Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision: Darkness in the Midst of Vision: Darkness in the Midst of Vision - Softcover

Breger, Louis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0471078581 ISBN 13: 9780471078586

Verlag: Wiley, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

Advance Praise for Louis Breger's FREUD "Louis Breger's rich and readable study of Freud offers a thoughtfully complex account of a great but flawed man. Everyone with an interest in psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic movement will enjoy exploring, grappling with, arguing about, and learning from this absolutely fascinating book"-JUDITH VIORST, AUTHOR, Necessary Losses and Imperfect Control "Written with brilliance and insight, Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision takes us on a daring, at times chilling, journey to the early years of psychoanalysis, revealing both the human weaknesses and the professional triumphs of its founder . . . . Cutting away the accretions of fabrication and romance cloaking Sigmund Freud, Breger has reinstated historical honesty to its rightful, high place, but the figure who emerges at the end of this breathlessly honest biography is quite as extraordinary as the legend concocted by Freud and perpetuated by his followers. Fresh, vigorous, and lucid"-PHILIP M. BROMBERG, Ph.D., CLINICAL PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY "Louis Breger's fine new biography of Freud is a welcome contribution to the existing literature and a corrective to much of it. It is also one of the best intellectual histories of the origin and development of psychoanalysis I have read in recent years. Breger is to be commended for his original research, the objectivity of his views, and the elegance and grace of his writing"-DEIRDRE BAIR, NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER FOR Samuel Beckett AND AUTHOR OF A FORTHCOMING BIOGRAPHY OF CARL JUNG "Finally, the Freud biography we have long been waiting for. With the history of Europe in the background, we follow with fascination Freud's journey from an impoverished childhood filled with losses to worldly fame, ending in exile in England. We come to understand the impact of Freud's difficult personality on the development of his brilliant as well as questionable theo

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LOUIS BREGER is Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies, Emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology and founding President of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He has been a practicing psychotherapist/psychoanalyst for over thirty-five years and has published numerous scholarly articles and books dealing with dreams, personality development, literary interpretation, and psychoanalytic theory.

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"Finally, the Freud biography we have long been waiting for."?Sophie Freud, Freud?s granddaughter and Professor Emeritus of Social Work, Simmons College

More Praise for Freud: Darkness in the midst of Vision

"Rich and readable . . . a thoughtfully complex account of a great but flawed man. . . absolutely fascinating."?Judith Viorst, author, Necessary Losses and Imperfect Control

"A foray into the past that matters a great deal."?The New York Times Book Review

"Masterly . . . this landmark work conveys a new sense of one of the great flawed men and movements of the last century."?Library Journal (starred review)

"Groundbreaking . . . Freudian analysis (literally) at its best."?Booklist

"Perceptive . . . Breger?s sane and lucid study must henceforth count among the indispensable books on Freud."?Times Literary Supplement

"Highly readable . . . Breger maintains a judiciously skeptical distance from Freud and Freud?s own self-mythologizing, yet never loses sympathy for the man himself."?J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Booker Prize

More Praise for Freud: Darkness in the midst of Vision

Rich and readable . . . a thoughtfully complex account of a great but flawed man. . . absolutely fascinating.-Judith Viorst, author, Necessary Losses and Imperfect Control

A foray into the past that matters a great deal.-The New York Times Book Review

Masterly . . . this landmark work conveys a new sense of one of the great flawed men and movements of the last century.-Library Journal (starred review)

Groundbreaking . . . Freudian analysis (literally) at its best.-Booklist

Perceptive . . . Breger's sane and lucid study must henceforth count among the indispensable books on Freud.-Times Literary Supplement

Highly readable . . . Breger maintains a judiciously skeptical distance from Freud and Freud's own self-mythologizing, yet never loses sympathy for the man himself.-J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Booker Prize

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Excerpt

Freud's Life: The First Thirty Years

A Traumatic Infancy

Freud has emerged as a person stranger and less explicable by his own theoriesthan he himself realized.

?Charles Rycroft

SIGMUND FREUD was born in 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia (today Príbor, in theCzech Republic), a small market town one hundred fifty miles north of Vienna,the first child of the newly married Jacob and Amalia Nathanson Freud. Freibergwas then part of the Austro-Hungarian or Hapsburg Empire, a vast region thatincluded parts of what later became Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania,the Ukraine, Yugoslavia, and present-day Austria. Of the 4,500 inhabitants ofFreiberg at that time, only 130?about 3 percent?were Jews like the Freuds;there were an equally small number of Protestants. The rest of thetownsfolk?over 4,000?were Czech Catholics. The new baby was named SigismundSchlomo. Sigismund was a German name from the word Sieg, or victory.Schlomo?Solomon in English?was a Hebrew name bestowed in honor of Jacob'srecently deceased father. The two names reflected the historical and culturalmilieu of Jacob and his family, positioned between traditional Jewish life andthe new path of emancipation and assimilation that was just opening to them inthe middle of the nineteenth century.

Jews had been a persecuted minority in Europe for centuries, their fortuneswaxing and waning at different times and in different countries. Under someprogressive regimes, they prospered as merchants, traders, and advisers tokings, while at other times they were subject to oppression, legalrestrictions, banishment, and pogroms in which they were slaughtered by thethousands. Such persecution forced families to move from one country toanother, and the father of Kallamon Jacob Freud?to give him his full name?hadsettled in what was then the Austro-Hungarian region of Galicia (now part ofthe Ukraine), in the village of Tysmenitz. During Jacob's youth, half thepopulation of Tysmenitz was Jewish; many were traders and merchants, and thetown was also a center of Jewish learning and scholarship. Jews in the village,or shtetl, of Tysmenitz followed centuries-old Orthodox traditions:they celebrated their own holidays, studied the Talmud, adhered to dietarylaws, and spoke Yiddish among themselves, all of which isolated them from theirgentile neighbors. Forbidden from owning land, they served as merchants,shopkeepers, and traders. As in many of the shtetls of eastern Europe, the Jewsinteracted with their gentile neighbors, yet constituted a world untothemselves with their separate religious practices, customs, and language.

Jacob's maternal grandfather, Siskind Hofmann, traveled between Galicia andMoravia, trading in wool, linen, honey, and tallow; Jacob became his juniorpartner and would work as a merchant and salesman for the rest of his life. Histravels took Jacob away from the narrow confines of the shtetl and introducedhim to a somewhat wider world. These journeys took him to Freiberg, where hebecame a permanent resident in 1852. Sally Kanner, whom he had married as avery young man, did not join him on his travels; she died in Tysmenitz beforehe moved to Freiberg. His two sons from this first marriage?Emanuel andPhilipp?joined their father in Freiberg to work in his business there.

As the nineteenth century progressed, discrimination toward Jews graduallylessened. The rise of the Enlightenment?particularly in Germany?brought aboutincreased religious tolerance. The Austrian emperor Joseph II issued aTolerance Ordinance in 1781 that did away with many restrictions on the Jews inhis realm, and Prussia officially emancipated its Jewish population in 1812.The revolution that shook western Europe in 1848 had, as one benefit, greaterreligious freedom. Franz Joseph, emperor of Austria-Hungary throughout much ofFreud's lifetime, granted full rights to Austrian Jews in 1849. When Jacob setup in Freiberg as a trader in wool, he was the beneficiary of these newfreedoms. The old prejudices did not disappear, of course; Jacob was still a"tolerated Jew" who had to apply to the authorities every year for permissionto pursue his business. Nevertheless, full political and civic rights and theabolition of many restrictions meant that Jews were in a far better positionthen they had been for centuries.

The new freedoms, along with contact with the world outside the shtetl,encouraged Jacob to shed many of the traditions of Jewish life. He was part ofa generation in transition, people who were beginning to think of themselves asAustrians or Germans as much as Jews, who moved away from Orthodox religiouspractices and adopted the customs, mores, and languages of their new countries.Where his ancestors spoke Yiddish and wrote in Hebrew, Jacob?who knew theselanguages?conducted his business in German. By the time he married Amalia, hisnew family was set on this assimilated path: they continued to celebrate thetraditional Jewish holidays of Purim and Passover, but more as festive events;the Orthodox practices of their forebears were gone and the new family wasraised as culturally but not religiously Jewish. Still, with all the newfreedom and assimilation, memories of persecution hovered in the air: therewere many reminders in daily life of their position as Jews; the effect ofcenturies of mistreatment, and the possibility of new violence, could not beerased from their minds. They were, after all, a tiny minority in Freiberg,surrounded by people who did not share their history or religion.

Following the death of his first wife, Jacob may have married a woman namedRebecca, who apparently also died. It is not known for certain whether thiswoman even existed but, if she did, Freud as an adult showed no awareness ofher, though she would have been known to his older half brothers and, no doubt,his mother. Jacob and Amalia Nathanson were married in 1855, when he was fortyand she twenty. Jacob has been described as fair and, in the later words of hisgrandson Martin, tall and broad-shouldered. Photographs of him around the ageof fifty reveal a handsome and distinguished-looking man. He was a person ofpleasant manners, easygoing, with a sense of humor?he was, after all, asalesman?and, at the time of his marriage to Amalia, somewhat successful inbusiness.

Little is known about Amalia Nathanson's background. She was born in the townof Brody in eastern Galicia and lived for a time in Odessa, where her olderbrothers settled. With her parents, and her younger brother Julius, she movedto Vienna when she was a child, and it was here that she and Jacob met. Herfather was a merchant and the family, at least in later years, was not poor.She was an attractive young woman, slender and dark, and possessed of greatvitality and a powerful personality. Jacob and Amalia were married by a rabbiaffiliated with the Reform movement, a further sign of their move away from theOrthodox traditions of their ancestors.

Sigismund Schlomo Freud was the firstborn son of the new marriage between Jacoband Amalia. He was known as "Sigi" throughout his childhood and his motherstill called him this when he was in his seventies, though he used the nameSigismund throughout adolescence, shortening it to Sigmund around the time heentered the university. Jacob, Amalia, and their infant son were soon joined bytwo additional babies. While Jacob's business seemed sufficient to support hisfamily, they could afford no more than a single rented room above the locksmithshop of a Czech family named Zajic in a building that still stands in Príbor.The family's living conditions were cramped, and which continued for a numberof years after they moved to Vienna, a situation that exposed little Sigi tomany intimate details of his parents' lives; at this time, babies were born athome and nursed in the conjugal bed. And they died at home as well.

The young Freud was part of an extended family in Freiberg that made up a smallworld unto itself. Jacob's two grown sons from his first marriage?Emanuel, agetwenty-four at the time of Sigmund's birth in 1856, and Philipp, agetwenty?had moved to Freiberg to work with their father. Emanuel was married toa woman named Marie and they had two children of their own: a sonJohn?Sigmund's nephew, though one year older?and a daughter Pauline, aboutseven months younger than Sigi, infants who would soon become his firstplaymates. Philipp, his unmarried half brother, lived across the street fromJacob and Amalia, while Emanuel, his wife, and his children occupied anapartment a few blocks away.

All of the adult Freuds worked together in the family business, buying woolwoven by the local peasants, dyeing and finishing it, and selling it tomanufacturers in other locations. Jacob was, in other words, a middleman whosebusiness depended on contacts and trade with customers in other cities. Sincethe business required the participation of many of the family members,including Amalia, the infant Sigi was left with a nursemaid, a Czech woman whoserved as an important substitute mother in Amalia's absence. If we imaginethings from the point of view of the very young Freud, his was a world of bigpeople and small children: his parents and half brothers?who were unclefigures?his nephew and niece?who were really like cousins?and the threewomen who mothered him in various ways?his mother, his nursemaid, andEmanuel's wife, Marie. Interestingly, several of Freud's adult dreams, analyzedin The Interpretation of Dreams, depict him with three mothers.

Although Jacob, his older sons, and his new wife were relatively recentarrivals in Freiberg, he probably had some contacts from his earlier businessdealings there. Nevertheless, their status as members of a tiny minority musthave given them a sense of isolation, a state that would have turned themtoward each other for social and emotional support. They did know at least onelocal Jewish family, the Flusses, whose father, Ignaz, also came from Tysmenitzand was in the same business as Jacob, and whose son, Emil, was the same age asSigmund. Emil remained a friend after the family moved to Vienna, and othermembers of the Fluss clan played significant roles in Freud's adolescence.

Within the extended family, Sigmund had two playmates: the older John and theyounger Pauline. Family members told how he and John played and scrappedtogether and described their misdeeds and teasing of the younger Pauline. AsFreud himself later wrote to his confidant Wilhelm Fliess at the time of hisself-analysis: "I have also long known the companion of my misdeeds between theages of one and two years; it is my nephew, a year older than myself. . . . Thetwo of us seem occasionally to have behaved cruelly to my niece, who was a yearyounger."

In a rare published account of his earliest years, Freud recalled playing inthe fields of Freiberg with two other children and painted an idyllic pastoralscene. But whatever happiness there may have been was soon overtaken by a hostof calamities. Even before Sigmund's birth, the family had been marked bydeath. Jacob lost his first wife, Sally, his second, Rebecca, and his father,Schlomo, the last just six months before his son was born. Emanuel and Philipphad lost their mother, their first stepmother, and their grandfather. Thesedeaths were followed during the next years by a series of losses that wouldhave powerful traumatic effects on the young boy.

The losses began when Amalia, quickly pregnant after she had Sigmund, gavebirth to a second son, Julius. This new brother was Freud's first rival, acompetitor who took his mother away from him when he was just eleven monthsold. She named the new baby after her own younger brother Julius, who had diedof tuberculosis at the age of twenty, just a month before she gave birth to hersecond child. The infant Sigmund's first exposure to death followed close athand; his baby brother died of an intestinal infection about six or eightmonths after he was born, when Sigmund was close to two. It is almost certainthat the death occurred in the one-room apartment and that Freud was exposed toit. He certainly witnessed his parents' and older half brothers' reaction tothis death.

Amalia was, in all probability, depressed following the death of her brotherand his namesake, her half-year-old son. Although there is no direct account ofher grief, it is an almost universal occurrence when a mother suffers the deathof an infant. Not only did the very young Freud lose his mother to a rival, butshe became unavailable in her unhappy state following her losses. Because thedeaths of Jacob's first and second wives a few years earlier, and grandfatherSchlomo's death shortly before Sigmund's birth, had been assimilated by thefamily, the acute periods of mourning would have passed. But the deaths ofAmalia's brother and her new baby were fresh. It is a good guess that the lossof this baby, in the context of the other deaths, created a family atmosphereof mourning and depression. The infant Sigmund would have been immersed in thisatmosphere at a very young age and, with only a limited understanding of death,must have felt vulnerable and fearful that he too might die, become sick, ordisappear. The death of Julius and his mother's grief could be expected to setoff highly threatening reactions in a child that small?fears that he wouldlose those he most needed?reactions that the bereaved parents would be littleable to respond to, if they were even aware of them.

The losses of Freud's first two years produced long-lasting fears associatedwith maternal absence and death, fears illustrated by a terrifying dream he hadat the age of eight or nine, which he recorded in his forties in TheInterpretation of Dreams. The dream occurred at a time in his middlechildhood when new babies were still being born and his mother was occasionallyabsent from home due to tuberculosis, the terrible disease of the nineteenthcentury. In the dream he saw his "beloved mother, with a peculiarly peaceful,sleeping expression on her features, being carried into the room by two orthree people with bird's beaks and laid upon the bed." He associated thefigures with funerals and "awoke in tears and screaming, and interrupted myparents' sleep." He wrote:

The expression on my mother's features in the dream was copied from the view Ihad of my grandfather [mother's father] a few days before his death as he laysnoring in a coma. The interpretation carried out in the dream . . . musttherefore have been that my mother was dying; the funerary relief fitted inwith this. I awoke in anxiety, which did not cease till I had woken my parentsup. I remember that I suddenly grew calm when I saw my mother's face, as thoughI needed to be reassured that she was not dead.

This anxiety dream was a clear example of the continuing power of Freud'sfear of the death/ loss of his mother. He "awoke in tears and screaming," histerror directly felt. The immediate trigger for the dream was the death ofanother parental figure, his maternal grandfather, which, combined withAmalia's preoccupation with new babies and absence due to tuberculosis, set offthe deeper fear that he might lose her forever.

This long-lasting connection between Freud's mother and the theme of death wasagain illustrated in a dream from his adult years, reported inInterpretation of Dreams, in which he found himself in a kitchen insearch of food. This led to associations of "the three Fates who spin thedestiny of man, and I knew that one of the three women?the inn-hostess in thedream?was the mother who gives life, and furthermore?as in my own case?givesthe living creature its first nourishment. Love and hunger, I reflected, meetat a woman's breast."

This stimulated a childhood memory:

When I was six years old and was given my first lessons by my mother, I wasexpected to believe that we were all made of earth and must therefore return toearth. This did not suit me and I expressed doubts of the doctrine. My motherthereupon rubbed the palms of her hands together?just as she did in makingdumplings, except that there was no dough between them?and showed me theblackish scales of epidermis produced by the friction as a proof thatwe were made of earth. My astonishment at this ocular demonstration knew nobounds and I acquiesced in the belief which I was later to hear expressed inthe words: "Thou owest Nature a death."

The death of his baby brother Julius, and the loss of his mother's attentionand care, were the sources of the infant Freud's own anxiety and grief.However, as an adult, he was never able to sort out these experiences or relatethem to his own fear and unhappiness. He was able to reconstruct his feelingsof guilt in relation to the death of Julius because, like almost every youngchild who is replaced by a new infant, he had wished to get rid of his rival,and it was this guilt that he emphasized in his later accounts of these events.In the midst of his self-analysis he wrote to Fliess: "I greeted myone-year-younger brother, who died after a few months, with adverse wishes andgenuine childhood jealousy; and . . . his death left the germ ofself-reproaches in me."

But he was never able to see his own reactions to the loss of Amalia to newbabies, the sense that she had betrayed him, and the yearning for her love. Heclearly felt these things as a young child and, in his later writings, coulddescribe them, but he always attributed the reactions to others?never himself.Even at the age of seventy-five, in his essay Femininity, he wrote:

The turning away from the mother is accompanied by hostility; the attachment tothe mother ends in hate. A hate of that kind may become very striking and lastall through life. The reproach against the mother which goes back furthest isthat she gave the child too little milk?which is construed against her as lackof love. The next accusation against the child's mother flares up when the nextbaby appears in the nursery. If possible the connection with oral frustrationis preserved: the mother could not or would not give the child any more milkbecause she needed the nourishment for the new arrival. In cases in which thetwo children are so close in age that lactation is prejudiced by the secondpregnancy, this reproach acquires a real basis, and it is a remarkable factthat a child, even with an age difference of only 11 months, is not too youngto take notice of what is happening. But what the child grudges the unwantedintruder and rival is not only the suckling but all the other signs of maternalcare. It feels that it has been dethroned, despoiled, damaged in its rights; itcasts a jealous hatred upon the new baby and develops a grievance against thefaithless mother. . . . we rarely form a correct idea of the strength of thesejealous impulses, of the tenacity with which they persist, and of the magnitudeof their influence upon later development. Especially as this jealousy isconstantly receiving fresh nourishment in the later years of childhood and thewhole shock is repeated with the birth of each new brother or sister.

This passage captured the powerful emotions Freud still felt over seventyyears later in regard to his mother and the many later babies that displacedhim. Amalia gave birth to Julius when Sigi was eleven months old;significantly, this was exactly the age he chose in his example. And the newarrival did deprive him of her milk and "all the other signs of maternal care."And Julius was followed by six more babies before he reached the age of ten,repeating the "whole shock" and reinforcing the sense of being "dethroned,despoiled" and "damaged." This passage gave an accurate account of Freud'searly experience of his mother, including his anger at her and the babies whodisplaced him. But he did not connect any of this to himself, or even to malebabies as a group; in his essay Femininity, only little girls werepresumed to have such feelings.

Following the death of Julius, Amalia became pregnant again, giving birth to adaughter, Anna, when Freud was two and a half. While his wish to get rid ofJulius was a reconstruction that he later made?he had no direct memory ofit?he did recall his dislike of this sister, which persisted throughout hislife. Anna was followed by four more sisters, two of whom, Rosa and Adolfine,he was rather fond of; the final sibling, Alexander, was born when he was ten.It was a repetitive pattern: throughout his childhood, his mother was pregnantand he was constantly losing her to new babies. The combination of his mother'sgrief, following the deaths of her brother and second son, and her seeminglyendless pregnancies and the demands of new infants, meant that the young Freudhad very little of her time, attention, and care. But it was not only hismother's ministrations that he lost in these first years; the trauma wascompounded by further losses, including that of an important substitute mother.

Freud was cared for during his first two-and-a-half years by a nursemaid, aCzech Catholic woman?scholars disagree about whether her name was Monika Zajicor Resi Willek?who told him pious stories, took him to church, and shaped hisearly education and sense of himself. While he later described her with thewords he heard from his mother?" elderly, ugly and clever"?his own memories,unearthed in the self-analysis, struck a different note. In the midst of hisrecollection of scenes from the Freiberg years, he wrote to Fliess that hisnursemaid "told me a great deal about God Almighty and hell and . . . instilledin me a high opinion of my own capacities." She was a vital maternal figure whosupported his early sense of importance and precocious intelligence. His motherlater told him that he would come home from the Catholic church with hisnursemaid and tell the family "how God carried on." The bright little boythought the priest was God, and the Catholic rituals made a vivid impression onhim. His memory of the nursemaid, as reported to Fliess, was most significant:"I shall be grateful to the memory of the old woman who provided me at such anearly age with the means for living and going on living. As you see, the oldliking is breaking through again today."

This memory, from the time when death and death fears permeated the family,shows the nursemaid's importance in sustaining his will to live and alsodemonstrates his direct affection for her, a feeling that came back to himalmost forty years later. This kind of open love?" the old liking is breakingthrough again today"?was almost never voiced in relation to Amalia. And thenhe lost the nursemaid, too. She was caught stealing by his half brotherPhilipp, arrested for petty theft, and sent to prison. He never saw her again.

That the young Freud blended together the traumatic losses of both his motherand nursemaid is evident in an important memory that he unearthed during hisself-analysis. He recalled a scene in which "my mother was nowhere to be found;I was crying in despair." His older half brother Philipp "unlocked a closet(Kasten) for me, and when I did not find my mother inside it either, Icried even more until, slender and beautiful, she came in through the door."Puzzling through this memory, he hit upon a solution: "When I missed my mother,I was afraid she had vanished from me, just as the old woman had a short timebefore. So I must have heard that the old woman had been locked up andtherefore must have believed that my mother had been locked up too?or rather,had been 'boxed up': eingekastelt."

This memory turns on the double meaning of the German word Kasten?boxor closet?also used colloquially for jail, as in "put in the box." The veryyoung Freud took his brother's words that the nursemaid had been put in aKasten concretely, as children are wont to do, and, in his despair,hoped to find her?and the mother that he had also lost?in the closet. Thedisturbing power of both losses is seen in his crying and the persistence ofthe memory over the years. The Kasten vignette also shows one way thatFreud adapted to his losses; he remembered his mother in ideal terms?" slenderand beautiful," not pregnant as she in fact was for most of hischildhood?while he referred to the nursemaid?a woman of around forty?as"old" and associated her with stealing and guilt. In fact, the words he used tocharacterize her?" elderly, ugly and clever"?make her sound like a witch in afairy tale.

Freud was two and a half when his nursemaid suddenly vanished from his life;this was also the time when he lost his mother to another baby, his sisterAnna. Current understanding of the psychological capacities of children thisage makes clear that he would have been little able to understand these events,and even less able to deal with them effectively. They were traumas thatoverwhelmed the capacities of the young boy. Following soon after these losses,Jacob Freud's business collapsed. Earlier accounts attributed the businessfailure to an economic crisis that swept the Moravian textile industry in the1850s and to anti-Semitism, but more recent research has revealed that there isno foundation to these explanations; the local economy was, in fact, booming,and there was no more prejudice against Jews than there had been in previousyears. Jacob's compatriot Ignaz Fluss, who was also a wool merchant, became thesuccessful owner of a textile mill in Freiberg at this time. Clearly, thebusiness failure was a result of Jacob's own incompetence, an explanationsupported by his later work history; he was never again successful in business,never able to earn much of a living.

The collapse of Jacob's business forced the family to leave Freiberg; Freud, ina rare later reference to this time, described it as the "original catastrophethat involved my whole existence." The departure broke up the close-knit,extended family that had provided Sigmund with what security he enjoyed duringhis first three years. His adult half brothers Emanuel and Philipp, Emanuel'swife Marie, his playmate and best friend John, and John's sister Pauline, allvanished from his life. Emanuel and his family, along with Philipp, moved toEngland, where they pursued their trade in Manchester, the great textilecenter. Children without reliable maternal attachments typically gain securityfrom other relationships and their familiar surroundings; losing the othermembers of the extended family, his playmates, and his home added weight to thetraumas he had already suffered. Jacob, Amalia, Sigmund, and baby Anna leftFreiberg for Leipzig, Germany, where they remained for about a year, but Jacobwas not able to establish his business there and they were forced to moveagain, this time to Vienna, where Amalia's family lived, and there they settledpermanently.

Upon their departure from Freiberg, when Freud was three and a half, his fearof train travel made its first appearance. At the railway station, the gas jetsused for illumination made him think of "souls burning in hell," an associationwith his lost nursemaid, who had told him "a great deal about God almighty andhell." Interestingly, the little boy was not frightened by the other strangethings he encountered at the station, including the large steam locomotive,which might have seemed overpowering to a small child. His phobia was quitespecific; he was afraid that the train would leave without him, that he wouldbe left behind, that he would lose his mother and father, just as he had losthis nursemaid a year before. This travel fear would reverberate throughout hislife and reach phobic dimensions during the time of his self-analysis; as hewrote to Fliess, "You yourself have seen my travel anxiety at its height." Asin his infancy, his fear was that the train would leave without him: as anadult, he was always anxious to get to the railway station well ahead of time.The travel phobia persisted for many years, as illustrated by his difficultyvisiting Rome. For years he longed to see the Italian capital, yet keptinventing obstacles that interfered with the trip. Similarly, his famous voyageto the United States in 1909 was accompanied by a fainting incident just beforedeparture, as well as a number of other anxiety symptoms?stomachaches,diarrhea?that he complained about for years afterward.

The traumatic experiences of Freud's first four years vanished from hisawareness. In contemporary terms, the events and images were stored as physicaland emotional sensations, but the memories were not available to consciousness;they were dissociated, not integrated into a coherent sense of self. Theyexisted in a separate compartment of his personality, protecting him from theirdisruptive effects. When he did look back on his early years, he cast them inpleasant imagery, smoothing out and reconfiguring the traumatic events of hisinfancy. He remembered Freiberg, the scene of his early fear and misery, inideal terms, as he did his mother; Vienna, where the family eventually faredbetter, was the object of both love and hate. His nursemaid, who he onlyreferred to in the Fliess letters, was recalled with a mixture of love anddistaste. The dissociation of his traumatic losses was supported by a happyfantasy of Freiberg; the negative emotions came out elsewhere. For the rest ofhis life he would find a variety of targets for his fears, unhappiness,disappointments, and hatreds.

By the age of three, Freud had lost his two most important caretakers?hismother and his nursemaid?the first in an atmosphere of illness, death, andgrief, and the second in one of crime and guilt. His lifelong preoccupationwith illness and death?both his own and of others close to him?had its originhere. Then the collapse of his father's business dispersed the extended family,causing the loss of his "uncles" and "aunt," his playmates, and the only homehe knew. Jacob, Amalia, and their two infants were forced to move twice; thesewere years of financial insecurity and the births of five more children. If thethree-year-old Freud felt deprived and frightened, so did his parents as theyfaced poverty and an uncertain future. It is unlikely that they would have beenable to give him reassurance and emotional support when they were overcome withtheir own troubles.

As a very young child, Freud could do nothing about the painful realities thatengulfed him; he almost certainly felt frightened, helpless, shunted aside, andovercome with longing for love and care. As Charlotte Brontë put it in hernovel Jane Eyre, he experienced "such dread as children only can feel."There was no one to comfort or understand him. The adults controlledeverything: they were present or absent, Philipp had his nursemaid sent away,the extended family members disappeared, his father lost his business and waslikely preoccupied?if not despairing?over their plight. Although Jacob laterappears as a kindly and well-meaning, if somewhat hapless, father, he wascertainly not able to protect his son during these early years.

This account of Freud's life, emphasizing the traumatic losses and disruptionshe suffered as a little boy, has been drawn from all the available biographicaland historical evidence. His own version of his childhood makes reference tosome of these events but, ultimately, gave major weight to his sexual desirefor his mother and fear of his rival-father as the most important sources ofhis conflicts and fears. Years later, in his self-analysis, Freud rememberedsome of the events of the Freiberg period: the birth and death of Julius, hisplay with John and Pauline, his love for his old nursemaid and herdisappearance. Reexperiencing his losses set off potentially overwhelminganxiety and sadness, feelings that he was not able to tolerate or contain onhis own, and he turned away from them to what seemed like a great discovery. Hewrote to Fliess:

A single idea of general value dawned on me. I have found, in my own case too,the phenomena of being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and Inow consider it a universal event in early childhood. . . . Later between twoand two and a half years?my libido toward matrem was awakened, namely,on the occasion of a journey with her from Leipzig to Vienna, during which wemust have spent the night together and there must have been an opportunity ofseeing her nudam. . . . You yourself have seen my travel anxiety at itsheight.

In these passages, Freud asserted that seeing his mother naked was the primarysource of his travel phobia and other manifestations of anxiety.(Interestingly, he misremembered his age, his first train journey havingoccurred at age three and a half, not two and a half, though the earlier timewas when he lost the nursemaid.) According to this explanation, fear wasaroused because his sexual wishes for his mother brought him into conflict withhis powerful father. These ideas, of course, were elaborated over the yearsinto his theory of the Oedipus complex and used to explain Sophocles'Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare's Hamlet, as early as the Fliessletters, as well as his own troubling emotional states. Eventually, thisinterpretation became the centerpiece of the psychoanalytic theory of neurosis,a theory which located the boy's anxiety in fear of castration at the hands ofthe father as punishment for his sexual desire for the mother. The details ofthe discovery of the Oedipus complex?or, more accurately, its invention?inthe self-analysis are critical given the great importance Freud gave to it.

The contrast between Freud's memories of his nursemaid?or his anxietydream about his mother's death from age eight or nine?and his "memory" of hisoedipal feelings is significant. In the first, he felt "the old liking" for thenursemaid and, in the Kasten incident, directly recalled his crying anddespair. The same was true of the terrifying nightmare of his mother's death.In the case of the "memory" of his oedipal arousal, the distancingLatinisms?libido, matrem, nudam?were employed, and he guessed "wemust have spent the night together and there must have been an opportunity ofseeing her nudam." In other words, he had no direct image or feeling for thisoedipal event; it was a reconstruction, an invention.

Freud spent his first three and a half years in the one-room apartment inFreiberg, and most of his subsequent childhood in small quarters in the Jewishghetto of Vienna. The precocious little boy witnessed many distressing events,including the births and nursing of the seven babies born in his first tenyears, deaths, illnesses, and his parents' reactions to their poverty andbusiness failures. Exposure to all this was no doubt far more disturbing thanseeing his mother unclothed. In other words, Freud created his oedipal theorybecause his traumatic losses aroused overwhelming emotions that were impossibleto manage alone, in a self-analysis. By turning to the oedipal story,he created a comforting myth, one which allowed him to think that what mostdisturbed him was his adultlike sexual desire for his mother, and also promotedhis weak father to a position of kingly power.

The distorting effects of Freud's substitution of the less threatening oedipalexplanation was paralleled by his reworking of other childhood events. In theessay Femininity, for example, he stated that it is only the littlegirl who feels "dethroned, despoiled, damaged [and who] casts jealous hatredupon the new baby and develops a grievance against the faithless mother." Hecontinued, "A mother is only brought unlimited satisfaction by her relation toa son; this is altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence ofall human relationships." This expressed his wishful fantasy?but certainly notthe reality?of his early years. A related distortion appeared in hisinterpretation of the nightmare from age eight or nine. After describing histerror and sobbing over the sight of his dead mother, he constructed acomplicated and strained interpretation in which the dream was supposed to bedriven by his sexual desires: "I was not anxious because I had dreamt that mymother was dying; but I interpreted the dream in that sense in my preconsciousrevision of it because I was already under the influence of the anxiety. Theanxiety can be traced back, when repression is taken into account, to anobscure and evidently sexual craving that had found expression in the visualcontent of the dream."

Rivalrous feelings between a boy and his father are central to Freud's theoryof the Oedipus complex, and he convinced himself that this aggressive conflictwas the origin of his own symptoms. In reality, there were many rivals for hismother's love, though it is not likely that Jacob, who was probably away fromhome on business trips for long periods, was a significant one in this earlyperiod; two-year-olds don't have oedipal fantasies, nor was his fatherconnected to the very painful loss of the nurse. There were no direct memoriesof such rivalry and fear between the young Sigmund and his father, nor did theyappear in later writings about himself, though he saw such conflicts everywhereelse: in his patients, his disciples, characters in literature?indeed, inalmost everyone. What is apparent in the emotion-laden memories from theself-analysis?in contrast to theory-based reconstructions?is how the angerand rivalry aroused in the young Freud by the birth of Julius wasretrospectively described as the source of his guilt feelings after the babydied. In addition, in his own recollections he did not locate rivalry and guiltin relation to his father but, rather, in his competitive play with his nephewJohn, who he described as the first of many ambivalent figures in his life. Ashe put it in 1925: "An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always beenindispensable to my emotional life; I have always been able to create themanew, and not infrequently my childish ideal [his nephew John] has been soclosely approached that friend and enemy have coincided in the same person; butnot simultaneously, of course, as was the case in my early childhood."

Speaking of John and the death of Julius he said, "This nephew and this youngerbrother have determined, then, what is neurotic, but also what is intense inall my friendships." Freud's attribution of guilt feelings following the deathof Julius was not in keeping with the psychology of a two-year-old. The same istrue with regard to his rivalrous play with his one year older nephew. Freuddescribed the "misdeeds" he and John committed and their "cruel" behaviortowards his niece?John's sister?Pauline, which he framed in sexual terms,imagining himself and John attempting to rape or "deflower" the little girl.Once again, this does not fit with the capacities of a two-year-old. The littleboys no doubt misbehaved and treated Pauline roughly, but it is unlikely thattheir actions, or his aggressive play with John, were the basis for a lifelongpattern of love and hate in intimate relationships. Children that age don'thave rape fantasies that they feel guilty about years later, nor is it likelythat his aggressive-competitive play with John could have had the long-lastingeffects that he attributed to it.

The powerful and lasting ambivalence that Freud described?his need for "anintimate friend and a hated enemy"?must be based on a firmer foundation thanthis innocuous sibling play and fighting. Knowing what transpired with hismother at this time, it seems likely that the "memories" of his feelings aboutJulius, John, and Pauline symbolized the more threatening reactions of love andhate he felt toward Amalia, reactions which continued throughout his childhood.The loss of her to new babies, her later absences due to illness, and hisfrustrated longing for her care continued for many years. The emotionalreactions that remained with him after the births of Julius and Anna werereinforced by the arrivals of the next five infants. These losses andfrustrations, repeated over and over, were a much firmer basis for the lifelongpattern of ambivalence than the reactions to the playmates of his infancy, apicture that he recon-structed in his forties. But while he felt love and hatetoward his mother, his desperate need for her made it impossible to consciouslyacknowledge these feelings. To the end of his long life he remained unaware ofthe full range of his feelings for Amalia.

There is a common thread running through all Freud's reconstructions of hisinfancy. He continually pictured himself as more able, more competent, morepowerful than he could have been at the ages described. He emphasized hiscompetitiveness, his rivalry, his anger, and the guilt occasioned by his deathwishes. While these are certainly observable reactions in young children, theyare found at later ages than those Freud sets forth. An infant under two,exposed to the death of a baby and his parents' grief, would feel frightened,bewildered, lost, and helpless. As additional losses occurred?as they did?theanxiety would be reinforced: who will disappear/ die next? His mother? Himself?In fact, anxiety about her death, and his own, continued well into his adultyears. The psychoanalyst-scholar Seigfried Bernfeld has done a careful analysisand noted: "In the self-confessions scattered throughout his writings, Freudfigures at times as a villain, a parricide, ambitious, petty, revengeful, butnever as a lover?save for a few very superficial allusions to his wife."

While the infant Freud's anger was part of his reaction to the early traumaticevents, his stress on it, and the corresponding neglect of his fear andhelplessness, was a way of protecting himself against these more overwhelmingemotions. His reconstruction of his early years created a picture in which hehad greater control, was not the helpless little infant he in fact was. Littleboys certainly have rivalrous feelings toward their fathers, and two-year-oldscommonly feel angry and competitive with new babies, and even wish themdead?within their limited understanding of death?but such competitivefeelings are not necessarily a source of serious conflict. But it was safer forthe adult Freud to focus on them than on his terror and helplessness. Theinterpretation he created to explain his own childhood became the prototype forhis understanding of everyone, a foundation that he relied on throughout hislife.

Continues...

Excerpted from Freudby Louis Breger Copyright © 2001 by Louis Breger. Excerpted by permission.
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Wiley
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0471078581
• ISBN 13: 9780471078586
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 484
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