

When Freud entered university in 1873 there had just been a stock market crash and many in politics and the press explicitly blamed ‘the Jews’.

Freud entered university (aged 17) to study medicine with the aim of seeking answers to the riddles of life rather than merely curing people.

Student Freud fell under the influence of Ernst Brucke, head of the Institute of Physiology, a follower of Hermann von Helmholtz. Helmholtz was a genius who, aged 26, helped secure recognition for the First Law of Thermodynamics (the sum total of energy remains constant in an isolated system). Together with the law of Entropy (energy cannot be turned back into mass without some loss – the Second Law of Thermodynamics) these form the most fundamental of all laws of nature.

Helmholtz later went on to do pioneering work in eye-surgery, optics and physiology. A school grew around him committed to the positivist creed, confident that science would one day be able to explain all the activity in the universe, including all activities of the human mind, on the basis of purely physical and chemical laws.

Brucke was a founder-member of this school in Berlin. When Brucke came to Vienna to head up the Institute of Physiology, he brought this powerful materialistic ideology with him. Freud studied under Brucke for 6 years, years he later recalled as the happiest of his life.

Physicalist physiology got rid of the idealist philosophy of Nature and eliminated the vitalism of the Aristotelian and Scholastic tradition i.e. the belief that God created organisms with forms and purposes, higher goals and objectives of their own. No, said physicalist physiology: all life can be explained in terms of the purely causal, deterministic forces described by biochemistry.

Freud applied these metaphors to clinical psychological observation: he saw the psyche as a machine reacting to the increase and release of tension (the unpleasure-pleasure principle) as a result of the demands of internal instincts on the one hand and external stimuli on the other (the basic argument of An Outline of Psychoanalysis).

For Küng, Freud made the mistake of turning science – a method of investigation – into a worldview – an Idol, in the Baconian sense.

Freud set up his private practice in nervous diseases in 1886, aged 30, on Easter Sunday. His wife, Martha Bernays, came from an eminent orthodox Jewish family in Hamburg. Freud suppressed her religious practices ruthlessly (she later said nothing upset her so much in her life as Freud forbidding her to light the holy candles on the first Friday of their marriage).

They had three sons (Ernst, named after Brucke; Martin, named after Jean-Martin Charcot, the French pioneer of nervous diseases; and Oliver, named after Oliver Cromwell) and two daughters, Sophie and Anna (born in 1895).

In Küng’s opinion, Freud made two great breakthroughs:

a) A theory of the unconscious

Freud’s achievement was to differentiate between the Primary Process of the Unconscious, the vast majority of mental life – and the preconscious and conscious mind, very much the Secondary Process; and to devise a method for examining the workings of the Unconscious.

Freud’s theory that unacceptable wishes are repressed only to return as symptoms. These are expressed in free association so the patient comes to know himself to his depths. All this occurs through transference i.e. replaying the repressed feelings in the privileged arena of ‘the therapeutic alliance’.

Through transference the patient is led to a lasting restructuring of his mental processes, the abolition of morbid symptoms, and restored to the ability to love and work. Interpretation is also carried out on dreams and parapraxes.

b) A theory of libido

Freud’s theory of libido hugely widened the concept of sexuality, extending it far beyond the specifics of genital sexuality in the present, and extending it back in time to cover all of human existence from the earliest part of life i.e. the invention of the concept of childhood sexuality.

Doing this enabled explanations of almost all sexual activity, perversions, love, affection etc to be brought under the rubric of one theory, rather than simply being rejected as extrinsic to human nature, ‘degenerate’ or ‘immoral’, as previously.

The progression of Freud’s medical-scientific investigations can be summarised: cerebral physiology > psychopathology > depth psychology > theory of everything.

2. Freud on the origin and nature of religion

Freud’s critique of religion is twofold:

  1. he tries to explain away the history of religion
  2. he tries to undermine the psychological basis of religion

1. The history

There are two broad theological movements:

  • Degenerationist: pagan religions are distorted versions of the original pristine version of the True Religion clearly understood by Adam and Eve; then came the Fall, the Tower of Babel and it’s been downhill ever since.
  • Meliorist: religion is evolving into higher and purer spiritual forms from its early primitive, half-savage forms.

The 18th century Enlightenment philosophers were degenerationists. For them denominational religion was a distortion of the original clear light of Reason which God had given to Mankind, which had been distorted by popular custom and the inventions of priests.

The nineteenth century saw Enlightenment Nature-theism transmuted into a Science of Religion. Simultaneously, colonial discoveries and the improvement of philology and textual criticism, provided a number of tools for paring away the ‘nonsense’ which had accumulated around the pure creed. The high point of this tradition is the work of Ludwig Feuerbach, who sought to remove the superstitions and legends accumulated over time in order to get back to the original pure creed of Christ.

Darwin turned the theory of degeneration – religion starting from the divine heights – on its head. Evolution implied a struggle upwards of intellect and reason from the savage swamp. This prompted a revolution in the ‘Science of Religion’; instead of hypothesising about what the early and purest creed must have been, scholars now examined earliest religions to ‘get at the heart’ of belief.

It is as a result of this new model that specialists devised a developmental model of religions, speculating that all religions start with primitive animism – then proceed to pagan polytheism – and then evolve to an intellectual and spiritual climax in monotheism (with a possible pre-animistic stage of belief in a world-soul, or mana).

An ethnologist called W. Robertson Smith thought the key parameter was not spirits and gods but the development of ancient rites and rituals: totemism, always accompanied by systems of taboos (‘Thou shalt not kill the totem animal’, ‘Thou shalt not marry thy sister’ (exogamy) and so on). (Taboo is Polynesian for untouchable). Thus civilisations pass through a series of stages: Magic, Religion, Science. These kinds of theories were backed up by the tremendous encyclopedic systematisation of Sir James Frazer (whose masterwork, ‘The Golden Bough’, Freud was such a big fan of – see his own annotated copy included in the exhibition at the Freud Museum).

This was the background Freud drew on when writing Totem and Taboo (1912) – at the suggestion of Carl Jung (still in the Movement at the point).

In Totem and Taboo Freud tries to assimilate the underlying fear of incest expressed in so many taboos (i.e. primitive morality) with the developmental model of religions, and with the ubiquity of totemism based round a holy animal who is eaten in an annual festival. Freud tries to draw a parallel between the religious practice of ‘primitive’ man and the behaviour of modern, urban obsessional neurotics, and between the savage’s reverence for the totem animal, representing the Father, with the explicit rise of the Father to pre-eminence in monotheistic religions.

In explaining the rise of totem animals Freud points to the suggestive way that young children initially like animals but then develop fears of them as they unconsciously project their Oedipal feelings (feelings of rage and of reciprocal anger) onto them.

The classic example in Freud’s writings is the case study of Little Hans, who was petrified of horses. This irrational phobia analyses out into fear they will bite him; and soon enough it is discovered that the horses in fact stand for the father who Han is afraid will chop his penis off.

To revere a totem all the year round and then kill it and eat it in a festive meal is, for Freud, a beautiful demonstration of Oedipal ambivalence, love/hate, revere/kill.

For Freud the Oedipus Complex is at the centre of all religions. The difference with Christianity is that it is a Son-religion. We identify with the Son crucified to appease the guilt we all feel at the communal assassination of the primal Father. To identify with Christ is to be relieved of the guilt of the primal parricide which Freud posits as the basis of human society in Totem and Taboo. It is to become free, rather as the neurotic, after analysis, is freed from his irrational obsessions and becomes free and autonomous to work and love.

2. The essence

Religious belief is an illusion, the fulfilment of the oldest deepest wishes of Mankind, childish wishes for:

  • protection from an uncaring world
  • universal justice (recognition of our own deserts, punishment of those who have wronged us)
  • eternal life

Freud’s diachronic history of religion – comparing early religion with childhood stages of thought – is complemented by his synchronic analysis – comparing contemporary, modern religious belief and practice with the behaviour and motivation of neurotics.

Freud doesn’t really say this fulfilment of deep wishes makes religion wrong – only that all aspects of it can be explained away in other, more scientific terms. Now, he says, as we acquire more knowledge about its origins and nature, religion is gradually dying (just as their as neurosis disappears from a gradually enlightened patient).

By contrast with religion, which fosters and encourages illusions about reality, Freud sees Science as providing an education for reality, in order to abolish childish reliance on religion and rebuild morality and social institutions on a clearer, unillusioned understanding of human nature.

We must grow up, master our own resources for real life, concentrate on this earthly life, prepare to build the New Jerusalem here on earth.

3. Critiques of Freud

In his 1927 pamphlet, The Future of An Illusion, Freud said that attacking religion may do psychoanalysis harm and the book proceeded to do just that by rousing the wrath of churchmen and moralists against him and his movement.

So Freud tried to emphasise that psychoanalysis is a neutral scientific tool, like infinitesimal calculus, a specialised tool for examining the human psyche. It could equally well be used by the defenders of religion.

Eugene Bleuler

Eugene Bleuler was one of the first to take issue with Freud. Bleuler, head of the Bergholzli mental institute in Zurich, Jung’s boss and man who gave us the terms ‘depth psychology’, ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘ambivalence’ was an early convert to psychoanalysis, but he could not go the whole way with Freud.

He granted the discovery of the unconscious but asked, Is it right to consider it only negatively, as a reservoir of repressed wishes, of the dark side? Is it right to regard the psyche as a simple machine, a mechanism within which psychic forces trigger each other and energy is circulated as in a sophisticated steam engine? Is it right to see the human animal motivated only by sexuality (even in the special widened sense Freud gave the word)? Is it right to see the mind as entirely determined by events in the distant past and not as a creative, proactive organism capable of creating new meanings and goals?

Alfred Adler

In 1911 Adler published his Critique of the Freudian Sexual Theory of Mental Life and was expelled from the Psychoanalytic Movement as a result.

A convinced socialist and, later, friend of Trostsky, Adler believed in looking at the individual as a whole in relation to the social world and all his relations with it. The aim of therapy is to build up the individual’s integrity and wholeness. Neuroses start in inferiority (the inferiority complex) and maladjusted attempts to overcome it (“the Masculine Protest”). The patient must abandon these ‘egocentric’ positions and get involved with the group. Happiness is community-based (you can clearly see Adler’s socialist bias).

(Although he powerfully denied Adler’s views once he’d been booted out of the movement, Freud later accepted some of his ideas about aggression. Some critics say Freud’s 1922 revision of instinct-theory dividing instinct into two drives, Eros and the death drive, are indebted to Adler.)

Jung

In 1913 Jung left the Movement and refined his own theories into what became Analytic Psychology. Jung redefined the libido as undifferentiated psychic energy (effectively denying its sexual nature) and claimed that it produces four processes – thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. Each of these is governed by a dialectic, thus:

  • thinking – the rational evaluation of right and wrong
  • feeling – you divide feelings into pleasurable and unpleasurable
  • sensation – you divide into external and internal stimuli
  • intuition – according as it is effective or ineffective

The individual is governed by two modes of approach to these four processes:

  • extravert – influenced by objective factors
  • introvert – influenced by external factors

The two modes apply to each of the four processes thus giving you eight character types. Whenever the one mode of each process dominates, the opposite mode rules the unconscious, and you have to get to grips with this dark side of the soul, ‘the shadow’.

The psyche is also defined by whether it is dominated by anima (female) or animus (male). Whichever dominates, you have to accept the opposite into your life. And you have to reconcile the ‘persona’, the face we make to meet the outside world, with the demands of the ego.

The aim of Jungian therapy is to bring all these facets of the personality into alignment into one integrated personality. (This brief account leaves out all Jung’s theories of the individual and the collective unconscious, archetypes, myths and symbols etc.)

For Adler, religion is the expression of the will-to-overcome humanity’s perceived inferiority in the face of implacable reality: religion works towards an ideal future perfection. For Adler, God is the perfection of a thoroughly human ideal of overcoming. Adler sees a place for religion in the perfect human society since it reflects a thoroughly human wish – but he doesn’t believe in it.

Jung blamed Freud’s thoroughgoing rejection of religion on his being a child of the late-Victorian rationalist materialist worldview (as described above). For Jung, religion is true insofar as it is believed. Jung wanted to remain a Christian but thought denominational Christianity was chaotic and confused and stood in need of further clarifying about the human soul: and this is what his depth psychology could provide.

Neither Jung nor Adler answer the big question set by Freud: Is religion nothing more than a fulfilment of mankind’s oldest deepest wishes?

Küng’s critique

Freud’s developmental history of religion (animism >pantheism > monotheism > science) is nowhere now taken seriously. All these belief systems exist in various places in the world but have nowhere been found to follow this pattern. Sometimes they’ve gone ‘backwards’. In many places aspects of the supposed different levels of development exist happily alongside each other. Nowhere is there proof of development from one stage to the next.

Nowadays Freud’s optimistic scientism has been replaced by a belief that science may have reached its limits in explaining the origins of the human mind. We even consider that primitive peoples know better than us how to live in sympathy with their environment and that – far from leading us to a utopia cleansed of irrationalism – there may be something inherently destructive in scientific enquiry.

In 1912, the same year as Totem and Taboo was published, Emile Durkheim, the founder of modern sociology, refuted Freud’s idea of primitive religions as slavishly superstitious, but said that they contained a hard core of reality, in laying down codes of practice which had their origins in relationships in primitive society, the clan.

Durkheim was followed by most modern anthropologists and sociologists in looking no further for meaning than the internal rules of each individual tribe and culture. (Compare the anthropological structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss.)

Thus neither the degenerative or the evolutionary theory of religion can be proved or disproved. Modern ‘primitive’ peoples aren’t photographs of the early days of humanity, as Freud and his sources thought. They themselves are the result of immense histories and traditions, albeit unwritten.

(One modern theory to explain their lack of development is to assign a crucial role to writing; whoever learns to write can leave histories; histories can be compared with modern practice and so enable the beginnings of a rational critique of social practices.)

Today there is less historical speculation, less moral-drawing, more studying of patterns of culture in situ using the functionalist approach pioneered by Bronislaw Malinowski.

At the other end of the scale modern research shows that religion has always existed. 100,000 years ago Neanderthal Man made grave furnishings; 150,000 years ago Heidelberg Man apparently offered the first fruits to his gods. The question has become not to explain away the existence of religion but to understand that for primitive man everything was religious. The more modern challenge is to explain away the rise of the secular, the scientific worldview.

Even Freud’s facts are largely wrong: totemism is not found among the beginnings of religion; among hundreds of totemic tribes discovered and documented only four knew of a rite which even vaguely resembled killing and eating the father. For anthropologist Mircea Eliade, the triumph of Freud’s views for a while was due to fashion: he established a fashionable doctrine which explains nothing in history or the rest of the world but does help explain the western intellectual’s own sense of dissatisfaction with established religion but obscure sense of guilt at the prospect of overthrowing it.

Freud claimed that psychoanalysis was a neutral tool for the cure of souls, practicable by lay and pious alike.

All Freud’s actual arguments for atheism are old, taken from Feuerbach et al but given new impetus by being underpinned by this new method of exploring the psyche. For example, all ‘projection theories’ of God as fictional answer to suffering humanity’s wishes and fantasies stem back to Feuerbach.

But Feuerbach’s, Marx’s and Freud’s atheisms are hypotheses which have not been proved. Against the reality of experience they set theory; and in the end, for all the subtlety of their critique of the social, economic or psychological determinants of the formation of religious belief in individuals and societies, no conclusion can be drawn from their theories about the existence or non-existence of God.

All human believing, hoping, loving contain elements of projection. But its object need not therefore be merely a projection. (page 77)

From the psychological point of view, faith is always going to look like the projection of early father-figures but this does not mean that God does not exist. That’s to say, the mere existence of a wish for God does not throw doubt on the actual existence of God. Perhaps it’s true:

Perhaps this being of our longings and dreams does actually exist. (page 79)

Thus Freud’s atheism (which he professed long before the discovery of psychoanalysis) turns out to ‘a pure speculation, an unproved postulate, a dogmatic claim’, just as dogmatic as anything laid down by his hated Church.

Freud’s scientism

Nowadays it is Freud’s belief in the ability of science to tell us the truth about the world, and to tell us how to behave in the light of this truth, which seems dogmatic and irrational.

Oskar Pfister, prophetically enough, criticised Freud’s position as itself an illusion before the Second World War; and since the experience of National Socialism, communist totalitarianism and the forces unleashed by the Western development of atomic bombs, the promises of atheistic science have themselves come to look deeply compromised.

The nineteenth century positivistic tradition of science delivering a utopian future now seem ludicrous. (To be fair, Freud towards the end of his life became increasingly pessimistic about this). The ideology of total planning based on rational analyses of human nature and human needs now lies in ruins: we are resigned to living with our imperfections.

For many people it is godless technocratic progress which has become the monster from which we must free ourselves. Cannot religion in fact help here, by providing a morality, a synthesis with science to create a humanistic morality?

Or will society create a new space of total disillusion with both modes of thought, neither militantly atheist nor evangelistically believing – simply drifting from belief to belief in a vast supermarket of the soul?

Is psychoanalysis a Jewish science?

Yes, says Kung. Freud was a stern Jewish moralist in a long tradition of stern Jewish moralists. He taught that all decent human life, all civilisation, rests on the suppression of sexuality, instinct and childhood gratification.

Everywhere in Freud you sense the return of the repressed legalism of the Jewish tradition which he ostentatiously rejected. There is little talk of joy or pleasure in Freud (this is what the French brought to it in the ‘jouissance’ of Barthes et al, bringing actual sex into all Freud’s talk about sex).

No, Freud’s psychology is deeply indebted to the repressed heritage of ancient Mosaic legalism. And this helps explain his lifelong obsession with Moses and his embarrassing attempts to explain away, to master, to over-write the mystery of Moses and Monotheism in his last work.

4. Critique of the critique

From Freud onwards every sphere of human knowledge has had to take account of the vast new terrain of the unconscious which Freud uncovered, and its impact on our lives. What Feuerbach wanted to achieve by a ‘cleansed’ philosophy, what Marx wanted to achieve by a science of social relations, Freud wanted to achieve through depth-psychology: an emancipation, a revaluation of the humanity of Man.

Kung concedes Freud’s criticisms of the failings of denominational religion and agrees that psychoanalysis can help in counselling etc. Psychoanalysis can liberate us from neurotic guilt feelings and help the neurotic subject return to autonomy. But it can’t relieve us of the fact of sin.

It can eliminate illness but it cannot answer ultimate questions about meaning and meaninglessness, life and death. Its aim is to bring things into consciousness, not to forgive; it is healing not salvation.

Küng’s advice to therapists is to be more religious.

Küng’s advice to theologians is to take more account of depth psychology.

Freud thought all neuroses were the result of repressed sexuality. On the contrary, Jung thought all neuroses were the result of what used to be called religion; the lack in people’s lives of a system to give their lives meaning or purpose. Jung criticises psychoanalysis for thinking the ego can stand up to the ‘dark side’ of the soul without the help of some revealed superhuman agency. In Jungian analysis this actually becomes the therapist and the therapeutic alliance.

Erich Fromm in Psychoanalysis and Religion sees two kinds of therapist:

  • the adjustment advisers
  • the doctors of the soul, committed to the optimum development of the self

For Fromm psychoanalysis is adaptable to humanitarian religion. ‘Wonder, rapture, becoming one with the world,’ all these feelings are generated in analysis, in the proper acknowledgement of the power of the id and the assent to life with all its imperfections. Fromm is an assimilationist. There should be no enmity between psychoanalysis and religion.

One of Freud’s problems was that he concentrated on an Old Testament punitive, superego-led religion; he completely failed to understand the quality of rational assent to the New Dispensation. For example, Freud tends to see Jesus only in terms of a revision of Judaism – Jesus as the sacrifice of the Son to the Father which ends the thousand years of Jewish guilt. Despite railing against it all his life, Freud showed surprisingly little understanding Christianity and its new creed of Love, of salvation through Love. (This was Pfister’s complaint also).

In pre-War Vienna Victorian sexual repression led to sex, instincts and the id being at the centre of investigations of psychic life. But, Küng argues, since the middle of the twentieth century there has been a steady growth in indulgence of all these instincts. Nowadays (when he was writing, in the 1970s) Küng thought that our biggest problems were caused by the opposite of repression, but by the overindulgence of the instincts and all the addictions and moral anarchy they lead to.

Since repression is no longer the problem it was in Freud’s day (1880s to 1910s) modern psychology has become more ego-orientated: how to give people a meaning and purpose, existential questions. The problem nowadays is one of spiritual emptiness. Technology may be daily triumphing over every aspect of our existence but it cannot finally give that existence a meaning. Küng (like Pfister before him) argues for a rational religion to cure the ill, prevent regression, channel grief and fear, help control the unbridled pleasure principle and contribute to healthy individuation.

Very late in the day, in 1933, when Hitler took power, Freud and Einstein exchanged letters on how to prevent another war. Freud seems in this late exchange to have suddenly grasped the reason behind, and the need for, a socially approved creed of Love.

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Posted by Simon on July 17, 2023

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Freud and His Followers by Paul Roazen (1975)

Paul Roazen (1936 to 2005) was a political scientist who became a leading historian of psychoanalysis. I first read this history of Freud and the psychoanalytic movement back in the early 1990s when it was only 15 or so years old. Now it’s getting on for 50 years old and, as I set off to read it again, I wondered about its value and relevance. Hasn’t it been superseded by more recent accounts with more modern perspectives?

Interviews

But, as I read on I discovered that this book has one really unique and enduring selling point which keeps it relevant. In 1964 Roazen set out to interview as many people as possible who had had direct experience and knowledge of Sigmund Freud. He managed to interview over 70 people who knew Freud personally; 40 or so who had taken part in the early movement or had a professional interest in its history; 25 of Freud’s actual patients; Freud’s sister-in-law, two daughters-in-law and three of Freud’s children.

(Roazen gives a full list of all those interviewed in an appendix. He also gives an extensive account of his interviewing methodology in the opening chapter.)

So even though this book is almost 50 years old, and the project itself began almost 60 years ago, the number and range of people he interviewed makes the book itself a unique historical record. While he was doing his research a steady stream of the interviewees, many in their 70s or 80s, passed away, slowly converting the book into a unique source of opinions from people who were patients of, trained under, or were directly related to Freud.

Having established his methodology, Roazen goes on to compare himself with the leading Freud biography of his day. From 1953 to 1957 Freud’s most loyal English disciple, Ernest Jones, wrote his epic three-volume biography of Freud. In this, as in all his other assessments and judgements, Roazen gives the impression of being thorough and balanced and fair. His view is that Jones was immensely thorough but, at many points, erred on the side of caution and discretion, not least to please Freud’s daughter Anna who, as early as the 1920s, had emerged as Freud’s heir and keeper of the flame and was to live on, protecting her father’s archive and reputation, until 1982.

So Roazen’s aim was to go beyond Jones, not by doing more work in the Freud archives (although he did gain unique access to the archive, as well as to the papers Jones acquired in researching his biography); but by using the method outlined above, by undertaking the most comprehensive possible set of interviews with people who knew Freud.

Context

This means that the book has much more context than a straight biography, in at least three distinct ways.

1. The followers

The most obvious way is indicated in the title of the book, which declares that it will treat Freud’s followers as thoroughly as the master. Hence, after spending 200 pages retelling the story of Freud’s early life, family, student days, tentative steps as a medical researcher, then covering the breakthrough into the invention of psychoanalysis and his development of it up to about 1910 – Roazen then devotes the remainder of this long book to a series of lengthy, in-depth chapters about ‘the followers’. These are:

  • Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Stekel (pages 187 to 233)
  • Jung (pages 235 to 300)
  • the followers who remained ‘loyal’, being Victor Tausk, Lou-Andreas-Salomé, Ernest Jones, Sandor Ferenczi, JJ Putnam, HW Frink, AA Brill (pages 304 to 386)
  • another rebel, Otto Rank (pages 389 to 413)
  • a chapter devoted to women followers: Ruth Mack Brunswick, Anna Freud, Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein (pages 415 to 478)
  • a short section about Erikson and Hartmann (pages 499 to 505)

All this before finally returning to the man himself in the final chapter to describe Freud’s decline, flight to England, and death. Well over half the book’s 520 or so pages of text are devoted to ‘the followers’.

2. Using the interview material

Early on, when dealing with Freud’s parents and birth and boyhood and so on, all the interview material Roazen goes to some trouble to explain right at the start of the book, isn’t used very much. Even when we get to the time Freud spent in Paris studying under Jean-Martin Charcot (October 1885 to January 1886), or his ten-year collaboration studying the origins of neuroses with Josef Breuer (1890 to 1900), or his intense correspondence with sounding board Wilhelm Fliess (1887 to 1904) – Roazen gives some quotes and opinions from his interview material but not enough to change the already established stories.

The benefit of the interview project really kicks in when Roazen starts to explain the theory and practice of psychoanalytical therapy itself, the famous talking cure. This is because he now quotes extensively from many of the actual patients Freud treated, and so you he starts to depart from all the official, stiff and often pompous descriptions which Freud and his followers gave in their writings, and depicts actual practice which is far more irregular, ad hoc, unpredictable than you would have imagined. Suddenly the narrative becomes really gripping, and really human. Roazen’s interviewees’ testimonies build up a vivid picture of a flawed and deeply complicated person.

This account feeds off in two directions. It links up with the idea of the ‘followers’ because many of the patients not only describe their therapy with Freud himself, but were farmed out to what, by the 1920s, had become a sizeable number of disciples in what was now an international Psychoanalytical Movement. My point being you don’t have to wait till the later chapters to hear about the followers, you begin to get a sense of which patients Freud assigned to which of his followers, and why, and how they fared, and sometimes the conversations which went on between, say Ferenczi or Deutsch, about a patient he’d given them.

There’s a fascinating section about how long an analysis should last, with a wild variation, from one or two months to 3 or 4 or 5 years, with some patients requiring top-ups for the rest of their lives (p.145). He even admitted, on a rare occasion, that analysis could in fact, last a lifetime (p.146).

It’s here, about page 140, that the book suddenly opens up and starts giving you all kinds of insights and information you don’t get from a standard biography.

If Freud allowed himself privileges which were not for younger and more inexperienced analysts, it was because he was above all an investigator and would try almost anything once. (p.139)

Suddenly, you start seeing Freud in the wider context of the broad Psychoanalytic Movement, at first regarding treatment of patients, then other issues, and this prepares you for what’s coming up, which is the major disagreements which caused the schisms.

3. The American context

Lastly, Roazen is an American academic living on the East Coast familiar with New York and New York psychoanalysts. So a thread running through the book (once it gets warmed up about page 140) is continual comparisons between Freud’s official writings and the (sometimes wild variation in his actual) therapeutic practice on the one hand – and the staid, dull, conformist practice of the American psychoanalysts Roazen appears to know or writes confidently about.

In a nutshell, the early psychoanalytic movement included quite a few madly inventive, not to say screwed-up, individuals who rang all possible changes on Freud’s original ideas, from modifying them, to introducing new concepts, to rejecting the entire thing and walking away to set up their own movements (Adler, Jung, Rank).

But when the founding fathers and mothers fled Europe with the rise of the Nazis and then the Second World War, they found themselves in a completely different culture, far less anarchic and individualistic, far more intensely capitalist and professionalised than the old world. And so the next generation of analysts, American-born, tended to be much more professional and regular and strict and boring.

Psychoanalysis grew so fast as a movement that it has sometimes oversold itself as therapy; Americans in particular have been guilty of this. (p.186)

This decline was part of the general disappointment which came to characterise the movement, and which Roazen mentions again and again:

Psychoanalysis began with the bold hope of freeing us from mental conflicts. Its history, however, records a series of retreats in its claims for therapeutic efficacy. Originally Freud proposed to apply depth psychology to all the human sciences. But by now psychoanalysts are largely content to restrict their profession to a medical specialty. Whereas Freud and his immediate followers were radical in their expectations and their promises, and considered themselves at odds with conventional society, success has now bred a very different group of psychoanalysts … Psychoanalysis as a field is now incapable of attracting people as original and, it should be said, as undisciplined as those who joined it half a century ago. (p.32)

Compare with the repeated criticism of contemporary (1975) New York analysts for being cold and distant (p.147). But the real criticism of American psychoanalysis is that it lost its theoretical energy, its radical charge, and became just one depth therapy among many others (p.388).

(Compare with Helene Deutsch’s disappointment, in later life, at the relative failure of analysis as a therapy, p.465.)

A lot later, Roazen summarises that the trend in American psychoanalysis has been towards emphasising the ego and the healthy-minded aspects of Freud’s work. It ‘hinges on Heinz Hartmann’s concept of the “autonomous” ego to resist regressions’ (p.473)

Recap

To recap, then, this is far superior to a standard biography because it a) quite quickly places Freud amid the burgeoning, squabbling world of his followers; b) Roazen’s unique interview material provides amazing insights into the actual practice of therapy in the 1920s and 30s, as well as the complex network of therapists and patients which surrounded the great man; and c) Roazen is viewing the whole thing from 30 or so years later, when the initial, explosive creativity of the movement has fizzled out (in America, anyway) into professional conformity. It went from being a radical revolution to a conservative profession. Freud unhappily anticipated this and tried to prevent it:

‘Because of the rarity of such a combination of qualities as are needed to form the true master of mental healing by the psychoanalytic method, psychoanalysis should always remain a vocation, a mission, and should never become (as unhappily it often does today) a mere occupation or business.’ (Freud quoted on page 143)

Topics

Rather than summarise the whole book, I’ll highlight interesting topics.

The roles of Charcot and Breuer

Charcot discovered that by implanting an idea into the unconscious mind, via hypnotism, he could trigger hysterical symptoms in a patient.

Breuer discovered that if you extracted a pathological idea from the unconscious by making it conscious, then a pathological symptom disappeared.

Is psychoanalysis a Jewish invention or profession?

Personally, I think it’s obvious that psychoanalysis was a Jewish invention, something to do with:

  • close scrutiny of the self
  • a Talmudic attention to texts and words for hidden meanings
  • the outsiderness of Jews in antisemitic central Europe made it easier for them to take unorthodox risks
  • a certain type of neurotic intensity which seems to be part of Jewish culture (this may be wrong, but my views are based on the novels of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and the movies of Woody Allen, all of which tend to ridicule goyim for being so much simpler, cruder and less obsessively reflective than Jews)

But because its founder and earliest adherents were all Jewish doesn’t make it a ‘Jewish science’. Obviously, its teachings have been taken up and developed by plenty of non-Jews and it works as a therapy for all kinds of people. In the same way that soul music is indisputably the invention of Black people, comes out of black social and musical culture, but can be enjoyed by anyone and has led plenty of white people to develop their own variations.

For what it’s worth, here are some of Roazen’s references to Jews and Jewishness in the book:

  • Freud could be suspicious of non-Jews. (p.36)
  • A Viennese Jewish analyst, Hanns Sachs, on moving to America and treating more gentile patients than he had in Europe, was worried how he could continue to analyse without Jewish stories. (p.42)
  • Freud remained sensitive to antisemitism and wary of all gentiles. He believed that basically there was no-one who was not antisemitic. (p.49)
  • To accomplish a great intellectual (rather than military) achievement was not only far more in accord with Jewish culture but was also in itself enough to establish the superiority of the Jewish spirit over the philistine Gentile world. (p.55)
  • Freud founded a great movement by which, in a sense, he sought to undermine Gentile values. (p.55)
  • As a Jew, Freud felt keenly the need for the help of the Gentile Jung. The Viennese psychoanalytic group was made up almost entirely of Jews, and Freud wanted psychoanalysis to be something more than a Jewish sect. (p.238)
  • ‘It is really easier for you than it is for Jung to follow my ideas, for in the first place you are completely independent, and then you are closer to my intellectual constitution because of racial kinship, while he as a Christian and a pastor’s son finds his way to me only against great inner resistances. His association with us is the more valuable for that. I nearly said that it was only by his appearance on the scene that psychoanalysis escaped the danger of becoming a Jewish national affair.’ Freud writing to Abraham (quoted page 239)
  • As a Jew trying to subvert and overcome Christian standards of morality, Freud had to break out of the constricting confines of Jewish circles in Vienna. (p.239)
  • Others in the movement regarded Freud’s reliance on Jung as currying favour with the Gentile world. (p.259)
  • Freud as a Jew sought Jung for the sake of breaking out of the constricting milieu of Viennese Jewry. (p.261)
  • In Freud’s movement Ernest Jones stood out as one of the few notable Gentiles. (p.347)
  • [Freud was] a master of Jewish anecdotes. (p.405)
  • Like Jung, [Heinz] Hartmann represented the world of academic psychiatry and was the Gentile Freud could rely on to keep analysis from being a completely Jewish affair. (p.505)

Why did psychoanalysis take off so quickly in America?

Roazen lists possible reasons:

  • core aspects of American culture – optimism and belief in individualism – chimed with a therapy which promised that the individual can cure themselves, through their own efforts
  • a child-centred culture liked the idea that all problems can be traced to childhood traumas or, to put it another way, we can develop new types of education to prevent those traumas ever taking place
  • a childish culture took to the idea of idealising child-like spontaneity over stifling ‘society’
  • America contained many rich people, specially in New York where the fleeing analysts arrived; before they knew it, they were treating the neuroses of the very, very rich
  • the rich like fashions and fads; psychoanalysis became steadily more and more fashionable in the 1920s and 30s
  • America, as a young nation, had a young unformed, malleable culture which this ‘radical’ new therapy could penetrate more easily than in hidebound European societies
  • America is a nation of immigrants who must carve out their own identities – psychoanalysis promises to help you do that, get in touch with your inner child, work through your problems, become successful etc
  • America, unlike France, Germany, Britain, lacked a psychiatric tradition of their own, so they, in effect, imported one and adopted it

In 1921 Freud had nine patients in analysis: 6 were new, of which 5 were Americans (p.145). By 1928 the majority of Freud’s patients were Americans (p.137).

American analysts in particular tended to be more orthodox than Freud, since European analysts were likely to have more regular contact with him. (p.142)

Later, discussing the influence of Putnam, Frink and Brill in America, Roazen suggests the US has an odd schizophrenia because its public rhetoric is all about individualism and self expression and yet in many ways it’s a deeply conformist society (shaped, although he doesn’t say this, by the all-pervasive effect of consumer capitalism).

American psychoanalysis quickly became professionalised, and well paid, talking among themselves the rhetoric of rebellion and radicalism, but in practice helping the mentally ill fit better into their society’s needs.

Although Freud loathed America…

Freud visited America along with Jung in 1909. He was quietly appalled at the lack of manners and ceremony surrounding, for example, barbecues, the lack of culture, the frenetic pace of life. Throughout the 1910s and 20s Freud’s dislike of America steadily grew. He called America ‘a gigantic mistake’. He denied ‘hating’ America, merely ‘regretted’ it.

America offended Freud ‘by its deference to numerical superiority, its belief in statistics, and its worship of brash wealth’. He called Americans ‘savages (p.406).

Roazen shrewdly points out this was partly due to Freud’s aversion to feeling dependent and, by the later 1920s, most of his patients were American i.e. he had become financially dependent on the Yankee dollar (p.382 ff.) Well into the 1930s his American patients paid Freud $20 an hour (p.419).

Is psychoanalysis based around Freud’s own personality?

Yes and no. If you’re not expecting it, it comes as a surprise to read Freud and discover just how much he refers to his own experiences and dreams and intuitions on every page. His collected writings are more like literary works than scientific papers, and literary works which are, moreover, continually, insistently autobiographical. As he himself wrote in his Autobiographical Study:

Two themes run through these pages: the story of my life and the history of psychoanalysis. They are intimately interwoven. (quoted p.507)

Or as Roazen puts it:

It would be impossible to overestimate how much of himself Freud put into his work. (p.103)

His founding text, the Interpretation of Dreams, is one of the most autobiographical works ever written, the general principles he writes about being extrapolated from an apparently endless stream of Freud’s own dreams – many, many dreams from other sources, historical, from literature, from patients or friends; buy many of Freud’s own personal ones, too. And this feels like a fundamentally literary strategy:

As with other great writers, it required a rich self to enable him to recreate a version of human experience out of his autobiography. (p.44)

Freud was aware this was a very weak spot for his theory, and touchy about suggestions that the entire theory was a huge extrapolation of his personal neuroses (p.150), so there’s weight to the attack.

But you can’t dismiss psychoanalysis as being the extrapolation of one man’s personality for two obvious reasons: one, Freud developed and evolved his ideas, quite drastically, over the 40 years he wrote on the subject; sure, these were based on his own changing beliefs, but they also reflected changes in the evidence: some the result of long analyses over decades with scores or patients; some from the evidence of other analysts in the growing movement; but the biggest change coming as a result of the First World War and the epidemic of shell shock it created.

And the second rebuttal is the way psychoanalysis was taken up and developed and fine-tuned by plenty of other people, initially in the shadow of Freud (from which some rebelled), but then, in the next generation, among analysts who’d never met him and took his teachings in whole new directions.

Especially the women analysts. Yes, you can critique some aspects of the original teachings as reflecting his personality and obsession, for example, his persistent denigration of women:

  • He thought that shame was a specifically feminine trait (p.49)
  • Freud tended in an old-fashioned manner to idealise and yet also denigrate women…In Freud’s world women are treated as objects, rarely as subjects. (p.67)

And the way his entire model of the mind privileged the experience and development of boys and men, and placed the son’s alleged struggle with his father (the Oedipus complex, p.119) dead centre of his first model of the mind. Yes, his theory had far less to say about girls and women, and when it did, was of a consistently insulting nature:

Freud’s resistance to religious ideas as akin to his more general rejection of dependence and passivity, which he associated with femininity. (p.260)

But his followers a) included leading women figures, such as Anna Freud, Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein  and b) they developed, rejected, improved and changed his teachings in all sorts of ways, especially regarding the role of mothers in the child’s development (see below).

Above all, psychoanalysis survived, as a theory and a practice, down to the present day, which it could never have done if it had just been an elaboration of just one man’s idiosyncrasies.

Psychoanalysis eventually became something quite different from Freud personally. As the movement expanded, changes were introduced into psychoanalytic thinking which would have been utterly alien to Freud himself. Working with the method he gave them, later investigators revised some of his most cherished positions. (p.46)

Prophet of doom

An interesting aspect which ties together the issues of Freud personality and success in America was his strong personal sense that civilisation was doomed (p.53). He was a pessimistic old so-and-so. He took a ‘characteristically harsh view of human nature’ (p.162).

Freud was inclined to think that not much could help improve mankind. (p.311)

Personally, I find his gloomy pessimism about human nature appealing about his work – as opposed to the happy, smiley, religiosity of Jung, which I find off-putting.

But there are two points: in his gloomy sense that civilisation was going down the tubes, Freud was very much of his time and place. Central European thinkers had been lamenting The End of Western Civilisation since the 1890s, a process crystallised in Oswald Spengler’s famous book, ‘The Decline of the West’ (1918). Freud’s own, late work, ‘Civilisation and Its Discontents’, published in 1930, took its place in this tradition of hand-wringing lament.

But it goes to show how little his personal opinions were stamped onto psychoanalysis that, in America, this gloomy old European defeatism was completely rejected in favour of the shiny can-do positivism mentioned above.

How important was the practice of psychotherapy to Freud?

The answer which emerges very clearly is ‘not very much’. Roazen’s account quotes sometimes shocking passages from Freud’s own letters to highlight two running themes:

1. Freud quite frequently refers to his patients as scum and riff-raff.

  • ‘I do not break my head very much about good and evil, but I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash…’ (quoted p.161)
  • ‘In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.’ (quoted p.161)

2. Freud thought psychoanalysis could only really work with patients who were a) mature and b) well educated enough for the ego to be able to make sense of the revelations therapy throws up (p.152); he preferred patients from ‘the more educated classes’ (p.153). In fact he went so far as stating that the ‘optimum conditions for psychoanalysis exist where it is not needed – among the healthy’ (p.175). He hoped for far more than palliating the anxieties of the well-off.

  • He had in mind something more cultured and more elevated than the treatment of psychotics; he wanted people to be higher and better. (p.158)
  • He demanded that people grow up; he expected more of mankind. (p.178)

And anyway: ‘No one has ever been fully satisfied with therapeutic results, analytic or otherwise’ (p.363).

3. He increasingly thought the hard labour of spending years trying to help people with obstinate mental problems was for ‘the theoretical yield’. In other words, he thought treating patients was only really justified by the new theoretical insights it could give you.

Freud the wordsmith

It’s extremely obvious that Freud was one of the great writers of the 20th century, that he based his theory and practice on a very close attention to words (in free association, slips of the tongue, as they transmuted into images in dreams, the acting out of transference in the analytical situation) and spread his teachings very successfully through his charming and persuasive writings.

An interesting light is shed by the fact that he didn’t like music because there are no words for the rational mind to latch onto.

  • Of all the arts music is perhaps closest to the id, and without a guide from the more rational part of his mind Freud felt uneasy. Unable to analyse the effects of music on himself, Freud could not enjoy it. (p.57)
  • ‘Music did not interest him because he regarded it as an unintelligible language.’ (Edward Hitschmann, quoted p.270)
  • ‘I feel no need for a higher moral synthesis in the same way that I have no ear for music.’ (Freud, quoted p.377)

The limits of psychoanalysis

Among the most interesting passages in the book is Roazen’s discussion of whether psychoanalysis can help mental illness beyond mild neurosis. Can it help with the more severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, manic-depression, multiple personality disorder? Short answer: No.

Tellingly, Roazen digresses from Freud to point out that psychiatry as a profession still (well, in 1975) had no hard and fast method of distinguishing between neurosis and psychosis, and only a poor understanding of the combined organic and psychological causes of severe mental illness; and a limited range of treatments, which often don’t really work.

That is the biggest context of all. Psychoanalysis evolved into a system of hermeneutics or interpretation – of signs, symbols, literature, art, film etc – in the essentially well. That’s where it has ended up having the longest life and biggest significance.

In the real world of psychology, it takes its place among a range of other talking therapies, strategies and medical treatment, of mild disorders such as neuroses and depression. It has turned out not to be the complete revolution in psychiatry which Freud and the early disciples hoped for.

Transference

The key criterion for deciding whether a patient was treatable was whether they could establish transference to the analyst. Yes, and the patient can project stifled feelings and act out smothered wishes onto the figure of the analyst and both can use these to dig down and unearth the roots of the neurosis. But if no transference can be established, no treatment is possible (p.165).

Darwin

Paul Robinson implies that describing Freud’s theory as an outcrop of Darwin’s theory of evolution was errant or scandalous, but that’s how I’ve always approached Freud. If there is no God, no plan, no teleology, if we have evolved by accident through a vast series of untold contingencies, if we are just another type of animal, but admittedly with this astonishing ability of reflection and thought – how would this ‘thought’ develop in the infant, how would its developmental stages linger in adult thinking; what is thinking? I like Freud because he situates us firmly in the animal kingdom where we belong, with no special dispensation.

It may be difficult for many of us to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their development into supermen. I…cannot see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved. The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different explanation from that of animals. (p.261)

Its main legacy

Psychoanalysis has left a legacy too pervasive on twentieth century culture to be measured. But Roazen has a very simple paragraph which says that Freud’s greatest and indisputable discovery in psychology is the persistence of infantile remnants in the adult mind, to a greater extent and of a vastly more complex nature than anyone had ever realised before. (Mind you, he has Erik Erikson saying a sentence later that Freud’s ‘greatest contribution’ was the importance of psychosexuality, p.200).

Looked at another way, Freud’s main legacy is the widespread availability of depth psychological therapy in every country in the world. The basic idea that psychological problems and symptoms in any of us may have their roots in early infant experiences and that these can be recovered, remembered and resolved, may not be the universally recommended treatment of mental ailments, but is universally accepted as at least one of the main therapeutic strategies.

Titbits

Height

Freud was only just about five foot seven in height, whereas Jung, 19 years younger, was a strapping six foot two. If we adopt a heightist theory of history, trouble was inevitable.

The schism with Jung

After seven years of correspondence, during which Freud had adopted Jung as the Crown Prince of psychoanalysis, their relationship ended. On a lecture tour of America in 1912 Jung made his differences from Freud quite clear and throughout 1913 they argued, leading up to the Psychoanalytic Congress of September 1913 where battle lines were decisively drawn. Jung rejected the primacy of sexuality. He rejected the notion that children were in any sense sexual. He had the insight that the fact that so many patients in analysis brought up infantile sexual memories was in fact a screening device, a projection back into earliest memory, of problems the patient was facing in the present. That psychoanalysis presented many patients with the easy option of dwelling endlessly on the past rather than confront the difficult future. According to Roazen this insight is now generally accepted among contemporary psychoanalysts. In 1913 Jung delivered his paper announcing his concepts of introversion and extroversion, with Freudian psychoanalysis seen as merely a subset of the former.

He was, in short, developing an entirely different model of the psyche and Freud felt he had to make an absolute break in order to protect the integrity of his model and his movement.

Jung thought he was making common-sense adaptations to the evidence continually being thrown up by actual treatment of patient. But Freud thought the sexuality of children was the absolute bedrock of his theory and saw in Jung the same pattern he’d seen in Adler and, indeed, in most western medicine and psychiatry, which was inability to face the fact of childhood sexuality which was itself based on repression among the deniers. In a typically Freudian manoeuvre, he thought the more everyone around him denied the existence of childhood sexuality, the more true it must be.

Jung resigned his editorship of the movement’s magazine in late 1913 but hung on until April 1914 before resigning as president of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Freud had to see things in embattled oppositions, a dialectic; at first the conflict between conscious and unconscious, after the Great War the conflict between the Life Drive and the Death Drive. Above all Freud had a strict requirement to make everything rational and clear and understandable; anything which couldn’t be clearly explained was a neurosis which had to be brought into the light of explanation.

Jung had a different temperament: he saw unity in the human mind, which could incorporate these other elements. He thought the mystical and unexplained needed to be experienced and healing, wholing properties. Freud thought only the unhappy neurotic man has fantasies. Jung saw fantasy as an aspect of creativity, as a positive component in a healthy mind.

Freud was obsessed with the impact of the earliest infant and childhood experiences on the adult. Jung became increasingly interested in the problems of the elderly. Older people are less concerned about the vicissitudes of sexuality, but by a search for meaning in life.

Jung had much more clinical experience working with the seriously mentally ill. This opened him up to a far greater range of ideas of what therapy could consist of and what ‘well’ looked like. Freud had a far narrower view and thought therapy could only work with neuroses and obsessions, in other words with relatively minor mental illness. This was because Freud’s model relied on the patient’s ego or rational self being relatively intact. Once the repressed traumas of childhood sexuality were dragged into the light of day and accepted, the patient could be relied on to integrate these insights and get on with life.

Whereas Jung treated patients whose egos were splintered and needed help just getting out of bed or getting dressed. So his model of therapy was far more interventionist. Freud advocated an aloof detachment, giving rise to a tradition of cold and antiseptic therapists. Jung thought therapy should more like a collaboration and a journey.

  • ‘The therapist is no longer the agent of treatment but a fellow participant in a process of individual development.’ (p.282)
  • ‘The psychotherapist should be absolutely clear in his own mind that the psychological treatment of the sick is a relationship in which the doctor is involved quite as much as the patient.’ (p.283)

Mind you Jung was a bigot, too. He was notoriously intolerant of male homosexuality. And he thought university education had a disastrous impact on women’s personalities (p.278).

Science

It was very characteristic of Freud not to define ‘science’ in terms of methodology, hypotheses, experiments and data, but solely in terms of his own model of the mind. Thus:

To Freud, the essence of science was that it represented ‘the most complete renunciation of the pleasure principle of which our mental activity is capable.’ (p.245)

But Roazen points out that this metaphor is immensely autobiographical. It simply described Freud’s personality – tight-lipped, stoical, immensely self-contained, aloof. An entirely subjective autobiographical model which every other analyst and therapist has been free to ignore, not least Jung with his emphasis on a more humane therapeutic engagement.

According to Roazen, it was in the 1920s that Freud moved away the often literary basis of his writings in a bid to emphasise the scientific nature of psychoanalysis.

Superstition

Superstition derives from suppressed hostile and cruel impulses. Superstition is in large part the expectation of trouble; and a person who has harboured frequent evil wishes against others, but has been brought up to be good and has therefore repressed such wishes into the unconscious, will be especially ready to expect punishment for his unconscious wickedness in the form of trouble threatening him from without. (Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1901.)

Totem and Taboo

Roazen rubbishes Totem and Taboo as do all modern commentators. Freud projected his fairy tale ‘discovery’ of the Oedipus Complex back onto ‘primitive’ societies claiming that every society passed through the same developmental phase (just as he insisted all toddlers do), namely when the horde is dominated by a great Father who hogs all the nubile women, the young generation of men (all his sons) band together to kill and eat him, then are overcome with guilt and so institute a new religion around a great sacrificed god alongside complex taboos regarding incest and exogamy.

No anthropologist has ever found any evidence to support this story which amounts to a fairy tale, a projection by Freud of his pet developmental theory back into an invented prehistory. Totem and Taboo is Freud’s silliest book, though it has steep competition in the equally ludicrous Moses and Monotheism (Freud had the grace to describe Totem as a ‘novel’, though it is really the fantastical farrago of a very old man working out his obsessions in public) (p.301).

Famous analysands

‘Analysand’ means ‘someone undergoing psychoanalysis’. The most famous analysands would include composer Gustav Mahler, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and novelist Herman Broch.

Ego psychology

Freud’s emphasis was on decoding the repressed wishes of the unconscious via dreams, slips and free association. His focus was on the unconscious and repressed drives. From the 1930s the younger generation of analysts began to switch the focus to the conscious mind, the ego, specifically to understand the mechanisms of coping and defence which the ego deployed.

In 1936 Freud’s daughter, Anna, who had followed him into analysis, published ‘The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence’, a study of the ‘ways and means by which the ego wards off depression, displeasure and anxiety’. It became a founding work of ego psychology. By the 1950s this focus on ego psychology had become the main stream of psychoanalysis.

Two paradoxes

Calvinism, Marxism and Psychoanalysis are all deterministic ideologies, propounding iron laws of causation, and yet all relied very heavily on the achievements of zealous and energetic individuals (p.350).

Marx loathed Russia, its backwardness and brutality, and yet it was in Russia, of all the European countries, that his followers seized power and he was set up as a god. Similarly, Freud came to deeply loathe America and all it stood for (fake egalitarianism, lack of culture, surplus money) and yet it was in the single nation he hated most that Freud’s invention became most successful and lucrative (p.384).

A fine figure

Ernest Jones, the only Gentile in Freud’s close circle, a feisty defender of the Master, and very energetic organiser, the man who wrote the magisterial three-volume biography of Freud – was also an excellent figure skater and actually wrote a book about figure skating. (p.353)

Freud’s followers

  • Paul Federn (1871 to 1950)
  • Edward Hitschmann (1871 to 1957)
  • Victor Tausk (1879 to 1919) suicide after Freud told Helene Deutsch to stop analysing him
  • Lou Andreas-Salome (1861 to 1937)
  • Hanns Sachs (1881 to 1947)
  • Theodor Reik (1888 to 1969)
  • Herman Nunberg (1883 to 1970)
  • Karl Abraham (1877 to 1925) solid, reliable
  • Max Eitingon (1881 to 1943) Russian with enough private fortune to fund the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute; analysed by Freud on evening strolls
  • Georg Groddeck (1866 to 1934) disorganised, Freud stole the word das Es for the unconscious, Groddeck believed organic illnesses were the product of thwarted desires, he specialised in applying psychoanalysis to organically sick patients
  • Paul Schilder (1886 to 1940) as professor of psychiatry at University of Vienna did more than any other man to promote psychoanalysis
  • Herbert Silberer (1882 to 1923) suicide
  • Ernest Jones (1879 to 1958)
  • Sandor Ferenczi (1873 to 1933) delightful, popular; Freud wrote more letters to Ferenczi than anyone else (2,500); diverged from Freud in later years by thinking patients needed the parenting and motherly love they often lacked in childhood
  • James Jackson Putnam (1846 to 1918) a Gentile, professor at Harvard and early American adopter of psychoanalysis; disagreed with Freud’s emphasis on conflict and the dark side of the unconscious
  • Horace W. Frink (1883 to 1935) a Gentile, had 2 analyses with Freud but then suffered a complete mental breakdown
  • Abraham A. Brill (1884 to 1948) by end of the Great War the acknowledged head of psychoanalysis in America (p.380)
  • Sandor Rado (1890 to 1972) brilliant pupil who was sent to direct training at the New York Institute but the faithful felt he had deviated in some of his books and led attacks which ended in him being expelled
  • Franz Alexander (1891 to 1964)
  • Erich Fromm (1900 to 1980) politically committed (Marxist) Fromm tried to integrate psychoanalysis with contemporary social thought. Together with Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan, Fromm belongs to a Neo-Freudian school of psychoanalytical thought which is outside the scope of Roazen’s book
  • Erik Erikson (1902 to 1994) an intuitive child analyst with no medical or university training, Erikson was spotted and encouraged to become an analyst by Anna Freud. He found the atmosphere of the Vienna group stifling; after he fled the Nazis to America, Erikson worked on the formation of identity, postulating a sequence of identities which the developing must create in order to achieve ‘ego strength. Erikson coined the term ‘identity crisis’

Otto Rank

Otto Rank (1884 to 1939) from a very lowly background, was mentored and supported by Freud, became his indispensable secretary, expert on mythology, wrote The Myth of the Birth of the Hero which, in offering psychoanalytic interpretations of literature, was right up Freud’s street.

When the breach came it was about the role of the mother, and the aims of therapy. Up till the 1920s Freud’s theory focused almost entirely on the role of the father, specifically the boy child’s resentment and efforts to overthrow him, named the Oedipus complex. Mothers existed, but as the source of the succouring breasts or as objects of infantile sexual fantasy, rarely for themselves.

Rank greatly expanded the importance of the mother, the closeness of the mother-infant bond, and the importance of separation anxiety. Rank then sought the deep origin of that anxiety in the experience of the trauma of being born, a horrifying experience laid down in the unconscious and triggered by all kinds of later experiences. Therefore, he developed the idea that the patient relive the experience of being born; or at least act out the anxieties and terrors it gave rise to.

This was in flat contradiction to Freud’s notion that therapy be an entirely rational process whereby infantile issues were dragged into the light of day and calmly examined by the detached, clinical adult. Freud’s therapy was all about intellectual insight. Rank was suggesting emotional release. Insight was not enough; the patient needed active emotional support (something Jung had suggested before the war). All this was expressed in his 1924 book, The Trauma of Birth.

Wilhelm Reich (1897 to 1957)

Reich was one of the most extreme and radical analysts and Freud disliked him from the start. Where Freud thought therapy was predominantly about memory i.e. dredging up specific repressed memories which lay behind specific neurotic symptoms, Reich (like Jung and Adler) thought therapy should address the whole person.

He took a literalistic definition of sexuality as genital gratification, which Freud thought a massive step backwards to the traditional view of sex which his theory of libido was meant to expand and deepen. Reich thought mental illness was caused by sexual repression and therefore he promoted free expression of sexuality. In the 1960s this fed into the notion of ‘free love’ i.e. having sex whenever you wanted with whoever you fancied, leaving no sexual urge unexpressed.

Reich thought the family was the institution whereby each generation’s sexuality was defined, controlled, monitored and repressed and so he recommended abolishing the nuclear family, and having children raised by communities of adults (as later practiced in Israeli kibbutzim).

Finally, he was a Marxist, a rare political radical among the bourgeois analysts, who linked the overthrow of bourgeois society and taking ownership of the means of production, as cognate with overthrowing the nuclear family so that every individual could take ownership of their own sexuality.

In the late 1920s Reich went on a lecture tour of Bolshevik Russia where he claimed that without a full sexual revolution the Soviet state would degenerate into a repressive bureaucracy, the net effect of which was, amusingly, to prompt the Soviet authorities to shut down the until-then thriving Russian Psychoanalytic Society (p.493).

Reich was kicked out of the International Psychoanalytical Society in 1934. Reich moved to Norway where he carried out investigations into the nature of the orgasm (trying to measure electrical activity in the brain during sex). With the outbreak of war he fled to America.

Shortly after he arrived in New York in 1939 that Reich first said he had discovered a biological or cosmic energy, an extension of Freud’s idea of the libido. He called it ‘orgone energy’ or ‘orgone radiation’, and the study of it ‘orgonomy. (Wikipedia)

His increasingly wild experiments with orgone and erratic behaviour drew the attention of the authorities and, after a sequence of legal problems, he was sent to prison in Pennsylvania where he died of heart failure in 1957.

Women psychoanalysts

The penultimate chapter, chapter 9, (pages 415 to 478), is devoted to the key women in the movement, namely:

Ruth Mack Brunswick née Blumgart (1897 to 1946)

Brunswick worked closely with Freud to flesh out his theories, subtly bringing out the importance of the mother in the development of the child, and the importance of the pre-oedipal period, especially in women, which Freud admitted he had been unable to get at because his women patients always projected memories of their fathers onto him (p.424). Brilliant theorist but Roazen depicts her as working too closely with Freud, her extended analysis with him (1922 to 1938) turning into a psychological addiction. She became addicted to painkillers and died miserably.

Anna Freud (1895 to 1982)

Freud’s youngest child, an unwanted pregnancy, ended up becoming his primary carer after he was diagnosed with jaw cancer in 1923, and then jealous protector of the family archive, letters and so on. Nowhere near as intellectually brilliant or as good a writer as her father, she nonetheless developed into a leading figure in the next generation of the movement for her pioneering work with children. For five years before she thought about becoming an analyst, she worked as a schoolteacher with small children, and this experience fed into her therapeutic practice and then theoretical writing (p.433). She set up the Anna Freud Clinic which continues to this day.

Anna said that children couldn’t be directly analysed because their chief transference remained onto their parents. Therefore the analyst had to a) develop an educative relationship with the child i.e. stand in the relationship of teacher but also b) work through the parents. Often, changing the family situation was enough to cure a child’s symptoms (p.438).

But her key theoretical work was to pioneer the new focus from the 1930s onwards on ego psychology (see above). Her most famous book, ‘The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence’, listed these mechanisms: regression, repression, reaction-formation, isolation, undoing, projection, introjection, turning against the self, denial, identification with the aggressor – all strategies to help the ego cope, manage, survive.

With Dorothy Burlingham she set up a hostel for parentless children during the Second World War and noticed that if one of the women carers succeeded in forming a mothering bond with a child, the child’s halted development could resume. The importance of mothering. During the 1950s and 60s it became more obvious that relationships with the good or bad mother played as much or a greater role in child development as with the threatening father depicted in Freud’s version of analysis.

Helene Deutsch (1884 to 1982)

Pioneer of female psychology. Published The Psychology of Women (1945). Despite her emphasis on the importance of the mother in the child’s development, many of Deutsch’s views were, echoing Freud’s sexism, surprisingly conservative, and she has come in for criticism from feminists. For example, Deutsch’s belief that a woman only becomes fully a woman by transferring her agency onto a strong man to whom she willingly becomes a dependent. She must leave the initiative to the man; she must renounce her originality, etc. Roazen cites a critique by Germaine Greer. (Roazen gives a jaw-dropping compilation of Freud’s sexist assumptions, pages 462 to 465).

She was Freud’s golden girl in the early 1920s but they had a falling out and she never regained his trust, which hurt her for the rest of the life. She played a key role in setting up and running the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, but spotted the looming threat of the Nazis and emigrated to America in 1935, where she continued practicing and was held in high esteem.

Melanie Klein (1882 to 1960)

Klein was one of the next generation of women who emphasised the importance of the Mother in a child’s development, in Freudian terms focusing on ‘pre-oedipal’ layers of child development.

Freud, in his rationalist patriarchal way, had emphasised the importance of words and reason: the repressed material has to be dragged into the light of day in the form of words. The female psychoanalysts highlighted the pre-verbal communication of the really young infant.

Klein caused a lot of controversy because she moved a lot of Freud’s developmental schema much earlier, into the life of the pre-verbal baby. She sees the baby as seething with the rage and jealousies which Freud had attributed to the Oedipus complex about age 5.

Klein was a zealot. She believed that children responded to the same therapeutic environment as adults. She thought the child playing with toys as the exact equivalent of the adult’s free association with words, and both as direct channels into the unconscious. She thought every child without exception should be given analytic therapy as a prophylactic against later neurosis. Roazen calls Klein’s approach ‘crusading’ and ‘utopian’ (p.478).

In this stern inflexibility she was the opposite of Anna Freud’s more nurturing, mothering supportiveness. The differences between the two women were made explicit when they both gave papers on child psychoanalysis at a psychoanalytical congress in 1927, and remained the source of sometimes bitter enmity. Freud was prepared to leave a patient with some neuroses if they helped him or her cope. Klein was ferocious to pursue every single neurosis in order to effect a complete ‘cure’.

Freud came to disapprove of Klein as the 1920s went on but was wanted to avoid an open break as he had with the big male schismatics: partly because the big three schisms were with men he had overloaded with oedipal significance and seen as his ‘son and heir’, Crown Prince etc, whereas he never gave any female analyst the same significance; partly because Klein’s theory came from a place doubly removed from his own experience, analysing children and deep consideration of the female psyche, neither of which Freud had a feel for.

When, in 1926, Ernest Jones offered Klein a job at the British Psychoanalytic Institute in London in a bid to beef up its intellectual level, she accepted the offer, moved to London and lived there for the rest of her life. Her fierce character and intense convictions strongly influenced British psychoanalysis and Roazen speculates that the British wing might, eventually have been forced to secede from the international movement if it hadn’t been for the Nazis.

The advent of the Second World War brought a wave of Viennese analysts to London along, of course, with the Master himself and her daughter. The newcomers thought Klein’s focus on pre-oedipal experiences was yet another denial of and resistance to the centrality of the Oedipus Complex – the same crux which had forced out Jung, Adler and Rank.

This town ain’t big enough for the both of us describes the daggers drawn atmosphere that developed between the well-established Kleinians and the newly arrived, orthodox Freudians.

Reading about the way Freudian psychoanalysis developed, evolved and splintered, creating divergent heretics and sects, gives exactly the same pleasure as reading about the first few hundred years of Christian history. There are multiple levels of pleasure. One is watching the way a fundamental idea can be reinterpreted, expanded, followed to its logical conclusions in ways its founders never dreamed of – like watching a game of chess unfold, like watching the plot of a good novel develop in ways you never expected but seem logical as soon as they’re explained.

And the other pleasure is a soap opera-level enjoyment of watching very clever people fight like ferrets in a sack. Roazen’s descriptions of Ernest Jones’s political manoeuvrings are entertaining, but not as funny as his account of the way Jones’s number two in London, Edward Glover, was conducting an analysis on Klein’s daughter, Melitta Schmideberg, and used material thrown up by this to attack Klein in the name of orthodoxy and Anna.

In a phrase, these very clever, very subtle people, who liked to imagine they held the key to solving all the psychological problems of mankind, turn out to be just as underhand, devious, manipulative and vicious as a cellarful of rats.

Thus Roazen speculates the way Melanie Klein’s writings emphasise the goodness of the mother but the child’s vicious, negative emotions, its possessiveness and anger, can plausibly be mapped onto the way her own daughter, Melitta, attacked her, in writing and in public forums.

The war of words really broke out at the end of the bigger world war, in 1944 and 45. A compromise was proposed whereby two groups would have separate facilities, the B group (Anna and followers) and the B group (everyone else). Some members joined the A group, some the B group, but at least half rejected the idea of a split, and wanted peace.

These became known as the Middle Group or Independents, and it’s from their number that the most influential British theorists emerged, namely John Bowlby, Michael Balint and Donald Winnicott.

Other notable women in the movement included:

  • Dorothy Burlingham, American who left her disturbed husband to move to Vienna with her four children; worked closely with Anna
  • Marianne Kris
  • Jeanne Lampl-de Groot
  • Eva Rosenfeld
  • Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth
  • Princess Marie Bonaparte (1882 to 1962)

Thoughts – the widest impact

Reading this book through to the bitter end (Roazen’s apparently never-ending list of Freud’s followers eventually becomes quite exhausting) makes you realise it’s getting on for pointless to try and assess ‘the legacy of Freud’ because his biggest legacy was that he created an entire new field of human enquiry and medical practice, which has spawned scores, maybe hundreds, of followers, acolytes and heretics who have themselves gone on to develop or invent whole new sub-domains and new channels of investigation.

Without Freud an Adler, Jung, Rank or Erikson and some of his umpteen other followers might have gone into psychiatry, but many wouldn’t have because they didn’t have the strict medical training required. So Roazen’s book teaches us that alongside a consideration of Freud’s achievement in terms of his writings and theory, must go the obvious fact that just as important was his creation of such a league of followers.

And that it is often through the followers that major ideas have emerged which have percolated into popular consciousness and popular culture. The concepts of the inferiority complex, identity crisis, separation anxiety, are all products of the intellectual framework Freud created.

*****

Great men

The most dated thing about the book is that Roazen comes from a time and place where he still believes in ‘Great Men’ and ‘Great Thinkers’. Although he critiques multiple aspects of Freud’s character and theory, nonetheless his basic instinct is to place Freud firmly in the pantheon of Great Men.

  • ‘Freud’s genius’ (p.13)
  • ‘a revolutionary in the world of ideas’ (p.29)
  • ‘Freud deserves to be a hero of our time’ (p.40)
  • Jones interpreted Freud’s credulity as part of the receptivity and open-mindedness that accompanies genius. (p.108)

He carries a 1940s/50s mental model of Great Men who Made the Modern World and are Heroes of Thought, Intellectual Giants etc. I don’t know exactly when this model died off – sometime in the 1980s? – giving way to a far more complex model which, for a start, includes lots more women, but more generally opened up the world of the mind to thousands more creative thinkers, across the full range of the arts and humanities and sciences, and also opened the doors to non-white people beyond the Anglosphere – till you arrive at the jostling, thronged, progressive and often dangerous, sometimes bewildering, multicultural intellectual world we live in today.

Americanisation

The second aspect I found odd was how conventional and conservative his view of psychoanalysis is. This might partly be because he’s American. Americans are (or were) notorious for their positive, upbeat, can-do attitude. Businesslike, have-nice-a-day consumer capitalism. It’s fairly well known that most of the first generation psychoanalysts, being Jewish, fled Europe with the rise of the Nazis and settled in America, especially in New York with its large Jewish population.

In America the questing, experimental, tentative, the Middle European and often quite bleak, pessimistic tone of Freud and his first followers, refugees from the land of Kafka and Musil, was converted into a positive, upbeat, we-can-fix-you procedure for the land of Walt Disney and Oprah Winfrey. You can achieve your dreams! You can be happy and healthy! You can have it all! Just sign up here for your starter course of psychotherapy at the very reasonable price of 25 bucks an hour and we’ll have you back on your feet and back in the office in no time.

So although Roazen pays lip service to Freud as discoverer of the unconscious blah blah, along with all the other stuff about libido, repression, transference and so on, it doesn’t really worry him. He doesn’t seem to take on board what is truly revolutionary about Freud which is that he destroyed the rationale of two and a half thousand years of philosophy, theology, legal and political theory which were all based on the notion that human beings have a capacity for objective reason.

No they don’t. We are terrified animals which, in the course of our infant development, develop a set of psychic defence mechanisms to mediate between the inner world of our raging drives/desires and the cold, brutal outside world which doesn’t give a damn about us. No wonder so many people are damaged and betray odd compulsions, obsessions and anxieties. It’s a very anxious position to be in!

But deeper and more subversive than that, Freud asserts that the rational mind isn’t a shining Greek god, isn’t a gleaming repository of reason and morality, but is made out of the same dark chaotic stuff as the unconscious. The so-called ego is just bits of the unconscious which are split off by the human organism, which can’t help itself developing strategies to try and cope with the ongoing frustration of nearly all its instinctual drives and fantasies.

This is a complete, radical and devastating break with the age-old tradition that all humans contain a fragment of the divine reason in their minds, are mostly capable of rational self-interest (as the economists ridiculously claim), of rational debate and political decisions (as political theorists absurdly claim). No. We are petrified animals subject to a bewildering variety of psychic mechanisms and strategies designed first and foremost to allow us to fulfil psychic wishes and desires, albeit often sublimated into socially acceptable forms.

Thus all the social labels and categories dished out by traditional psychology, ‘neurotic’, ‘obsessive’, ‘degenerate’ and so on, are all relative. We are all on the spectrums of weird behaviour. People don’t just have quirks and anomalies which are basically additions to a reliable core of common sense and reason. There is no common sense and reason. We are all made entirely out of quirks and weirdness. Freud hoped his therapy might, a little, ameliorate and lessen the quirks and weirdnesses which afflict all of us, which humans are, in fact, made of.

Credit

Freud and His Followers by Paul Roazen was published by Alfred Knopf in the USA in 1975, and by Allen Lane in the UK in 1976. References are to the 1979 Peregrine paperback edition.

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An Outline of Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud (1940)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other concepts have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his assumption of Western superiority over ‘primitive’ peoples, and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions over into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

Background

Freud was allowed to leave Austria by the newly installed Nazi authorities in early June 1938. The unfinished manuscript of ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’ bears the date July 1938, so scholars think that he began to write it either while waiting for permission to leave Austria or soon after his arrival in England. By early September he had written 63 sheets of notepaper but broke off to undergo a serious operation for the spreading cancer of his jaw and he never resumed work on it.

The manuscript was discovered among his papers after his death in September 1939. The editors of the Pelican Freud Library point out that although it might be unfinished, it is not incomplete. The final chapter is shorter than the others but appears to complete the prospectus laid out in the preface.

Almost all Freud’s previous works (for example, the Introductory and New Introductory Lectures) were aimed at the general public. The Outline, the editors explain, is not. It is more like a refresher course for established students of psychoanalysis with the result that the style is clipped and many matters alluded to only briefly, on the assumption that the reader is already familiar with sometimes quite detailed aspects of the theory.

The work is in three parts. Part one describes the structure of the mind, its division into id, ego and superego, and the pressure of the external world. It lays out the nature of the two great categories of primal drive – the sexual urge to procreate (Eros) and the organism’s wish to cease stimuli and excitation (the death drive or Thanatos).

In part two, Freud discusses the technique of psychoanalysis, what its aims are, how it works.

In part three, Freud (briefly) situates psychoanalysis within the broader realms of philosophy and psychology, before recapping the theory.

Preface

The teachings of psychoanalysis are based on an incalculable number of observations and experiences and only someone who has repeated these observations on himself and on others is in a position to arrive at a judgement of his own upon it.

Part 1. The mind and its workings

Chapter 1. The psychical apparatus

The oldest part of the psyche is the id. It contains everything inherited at birth, which means the instincts. The id develops an outer layer to mediate with the external world, the ego. The ego has the task of self-preservation. As regards external events it does this:

  • by storing up stimuli in the memory
  • by avoiding excessively strong stimuli (through flight)
  • dealing with moderate stimuli (through adaptation)
  • learning to bring about change in the external world to its own advantage (activity)

As regards the internal world the ego performs its task of self-preservation by gaining mastery of the instincts, deciding which ones will gain satisfaction and when, or vetoing them altogether.

It is guided in these decisions by tensions caused by (internal and external) stimuli: raised tension is experienced as unpleasure, lowered tension is experienced as pleasure. The ego strives after pleasure and to avoid displeasure. A foreseeable increase in unpleasure leads to anxiety. From time to time the ego retires from its job of mediation into sleep, which appears to be necessary to rest the body and brain.

The long period of human childhood leaves behind a precipitate of parental strictures, the superego. The ego has to satisfy the demands of 1) the superego, 2) the id and 3) external reality. The superego is formed not only from the strictures of the specific parents but from the family, national and racial demands, as well as the demands of the immediate social milieu; and then, along the way, incorporates material from teachers and other authority figures.

The id is the forces of nature, of heredity; the superego, the broad forces of culture and environment; the ego is formed as a result of the accidental experiences of the individual.

Chapter 2. The theory of the instincts

The general theory of instincts is not well understood. Insofar as instincts replace each other and displace energy onto each other there may be thousands of instincts. To be simple, psychoanalysis discriminates two basic instincts, Eros and the destructive instinct, elsewhere referred to as Thanatos. (Contrasting instincts of self-preservation and preservation of the species, between ego-love and object-love, fall within the realm of Eros).

Eros sets out to bind things together and preserve them; Thanatos seeks to tear things apart and destroy them. Thanatos tends ultimately to an inorganic state, hence it is also known as the Death Drive.

The two instincts can combine or oppose. Thus eating is an act of killing something for our satisfaction; sex incorporates aggression with reproduction. A surplus of the destructive instinct turns the lover into Jack the Ripper; a deficit, into a peeping Tom.

The two instincts exist alongside each other in the childish ego-id. The death instinct is easily detected when directed outwards in aggression; when the superego is constructed, the death instinct is attached to it and can operate self-destructively against the organism itself. Holding back aggressiveness can be just as detrimental as restraining sexual desire.

The libido is detectable in the primary infant state of pure narcissism when the ego takes itself as object. As the child develops it projects libido onto external objects. Throughout life the ego remains the reservoir of the libido from which libido is sent out to cathect (or charge) objects and to which it returns. Only when the subject is completely in love is the majority of the libido cathected onto the object which takes the place of the ego.

The nature of the libido has been deduced from its behaviour in the form of the sex instinct. This aspect of the libido develops out of the contributions of a succession of component instincts which are variously attached to different erotogenic zones.

Chapter 3. The development of the sexual function

The traditional view has it that human sexual life consists in bringing your genitals into contact with the genitals of someone of the opposite sex, with accompanying phenomena such as like kissing and touching. This activity is supposed to start at puberty. How does the traditional view then deal with the fact that:

a) some people are attracted to people of their own sex with similar genitals?
b) some people seek sexual satisfaction but ignore the genitals or other people altogether (called ‘perverts’)?
c) some children take an early interest in their own genitals (called ‘degenerate’)?

In contrast to the evident failure of the traditional theory, psychoanalysis has discovered that:

a) sexual life doesn’t begin at puberty but soon after birth
b) it is necessary to distinguish between sexuality and genitality, the former vastly outcompassing the latter
c) sexual pleasure can be obtained from many zones of the body and that these often only imperfectly overlap with the organs of reproduction

Childhood sexuality develops to a peak in the fifth year and thereafter falls into a lull during which much is forgotten: the latency period.

The onset of sexuality in man is therefore diphasic, first occurring in infancy, falling into latency, and re-efflorescing in puberty. The latency period seems to play a vital role in the process of acculturation unique to man, the passing on of traditional wisdom and knowledge to the next generation.

The first stage of childish development is the oral phase of suckling; the continuation of sucking after the baby is fed is evidence of the separation of pleasure-seeking and physiological need. This – the separation of strict physical need from the enjoyment of physical pleasure – is the justification for describing the baby as ‘sexual’.

Elements of sadism are present in the baby biting the nipple. This sadism is expanded in the next stage, the anal-sadistic phase, where biting and defecation become sources of pleasure.

Finally comes the phallic period when the child detaches sexual pleasure from bodily functions altogether and associates it with playing with its penis or clitoris. The little boy playing with his penis obscurely associates this pleasure with his mother; he wants to be the sole object of its mother’s attention and to do away with the father who keeps taking her away. This is the Oedipus Complex. The little girl, as and when she comes to see or hear about a boy’s genitalia, perceives the absence of a penis as a loss and conceives penis envy. The childish turning away from sexuality which this produces in women often lasts a lifetime.

These developmental phases do not develop in a simple pattern but overlap, often becoming fixated at particular levels. With the onset of puberty these earlier patterns return to influence sexual behaviour. Some early pleasures become focussed on traditional genital activity; some remain in residue as types of foreplay; some become the object of perverted sexual practice; some are repressed, or employed by the ego in forming character traits, and the energy of still others are sublimated into higher and socially acceptable cultural activity.

These discoveries mean that:

a) the phenomenology of the subject has to be examined from a dynamic or economic point of view
b) the aetiology of later mental illness is to be found in the patient’s early life

Chapter 4. Psychical qualities

What is the psyche? Behaviourism says there isn’t one, that we observe and quantify each other like machines.

Traditional psychology says there is a psyche and that it is synonymous with consciousness. Consciousness is hard to define but we all know what we mean by it. A psychology which confines itself to consciousness studies the difference between perceptions, feelings, thought-processes and wishes. But it is clear to self-reflection that these processes are not as continual, as transparent or sequential as earlier philosophers, for example John Locke, thought.

What are we to make of the gaps, the blanks, the dysjunctions in attempts to describe our mental life which trouble the ‘continuous consciousness’ model of the old view?

Psychoanalysis shifts the whole playing field by saying that the overwhelming bulk of psychic life is unconscious. It cannot be known (as the workings of chemistry or physics in the brain cannot be experienced) but its activity can be deduced and general laws governing its behaviour worked out by observation.

Some things out of consciousness become conscious easily; they originate in the pre-conscious, a kind of ante-chamber to consciousness and can be readily accessed. But the lion’s share of mental activity is unconscious and therefore can only ever be inferred or deduced from other evidence

Preconscious material makes its way into our conscious mind with little effort, but unconscious material can only be reclaimed for consciousness by a great effort. One is aware of resistance to its extraction. Sometimes unconscious material forces its way into consciousness and dominates it – as in psychotic illness. Sometimes preconscious material can be subject to repression and become inaccessible – as when we lose our memory.

Animals may well function with just an ego-unconscious. In men this happy state is complicated by the existence of speech which links perceptions to mnemic images and residues of perception, or memory. We don’t operate in a permanent present; we accumulate a huge weight of experiences.

In human beings, since the invention of language, internal events, thanks to being verbalised, can acquire a kind of reality which rivals outer perceptions. To test which is coming from where the ego develops methods for reality-testing. Errors which easily arise due to the new situation – where we mistake internal psychic experiences for ‘reality’ – are called hallucinations or dreams.

The inside of the ego is largely preconscious, with a thin layer of consciousness monitoring outside perceptions and an inner stream of consciousness. The id is entirely unconscious. What the nature of the physical processes are which make the biochemical changes which the mind is capable of perceiving remain a mystery.

Chapter 5. Dream interpretation as an illustration

A model mind is one in which the frontiers of the ego are safeguarded from the encroachments of the id by effective repression, and in which the superego and the ego work together as one. To find out how these forces work together we should see them malfunctioning and an easy way to begin is with dreams.

Everyone dreams. In dreams our experiences are hallucinatory, surreal, bizarre, nonsensical – everything we believe the unconscious to be. Dream interpretation distinguishes between the manifest content, what we remember of the dream upon waking, and the latent content, the real message of the dreams.

In a dram unconscious material has forced its way past the slumbering defences of repression into the preconscious; here it is scrambled by the Censor in such a way as not to disturb the sleep which the human organism requires. In other words, dreams enable refreshing sleep to occur because, although we are more vulnerable to raids from the unconscious, the censor steps in to distort the latent content of the impulse.

Dreams can originate from either suppressed wishes deep in the unconscious or from preconscious traces of the day’s activities to which deeper unconscious urges attach themselves.

Evidence that dreams are indeed the irruption of the repressed are:

a) dreams contain a high degree of material forgotten or inaccessible to waking consciousness
b) dreams partake of linguistic symbols derived from earlier stages in the subject’s development
c) dreams often repeat scenes from childhood which are repressed in waking life
d) dreams incorporate memories not accessible to the individual, possibly memories from the origins of the race

But Freud has called dream interpretation ‘the royal road to the unconscious’ because dreams make accessible to us the bizarre laws to which unconscious life is subject. These include processes of distortion called condensation and displacement.

The deduction from dreams is that the unconscious is desirous of expending its energy regardless of object. The dream is the guardian of sleep because it fulfils this rude instinct, this pressing unconscious wish, in the shape of a fantasy.

Anxiety dreams, which seem to disprove the thesis that dreams are fulfilments of wishes, happen when the instinct overpowers the Censor and is threatening to storm the ego in the full ugliness of its naked lust. The only option open to the ego is to wake up, switch defences up to full, and stuff the repressed material back into oblivion – but at the cost of an all too palpable effort (sweats, adrenalin, anxiety etc).

Part 2. The practical task

Chapter 6. The technique of psychoanalysis

A dream, then, is a psychosis which remains under our control. By contrast other mental illnesses are less controllable. They may come about when the urgings of the id unbalance the ego, or when the superego makes impossible demands, or when both gang up on the poor ego.

In analysis the analyst comes to the ego’s aid with a promise to reinforce his mechanism of defence in return for the subject giving us the complete honesty and candour we need to examine the unconscious. [N.B. it is this bolstering of defences which was pursued in the work of ego psychology developed by Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud].

Psychotics who have completely abandoned contact with reality are beyond the terms of this pact and cannot be treated by psychoanalysis. But there is another class of psychiatric patient who still has enough contact with reality to undertake the pact required to carry out therapy – ‘the vast number of people suffering severely from neuroses.’

The therapeutic pact If the neurotic gives us his full story in full candour we will help rebuild his ego. Sounds like the role of the master-confessor from the olden days of religion? Yes, except for the all-important distinction that a psychoanalyst can learn from the patient what he does not know himself, which Christian confession can never do.

In order to do this the psychoanalyst must extract everything whatever that comes to the patient’s mind, no matter how trivial. It is from this material that the analyst deduces the unconscious urges which are dominating the patient.

But the analyst will meet resistance. And after resistance, transference. The patient will begin to project onto the analyst all the feelings evoked by their memories of childhood, for example, the ambivalent love-hate feelings which every child projects onto its first authority figure, the Father.

Transference has the advantage that the analyst can then act with the authority of the father and the patient may make great efforts to please Daddy. Plus, the analyst has the advantage of seeing a key period from the patient’s life acted out in front of them rather than inconclusively reported by a confused patient.

Unfortunately, transference has a negative side as the repressed anger and defiance of the patient, also, can be projected onto the analyst. Worse, the repressed erotic wish for the parent of the opposite sex can emerge in the shape of the patient falling in love with the analyst.

If the patient thinks these are real experiences, it’s tricky; the analyst has to disabuse them and make them see that these are just repetitions of childhood feelings. Once transference is acknowledged, the patient can begin the process of rebuilding, of broadening the area of control of, the ego.

The second part of the cure is the overcoming of resistances. The ego, threatened from within and without, expends a lot of energy clinging to certain anti-cathexes, resistances to repressed material. It is the job of analysis to embolden the ego, to give it the power to regain mastery over its whole domain and not to feel threatened and embattled (anxious, hysterical, neurotic or obsessive).

As resistances to the expression of forbidden material are overcome, welcome mental energy is liberated for the ego to redeploy across its kingdom. When the analysis has progressed this far, two factors now become evident. The first is Guilt, which is the shape taken by resistance in the superego, which expends energy punishing the ego. The superego insists that:

The patient must not become well but must remain ill because they deserve no better.

The analyst has to make the unreasonableness of this self-punishment clear to the patient. The second factor is a complete takeover of the ego by the will to destruction, the death wish, which often leads to suicide.

Chapter 7. An example of psychoanalytic work

One fundamental discovery of psychoanalysis has been that neurotics have the same pathology as normal people, they have the same innate disposition as normal people, the same experiences, the same problems to solve. They are simply people who find this framework of requirements too much, resulting in misery, anxiety, symptoms.

On closer investigation, it appears that almost all these neuroses have their origin in childhood. Hardly surprising when you consider the primal power of the id and the vulnerability of the still-developing ego, feeble, immature and incapable of resistance.

The ego copes with excess stimuli from the external world with flight; with excess stimuli from the internal world with repression, attempts at mental flight, denial and rejection. It later turns out that these have been paid for at the cost of full development, and that the libidinal energy devoted to holding these instincts back, permanently cripples and disables the ego; stunts its proper development.

Why has evolution permitted such an apparently costly mechanism to afflict the young animal? Because it’s a small price to pay compared to the epic task which the ego has to achieve in its first five years:

In the space of a few years the little primitive creature must turn into a civilized human being; he must pass through an immensely long stretch of human cultural development in an almost uncannily abbreviated form. This is made possible by hereditary disposition; but it can never be achieved without the additional help of upbringing, of parental influence which, as a precursor to the superego, restricts the ego’s activities by prohibitions and punishments and encourages the setting-up of repressions.

Thus, the influence of civilisation is among the determinants of neurosis. It is easy for a barbarian to be happy – he gives way to all his basest desires, represses nothing and so has no neuroses. For a civilised man it is a long strenuous journey, with many pitfalls.

The central role of sexuality in this developmental journey has been proved by psychoanalysis time after time:

The symptoms of neuroses are either a substitutive satisfaction of some sexual urge or measures to prevent such a satisfaction; usually some kind of compromise between the two.

Why should this be so surprising? The one essential role of every organism is to reproduce; preparation for reproduction is crucial; and yet in the rise of civilisation no instinct is more thoroughly repressed than sexuality. Given such strong opposing forces why be surprised that so many people fall victim in one way or another to illness caused by the repression of their innermost desires?

Central to the child’s experience is the Oedipus Complex. Freud approaches it via a developmental history of the child.

The child’s first erotic experience is sucking at the breast, the primary model of gratification (‘Love and hunger meet at a woman’s breast’, The Interpretation of Dreams, page 295). Initially breast and baby are one polymorphously perverse substance.

Soon the breast is differentiated and becomes cathected (i.e. charged) with conflicting feelings of love and hate (tiny aggression is shown by biting the nipple) in the oral phase. Soon the breast forms itself into the whole of the mother who pampers and plays with the child, prompting a galaxy of feelings, gratifications and frustrations, pleasures and rages.

Thus the mother is the first seducer, the prototype of all later love-relations.

At three and four, in the phallic stage, the baby boy is aware of the pleasure given by playing with his penis and shows it off proudly to his mother. He associates this pleasure with her and wants to possess her, according to the prompting of obscure feelings. If the child shares the Mother’s bed and then Daddy comes home and he is returned to his cot, the feelings of little Oedipus can be imagined. Rage and hatred and lust and desire seethe in the toddler mind. Eventually the mother or father tell little Johnny to stop playing with himself or being so stubborn or bad tempered and all these injunctions are accompanied by the explicit or implicit threat to deprive the boy of the source of his greatest pride and pleasure, his penis.

This is the castration complex and is the most terrifying experience of a small boy’s life. It echoes down the ages in the Greek myths where successive gods castrate their father, and in the age-old practice of circumcision by which pubescent boys submit to authority, in both Judaism and Islam.

In response to this terrifying fear the child suppresses its masturbatory activities and sublimates them into fantasies. It fosters resentment, defiance and fear of the father and practices a total renunciation of the mother or slavish identification with her, in order to be spared by the Father.

It is precisely because this ‘nuclear complex’ paves the way for so many strategies of defence that psychoanalysis calls it the founding moment in the development of human character. All these seething feelings are repressed in childhood, go underground during the latent phase. But then they return in new guises at puberty that explosive period of sexual and egoistic efflorescence, with the arrival of full-blown sexual awareness. The revival of repressed material with the onset of puberty plays a large role in determining character.

On this model girls are born inferior. Their lack of a penis leads to penis envy. Their attempts at masturbation are failures, hence a general turning away from sexual life in girls and women.

They may try to introject the masculinity they lack and become lesbians. They may turn to hatred of the mother who brought them into the world without a penis and so turn their love toward the father. In this narrative the girl’s attempt to be like their father and to incorporate his penis-authority is finally sublimated into the wish to take the mother’s place, to bear Daddy a baby. Once formulated, this wish may, like the boy’s forbidden fantasies, be repressed into the unconscious but, with the onset of puberty, the wish is revived but directed outwards, so that the young woman goes off to attach herself to the first suitable male who reminds her of Daddy.

Part 3. The theoretical yield

Chapter 8. The psychical apparatus and the external world

Ultimate reality is itself unknowable. All we can know is reality as mediated by our sense perceptions and ‘known’ as it is perceived by our organ of knowledge, the mind.

Thus, in describing the workings of the mind most psychology, and most ordinary people, have to work with concepts which are largely metaphorical, concepts like height, depth, width or more advanced concepts like time, like cause and effect, which have no physical, tangible ‘reality’. We have imposed them on ‘reality’ because they provide us with a working model, a way of getting on with the real world.

Psychoanalysis is no different. It invokes metaphorical concepts like the unconscious, the repressed, the libido and so on. We can never know exactly what these things ‘are’. Possibly, we will one day be able to correlate them to specific physical, biochemical changes in the brain. In the meantime we use them because they provide a workable explanation of the many other phenomena we observe in the mind.

To recapitulate: the id is the realm of unconscious drives; it is ruled by two broad instincts 1) the desire to fulfil every instinctual wish 2) the equal and opposite drive to reduce tension. Ultimately, the second wish is pushing for the cessation of all tension and stimuli (‘Nirvana’). The two broad streams of instincts are assigned to two broad categories: the desire for pleasure, of which sexual pleasure is a subset, fall under the heading of Eros; and the wishes for all stimuli to cease fall under the death instinct.

Mediating between the id and external reality is the ego. The ego attempts to control the instincts of the id such that they can be fulfilled at the most propitious moments in the external world. Sometimes desires which threaten the ego’s function have to be entirely repressed and the ego has to expend energy doing this. The id is driven exclusively by desire for pleasure, the Pleasure Principle, while the ego is driven by a desire for safety, the Reality Principle.

Most of the ego is preconscious. Occasional strands of association, images and verbal residues, drift across the part of the psyche which is capable of self-reflection, often puzzling or even bewildering us.

The ego develops and separates itself off from the primal id at a price. Its autonomy is always contingent and subject to disruptive incursions from ‘below’, from the unconscious, and to a constant stream of punitive demands from ‘above’, from the superego. And the ego is constantly under attack from the terrifying forces of external reality.

No wonder the ego often cracks under the strain and has a ‘breakdown’. It is at this stage that psychoanalysis sets out to trace the fissures, the cracks of the breakdown, back to their earliest origins in childhood. And, once the repressed material has been dragged into the light of consciousness, the patient can acknowledge the long buried childhood experiences which are at the root of the problem and begin rebuilding new, better ego defences with which to face the world.

Chapter 9. The external world

Guilt is the punitive action of the superego upon the ego. The superego is the concentrate of injunctions laid upon us by our first objects, the parents. Thus the psyche has three parts:

  1. the deep inner world – the id
  2. a special part of the outside world introjected or brought inside – the superego
  3. a bit that mediates between outer and inner – the ego

The superego is the heir to the Oedipus Complex. Its intensity has nothing to do with the actual strictness of the real-life parents, but is a function of the intensity of the Oedipal feelings which the child had to repress.

It is a dim perception of this sense of a planting-from-outside which has led theologians to account for conscience as being implanted in us by a higher cause, God.

The superego is initially based on the residue of the Oedipus Complex, but attracts to itself all the teachings of the parents, of teachers and authority figures, general social morality and the accumulated wisdom of the past…

[Here the manuscript breaks off in mid-sentence. The editors of the Pelican edition end the text with ellipses…Quite poignant.]

Comment

This is Freud’s most concentrated theoretical exposition of psychoanalysis, rich in new insights and cross-connections and very persuasive, especially where he gives a bit of wider context, mentioning (albeit briefly) psychoanalysis’s position vis-a-vis philosophy and other psychological theories i.e. it goes deeper than both, far, far deeper.

The passage describing the actual process of psychotherapy is the clearest, most persuasive summary of how the analytic therapy works which I have read.

Possibly it is so effective because he largely eschews the florid metaphors he is so prone to in the rest of his work (analysis as archaeology etc) and also because he doesn’t waste time going off on one of his rants against religion or into a long digression on a literary text (Gradiva, Hamlet etc).

Instead, he bases the theory on the basis of a materialist, biological interpretation of the human organism and human mind,  stopping to consider what the evolutionary reason or advantage for this or that mental strategy might be – and this gives it more scientific weight and authority than almost anything else I’ve read by him.

If you were going to read one work by Freud, maybe this is the one; it’s barely 70 pages long in the Pelican Freud Library paperback.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’ was first translated into English by James Strachey in 1964 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. My quotes are from the version included in volume 15 of the Pelican Freud Library, published in the 1986.

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Posted by Simon on July 12, 2023

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Civilisation and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud (1930)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian or bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

Civilisation and Its Discontents might more accurately be titled Why Civilisation Makes Us Unhappy. Freud suggests that civilisation is built on the renunciation of sexual and aggressive drives but that, although this benefits wider society, it often comes at the expense of anxiety and guilt i.e. mental illness, for us as individuals.

Many of the articles and books I’ve read about Freud claim that this was his single most influential book.

Civilisation and Its Discontents is a good example of Freud’s lifelong interest in the Big Questions of society – religion, morality, art and so on. His attempts at explaining the origins of society in Totem and Taboo (1914) and Moses and Monotheism (1939) were heavily criticised at the time and have been generally discredited since. His attack on Christianity in The Future of an Illusion (1927) doesn’t address (or invent) historical events in the same way as Totem and Moses does and so hasn’t dated so badly. It’s more an analysis of the psychological underpinnings of organised religion and so retains some force – although it has been superseded by thousands of later writers, commentators, utopians and revolutionaries, also seeking to abolish religious belief, so it’s just one polemic in a very crowded field.

By comparison with those other books, Civilisation and Its Discontents (although it kicks off with yet another dig at religious belief) is built on stronger foundations. Its central thesis that repression of our baser instincts is simultaneously the basis of a ‘civilised’ society and the source of many problems and mental illnesses suffered by its civilised citizens. This is an intuitively plausible argument which the passage of time has done nothing to discredit, which is why many critics reckon it might have been Freud’s single most influential book: its message that modern society makes us ill probably reached a far wider audience than any of his more theoretical or therapeutic works.

1.

Freud opens with a reference to his essay The Future of an Illusion, his most sustained, full-frontal attack on the psychological bases of religious belief. Freud replies to a critic who had written to say that Future failed to take into account genuinely spiritual feelings, in particular the ‘oceanic feeling’ of which the religious speak (as did Freud’s renegade follower, C.G. Jung).

Freud explains that this feeling is a relic, left after the realistic ego grew up, of a person’s infantile narcissism and sense of oneness with the world. For Freud religious belief begins in the infant’s sense of helplessness and need for parental protection, a feeling which is reborn and accentuated in the adult by their nervous awareness of the countless risks and dangers of human existence.

2.

Life is cruel. Human beings, endowed with memory to remember the past and reason enough to foresee the disasters of the future, need protection from both. There are three ways of escaping reality:

  1. Defence mechanisms, such as religion.
  2. Substitute satisfactions and sublimations of hopes and fears – Art.
  3. Intoxicants to extinguish consciousness.

What is the purpose of life? Well, who knows. But when you examine the way people actually behave – and not what they say – it is clear that most people live life in the pursuit of happiness. This happiness is threatened by three things:

  1. The decay and dissolution of the body.
  2. The destructiveness of the outside world.
  3. Our difficult relations with other people.

So how can we escape this dreadful predicament?

  • hedonism? (full of risks and danger)
  • art? (limited to the percipient few)
  • intoxicants? (ultimately self-destructive)
  • Eastern quietism? (brings only mild contentment, not happiness)
  • hermetic isolation? (you go mad)
  • delusions and mental illness? (as in psychotics and paranoiacs)
  • mass delusions? (for example, religion)
  • love, which may be the source of our greatest gratifications? (but oh how exposed and vulnerable we are to its sudden withdrawal)
  • the enjoyment of beauty? (fickle and easily destroyed)

There are maybe three psychological types, who will each tackle these problems differently:

  1. The Erotic Man who wants love and sexual satisfaction.
  2. The Narcissist who tries to take control of the world in his own mental pleasures.
  3. The Man of Action who seeks to change the world.

But there is one complete worldview which seeks to tackle all of these threats to our wellbeing – Religion. Religion tackles the vulnerability of human beings by:

  • depressing the value of life in this world
  • drawing its followers into an unreal view of the world, similar to mass delusion
  • fixing them in psychical infantilism

3.

So, it’s 1930. We are all discontented with civilisation. Why? Because in rising to a civilised level we have been forced to renounce many instinctual pleasures. A glance at many primitive peoples, for example, Australian aborigines, seems to show a people at one with life. By contrast, psychoanalysis has shown the terrible price in neurosis and nervous disease paid by ‘civilised’ people for the benefits of civilisation. A general disappointment with the early promises to improve life made by science and technology hasn’t improved things. So what are the salient features of this civilisation we are so unhappy with?

  • technology and the exploitation of nature
  • the creation of order and beauty
  • higher mental achievements, for example, religion, art and science
  • the ordering of human affairs via Justice and the Law

On the level of the individual citizen, civilisation is a process which results in:

  • character-formation
  • the sublimation of the instincts into ‘higher’ cultural achievements
  • the renunciation of instinct

4.

The development of civilisation is like the growth of an individual. Savage men are driven to compete for a wife/sex object. One strong man comes to rule the horde. Then the sons rise up and kill the Father. Genital love is the motor in the formation of the Family. Aim-inhibited love leads to friendship and camaraderies, useful for uniting the group and forming bonds between them. Once set on this path, Man is moved to sublimate his basic sex-drive into more complicated psychic and social structures. As society is built up it exerts tighter control on the individual’s potentially anarchic sexuality, corralling it and narrowing it down to focus on heterosexual pairing. Even that restricted arena of expression mustn’t come about before a rigorous series of rituals have been carried out.

So much for libido and sex drive. Are there other reasons for the unhappiness created by civilisation?

5.

Yes. Human beings are violent. The Biblical injunction to love your neighbour is only necessary because there is such a violent urge in all of us to rape, torture, exploit and mutilate our neighbour. Society uses every means at its disposal to rearrange libido so as to secure social acquiescence. One obvious way is via aim-inhibited libido, libido which is rerouted into either generalised affection (for your dog or children or old people) or into friendship, rerouted libido which vastly expand the ties of family into society.

Civilisation has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man’s aggressive instincts and to hold the manifestations of them in check by psychical reaction formations. Hence, therefore, the use of methods designed to incite people into identifications and aim-inhibited relationships of ‘love’, hence the restriction upon sexual life, and hence, too, the ego-ideal’s commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself – a commandment which is justified by the fact that nothing runs so strongly counter to the original nature of man.
(Pelican Freud Library, volume 12, page 303)

The communists say that men were originally peaceable and equal but that the institution of private property has corrupted them. Do away with private property and everything will be alright. Freud laughs. On the contrary, all societies are bound together by what they exclude, by their ability to project the natural aggression of their members outwards onto outsiders.

In this respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered most useful services to the civilisations who were their hosts. (volume 12, page 305)

A newly insurgent dream of Germanic world domination has inevitably raised the oldest scapegoat upon which to focus its anger – the Jew. And the communist utopia in Russia turns out to call for an entire class to anathematise, the bourgeoisie (although, at this period, the direst fate was being meted out to the wealthier peasants, known as kulaks.)

In order to become civilised, man has to give up these two elements: unbridled sexual satisfaction and the expression of aggression. Primitive man expressed these easily and was happy. He also died young. Civilised man has exchanged happiness for security. We live long lives with a lot of frustration and misery in them.

6.

Section 6 is a complicated defence of Freud’s theory of the death instinct or Thanatos. Originally Freud posited just two psychic classes, ego-instincts and object-instincts. The idea of narcissism, first developed in an essay of 1914, complicated matters and by 1920 Freud had developed a new fundamental opposition, that between Eros and the death drive, between instincts which seek to unify, to bind (in a primitive way with the breast, with food; later with a sex-object; in a sublimated form with friends or comrades, via aim-inhibited libido) and instincts which seek to break psychic energy down into smaller units, ultimately to death.

In practice our instincts always appear in some combination. On the personal level libido accompanied with aggression is sadism; the death drive comes to the aid of group psychology and aim-inhibited libido by being deflected outwards onto strangers and enemies. Aggression thwarted is turned inwards as masochism or self-punishment or suicide. Despite opposition and scepticism to these ideas, even within analytic circles:

I adopt the standpoint, therefore, that the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man, and that it constitutes the greatest impediment to civilisation. (12: 313)

Civilisation is a process in the services of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. These collections of men are libidinally bound to each other. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common, will not hold them together. But man’s natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes this programme of civilisation. This aggressive instinct is the derivative and the main representative of the death instinct which we have found alongside Eros and which shares world dominion with it. Thus the evolution of civilisation represents a struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of and it is this battle of giants that our nursemaids try to distract us from with their lullaby about Heaven. (12: 314)

7.

So how is this aggression controlled in the individual? Through the superego. By returning it in upon itself, by setting a part of itself aside, the ego is able to satisfy upon itself the aggressive wishes it would like to impose on others – Freud calls this mental agency the conscience and the emotional affect it produces in us is guilt. The superego is the watch-dog of civilisation planted inside the head of each of us.

Guilt is the fear of the loss of love, its primal source the withdrawal of parental love. In its simplest form, if you do something bad you are anxious that you will be found out and that love will be withdrawn from you, the love of your parents or of the community at large. So you can still do wrong but will strive not to be found out.

In the more sophisticated form, you develop a full superego based on childish experiences and anxieties. Now you feel guilty even if no-one finds out or can find out what you’ve done – because someone does know; your conscience knows. What’s more, it knows about things you haven’t even done but have fantasised about doing; and it knows about things you’ve fantasised about doing and repressed so deeply you don’t even remember them. Since everyone has the same Oedipal fantasies, everyone suffers a greater or lesser sense of guilt.

More: the superego is fiercest in those who set out to please it most; the more you try to please it in every way, the more demanding the superego becomes. Hence the pathological saint. And if bad luck from the external world does actually befall you, this only provides the punishing superego with more opportunities to punish you for being such a loser. Hence, Freud declares, with the confidence of an unbelieving Jew, the characteristics of the Jewish race, in that the more calamities overtook it, the more they blamed themselves.

More: there is an original substratum of guilt laid down in all of us due to archaic vestiges of the primal Parricide, which is bequeathed to each of us at birth. Its traces are reawakened by naughty things we do, which introduces us to fear of punishment (withdrawal of love); and further reinforced by the introjection of that fear/aggression in a superego. The more we renounce our instincts, the more the superego is given energy to punish us, to demand more. Therefore, insofar as civilisation is defined as the renunciation of instinct, it must inevitably lead to an increase in guilt. Civilisation, by its very nature, reinforces the superego in all of us, and the superego is the punishing principle. Civilisation must make everyone feel guilty.

8.

So, to recap: The price we pay for civilisation and security is the loss of happiness through instinctual renunciation and an accompanying increase in personal guilt.

Freud goes on to speculate that maybe guilt is the product not of libidinal wishes but only of repressed aggressive wishes. So neurotic symptoms are the result of the libido being repressed; when aggression is repressed it reactivates ancient feelings of remorse (for murders, real or imaginary) and guilt i.e. the aggression is rechannelled, via the superego, against the repressing ego, in the form of demands for more obeisance and penitence.

Freud draws the analogy between the development of an individual and the development of civilisation. In the latter, also, a superego, an ego-ideal, is created in the form of a strong leader – Moses, Jesus et al. Just as the oedipal boy unconsciously wishes his authoritative father dead but then suffers remorse and guilt at these buried feelings, so the Jews and Christians wanted their insufferably strict leaders dead and then, in fact, killed them. And just as the individual superego – in the latency period – sets up an idealised version of the dead leader’s injunctions and punishes followers for not attaining them, so entire peoples feel guilt and remorse at the primal murder they’ve committed, set up idealised versions of the murdered Father (of Moses who talked to God, of Jesus who IS God) and punish themselves for not living up to these impossibly high ethical standards.

Over and above the vague sense of guilt or malaise whose origin Freud has explained, there are the specific injunctions of the superego. In individual patients, modern therapy often consists in softening the impossibly strict demands made on them by their own superegos, demands which result in unhappiness and illness.

In society as a whole, the same is true. Our society makes impossible demands on people. Freud singles out the injunction to love your neighbour as yourself as a prime example. It is a fine specimen of the highest ethical ideal a society can rise to, but its very impossibility leads to unhappiness among the many people who try to live up to it, fail, and then punish themselves.

Freud dryly remarks that he thinks maybe a real change in the relations of people and their possessions, a genuine redistribution of wealth – in other words communism – would be more likely to produce ethical improvement than religion’s insistence on demanding the impossible.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. Civilisation and Its Discontents was translated into English in 1961 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Quotes in this blog post are from the version which was included in Volume 12 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘Civilisation, Society and Religion’, published in 1985.

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The Question of Lay Analysis by Sigmund Freud (1926)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian or bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

Background

In 1926 the Viennese authorities began legal proceedings against Dr Theodor Reik, a non-medical psychoanalyst, under an old Austrian law against quackery, because he was practicing psychotherapy without a medical qualification. Freud wrote this pamphlet to clarify the underlying question of whether the practice of analytic therapy should be restricted to trained medical doctors.

Many first-generation analysts, themselves originally doctors by training, thought that psychoanalytic practice very much should be restricted to qualified physicians. But Freud’s answer was: No, it shouldn’t.

The book is cast in the form of a dialogue, with ‘An Impartial Person’ asking questions (which I highlight in italics) and Freud, in the first person, slowly, sensibly answering them.

The text comes in seven bite-size chapters and is written in a light-hearted style which I have copied in my own summary and comments.

1.

Freud outlines the kind of psychological symptoms which may take you to the doctor: a horrible sense of guilt, a compulsive need to perform obsessive actions, a fear of going outside or socialising, all sorts of phobias, sexual impotence, fear of women, frigidity, attachment to prostitutes or perversions, inability to concentrate or to stop the mind rambling along unconnected byways of its own.

You are referred to a psychoanalyst. What happens there? You talk, the analyst listens.

So it’s like a simple magical cure? Well, yes, except that it takes months, sometimes years of talking. So it’s like going to confession, then? No, because the most important part is that you are encouraged to say things you do not know. What?

2.

Before we go any further let’s explain a bit of theory. This account is not necessarily complete and the theory has changed and evolved into its present form over thirty years, but then this is Science not Holy Writ, so please bear in mind the things written here are contingent on new discoveries.

Science, as you know, is not a revelation; long after its beginnings it still lacks the attributes of definiteness, immutability and infallibility for which human thought longs so deeply.
(Freud Pelican Library volume 15, page 291)

Well now, all of us have moments when the mind slips off and wanders at will through a fantasy world which is very like the  mental world of some mentally ill people; and these are in dreams. Interpreting dreams is a key way of getting at the unconscious mind, although many people have picked up this idea from newspapers etc and distorted its application.

Anyway, let’s construct our mental picture of the mind. We are going to use spacial analogies, using metaphors of above, below, shallow, deep. Admittedly these don’t refer to actual positions in the mind: but it’s the best we can do and, after all, what do you expect? All scientific theories are a little rough at the beginning.

Well now, all of us are aware of a part of us mediating between our basic physical needs and the sometimes harsh realities of the outside world. Let’s call this mediating part of the mind the ‘I’ or, to use Latin, the ego. This is pretty much what we mean when we say ‘I’m hot’ or ‘I’m hungry’, reflecting the feelings of the conscious mind.

But behind this conscious assessment of what we feel, we often sense the presence of an enormous number of unexpressed feelings. Let’s call the place where these unexpressed feelings originate the ‘it’ or, in Latin, the id.

We propose that the ego is the layer of the mental apparatus (the id) which has been modified by the influence of the external world (of reality)…

For us the ego is something superficial and the id something deeper. The ego lies between reality and the id, which is what is truly mental. (volume 15, page 296)

Picture the ego as an organisation characterised by a focus on unity, trying to hold things together in the face of conflicting demands. By contrast, the id is all over the place; the multiplicity of urges which make up the id are each pursuing their separate agendas, in their own way, regardless of each other, of the ego or of outside reality.

You don’t believe this because you haven’t experienced it. Most of our trainees sit there thinking, Yeah, so what, big deal. Then they begin a training analysis and slowly the reality of this theory is demonstrated to them.

3.

Let’s look at the mind in another way, from a dynamic rather than a topographic perspective:

Instincts fill the id. All the energy in the id originates from them. Nor have the forces in the ego any other origin; they are derived from those in the id. What do these instincts want? Satisfaction – the establishment of the situation in which bodily needs can be extinguished. A lowering of the tension of need is felt by our organ of consciousness as pleasurable; an increase of it is soon felt as unpleasurable. (15:300)

Hence we say that mental activity operates under the rule of the Pleasure Principle. The id is continually pushing for satisfaction of all its instinctual drives – food, sex, booze, anger etc, literally the driving forces of the human animal.

The ego has to steer a ship driven by all these wild desires, avoiding all the snares and dangers of the real world. The ego observes the real world, learning how best to achieve satisfaction from it; and tries to rein in the drives of the id, keeping them on a tight rein until the moment is right.

The ego, then, operates under the Reality Principle. When things are going well, the ego and the id function together, because they are in fact made of the same stuff, mental energy. But:

A small living organism is a miserable, powerless thing in face of the overwhelming destructive might of the outside world. A primitive organism which hasn’t developed an ego-organisation is at the mercy of instinctual drives. It lives by the ‘blind’ satisfaction of its instinctual wishes and often perishes in consequence. The differentiation of an ego is above all a step towards self-preservation. (15:302)

If a desire brings the organism into peril which it, fortuitously, survives, the next time it approaches a similar situation it experiences a memory of the first event which is also a warning: it experiences this as anxiety. The ego will try and turn back the drive which is prompting the anxiety attack but can only repress it. Instinct will out. Roaming around within the crazy world of the id, the frustrated drive attaches itself to a more respectable colleague and emerges as a symptom. In a crazy distorted way, therefore, we see unconscious wishes which have been repressed for the survival of the organism emerge when our ego defences are low – hence our interest in those moments of low defence, during sleep in the form of dreams, in slips of the tongue and inexplicable amnesias, and in neurotic symptoms.

So the really serious mental cases I’ve heard about, the psychotics and the schizophrenics, with them maybe the ego didn’t even put up a fight but just went flying off with the id into its crazy world, into ‘a world of its own’?

Now you’re getting the hang of it. Nobody knows for sure, but that’s pretty much our theory.

Now I’m in a position to explain to you what psychoanalytic therapy is. We try to restore to the ego its autonomy; we try to restore its control over the id by bringing to light the repression of instinct which has driven the id to an unorthodox escape route i.e. created the patient’s symptoms.

Experience shows that the decisive repressions which lie behind most symptoms originally occurred in most patients’ childhood, when the ego was struggling to master its instinctual drives and finding its place in the outside world.

It should come as no surprise, then, that analysis takes the patient back to the earliest period of their life and uncovers memories which most of us would prefer to leave buried in the oblivion of childish amnesia.

The problem areas are identified by exploring the patient’s past, using dream interpretation and free association. As we approach the danger area the patient dries up – the associations and the memories stop. We have to teach the patient to overcome this resistance. We are educating the ego not to take refuge in the mental equivalent of ‘flight’, but to drag the memory, and the wish behind it, into the light of day. Once this is expressed, the patient is empowered to begin trying to overcome it.

Why, if it was impossible to face up to this experience back then, should the patient be able to handle the truth of his wishes now?

Because back then the patient was three-years-old and, although the terror was real and overwhelming to the infant at that age, to the adult mind whose ego-mechanisms are hugely more developed, the final revelation of what has been troubling  them all along often appears embarrassingly infantile.

The thing from which the patient’s childish ego fled in terror will often seem to their adult and strengthened ego no more than child’s play. (15:305)

4.

What about sex? I thought psychoanalysis was all about your sex life and surely only doctors who are entirely trustworthy and trained to a high level of dispassionateness have the integrity to be trusted with that kind of matter?

As to sex, yes, it has turned out to be the basis of so many of our patients’ problems that we are led to believe it plays a key role in mental life. But what, after all, would you expect? Just look at the importance of reproduction for animals

Insofar as we have evolved from the animal kingdom, of course we have inherited a strong sex drive; a drive which is not restricted, as it is in most animals, to certain seasons when they are ‘on heat’, but operates all the year round.

If you asked people to speak openly and with utter candour about all aspects of their lives’ wouldn’t you expect their sexual experiences, their sexual fears and fantasies, to crop up sooner or later.

All this seems to me simple and reasonable. That it has brought down on our heads all kinds of denunciations and accusations of immorality and pansexualism and obsession with sex, I attribute to the deeply neurotic and repressed nature of our civilization, which leads most people to reject and deny the truth about human nature.

Back to psychotherapy: So we return to memories of infancy to find the cause of the repressions which afflict the adult. And we find that most of those infant repressions are to do with sexuality.

You mean…?

Yes. Psychoanalysis’s greatest discovery has been the sexuality of children. People say we have desecrated the innocence of childhood. I say we are reporting what every nurse and many pediatricians have always known but been too afraid to put into words.

The sex life of a child is of course different from that of an adult. It passes through a long process of development during which it becomes involved with numerous component instincts with different aims, until at last it arrives at the seat of, and is ready at the service of, the grand goal of reproduction. But in such a long development there are bound to be hiccups.

For instance, the libido can become fixated at certain points, tied up with other instincts. Years later, when obstacles arise to normal sexual function, the libido may retreat to these earlier fixations, a process called regression.

The oddest thing is not that children have sexual feelings; when you really think about it, it would be odd if, as little animals, they didn’t have inklings of, or experiment with, the apparatus for the all-important task of reproduction to come.

The odd thing is that those feelings go into abeyance at about age 5 and are suppressed. Much is forgotten or loses its attraction during this period, the latency period. During the latency period the child builds up what we call reaction-formations, of disgust and shame, which combine with what it is told by parents to form a ‘morality’, something missing from the first five years as any parent knows and hard enough to instil into the older child.

This is the period when rules of behaviour, when ethics and morality, when right and wrong are instilled into the child who is repeatedly told that the simple gratification of its wishes (as in the early years) is ‘dirty’, ‘naughty’, ‘bad’ etc. From an evolutionary point of view you can see why the tribes who managed to do this to their young probably functioned better and survived.

We believe what happens is that the child needs a respite between the purely instinctual development of the early years, and the eruption of strength and renewed desires and lusts at puberty.

Civilization, therefore, is based on the effective repression of individual desires. A good citizen represses their desires effectively; a bad citizen either gratifies themself in an anti-social way, or falls prey to the kind of illness we began by looking at.

As to the content of those childhood feelings, consider the contents of fairy tales and mythology. There we see a persistent fear of the father. Kronos swallowed his children and castrated his father, Uranus. In his turn Kronos was himself emasculated by his son, Zeus, who he had tried to kill and who only triumphed through the help of his loving mother.

Think of the big bad wolf coming to eat you. Psychoanalysis says these are all projections of the primal fear of the huge father and that the most vivid way this terror can express itself, for a boy, is the fear that Daddy will chop off his penis. We call this the castration complex.

Maybe there is such a close correlation between the mental life of the child and the myths and stories of the earliest peoples because the child literally lives through the intellectual state of the primitive, rather as the embryo undergoes reptile or fish-like stages in its gestation in the womb.

However this may be, the essential fact about childhood sexuality is that it climaxes in the Oedipus Complex. The boy develops strong feelings for the mother, the girl for her father. You have to appreciate the vehemence of the love and the equal vehemence of the hate against the same-sex parent. The boy violently wishes to supersede the father, to replace him in his mother’s affections.

Eventually the Oedipus Complex is overcome, it disintegrates, it is resolved and the child lapses into the general amnesia of the latency period. But only rarely are all the stresses and strains associated with the Oedipus Complex in its full complexity totally mastered. And with the onset of puberty what hasn’t been properly sorted out returns to dominate the subject –  sometimes within the bounds of ‘normal’ behaviour, sometimes pushing the subject beyond these bounds into illness.

And the evidence for all this is?

  1. The records of earliest civilisations i.e. most mythologies include incestuous liaisons between father and daughter and mother and son. By the time we hear of them they have been repressed from everyday life and projected, culturally, onto gods and heroes who amount to psychological fantasy figures.
  2. The overwhelming testimony of adults under analysis.
  3. The analysis of children themselves down to the earliest years which we are now carrying out.

5.

So much for theory. This is what you need to know as an analyst, but now come the skills of technique.

You must listen in an unprejudiced way to everything the patient says. Nothing is too trivial. Everything has meaning. But the meaning isn’t clear. It has been distorted, by time, by the telling, but above all by the censoring processes of the ego.

Everything – memories, dreams, free associations – require skillful interpretation. This interpretation, of course, may be influenced by your personality. So you need to undergo a thorough analysis yourself to bring all your own neuroses to the surface, to transform you as much as possible into the ideal interpreter.

There is a method and there are the lessons of symbolisation we have built up since psychoanalysis emerged. But there is no denying it has a strong subjective element, too. How could it be otherwise in psychological treatment. Even doctors have to listen carefully and interpret what the patient is telling them.

Doctors are often wrong because they are taught about the body and modern pharmacology but fail to listen. Analysts have this advantage over doctors, that their entire training is in how to listen, how to suspend disbelief and listen to the hints and tips given out by the unconscious mind.

You have to have the insight and the tact to know exactly when to intervene in the analysis to put forward your interpretation. Too soon and you arouse resistance and defiance; too late and you have missed the moment.

And as if that wasn’t hard enough, when you finally tell the conscious ego of the patient what’s wrong with him – he denies it. All his wishes for a cure are thrown out of the window while he absolutely denies all your interpretation. Because every neurosis represents a flight from reality, a flight into illness, it is not easily to be given up.

For many patients this is because being ill has positive advantages. It brings them sympathy, allows them to avoid onerous duties (like going to the Front during the War), enables them to impose on their families or on friends or loved ones. Such basic strategies are hard to overthrow.

But there is another more complicated reason. There is something I omitted from our topographical description of the mind:

Within the ego itself a particular agency has become differentiated, which we name the superego. This superego occupies a special position between the ego and the id. It belongs to the ego and shares its high degree of psychical organisation; but it has a particularly intimate connection with the id. It is in fact a precipitate of the first object-cathexes of the id and is the heir to the Oedipus Complex after its demise.

This superego can confront the ego and treat it like an object and it often treats it very harshly. It is as important for the ego to remain on good terms with the superego as with the id. Estrangements between the superego and the ego are of great significance in mental life.

The superego is the vehicle of the phenomenon we call conscience. Mental health depends on the superego being developed i.e. on it being sufficiently impersonal [representing the impersonal values and ethics of society]. And that is precisely what it is not in neurotics, whose Oedipus Complex has not passed through the correct process of transformation. Their superego still confronts their ego as a strict father confronts a child; and their morality behaves in a primitive fashion, in that the ego gets punished by the superego. Mental illness is employed as the means of this self- punishment. (15:324)

Guilt is the affective malaise generated by the disobedient ego when confronted with the prospect of the imperfectly developed, over-punitive superego. Effective therapy is the overcoming of the patient’s resistances i.e. his attachment to illness as a defence. There are various mechanisms of resistance (anger, denial, partial concession) and an all-consuming guilt is the resistance of a defective superego. The overcoming of these resistances requires much more time and ingenuity than the relatively simple act of interpretation. Maybe you can see now why analysis takes so long. It is very far from being a ‘magical cure’ as you initially suggested.

Oh and one more thing. Just as you think you have finished extracting the psychic material, just when you have made your careful interpretation, just when you have wrestled with the various forms of resistance – the patient falls in love with you. It is very embarrassing.

Surely that is a help, though, because you will cooperate with someone you love and trust?

At first it seems like that, but slowly the love becomes more possessive, more demanding and reveals the other side of the coin, a fierce jealousy and finally a rage and anger and defiance. It drives away all other mental activity. In other words ,it is a very sophisticated form of resistance.

This is what we call transference, the projection of the patient’s early loves and jealousies onto the analyst which the analyst – the detached impartial observer – never prompted or merited. Instead it slowly becomes clear that in the transference the patient is acting out a fantasy; he or she is re-enacting the scene of the real or imagined love and hatred which lie at the root of the neurosis.

Thus transference can be co-opted as part of the cure as the patient is brought to see that he is reliving the past, grappling with his old demons.

So who is the patient really in love with, then?

The parent of the opposite sex. Nine times out of ten the patient is reliving scenes from the early, primitive period of his life when his sexuality was rampant and uncontrolled, when he was infatuated with and terrified by his parents, and projecting onto them his own rages or lusts. Thus we come full circle. You see how we have derived the theory I outlined above and you realise why it is necessary to know the theory when dealing with the practicalities of therapy.

6.

[Now we come to the nub of Freud’s argument for the lay practice of analysis.]

Now, with a correct understanding of what analysis involves it is clear that many of the requirements for it can quite easily be found among exceptional men in society who are prepared to undergo the rigorous training. By contrast, medical doctors are taught about the body as if it were a machine. When it breaks down they are instructed in either the physical techniques or the pills to fix it.

Five years of imbibing this attitude and you are completely the wrong person to undertake the delicate hermeneutics required of analysis.

What’s more, analysis has been greeted by the medical profession with howls of derision and has failed to be incorporated into any medical college’s curriculum. Doctors, being taught in that sceptical atmosphere, are just about the worst kind of people who could practice analysis.

No. Any laws restricting the practice of analysis to qualified doctors would prevent many perfect candidates taking it up, and restrict it to the people least likely by inclination and training to submit to yet another long course of specialist training.

What many doctors have already tried to do as individuals (shorten the analysis period or water down its premises by rejecting the sexual theories) would then be carried out wholesale by the medical profession and all the hard-won wisdom of Freud and his followers be reduced to an ineffective appendage of traditional psychology.

7.

But don’t many of the medical men in your own movement actually want analysis to be restricted to qualified medics to prevent it falling into the hands of quacks?

That is true and I’m not sure why. But for doctors only to be allowed to practise analysis would add a couple of years to the medical curriculum, which is already too long. It is true there are many possible somatic causes of neurosis and it would be as well to be aware of these. But in any case, every patient should be referred before analysis to a medical doctor in order to ensure that they are physically healthy; and, if symptoms arise in analysis, the patient should be referred back again to a doctor.

Wouldn’t it be easier if the analyst was also a doctor and could do this in one?

No, worse. For an analyst to physically examine a patient whom he is analysing is courting disaster. And again, the analyst’s training is not a small adjunct to a medical training; it actually – ideally – involves whole different areas: the history of civilization, ancient history and mythology, the science of literature. Wouldn’t it be better for analysts to be allowed to concentrate on what they require and for doctors to learn what they require and not to muddle up the two?

Freud has two last reasons for keeping analysis open to the public:

1. Rather than be swallowed up to become a footnote in medical textbooks ‘alongside hypnotism, autosuggestion and moral persuasion’, psychoanalysis is destined “to become indispensable to all the sciences which are concerned with the evolution of human civilisation and its major institutions such as art, religion and the social order.” (15:351)

2. Freud concludes with a vision of the future in which an army of analysts in the name of Science cures Humanity of all its neuroses and prepares the way for the millennium! (Compare Oskar Pfister’s critique of Freud’s scientific utopianism in his reply to Freud, Illusion of a Future).

Postscript (1927)

After an interval of discussion within the Psychoanalytic Movement itself, Freud rounded up the debate with this postscript to the main text. For him what matters is not whether an analyst is qualified as a doctor, but whether he is qualified to be an analyst. This requires a training very different from medical training, overlapping in some places but incorporating much sociology, psychology, history of civilization, of myths and religions etc.

Freud gives a brief review of his own career: though qualified as a doctor he never really wanted to be one and it was this distance from medical orthodoxy which gave him the intellectual freedom to discover psychoanalysis:

I became a doctor through being compelled to deviate from my original purpose; and the triumph of my life lies in my having, after a long and roundabout journey, found my way back to my earliest path… In my youth I felt an overpowering need to understand something of the riddles of the world in which we live and perhaps even to contribute something to their solution. (15:358)

Although a medical training at the moment is probably the best preparation for becoming an analyst, Freud looks forward to a time when specialised training institutes dedicated to training analysts will accept people from all walks of life.

Thoughts

1. And this is what happened. Institutes of Psychoanalysis were, as Freud hoped, established in all major Western countries before Freud’s death. But for historian of science Frank Sulloway, it was a fatal moment when analysis set up institutes outside the structure of universities, with their 1,000 yearlong traditions of testing, debating and verification.

Freud wanted to save psychoanalysis from being watered down by the establishment. For Sulloway this short-term gain led to the longer-term dwindling and decline of psychoanalysis as a discipline, which we’re now seeing.

2. Freud’s overview of his theory is compelling, or at least very clear. But the most notable thing comes towards the end when he makes the frank admission that he was never very interested in medicine, and even in psychology, as such. He always wanted to investigate and solve the big cultural, religious and literary puzzles.

The quote about him having to make a detour away from his original interest and only after ‘a long and roundabout journey’ return to his first love, is repeated in all the summaries of him you find in humanities subjects, especially art and literature studies, and candidly and openly explains why in his last decade he devoted ever more energy to writing about religion, civilisation, the origin of society and so on, sometimes persuasively, but often, as in Totem and Taboo and Mose and Monotheism, using scholarship which has now been completely disproved, and with a crankiness which reflects very badly back on his claims for psychoanalysis to be a scientific objective discipline.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. The Question of Lay Analysis was first translated into English in 1959 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Quotes in this review are from the version included in Volume 15 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘Historical  and Expository Works on Psychoanalysis’, published by Pelican Books in 1986.

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Three Essays on Sexuality by Sigmund Freud (1905)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian or bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

Introduction and overview

Freud’s aim was to show the ubiquity and the strangeness of sex and use the sex instinct, massively expanded and redefined, as the basis of an entire new theory of human psychology.

According to historian of psychoanalysis Frank Sulloway, Freud found the sex instinct most suitable as the central vehicle or basis for the new and emphatically physiological type of psychology he wanted to devise, because it is a) so strong and b) so flexible.

In these three ground-breaking essays on sexuality, Freud set out to widen the concepts of sexuality, the sex instinct, libido, so as to encompass a much broader sphere of activity than ever previously imagined in order to make them underpin almost every aspect of human nature.

In Freud’s psychology people’s characters are like complicated family trees, all descended from the same one huge fountain of libido which is channelled and rechannelled into ever-smaller rivers and streams.

It is these rechannellings, the repressions and redirections and reaction-formations and sublimations and so on which come to make up your character – a collection of habits based on infantile pleasures, of disgust or shame (reaction-formations) or heroic ambition (sublimation) or guilts and anxieties (the neuroses).

Thus the Three Essays On The Theory of Sexuality (1905) is Freud’s second most important book after The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

Essay 1 begins with a detailed look at the state of Victorian knowledge about homosexuality and perversions, because they reveal:

  1. the infinite malleability of the sex instinct
  2. how easily the sex instinct can be rerouted away from its ‘proper’ channel of ‘normal’ sexuality
  3. how even ‘normal’ sexuality is in fact built up of a network of pretty weird behaviour (Freud’s most striking example is kissing, which doesn’t make any sense the more you look at it)

In Essay 2 Freud shows that sexuality is not only present but vitally important in the life of infants and children. This idea was the biggest single cause of opposition to Freud’s theories in his lifetime, from Church and State, from commentators and populist politicians, and from decent people everywhere. It still is.

Freud is not very much interested in ‘love’. Love is the psychological effect of the ‘overvaluation of the sexual object common to almost all manifestations of the libido’:

It is only in the rarest instances that the psychical value set on the object as being the goal of the sexual instinct stops short at the genitals. The appreciation extends to the whole body of the sexual object and tends to involve every sensation derived from it. The same overvaluation spills over into the psychological sphere: the subject becomes, as it were, intellectually infatuated (that is, his powers of judgment are weakened) by the mental achievements and perfections of the sexual object and he submits to the latter’s judgments with credulity.

For Freud sex and love are interchangeable terms. He contrasts the overvaluation of the love-object found in the Western tradition with the more relaxed approach of the ancient world:

The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasise its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.

The Greeks held Bacchic orgies and had a god, Priapus, dedicated to the male organ; by contrast we in our time appear to fear the penis more than ever and instead reverence the idealised object of libido, the dream partner of the opposite sex (or the same sex), and the institution of Marriage.

And despite all the rhetoric from feminists and LGBTQ+ activists about interrogating and subverting this, that or the other stereotype and convention, we still appear to be in thrall to the narrow concept of finding ‘love’ in a faithful, monogamous, committed relationship, every bit as much as our Victorian forebears – very narrow and limited compared to the polymorphous, open and pluralistic attitudes of the 30 or so ancient Roman authors I read last year.

THREE ESSAYS ON THE THEORY OF SEXUALITY (1905)

This long work sets out to show the importance of sexuality in all human achievements, to establish a wider-than-usual definition of sexuality, and to prove the existence of infantile sexuality.

Freud’s recurring tactic is to make the ordinary, the everyday, look strange; to look again without conventional blinkers at things we think we know, and to show that our attitudes are complacent, superficial and contradictory.

1. The sexual aberrations

Popular opinion credits two universal instincts, Hunger and Sexuality. Sex is supposed to set in at the time of puberty and manifest itself in irresistible attractions between adults of the opposite sex with the ultimate end of genital sex, itself with the purpose of reproduction (as taught in Christianity and most of the other world religions).

Let us call the desired one the sexual object, the act towards which the instinct tends, the sexual aim.

(1) Deviations in respect of the sexual object

If popular opinion is true and God made sex solely for reproduction, how do we account for homosexuals?

(A) Inversion

Behaviour of ‘inverts’. For a start there are different types:

  • a) absolute inverts, totally repelled by the opposite sex
  • b) amphigenic inverts i.e. bisexuals
  • c) contingent inverts, depending on circumstances

Some inverts accept their condition as natural; others feel it a torment. Some were gay as far back as they remember; for others, homosexuality cropped up at puberty; others only ‘come out’ as adults, sometimes after they’ve followed a straight career with wife and kids.

Nature of Inversion

The first observers thought inversion the result of nervous degeneracy because it was first found among mental patients studied in asylums.

Degeneracy

But then it was late-Victorian fashion to blame anything you didn’t understand on ‘degeneracy’: criminals are degenerate, the working class is degenerate, Africans are degenerate etc.

Freud defines degeneracy in rigorous Darwinian terms as the actual impairment of an organism’s efficiency and survival probability. In these, practical, terms inversion is not degenerate. Not only is it found in people otherwise perfectly normal, but it is found in people ‘who are indeed distinguished by specially high intellectual development and ethical culture.’

Innate character

Some gays insist homosexuality is absolutely innate. But the existence of the late-developers or of contingent homosexuals argues against this. Far from being innate, much evidence suggests that homosexuality is acquired:

  • the case of many ‘inverts’ in whom an early impression left a permanent gay after-effect
  • later influences and life experiences which have fixed contingent gayness e.g. the army, prison, monastery etc

Almost all ‘inverts’ will be found to have been subjected to some experience like this (for example, public school). But on the other hand, so were many people who went on to be perfectly hetero. So it remains hard to say whether homosexuality is acquired or innate.

Bisexuality

Havelock Ellis says a clue might be that homosexuality is a form of psychical hermaphroditism, a mental equivalent of having the organs of both sexes.

Richard von Kraft-Ebing says that the brain contains female and male brain centres which are activated by a ‘sex gland’. (It wasn’t only Freud who was having batty, speculative ideas at this time.)

Whoever is right, it seems that most authorities accept the idea of an innate bisexuality in everyone, and that ‘inversion’ owes something to early disruption of development.

Later, Freud would write:

It is well known that at all times there have been, as there still are, human beings who can take as their sexual objects persons of either sex without the one trend interfering with the other. We call these people bisexual and accept the fact of their existence without wondering much at it … But we [psychoanalysts] have come to know that all human beings are bisexual in this sense and their libido is distributed between objects of both sexes, either in a manifest or a latent form.

Sexual object of inverts

Popular opinion holds that ‘inverts’ simply desire the qualities of the opposite sex. An inverted man is like a woman in desiring the qualities of the opposite sex, of masculinity, in his sex object.

But what about gays who love pretty boys, boys who demonstrate all the qualities of a girl, being beautiful, hairless, young and coquettish?

What about transvestites who do a good trade dressing up as women for gay clients? In ancient Greece older men regularly looked after shy, young, girlish boys.

So the sex object is a compromise between an impulse that seeks for a man and one for a woman (in the same way that a symptom is a compromise between a wish and reality).

Psychoanalysis’s explanation is thus: in his childhood the future ‘invert’ passes through a brief but intense attachment to a woman (normally his mother). After leaving this behind he identifies himself with this woman and take himself as his sexual object. Invoking infantile narcissism, ‘inverts’ identify themselves with a woman and set out to find a boy whom they can mother and love as their mother loved them.

The situation will be exacerbated by the absence of a strong father. Think of Oscar Wilde and his imperious mother; of W.H. Auden’s father away at the Front while his mother dressed him in girl’s clothing; of the plays of Joe Orton.

So, says Freud, being gay is being in endless flight from women.

But, Freud emphasises, this isn’t weird. Psychoanalysis has established that everyone makes homosexual object choices in their unconscious mind; that the freedom to range wide over male or female objects is found in childhood, in primitive societies, in early history and in the ancient world, and is the original basis of sexuality.

It is only as a result of later, Victorian social restrictions that people are forced into one fixed, standardised and regimented mould, heterosexual or homosexual, or their modern equivalent which demands that people be in monogamous committed couple relationships.

In reality a person’s final sexual orientation is not decided until after puberty, and then only as the result of innumerable obscure influences. That there is a multiplicity of determining factors is indicated by the extraordinary range of sexual practices and attitudes to be found in mankind.

Thus psychoanalysis regards so-called ‘normal’ sexuality as achieved only under intense pressure and great restriction of the original wider options for pleasure. In fact it’s so-called ‘normal’ sexuality, the genital attraction between man and woman, which is historically problematic and just as much in need of explanation as any other form.

Sexual aim of ‘inverts’

No one single aim can be laid down for the sexuality of ‘inverts’, as it can for the ‘normal’ behaviour of straights; there is too great a variety.

Conclusion

We have been in the habit of regarding the link between the sexual aim and the sexual object as more solid than it is. In fact the object appears to be no more than soldered onto the instinct, and which aim takes which object is a great deal more problematical than previously thought, because the sexual instinct is more free-flowing and independent than we previously suspected.

(B) Sexually immature person and animals as sexual objects

Light is thrown on the sexual instinct by the fact that it permits of so much variation in its objects and such a cheapening of them.

That children can be the objects of sex, or even animals, tells us about the vicissitudes of the sex instinct (along with rapes, sexual assaults and perverse murders). It seems as if the sex instinct will do almost anything to achieve satisfaction.

The impulses of sexual life are among those which, even normally, are the least controlled by the higher activities of the mind… In the process of human cultural development, sexuality is the weak spot.

(2) Deviations in respect of the sexual aim i.e. perversions

Popular opinion says the sexual aim is the union of the genitals in copulation which leads to the release of sexual tension. But a moment’s reflection tells you that, even in ‘normal’ sexuality, people kiss – bringing together two parts of the digestive system – for pleasure. And most people linger to some extent over intermediate stages, such as looking and touching. So the seeds of ‘perversity’ are all around us.

Perversions are sexual activities which either:

  • extend in an anatomical sense beyond the parts of the body designed for sexual union
  • linger or halt at the intermediate stages on the path to sexual union

(A) Anatomical extensions

Overvaluation of the sexual object

The first and prime perversion of sex from its object is the overvaluation of the object i.e. ‘love’. For all practical purposes ‘love’, for Freud, is this (potentially pathological) overvaluation of the love object.

It is only in the rarest instances that the psychical value set on the object as being the goal of the sexual instinct stops short at the genitals. The appreciation extends to the whole body of the sexual object and tends to involve every sensation derived from it. The same overvaluation spills over into the psychological sphere: the subject becomes, as it were, intellectually infatuated with (that is, his powers of judgment are weakened) by the mental achievements and perfections of the sexual object and he submits to the latter’s judgments with credulity.

This sexual overvaluation is something that cannot easily be reconciled with [society’s] restriction of the sexual aim to union of the actual genitals and it helps to turn activities connected with other parts of the body into sexual aims.

Once a sexual object has been chosen, the ordinarily effective higher activities of the mind – judgment and civilised restraint – all too often go out of the window. In most people this results in crushes, infatuations, sometimes in grands amours: once the libido sees an opening, it tends to pour forth like a flood.

How the subject (carried away by powerful libido) and the (perhaps reluctant) object cope with the situation is the theme of most of Western literature from Hero and Leander to Madame Bovary.

(I can see an evolutionary explanation for all this which Freud doesn’t mention, which is that: having made a sexual choice, overvaluation follows from a) opening the floodgates of an instinct otherwise fiercely repressed b) to ensure a strong libidinal attachment to the woman who you’re planning to impregnate – so it is a blind Darwinian instinct designed to make the impregnator bond with their mate  and remain to look after their offspring; but, as all of human history tells us, this often clashes with the other biological imperative affecting men which is impregnating as many women as possible, hence the many men who eat, shoot and leave.)

Sexual use of the mucous membrane of the lips and mouth

Freud proceeds with his agenda of making everything about sex and love look strange and uncanny.

The use of the mouth as a sexual organ is regarded as a perversion if the lips (or tongue) of one person are brought into contact with the genitals of another, but not if the mucous membranes of the lips of both of them come together.

Why do people find kissing acceptable and cunnilingus or fellatio disgusting? Freud here points to the purely conventional, culturally-determined nature of our feelings.

Has ‘disgust’ (a powerful reaction-formation) played a large part in forming our cultural conventions – or is it simply a product of the increasing self-repression which characterises us in the West (unlike other contemporary civilisations, primitive cultures and the cultures of the ancient world, which were and are much more liberal in their sexual practices)?

Freud seems to think the ancients were more honest in this, as in so much else.

The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasise its object. The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honour even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.

The progress of civilisation seems to require a steadily increasing restriction of the sexual instinct, bought at the price of a growing sense of disgust. Hence the genitals of men and women, worshipped by the Greeks as holy, are now banned as dangerously corrupting.

There is no doubt that the genitals of the opposite sex can in themselves be an object of disgust and that such an attitude is one of the characteristics of all hysterics.

One thinks of John Ruskin (allegedly) driven into paroxysms by the discovery on his wedding night that, unlike the Greek statues which he adored, his wife had pubic hair. Or, more up to date:

Indecent exposure, sometimes known as ‘flashing’, is a serious sexual criminal offence, which carries a custodial sentence of up to 2-years at its most severe. (Old Bailey solicitors)

Does ‘disgust’ drive the repression of sexuality i.e. is disgust natural, a ‘God-given’ reaction of the ‘God-given’ conscience to the spectacle of fallen sexuality? A question related to: is conscience ‘God-given’ and so universal? Or is ‘conscience’ created by culture and therefore morally relative across different cultures? Morality and disgust on the one side, pragmatism and sexual libertarianism on the other.

Or is disgust an entirely material, biological reaction-formation to the compulsory repression of sexuality enforced by a coercive society, no God or morality required?

Sexual use of the anal orifice

People who think sodomy is disgusting because we defecate through the anus are as correct as women who say the penis is disgusting because men urinate through it or men who think the vulva is disgusting because women menstruate through it.

Which is to say, all these opinions are correct in their own terms, but missing the point. These organs can (clearly) be put to various uses. Should they be? Or should they be restricted to their ‘God-given’ purposes? But then who is to say what their correct usage is? A bunch of old men wearing purple dresses in the House of Lords? Imams and rabbis? Agony aunts? TV shows. Gender studies lecturers? Where is the authority for this?

Significance of other regions of the body

What seems to be common to all human sexuality is:

  1. overvaluation of the sexual object
  2. a versatile ability on the part of the sexual aim to use any part of the body as the sexual object for gratification

Unsuitable substitutes for the sexual object: fetishism

In fetishism the sexual instinct replaces the primary object (the genitals) and the overvalued secondary object (the person attached to the genitals) with unlikely tertiary objects – parts of the body, locks of hair, feet – or linked objects, such as underwear or other items of clothing.

A certain amount of fetishism is habitually present in normal love, especially of those stages of it in which the normal sexual aim seems unattainable or its fulfilment prevented.

A lock of your true love’s hair. Or as Goethe put it in Faust:

‘Get me a kerchief from her breast,
A garter that her knee has pressed.’

These objects can justifiably be likened to the fetishes of primitive peoples. Inscribed in fetishes is a primitive symbology, comparable with the symbolism of dreams. For example, the foot is an age-old symbol for the penis. Fur is linked to the hair of the mons Veneris. The shoe or slipper is a symbol of the female genitals (as in Cinderella) into which the male foot neatly slips, and so on.

(B) Fixations of preliminary sexual aims

Appearance of new aims

External factors (danger, unavailability of a sexual object, risk of disease) tend to fix libido at the preparatory activities. Truly, every normal aspect of ‘love’ carries the seeds of a perversion.

Touching and looking

Seeing is an evolutionary derivative of touching. A look can be as exciting as a touch.

Both seeing and touching are ‘ordinary’ parts of ‘normal’ sexual activity – unless lingered over, or unless they become ends in themselves, in which case we have voyeurism/exhibitionism and various types of masturbation.

Freud thought exhibitionism the result of either wishing for a reciprocal showing of the other person’s genitals; or a triumphant assertion against the Castration Complex: ‘Look, I’ve still got my willy!’

He doesn’t seem to take into account the sadistic urge to offend or scare women, a kind of sublimated form of rape, visual rather than physical rape.

The power of vision is shown by just how upset some women can feel, how physically defiled, just because a strange man showed them his penis. I’m not downplaying the offence or upset caused.

The concealment and revelation of the sexual parts of the body go hand in hand with the rise of civilisation and progressive sexual repression. It is unlikely that the Greeks had strip clubs; instead they had orgies, the real thing. We have strip clubs because of the immense repression to which our sexuality has been subjected.

For Freud the concept of ‘beauty’ itself originates in sexual excitement but is sublimated away from the genitals onto the body as a whole, which is perceived as ‘beautiful’, a concept or feeling which can then  be transferred onto other types of object, and then onto objects created and enjoyed for their ‘beauty’ alone i.e. works of art.

This explains why women are more often the object of art than men – even in women painter’s paintings – because men are more sexually predatory than women. And why the sight of the genitals themselves is rarely ‘beautiful’; all pleasure has been sublimated out of them leaving only the reaction-formation of ‘disgust’.

Sadism and masochism

These were given their names by Richard von Kraft-Ebing (Viennese) in the 1890s, after the Marquis de Sade (French) and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (Viennese) As with the other perversions, a moderate amount of sado-masochism is generally regarded as ‘normal’:

The sexuality of most male human beings contains an element of aggressiveness – a desire to subjugate. The biological significance of it seems to lie in the need for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by means other than the process of wooing. Thus sadism would correspond to an aggressive component of the sexual instinct which has become independent and exaggerated and, by displacement, has usurped the leading position.

Many types of sexual relationship which are regarded as ‘normal’ contain a high amount of aggression; sadism becomes an actual perversion when pleasure is derived from violence alone.

Masochism is sexual excitement aroused purely by receiving pain or humiliation. Later in his career, after he’d outlined the new theory of the superego, Freud distinguished between purely physical masochism and moral masochism, the desire to be found guilty of sins, to be punished for them and so on, an internal submission of the ego to the overbearing superego which plays such a large part in religious life.

Freud thinks masochism is secondary, a deflection of primary sadism – which the subject is too weak to inflict onto others – back onto the self. Masochism is for weaklings; or for the weakling part of even strong people.

The history of human civilisation shows beyond any doubt that there is an intimate connection between cruelty and the sexual instinct.

But nobody really knows why. Some people think aggression is a development of the primal desire to eat, to master objects by putting them in the mouth – an instinct seen in children and in the holy meals at the centre of many religions. Others think there is some intimate biochemical link between pleasure and pain.

Suggestive for Freud’s bisexual thesis – the mingling of the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’ in all of us – is Havelock Ellis and Kraft-Ebing’s agreement that masochism and sadism are often found in the same person.

(3) The perversions in general

Variation and disease

Medical men first identified perversions in the insane and perversion was blamed (like homosexuality) on ‘degeneracy’. What Freud has shown is that the perversions are implicit in even ‘normal’ love.

No healthy person, it appears, can fail to make some addition that might be called perverse to the normal sexual aim; and the universality of this finding is enough to show how inappropriate it is to use the word ‘perversion’ as a term of reproach. In the sphere of sexual life we are brought up against peculiar and, indeed, insoluble problems as soon as we try to draw a sharp line to distinguish mere variations within the range of what is physiological from pathological symptoms.

On one side the liberal Freud, on the other a vast army of censorious Christians, trying to draw precisely that line, trying to tell people exactly just which type and forms of ‘love’ are permissible and which aren’t, from the Pope to Mary Whitehouse.

For the Moral Majority it is always other people who are degenerate, other people who are the helpless prey of, for example, homosexual men in the homosexual age of consent debate.

Freud is saying, if you only look at the acts themselves you may be tempted to define them as unchristian or degenerate, pathological or perverted etc. But if you look at the instinct which carries so many people to such lengths, it is the same instinct and it is in all of us – it is what our minds are made of.

The mental factor in perversions

Despite the sometimes disgusting ends to which the love instinct is put, all these behaviours are to some extent idealisations of the libido, in the sense of abstractions of it away from its normal role.

The omnipotence of love is perhaps never more strongly proved than in such of its aberrations as these. The highest and the lowest are always closest to each other in the sphere of sexuality.

Two conclusions

Every individual plays a double existential role:

  1. to reproduce, to pass on its genes and preserve the species
  2. to preserve itself while it does this

Sometimes the two purposes clash and this is the basis of Freud’s psychology, the clash between the unconscious libidinal drive to have sex, all the time, with everyone and everything; and the rational ego’s struggle to redirect this blind drive into socially acceptable forms which help the individual survive and help it be at peace with itself. So the origins of any person’s sexuality must be looked for in two places: in the history of the species and the accidents of the individual.

Our study of the perversions has shown us that the sexual instinct has to struggle against certain mental forces which act as resistances, and of which shame and disgust are the most prominent. It is permissible to suppose that these forces play a part in restraining that instinct within the limits that are regarded as normal; and if they develop within the individual before the sexual instinct has reached its full strength, no doubt they then determine the course of its development.

These forces, which act like dams upon sexual development – disgust, shame and morality – must also be regarded as historical precipitates of the external inhibitions to which the sexual instinct has been subjected during the psychogenesis of the human race. We can observe the way in which, in the development of individuals, they arise at the appropriate moment, as though spontaneously, when upbringing and external influence give the signal.

In the second place we have found that some of the perversions are only made intelligible if we assume the convergence of several motive forces. If such perversions admit of analysis, that is, if they can be taken to pieces, then they must be of a composite nature. This gives us a hint that perhaps the sexual instinct itself is no simple thing but put together from components which have come apart again in the perversions.

(4) The sexual instincts in neurotics

Psychoanalysis

Here Freud reiterates his belief that all the psychoneuroses are based on sexual instinctual forces and that the psychoneuroses can only be investigated using the method perfected by Josef Breuer and himself – psychoanalysis. He gives a useful summary of the famous cathartic method:

By this I do not merely mean that the energy of the sexual instinct makes a contribution to the forces that maintain the pathological manifestations (the symptoms). I mean expressly to assert that that contribution is the most important and only constant source of energy of the neurosis and that in consequence the sexual life of the persons in question is expressed in these symptoms. The symptoms constitute the sexual activity of the patient!

The removal of the symptoms of hysterical patients by psychoanalysis proceeds on the supposition that those symptoms are substitutes – transcriptions, as it were – for a number of emotionally cathected mental processes, wishes and desires which, by the operation of a special psychical procedure (repression) have been prevented from obtaining discharge in psychical activity that is admissible to consciousness.

These mental processes, being held back in a state of unconsciousness, strive to obtain an expression that shall be appropriate to their emotional importance – to obtain discharge; and in the case of hysteria they find such an expression (by means of the process called conversion) in somatic or bodily phenomena, that is, in hysterical symptoms [cf Anna O’s inability to drink water, choking sensation etc].

By systematically turning those symptoms back (with the help of psychoanalysis) into emotionally cathected ideas – ideas that can now become conscious – it is possible to obtain the most accurate knowledge of the nature and origin of these formerly unconscious psychical structures.

Findings of psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis has shown that:

Symptoms represent a substitute for impulses the source of whose strength is derived from the sexual instinct… The character of hysterics shows a degree of sexual repression in excess of the normal quantity, an intensification of resistance against the sexual instinct (which we have already met with in the form of shame, disgust and morality), and what seems like an instinctive aversion on their part to any intellectual consideration of sexual problems.

In the case of someone predisposed to hysteria, the onset of his illness is precipitated when, either as a result of his own progressive maturity or of the external circumstances of his life, he finds himself faced by the demands of a real sexual situations. Between the pressure of the instinct and his antagonism to sexuality, illness offers him a way of escape. It does not solve his conflict but seeks to evade it by transforming his libidinal impulses into symptoms.

(See Jensen’s Gradiva, written two years later, which is a textbook example of hysteria as the self-deluding flight into illness. The archaeologist Norbert’s escape from the reality of an emotionally demanding sexual situation – his awakening love for Zoe – into delusions about the light-tripping woman on the antique frieze whom he names ‘Gradiva’, and then Norbert’s actual fleeing to Italy, to Pompeii, to escape the sexual situation, only to meet Zoe magically transformed into the woman in the frieze –– from the heart of the reaction-formation returns the repressed. In the novel Norbert is then cured through love, by the redirecting of his libido – unhealthily cathected onto the Gradiva-delusion – back to the reality of his flesh-and-blood love, Zoe, by the love object herself.)

Neurosis and perversion

Moreover, neurotics’ symptoms, upon psychoanalysis, often turn out to be conversions not just of ‘normal’ sexuality, but to include what are called the perversions i.e. neurotics’ unconsciousnesses are often raging with perverse wishes deflected into symptoms. Hence Dora’s persistent cough is a (transmuted) wish for oral sex with Herr K.

a) The unconscious life of all neurotics shows inverted impulses, fixation of the libido on persons of their own sex.

b) The unconsciouses of neurotics show tendencies to every kind of anatomical extension of sexual activity, particularly oral and anal.

c) An especially prominent part is played by the fact that the instincts involved are component instincts. Thus the perversions often come in opposing pairs: exhibitionism and voyeurism; the active and passive forms of the instinct for cruelty.

It is through such an opposition, a component tying together of libido and cruelty, that the transformation from love into hate takes place, the transformation from affectionate into hostile impulses.

(You can see here the embryonic shape of Freud’s later division of all the instincts into Sex instincts and Death instincts, Eros and Thanatos which would formulate nearly 20 years late, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.)

(5) Component instincts and erotogenic zones

If we trace back the positive and negative aspects of the perversions (masochism/sadism, voyeurism/exhibitionism) they appear to derive from component instincts which themselves admit of further analysis.

When sexual excitement derives from a particular organ or area of the body we refer to that as the erotogenic zone.

Thus, under the right circumstances, the anus or the mouth can become an erotogenic zone. Or the surface of the skin in touching. Or the eye itself in voyeurism where, through the eye alone is felt excitement comparable to that of sex in a ‘normal’ person.

(6) Reasons for the apparent preponderance of perverse sexuality in the psychoneuroses

But just because neurotic symptoms often contain a perverse wish doesn’t mean that neurotics are closer to perverts than to ‘normal’ people. Neurotics are normal people whose libido, either because of innate predisposition or due to accident, has been dammed up.

Most psychoneurotics fall ill after the age of puberty as a result of the demands made upon them by normal sexual life. Or else illnesses of this kind set in later, when the libido fails to obtain satisfaction along normal lines. In both these cases the libido behaves like a stream whose main bed has become blocked. It proceeds to fill up collateral channels which may hitherto have been empty.

Where the constitution is predisposed to illness maybe no external factor will be required. On the other hand, a great shock in real life may tip a robust constitution into neurotic illness.

Might there be a link between the perversions wished for by the neurotic’s unconscious, between the erotogenic zone it highlights, and innate constitution?

In a word, can you define personality types by predisposition to a particular perversion/erotogenic zone? (This is what Freud does in the following essay, about childhood sexuality, defining and describing the oral, anal types and so on.)

(7) Intimations of the infantile character of sexuality

“By demonstrating the part played by perverse impulses in the formation of symptoms in the psychoneuroses, we have quite remarkably increased the number of people who might be regarded as perverts. It is not only that neurotics in themselves constitute a very numerous class, but it must also be considered that an unbroken chain bridges the gap between the neuroses in all their manifestations and ‘normality’….

Thus the extraordinarily wide dissemination of the perversions forces us to suppose that the disposition to perversions is itself of no great rarity but must form a part of what passes as the ‘normal’ constitution…

There is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions but it is something innate in everyone, though as a disposition it may vary in its intensity and may be increased by the influences of actual life. What is in question are the innate constitutional roots of the sexual instinct. In one class of cases (the perversions) these roots may grow into the actual vehicles of sexual activity; in others they may be submitted to an insufficient suppression (repression) and thus be able in a roundabout way to attract a considerable portion of sexual energy to themselves as neurotic symptoms; while in the most favourable cases, which lie between these two extremes, they may by means of effective restriction and other kinds of modification bring about what is known as ‘normal’ sexual life.

Thus the germs of our character, the way our sexual instincts will be channelled, are probably laid down in childhood. In the next essay Freud looks at the play of influences which govern the evolution of infantile sexuality until its outcome in perversion, neurosis or normal sexual life.

Essay 2. Infantile sexuality

Neglect of the infantile factor

In Essay 2 Freud sets out to smash the popular opinion that children have no sexual feelings; that sexual feelings only set in with puberty. On the contrary, all the literature, and a chat with any nurse, will tell you that many babies play with their willies or fannies and suck various bits of themselves, but these stories are generally only mentioned as exceptions and monstrosities.

Why do we not remember our sexual feelings from our own childhood years?

Infantile amnesia

We definitely behave lively in every respect during childhood, giving every evidence of feeling joy, love, rage, delight. Why do we forget so much of this? Freud says that under analysis patients often remember events from their earliest years. Therefore the memories are stored somewhere – but are repressed from everyday access. Why? Nobody knows.

(1) The period of sexual latency in childhood and its interruptions

Based on a) scattered reports of the so-called exceptional behaviour of infants in the literature and b) the memories of neurotics revealed by psychoanalysis, Freud will sketch out a theory of infantile sexuality.

Freud thinks of the sex instinct as being innate in the child; that it grows as the child grows; that it is overtaken by suppression at the age of 5 or 6; then it revives and develops further at puberty, developing in a pattern of fits and starts. Childhood sexuality only emerges into the light of observable day in the third or fourth year of life.

Sexual inhibitions

It is during this same period that the mental forces are built up which are later to impede and block the flow of the sexual instinct – feelings of disgust (at an object), feelings of shame (at oneself) and moral and aesthetic ideals (as it were, objective guidelines we build for ourselves).

Reaction formation and sublimation

These are the two methods by which these dams are erected to prevent the return of repressed material into the conscious mind.

Sublimation is a widely reported phenomenon, the diverting of instinctual sexual energies into ‘higher’, more socially acceptable ones.

A reaction formation is:

a defence mechanism in which emotions and impulses which are anxiety-producing or perceived to be unacceptable are mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency

Freud thinks that reaction formations are the result of a series of unpleasurable experiences, either of internal unpleasure (excessive playing with the genitals leads to unpleasure) or external tellings-off, which create, as it were, a psychological allergic reaction to the erotogenic zone and experiences in question. Told off for touching his winkle enough times and the small boy genuinely come to believe it is dirty and disgusting.

[A digression on Freud’s final theory of sexual development

A lot later, Freud was to elaborate and fine-tune the notion that the human infants evolve through a set number of stages, namely:

  • polymorphous perversity – undifferentiated pleasure in the whole body
  • oral phase (0 to 1 year) – the infant gets most of their pleasure from their mouth, for example eating and thumb-sucking: if an infant’s oral needs aren’t met it can develop an develop oral fixation which continues into adult life
  • anal phase (1 to 3 years) – controlling bladder and bowel movements, potty training, when successfully accomplished leads to praise from parents and a sense of achievement and independence; but if parents take an approach that is too lenient, Freud suggested that an ‘anal-expulsive personality‘ – could develop whereby the adult has a messy, wasteful, or destructive personality, while if parents are too strict, he believed this could lead to an ‘anal-retentive‘ personality which is over-strict, rigid, and obsessive.
  • phallic stage (3 to 5 years) – focus of the libido is on the genitals and children begin to discover the difference between boys and girls
    • in boys this gives rise to the Oedipus complex as boys view their fathers as a rival for the mother’s affections: the Oedipus complex describes these feelings of wanting to possess the mother and replace the father. But at the same time the little boy worries that his father will punish him for having these feelings, a fear Freud termed castration anxiety
    • other Freudians suggested the term Electra complex to describe a similar but mirror set of feelings experienced by small girls, namely the wish to be possessed by their father and rid of their mother, accompanied by parallel feelings of guilt and anxiety
    • Freud, however, believed that instead of the Electra complex, girls experience what he notoriously called penis envy i.e. the wish to be a boy, the lack of a penis forever leaving girls feeling inadequate. Even in Freud’s own day female psychoanalysts deplored this idea, and female followers have denied it and overwritten it ever since]
  • latency phase (6 to puberty) – the superego or conscience gains in power, the libido and memories of all those early physical pleasures are suppressed; instead boys or girls enter school and become more concerned with peer relationships, hobbies, and other interests; a time of exploration in which the sexual energy repressed or dormant, still present but sublimated into other areas such as intellectual pursuits and social interactions
  • genital stage (11, 12, 13 onwards) – at puberty the libido becomes active again and teens develop a strong sexual interest in the opposite sex: if all the previous stages have been successfully navigated, the person becomes a rounded, balanced individual]

Freud therefore thinks that the development through the oral, anal and phallic stages is partly achieved by the erection of these reaction formations which act as ‘dams’ or road blocks saying ‘No Going Back’.

That this may be the origin of feelings of ‘shame’ and ‘disgust’ is an interesting theory to ponder; that this process is the basis of all civilised morality, as Freud claims, was clearly a provocative thing to say, and which sparked much outraged opposition to him and his theories.

Interruptions of the latency period

Not all children’s sexuality goes underground at about five years old. There may be all sorts of exceptions, single strands of sexual pleasure continuing into the latent period.

(2) The manifestations of infantile sexuality

Thumb-sucking

This emerges early and often persists into adolescence. Sometimes accompanied by the rubbing of an erotogenic zone it can act as an introduction to masturbation. Because it is accompanied by pleasurable rubbing, and sometimes even by orgasm-type physical reactions, Freud makes thumb-sucking the prototype of infantile sexuality.

Auto-erotism (coined by Havelock Ellis in 1898)

Infants initially derive pleasure from their own bodies. Sucking thumbs or lips or any other part of the body is a repetition of the initial oral activity, sucking at the breast.

No-one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as the prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.

As the child grows it experiments with enacting the sexual pleasure of sucking when the breast is absent: sucking any part of its own body, taking itself as a source of pleasure. In later life the pleasures of lingering kissing re-enact this primal sexual experience. In some children there is a constitutional intensification of the labial region (lips):

If that significance persists, these same children will grow up to become epicures in kissing, will be inclined to perverse kissing or, if males, will have a powerful motive for drinking and smoking. If, however, repression ensues, they will feel disgust at food and will produce hysterical vomiting.

Thus, for Freud, entire character types and types of adult behaviour can be traced right back to earliest childhood behaviour.

(3) The sexual aim of infantile sexuality

Characteristics of erotogenic zones

Erotogenic zones are a moveable feast. Particular parts of the body seem predisposed to resonate with sexual pleasure (the genitals, lips, nipples, anus, the surface of the skin generally) and if an infant, in its auto-erotic stage, chances on one of these to suck or play with, that part easily becomes the model of sexual pleasure, of reassurance etc in later life.

Any part of the body can acquire the same susceptibility to stimulation as is possessed by the genitals and can become an erotogenic zone.

It is hard to think of a view more contrary to the popular, conventional view that a) infants have no sex life and that b) sex appears only at puberty and is exclusively confined to the genitals.

The infantile sexual aim

Although all the body is susceptible to sexualisation, certain zones seem predisposed to be especially erotogenic, generally zones which are physiologically designed for other activities and pleasures which the child can then repeat by auto-erotic stimulation: the lips for eating, the penis for peeing, the anus for defecating can all be co-opted by the libido.

(4) Masturbatory sexual manifestations

Activity of the anal zone

Psychoanalysis of patients has revealed the surprising extent to which the anus is not only a source of pleasure in infancy but retains its pleasurable power throughout life.

Children who are making use of the susceptibility to erotogenic stimulation of the anal zone betray themselves by holding back their stool till its accumulation brings about violent muscular contractions and, as it passes through the anus, is able to produce powerful stimulation of the mucous membrane. In so doing it must no doubt cause not only painful but highly pleasurable sensations.

One of the clearest signs of subsequent eccentricity or nervousness is to be seen when a baby obstinately refuses to empty its bowels when he is put on the pot and holds back that function till he himself chooses to exercise it. He is naturally not concerned with dirtying the bed, he is only anxious not to miss the subsidiary pleasure attached to defecating.

Faeces come to have another important meaning for the child.

They are clearly treated as part of the infant’s own body and represent his first ‘gift’: by producing them he can express his active compliance with his environment and, by withholding them, his disobedience…

The retention of the faecal mass, which is thus carried out by the child intentionally to begin with, in order to serve, as it were, a masturbatory stimulus upon the anal zone or to be employed as a weapon in his relation to the people looking after him, is also one of the roots of the constipation which is so common among neuropaths.

Activity of the genital zone

The glans of the penis in boys and the clitoris in girls:

The anatomical situation of this region, the secretions in which it is bathed, the washing and rubbing to which it is subjected in the course of a child’s toilet, as well as accidental stimulation, make it inevitable that the pleasurable feeling which this part of the body is capable of producing should be noticed by children even during their earliest infancy, and should give rise to a need for its repetition.

Girls often masturbate simply by rubbing their thighs together. Boys tend to use hands.

The preference for the hand which is shown by boys is already evidence of the important contribution which the instinct for mastery is destined to make to masculine sexual activity.

Second phase of infantile masturbation

In this early essay Freud posits three periods of sexual activity: a first phase of infantile sexuality; a second phase flourishing around the fourth year; then the eruptions of puberty.

The second phase of infantile sexual activity may assume a variety of different forms which can only be determined by a precise analysis of individual cases. But all its details leave behind the deepest unconscious impressions in the subject’s memory, determine the development of his later character, if he is to remain healthy, and the symptomatology of his neurosis, if he is to fall ill after puberty.

Return of early infantile masturbation

The return of infantile sexuality at around 4 and 5 years is determined by all sorts of factors, internal and external. But Freud is careful to mention the external factor of infantile seduction (or child abuse, as we would say) as a way many of his patients recall being jolted, as it were, into sexual life, and made aware of the erotogenicity of the genitals.

Polymorphously perverse disposition

In and as a result of sexual abuse, children can be induced to all manner of perversions thus revealing, for Freud, an innate disposition to polymorphous perversion.

The same, he asserts, is true of many women, as witness the large number of prostitutes who can accommodate any type of sexual taste for their clients.

It becomes impossible not to recognise that this same disposition to perversions of every kind is a general and fundamental human characteristic.

[At one and the same time this notion is typical of Freud’s throwaway sexism, but also of the immense tolerance and acceptance of a huge variety of sexual predilections implicit in his theory.]

Component instincts

Exhibitionism, voyeurism and cruelty are all apparent as perversions in potentia in children. Small boys proudly display the thing which gives them so much pleasure and which they pee through, their penis, which thus symbolises at least two types of infantile ‘mastery’.

Looking is the child’s earliest way of relating to the world. Once it has established its own erotogenic zones it is curious to see them in others: voyeurism.

Cruelty comes relatively easily to the childish nature, since the obstacle that brings the instinct for mastery to a halt at other people’s pain – namely a capacity for pity – is developed relatively late…

It may be assumed that the impulse of cruelty arises from the instinct for mastery and appears at a period of sexual life at which the genitals have not yet taken over their later role…

Children who distinguish themselves by special cruelty towards animals and playmates usually give rise to a just suspicion of an intense and precocious sexual activity arising from erotogenic zones…

The absence of the barrier of pity brings with it a danger that the connection between the cruel and the erotogenic instincts, thus established in childhood, may prove unbreakable in later life.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions show that early beating on the buttocks can easily be linked with erotogenic pleasure and form the basis of a fusion of the instincts of sex and cruelty in later life.

(5) The sexual researches of childhood

The instinct for knowledge

At the same time as children reach an early peak of sexuality (3 to 5 years) they display an instinct for knowledge. For Freud this is a sublimated form of the instincts for mastery and of seeing, voyeurism.

Psychoanalysis has shown that the first problem to awaken the childish thirst for knowledge are sexual problems, where do I come from? why does my wee-wee make give me pleasure?

The Riddle of the Sphinx

Freud gave this typically grandiose title to the core question of infancy: where do babies come from?

Sex differences aren’t important at this stage since boys assume all babies have penises.

Castration complex and penis envy [this section was added in 1915]

Only painfully do boys realise there’s a whole category of person who doesn’t have a penis and become petrified that they too might lose their mighty weapon. This he calls the castration complex.

The discovery that girls don’t have one gives many boys an enduringly low opinion of girls. For girls, the discovery that boys have this toy which they can play with induces in them penis envy and an enduring sense of being second-rate. Penis envy culminates in the girl’s wish to be a boy.

[The whole concept of ‘penis envy’ is probably the single most outrageous example of Freud, despite being a revolutionary on one level, nonetheless often reinscribing the sexist prejudices of his Victorian times in a new language.]

Theories of birth

All children speculate about where babies come from, especially if their mother is pregnant again. The central feature of most theories is that the baby is got by eating something (as in many fairy tales) and delivered through the anus.

Sadistic view of sexual intercourse

Many children see or overhear their parents making love. Children feel intense curiosity about it. It seems to have to do with some joint activity involving peeing or defecating. But many children pick up on the apparent violence involved (hard physical movements, screaming) and this is another way in which cruelty may attach itself to a child’s fantasy world and resurface in a person’s adult attitudes to sex.

Typical failure of infantile sexual researches

No matter how subtle the sexual theories of children they are invariably wrong; for how could they know about semen and ovaries? But the whole attempt is important to Freud as a symbol of the growing independence of the child. These researches:

constitute a first step towards taking an independent attitude in the world, and they imply a high degree of alienation of the child from the people in his environment who formerly enjoyed his complete confidence.

(6) The phases of development of the sexual organisation

Infantile sexual pleasure is the opposite in every way of ‘normal’ adult sexuality. It is essentially auto-erotic, and its component instincts are generally disconnected and scattered over all manner of activities: this is the meaning of polymorphous perversity.

Compare and contrast with adult sexuality aims at genital contact with some external object.

Pregenital organisations

I.e. sexual patterns before the instinct settles on the genitals:

1. The oral or cannibalistic phase: the aim is the incorporation of the sexual object, to eat it, to master it by ingesting it and stimulating the mucous membranes of the lips at the same time.

This is the origin of cannibalism in primitive peoples; of the primitive relic of a holy meal found in most religions; and of the higher intellectual activity of identification with a hero figure.

The primitive and intellectual functions are brought together in the Eucharist where we eat the body of Christ at the same time as we acknowledge Him lord and master.

2. The sadistic-anal phase: it is at this early stage that the sex instinct can be seen dividing into the active-passive division which characterises all later sexuality: the masculine drive to mastery, of defecating at our own time and pleasure; and the feminine pleasure derived from the anus; a sadistic and a passive pleasure intermingle.

Ambivalence

This duality is the basis of later ambivalence, a word coined by the Swiss psychiatrist Paul Eugen Bleuler (Bleuler was a prolific coiner of neologisms; he also invented the terms ‘schizophrenia’, ‘schizoid’ and ‘autism’).

Ambivalence became central to Freudian theory. It describes the holding of contradictory feelings, classically love and hate, towards the same object. Thus the child can both love but be terrified by their father.

Phallic phase

Freud distinguishes one last phase of infantile sexuality, where a love-object has emerged but the instinct in both boys and girls focuses on the penis alone, when boys develop pride in their penis and girls develop a painful sense of lack of penis, giving rise to penis envy (see comments above).

Diphasic choice of object

To summarise, Freud can claim that, completely contrary to the popular view, the distinctive thing about human sexuality is:

  • that it is present, in various forms, in infants from the earliest time
  • that it develops through a series of stages
  • that each of these stages carries the risk of arrest or error which deforms the child’s feelings and emotions around libido
  • that infantile sexual choices and activity are progressively repressed by reaction-formations (guilt, shame) by the age of about 5
  • that the entire set of experiences goes underground during the latency period (5 or 6 to puberty), is repressed and forgotten
  • that it resurfaces in a more explicitly sexual mode at puberty but with shapes and flavours conditioned by those earliest experiences

These infantile longings become the basis of later ‘affectionate’ feelings:

Their sexual aims have become mitigated and they now represent what may be described as the ‘affectionate current’ of sexual life. Only psychoanalytic investigation can show that behind this affection, admiration and respect there lie concealed the old sexual longings of the infantile component instincts which have now become unserviceable.

(7) The sources of infantile sexuality

These conclusions have been reached by the psychoanalysis of adult patients and the observation of children. Sexual excitation in children seems to arise from:

a) repetition of satisfaction achieved in normal organic processes (sucking, defecating)
b) through external stimulation of erotogenic zones
c) as the expression of fundamental instincts

Mechanical excitations

Children love swinging and being thrown and caught. Psychoanalysis has shown the recurrence of these sensations in adult dreams i.e. that they lay down patterns of the earliest pleasures, for example, fantasies of flying, air blowing against the skin and genitals.

It is well known that rocking is habitually used to induce sleep in restless children. The shaking produced by driving in carriages and later by railway travel exercises such a fascinating effect upon older children that every boy, at any rate, has at one time or another in his life wanted to be an engine driver.

It is a puzzling fact that boys take such an extraordinarily intense interest in things connected with railways and, at the age at which the production of fantasies is most active (shortly before puberty), use those things as the nucleus of a symbolism that is peculiarly sexual. A compulsive link of this kind between railway travel and sexuality is clearly derived from the pleasurable character of the sensations of movement.

In the event of repression, which turns so many childish preferences into their opposite, these same individuals, when they are adolescents or adults, will react to rocking or swinging with a feeling of nausea, will be terribly exhausted by a railway journey, or will be subject to attacks of anxiety on the journey.

Muscular activity

Many patients report their first memories of sexual excitation when romping, fighting and playing with playmates. Organised games are done at school to keep the body healthy and divert adolescent attention away from sexuality: Freud says what this is doing is channel sexuality back into one of its specific components.

Affective process

Powerful emotions have sexual effects. Terrified or anxious children may touch their genitals for reassurance. The erotic aspect of terror, fright and so on may become intimately associated with sexuality so that adults find fear and terror thrilling; either in real life, in fantasies of rape or masochistic punishment; or in imaginary worlds of books or the cinema.

Pathways of mutual influence

If the taking in of food gives rise to sexual pleasure then the reverse may be true. If healthy sexuality accompanies healthy eating, then disturbance of sexuality may lead to disturbance of nourishment. Thus a sexually disturbed hysteric may cease eating.

We can speculate about a whole network of pathways by which sexual instincts may be channeled both towards basic organic functions (for example, eating) and also rerouted towards higher functions (that is, sublimated, into thinking, planning, deciding).

Essay 3. The transformations of puberty

Infantile sexuality is polymorphously perverse and auto-erotic, finding pleasure as it learns to control and play with its own body.

The latency period sees the repression of sexuality in the name of various reaction-formations and sexuality’s sublimation into all kinds of games and fantasies.

With puberty the genitals become active and the subject actively seeks a love object outside itself. The new sexual aim of genital union appears and all the scattered erotogenic zones with their sex impulses become focused on, and subordinate to, genital union. Hopefully.

‘Normal’ sexuality consists of the uniting of the affectionate current (the sublimated remains of childhood sexuality) and the sensual current (mainstream libido).

So proper human sexual development is the coming together of affection/love and sex/pleasure, focussed on the genitals, to produce the ‘normal’ healthy adult. But, as always, there can be all kinds of hiccups along the way.

(1) The primacy of the genital zones and fore-pleasure

At puberty the sex organs grow and become ready for use. They can be excited in three ways:

  1. excitation of the erotogenic zones from outside
  2. from the organic interior
  3. from mental life, the storehouse of impressions and ideas

Sexual excitement is felt in two ways:

  1. perception of a mental tension of an extremely compelling type
  2. physical preparation: erection of the penis, lubrication of the vagina

Sexual tension

How come sexual excitation is perceived as both pleasurable but also as an unpleasurable tension?

The mechanism of fore-pleasure

Touching or seeing clearly give rise to a) pleasure in themselves b) a perceived raising of sexual tension.

It is as if the fore-pleasure derived from stimulating the erotogenic zones is designed to increase the incentive to move onto the act of sexual union.

Initial pleasure thus disguises increasing tension (unpleasure) so you are led relentlessly on towards copulation, the aim of the entire organism.

The whole pattern leads up to orgasm and the release of the appropriate sexual substances. It would seem that orgasms are designed to extinguish libido, if only temporarily. They are the height of pleasure, the abrupt release of tension by the blood thronging the penis or clitoris rushing back into the body as the scrotum or vagina undergoes a series of muscular contractions perceived as pleasurable.

And this release of tension takes you right the way back to square one i.e. normal bodily function; the overwhelming compulsion towards sex evaporates, the rational mind returns to full control.

Freud divides the two stages into fore-pleasure and end-pleasure.

A distinction similar to the fore-pleasure offered by the telling of jokes which prepare you for the greater release of libidinal pressure (laughing).

[He uses the same division in his essay Creative Writers and Daydreaming to describe the fore-pleasure afforded by aesthetic or formal literary techniques which prepare the way for the deeper pleasure of sharing unconscious fantasies (tales of damnation and salvation, risk and adventure, Ian Fleming and Barbara Cartland).]

Dangers of fore-pleasure

But fore-pleasures are clearly yet another balancing act; the incentive of pleasure must be balanced by an increase of tension which successfully propels you towards sex. If the yield of orgasmic pleasure doesn’t live up to the growth in tension, you may become stuck at the fore-pleasure stage.

Obviously enough, you may be predisposed to this through any number of accidents which emerge in infancy. Extreme attachment to various types of fore-pleasure, to a particular erotogenic zone or to the mental equivalents of them (stimulation of the anus – masochism/inversion) may develop into full-blown perversion.

But these very complex combinations will have some influence over the shape of even the most healthy adult sexuality.

Not only the deviations from normal sexual life but its normal form as well are determined by the infantile manifestations of sexuality.

Again, if this is an accurate account of the growth of sexuality, it shows that it will be very hard to police, to draw a hard and fast line between ‘normal’ and perverse.

Freud is making the controversial claim that ‘the normal’ is built on ‘the perverse’ and most of its activities contain the seeds of perversity.

(2) The problem of sexual excitation

Part played by the sexual substances

Maybe sexual tension is produced, in men, by the accumulation of semen in the testicles? Kraft-Ebing thought so. But if so, how can this account for sexual excitation in children and women?

Importance of the internal sexual organs

Arguing against that theory, observation of castrated men shows that sexual excitement continues to operate with no semen at all.

Chemical theory

Freud speculates that the key role is played by substances released by the sex glands. In his day there was no convincing biological theory of sex.

The discovery of the class of chemicals called ‘hormones’ (at around this time, 1905, in England) paved the way to our present understanding of how sex works.

It’s worth pointing out, though, that even today one of the great mysteries is: Why Sex? And, as Steve Jones says, If Sex, why only two sexes?

(3) The libido theory

Libido is:

a quantitively variable force which serves as a measure of processes and transformations occurring in the field of sexual excitation

A kind of electricity. Freud imagines that libido is distinguished from the other main instinct, hunger, chemically. Libido is a chemically unique force. Psychoanalysis has shown that libido is derived not just from the genitals but from all sorts of organs, including the skin.

We thus reach the idea of a quantity of libido, to the mental representation of which we give the name of ego-libido, and whose production, increase or diminution, distribution and displacement should afford us possibilities for explaining the psychosexual phenomena observed.

Psychoanalysis can only observe ego-libido as it becomes attached to objects i.e. becomes object-libido, as it is attached to, detached from, swapped around various objects (for example, images, fixations, words and ideas) directing the subject’s activity towards sex. For the act of sex, in particular orgasm, results in the temporary extinction of libido.

Psychoanalysis observes the outflowing of libido from the ego and its return thereto.

The ego acts as a psychic reservoir for libido.

In the earliest phases every ego is narcissistic, that is, focusses libido on itself (during the auro-erotic stages of infantile sexuality). Only later does the ego develop the ability to project energy onto external objects and Freud (or his English translators) label these object-cathexes.

The slightest damage to the organism (for example, illness) results in a return to infantile narcissism, as do psychic wounds.

Narcissism is also evoked by particularly self-contained objects, by aloof women, by cats, and by babies (see Freud’s 1914 essay On Narcissism).

In later editions of the Three Essays Freud attacks Jung for watering down libido to make it mean psychical instinctive forces in general.

But the whole point of having a distinct sexual instinct, chemically differentiated from all other instincts, whose special operations can be studied through observation and analysis, in fact all Freud’s efforts and theories, are destroyed if you thus throw out the distinguishing sexual element of libido theory.

(4) The differentiation between men and women

Libido is masculine i.e. active, in character.

In levels of autoerotism and masturbation boys and girls are similar, though girls develop the reaction-formations of shame and disgust more easily than boys (i.e. mental forces which damp down their libido).

Freud suggests three meanings of masculine and feminine:

  • passive versus active personalities
  • biological i.e. defined by sex organs
  • sociological i.e. observing the actual behaviour of men and women

Freud uses masculine and feminine to denote active and passive. To say libido is masculine means it is, in this value system, always active. As to the sociological aspect:

Such observation shows that in human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense. Every individual, on the contrary, displays a mixture of the character-traits belonging to their own and to the opposite sex and shows a combination of activity and passivity…

Without the fundamental idea of innate bisexuality I think it would scarcely be possible to arrive at an understanding of the sexual manifestations that are actually to be observed in men and women.

Leading zones in men and women

The clitoris is what little girls masturbate, as boys the penis. Both become erect i.e. engorged with blood during excitation. But Freud thinks that at puberty, whereas boys receive a fresh wave of sexual excitement, girls undergo a profound sexual repression; this takes the form of moving their chief erotogenic zone from the clitoris to the vagina.

The ‘normal’ woman has thus repressed her masculine active organ (the clitoris) in the name of vaginal excitation designed for sex and procreation:

The fact that women change their leading erotogenic zone in this way, together with the wave of repression at puberty which, as it were, puts away their childish masculinity, are the chief determinants of the greater proneness of women to neurosis and especially to hysteria.

[This is, of course, complete rubbish. Women retain their chief sexual excitation through the clitoris. The rediscovery and widespread publicisation of clitoridal sexuality was one of the great achievements of the feminists in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s I was well aware that many women cannot orgasm through vaginal stimulation alone but need clitoral stimulation as well and I think (I hope) this has now become common knowledge. Thus Freud’s theorising away of the clitoris, along with all his theories about the inevitable inferiority of women, are the grossest example of his simply recasting the patriarchal prejudices of his time in a new language.]

(5) The finding of an object

[Expanded in the 1915 essay On Narcissism.]

A person may love:

1. according to the anaclitic (attachment) type:

  • the woman who feeds him
  • the man who protects him

2. according to the narcissistic type:

  • what he himself is
  • what he himself was
  • what he himself would like to be i.e. an idol
  • someone who was once part of themselves i.e. a baby

Suckling at the breast is the prototype of all pleasure and love.

From 1915 Freud introduces the idea of narcissism into his theory. The physical pleasure of suckling at the breast is now accompanied by the psychic pleasure of self-love, the earliest attachment of libido to the ego, the ego to itself, as it grows and comes to consciousness.

After puberty all love objects will partake of these two earliest loves; all love objects will have an element of narcissism and of attachment (cupboard) love.

The finding of a love-object is always a refinding of this original pleasure. A recapturing of what we once had. Falling in love is always a return to lost happiness.

The sexual object during early infancy

Everyone’s first love is for their mother. Freud goes further to say everyone’s first sexual object is their mother. Mothers stroke and kiss and caress babies, thus awaking the erotogenic zones and sex instincts. There is nothing perverse in this. The mother is only fulfilling her task in teaching the child how to love. Later in life, the former baby will itself stroke and kiss and caress a love object. How else does it learn to do this except by unconscious recall of its own childhood caresses?

Infantile anxiety

Infantile anxiety is caused by the loss of the person the infant loves. They are afraid of the dark because in the dark they cannot see the person they love. An infant who turns his love/libido into anxiety when it cannot be satisfied is behaving exactly like an adult neurotic.

The barrier against incest

‘Normal’ development means the transmutation of the early sexual attachment to the mother into ‘affection’ i.e. aim-inhibited libido. One of life’s great tasks is overcoming this love and learning to reattach it to socially acceptable objects.

This happens partly due to internal psychic development but is hugely reinforced by social and moral pressures. In Totem and Taboo (1913) Freud writes about the fundamental taboo against incest which is, in his view, the beginnings of society and morality.

Nonetheless, incest remains a possibility in the unconscious mind, in dreams and fantasies.

Puberty is particularly rich in fantasies as the adolescent tries out various combinations of object and experiments with its new strong feelings obsessively in the mind, before attempting to put them into practice.

Some fantasies are particularly common: the adolescent’s fantasies of overhearing his parents having sex; of having been seduced in infancy; of having been threatened with castration; fantasies of life in the womb; and the so-called Family Romance, the fantasy of being the abandoned child of rich beautiful parents – a rationalisation of infantile perception of parental omnipotence.

In overcoming renewed childhood sexual fantasies about his parents the adolescent also has to make the crucial break with them; to rebel against parental authority, particularly the father.

Some people never make it and remain in thrall to their parents. Many women never properly escape and remain as loving and passive as they were in childhood. Girls have a tendency to rebel against their sexual destiny, against sexuality itself and to flee into exaggerated affection for siblings or parents. To become virgin carers.

It falls to some men to become the complete rebels against authority which are required by the furtherance of the race.

After-effects of infantile object-choice

These powerful loves of childhood cast a pall over the rest of our lives. Women often look for older, more mature, authoritative husbands who are quite obviously father-substitutes. Men, even more often, are looking for the unconditional love of their mothers.

Prevention of inversion

It seems that the presence in our childhood of the same sex parent as a figure of a) resented authority and b) sexual rivalry, contributes to our early love for the opposite sex parent, all of which is motivated by the hormones at puberty.

But if the family unit is disturbed, if one of the parents is lacking, this is a powerful accidental stimulus to homosexuality (innate predispositions aside).

SUMMARY

* Neuroses are the mirror image of perversions: both represent aberrations from normal sexuality. Neurotic symptoms are generally a reinvoking of infantile perversions, at least in fantasy and transferred symptoms, as libido flees an unbearable sexual situation.

* Perversions are the fixation of the libido onto particular components of sexuality at the expense of normal heterosexual genital union.

A disposition to perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct and ‘normal’ sexual behaviour is developed out of it as a result of organic changes and psychical inhibitions occurring in the course of maturation.

* Any departure from established sexuality is therefore an instance of developmental inhibition and infantilism, a regression.

* The sexual instinct is put together from various factors and, in the perversions, these components fall apart.

* ‘Normal’ sexuality integrates these instincts and submits them to socially-condoned genital aims.

* Children bring sexuality into the world with them. After an efflorescence of sexuality from ages 2 to 5 the sex instinct undergoes a repression, entering the latency period. Sexual feelings continue during this period but rerouted:

a) to develop secondary characteristics such as affection and friendship (aim-inhibited libido)
b) into ‘reaction-formations’ to sexual activities, which are now perceived as dirty, shameful, disgusting and so on, into a predisposition to receive moral education. These reaction-formations will be critical in establishing the channels along which libido can flow after puberty; too strong and they will react badly to the arrival of puberty and real sexual situations, causing all sorts of havoc, not least the flight into illness which characterises neurosis.

* Children develop through three phases: oral (breastfeeding), anal-sadistic in which ambivalence emerges, and phallic, part of which is the Oedipus complex. Then it is all buried in the latency period.

* The diphasic onset of sexuality i.e. in two stages, allowing for a latency period during which the socialising process can get going, seems to be a precondition for humanity’s civilised achievements. But, being so long and precarious, the latency period also explains mankind’s predisposition to neurosis and mental illness, and to the various failures and perversions of the sex instinct.

* The perversions of infancy, the finding of pleasure in erotogenic zones, returns with puberty but subordinated, as fore-pleasures, to the great act of copulation itself.

* Children find their first sex object in the opposite sex parent but this lust is repressed and redirected by the primeval psychological taboo against incest.

Factors interfering with development:

Every step on this long path of development can become a point of fixation, every juncture in this involved combination can be an occasion for a dissociation of the sexual instinct.

Constitution and heredity

Nature/nurture, which comes first? Imponderable. Except to say that in families with a predisposition to sexual failure, the men will tend to be perverts, the women, “true to the tendency of their sex to repression”, will become negative perverts i.e. hysterics.

Further modification

Whatever the hereditary predisposition, it is clear the sex instincts undergo further modifications:

Perversion: at puberty the libido may find the genital zone too weak for the tasks asked of it, and so revert to fixation on earlier infantile perverse zones.

Repression: the instincts in question are repressed and travel underground until they can find their expression disguised as hysterical symptoms. They can have perfectly normal sex lives but accompanied by psychological problems.

Sublimation: excessive sexual dispositions can be redirected into socially acceptable fields, thus yielding greater psychic efficiency and providing a strong evolutionary advantage. Maybe this is the reason why sublimation is the basis of much human mental life.

Reaction-formation: the building up during the latency period of strong counter-forces to perverse instincts, abetted by education which is designed to channel sexuality into ‘normal’ ends.

What we describe as a person’s character is built up to a considerable extent from the material of sexual excitations and is composed of instincts that have been fixed since childhood, of constructions achieved by means of sublimation, and of other constructions, employed for effectively holding in check perverse impulses which have been recognised as unutilisable.

Credit

All Freud’s works have complicated histories in translation. The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality were first translated into English in 1953 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. References in this blog are to the revised version, published in 1977 as part of ‘On Sexuality’, Volume 7 of the Pelican Freud Library.

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An Autobiographical Study by Sigmund Freud (1925)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian or bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

This essay was one of 27 commissioned for a series called ‘Contemporary Medicine in Self-Portrayals’ i.e. less a strict autobiography than a ‘my life and my contribution to science’.

It comprises a sketchy historical review of the events leading up to Freud’s ‘discovery’ of psychoanalysis, then an exposition of psychoanalysis’s central tenets, an explanation of the technique, and a sketch of its applications to other spheres of human knowledge.

Early life

Sigmund Freud was born on 6 May 1856 in Freiberg in Moravia, in the modern Czech Republic, the youngest of 9 children of the bankrupt wool-trader Jacob Freud (facts also mentioned in The Interpretation of Dreams, page 284).

The family moves to Vienna when Freud is 4. He is consistently top of his class at the Gymnasium (junior school).

His father, Jacob, though poor, said, ‘Follow whatever career you wish, son’. Freud didn’t especially want to become a doctor:

I was moved rather by a sort of curiosity which was directed more towards human concerns than towards natural objects.

At higher school he was caught up in the intellectual excitement generated by the theories of Darwin and, after listening to a reading of an inspiring essay on Nature by Goethe, he decides to study medicine (as recounted in The Interpretation of Dreams, page 572).

1873: Starts attending University of Vienna. Encounters antisemitism for the first time. Unsure what to specialise in until he attends classes by Ernst Brucke, Professor of Physiology, who becomes his hero.

1876 to 1882: Researches physiology of the nervous system of fish and eels. Takes a long time to win his Degree as Doctor of Medicine, in 1881.

1882: Brucke tells him, ‘You are poor. There’s no money in pure research; best to take up the actual practice of medicine.’ So Sigmund enters the Vienna General Hospital but continues with his theoretical interests, now concentrating on disorders of the human nervous system.

From the anatomy of the brain – still a very theoretical subject, i.e. no cash – Freud moved on to study nervous diseases. Almost nothing was known about nervous diseases in the 1880s, there were no specialists and few texts in Vienna. Far away in Paris shone the beacon of Jean-Martin Charcot, a leading light in treating mental illness.

1885: Appointed Lecturer on Neuropathology due to his research. Soon afterwards awarded a bursary and set off to Paris to study under Charcot. Here Charcot had proved that hysteria existed as a definite  and distinct diagnosis. Contrary to received opinion it could be found in men as well as women. It resulted in physical symptoms. It could be brought on by hypnotic suggestion. But as to the psychological origins of hysteria – nothing.

1886: On the way back from his winter stay in Paris he stopped at Berlin to study the disorders of childhood. Via the prestigious Kassowitz Institute for Children Freud published a string of learned studies of cerebral palsy.

1883 to 1884: Freud experiments with the new drug cocaine as a possible anaesthetic, but others do the definitive work.

1886: Freud marries Martha Binnays, his fiancée for 4 long, frustrating years due to his lack of money or prospects. Now, aged 30, with no real achievements to his name, Freud really needs money to set up the kind of bourgeois household he wants.

1886: When Freud lectures in Vienna on Charcot’s discoveries he is largely ridiculed and excluded from research laboratories. So he sets up as a private consultant on nervous diseases. How does he treat people? With electrotherapy (which he soon drops) and with the method of hypnotism which he had witnessed in Paris.

1889: Freud visits Nancy in France, to watch the great Hippolyte Bernheim perform hypnosis. It was Bernheim who developed the notion of suggestibility under hypnosis. Freud had translated Bernheim’s On Suggestion and its Applications to Therapy in 1888. He took along some of his private patients. Pondering hypnosis hints that there are forces operating on the mind of which we are normally unconscious. But in practice it rarely cures real neurotics.

1880 to 1882: While all this went on Freud befriended Josef Breuer, a physician 14 years his elder, who lives and practices in Berlin. Breuer tells him about his treatment of Anna O. This clever young woman was afflicted with a colourful array of neurotic symptoms. Breuer discovered that if he hypnotised her, she was capable of explaining the origins of the symptoms in real-life events of which she was unaware in waking life. Not only that, but once she explained the cause, the symptom disappeared! Clearly neurotic symptoms have meaning; they are related to real life events, so they are memories but they are buried somewhere inaccessible to waking consciousness. Freud replicates Breuer’s results with many of his private patients.

1895: Freud publishes Studies On Hysteria, a list of case studies with some theory of the ‘cathartic’ method of cure i.e. hysteria is caused by suppressed memories but if these memories can be brought into the conscious minds, the symptom disappears. Breuer is happy to leave his findings at that.

1895 to 1900: The Heroic Period. Freud sets out on a voyage of discovery building on the insights gained so far. Above all, he begins to suspect a sexual factor in the aetiology of hysteria. He moves on to confirm a similar sexual motive lying beneath neuraesthenics. He realises that much of the success of hypnotism is due to the patient’s trust in the hypnotist. After a while he realises that he can get comparable results in his patients (i.e. the release of a flood of memories) by just asking the patient about their experiences. Slowly he evolves the technique of free association.

1896: Freud’s father dies and this triggers a pitiless self-analysis in which he reviews his whole life, his aims and achievements to date. He comes to realise the importance of little-suspected motives, of early fears and anxieties in his adult life, choices and behaviour. At the same time he is examining his patients for similar origins to their obsessions and symptoms.

All the thoughts of this turbulent period are recorded in his epic correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess, an ear-nose and throat specialist based 500 miles away in Berlin. Nowadays dismissed as a crank, Fliess nonetheless provided an invaluable sounding board for Freud’s experimental speculations at a time when respectable opinion in Vienna increasingly shunned him.

Psychoanalysis

1899: publishes The Interpretation of Dreams which contains all Freud’s major discoveries, either explicitly or in embryo:

  • Neurotic symptoms are the return of repressed memories of desires or feelings too shameful for the patient to cope with, which is why they are repressed.
  • The amount of effort needed to recall them to conscious thought is a measure of resistance.
  • Free association helps the patient approach the dangerous memory.
  • But a quicker way to get there is through dream interpretation.
  • Dreams are the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish.
  • Dreams use the language of the unconscious in which everything is eternally present, persons are interchangeable, logic is forgotten and the vilest desires are expressed.
  • Desires are distorted by the dream-work which consists of condensation, overdetermination, displacement – so that a dream has two layers, the manifest content (what we remember and tell upon waking) and the latent content (the distorted wish).
  • ‘Dream interpretation is the royal road to the Unconscious.’

An instinctive wish wells up in us. The ego forbids it entrance to consciousness. It is repressed but it must have expression. So it emerges, disguised, in dreams and in neurotic symptoms. Therefore, mental illness is a message from the unconscious; when the painful message is deciphered by the common work of analysis, the wish is discharged with an ‘affective release’ i.e. emotion; the patient bursts into tears etc.

Following on the Release of Tension there is the Act of Judgement or Sublimation. You consciously come to terms with this shameful part of your personality; or, less consciously, you sublimate its energy into a new understanding of your life, your motives, your agenda, into higher goals.

The essence of the Psychoanalytical Revolution is this: Everything mental is in the first instance unconscious; the attribute of consciousness may be present or it may be absent. Consciousness, this precious mind and the clever thoughts we value so much, are, then, almost irrelevant to the truth about what we are and to how we actually behave as human animals.

This is a departure from all previous theories of the mind which, reasonably enough, had concentrated on asking how Reason and Intellect work, what is the role of language in thought etc etc? Two thousand years of philosophers worrying away at the nature of the links between sensations and concepts and the words we express them in.

Freud says this is all irrelevant. Consciousness is a puny, secondary, almost irrelevant secretion – a rationalisation, a justification – of decisions and wishes and desires and strategies which are fully worked out in a part of the mind which can by its nature never be accessible to us. We can only guess at its activities by inference, from the misshapen tip of the iceberg which is all we can see.

Human mental activity is almost entirely unconscious.

The sexuality of children

1905: Three Essays on Sexuality. The other major component of the theory is the sexuality of children. Through analysis, through dreams and free association, most of Freud’s patients traced their problems back to infantile sexual experiences. Though not sexual in the standard meaning (erection, ejaculation etc) Freud found that children are excited and gain pleasure – gratification – of the sexual instinct, through different parts of their bodies as they grow. He called these the erotogenic zones.

He hypothesised a developmental model:

  • Years 0 to 1: pleasure through the mouth, sucking on the breast, the oral phase
  • Years 1 to 3: pleasure in acquiring control over peeing and defecating, the anal-sadistic phase
  • Years 3 to 5: pleasure in playing with the little penis or clitoris, the phallic stage

At this point the sexual drives are clearly in approximately the right place for the purposes of reproduction to which they will be called at the onset of puberty.

The actual pleasure is derived from the operation of a whole number of instincts which steadily sort themselves out into their component parts as the child grows, often resulting in pairs of opposites: masochistic and sadistic urges; the urge to show and to look.

Small children’s play amounts to continuous experimentation with a steadily growing range of instinctual drives and satisfactions, applied to the child’s steadily growing awareness, first of parts of its body, then of their functions, then of the body’s relationship to the outside world, and finally to other people, to its siblings and parents.

The sexual impulse overall can be called the libido. The libido does not develop smoothly.

As a result either of the excessive strength of certain of the components or of experiences involving premature satisfaction, fixations of the libido may occur at various points in its development. If subsequently a repression takes place, the libido flows back to these points (a process described as regression) and it is from them that the [frustrated] energy bursts through in the form of a symptom.

The Three Essays set out to schematise all human sexual experience.

‘Normal’ heterosexual genital intercourse undertaken for the procreation of children – the only form of sex allowed by the Catholic Church of Freud’s time – is a product of the most strenuous repression of other desires and the pinnacle, the furthest highest peak, of socially acceptable sexual development. In reality, the overwhelming majority of the population are unable to adhere to this incredibly restricted target and indulge in various forms of ‘perversion’ (in the Catholic sense).

The Three Essays turn 2,000 years of theories about sex and our relationship with our bodies on their heads. In Freud’s model the gratification of physical instincts is the bedrock of human existence; in his view, children, far from being sexless innocents, from the earliest age are indulging these desires, and none of us ever really gives them up; they are merely repressed. They can be repressed in numerous ways, if the process is done badly, resulting in us becoming twisted or neurotic; or they can be sublimated into ‘higher’ activities acceptable to society.

The structures of society, the institutions of civilised life which we like to pride ourselves on – its laws and morality and religion and philosophy and art – are constructed in order to hide our true animal nature from ourselves.

Back to the theory of human development. The developing instincts must have an object: to begin with it is the infant’s own body, in a state of permanent auto-erotism (thus the small infant is said to be polymorphously perverse, simply meaning that it finds pleasure in every aspect of physicality).

Later, the infant develops an awareness of the breast it is suckling from and develops an image of the Good Mother (who suckles it) and the Bad Mother (who goes away).

Later still the child becomes aware of the complementary roles played by its mother and father, and the boy-child wants to take his father’s place and take possession of his mother. This is the Oedipus Complex, which Freud placed slap-bang at the centre of his theory of childhood development, of the aetiology of the neuroses, of the origins of culture and society, and of the way existing societies are run.

All a boy child’s puzzles about its little willy and about where it came from, everything becomes centred on this grand obsession: 1) terror of the all-powerful Father, and the reverse side of terror, aggression, the wish to kill him; and 2) love of the mother who suckled us and is affectionate.

Like Oedipus, we wish to kill our father and sleep with our mother. These are the only people in the child’s life; onto them he projects models of all the possible relations human beings can have. No surprise, then, that in later life so many of our attitudes to authority figures, love objects, other citizens, work-mates etc will be found to derive from the primitive stratum of emotional webs which are centred on the Oedipal Complex.

Once the child has overcome these feelings, he lapses into years of amnesia, the latency period from 5 to the onset of puberty at 11, 12, 13. The storm and stress of infancy are largely forgotten while the child’s faculties are concentrated outwards onto social activity, on learning from parents, teachers and other authorities, what rules to obey, how to read and write and judge, how to handle your peers: the vital work of acculturation, of learning the ancestral wisdom which separates us from the simple beasts who repeat in each generation their timeless instinctive activity.

The latency period seems to be a phenomenon of advanced societies. During this period the child develops reaction-formations (equal and opposite reactions against the sexually intense years), meaning emotions such as disgust and shame.

These, for Freud are the origins of morality. You are indoctrinated into thinking that the acts of defecating, peeing, playing with your genitals are ‘dirty’. You react with shame. Encouraged by your parents, your teachers and everything you read, you develop an idea that sex is ‘wrong’, ‘dirty’.

A strong body of tradition originating from the highest possible authority (God) goes to confirm all these feelings and to encourage you to sublimate them into socially-acceptable forms. Thus religious believers themselves display many interesting examples of perversions, neuroses and various types of abnormal behaviour but under the protection of piety.

The child introjects all of these injunctions from their parents and other authority figures, and constructs an ego-ideal, a model way to live and behave and think. They hero-worship idealised figures, from Jesus to Hollywood stars to the latest soccer players.

The naive child want to live up to their standard, to impress them with selflessness and devotion to an ideal. Thus the growing child lays down in their mind a superego or conscience, the internalised laws of their culture which now supersede the rules of the parents (who are, in any case, beginning to seem all-too-human and fallible).

Puberty

The onset of puberty with its rush of hormones and the development of primary and secondary sexual differentiation is a traditional time of turmoil in all societies and a time when the young have to be forcibly, sometimes painfully, initiated into full adult membership of society.

In more advanced cultures this means the early sexual patterns are revived but come into fierce conflict with the reaction-formations of disgust and shame and the powerful strictures of the introjected superego.

But the ideal, mature grown-up is as much of a myth as the ideal, model, married heterosexual. Freud’s theory helps to explain what a chaos of complexes and obsessions and instincts and desires and repressions and terrors and self-punishment we have to pass through to emerge as anything like the responsible grown-ups which society requires.

I hope it will be easy to gather the nature of my extension of the concept of sexuality. In the first place sexuality is divorced from its too close connection with the genitals and is regarded as a more comprehensive bodily function, having pleasure as its goal and only secondarily coming to serve the purposes of reproduction. In the second place the sexual impulses are regarded as including all those merely affectionate and friendly impulses to which usage applies the exceedingly ambiguous word ‘love’.

The detaching of sexuality from the genitals has the advantage of allowing us to bring the sexual activities of children and of perverts into the same scope as those of normal adults. The sexual activities of children have hitherto been entirely neglected and though those of perverts have been recognised it has been with moral indignation and without understanding. From the psychoanalytic standpoint, even the most eccentric and repellent perversions are explicable as manifestations of component instincts of sexuality which have freed themselves from the primacy of the genitals and are now in pursuit of pleasure on their own account as they were in the very early days of the libido’s development. The most important of these perversions, homosexuality, scarcely deserves the name. It can be traced back to the constitutional bisexuality of all human beings and to the after-effects of the phallic primacy. Psychoanalysis enables us to point to some trace or other of a homosexual object-choice in everyone…. Psychoanalysis has no concern whatever with any judgements of value.

The second of my alleged extensions of the concept of sexuality finds its justification in the fact revealed by psychoanalytic investigation that all of these affectionate impulses were originally of a completely sexual nature but have become inhibited in their aim or sublimated. The manner in which the sexual instincts can thus be influenced and diverted enables them to be employed for cultural activities of every kind.

Psychoanalytic therapy

Freud then moves on to explain the technique of analysis. This is based on the concept of transference. The typical psychoanalytic patient soon forgets the wish to be cured of unhappiness or troubling thoughts and symptoms. He begins to project onto the analyst his deepest feelings. These may be of love and affection for the great healer of souls – in which case the analyst can work with them to continue towards catharsis.

But transference may become entirely negative, the patient projecting aggression and defiance onto the analyst. This makes things difficult, sometimes impossible. The centrality and the limitation of transference explains why analysis works with some patients and not with others; and also why whole categories of patient are beyond its help, namely schizophrenics and paranoiacs, who are too detached from reality to form the realistic relationship with the analyst which transference requires in order to work.

The transference is made conscious to the patient by the analyst and it is resolved by convincing him that in his transference attitude he is re-experiencing emotional relationships which had their origin in his earliest object attachments during the repressed period of his childhood.

The history of the psychoanalytic movement

1900: Freud’s discoveries were either ignored or dismissed. Freud came to attribute this to the resistance of the wider world to the truth, resistance which is modelled on and derives from the original work of repression carried out during the latency period. The denial from the wider world  resembles the denial Freud encountered from individual patients who disbelieved his interpretations until they were finally persuaded and cured.

1902: Interested physicians begin to meet at Freud’s house.

1906: Interest in Freud stirs in Zurich, at the renowned Bergholzli Sanatorium run by Eugene Bleuler and his rising assistant Carl Gustav Jung.

1908: All interested parties, from Austria, Germany and Switzerland, meet at Salzburg for the first Psychoanalytic Congress.

1909: Freud and Jung are invited to America, to lecture at Clark University, Worcester, Massachussetts, at the invitation of President Stanley Hall. In the States Freud meets Harvard neurologist James J. Putnam and the ‘pragmatic’ philosopher William James. James in his classic text, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), had set out to draw a limit to the kind of scientific positivism espoused by Freud, and to reserve an exclusive area of experience open only to intuition: more or less corresponding to religious experience.

1910: The Second Psychoanalytical Congress in Nurenberg sets up an the International Psychoanalytical Society and appoints Jung the first President.

1911 to 1913: Two secessionist movements. Alfred Adler leaves to set up Individual Psychology based on the ‘masculine protest’, the idea that neuroses are formed by the drive to overcome perceived organ inferiorities. (This is the origin of the inferiority complex). Jung leaves to set up Analytical Psychology, emptying Freud’s libido of its sexual content, rejecting the Oedipus Complex and importing ideas like a ‘racial unconscious’, ‘the oceanic feeling’, ‘archetypes of behaviour’ – in every instance abandoning the specific discoveries of Freud for vaguer, more mystical interpretations of personality.

1914 to 1918: The Great War brings psychoanalytic practice and publications to a halt.

1920: Psychoanalytical Congress at the Hague. The War helped spread psychoanalysis by bringing home the reality of the psychogenesis of mental illness to the general population. Previously sceptical doctors, put off Freud’s theories by their sexual aspects, were forced to take into account ‘the flight from reality’, ‘the flight into illness’, in the form of the ‘shell-shock’ which had afflicted so many combatants.

Freud says the history of psychoanalysis breaks into two periods: the Heroic Period 1895 to 1906 when he was substantially alone; and the period from 1906 – when the Swiss came on board – to the time of writing (1925), when a body of analysts has grown in its own right and contributed many new ideas.

Narcissism

One major new addition to the theory made during the war was the theory of narcissism. Before the ego has identified external objects, it takes itself as an object and an element of narcissism never really leaves us.

All through the subject’s life his ego remains the great reservoir of his libido, from which object-cathexes are sent out and into which the libido can stream back again from the objects. Thus narcissistic libido is constantly being transformed into object-libido, and vice-versa. An excellent instance of the length to which this transformation can go is afforded by the state of being in love, whether in a sexual or a sublimated manner, which goes so far [in self-love] as involving a sacrifice of the self.

In 1925, at the period of writing this pamphlet, Freud had entered a new phase. The new concept of narcissism had disrupted the simplicity of the old theory. Previously Freud had divided the instincts into sex-instincts and ego-instincts; into a conflict between sex – operating on the Pleasure Principle – and the ego – working on the Reality Principle. The conflict between these two opposed forces explained repression, neurosis etc.

But if the ego could also be the object of libido, which is what narcissism amounts to, then the two supposedly antagonistic forces are closer together than was previously thought.

Second theory

In 1922 to 1923 Freud wrote Beyond The Pleasure Principle, The Ego and The Id, and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Between them these works tried to resolve the contradictions  thrown up by the theory of narcissism with two further innovations:

First, a new topographic theory of the mind incorporated the unconscious drives and instincts into the new and bigger concept of the id; the id provides the energy for the ego, which grows out of it by a process of repression and having to come to grips with the external world i.e. the ego is formed by the clash between the inner Pleasure Principle of the human creature and the harsh unyielding world compressed into the Reality Principle; at a later stage, as we’ve seen above, the child develops the superego or conscience.

But Freud also posited a major new force, the Death Drive. He grouped together all the positive instincts of the earlier theory, all the drives towards satisfaction which seek unity and binding-together, the drives propelling us forwards through life, under the name Eros. In opposition to them, as the drive which seeks dissolution and a return to the inorganic, he posited the existence of a death drive or Thanatos.

The death drive wishes the organism to return to stasis, to achieve peace. The death drive is made up of components which include the wish to suicide – the death wish – a wish to return to the peaceful, unstrife-ridden world of the womb. That’s the death drive turned inwards, against the self. But it can also be directed outwards, sublimated and projected, in the form of aggression towards others.

Freud was well aware that these new developments were highly speculative but the impact of the Great War had shown everyone that as well as sexual or libidinal satisfactions a great deal of vicious violent barbarism made up a major part of the human animal. The death drive is Freud’s attempt to bring together all these anomalies under one roof.

These innovations proved fruitful for future developments in psychoanalysis. The new way of thinking of the ego as the zone of protection for the animal, the place where it learns to mediate between its wild lusts and the restrictions of outer reality, led to research which views many mental activities as essentially defensive.

These psychic mechanisms of defence which the human animal erects were to be investigated in detail by Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud. And the understanding of aggression, of the hate and rage which the tiny animal feels against its parents in the earliest years and which it later projects outwards onto society, these were to be investigated by Melanie Klein.

Social theory

Lastly, Freud turns to psychoanalysis’s applications to other spheres of knowledge. Here he refers to the way psychoanalysis has taken off in France mainly in the arts. (As Roy Porter among others has pointed out, in France many of Freud’s discoveries in the realm of the unconscious and developmental theory already existed in the work of Charcot and Janet and Piaget, so he was not seen as such a ground-breaking pioneer.)

1. Literature and myth

In the final sections of this essay Freud outlines how he applies the insights of psychoanalysis to other areas. Central is the Oedipus Myth which has haunted all the ages because it is a perfect representation of a universal law of the human mind. Hence the mystique of Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, which is a more refined application of the same insight. Hamlet is unable to revenge his father because Claudius (his father’s murderer) has already acted out Hamlet’s own deepest (repressed) fantasy: he has killed his father and is sleeping with his mother.

Freud’s loyal English disciple Ernest Jones wrote a full-length study of Oedipus and Hamlet. Otto Rank, Freud’s loyal secretary, wrote a compendious book on the Incest Theme in literature and went on to compile an encyclopedic analytical interpretation of ‘The Myth of The Birth of The Hero’.

Thus was born a whole new way of relating to, thinking about and interpreting literary and artistic creations, a method of analysing out the hidden or repressed analytical material contained in a novel or painting, an academic tradition which continues to the present day. Freud in various works devised theories and insights into art, literature and the imagination, which gave them a special privileged place in his theory:

The realm of imagination is a ‘reservation’ made during the painful transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle in order to provide a substitute for instinctual satisfactions which had to be given up in real life. The artist, like the neurotic, had withdrawn from an unsatisfying reality into this world of imagination; but, unlike the neurotic, he knew how to find a way back from it and once more to get a firm foothold in reality. His creations – works of art – were the imaginary satisfactions of unconscious wishes, just as dreams are; and like them they were in the nature of compromises, since they too were forced to avoid any open conflict with the forces of repression. But they differed from the narcissistic asocial forces of dreaming in that they were calculated to arouse sympathetic interest in other people and were able to invoke and satisfy the same unconscious wishful impulses in them too.

Freud himself applies these insights in his book-length studies of Leonardo and of Michelangelo’s famous statue of Moses.

2. Freudian slips and jokes

Freud had also expanded the application of psychoanalysis into ‘the psychopathology of everyday life’, clearly showing the continuity of the wish-principle in everyday slips of the tongue and accidents which, also, turn out to be messages from the unconscious realm, the so-called ‘return of the repressed’.

In addition, there was his study of jokes in Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious (1905) which similarly points to the return of embarrassing repressed material in the socially acceptable form of comedy.

3. Religion

Religion was a major obsession of Freud’s throughout his writing life. In the short early essay, Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907) Freud showed that obsessive actions amount to a private religion and that religion amounts to ‘a universal obsessive neurosis’.

Freud then gives a useful summary of Totem and Taboo (1913) in which he had tried to show how the universal taboo on incest and the worship of taboo animals supposed to have fathered the tribe were reducible to primitive attempts to control the Oedipus Complex.

Bearing in mind that many of these tribes every year kill and eat the totem animal (which is otherwise feared and revered) in a special feast, Freud hypothesises:

The father of the primal horde, since he was an unlimited despot, had seized all the women for himself; his sons, being dangerous to him as rivals, had been killed or driven away. One day, however, the sons came together and united to overwhelm, kill and devour their father, who had been their enemy but also their ideal. After the deed they were unable to take over the father’s heritage since they stood in one another’s way.

Under the influence of failure and remorse the learned to come to an agreement among themselves; they banded themselves into a clan of brothers by the help of the ordinances of totemism, which aimed at preventing a repetition of such a deed [the Primal Parricide], and they jointly undertook to forgo the possession of the women on whose account they had killed their father.

They were then driven to finding strange women, and this was the origin of the exogamy which is so closely bound up with totemism. The totem meal was the festival commemorating the fearful deed from which sprang man’s sense of guilt (or ‘original sin’) and which was the beginning at once of social organisation, of religion and of ethical restrictions.

Now whether we suppose that such a possibility was a historical event or not, it brings the formation of religion within the circle of the father complex and bases it upon the ambivalence which dominates that complex.

After the totem animal had ceased to serve as a substitute for him, the primal father, at once feared and hated, revered and envied, became the prototype of God himself.

The son’s rebelliousness and his affection for his father struggled against each other through a constant succession of compromises, which sought on the one hand to atone for the act of parricide and on the other to consolidate the advantages it had brought.

This view of religion throws a particularly clear light upon the psychological basis of Christianity, in which, as we know, the ceremony of the totem meal still survives, with but little distortion, in the form of Communion.

Totem and Taboo is among the most discredited of Freud’s works, based on nineteenth century anthropology which has been superseded. Seen from another angle, it is among his most ambitious, and florid, attempts to apply his theory to every aspect of human society past and present.

Summary

Thus Freud has tried to show how psychoanalysis is able to throw light on the origin of everyday slips, dreams, jokes and humour, morality, art, religious belief and practice, myths and folktales, and shows them all to be different ways of dealing with the same psychological material.

Psychoanalysis has also led to investigations and clarifications of symbolism, building on the symbolism of dreams to look at symbolism in art and religion.

In the field of education Freud singles out Oskar Pfister, author of pedagogical books (and his great interlocutor on religious issues) and, for the analysis of children and greater theorisation of childhood, Freud refers to the work of his devotee, Melanie Klein, and of his daughter, Anna.

Postscript (1935)

Freud concludes that with the announcement of the topographical structure of the mind (id, ego and superego) and the division of instincts into classes (Eros and the death instinct) he has finished his theoretical contribution. Others are carrying on where he left off.

My interest, after making a lifelong detour through the natural sciences, medicine and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which had fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking….

I perceived ever more clearly that the events of human history, the interactions between human nature, cultural development and the precipitates of primeval experiences (the most prominent example of which is religion) are no more than a reflection of the dynamic conflicts between the ego, id and the superego, which psychoanalysis studies in the individual – are the very same processes repeated on a wider stage.

Thoughts

Freud was a politician to his fingertips. In a letter to Fliess he described himself as a ‘conquistador’ and he wasn’t exaggerating. The word indicates the grandiose scale of his ambition and his self-image.

For example his late work, Moses and Monotheism, can be seen as an attempt to rewrite Jewish history the better to place himself as its logical conclusion. Freud is the new Moses leading the Chosen People of the new science, psychoanalysis, into the Promised Land of scientific understanding and psychological health.

Most of the dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams are analysed to reveal a mammoth ambition and self-confidence, clearly in part derived from the wish to overcome, to supersede, his weakling father Jacob.

Everything he wrote was written with a political aim. The History of the Psychoanalytical Movement (1914) is a case in point, containing as it does a fierce polemic against the acolytes who had recently seceded from the Movement: Alfred Adler who went on to found ‘Individual Psychology’ and Jung who founded ‘Analytical Psychology’.

Seen in this light i.e. as part of Freud’s relentless ‘political’ aim to publicise and establish his theories, The Autobiographical Study is interesting because:

  1. It goes to such great lengths to insist on the strictly scientific nature of his research before he conceived psychoanalysis, and to demonstrate the continuity of psychoanalysis with mainstream science.
  2. It seeks to put the record straight on his relations with Janet. Pierre Janet, a disciple of Charcot’s, was the founder of modern psychology in France and the French (with typical chauvinism) claimed that Freud had come to France, purloined all their ideas, then dressed it up in heavy Germanic philosophical terms.
  3. Freud reproves the entire profession of philosophy for not being capable of fitting his concepts into their intricate systems of words, which is why he had a lifelong indifference or dismissal of philosophy as irrelevant to his discoveries which he always, of course, were based on facts not mystifying word games.

Credit

All Freud’s works have complicated histories in translation. An Autobiographical Study was first translated into English in 1959 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. References in this blog are to the revised version, published in 1986 as part of Volume 15 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘Historical and Expository Works on Psychoanalysis’.

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Posted by Simon on June 14, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/06/14/an-autobiographical-study-sigmund-freud/

Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire @ the Freud Museum

The Freud Museum

The Freud Museum is located at 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX, a six or seven minute walk from Finchley Road tube station.

It’s the house which Freud’s English colleagues and supporters bought for him and his family to come to after the Nazis annexed Austria and Freud’s lifelong home town of Vienna in March 1938, forcing him to flee the country.

Freud himself was already very ill with the throat cancer which would kill him 18 months later in September 1939. But after his death Maresfield Gardens remained the Freud family home until his daughter, Anna Freud, herself a pioneer of child psychoanalysis, died in 1982. The house opened as a museum four years later.

It’s a fascinating place to visit at any time, light and clean and airy, with a comprehensive bookshop at the back, opening into a modest, leafy London garden.

But the centrepiece of the museum is the ground floor where Freud recreated the study from his house in Vienna and which has been lovingly restored to how it was in his time. You can see the desk where he wrote so many great works, his bookshelves packed with leather-bound volumes of psychology, history and literature.

Freud’s desk at the Freud Museum, London (photo by the author)

You can see the famous couch, smothered in dark patterned rugs, where his patients came and lay and free associated their thoughts, projecting their hopes and fears and fantasies onto the inventor of psychoanalysis, who sat quietly listening.

Freud’s couch at the Freud Museum (photo by the author)

So far, so Victorian, in décor and furnishings.

But maybe the most striking and unexpected aspect of the room is the astonishing number of antiquities scattered everywhere. There are half a dozen or more glass cases packed with ancient statuettes and figurines, vases and jugs, there are busts on platforms and stands, lined up along shelves all round the room, and a double row of small antique figurines on his desk right in front of him, in his field of vision every day as he either wrote or listened to his patients.

Freud was an obsessive collector of ancient figures and antiquities all his life, building up a collection of several thousand by the time he died, and literally hundreds are stacked on shelves, in cases, on mantlepieces and stands. Everywhere you look, in every direction, hundreds of ancestral presences sit silently, looking out at you with a cold timeless regard, from very angle.

Another view of Freud’s study, showing desk (in the foreground), shelves and glass cases packed with antiquities

And that’s what this exhibition is about. It’s a small but powerful exploration of Freud’s lifelong fascination with archaeology and antiquity and the role they played in his writings, his practice, in his deepest formulations of the new ‘science’ of psychoanalysis which he invented and developed through 40 intensely productive years, and in the successive models of the human mind which he developed, refined and publicised.

Freudian reservations

Let me explain my position regarding Freud. Very like the other two world-shattering geniuses, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, Freud’s influence is so enormous and all-pervasive, so underpins almost everybody’s modern notions of human nature and our behaviour in the world, that it’s more or less irrelevant whether most or all of it is ‘true’ or not.

The various versions of his theories and the hundreds of insights they generate have provided mental maps, sociological constructs amounting to an entire worldview which we all now inhabit, thronged with insights, phrases and terminology (Freudian slip, the unconscious, the ego, being repressed, ‘anal’ behaviour, Oedipal conflict) which are freely used in newspapers, magazines and conversation.

With regard to the psychoanalytical method – the talking cure – my understanding is that many scientific trials have been undertaken to assess the efficacy of psychoanalytical therapy compared with other depth psychologies, with more orthodox psychiatric treatment, with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and with drugs. But the attempt is problematic for quite a few reasons. For a start no two people are alike so what works for one patient might simply not work for another. It’s impossible or very challenging to set up a double-blind, controlled study.

For another thing, Freudian psychoanalysis doesn’t necessarily aim at a fixed outcome. CBT may cure a symptom which is preventing you from living your life happily, but Freudians would say it’s only addressed a symptom, not the underlying cause. Freudian psychoanalysis can be open-ended, can indeed last the whole of the rest of your life – which leads cynics and critics to attack it as a money-making scam, hooking the vulnerable into an endless sequence of sessions, at an exorbitant fee.

I was offered and took depth therapy on the NHS in my 20s, and know lots of people who’ve had extended psychotherapy of one sort or another. It didn’t cure me of anything but it certainly helped to be listened to, at length, discussing issues and memories which became quite painful to recall.

Nut even then, in the 1980s, there were lots of varieties and schools and flavours of psychotherapy and my understanding is that the range of practices and theories underlining them has continued to grow. But my understanding is that Freud invented the paradigm of counselling, of extended therapy which aims to dig deep to resolve deep psychological problems, on which all other schools of therapy are based.

Another line of attack is the number of scandals which have come to light about abusive analysts, drunk analysts, power-mad analysts, and so on. The analyst-analysand (therapist-patient) relationship does give the therapist an unprecedented amount of power to steer and control the emotional lives of the very vulnerable. But my understanding is that this kind of thing, like the abuse of power in many other positions (in the church, in sports coaching) can be reported and handled by the relevant professional bodies as well as the police and legal system.

Another line of attack comes from feminists who, right from the start, pointed out the hair-raisingly sexist nature of almost everything Freud wrote and protested his engrained view of women as biologically, physically and mentally inferior to men. You can’t deny it, it’s there on almost every page, along with entire essays dedicated to proving women’s inferiority. Feminist Freudians have tried to overwrite concepts like the notorious ‘penis envy’ which he thought girls and women suffered from, but  in this and many other concepts and assumptions, Freud remains rebarbatively sexist.

Then there’s the earliest and most unimaginative argument against Freud, that his obsession with sex, sexual drives, libido, anal eroticism, fetishism and so on prove that he himself was a sex maniac, a pervert, and so discredit the theory. You can see why a one-sided reading of his earlier theory, especially the early focus on the sexuality of children, would trigger this attack. But, for me, it betrays ignorance of the wider context of the theory which, especially in its later, expanded form, is just as interested in aggression, anger, depression, group psychology, and spends a lot of time exploring the idea of the conscience, the part of the mind which holds us to high standards and punishes us for our failures.

And most powerful of all is the accusation that, although many of his patients in the 1890s told him they had suffered real, physical sexual abuse as children, he was so disturbed by its apparent ubiquity that he couldn’t countenance it, couldn’t accept it; and that one of his central claims – that children fantasise about sexual activity (sex with the parent of the opposite sex, while hating the parent of the same sex, the insight he named the Oedipus complex) – was a denial of the reality of child abuse; that  Freud made what we now regard as the cardinal sin when treating child abuse, which is to refuse to listen and refuse to believe what his patients were telling him.

If true, this was obviously shameful for a physician, sworn to help his patients; but, more powerfully, successive critics have argued that this rejection of actual real-world abuse compromises his entire theory, leading to the accusation that the entire theory is based on a self-serving lie. His rejection of the fact of child abuse and transformation of it into the realm of infantile fantasy may be the most difficult accusation to counter and one which resonates to this day.

So I hope I’m aware of the battery of arguments which can be brought against Freud the man, against his theories, against his personal attitudes, against the inefficacy and/or luxury nature of his type of therapy, of the disproveability of the efficacy of the talking cure, along with plentiful historical examples of its abuse.

But, in my opinion, although many of these attacks deserve to be taken seriously, especially the final one, none of them can really dent the incalculable impact, for good or ill, which Freud has had on the vast shared set of values, ideas, concepts, phrases and ideas which we call Western culture.

Ancient figurine of the sphinx, central player in the legend of Oedipus, symbolising for Freud, as for generations of thinkers before him, the riddle of human existence, but which Freud boldly (arrogantly) thought he had solved

Until Freud’s time most psychologists, most philosophers and lawyers and, following them, most people thought of the human mind as basically Rational, a thinking machine which is aware of its own thoughts, can order and control them, home to Reason which guides our behaviour to rational, definable ends.

If people behaved irrationally then experts directly involved with human nature, such as philosophers or theologians or lawyers, developed explanations and excuses for this falling away from Ideal reason, ideas of possession by outside forces, or temporary madness and so on, notions which explained away people’s irrational behaviour in such a way as to preserve the basic premise that man is the Rational Animal.

In the Christian tradition which dominated western thought for a thousand years, and which in fact predates Christianity, going back through Stoic philosophy for centuries before Christ (cf Cicero and Seneca) – in this immense tradition, human beings have been endowed with reason by the Creator of the universe and, although this spark of Divine Reason may sometimes be clouded by ‘passions’ or frenzy or extreme emotion or drink or drugs, these are temporary aberrations from the basically rational soul which God has given each of us.

Freud’s theory blasts this model to smithereens. By the 1890s there had been plenty of secular thinkers, especially in the life sciences which were swiftly converted to Darwin’s revolutionary theory of evolution by natural selection, but no-one who undermined the old models of a God-given, rational mind so completely.

For Freud the mind is a battlefield, a site of endless conflict between conflicting psychological forces, drives, urges, instincts, wishes, dreams, fantasies, angers, anxieties and many more. His fundamental insight was that the human mind, far from growing into a stable, mature and reliable tool for managing our way through the world, is a dynamic, ever-changing site of tremendous psychic conflict.

Because – second big idea – the majority of mental activity is unconscious. We are only dimly aware or not aware at all, of the tremendous forces, urges, drives and so on which motivate us every waking moment and haunt us in our dreams. Why do so many people behave so irrationally? Why are so many people in the grip of compulsive behaviour which they know is self-destructive (smoking, alcohol, over-eating, drugs, risk-taking, outbursts of psychopathic anger or helpless despair) yet feel powerless to change?

Because we are driven by tremendously powerful unconscious forces which we repress and prevent ever emerging into full consciousness.

As Freud stumbled deeper into these discoveries in the 1980s, trying to make sense of what his clinical patients were telling him, engaging in the slightly dubious ‘self analysis’ of his own dreams and memories and feelings, and corresponding with his friend and intellectual confidant Wilhelm Fliess, he threw again and again used metaphors around the idea of having to dig down below the level of conscious thought, having to excavate layer after layer to get down to the basic fears, anxieties and so on which seemed to be driving his patients.

“Thus it came about that in this, the first full-length analysis of a hysteria undertaken by me, I arrived at a procedure which I later developed into a regular method and employed deliberately. This procedure was one of clearing away the pathogenic psychical material layer by layer, and we liked to compare it with the technique of excavating a buried city.”
(Studies on Hysteria, 1895)

Again and again Freud referred to the work he was doing with his patients to try and rediscover their childhood memories in order to free them of their adult illnesses, and the parallel work he was doing on himself, digging deeper and deeper into his own repressed memories, as forms of archaeology.

And it’s this, the meeting place between Freud’s continua use of the metaphor of excavation and archaeology, and the ancient objects derived from the actual practice of real world archaeology which Freud obsessively collected and packed into his study and invoked in his writings from the start to the end of his career as a thinker and writer – which this exhibition addresses and explores. Which it excavates.

The exhibition

The exhibition space is upstairs. It’s only one room but, considering the ideas whose origin it describes and investigates went on to transform all human culture and to underpin how almost everyone alive today conceives of human nature and of themselves, it feels like it contains an entire world. An atom bomb of ideas.

Installation view of ‘Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire’ at the Freud Museum, showing three of the six themes and their display cases, being Oedipus, Charcot and Dreams. Note the small number of items on display. But it isn’t the number of artefacts, it’s the ideas behind them that fill the room.

Exhibition structure

The exhibition selects twenty-five key objects – antiquities, figurines and statuettes, books and prints – each normally hidden from view, extracted from the clutter of Freud’s study for special attention and investigation at close range, to illustrate how Freud’s collecting was bound up with his development of the concepts and methods of psychoanalysis.

The exhibition is divided into six themes, which I’ll briefly list here then explore in greater detail:

  1. Oedipus:
  2. Charcot
  3. Dreams
  4. Gradiva
  5. Totem and Taboo
  6. Moses

1. Oedipus: the riddle of desire

Inevitably the narrative must start with Oedipus who gave his name to Freud’s notion of the Oedipus Complex. This is in fact just one part of the process of growth and maturing which Freud thought all boys go through. At around the age of 5 all boys have grown enough, and experienced enough pre-pubescent sexual feeling, to sense that they want to be very close to their mother and come to resent their father’s possession of her. In the unconscious mind, the boy wants to have sex with his mother and kill his father. Freud introduced the idea in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and coined the term in his paper A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men (1910).

The Oedipus story is super well-known ad previous thinkers had interpreted it and its symbolism. Freud used it to dramatise what he saw as a universal condition, a universal experience of all growing boys which they have to completely suppress in order to mature properly, but whose repression leaves its marks on the adult and, in some men, is constantly threatening to return, so that it has to be staved off with harsh mental defences which sometimes result in florid mental beliefs, patterns and behaviour.

But early on in the myth of Oedipus he has to solve the riddle put to him by the sphinx and so the story had another significance for Freud: for trying to excavate down into the psyche of each patient could also be described as solving their riddle.

Objects on display

On display from Freud’s collection are six objects connected with Oedipus, three vases, a statuette, an amulet and a print of Ingres’ classic painting of Oedipus and the Sphinx.

2. Charcot: from iconography to archaeology

Jean-Martin Charcot was a French neurologist and professor of anatomical pathology. Freud went to study with him in Paris in 1885 (when Freud, born in 1856, was 29). Charcot used hypnosis to treat patients who displayed physical symptoms with no organic cause, a class of patients categorised as ‘hysterics’. His work made the subject of ‘hysteria’ a popular one for doctors interested in psychology across Europe. A book was published containing comprehensive descriptions of Charcot’s work and numerous prints of his hypnosis of hundreds of patients.

A Clinical Lesson at the Salp​etri​ere​. Print of engraving by E. Pirodon after the oil painting by Andre Brouillet​ (​1888​)

But this stuff about Charcot is really here because Charcot was about the surface. There was a fair amount of showmanship in Charcot’s demonstrations, made to auditoriums full of admiring students, and Freud came to dislike the way Charcot exaggerated the patient’s superficial symptoms in order to cure them.

In reaction against Charcot, Freud set off in the opposite direction. His cures would be conducted not in public but in private; they would not be wonder cures achieved in one flashy demonstration, but the result of sustained engagement over a prolonged period of time. And above all they would not work by bringing florid symptoms (hysteria, weeping, sobbing, moaning, screaming) to the surface of the human mind, but quite the opposite, entail a systematic, extended, and ever-deeper excavation down through layer after layer of the human psyche.

Which is why the exhibition places next to the Charcot print a copy of the big leather-bound volume of Ilios, the huge work in which the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann described his discovery of the legendary city of Troy (in western Turkey). Freud was going to be an archaeologist of the human psyche.

3. Dreams: decoding the way to the wish

From ancient times through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, dreams were given a special place as omens, as warnings from the gods, as indicators of good or bad fortune for the dreamer, and thousands of books had been written interpreting the universal symbolism of dreams. In 1880s and 1890s scientific circles the view was the opposite: that dreams are the meaningless by-products of physiological processes of the mind.

In his breakthrough book, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud proposed a middle way: that dreams do have a meaning, a symbolic purpose, but that they are not universal to mankind. Each dream has a meaning which is specific to the dreamer. Each dreamer’s mind selects images which symbolise individual and specific hopes, fears etc.

Each dream is a wish fulfilment but what exactly the wish is, and how it is converted into particular images, can only be established by lengthy, in-depth excavation down through the layers of the conscious mind and into each patient’s unconscious.

The display case shows an ancient wine jug, a bust and a warrior figurine. The Interpretation of Dreams includes scores of Freud’s own dreams. In one of them his wife Martha gives him a drink from an Etruscan cinerary urn like the one on display here. The urn represents satisfaction of a basic instinct (thirst) but also symbolises the wished-for return of an object like it which he had given away then regretted.

It’s a fairly simple demonstration of the way we humans give objects multiple everyday or conscious meanings, and then how images of the objects are recombined in the unconscious to emerge in strange combinations, accompanied by sometimes haunting, sometimes terrifying, sometimes blissful emotional feelings, in our dreamlife.

4. Gradiva: tracing the pathways of archaeological desire

Gradiva plays a special role in the history of Freud’s writing about writing i.e. about literature, which he was to come to have such a seismic influence on. In 1907 he published his first full-length analysis of a literary text, a novel by the German writer and poet Wilhelm Jensen titled Gradiva: A Pompeian Fantasy which had been published in Vienna in 1902, so it was quite a current work.

Straightaway the word Pompeii should alert us to the fact that the book is going to play straight into Freud’s fascination with ancient ruins. Freud refers to the relevance of Pompeii, where secrets had been long buried and were now being excavated and restored to the light, to his own concepts of psychoanalytical therapy, in his letters to Fliess in the mid-1890s, and he actually visited Pompeii itself in 1902.

In this novel the hero, Norbert Hanold, who is studying archaeology, ‘falls in love with’ (becomes obsessed with) an ancient bas-relief of a young woman striding along in a Roman toga.

Cast relief of ‘Gradiva’​ (​1908​)

Since the relief was found as part of the excavation of the buried city of Pompeii (just recently being unearthed) the hero decides to travel to Italy, and to the archaeological site, to find this woman, or her spirit, or her reincarnation.

So you can straightaway see how the novel is about a man in the grip of a delusion and a compulsion, psychological territory Freud was striving to make his own during the later 1890s and early 1900s.

In the end, after failing to find the modern avatar of the beautiful statue anywhere in the real world and after some painful self-analysis, Hanold comes to realise that who the woman reminds him of is a childhood friend who lives opposite him back home, returns, tells her of his love etc.

For Freud the novel is rich in confirmations of his theories. The hero had youthful erotic feelings for this neighbour but his strict upbringing forbade him from acknowledging them. Instead he repressed them and sublimated them i.e. redirected his psychic energy into the socially acceptable medium of studying archaeology and ancient history.

When he came across the bas relief as part of his studies, he was seized, possessed by something about it which he couldn’t define. Well, that’s because he had completely repressed his childhood longing for his sweetheart. the feeling remained but divorced from its source. So the bas relief became what Freud calls a compromise formation i.e. a real-world object which can ‘satisfy’ his libidinal drive and desire, but in a socially acceptable mode (i.e. a perfectly natural part of his adult studies).

The obsession he develops with it, however, obviously goes beyond the bounds of the ‘normal’ and this is like the patients who came to see Freud, people in the grip of obsessive, compulsive, neurotic thoughts or behaviour which they couldn’t explain and couldn’t shake off.

It also plays right into Freud’s hands that the hero is depicted as having numerous florid and bizarre dreams, thus allowing Freud to apply the insights he’d recorded in The Interpretation of Dreams to show how Hanold’s dreams were continually urging acknowledgement of his real-world love, but were blocked from doing so by the forces of repression and so emerged in complex combinations of symbols and imagery.

And the way the heroine, Zoe, cares for Hanold after his breakdown, slowly coaxing him back to health and to accept his love for her, is comparable to the psychoanalytic method Freud had devised, the famous listening cure.

Objects on display

On another level, the novel is about the journey of a repressed north European to the warm south which has, for centuries, symbolised release into and acceptance a world of sensual pleasures which we uptight northerners deny ourselves in order to function in our advanced capitalist economies.

The excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii had unearthed a surprising number of explicitly sexual objects, specifically depictions of the erect penis, often with wings, a magical object worthy of veneration or kept as a lucky charm or amulet. The fact that this is still regarded as shocking or bizarre shows you how far we are from the ancient world’s frank acceptance of the facts of sex.

Six phallic objects and amulets from various cultures of antiquity, part of Freud’s collection. You are free to regard these as sinister, sexually suggestive, funny (as I do), or as examples of the ancient world’s frank acknowledgement of the importance of sexuality in human life, which had to be censored, suppressed and policed in industrialised, capitalist societies. At the same time, this or any other view you have is quite obviously a projection of your own personal ideas, memories, associations and patterns of thought onto simple, cold, inanimate objects, and it is this power of mental projection onto objects which it is part of the aim of the exhibition to both explore and to demonstrate.

5. Totem and Taboo: the search for origins

Another criticism of Freud is that he quite early on strayed beyond his area of supposed expertise i.e. psychology (theory of the mind) and psychiatry (practical cure of mental illness) into subjects quite beyond his speciality. And it’s true. He not only produced a substantial body of literary and art criticism (essays and book-length studies) but did the same in anthropology and theology.

In 1913 he published Totem and Taboo. It was partly a response to his protegé Carl Jung who was rebelling against Freud’s insistence on the centrality of repressed sexuality and the Oedipus Complex in all human development. Therefore it ups the stakes by asserting that the Oedipus Complex is not only a part of the normal development of every boy, but explains a founding event in actual, real-world history.

Freud asserted that the founding event of ancient societies was an actual parricide, where the sons of the chief rose up and killed him, then claimed access to the queen or women of the harem. A sexual rebellion. But, crippled by guilt at murdering their father, the sons then set about repressing all memory of it, denying and blocking anything which would indicate their great crime. And this is the origin of the compulsive taboos which contemporary anthropologists observed in so many ‘primitive’ societies.

Freud then goes on to make the grandiose claim that this Primal Event was the foundation stone of all religion, morality, society and related art.

Objects on display

On display are copies of ‘The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion’, the hugely influential compendium of myths, legends gathered from all round the world by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer, which influenced a generation of writers and thinkers. A two-volume edition had been published in 1890 but Freud owned the twelve volumes of the third edition, published serially from 1906 to 1915. His copies, some of which are on display here, are covered with pencilled notes and he incorporated much material from the book into Totem.

Amusingly, Freud sent a copy of Totem and Taboo to Fraser, who didn’t deign to reply.

The curators don’t mention this but my understanding is that almost every aspect of Totem and Taboo has been disproved. It very obviously represents a kind of imperial ambition by Freud to move his theory out of the world of private practice and discreet papers written for specialist journals, and stake a claim to making major discoveries in history, anthropology, the origins of religion, morality and so on.

Although the specific claims made about ‘primitive’ societies being comprehensively rejected by actual anthropologists, Freud successfully made a new myth about himself and his role as explainer of everything. It was the kind of grandiose ambition which drove one-time followers like Jung, and others like Adler and Rank, to secede from the official psychoanalytic movement and set up their own variations.

A digression on Freud’s sociological writings

This world-claiming ambition, this tendency to stray way beyond his area of expertise and set himself up as a master explainer of society is evident in many of Freud’s later works. In The Future of An Illusion (1927) he sets out to disprove religious belief by rewriting every religious belief and practice in terms of psychoanalytic terminology (repression of sexual urges, ‘sublimated’ into love of an all-powerful father, accompanied by a world of obsessive-compulsive rituals and ceremonies).

In 1930’s Civilization and Its Discontents Freud applies psychoanalysis to sociology, arguing that modern, mass, industrial, capitalist societies need to enforce widespread suppression and control of people’s libidinal urges, not just to sex but to express other needs and drives, and it is this systematic repression of human needs which makes so many people unhappy in modern society. In many ways this turned out to be Freud’s most influential work, because it influenced social reformers and would-be revolutionaries, especially in the utopian 1960s.

Anyway, this final display is about Freud’s deepest foray into myth, legend and so on as he took on the roots of Christianity and, behind it, of Christianity’s parent, Judaism.

Freud was a Jew who accepted his secular inheritance but rejected the religious aspects of Judaism. Running alongside the obsessive references to archaeology throughout his writing career, which this exhibition focuses on, was Freud’s parallel obsession with denying and debunking religious belief and practice at every opportunity.

There are quite a few Freudian explanations of this noticeable obsession. One is that he was guilty about rejecting the religion of his forefathers and so spent his entire life trying to deny its reality. A subtler one is that Freud didn’t so much deny the reality of the Jewish religion as attempt to rewrite it in his own terms. In his imperial way, he attempted to overwrite religion, to write it away. Coming from a different angle, you could say that this ‘obsession’ was a response to the lifelong anti-semitism which he and his family and Jewish friends and colleagues suffered on an almost daily basis, in personal encounters but also in the press and culture of turn of the century Vienna.

Everyone mentions the fact that from 1897 to 1910 Vienna was run by the unusually powerful mayor, Karl Lueger, who oversaw the transformation of the city into a modern metropolis but at the same time exploited populist and anti-semitic feeling, legitimising widespread and semi-official antisemitism which some historians think established a model for the psychotic racism promoted by Adolf Hitler who was, of course, Austrian and an impressionable teenager during Lueger’s time in office.

You can take your pick of interpretations or mix and match all of them and this, also, is a Freudian idea which he called over-determination. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud speculated that individual dream images or narratives can operate on multiple levels or be representing more than one wish or drive. Same with the symptoms his patients presented with. Overdetermination occurs when a single-observed effect is determined by multiple causes any one of which alone would be sufficient to account for the effect.

Thus I routinely describe historical events as ‘over determined’, such as the First World War, for which historians have proposed a vast number of causes. The Freudian notion of over-determination i.e. multiple cause for one event, frees you up, allows you to accept a number of different explanations, allows you to experiment with apportioning different levels of responsibility for different events.

It’s an example of the way Freud’s theory gives conceptual definition to the complexity of life, motivation, simple and complex events which we all know are multi-levelled and multi-motivated. Freud’s theory provides a theoretical underpinning for this multiplicity of viewpoints, about anything.

6. Moses: the return of the repressed

Freud’s last published work was not a grand summary of his theory (although he was working on one, which remained unfinished). It was the long, densely argued and eccentric work of religious sociology, Moses and Monotheism. In it he applies the Oedipus story to the entire history of the Jewish people, his people, in an attempt to dethrone the founder of Judaism, Moses. It was itself a nakedly Oedipal attempt to overthrow the father and assert his (Freud’s) moral and intellectual independence.

For Freud makes the scandalous assertion that Moses was not himself Jewish. Freud argues that Moses was in fact an Egyptian prince, but one who followed the heretical teachings of the pharaoh Akhenaten. From what we can tell, Akhenaten, the tenth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, who ruled from 1353 to 1336 BC, attempted to overthrow the Egyptians’ traditional polytheism i.e. belief in a large and florid pantheon of gods, and replace it with worship of the One True God.

Tasked with overseeing the Israelite captives in their slave tasks, this Egyptian prince, Moses, tried to impose Akhenaten’s strict monotheism on them but they rose up and, as in the classic Oedipal narrative, murdered their father figure. But, like all good Oedipal actors, they then couldn’t cope with the guilt of their deed and repressed it, wiping out all memory of the historical event, and instead reinventing Moses as one of their own and a wise and good teacher.

Following the basic model of the mind he had postulated as long ago as 1897, Freud speculated that knowledge of their collective murder kept threatening to leak out and so the Jews, as a people, instituted a comprehensive system of taboos and restrictions, the most famous being not to eat pork, but there are hundreds of others. As time went by these taboos were expanded and elaborated until they dictated almost every aspect of everyday life, as well as a host of religious rituals.

This last display takes Moses and Monotheism to be not only the climax of Freud’s career as a writer but of his vaulting ambition to establish a psychoanalytical version of human history, society, and the origins of religion and morality. Like Totem and Taboo there’s something slightly mad about this book, disreputable about its theories and the interpretations which Freud applies to history and strain to breaking point. It’s absurd. But there’s also something awe inspiring about the man’s grandiose ambition.

If you stop thinking about it as a serious piece of archaeology or sociology and consider it as simply a piece of imaginative writing, the ambition and the ingenuity with which Freud attaches his theory to every aspect of Jewish history, theology and practice are dizzying.

Objects on display

A small statuette of the Egyptian god Amon-Ra, who Akhenaten promoted as the one true God. A print of Rembrandt’s famous painting of Moses coming down from the mountain holding the tablets of the law. An edition of the Philippson edition of the German Bible. And a small hannukah lamp, associated with domestic Jewish ritual.

The end wall and right-hand wall of the exhibition, showing the section about Gradiva (at the end) and Totem and Moses, on the right

Objects and meanings

The title of the exhibition includes the word ‘objects’ because among Freud’s many insights is the way all of us project wishes, desires, anxieties onto all the objects around us all the time. We not only relentlessly anthropomorphise the world – that’s level one psychology; we also personalise the world by investing all manner of objects around us with value and meaning. And these meanings alter over time, over very short periods as our moods or memories change, as events invest them with new auras of meaning, some of them over lifetimes.

In other words, all the objects around us are invested with some measure of significance, we can’t stop ourselves. And so the exhibition’s attention to the objects which Freud a) collected obsessively b) positioned all around him in his working environment c) described, discussed, referred to and invoked endlessly in all his writings from start to finish is both an ‘exploration’ of the significance of some of the objects, but also the evocation of all kinds of associations and feelings in us, the visitors.

H.D.’s interpretation

Freud arrived in London before his belongings. When these arrived, especially the crates containing his carefully wrapped antiquities, his friend and former patient, the American poet H.D., sent Freud a bunch of gardenias with a note ‘to greet the return of the Gods’.

HD is also represented by a short but powerful quote on the main introductory wall label. Here she is recorded as noting, in her memoir of Freud and her psychoanalytical treatment, what we’ve already observed, that his rather staggering array of figurines, statuettes and antiquities were intimately bound up with his development of the concepts and methods of psychoanalysis. But she goes on to say something more. She has the insight that they helped Freud to ‘stabilise the evanescent thought’ that was continually at risk of dissipation.

This is a new and powerful insight. I’ve already mentioned the idea of ambivalence, which follows from Freud’s dual structure of the mind (conscious mind struggling to repress all kinds of unconscious urges). Once developed, this explains how we can all have ambivalent or contradictory feelings about objects, because there is so much going on in the unconscious which we’re not aware of, and because the human psyche’s tendency to project these feelings, moods, anxieties, desires onto all manner of inanimate objects around us.

So much for ambivalence. And so much for the notion that Freud used the antiquities to inspire his ideas about excavating and archaeology. It’s a typically voodoo, Freudian, psychoanalytical insight, one which appears absurd on the surface but slowly makes more sense the more you ponder it, that the figurines littering his desk and study, also in some sense, limited and controlled his thought.

Because if there’s one thing about Freud’s achievement as a writer, it’s that he was so very fecund with ideas. From the initial insights around 1900 were to spring an exploding, ever-ramifying, ever-more complex system or network or matrix of ideas and insights and categories and theories and terminology which he never ceased developing and refining, and which he consciously amplified and spread beyond psychology into disciplines far removed from his area of expertise, as this exhibition makes abundantly clear.

So maybe the figurines not only inspired his writing (and his treatment) but also brought him back to the thing he started writing about, focused things back on the project in hand. They were instruments of inspiration and control.

Who’s to say whether this is ‘true’ or not, but by this stage, hopefully, you have joined me in not being so concerned about the truth of a lot of this so much as its interpretive and, above all discursive power. It enables the imagination. Psychoanalysis’s uncanny combination of scientific phraseology applied to ideas which sometimes seem acute, sometimes way off beam, sometimes suck you in and make you see the world in a completely different way, this all leaves the pragmatic world of truth values far behind as we go romping through a wild and shaggy, dense and huge, huge and fascinating imaginative realm.

Three figurines from Freud’s collection. Which one – smooth elegant Egyptian, primitive fertility figure, or happy dancer – do you identify with, and why?

Digital archive

The exhibition is accompanied by a digital multimedia resource, containing video recordings, podcasts, photos of rarely seen objects from the collection, and a list of suggested reading.

Related links

The Freud Museum has had a previous exhibition specifically on the theme of archaeology:

Related books

The Museum has produced a comprehensive catalogue for the exhibition, with essays expanding the themes raised in the wall labels. But, unsurprisingly, there also turn out to be quite a few book-length academic studies of Freud’s fascination with antiquity and obsession with collecting:

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by Simon on June 12, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 12, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/06/12/freuds-antiquity-object-idea-desire-the-freud-museum/

Crash by J.G. Ballard

WARNING: This review contains written text of an extremely brutal and explicit sexual nature.

Crash is Ballard’s most ‘controversial’ book because of its combination of psychotic behaviour (the characters’ obsession with car crashes) with extraordinarily powerful pornographic writing. It depicts the sexual fetishisation of car crashes with tremendous intensity:

In these crude photographs, Vaughan had frozen my uncertain embraces as I edged my wounded body into its first sexual encounters since the accident. He had caught my hand stretching across the transmission tunnel of my wife’s sports car, the inner surface of my forearm dented by the chromium gear lever, my bruised wrist pressing against the white flank of her thigh; my still-numb mouth against Renata’s left nipple, lifting her breast from her blouse as my hair fell across the window-sill; Helen Remington sitting astride me in the passenger seat of her black saloon, skirt hitched around her waist, scarred knees pressing against the vinyl seat as my penis entered her vulva, the oblique angle of the instrument panel forming a series of blurred ellipses like globes ascending from our happy loins.

The book is packed with scenes like this, in which the two central male characters become sexually addicted to fantasies of brutal car crashes, masturbating and ejaculating over their photos and film footage of terribly car wrecks or paying prostitutes to adopt the postures of car crash victims for their semen-filled, pornographic satisfaction.

Source explanations in The Atrocity Exhibition

Why? Well, a clue is given in one of the intense, experimental texts which make up Crash’s predecessor, The Atrocity Exhibition. In it are several little speeches given by the book’s resident psychiatrist, Dr Nathan, who suggests that:

‘Now that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike, one has to bear in mind the positive merits of the sexual perversions. Talbert’s library of cheap photo-pornography is in fact a vital literature, a kindling of the few taste buds left in the jaded palates of our so-called sexuality.’

And later the same idea is repeated:

‘Sex is now a conceptual act, it’s probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all. The perversions are completely neutral, cut off from any suggestion of psychopathology – in fact, most of the ones I’ve tried are out of date. We need to invent a series of imaginary sexual perversions just to keep the activity alive.’

Nathan is suggesting that conventional sex has become so ‘vanilla’, and we humans so incapable of reaching each other during it, that only extreme perversions and pornography can nowadays prompt a response, a reaction, a genuine connection.

The Atrocity Exhibition doesn’t stop at car crashes, but suggests the erotic potential of newsreel atrocities, napalm burning Vietnamese villages, and speculates that eye witnesses to the Kennedy assassination experienced a surge in their sex lives for months afterwards. The book is saturated to overflowing with sexual imagery and feelings.

Ballard is being frank about the way that sex, sexual arousal and sexual excitement is nowhere near as easily defined or controlled as we like to think. But in Crash he is concentrating on the weird obsession people have with cars, on cars as the focal point of post-war culture.

The mystique of car crashes

Crash is obviously related to the famous exhibition Ballard put on in 1969 titled Crashed Cars, displaying three auto wrecks complete with photos of their original locations and conditions, an exhibition which scandalised right-thinking people at the time but would pass with barely a flicker today (it was fifty years go, after all).

Why stage it at all? Because there is something genuinely hypnotic and entrancing about car crashes. We stop to stare at them on the motorway or the street but, more symptomatically, our culture is full of all sorts of thrills and excitements to do with cars, from Formula One racing to stock car rallies to the American fad for demolition derbies, and thousands of movies which feature ‘thrilling’ car chases.

Crash is only really taking the idea of risk and excitement implicit in our culture’s obsession with cars to its logical, intense and irrational conclusion.

It is clear that the car crash is seen as a fertilizing rather than a destructive experience, a liberation of sexual and machine libido, mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an erotic intensity impossible in any other form. (The Atrocity Exhibition)

Part of what shocked readers then and now is the calm, detached, scientific way in which Ballard describes, using only the correct biological terminology (there are no swearwords anywhere in the book), the sexual obsession of the two central male figures, their erections, the shape of their penises, the way they rub the glans against the hand or shoulder of a paid-for prostitute, and the calm way he describes arranging the prostitutes so that their ‘vents’ and ‘clefts’ are presented in stylised poses, or imagines the vaginal mucus of the film star who both men are obsessed with, Elizabeth Taylor.

Vaughan propped the cine-camera against the rim of the steering wheel. He lounged back, legs apart,one hand adjusting his heavy groin. The whiteness of his arms and chest, and the scars that marked his skin like my own, gave his body an unhealthy and metallic sheen, like the worn vinyl of the car interior. These apparently meaningless notches on his skin, like the gouges of a chisel, marked the sharp embrace of a collapsing passenger compartment, a cuneiform of the flesh formed by shattering instrument dials,fractured gear levers and parking-light switches. Together they described an exact language of pain and sensation, eroticism and desire.

Part of the book’s transgressive thrill comes from the way the most outlandish sexual impulses are treated in this blank, detached, factual way. ‘Have you no shame, no manners, no restraint?’ the books critics asked. No, replied Ballard.

The collision of our two cars, and the death of her husband, had become the key to a new sexuality. During the first months after his death she moved through a series of rapidly consumed affairs, as if taking the genitalia of all these men into her hands and her vagina would in some way bring her husband back to life, and that all this semen mixed within her womb would quicken the fading image of the dead man within her mind.

See – no swearwords, just a documentary factuality. But of a subject (‘all this semen mixed within her womb’) that is usually discussed and described in polite circumlocutions (‘she had several boyfriends after her husband died’). It is this incredibly blunt reduction of all aspects of relationships to penises and vulvas which is, I think, the most calculatingly offensive aspect of the book.

The plot – short version

The plot is fairly straightforward: The married narrator is a professional producer of TV commercials. He has a car crash and as a result finds his (already rampant) sexuality being warped into re-enacting or remembering the crash, not least with the woman survivor of the car he crashed into, Dr Helen Remington. He is spied on and then meets Dr Robert Vaughan, a former TV presenter and a man obsessed with the sexual fetishisation of car crashes. He meets Vaughan’s small circle of fellow scarred crash survivors, and both the narrator and his wife find themselves drawn into the sexual fetishisation of car crashes in its most intense form, exploring the outer limits of perverse sexuality, before the book ends with Vaughan’s failed attempt to crash his car into the limousine of Elizabeth Taylor, the Hollywood film star who is in London to make a film.

The plot – long version

The (initially unnamed) first-person male narrator is a 4-year-old producer of television commercials (p.80) and lives near the film studios in Shepperton, west of London. He has a wife named Catherine and is having an affair with his secretary, Renata. One day he is involved in a car crash, his tyre blows out, propelling his car across the central reservation into the path of an ongoing car and they collide head-on. The male driver of the other car is thrown clean through the windscreen and bleeds to death all over the narrator, the man’s stunned wife staring into his eyes.

Narrator and wife – now widow – are taken to Ashford hospital where they both slowly recuperate and notice a burly doctor prowling around. Through a series of events the narrator finds himself bumping into the crash victim, whose name is Dr Helen Remington.

First a note that his sex life with his wife was already intensely erotic. She has affairs with fellow pilots or businessmen, knowing about his affair with Renata. During their marital sex, together they describe and/or re-enact Catherine’s latest sexual adventure and, at the moment of climax, she reveals her latest lover’s name.

The narrator drives Renata to the location of the crash, parks on the hard shoulder, and proceeds to have sex with the reluctant woman. A car is parked not far behind them and he notices a man with a camera. Later he’ll find out this was Vaughan voyeuristically photographing him.

A few days later, having dropped his wife at her work, the narrator picks up one of the hookers who hang round London airport and drives her to the top of Northolt multi-story car park to have sex. She is giving him a blowjob when a flashbulb goes off. Detaching himself and getting out, the narrator follows the photographer back to his car and realises a) it is the same man he saw prowling in Ashford hospital and parked behind him on the hard shoulder b) it is Dr Robert Vaughan, former computer scientist with a glamorous career as a TV presenter (a new type of crossover figure in the late 1960s and 70s). Vaughan refers to the narrator as ‘Ballard’. Aha. It is one of those kinds of novels, the kind where the narrator has the same name as the author. Not very often, though, so I’ll continue to refer to him as ‘the narrator’ since this is how he comes over in the text.

A week or so later, Ballard goes to the Northolt police pound to find his wrecked car, he finds Helen there. They drift into conversation and, in an electrifying scene, he offers to drive her home and they find themselves driving towards the location of the crash. The narrator becomes carried away by hyper-sexual fantasies

I followed the queue of cars, already thinking of how she would behave during sexual intercourse. I tried to visualize her broad mouth around her husband’s penis, sharp fingers between his buttocks searching out his prostate.

The narrator surreptitiously rubs the glans of his penis against the steering wheel until he ejaculates. He is quite shaken up; Helen seems to notice, and she puts his hand on her shoulder and guides him to a quiet side street, where she tells him about her job in the immigration department of the airport, while the narrator trembles with complicated lusts. He drops her home.

A week after the coroner’s inquest, the narrator sees Helen waiting at a bus stop at one of the airport terminals and offers her a lift. Once again they ascend the motorway and head towards the crash site. She presses against his shoulder. Wordlessly he comes off the motorway and drives to a deserted service road among the reservoirs. Here they have shatteringly erotic sex, mutual masturbation followed by her mounting him, all parts of their bodies in contact with the complicated mouldings, plastic and glass of the car’s interior.

The plastic laminates around me, the colour of washed anthracite, were the same tones as her pubic hairs parted at the vestibule of her vulva. The passenger compartment enclosed us like a machine generating from our sexual act an homunculus of blood, semen and engine coolant.

Over the next few weeks they have sex in his car routinely, but discover they can’t achieve it at her house: he can’t get an erection, she gets irritable and snappy.

While his wife is away at some conference the narrator takes Helen to a stock car rally – his jilted secretary gave him two tickets as an ironic gesture. One of the contestants is a wrecked-looking man with a ponytail of white hair who we learn is named Seagrave, a former stunt driver at Shepperton studios. He is encouraged in taking part by none other than the sinister Dr Vaughan.

When the stunt Seagrave is involved in goes wrong, Vaughan asks Helen to accompany him as he drives Seagrave to the nearest hospital, with the narrator following in his car. Once at the hospital, Helen takes Seagrave in, while the narrator gets into the passenger seat of Vaughan’s car. It is here, during their long wait, that the narrator first becomes sexually attracted to Vaughan and his (already hyper-active sexual imagination) fantasises about holding the bigger man’s penis, about masturbating him, or being entered by him, and almost sees the globules of the big man’s sperm spurting across the car dashboard. (It is like this all the way through.)

When Seagrave is released, Vaughan takes him, Helen and the narrator back to Seagrave’s house. Here they meet his thin nervy 30-year-old wife Vera, his 2-year-old son, and two friends, a TV producer who worked with Vaughan early in his career and a 30 year-old social worker named Gabrielle who has metal braces on her arms and back from a severe crash. While they sit on Seagrave’s sofa in his suburban house, Vaughan takes Ballard out to the back where he shows him his ‘project’, which is a big album of photos showing every stage of Gabrielle’s life from the crash, which he attended and helped at, through every stage of her recovery. Entranced, the narrator realises the crash blessed her with an entire new sexuality.

This agreeable young woman, with her pleasant sexual dreams, had been reborn within the breaking contours of her crushed sports car. Three months later, sitting beside her physiotherapy instructor in her new invalid car, she held the chromium treadles in her strong fingers as if they were extensions of her clitoris. Her knowing eyes seemed well aware that the space between her crippled legs was constantly within the gaze of this muscled young man. His eyes roved among the damp moor of her pubis as she moved the gear lever through its cage. The crushed body of the sports car had turned her into a creature of free and perverse sexuality, releasing within its twisted bulkheads and leaking engine coolant all the deviant possibilities of her sex.

Then Vaughan shows the narrator the sequence of photos he’s taken of him, in the car crash, in hospital, in cars having sex with Renata and then Helen. The narrator isn’t offended or upset, he’s fascinated. then Vaughan shows him the next stage of the project: photos of the movie star Elizabeth Taylor, who is currently in London, staying at the Hilton Hotel while she makes a movie at Shepperton Studios. Vaughan asks if the narrator knows her. Well, obviously not. But she is making a film at Shepperton and the narrator has an office there to produce commercials.

A few days later the narrator is at the studio, watching Liz Taylor herself be made up for the next scene of her film which is, eerily, spookily and unsurprisingly- a car crash. not only that, but Seagrave is being made up as Elizabeth Taylor in order to be her stunt double. There’s a kerfuffle at the door of the studio and the narrator sees Vaughan fighting off a security camera who is trying to take Vaughan’s camera away. Vaughan is a big man and retains it. He intends to photograph the scene.

The scene cuts to the narrator in bed with his wife. She is a very dirty lady, they are perfectly suited, as their marital sex reaches a climax, she asks the narrator insistently about Vaughan – has he seen Vaughan’s penis, how big is it, what shape is it, has he sucked his penis, would he like to, what flavour is his semen – and so on, until they both have thunderous orgasms.

In The Atrocity Exhibition some of the characters speculate about the invention or advent of a ‘new sexuality’. I realise that in Crash all the characters are living a new sexuality, and not just the men, not at all:

Gabrielle ‘The crushed body of the sports car had turned her into a creature of free and perverse sexuality’

Catherine ‘That Catherine should choose Vaughan, whose manic style summed up everything she found most unnerving, struck me as perfectly logical. The multiple car-crash we had seen had sprung the same traps in her mind as in mine.’

Helen ‘The collision of our two cars, and the death of her husband, had become the key to a new sexuality… Only in the car could she reach her orgasm.’

Helen has got a new job at the Road Research Laboratory. She takes the narrator along to witness one of those staged car crashes where the car is full of text crash dummy mannequins. Inevitably, Vaughan shows up, with his camera, and surreptitiously masturbates as the crash is carefully and elaborately staged by the RRL technicians, and Ballard gives a minutely detailed, moment-by-moment description of the test car crash, as filmed in slow motion.

Shavings of fibreglass from [the test motorbike rider’s] face and shoulders speckled the glass around the test car like silver snow, a death confetti.

The 30 or so spectators, including the Minister’s wife, stand around in silence, dumbfounded. It is like a religious ceremony. The narrator glances across and sees the wet patch at Vaughan’s crotch. Then Vaughan strolls over to the smashed car, wrenches open the front door and wedges onto the seat next to the mangled mannequin. Later he drives the narrator home and shows him the questionnaires he’s been getting his ‘friends’ and contacts to fill out, asking which politicians or celebrities they would like to see in car crashes; what sort of crashes they would be; what kind of wounds the celebrities would receive. The answers amount to an encyclopedia of physical atrocities which Ballard takes to the limit and beyond, as the entire book is intended to.

As Vaughan turned the car into a filling station courtyard the scarlet light from the neon sign over the portico flared across these grainy photographs of appalling injuries : the breasts of teenage girls deformed by instrument binnacles, the partial mammoplasties of elderly housewives carried out by the chromium louvres of windshield assemblies, nipples sectioned by manufacturers’ dashboard medallions; injuries to male and female genitalia caused by steering wheel shrouds, windshields during ejection, crushed door pillars, seat springs and handbrake units, cassette player instrument toggles. A succession of photographs of mutilated penises, sectioned vulvas and crushed testicles passed through the flaring light…

They pull over at a motorway services where the narrator buys a couple of bottles of wine, Vaughan rolls some joints and they pick up a couple of whores. The blonde sits in front next to the narrator as he drives, but in the back seat Vaughan subjects the dark-haired, slim-hipped one to extraordinary humiliations, moving and arranging her body into the postures of crash victims, exploring her cleft and orifices with scientific detachment, continually changing their positions. As he drives, the narrator realises he can control the sexual junctions taking place in the back by varying his speed, overtaking, accelerating, or going down exit ramps. Vaughan climaxes, they drive back to the services and dump the girls.

Over the next few days Vaughan bombards requests to get access to the actress and hand her his questionnaire. He is mad. In the narrator’s office he feverishly draws in imaginary car crash wounds on a publicity photo of Elizabeth Taylor while hitting his penis in a karate chop gesture, working himself towards orgasm, till the narrator stops him, all too aware of how aroused he is by Vaughan’s arousal. The narrator is fantasising almost continually about performing fellatio on Vaughan or being sodomised by him.

A few days later the narrator is driving Vaughan and Catherine back from the airport into central London. They are forced to slow down by the emergency services surrounding a three-car pile-up. The postures of the victims are graphically described as well as the firemen’s efforts to cut them out of the wreckage. They park on the hard shoulder a hundred yards further along, and Vaughan leaps out with his camera. A footbridge over the motorway is packed with sightseers gawping at the crash. The narrator notes the sexualised atmosphere, with the gawpers eventually leaving, arms round their partners.

On the way back into London the narrator pulls over into a service station and pays to go through the car wash repeatedly, while Vaughan has sex with his wife in the back seat, arranging their bodies in a series of stylised postures. Back in their apartment, the narrator dabs the wounds and bruises on her body with the tip of his penis.

Increasingly in thrall to Vaughan, the narrator becomes his unofficial chauffeur as they first steal cars, then borrow them using passkeys obtained from Seagrave’s wife for cars parked at the airport, and drive round looking for crashes or picking up whores or just available girls who Vaughan can position and abuse in innumerable poses in the back seat.

It’s during this period that they arrive at a devastating crash scene in order for Vaughan to a) get his camera and flash bulbs and take countless photos of the woman victim as she lies mangled across the front seats b) then cradle her head as she bleeds out into her white blouse and c) soon afterwards pick up a cheap prostitute and, in the back of his and the narrator’s car, makes her adopt the posture of the dying woman, examining her from all angles, and stylising her position before ejaculating over her.

They arrive at another crash to find the car of a middle-aged dentist has rolled over and off the road into a suburban garden. Waiting till the police and other services have quite left, Vaughan jumps down into the garden, takes his penis out and rubs it along various surfaces of the car. Finding a piece of chalk the police had used, he draws an outline of his penis against the paintwork. Pleased, he draws a succession of penis outlines all over the car and across the car’s seats and dashboard.

Vaughan, Gabrielle and the narrator visit the Motor Show at Earl’s Court. Showroom salesmen are embarrassed by Gabrielle’s extensive wounds and braces. Later, the narrator has sex with Gabrielle in her car, both of them bored with the conventional motions, until she starts kissing and sucking his scars, and he pushes his erect penis into the scarred grooves and clefts of her body caused by her crash. At which point they both become very aroused, and go on to have sex in her car over the following weeks.

The final chapters describe Vaughan’s increasing restless frustration. It’s a shock to both of them when they hear on the police radio of a crash involving Vaughan’s muse, Elizabeth Taylor. When they get to the scene they realise that – garishly and gruesomely and ironically – it is the raddled old stuntman, Seagrave, wearing the Elizabeth Taylor he’s been paid to wear when he was her body double in the staged car crash in the film she is still making at Shepperton.

Seagrave was high on LSD and drive head-on into the car of a faded TV presenter, and is dead, the present badly injured, and Vaughan follows the stretcher bearers carrying her to the ambulance (only to be turned away by the police who are coming to know Vaughan and his suspicious behaviour). Later he picks up a prostitute and rams his erect penis down her throat for ten minutes straight, making her gag and then vomit.

As the narrator accompanies Vaughan on their midnight outings to film or photograph crash scenes, or pick up prostitutes to arrange in ever more ghoulish postures of crash victims, the narrator realises his is increasingly attracted to Vaughan’s own sexuality, letting his homosexual tendencies become evermore obvious until, as he watches Vaughan copulating with prostitutes in the back seat of their car, he imagines it is he himself who is submitting to Vaughan’s oily, scarred hands and receiving his swollen penis in his anus or mouth.

The ante-penultimate chapter (21) is devoted to an extraordinarily vivid description of an acid trip, Vaughan giving the narrator a sugar cube dipped in acid as they set off driving and the drug kicking in as the narrator drives along the motorway, the text becoming carefully more visionary to reflect the gathering hallucinations.

Despite being tempted to drive into the oncoming traffic they manage to negotiate their way to a quiet slip road where, tripping off their faces, the narrator finally gets his long-held wish and has sex with Vaughan, unbuttoning him and kicking and kissing all his scars, before sucking his penis and then sodomising him and ejaculating in his anus, before the two very odd men return to slumping half naked in the front seats of their parked car, watching the light pour in glory from the crashed cars lying in the wrecker’s yard they’ve stopped next to.

Chapter 22 is brief and describes the narrator coming down from his acid trip, the world slowly returning to its banal grey, as he staggers from Vaughan’s heavy American Lincoln car and takes refuge in a wreck at the entrance to the wrecker’s yard. After an hour or so he stretches and stands up, and is walking back when he hears the roar of an engine and the Lincoln comes racing out from the underpass and tries to kill him, smashing into the side of the wrecked car and tearing down a stretch of the yard’s wooden fence, before roaring off along the slip road.

In chapter 23 it has taken the narrator some days to come down from his acid trip, and he is still having flashbacks and feeling shaken, not only by the intensity of the hallucinations, but by the memory of Vaughan suddenly, aggressively gunning the engine of the car and heading straight for him, trying to run him down.

The affair with Helen seems to have ceased and now he is recovering at the apartment and is looked after by Catherine who, having had sex with Vaughan, understands his addiction. They go out together in his car looking for the damaged archangel of the motorways, the concrete constructions described with the errant luminosity of the acid aftershocks.

They bump into Seagrave’s widow, Vera, at a filling station. She tells them the police are now definitely after Vaughan after an American serviceman was run over at Northolt. The narrator begins to explain that it’s not people but technology that stimulates Vaughan, but Vera cuts him short by telling him she was in the car with Vaughan. Ah. So he’s gone postal, crossed the line, achieved critical mass. Not sleeping or eating, haggard and grim-faced, Vaughan really has become the psychotic killer of the highways.

He is laying in wait for them. Catherine tells the narrator Vaughan followed her home from work at the airport, tailing her. The narrator follows Catherine as protection and next day takes part in a high-speed chase as Vaughan ram up alongside her, fades in the slow lane, then makes another approach and scrapes right alongside Catherine’s right car, before pulling away and disappearing down an exit ramp.

Day after day Vaughan follows Catherine along the expressways and airport perimeter roads. His old heavy Lincoln car is becoming a battered wreck, with dented fenders and wings, quarter windows smashed out, paintwork damaged and bent. The narrator doesn’t warn his wife about Vaughan’s intentions, but then he hardly needs to. Both of them have entered the end-zone, hypnotised by the high speed death-game they’re playing which is, of course, inextricably interfused with a panoply of sex games.

Aware of this coming collision, Catherine had entered an entranced room within her mind. Passively, she allowed me to move her limbs into the positions of unexplored sex acts.

After sex, in the quiet of the night, the narrator hears a heavy car gunning outside. He waits, dresses and goes down. There is Vaughan’s Lincoln, in all its battered dishevelled glory. Inside is a tartan blanket and empty food tins, Vaughan has evidently been living in it, on the run from the police. Catherine appears, she noticed his absence. As they stand beside the wrecked auto in the midnight silence, they hear the roar of another engine and walk back towards the ramp up out of the underground garage of the high rise where they live. Suddenly the narrator’s car appears, driven by Vaughan at manic speed. Before they have chance to cry out, the silver car has swerved round them and off into the night.

Ten days pass and the Lincoln slowly dies, its tyres deflating, rain and leaves getting in through the smashed windows, then a gang of youths completing the decay with a thorough trashing.

The short final chapter returns us to the start. Ballard’s stories are often book-ended like this, opening with a macabre scene and then going back to tell us how we ended up here. This is the structure of Crash. It opens with the narrator arriving at the scene of Vaughan’s final crash, the one in which he tried to collide with the chauffeur-driven limousine of movie star Elizabeth Taylor but missed, sailing through the safety barriers of a flyover and landing into the roof of a passing coach full of tourists. Vaughan is killed outright. Many of the tourists are killed or horribly maimed.

Now the narrator watches the white-faced film star, Liz Taylor, who the entire story has, in a sense, been about, standing by her stationary limo and being comforted by the chauffeur.

As well as the police and ambulance and helicopters fluttering overhead, a huge crowd has been drawn by (untrue) radio reports of the actress’s death and Ballard deploys his hallucinatory skills to great effect to describe the scene as a great stage set.

On the roofs of the police cars the warning lights revolved, beckoning more and more passers-by to the accident site, across the recreation grounds from the high-rise apartment blocks in Northolt, from the all-night supermarkets on Western Avenue, from the lines of traffic moving past the flyover. Lit by the arc-lights below, the deck of the flyover formed a proscenium arch visible for miles above the surrounding traffic. Across the deserted side-streets and pedestrian precincts, the concourses of the silent airport, the spectators moved towards this huge stage, drawn there by the logic and beauty of Vaughan’s death

The final apotheosis of the car crash as media event and public spectacle, liberating a multitude of latent sexual forces, attracting hundreds of sightseers, they know not why, and opening previous unknown doors in their minds.

The Epilogue describes the narrator and Catherine visiting the police pound, the one where he began his affair with Dr Remington, now in search of the wreckage of the car Vaughan stole and died in. They cram themselves into the wrecked back compartment and, inevitably, conduct a small sex act, she sitting astride him to ‘draw off a small spurt of semen after a short throe’. Then they walk among the wrecked cars.

Headlights are turned on, blinding them. Walking round to the car they find it occupied by Gabrielle, the car-crash cripple and Dr Remington. Ah. They are now a lesbian item. They reverse away and are gone. a) They were paying homage to Vaughan’s wrecked car and celebrating his legacy b) Ballard was handily informing us how their story ended up, the narrator pleased that Dr Remington’s explorations of sexual perversity are continuing.

The narrator realises he had cupped his hand under Catherine’s vulva after their sex to catch his oozing semen. Now, in the final scene of the book, they stroll among the wrecked cars and the narrator uses his semen to bless and anoint the instrument panels and steering wheels and handbrakes and all the other implements of pain and wounding and maiming which a car’s passenger compartment contains. It so perfectly conveys the jewelled perversity of the book that it’s worth quoting at length.

When they had gone, Helen’s arm on Gabrielle’s shoulder as she reversed away, Catherine and I moved among the cars. I found that I was still carrying the semen in my hand. Reaching through the fractured windshields and passenger windows around me, I marked my semen on the oily instrument panels and binnacles, touching these wound areas at their most deformed points.

We stopped at my own car, the remains of its passenger compartment sleek with Vaughan’s blood and mucilage. The instrument panel was covered with a black apron of human tissue, as if the blood had been sprayed on with a paint gun. With the semen in my hands I marked the crushed controls and instrument dials, defining for the last time the contours of Vaughan’s presence on the seats. The imprint of his buttocks seemed to hover among the creases of these deformed seats. I spread my semen over the seat, and then marked the sharp barb of the steering column, a bloodied lance rising from the deformed instrument panel.

Catherine and I stood back, watching these faint points of liquid glisten in the darkness, the first constellation in the new zodiac of our minds. I held Catherine’s arm around my waist as we wandered among the derelict cars, pressing her fingers against the muscles of my stomach wall. Already I knew that I was designing the elements of my own car-crash.

Stylised gestures, junctions and angles

Rereading the book I was taken by storm by the intensity of the sexual feelings and fantasies described by the narrator.

But also by another major thread, which is harder to describe and also a lot less sexy and so less grabby and impactful. And this is that, underlying the sexualisation of car crashes there is a kind of deeper level of weirdness, which is the basic, foundational insight – perception – hallucination, call it what you will, whereby Ballard identifies the geometry, the angles and abstract shapes and angles, underlying human bodies, human gestures and human behaviour.

In The Atrocity Exhibition Ballard mentions the Vorticists, the short-lived English avant-garde art movement which flourished just before the Great War. As the Tate website puts it:

Vorticist painting combined cubist fragmentation of reality with hard-edged imagery derived from the machine and the urban environment.

Add intense sexuality to the hard-edged imagery and you have Ballard:

The same unseen sexuality hovered over the queues of passengers moving through airport terminals, the junctions of their barely concealed genitalia and the engine nacelles of giant aircraft…

The same conjunctions, all the more terrifying when they seemed to evoke the underlying elements of character, I saw in the photographs of facial injuries. These wounds were illuminated like medieval manuscripts with the inset details of instrument trim and horn bosses, rear-view mirrors and dashboard dials. The face of a man whose nose had been crushed lay side by side with a chromium model-year emblem. A young coloured woman with sightless eyes lay on a hospital couch, a rear-view mirror inset beside her, its glassy stare replacing her own vision.

If the Vorticists (and the Futurists and other Modernist painters) saw the machine beneath the skin of the human organism, Ballard sees the machine beneath the skin – and then sees the machine and the human having sex.

As I explored her body, feeling my way among the braces and straps of her underwear, the unfamiliar planes of her hips and legs steered me into unique culs-de-sac, strange declensions of skin and musculature. Each of her deformities became a potent metaphor for the excitements of a new violence. Her body, with its angular contours, its unexpected junctions of mucous membrane and hairline, detrusor muscle and erectile tissue, was a ripening anthology of perverse possibilities.

A violent world sensationalised but also sanitised by mass media

There’s another thread running through the book, too, which is the sensationalising of atrocity by the newly available mass media i.e. television and photojournalism magazines.

Commentators in Ballard’s day were paying a lot of attention to the power of this new mass media, ‘new’ mainly referring to the newish technology of television, which was becoming more and more widespread.

It was only a few years since the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan had published his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in 1964, which introduced the phrase: “The medium is the message”. The imaginative dominance of television was new, and it was taking place at the same time as an explosion in the uncensored coverage of war and atrocity, the mid-60s seeing the burnt corpses of Vietnam brought into everyone’s living room on the nightly news.

To many people, such as McLuhan, it seemed as if the visceral power of TV was introducing a new era in human consciousness and I think it’s important, for a sympathetic reading of the book, to grasp the novelty and power of these new insights about this popular new medium – and then to realise that Ballard was giving them visceral expression, taking to a straight-faced extreme the psychological damage which worried lots of contemporaries.

Here is the narrator’s wife visiting him in hospital after the crash:

Catherine watched me trying to catch my breath. I took her left hand and pressed it to my sternum. In her sophisticated eyes I was already becoming a kind of emotional cassette, taking my place with all those scenes of pain and violence that illuminated the margins of our lives – television newsreels of wars and student riots, natural disasters and police brutality which we vaguely watched on the colour TV set in our bedroom as we masturbated each other. This violence experienced at so many removes had become intimately associated with our sex acts. The beatings and burnings married in our minds with the delicious tremors of our erectile tissues, the spilt blood of students with the genital fluids that irrigated our fingers and mouths. Even my own pain as I lay in the hospital bed, while Catherine steered the glass urinal between my legs, painted fingernails pricking my penis, even the vagal flushes that seized at my chest seemed extensions of that real world of violence calmed and tamed within our television programmes and the pages of news magazines

So it’s not just a book about car crashes and sex: it’s a wider investigation or hallucination about the impact of extremely violent images being served up to quite ordinary citizens day after day after day in newspapers and on TV, and an exploration of the numbing, desensitising, and then disturbing impact this ultimately has on its consumers.

Here is the narrator, who has just driven his secretary to the site of that first crash and parked on the hard shoulder and finds himself in a psychotic state, linking: a) an extreme terminology describing sex and her body with b) the traumatic experience of the crash – all melded with c) the terrible images of human suffering which are now routinely packaged and promoted by the mass media. It makes for a searing combination:

I moved my hand along her thigh. Her vulva was a wet flower. An airline coach passed, the passengers bound for Stuttgart or Milan peering down at us. Renata buttoned her coat and took a copy of Paris-Match from the dashboard shelf. She turned the pages, glancing at the photographs of famine victims in the Philippines. This immersion in parallel themes of violence was a protective decoy. Her serious student’s eyes barely paused at the photograph of a swollen corpse that filled a complete page. This coda of death and mutilation passed below her precise fingers as I stared at the road junction where, fifty yards from the car in which I now sat, I had killed another man.

Car crashes and sex, yes: but also, between the lines, an indictment of the cynicism and exploitativeness of the high-minded magazines and TV programmes which distributed images of atrocity for profit.

If you need novels to have ‘themes’, then it is not hard to extract some weighty and still-very-relevant themes and ideas from this, at first glance, deliberately obscene and provocative novel.

Related links

Reviews of other Ballard books

Novels

Short story collections

Other science fiction reviews

Late Victorian
1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1900s
1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1910s
1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1920s
1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, where they discover…

1930s
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years – surely the most sweeping vista of any science fiction book
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Oxford academic Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra, as the natives call the planet Mars

1940s
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950s
1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the  Foundation Trilogy, which describes the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence, powered by ‘spindizzy’ technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them until one fireman, Guy Montag, rebels
1953 The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester – a breathless novel set in a 24th century New York populated by telepaths and describing the mental collapse of corporate mogul Ben Reich who starts by murdering his rival Craye D’Courtney and becomes progressively more psychotic as he is pursued by telepathic detective, Lincoln Powell
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
— Some problems with Isaac Asimov’s science fiction
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fast-paced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport, a terrifying new weapon has been invented, and tattooed hard-man, Gulliver Foyle, is looking for revenge
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding novel of Blish’s ‘Okie’ tetralogy in which mayor of New York John Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe
1959 The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut – Winston Niles Rumfoord builds a space ship to explore the solar system where encounters a chrono-synclastic infundibula, and this is just the start of a bizarre meandering fantasy which includes the Army of Mars attacking earth and the adventures of Boaz and Unk in the caverns of Mercury

1960s
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Kerans is part of a UN mission to map the lost cities of Europe which have been inundated after solar flares melted the worlds ice caps and glaciers, but finds himself and his colleagues’ minds slowly infiltrated by prehistoric memories of the last time the world was like this, complete with tropical forest and giant lizards, and slowly losing their grasp on reality.
1962 The Voices of Time and Other Stories – Eight of Ballard’s most exquisite stories including the title tale about humanity slowly falling asleep even as they discover how to listen to the voices of time radiating from the mountains and distant stars, or The Cage of Sand where a handful of outcasts hide out in the vast dunes of Martian sand brought to earth as ballast which turned out to contain fatal viruses. Really weird and visionary.
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard space-travelling New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1962 Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut – the memoirs of American Howard W. Campbell Jr. who was raised in Germany and has adventures with Nazis and spies
1963 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut – what starts out as an amiable picaresque as the narrator, John, tracks down the so-called ‘father of the atom bomb’, Felix Hoenniker for an interview turns into a really bleak, haunting nightmare where an alternative form of water, ice-nine, freezes all water in the world, including the water inside people, killing almost everyone and freezing all water forever
1964 The Drought by J.G. Ballard – It stops raining. Everywhere. Fresh water runs out. Society breaks down and people move en masse to the seaside, where fighting breaks out to get near the water and set up stills. In part two, ten years later, the last remnants of humanity scrape a living on the vast salt flats which rim the continents, until the male protagonist decides to venture back inland to see if any life survives
1964 The Terminal Beach by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s breakthrough collection of 12 short stories which, among more traditional fare, includes mind-blowing descriptions of obsession, hallucination and mental decay set in the present day but exploring what he famously defined as ‘inner space’
1964 Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by Peter George – a novelisation of the famous Kubrick film, notable for the prologue written as if by aliens who arrive in the distant future to find an earth utterly destroyed by the events described in the main narrative
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – Le Guin’s first novel, a ‘planetary romance’ or ‘science fantasy’ set on Fomalhaut II where ethnographer and ‘starlord’ Gaverel Rocannon rides winged tigers and meets all manner of bizarre foes in his quest to track down the aliens who destroyed his spaceship and killed his colleagues, aided by sword-wielding Lord Mogien and a telepathic Fian
1966 Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin – both the ‘farborn’ colonists of planet Werel, and the surrounding tribespeople, the Tevarans, must unite to fight off the marauding Gaal who are migrating south as the planet enters its deep long winter – not a good moment for the farborn leader, Jakob Agat Alterra, to fall in love with Rolery, the beautiful, golden-eyed daughter of the Tevaran chief
1966 – The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Sanders journeys up an African river to discover that the jungle is slowly turning into crystals, as does anyone who loiters too long, and becomes enmeshed in the personal psychodramas of a cast of lunatics and obsessives
1967 The Disaster Area by J.G. Ballard – Nine short stories including memorable ones about giant birds, an the man who sees the prehistoric ocean washing over his quite suburb.
1967 City of Illusions by Ursula Le Guin – an unnamed humanoid with yellow cat’s eyes stumbles out of the great Eastern Forest which covers America thousands of years in the future when the human race has been reduced to a pitiful handful of suspicious rednecks or savages living in remote settlements. He is discovered and nursed back to health by a relatively benign commune but then decides he must make his way West in an epic trek across the continent to the fabled city of Es Toch where he will discover his true identity and mankind’s true history
1966 The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis –
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into a galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped ‘andys’ – earning enough to buy mechanical animals, since all real animals died long ago
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after they are involved in an explosion on the moon
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin – an envoy from the Ekumen or federation of advanced planets – Genly Ai – is sent to the planet Gethen to persuade its inhabitants to join the federation, but the focus of the book is a mind-expanding exploration of the hermaphroditism of Gethen’s inhabitants, as Genly is forced to undertake a gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north with the disgraced native lord, Estraven, during which they develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love
1969 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s breakthrough novel in which he manages to combine his personal memories of being an American POW of the Germans and witnessing the bombing of Dresden in the character of Billy Pilgrim, with a science fiction farrago about Tralfamadorians who kidnap Billy and transport him through time and space – and introduces the catchphrase ‘so it goes’

1970s
1970 Tau Zero by Poul Anderson – spaceship Leonora Christine leaves earth with a crew of fifty to discover if humans can colonise any of the planets orbiting the star Beta Virginis, but when its deceleration engines are damaged, the crew realise they need to exit the galaxy altogether in order to find space with low enough radiation to fix the engines – and then a series of unfortunate events mean they find themselves forced to accelerate faster and faster, effectively travelling forwards through time as well as space until they witness the end of the entire universe – one of the most thrilling sci-fi books I’ve ever read
1970 The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s best book, a collection of fifteen short experimental texts in stripped-down prose bringing together key obsessions like car crashes, mental breakdown, World War III, media images of atrocities and clinical sex
1971 Vermilion Sands by J.G. Ballard – nine short stories including Ballard’s first, from 1956, most of which follow the same shape, describing the arrival of a mysterious, beguiling woman in the fictional desert resort of Vermilion Sands, the setting for extravagantly surreal tales of the glossy, lurid and bizarre
1971 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin – thirty years in the future (in 2002) America is an overpopulated environmental catastrophe zone where meek and unassuming George Orr discovers that is dreams can alter reality, changing history at will. He comes under the control of visionary neuro-scientist, Dr Haber, who sets about using George’s powers to alter the world for the better with unanticipated and disastrous consequences
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic, leading to harum scarum escapades in disaster-stricken London
1972 The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin – novella set on the planet Athshe describing its brutal colonisation by exploitative Terrans (who call it ‘New Tahiti’) and the resistance of the metre-tall, furry, native population of Athsheans, with their culture of dreamtime and singing
1972 The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe – a mind-boggling trio of novellas set on a pair of planets 20 light years away, the stories revolve around the puzzle of whether the supposedly human colonists are, in fact, the descendants of the planets’ shape-shifting aboriginal inhabitants who murdered the first earth colonists and took their places so effectively that they have forgotten the fact and think themselves genuinely human
1973 Crash by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s most ‘controversial’ novel, a searingly intense description of its characters’ obsession with the sexuality of car crashes, wounds and disfigurement
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it in one of the most haunting and evocative novels of this type ever written
1973 Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s longest and most experimental novel with the barest of plots and characters allowing him to sound off about sex, race, America, environmentalism, with the appearance of his alter ego Kilgore Trout and even Vonnegut himself as a character, all enlivened by Vonnegut’s own naive illustrations and the throwaway catchphrase ‘And so on…’
1974 Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard – the short and powerful novella in which an advertising executive crashes his car onto a stretch of wasteland in the juncture of three motorways, finds he can’t get off it, and slowly adapts to life alongside its current, psychologically damaged inhabitants
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – in the future and 11 light years from earth, the physicist Shevek travels from the barren, communal, anarchist world of Anarres to its consumer capitalist cousin, Urras, with a message of brotherhood and a revolutionary new discovery which will change everything
1974 Inverted World by Christopher Priest – vivid description of a city on a distant planet which must move forwards on railway tracks constructed by the secretive ‘guilds’ in order not to fall behind the mysterious ‘optimum’ and avoid the fate of being obliterated by the planet’s bizarre lateral distorting, a vivid and disturbing narrative right up until the shock revelation of the last few pages
1975 High Rise by J.G. Ballard – an astonishingly intense and brutal vision of how the middle-class occupants of London’s newest and largest luxury, high-rise development spiral down from petty tiffs and jealousies into increasing alcohol-fuelled mayhem, disintegrating into full-blown civil war before regressing to starvation and cannibalism
1976 Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut – a madly disorientating story about twin freaks, a future dystopia, shrinking Chinese and communication with the afterlife
1979 The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G. Ballard – a strange combination of banality and visionary weirdness as an unhinged young man crashes his stolen plane in suburban Shepperton, and starts performing magical acts like converting the inhabitants into birds, conjuring up exotic foliage, convinced his is on a mission to liberate them
1979 Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut – the satirical story of Walter F. Starbuck and the RAMJAC Corps run by Mary Kathleen O’Looney, a baglady from Grand Central Station, among other satirical notions including the new that Kilgore Trout, a character who recurs in most of his novels, is one of the pseudonyms of a fellow prison at the gaol where Starbuck serves a two year sentence, one Dr Robert Fender

1980s
1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – set in an England of 2035 after a) the oil has run out and b) a left-wing government left NATO and England was promptly invaded by the Russians – ‘the Pacification’, who have settled down to become a ruling class and treat the native English like 19th century serfs
1980 The Venus Hunters by J.G. Ballard – seven very early and often quite cheesy sci-fi short stories, along with a visionary satire on Vietnam (1969), and then two mature stories from the 1970s which show Ballard’s approach sliding into mannerism
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the ‘Golden Era’ of the genre, basically the 1950s
1981 Hello America by J.G. Ballard – a hundred years from now an environmental catastrophe has turned America into a vast, arid desert, except for west of the Rockies which has become a rainforest of Amazonian opulence, and it is here that a ragtag band of explorers from old Europe discover a psychopath has crowned himself President Manson, has revived an old nuclear power station in order to light up Las Vegas, and plays roulette in Caesar’s Palace to decide which American city to nuke next, made redundant, girlfriend committed suicide) invents a fantasy world, the Dream Archipelago, and how it takes over his ‘real’ life
1982 Myths of the Near Future by J.G. Ballard – ten short stories showing Ballard’s range of subject matter from Second World War China to the rusting gantries of Cape Kennedy
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1984 Neuromancer by William Gibson – Gibson’s stunning debut novel which establishes the ‘Sprawl’ universe, in which burnt-out cyberspace cowboy, Case, is lured by ex-hooker Molly into a mission led by ex-army colonel Armitage to penetrate the secretive corporation, Tessier-Ashpool, at the bidding of the vast and powerful artificial intelligence, Wintermute
1986 Burning Chrome by William Gibson – ten short stories, three or four set in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe, the others ranging across sci-fi possibilities, from a kind of horror story to one about a failing Russian space station
1986 Count Zero by William Gibson – second in the ‘Sprawl trilogy’
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa
1988 Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson – third of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy in which street-kid Mona is sold by her pimp to crooks who give her plastic surgery to make her look like global simstim star Angie Marshall, who they plan to kidnap but is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero; while the daughter of a Japanese gangster who’s sent her to London for safekeeping is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer

1990s
1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative version of history, Charles Babbage’s early computer, instead of being left as a paper theory, was actually built, drastically changing British society, so that by 1855 it is led by a party of industrialists and scientists who use databases and secret police to keep the population suppressedeep the population suppressed

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by Simon on February 2, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Novel
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Posted by Simon on February 2, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/02/02/crash-j-g-ballard/