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An Autobiographical Study by Sigmund Freud (1925)

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 (also mention in The Interpretation of Dreams, page 284).

Moves to Vienna aged 4. Consistently top of his class at the Gymnasium (junior school).

His father, Jacob, though poor, said, ‘Follow whatever career you wish, son’. He didn’t specially 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 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 very theoretical, 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 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, 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 hypnotism he had witnessed in Paris.

1889: Freud visits Nancy 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. Breuer tells him about his treatment of Anna O. This clever young woman is 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. Slowly he evolves the technique of free association.

1896: Freud’s father dies and he begins a pitiless self-analysis reviewing 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 wacky 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 re-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 further property of consciousness may be present or it may be absent. Consciousness, this precious mind, is, then, almost irrelevant to the truth about us 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 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.

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 his 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 is 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 – is a product of the most strenuous repression of other desires, and the pinnacle, the furthest highest peak, of 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 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 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 child’s puzzles about its little winkle, 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 parts 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 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.

You want to live up to their standard, to impress them with selflessness and devotion to an ideal. You lay down in your mind a superego or conscience, the internalised laws of your 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 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. It is denial from the wider world similar to 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 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 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 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 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 these contradictions with two 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 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.)

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 paralysed 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, in terms of analysing out the hidden or repressed analytical material, 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 books on Leonardo and on Michelangelo’s famous statue of Moses.

Freudian slips and jokes

He 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 ‘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.

Religion

Then he had turned his attention to religion. 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’.

In this work 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.

Thus 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 Melanie Klein and 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.

Moses and Monotheism is on one level 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 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 The Autobiographical Study is interesting because:

it goes to great lengths to convey the strictly scientific nature of his research before psychoanalysis came along and to demonstrate the continuity of psychoanalysis with mainstream science
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
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

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 6 or 7 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 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:

Oedipus:
Charcot
Dreams
Gradiva
Totem and Taboo
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 Salpetriere. 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.

Digital archive accompanying the exhibition

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:

Irrationality: The Enemy Within by Stuart Sutherland (1992)

The only way to substantiate a belief is to try to disprove it.
(Irrationality: The Enemy Within, page 48)

Sutherland was 65 when he wrote this book, and nearing the end of a prestigious career in psychology research. His aim was to lay out, in 23 themed chapters, all the psychological and sociological research data from hundreds of experiments, which show just how vulnerable the human mind is to a plethora of unconscious biases, prejudices, errors, mistakes, misinterpretations and so on – the whole panoply of ways in which supposedly ‘rational’ human beings can end up making grotesque mistakes.

By the end of the book, Sutherland claims to have defined and demonstrated over 100 distinct cognitive errors humans are prone to (p.309).

I first read this book in 2000 and it made a big impact on me because I didn’t really know that this entire area of study existed, and had certainly never read such a compendium of sociology and psychology experiments before.

I found the naming of the various errors particularly powerful. They reminded me of the lists of weird and wonderful Christian heresies I was familiar with from years of of reading early Christians history. And, after all, the two have a lot in common, both being lists of ‘errors’ which the human mind can make as it falls short of a) orthodox theology and b) optimally rational thinking, the great shibboleths of the Middle Ages and of the Modern World, respectively.

Rereading Irrationality now, 20 years later, after having brought up two children, and worked in big government departments, I am a lot less shocked and amazed. I have witnessed at first hand the utter irrationality of small and medium-sized children; and I have seen so many examples of corporate conformity, the avoidance of embarrassment, unwillingness to speak up, deferral to authority, and general mismanagement in the civil service that, upon rereading the book, hardly any of it came as a surprise.

But to have all these errors so carefully named and defined and worked through in a structured way, with so many experiments giving such vivid proof of how useless humans are at even basic logic, was still very enjoyable.

What is rationality?

You can’t define irrationality without first defining what you mean by rationality:

Rational thinking is most likely to lead to the conclusion that is correct, given the information available at the time (with the obvious rider that, as new information comes to light, you should be prepared to change your mind).

Rational action is that which is most likely to achieve your goals. But in order to achieve this, you have to have clearly defined goals. Not only that but, since most people have multiple goals, you must clearly prioritise your goals.

Few people think hard about their goals and even fewer think hard about the many possible consequences of their actions. (p.129)

Cognitive biases contrasted with logical fallacies

Before proceeding it’s important to point out that there is a wholly separate subject of logical fallacies. As part of his Philosophy A-Level my son was given a useful handout with a list of about fifty logical fallacies i.e. errors in thinking. But logical fallacies are not the same as cognitive biases.

A logical fallacy stems from an error in a logical argument; it is specific and easy to identify and correct. Cognitive bias derives from deep-rooted, thought-processing errors which themselves stem from problems with memory, attention, self-awareness, mental strategy and other mental mistakes.

Cognitive biases are, in most cases, far harder to acknowledge and often very difficult to correct.

Fundamentals of irrationality

1. Innumeracy One of the largest causes of all irrational behaviour is that people by and large don’t understand statistics or maths. Thus most people are not intellectually equipped to understand the most reliable type of information available to human beings – data in the form of numbers. Instead they tend to make decisions based on a wide range of faulty and irrational psychological biases.

2. Physiology People are often influenced by physiological factors. Apart from obvious ones like tiredness or hunger, which are universally known to affect people’s cognitive abilities, there are also a) drives (direct and primal) like hunger, thirst, sex, and b) emotions (powerful but sometimes controllable) like love, jealousy, fear and – especially relevant – embarrassment, specifically, the acute reluctance to acknowledge limits to your own knowledge or that you’ve made a mistake.

At a more disruptive level, people might be alcoholics, drug addicts, or prey to a range of other obsessive behaviours, not to mention suffering from a wide range of mental illnesses or conditions which undermine any attempt at rational decision-making, such as stress, anxiety or, at the other end of the spectrum, depression and loss of interest.

3. The functional limits of consciousness Numerous experiments have shown that human beings have a limited capacity to process information. Given that people rarely have a) a sufficient understanding of the relevant statistical data to begin with, and b) lack the RAM capacity to process all the data required to make the optimum decision, it is no surprise that most of us fall back on all manner of more limited, non-statistical biases and prejudices when it comes to making decisions.

4 The wish to feel good The world is threatening, dangerous and competitive. Humans want to feel safe, secure, calm, and in control. This is fair enough, but it does mean that people have a way of blocking out any kind of information which threatens them. Most people irrationally believe that they are cleverer than they in fact are, are qualified in areas of activity of knowledge where they aren’t, people stick to bad decisions for fear of being embarrassed or humiliated, and for the same reason reject new evidence which contradicts their position.

Named types of error and bias

Jumping to conclusions

Sutherland tricks the reader on page one, by asking a series of questions and then pointing out that, if you tried to answer about half of them, you are a fool since the questions didn’t contain enough information to arrive at any sort of solution. Jumping to conclusions before we have enough evidence is a basic and universal error. One way round this is to habitually use a pen and paper to set out the pros and cons of any decision, which also helps highlight areas where you realise you don’t have enough information.

The availability error

All the evidence is that the conscious mind can only hold a small number of data or impressions at any one time (near the end of the book, Sutherland claims the maximum is seven items, p.319). Many errors are due to people reaching for the most available explanation, using the first thing that comes to mind, and not taking the time to investigate further and make a proper, rational survey of the information.

Many experiments show that you can unconsciously bias people by planting ideas, words or images in their minds which then directly affect decisions they take hours later about supposedly unconnected issues.

Studies show that doctors who have seen a run of a certain condition among their patients become more likely to diagnose it in new patients, who don’t have it. Because the erroneous diagnosis is more ‘available’.

The news media is hard-wired to publicise shocking and startling stories which leads to the permanent misleading of the reading public. One tourist eaten by a shark in Australia eclipses the fact that you are far more likely to die in a car crash than be eaten by a shark.

Thus ‘availability’ is also affected by impact or prominence. Experimenters read out a list of men and women to two groups without telling them that there are exactly 25 men and 25 women, and asked them to guess the ratio of the sexes. If the list included some famous men, the group was influenced to think there were more men, if the list included famous women, the group thought there are more women than men. The prominence effect.

The entire advertising industry is based on the availability error in the way it invents straplines, catchphrases and jingles designed to pop to the front of your mind when you consider any type of product, making those products – in other words – super available.

I liked the attribution of the well-known fact that retailers price goods at just under the nearest pound, to the availability error. Most of us find £5.95 much more attractive than £6. It’s because we only process the initial 5, the first digit. It is more available.

Numerous studies have shown that the availability error is hugely increased under stress. Under stressful situations – in an accident – people fixate on the first solution that comes to mind and refuse to budge.

The primacy effect

First impressions. Interviewers make up their minds about a candidate for a job in the first minute of an interview and then spend the rest of the time collecting data to confirm that first impression.

The anchor effect

In picking a number people tend to choose one close to any number they’ve recently been presented with. Two groups were asked to estimate whether the population of Turkey was a) bigger than 5 million b) less than 65 million, and what it was. The group who’d had 5 million planted in their mind hovered around 15 million, the group who’d had 65 million hovered around 35 million. They were both wrong. It is 80 million.

The halo effect

People extrapolate the nature of the whole from just one quality e.g. in tests, people think attractive people must be above average in personality and intelligence although, of course, there is no reason why they should be. Hence this error’s alternative name, the ‘physical attractiveness stereotype’. The halo effect is fundamental to advertising, which seeks to associate images of beautiful men, women, smiling children, sunlit countryside etc with the product being marketed.

The existence of the halo effect and primacy effect are both reasons why interviews are a poor way to assess candidates for jobs or places.

The devil effect

Opposite of the above: extrapolating from negative appearances to the whole. This is why it’s important to dress smartly for an interview or court appearance, it really does influence people. In an experiment examiners were given identical answers, but some in terrible handwriting, some in beautifully clear handwriting. The samples with clear handwriting consistently scored higher marks, despite the identical factual content of the scripts.

Illusory correlation

People find links between disparate phenomena which simply don’t exist, thus:

people exaggerate the qualities of people or things which stand out from their environments
people associate rare qualities with rare things

This explains a good deal of racial prejudice: a) immigrants stand out b) a handful of immigrants commit egregious behaviour – therefore it is a classic example of illusory correlation to associate the two. What is missing is taking into account all the negative examples i.e. the millions of immigrants who make no egregious behaviour and whose inclusion would give you a more accurate statistical picture. Pay attention to negative cases.

Stereotypes

People tend to notice anything which supports their existing opinions.
We notice the actions of ‘minorities’ much more than the actions of the invisible majority.

Projection

People project onto neutral phenomena, patterns and meanings they are familiar with or which bolster their beliefs. This is compounded by –

Obstinacy

Sticking to personal opinions (often made in haste / first impressions / despite all evidence to the contrary) aka The boomerang effect When someone’s opinions are challenged, they just become more obstinate about it. Aka Belief persistence. Aka pig-headedness. And this is axacerbated by –

Group think

People associate with others like themselves, which makes them feel safe by a) confirming their beliefs and b) letting them hide in a crowd. Experiments have shown how people in self-supporting groups are liable to become more extreme in their views. Also – and I’ve seen this myself – groups will take decisions that almost everyone in the group, as individuals, know to be wrong – but no-one is prepared to risk the embarrassment or humiliation of pointing it out. The Emperor’s New Clothes. Groups are more likely to make irrational decisions than individuals are.

Confirmation bias

The tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s pre-existing beliefs or hypotheses. In an experiment people were read out a series of statements about a named person, who had a stated profession and then two adjectives describing them, one that you’d expect, the other less predictable. ‘Carol, a librarian, is attractive and serious’. When asked to do a quiz at the end of the session, participants showed a marked tendency to remember the expected adjective, and forget the unexpected one. Everyone remembered that the air stewardess was ‘attractive’ but remembered the librarian for being ‘serious’.

We remember what we expect to hear. (p.76)

Or: we remember what we remember in line with pre-existing habits of thought, values etc.

We marry people who share our opinions, we have friends with people who share our opinions, we agree with everyone in our circle on Facebook.

Self-serving biases

When things go well, people take the credit, when things go badly, people blame external circumstances.

Avoiding embarrassment

People obey, especially in a group situation, bad orders because they don’t want to stick out. People go along with bad decisions because they don’t want to stick out. People don’t want to admit they’ve made a mistake, in front of others, or even to themselves.

Avoiding humiliation

People are reluctant to admit mistakes in front of others. And rather than make a mistake in front of others, people would rather keep quiet and say nothing (in a meeting situation) or do nothing, if everyone else is doing nothing (in an action situation). Both of these avoidances feed into –

Obedience

The Milgram experiment proved that people will carry out any kind of atrocity for an authoritative man in a white coat. All of his students agreed to inflict life-threatening levels of electric shock on the victim, supposedly wired up in the next door room and emitting blood curdling (faked) screams of pain. 72% of Senior House Officers wouldn’t question the decision of a consultant, even if they thought he was wrong.

Conformity

Everyone else is saying or doing it, so you say or do it so as not to stick out / risk ridicule.

Obedience is behaving in a way ordered by an authority figure. Conformity is behaving in a way dictated by your peers.

The wrong length lines experiment

You’re put in a room with half a dozen stooges, and shown a piece of card with a line on it and then another piece of card with three lines of different length on it, and asked which of the lines on card B is the same length as the line on card A. To your amazement, everyone else in the room chooses a line which is obviously wildly wrong. In experiments up to 75% of people in this situation go along with the crowd and choose the line which they are sure, can see and know is wrong – because everyone else did.

Sunk costs fallacy

The belief that you have to continue wasting time and money on a project because you’ve invested x amount of time and money to date. Or ‘throwing good money after bad’.

Sutherland keeps cycling round the same nexus of issues, which is that people jump to conclusions – based on availability, stereotypes, the halo and anchor effects – and then refuse to change their minds, twisting existing evidence to suit them, ignoring contradictory evidence.

Misplaced consistency & distorting the evidence

Nobody likes to admit (especially to themselves) that they are wrong. Nobody likes to admit (especially to themselves) that they are useless at taking decisions.

Our inability to acknowledge our own errors even to ourselves is one of the most fundamental causes of irrationality. (p.100)

And so:

people consistently avoid exposing themselves to evidence that might disprove their beliefs
on being faced with evidence that disproves their beliefs, they ignore it
or they twist new evidence so as to confirm to their existing beliefs
people selectively remember their own experiences, or misremember the evidence they were using at the time, in order to validate their current decisions and beliefs
people will go to great lengths to protect their self-esteem

Sutherland says the best cleanser / solution / strategy to fixed and obstinate ideas is:

to make the time to gather as much evidence as possible and
to try to disprove your own position.

The best solution will be the one you have tried to demolish with all the evidence you have and still remains standing.

People tend to seek confirmation of their current hypothesis, whereas they should be trying to disconfirm it. (p.138)

Fundamental attribution error

Ascribing other people’s behaviour to their character or disposition rather than to their situation. Subjects in an experiment watched two people holding an informal quiz: the first person made up questions (based on what he knew) and asked the second person who, naturally enough, hardly got any of them right. Observers consistently credited the quizzer with higher intelligence than the answerer, completely ignoring the in-built bias of the situation, and instead ascribing the difference to character.

We are quick to personalise and blame in a bid to turn others into monolithic entities which we can then define and control – this saves time and effort, and makes us feel safer and secure – whereas the evidence is that all people are capable of a wide range of behaviours depending on the context and situation.

Once you’ve pigeon-holed someone, you will tend to notice aspects of their behaviour which confirm your view – confirmation bias and/or illusory correlation and a version of the halo/devil effect. One attribute colours your view of a more complex whole.

Actor-Observer Bias

Variation on the above: when we screw up we find all kinds of reasons in the situation to exonerate ourselves: we performed badly because we’re ill, jet-lagged, grandma died, reasons that are external to us. If someone else screws up, it is because they just are thick, lazy, useless. I.e. we think of ourselves as complex entities subject to multiple influences, and others as monolithic types.

False Consensus Effect

Over-confidence that other people think and feel like us, that our beliefs and values are the norm – in my view one of the profound cultural errors of our time.

It is a variation of the ever-present Availability Error because when we stop to think about any value or belief we will tend to conjure up images of our family and friends, maybe workmates, the guys we went to college with, and so on: in other words, the people available to memory – simply ignoring the fact that these people are a drop in the ocean of the 65 million people in the UK. See Facebubble.

The False Consensus Effect reassures us that we are normal, our values are the values, we’re the normal ones: it’s everyone else who is wrong, deluded, racist, sexist, whatever we don’t approve of.

Elsewhere, I’ve discovered some commentators naming this the Liberal fallacy:

For liberals, the correctness of their opinions – on universal health care, on Sarah Palin, on gay marriage – is self-evident. Anyone who has tried to argue the merits of such issues with liberals will surely recognize this attitude. Liberals are pleased with themselves for thinking the way they do. In their view, the way they think is the way all right-thinking people should think. Thus, ‘the liberal fallacy’: Liberals imagine that everyone should share their opinions, and if others do not, there is something wrong with them. On matters of books and movies, they may give an inch, but if people have contrary opinions on political and social matters, it follows that the fault is with the others. (Commentary magazine)

Self-Serving Bias

People tend to give themselves credit for successes but lay the blame for failures on outside causes. If the project is a success, it was all due to my hard work and leadership. If it’s a failure, it’s due to circumstances beyond my control, other people not pulling their weight etc.

Preserving one’s self-esteem

These three errors are all aspects of preserving our self-esteem. You can see why this has an important evolutionary and psychological purpose. In order to live, we must believe in ourselves, our purposes and capacities, believe our values are normal and correct, believe we make a difference, that our efforts bring results. No doubt it is a necessary belief and a collapse of confidence and self-belief can lead to depression and possibly despair. But that doesn’t make it true.

People should learn the difference between having self-belief to motivate themselves, and developing the techniques to gather the full range of evidence – including the evidence against your own opinions and beliefs – which will enable them to make correct decisions.

Representative error

People estimate the likelihood of an event by comparing it to an existing prototype / stereotype that already exists in our minds. Our prototype is what we think is the most relevant or typical example of a particular event or object. This often happens around notions of randomness: people have a notion of what randomness should look like i.e. utterly scrambled. But in fact plenty of random events or sequences arrange themselves into patterns we find meaningful. So we dismiss them as not really random. I.e. we have judged them against our preconception of what random ought to look like.

Ask a selection of people which of these three sets of six coin tosses where H stands for heads, T for tails is random.

TTTTTT
TTTHHH
THHTTH

Most people will choose 3 because it feels random. But of course all three are equally likely or unlikely.

Hindsight

In numerous experiments people have been asked to predict the outcome of an event, then after the event questioned about their predictions. Most people forget their inaccurate predictions and misremember that they were accurate.

Overconfidence

Most professionals have been shown to overvalue their expertise i.e. exaggerate their success rates.

Statistics

A problem with Irrationality and with John Allen Paulos’s book about Innumeracy is that they mix up cognitive biases and statistics, Now, statistics is a completely separate and distinct area from errors of thought and cognitive biases. You can imagine someone who avoids all of the cognitive and psychological errors named above, but still makes howlers when it comes to statistics simply because they’re not very good at it.

This is because the twin areas of Probability and Statistics are absolutely fraught with difficulty. Either you have been taught the correct techniques, and understand them, and practice them regularly (and both books demonstrate that even experts make terrible mistakes in the handling of statistics and probability) or, like most of us, you have not and do not.

As Sutherland points out, most people’s knowledge of statistics is non-existent. Since we live in a society whose public discourse i.e. politics, is ever more dominated by statistics, there is a simple conclusion: most of us have little or no understanding of the principles and values which underpin modern society.

Errors in estimating probability or misunderstanding samples, opinion polls and so on, are probably a big part of irrationality, but I felt that they are so distinct from the psychological biases discussed above, that they almost require a separate volume, or a separate ‘part’ of this volume.

Briefly, common statistical mistakes are:

too small a sample size
biased sample
not understanding that any combination of probabilities is less likely than either on their own, which requires an understanding of base rate or a priori probability
the law of large numbers – the more a probabilistic event takes place, the more likely the result will move towards the theoretical probability
be aware of the law of regression to the mean
be aware of the law of large numbers

Gambling

My suggestion that mistakes in handling statistics are not really the same as unconscious cognitive biases, applies even more to the world of gambling. Gambling is a highly specialised and advanced form of probability applied to games. The subject has been pored over by very clever people for centuries. It’s not a question of a few general principles, this is a vast, book-length subject in its own right. A practical point that emerges from Sutherland’s examples is:

always work out the expected value of a bet i.e. the amount to be won times the probability of winning it

The two-by-two box

It’s taken me some time to understand this principle which is given in both Paulos and Sutherland.

When two elements with a yes/no result are combined, people tend to look at the most striking correlation and fixate on it. The only way to avoid the false conclusions that follow from that is to draw a 2 x 2 box and work through the figures.

Here is a table of 1,000 women who had a mammogram because their doctors thought they had symptoms of breast cancer.

	Women with cancer	Women with no cancer	Total
Women with positive mammography	74	110	184
Women with negative mammography	6	810	816
	80	920	1000

Bearing in mind that a conditional probability is saying that if X and Y are linked, then the chances of X, if Y, are so and so – i.e. the probability of X is conditional on the probability of Y – this table allows us to work out the following conditional probabilities:

1. The probability of getting a positive mammogram or test result, if you do actually have cancer, is 74 out of 80 = .92 (out of the 80 women with cancer, 74 were picked up by the test)

2. The probability of getting a negative mammogram or test result and not having cancer, is 810 out of 920 = .88

3. The probability of having cancer if you test positive, is 74 out of 184 = .40

4. The probability of having cancer if you test negative, is 6 out of 816 = .01

So 92% of women of women with cancer were picked up by the test. BUT Sutherland quotes a study which showed that a shocking 95% of doctors thought that this figure – 92% – was also the probability of a patient who tested positive having the disease. By far the majority of US doctors thought that, if you tested positive, you had a 92% chance of having cancer. They fixated on the 92% figure and transposed it from one outcome to the other, confusing the two. But this is wrong. The probability of a woman testing positive actually having cancer is given in conclusion 3: 74 out of 184 = 40%. This is because 110 out of the total 184 women tested positive, but did not have cancer.

So if a woman tested positive for breast cancer, the chances of her actually having it are 40%, not 92%. Quite a big difference (and quite an indictment of the test, by the way). And yet 95% of doctors thought that if a woman tested positive she had a 92% likelihood of having cancer.

Sutherland goes on to quote a long list of other situations where doctors and others have comprehensively misinterpreted the results of studies like this, with sometimes very negative consequences.

The moral of the story is if you want to determine whether one event is associated with another, never attempt to keep the co-occurrence of events in your head. It’s just too complicated. Maintain a written tally of the four possible outcomes and refer to these.

Deep causes

Sutherland concludes the book by speculating that all the hundred or so types of irrationality he has documented can be attributed to five fundamental causes:

Evolution We evolved to make snap decisions, we are brilliant at processing visual information and responding before we’re even aware of it. Conscious thought is slower, and the conscious application of statistics, probability, regression analysis and so on, is slowest of all. Most people never acquire it.
Brain structure As soon as we start perceiving, learning and remembering the world around us our brain cells make connections. The more the experience is repeated, the stronger the connections become. Routines and ruts form, which are hard to budge.
Heuristics Everyone develops mental short-cuts, techniques to help make quick decisions. Not many people bother with the laborious statistical techniques for assessing relative benefits which Sutherland describes.
Failure to use elementary probability and elementary statistics Ignorance is another way of describing this, mass ignorance. Sutherland (being an academic) blames the education system. I, being a pessimist, attribute it to basic human nature. Lots of people just are lazy, lots of people just are stupid, lots of people just are incurious.
Self-serving bias In countless ways people are self-centred, overvalue their judgement and intelligence, overvalue the beliefs of their in-group, refuse to accept it when they’re wrong, refuse to make a fool of themselves in front of others by confessing error or pointing out errors in others (especially the boss) and so on.

I would add two more:

Suggestibility

Humans are just tremendously suggestible. Say a bunch of positive words to test subjects, then ask them questions on an unrelated topic: they’ll answer positively. Take a different representative sample of subjects and run a bunch of negative words past them, then ask them the same unrelated questions, and their answers will be measurably more negative. Everyone is easily suggestible.

Ask subjects how they get a party started and they will talk and behave in an extrovert manner to the questioner. Ask them how they cope with feeling shy and ill at ease at parties, and they will tend to act shy and speak quieter. Same people, but their thought patterns have been completely determined by the questions asked: the initial terms or anchor defines the ensuing conversation.

In one experiment a set of subjects were shown one photo of a car crash. Half were asked to describe what they think happened when one car hit another; the other half were asked to describe what they thought happened when one car smashed into the other. The ones given the word ‘smashed’ gave much more melodramatic accounts. Followed up a week later, the subjects were asked to describe what they remembered of the photo. The subjects given the word ‘hit’ fairly accurately described it, whereas the subjects given the word ‘smashed’ invented all kinds of details, like a sea of broken glass around the vehicles which simply wasn’t there, which their imaginations had invented, all at the prompting of one word.

Many of the experiments Sutherland quotes demonstrate what you might call higher-level biases: but underlying many of them is this simple-or-garden observation: that people are tremendously easily swayed, by both external and internal causes, away from the line of cold logic.

Anthropomorphism

Another big underlying cause is anthropomorphism, namely the attribution of human characteristics to objects, events, chances, odds and so on. In other words, people really struggle to accept the high incidence of random accidents. Almost everyone attributes a purpose or intention to almost everything that happens. This means our perceptions of almost everything in life are skewed from the start.

During the war Londoners devised innumerable theories about the pattern of German bombing. After the war, when Luftwaffe records were analysed, it showed the bombing was more or less at random.

The human desire to make sense of things – to see patterns where none exists or to concoct theories… can lead people badly astray. (p.267)

Suspending judgement is about the last thing people are capable of. People are extremely uneasy if things are left unexplained. Most people rush to judgement like water into a sinking ship.

Cures

keep an open mind
reach a conclusion only after reviewing all the possible evidence
it is a sign of strength to change one’s mind
seek out evidence which disproves your beliefs
do not ignore or distort evidence which disproves your beliefs
never make decisions in a hurry or under stress
where the evidence points to no obvious decision, don’t take one
learn basic statistics and probability
substitute mathematical methods (cost-benefit analysis, regression analysis, utility theory) for intuition and subjective judgement

Comments on the book

Out of date

Irrationality was first published in 1992 and this makes the book dated in several ways (maybe this is why the first paperback edition was published by upmarket mass publisher Penguin, whereas the most recent edition was published by the considerably more niche publisher, Pinter & Martin).

In the chapter about irrational business behaviour Sutherland quotes quite a few examples from the 1970s and the oil crisis of 1974. These and other examples – such as the long passage about how inefficient the civil service was in the early 1970s – feel incredibly dated now.

And the whole thing was conceived, researched and written before there was an internet or any of the digital technology we take for granted nowadays. Can’t help wondering whether the digital age has solved, or merely added to the long list of biases, prejudices and faulty thinking which Sutherland catalogues, and what errors of reason have emerged specific to our fabulous digital technology.

On the other hand, out of date though the book in many ways is, it’s surprising to see how some hot button issues haven’t changed at all. In the passage about the Prisoners’ Dilemma, Sutherland takes as a real life example the problem the nations of the world were having in 1992 in agreeing to cut back carbon dioxide emissions. Sound familiar? He states that the single biggest factor undermining international co-operation against climate change was America’s refusal to sign global treaties to limit global warming. In 1992! Plus ça change.

Grumpy

The books also has passages where Sutherland gives his personal opinions about things and some of these sound more like the grousing of a grumpy old man than anything based on evidence.

Thus Sutherland whole-heartedly disapproves of ‘American’ health fads, dismisses health foods as masochistic fashion and is particularly scathing about jogging.

He thinks ‘fashion’ in any sphere of life is ludicrously irrational. He is dismissive of doctors as a profession, who he accuses of rejecting statistical evidence, refusing to share information with patients, and wildly over-estimating their own diagnostic abilities.

Sutherland thinks the publishers of learned scientific journals are more interested in making money out of scientists than in ‘forwarding the progress of science’ (p.185).

He thinks the higher average pay that university graduates tend to get is unrelated to their attendance at university and more to do with having well connected middle- and upper-middle-class parents, and thus considers the efforts of successive Education Secretaries to introduce student loans to be unscientific and innumerate (p.186).

Surprisingly, he criticises Which consumer magazine for using too small samples in its testing (p.215).

In an extended passage he summarises Leslie Chapman’s blistering (and very out of date) critique of the civil service, Your Disobedient Servant published in 1978 (pp.69-75).

Sutherland really has it in for psychoanalysis, which he accuses of all sorts of irrational thinking such as projecting, false association, refusal to investigate negative instances, failing to take into account the likelihood that the patient would have improved anyway, and so on. Half-way through the book he gives a thumbnail summary:

Self-deceit exists on a massive scale: Freud was right about that. Where he went wrong was in attributing it all to the libido, the underlying sex drive. (p.197)

In other words, the book is liberally sprinkled with Sutherland’s own grumpy personal opinions, which sometimes risk giving it a crankish feel.

Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain

Neither this nor John Allen Paulos’s books take into account the obvious fact that lots of people are, how shall we put it, of low educational achievement. They begin with poor genetic material, are raised in families where no-one cares about education, are let down by poor schools, and are excluded or otherwise demotivated by the whole educational experience, with the result that :

the average reading age in the UK is 9
about one in five Britons (over ten million) are functionally illiterate, and probably about the same rate innumerate

His book, like all books of this type, is targeted at a relatively small proportion of the population, the well-educated professional classes. Most people aren’t like that. You want proof? Trump. Brexit. Boris Johnson landslide.

Trying to keep those pesky cognitive errors at bay (in fact The Witch by Pieter Bruegel the Elder)

Trying to keep those cognitive errors at bay (otherwise known as The Witch by Pieter Bruegel the Elder)

Reviews of other science books

Chemistry

The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into the Land of the Chemical Elements by Peter Atkins (1995)

Cosmology

The Environment

Genetics and life

Human evolution

Maths

Particle physics

Atomic by Jim Baggott (2009)

Psychology

1 Comment

by Simon on April 3, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Psychology, Science

Tagged a priori probability, actor -observer bias, anthropomorphism, anxiety, avoiding embarrassment, avoiding humiliation, base rate probability, belief persistence, betting, brain structure, civil service, clearly defined goals, cognitive bias, confirmation bias, conformity, Depression, distorting the evidence, drives, elementary probability, elementary statistics, Evolution, expected value, experiments, false consensus effect, fashion, first impressions, Freud, fundamental attribution error, gambling, global warming, group think, Heresy, heuristics, hindsight, ignorance, illogic, illusory correlation, Innumeracy, Irrationality, jogging, John Allen Paulos, jumping to conclusions, laziness, Leslie Chapman, limits of consciousness, logic, logical fallacies, mammogram, Milgram experiment, misplaced consistency, obedience, obstinacy, overconfidence, physiology, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, prejudice, preserving one's self-esteem, probability theory, projection, Psychology, rationality, regression analysis, representative error, research, self-serving bias, self-serving biases, social science, statistics, stereotypes, stress, Stuart Sutherland, suggestibility, sunk costs fallacy, suspending judgement, the 'physical attractiveness stereotype', the anchor effect, the availability error, the boomerang effect, the devil effect, the halo effect, the law of large numbers, the law of regression to the mean, the Liberal fallacy, the primacy effect, the Prisoners' Dilemma, two-by-two box, unconscious bias, Which?, Your Disobedient Servant

Posted by Simon on April 3, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/04/03/irrationality-stuart-sutherland/

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged projection

Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire @ the Freud Museum

The Freud Museum

Freudian reservations

The exhibition

Exhibition structure

1. Oedipus: the riddle of desire

Objects on display

2. Charcot: from iconography to archaeology

3. Dreams: decoding the way to the wish

4. Gradiva: tracing the pathways of archaeological desire

Objects on display

5. Totem and Taboo: the search for origins

Objects on display

A digression on Freud’s sociological writings

6. Moses: the return of the repressed

Objects on display

Objects and meanings

H.D.’s interpretation

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged projection

An Autobiographical Study by Sigmund Freud (1925)

Early life

Psychoanalysis

The sexuality of children

Puberty

Psychoanalytic therapy

The history of the psychoanalytic movement

Narcissism

Second theory

Social theory

Literature and myth

Freudian slips and jokes

Religion

Postscript (1935)

Thoughts

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Freud’s Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire @ the Freud Museum

The Freud Museum

Freudian reservations

The exhibition

Exhibition structure

1. Oedipus: the riddle of desire

Objects on display

2. Charcot: from iconography to archaeology

3. Dreams: decoding the way to the wish

4. Gradiva: tracing the pathways of archaeological desire

Objects on display

5. Totem and Taboo: the search for origins

Objects on display

A digression on Freud’s sociological writings

6. Moses: the return of the repressed

Objects on display

Objects and meanings

H.D.’s interpretation

Digital archive

Related links

Related books

Share this:

Like this:

Irrationality: The Enemy Within by Stuart Sutherland (1992)

What is rationality?

Cognitive biases contrasted with logical fallacies

Fundamentals of irrationality

Named types of error and bias

Jumping to conclusions

The availability error

The primacy effect

The anchor effect

The halo effect

The devil effect

Illusory correlation

Stereotypes

Projection

Obstinacy

Group think

Confirmation bias

Self-serving biases

Avoiding embarrassment

Avoiding humiliation

Obedience

Conformity

The wrong length lines experiment

Sunk costs fallacy

Misplaced consistency & distorting the evidence

Fundamental attribution error

Actor-Observer Bias

False Consensus Effect

Self-Serving Bias

Preserving one’s self-esteem

Representative error

Hindsight

Overconfidence

Statistics

Gambling

The two-by-two box

Deep causes

Suggestibility