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SIGMUND FREUD

1856 - 1939

A Lecture given by Angela Maffeo before the Boston Chapter of Psychological Type

The College Club, Boston, Massachusetts

February 23, 1998

Sigmund Freud was born in what is now Czechoslovakia in 1856. Four years later his family moved to Vienna -- a magnet for Jewish émigrés at the time. Restrictions had recently been lifted and young Jewish males were able to pursue their lives and careers in an unrestricted fashion for the first time.

Freud was the first and favorite of his mother’s eight children. She was the third and very young wife of his father -- a poor wool merchant.

Freud was born with a covering of black hair all over the body. In accordance with traditional Jewish lore, this was interpreted as a sign of special favor. An old woman fortuneteller informed his mother, when he was still an infant, that he was destined for great things.

Freud received no religious instruction at home and was encouraged to cultivate high ambitions. He was a brilliant student and at the top of his class in the gymnasium for seven years. He first mastered Greek, Latin, German and Hebrew, then learned French and English, and also taught himself the rudiments of Spanish and Italian. He began to read Shakespeare at the age of eight. Shakespeare and Goethe remained his favorite authors.

Inspired by Darwin and Goethe, Freud decided on a career in science. He entered the University of Vienna at 17, where he encountered anti-semitism: "I was expected to feel myself inferior and an alien because I was a Jew. I refused absolutely to do the first of

these things. I have never been able to see why I should feel ashamed of my descent or, as people were beginning to say, of my race."

He studied physiology and neurology. By preference, Freud was a scientist, particularly skilled with the microscope. He was a brilliant researcher moving towards a career in neuropathology, until he met Martha Bernays and fell in love. He was 26 years old.

Because a career in research could not support a family, Freud was advised to pursue a career in medicine. He chose the study of nervous diseases because there were few specialists in that branch of medicine in Vienna. Basically he taught himself. There was one renowned doctor in this field, but he was in Paris. At 29, Freud went to Paris and studied under the famous Charcot (1885), the billiant French neurologist, where he was introduced to the concept of multiple states of consciousness and the use of hypnosis as an instrument to heal medical disorders.

Charcot’s teaching on hysteria awakened his interest in the problems of the neuroses, as opposed to organic diseases of the nervous system. He learned from Charcot that, in order to understand hysteria, he had to look to psychology rather than neurology. Since patients, when awaking from the trance-like state induced by hypnosis, could not recall what had been suggested to them while hypnotized, hypnotic experiments also taught Freud that mental processes, which took place unconsciously, could have a powerful effect upon behavior.

When he returned to Vienna, he opened his practice and was soon married. He was 30 years old. (1886). At first he floundered in his practice. The textbooks were useless. Finally, after 20 months of frustration, he began to use hypnotic suggestion. He came to consider it as the best therapeutic tool to treat what he referred to as “the crowds of neurotics...[that] hurried, with their troubles unsolved, from one physician to another. He said there “was something positively seductive in working with hypnotism. For the first time, there was a sense of having overcome one’s helplessness; and it was highly flattering to enjoy the reputation of being a miracleworker.” In 1889 he traveled again to France [Nancy] with the idea of “perfecting my hypnotic technique.” It was during this trip that he said:

“I received the profoundest impression of the possibility that there could be powerful mental processes which nevertheless remained hidden from the consciousness of men.”

When he returned to Vienna he began to use a method he first heard about from Dr. Breuer, an intimate associate. Dr. Breuer called his treatment "catharsis." Between the years 1880-1882, Dr. Breuer treated a young and beautiful 21 year-old patient distinguished in the history of Psychoanalysis as one "Anna O." She had hysterical symptoms, which included paralysis of her limbs, disturbed vision, a severe nervous cough, aversion to food and drink, loss of memory (she forgot her native German language) and a tendency to go into states called absence.

Breuer devoted himself to her and sympathized with her sufferings, much to the dismay of his wife. Finally, he was able to help her when he made a chance observation that relieved her of these clouded states of consciousness. According to Freud, “[Breuer] induced her to express in words the effective phantasy by which she was at the moment dominated.” From this discovery, Breuer arrived at a new method of treatment. He put her into deep hypnosis and made her tell him each time what it was that was oppressing her mind.

Anno O. felt better after talking about her painful memories. She even coined the term “talking cure” because it led to the disappearance of her symptoms, if it was accompanied with expression of emotion -- the emotion that had been pent up and led to her symptoms in the first place.

Soon Anna O. was better and Breuer brought her treatment to an end, or thought he had. One of the stories told about the ending of her treatment is this one:

Dr. Breuer’s wife became jealous of Anna O. and when Breuer became aware of his wife's feelings, he brought the treatment to an abrupt end. Unfortunately, on that same evening, he was summoned to Anna O. and when he arrived at her side, he found her as sick as ever. Worse, still, Anna O. was in the “throes of a hysterical childbirth” -- the logical termination of a phantom pregnancy that had been invisibly developing in response to Breuer’s treatment. Breuer calmed her down but then fled the house in a cold sweat. According to the story, he then took his wife to Venice for a second honeymoon.

What had probably happened was a classic case of transference and counter-transference, but no one understood or knew the meaning of such things. Breuer just fled in fear. Soon Freud would come to recognize it as a natural development in psychoanalytic treatment because of similar experiences with his patients. Jung would come to consider the concept of "transference" as the alpha and Omega of psychoanalysis.

Freud’s use of Breuer’s technique duplicated his results. But, after his initial enthusiasm for the technique, he became dissatisfied with this method also. After all, Freud found hypnosis too difficult and trying.

“I was soon too tired of issuing assurances and commands such as “You are going to sleep! Sleep! And of hearing the patient, as so often happened when the degree of hypnosis was light, [say] with me: “But, doctor, I’m not asleep,” and of then having to make highly ticklish distinctions: “I don’t mean ordinary sleep; I mean hypnosis. As you see, you are hypnotized, you can‘t open your eyes...”

More importantly, Freud began to suspect the erotic component present in hypnosis. Although Breuer had kept the hysterical pregnancy of Anna O story from him, Freud was dismayed and concerned when one of his own patients put her arms around his neck when she came out of a trance. But the concept of “transference” revealed itself in these alarming experiences.

Soon, Freud began to consider the possibility of arriving at a catharsis without hypnosis. He tried other techniques and failed. However, the very difficulty and laboriousness of the process led Freud to a crucial insight. There was a force within the patient that had origianlly pushed the pathogenic experiences out of consicousness (Freud called it “repression”). He called its counterpart (“resistance”), which had kept it out of consciousness. Freud concluded:

“All these experience had involved the emergence of a wishful impulse which was in sharp contrast to the subject’s other wishes, and which provided incompatible with the ethical and aesthetic standards of his personality,” and thus had to be “repressed.”

One example he gave was of a patient who had repressed the memory of a wish to marry her brother-in-law, which had come to her unbidden at the deathbed of her sister and had so horrified her that she converted it into a hysterical symptom.

Freud had come to the conclusion that hysterical patients “suffer from reminiscences.” Only when his urging technique forced the memory back into consciousness could she rid herself of its pathogenic power.

Eventually he stumbled upon the psychoanalytic method of “allowing.” It would later be called "free association," which ultimately led to dream analysis. Freud called it “A relaxation of the watch upon the gates of reason, the adoption of an attitude of uncritical self-observation.” The English psychoanalyst J. Strachey (editor of the Standard Edition of Freud’s Works) described free association as:

“Nothing less than the ‘Invention of the first instrument for the scientific examination of the human mind.’” (Malcolm, 1981, p. 17)

There would be a transitional period for Freud between the time of his use of Catharsis to Psychoanalysis proper. Dr. Breuer would depart from their joint work and he would be left alone to soon discover in his research the link between his patient’s symptoms and their erotic life.

Before the century’s end, Freud would endure his own archetypal process of self-analysis and introduce new concepts into the modern mind regarding dreams and the unconscious; he would give new meaning to such words as “repression,” “infantile sexuality,” “the Oedipus complex,” “free association,” and “transference.”

Psychoanalysis would soon take on a life of its own because it was thought to open up secrets to human personality, culture, and history.