Authors: Frank Tallis
Yet, as the unconscious was losing the affection of psychoanalysts, it was attracting considerable interest from other quarters – most notably the artistic community. Poets, musicians, painters, playwrights, novelists, and even film-makers, all drew inspiration from the idea of the unconscious, and interestingly, it was the unadulterated, undiluted, Freudian unconscious that captured their attention. The world of forbidden Oedipal wishes, repressed sexuality, and symbolic dreams.
The trespass of Freudian ideas into the wider cultural domain was not welcomed by everyone. For example, the author D. H. Lawrence was sufficiently concerned about the incursion to write two cautionary essays: ‘Psychoanalysis and the unconscious’ (1921) and ‘Fantasia of the unconscious’ (1922), Lawrence considered Freud’s view of the unconscious too narrow and limiting; however, Lawrence’s alternative conceptualisation was somewhat eccentric, and few took heed of his warnings. For many, the strange, disturbing landscape of the Freudian unconscious was too exciting to brook temptation. It exercised a curious fascination.
Predictably, the first works of art showing the unmistakable imprint of Freudian psychology were produced by Viennese artists. The composer Arnold Schoenberg (who lived and worked in Vienna until 1911) actually wrote an opera which takes place in the unconscious.
Erwartung,
which was completed in 1909, is scored for a single soprano and orchestra. The action is spare, but chilling: a woman in a white dress appears at the edge of a moonlit forest and, after following a barely visible path, discovers the body of her lover. He has been murdered. The woman talks to her lover as though he is still alive, but gradually her grief becomes anger and she accuses him of being unfaithful. The woman finally forgives her lover for his past transgressions and bids him goodbye with a parting kiss.
Erwartung
is full of teasing ambiguities, not least of which is the possibility that it is the woman herself who has killed her lover.
This extraordinary work is profoundly Freudian. The libretto is like the fevered confession of a disturbed patient lying on the couch at Bergasse 19, The dark forest suggests the unconscious, wherein – as Freud insisted -opposing emotions such as love and hate can coexist without contradiction, and time and space have little meaning. This is certainly new territory for opera – a nightmare world of supernatural presences, rotting flesh, and violent sexual passion. To describe the Freudian unconscious in musical terms necessitated a radical departure from tradition. Consequently,
Erwartung
was one of Schoenberg’s earliest atonal works. The listener is robbed of familiar musical landmarks such as key. Chord sequences fail to make logical progress. This degree of tonal disorientation is sustained until the very last bars, when instead of closing on a satisfying cadence, the music simply dissolves in a flurry of ascending and descending lines.
Another Viennese native who responded to psychoanalysis was the writer Arthur Schnitzler – a man who had much in common with Freud, being not only medically qualified but also very interested in mental illness. Indeed, Schnitzler’s first paper, published in 1889, described the hypnotic treatment of several cases of ‘hysterical aphonia’ (voice loss without an organic cause); however, unlike Breuer and Freud in the early 1890s, Schnitzler did not find hypnosis very convincing. He believed that some patients were simply ‘posing’ or ‘role acting’ and even entertained doubts about the diagnostic validity of hysteria. In the end, he seems to have entertained doubts about the entire therapeutic enterprise. He let his practice shrink, made the acquaintance of several young actresses, and – encouraged by their loose sexual mores – finally decided that his real vocation was writing for the stage.
Schnitzler is now most famous for his novella
Dream Story
(1926), which recently gained a much larger readership when it was filmed as
Eyes Wide Shut
(1999) by the director Stanley Kubrick.
Dream Story
may begin in the real world, but very soon it becomes impossible to establish whether the action is real or imaginary, A wife confesses her secret desire for a young officer and her husband, Fridolin, embarks on a curious nocturnal Odyssey that resonates with Freudian symbolism. The text is erotically charged, and a central episode involves Fridolin’s illicit entry into a large house, where a masked ball is made considerably more exciting by the presence of statuesque, ‘naked beauties’.
By the time Schnitzler was writing
Dream Story
– a relatively late work – Freud’s Innocence on the arts in the Europe had extended well beyond vienna. His ideas were embraced by the French intelligentsia, and most notably by André Breton, the poet and critic who in 1924 launched the surrealist movement with the publication of the first surrealist manifesto,
Le Poisson soluble.
Breton’s goal was to produce works of ait that combined elements of conscious and unconscious experience. Thus, he suggested that the world of the unconscious – the world of dreams, fantasy, and visions – should be represented cheek by jowl with the trappings of everyday existence. This super, or absolute, reality Breton described as a ‘surreality’. Breton, and poets such as Paul Éluard and Pierre Reverdy, were guided by a creative method or principle that has much in common with Freud’s dream work – the process which serves to disguise the latent content of dreams. Their poetry is characterised by odd, seemingly impenetrable juxtapositions, determined not by logic but by unconscious mechanisms.
Another writer associated with both surrealism and psychoanalysis was Georges Bataille. His most famous work,
Story of the Eye
(1928), resembles Schnitzler’s
Dream Story
insofar as it is also a sexual Odyssey; however, Bataille is far more explicit. Freud’s forbidden wishes are fully realised in successive scenes that might best be described as hallucinatory pornography. For example, at one point two men and a woman rape and murder a priest before using one of his eyeballs as a sex toy.
Surrealist art proved considerably more successful than surrealist literature, provoking immediate international interest. Indeed, since the 1920s it has sustained an extraordinary degree of popularity, to the extent that many surrealist paintings have become iconic – being frequently reproduced or parodied in advertisements and the media. This remarkable popularity is easily explained. The bizarre landscapes of Paul Delvaux, René Magritte, and Salvador Dalí are, in fact, curiously familiar. It is as though these artists surrendered to sleep without letting go of their paintbrushes. We recognise the landscape of dreams.
Dalí (who eventually became the high priest of surrealism) actually visited Freud in 1938. Freud was living in London, having fled from Nazi persecution in Vienna. For Dalí, whom Freud later described as having ‘fanatical eyes’, the visit to Elsworthy Road was not a social call but a pilgrimage. In many respects it was Freud rather than Breton who had written the surrealist manifesto, calling it instead
The Interpretation of Dreams.
The young Spaniard surreptitiously made a sketch of Freud, which he later turned into a rather enigmatic pen-and-ink drawing. The portrait has a soft, hazy transparency. Freud seems to be fading away. Sadly, neither the sketch nor the drawing was shown to Freud. His family felt that Dali’s picture was rather too accomplished, capturing a presentiment of the old man’s imminent death – he was suffering from terminal cancer.
Freud was rather ambivalent about surrealism. He accepted that artists like Dalí were technically very proficient, but he wasn’t altogether sure that the unconscious was best captured by odd juxtapositions and fantastic landscapes. Indeed, Freud felt that the presence of the unconscious was more evident in traditional masterpieces – such as the works of Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo. The great artists of the Renaissance produced paintings and sculptures that could not be understood without interpretation. The hidden meanings had to be teased out. By attempting to paint the unconscious directly, the surrealists had failed to grasp an essential feature of the unconscious – its mystery.
Freud may have had more sympathy for artists like Jean Arp and Joan Miró. Although they also worked under the banner of surrealism, their approach was somewhat different from the likes of Dali, Magritte, and Delvaux. Arp and Miró created abstract images that were suggestive, but indefinite. Arp and Miró were not trying to paint the unconscious, but rather to provoke unconscious associations and resonances in the viewer.
Within a few decades psychoanalysis had been transformed from the preoccupation of a group of fringe medical practitioners, to a lingua franca spoken by artists and scientists alike. Yet Freud was to achieve an even greater degree of cultural penetration – much deeper and far wider than anyone had previously imagined. And the reason for this cultural conquest was not a person, or an artistic movement, but a country: America.
In 1909 Freud was invited to America by Professor G. Stanley Hall – a psychologist and the president of Clark University – in order to receive an honorary degree and to deliver a series of talks on the new science of psychoanalysis. Freud had not been championed by any local universities in Austria or Germany – which made Hall’s unexpected invitation even more extraordinary. Why should he be honoured by a university in Massachusetts?
The invitation had much to do with Stanley Hall’s personal interest in new ideas, and particularly those emanating from Europe, He was an extremely insightful man, who realised long before many of his peers that psychoanalysis was a discipline with considerable promise.
Hall also invited Jung, then Freud’s protégé and most zealous advocate; he too was to receive an honorary degree, largely for his work on schizophrenia – his principal area of expert knowledge.
In the end, a party of three analysts set off for America: Freud, Jung, and Sándor Ferenczi.
What Freud called their ‘travel adventure’ began with a bizarre incident. The three men were having lunch in Bremen, waiting to board ship. Unfortunately, the conversation was dominated by Jung, who spoke incessantly about the results of an archaeological dig taking place in northern Germany. Although Freud was a keen amateur archaeologist, even he was beginning to tire of Jung’s persistence. He began to suspect that Jung’s obsessive talk of corpses had a hidden meaning; namely, that Jung harboured an unconscious wish to kill him. Freud subsequently fainted.
Later Freud confessed his thoughts to Jung, who responded with utter dismay. Indeed, he claimed to be alarmed at the intensity of Freud’s ‘fantasies’; however, given that within a few years their friendship would be in tatters, perhaps the old man wasn’t so stupid after all. If anyone had an ear for subtext, surely it would be Freud.
In spite of this incident, the following day the trio set off for America in high spirits, determined to entertain themselves by interpreting each other’s dreams. After arriving in America the three analysts spent a week in New York before making their way to Clark University.
Jung’s letters to his wife Emma give a vivid account of their enthusiastic reception. He met other academics, attended garden parties, and was surprised to find the most unlikely people {two old ladies for example) well informed about psychoanalysis. Jung was particularly impressed by Professor Hall, whom he described as ‘refined’ and ‘distinguished’, although he described Hall’s wife in less favourable terms — ‘plump … and extremely ugly’. On 13 September Freud and Jung received their degrees at a major awards ceremony. Jung described Freud as being ‘in seventh heaven’. At last, he had gained official recognition for his work.
Given these circumstances, Freud should have developed a deep affection for America – the only nation in the world to distinguish him; the only nation in the world to recognise his greatness. In fact, the very opposite happened. Freud had always been somewhat dismissive of America, and after his ‘travel adventure’ his prejudices became even more entrenched. Indeed, his dislike of America deepened to the point of absurdity. For example, he complained that American food had disturbed his digestive system and that visiting America had caused his handwriting to deteriorate. Moreover, this low opinion of America remained close to contempt throughout his life. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in his succinct comment on the size of America; ‘Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake’.
Although Freud’s initial anti-American prejudice was entirely irrational, Americans soon gave him good reason to maintain his curmudgeonly attitude. Freud’s theories were frequently misrepresented and trivialised in the press, the psychoanalytic vocabulary was misappropriated, and Freud himself was described as some sort of expert on romance. Freud’s undisguised disdain had no effect. Even though Freud hated America, America loved Freud. In 1911 both the Psychoanalytic Society of New York and The American Psychoanalytic Association were founded, and in the 1920s psychoanalytic institutes spread throughout the country. Exposure to psychoanalytic ideas became a routine feature of medical training, and the concept of getting to the unconscious root of the problem became axiomatic in the treatment of all mental illness — the goal of all psychiatrists.
The influence of psychoanalysis on cultural life in Europe quickly spread to America. Surrealism was viewed as an important development and many American artists were keen to experiment with this new style; however, psychoanalysis established itself properly in the American imagination not through art but through America’s dominant cultural vehicle – the movies.
Perhaps the first person to realise the dramatic potential of psychoanalysis was the film magnate Samuel Goldwyn, who actually tried to get Freud to write him a script. Freud’s response to the Hollywood invitation was conspicuously brief; ‘1 do not intend to see Mr Goldwyn’. It is a measure of Freud’s celebrity, that his refusal to co-operate with Hollywood was headline news. On 25 January 1935 the
New York Times
proclaimed: ‘Freud rebuffs Goldwyn. Viennese psychoanalyst is not interested in motion picture offer.’