Sigmund Freud* (2 page)

After his death in 1939, supporters carried on Freud’s work. Others rejected some of his ideas and took psychoanalysis in new directions. And in the last quarter century, medication has eclipsed talk therapy altogether as the quickest means to treat mental illness. Nevertheless, thousands of books have been written about Freud; try Googling him and you’ll find millions of references. He’d be thrilled.

Not coincidentally, the man who popularized the term “ego” as a scientific concept had a rather large ego himself. He was bound and determined to map
terra incognita
, the unknown, previously inaccessible land of the mind. That was how he’d achieve his biggest dream—to become a famous hero.

And Freud
was
going to be a hero.

CHAPTER ONE

“My Golden Sigi”

ON MAY 6 , 1856, young Amalia Freud laid eyes on her firstborn child. Sigismund Schlomo Freud was his name. Later on, he shortened his first name to Sigmund. But to his mama he was and would always be “my golden Sigi.”

Clever and obedient, this was obviously a boy who could do no wrong, who would accomplish something brilliant in life. He later acknowledged that he was “his mother’s undisputed darling” and always credited his confidence to this. Beautiful, fierce—a “tornado” or a “tyrant,” depending on one’s point of view—she was almost twenty years younger than her husband, a widower with two grown sons from his earlier marriage.

As much as Amalia idolized Sigi, he soon lost her full attention. Eleven months after his birth, another son, Julius, was born. Like many an older sibling, little Sigi wished his rival out of the way. But then Julius died from an infection before he was a year old. What was the impact on Freud? Looking back on his childhood, Freud felt he’d been left with a burden of guilt. Had his “wish” come true?

More siblings arrived—six more eventually, all surviving childhood—and Sigi was cared for by a beloved nursemaid. When she was caught stealing and sent to prison, Sigi was bereft. All these losses, before he was even three years old.

The Freud home was a shabby one-room apartment in Freiberg, a small market town now part of the Czech Republic. Freud’s father, Jacob, was a traveling wool salesman, a not very successful one, possibly financially irresponsible. The family struggled. Later in life, Freud would appreciate Jacob’s “deep wisdom and fantastic lightheartedness,” but he felt that his childhood had been clouded by worry.

Still, the extended Freud family was close-knit, and the children got to frolic in the quiet countryside, with its soft green meadows and shadowy forests, the snowy Carpathian mountains in the background.

Then, in 1859, hoping to make more money, Jacob uprooted his family. Their eventual new home was 150 miles south—in the big glittering city of Vienna, Austria, bordered by the beautiful blue Danube River on one side and forest on the other three. Vienna was the capital of the huge and powerful Austrian Empire, stretching from Switzerland to Russia. Like many Jewish families, the Freuds envisioned a better future for their children in Vienna, where anti-Semitism—discrimination against Jews—was on the wane. The emperor, Franz Joseph, had given Jews some civil rights in 1849. Full citizenship came in 1867. Now Jews could enter any profession, own their own homes, and live in any neighborhood, not just the ghetto restricted to them.

But four-year-old Sigi was devastated by the move. He later claimed to be haunted, even at this tender age, by the loss of his childhood home, the greatest loss of all: “I have never got over the longing for my home.” And while he remained in Vienna for almost his entire life, he continually badmouthed the city—it was “disgusting.” He once wrote, “I hate Vienna with a positively personal hatred.” Yet he thrived there—it was to be a zone of comfort he never left, until forced to many years later.

Jacob, on the other hand, failed to thrive in Vienna. For years, the Freuds stayed in a one-room apartment in a dismal, overcrowded neighborhood. This slum was where most Jewish arrivals lived until they could afford to move.

At first, little Sigi was taught by his mother and father at home. At nine he entered a
gymnasium
—a combination of middle and high school. Very academic, very strict. Memorization was the main technique, with a thorough drilling in Greek and Roman classics. Sigi went straight home after school to study all night. He was first in his class almost every year, with perfect marks in all his subjects—languages, religion, physics, math, history, and geography, and even conduct. He could be compassionate and kind. When he was ten, he organized his teachers and other students to make bandages for Austrian soldiers wounded during the war against Prussia (now part of Germany and Poland).

One of Freud’s most painful memories was from age ten. His father, trying to show how times were better for Jews now, recounted an ugly incident he had faced many years before. A man had knocked Jacob’s new fur hat off his head into the mud and taunted, “Jew, get off the sidewalk.” Sigi was appalled at the racism as well as his father’s reaction: Jacob merely picked up his mud-splattered hat and walked away. In this story, his father—supposedly his protector—acted like a coward. This was not the behavior of a hero. If only, the boy thought, Jacob had been more combative, physically confronting his tormentor. Sigi was ashamed.

Vienna’s population was the fastest-growing of any European city, exploding to two million by 1910. Businesses were thriving, gorgeous buildings sprang up, parks were landscaped, creative and intellectual endeavors flowered. Along the Ringstrasse, the magical circular boulevard lined with cafés, people nibbled pastries or the famous chocolate dessert, Sacher torte. They sipped wine or coffee and flirted, gossiped, philosophized. Their city had the best doctors and scientists, the best museums and schools, and without question the best music. Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and Johann Strauss had all lived there. It became the home of composer Gustav Mahler, as well as artist Gustav Klimt and others. Vienna was a mecca for artists. (The young and untalented Adolf Hitler spent seven years there painting—badly.)

Young Freud did love Vienna’s museums. But he didn’t go to coffeehouses or the fabulous opera house or art galleries. In part this was because he was poor. Also, his passions were quieter. He was one well-read boy, curious about everything in print—German classics, literature from ancient Greece and Rome, contemporary writers and philosophers. He mastered one language after another in school—Latin, Greek, French, perfect English (devouring and memorizing Shakespeare’s plays in English), then taught himself Italian and Spanish.

One of his favorite writers was Ludwig Borne, especially an essay of his called “The Art of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days.” Borne advised a writer to take paper and write down “everything that comes into your head” with total honesty and without thinking about it: “You will be quite out of your senses with astonishment at the new and unheard-of thoughts you have had.” Automatic writing, this was called.

Freud was a born writer. Like many people, he found his dreams interesting, but he actually took the trouble of writing them down in a notebook every day. No one knew what dreams meant or didn’t mean, but to him they were worth putting on paper.

He and his best friend, Eduard Silberstein, exchanged endless letters with poetry and word games, gossip, titles of books they were reading, thoughts about girls.

But he didn’t exactly date. “Young ladies are boring,” he confided to Eduard. The two teens had formed a secret society they called a “Spanish Academy,” speaking Spanish and taking on names of dogs from Cervantes’s classic novel,
Don Quixote
. Freud called himself Cipion, a smart, moralistic dog. He felt he had a good grasp on right and wrong. At fifteen, he led a student revolt against a teacher accused of not knowing his material.

Sometimes Freud lectured Eduard on behavior—against tempting a girl into sex before marriage, for example: “A thinking man is his own legislator. . . . But a woman, let alone a girl, has no inherent ethical standard; she can act correctly only if she keeps within the bounds of convention.”

As a big brother, Sigi was pompous, even bossy. He helped his younger siblings—a brother and five sisters—with their homework and freely gave advice on how they should behave. He warned one sister against listening to compliments, saying that praise made young girls “vain” and “insufferable.” He told another sister that the novels she read were improper for a girl her age.

Disappointed by his weak, unsuccessful father, Freud was dazzled by strong men in history, especially those who combatted their foes. As a little boy, he would reenact battles with his toy soldiers, labeling each with the real names of soldiers. Later he admired military leaders who fought against great odds, like Alexander the Great, who conquered the Persian Empire; Hannibal, the North African general who crossed the Alps to challenge Rome; Oliver Cromwell, a commoner who became ruler of England; and Napoleon, emperor of all Europe. One of Freud’s biggest heroes was the Renaissance artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci—so intellectually curious, so fiercely independent.

He also much admired his mother, who continued to brag about her oldest son. While the rest of the family did without, Freud was allowed to run up debts at the bookstore. His greatest pleasure was in adding one book a month to his personal library.

At sixteen, during his last year at the gymnasium, for his final exam, he translated Sophocles’s famous play
Oedipus Rex
, which tells of the Greek hero’s tragic end. Oedipus was the fellow in Greek mythology who had become king by answering the riddle of the Sphinx. This monster, half-woman and half-lion, was terrorizing the city of Thebes. The only way to stop her was to solve her riddle: “What walks on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening?” Oedipus correctly replied that it was man—who crawls on all fours as a baby, walks upright as an adult, and uses a cane in old age.

So Oedipus vanquished the Sphinx, but during this adventure he ended up killing a man and then marrying his widow. The man turned out to be his father, the woman his own mother. Upon learning what he’d done, Oedipus blinded himself. This tragedy, popular from ancient times to this day, stirred Freud greatly as he put in long hours translating it from Greek into German. Full of significance for him as a student, the story was to reveal even deeper meanings to Freud years later.

Upon graduation, his plan was to go to the University of Vienna and study law. He was ambitious and wanted to help people, just as he’d been improving the lives of his hapless siblings. Perhaps he would become a political leader, now that Jews were allowed to work in the government.

But something else began luring him. When he was seventeen, he attended the World Exhibition in Vienna, a showcase for science and technology, the biggest display thus far in Europe. Freud was so stimulated that he went every day all that summer, seeing thousands of exhibits—steam engines, the latest in first-aid practices, machines that mass-produced goods. The future was in science.

That same year, he went to a public lecture where a scientist read aloud an essay attributed to Germany’s great poet, Goethe. Called “On Nature,” it was a mushy ode to the mysteries of nature, portrayed as a forever-nurturing mother.

Freud promptly went home and announced in a letter to a friend, “I have determined to become a natural scientist. . . . I shall gain insight into the age-old dossiers of Nature, perhaps even eavesdrop on her eternal processes, and share my findings with anyone who wants to learn.”

He was switching from law to science. He made a snap decision that science would be the arena where he would accomplish “deeds of improbable greatness.” Freud was never one to underestimate himself. Science would be the weapon he would wield against the forces of darkness, the many problems in the world.

In 1873 he entered the University of Vienna to study zoology, the branch of biology that focuses on animal life.

At this time he had a favorite fantasy. On the university campus were statues of professors from days gone by. He liked to imagine that one day a statue of Sigmund Freud would join them. He could even see the caption on it: a quotation from the play
Oedipus Rex
—“He divined the famous riddle and was a most mighty man.”

As he later wrote, a little more modestly, “I felt an overpowering need to understand something of the riddles of the world in which we live and perhaps to contribute something to their solution.”

What particular riddle he would solve, he didn’t know. Not yet.

CHAPTER TWO

Dissecting Four Hundred Eels

FOR THE NEXT nine years Freud stayed at the University of Vienna, his eye to the microscope.

All the Freuds made sacrifices for Sigi’s studies. By now the family lived in a better apartment—but he was the only one with his own room and an oil lamp. The other eight people, crammed into the three bedrooms, had to make do with candlelight. When he complained that a sister’s piano practice interfered with his concentration, the piano disappeared. He ate dinner alone in his room, occasionally having friends over for talks about science.