Sigmund Freud was born 150 years old this week, and his stock has never been lower. Almost no intellectual or character fault has not been ascribed to him. It is now as fashionable to revile him as it once was to revere him; he is regarded as little better than a charlatan who would have been more accurately named Fraud than Freud.
His theories have been thoroughly exploded and his life’s work undermined to the point of complete destruction by conclusive historical and biographical research. And yet almost everyone suspects that, despite all that has been written against him, despite the myriad books debunking him, he remains a greater man than any of his critics. For if he were quite as negligible a figure as he is now accounted, why would it be necessary to throw so many stones at him for so long?
Of course, historical importance and intellectual merit are not quite the same thing. A man’s ideas may be utterly worthless yet highly influential, or brilliant but without significant echo. With Freud, it is not easy to say precisely what his achievement was; but a man who created, in Auden’s phrase, a climate of opinion the world over must have been out of the ordinary.
The charges against him are many and serious. Far from having been the lone pioneer of the unconscious mind that he claimed to have been, he was a continuer and follower of the ideas of other men, whose influence he dishonestly failed to acknowledge. In short, Freud was a mythomaniac of gigantic proportions who had no hesitation in rewriting the past.
He was intellectually dishonest. He was well aware that his patients were not cured in the way that his published case histories claimed that they were (he fell out with his much more scrupulous colleague and coauthor, Josef Breuer, over this), and that therefore the claims he made for his method were false; hence all his theorising about the structure of the mind was based on no scientific evidence whatsoever.
He claimed to be a natural scientist but in fact had little appreciation of scientific method and acted more as the leader of a cult or new religion than as a disinterested searcher after truth.
Whenever a disciple, such as Jung or Adler, disagreed with him, he did not so much refute his ideas as seek to ruin him by excommunication from the “true church” of psychoanalysis, which was a reaction to criticism more appropriate to a theocrat than to a real scientist. Freud wanted uncritical admiration and agreement from his followers, or rather disciples, not honest criticism, which he believed (or pretended to believe ) was the consequence of an unresolved Oedipus complex.
The influence of his ideas, albeit in vulgarised and simplified versions, has been culturally baleful and even catastrophic. For example, the notion that dysfunctional behaviour in adulthood has its origin in infantile or childhood traumas has led to a general belief in the existence of buried psychological treasure which, once unearthed and expressed in clear terms, automatically, in and of itself, causes the dysfunctional behaviour to cease, without any further conscious effort to control it on the patient’s part.
Freud thus strengthened a tendency for people to place the blame for their vices first on their parents and secondly on the doctors who failed to “cure” them of those vices. He was one of the most powerful modern destroyers of the concept of personal responsibility.
His view that the repression of childhood sexuality caused, or could cause, neuroses or even psychoses resulted in the crude sexualisation of culture, for it implied that attempts to control oneself were not merely unhealthy but dangerous. Freud was thus the principal intellectual influence behind our current libertinism.
He also weakened the place of rational argument in human affairs. He made it possible for people always to argue that those with whom they disagreed were not so much mistaken about the evidence or logic of the matter as motivated by neuroses of which they were unaware. Thus Marx and Freud were the two patron saints of the ad hominem argument, which leads inevitably to intellectual laziness and dishonesty.
Marx argued that those who disagreed with him were blinded by economic interest; Freud that those who disagreed with him were blinded by their neuroses — which only psychoanalysis, as prescribed by him, could cure. The philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper called their two systems of thought, Marxism and psychoanalysis, “reinforced dogmatisms” because all attempts at refutation are taken by believers as being confirmation of their truth.
Even if many of the charges against Freud are true, however, a man is not necessarily responsible for the uses to which his ideas are put. Moreover, Freud clearly was exceptionally gifted.
Starting out to study neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, to which he made considerable contributions, he became a neurologist for a time and wrote a classic work on cerebral palsy. He also came near to discovering the local anaesthetic effects of cocaine (the first such anaesthetic ever discovered), though instead he went off at an unfortunate tangent and recommended it as a cure for opiate addiction, in the process ruining the life of an addicted colleague, Dr Fleischl-Marxow. Nevertheless, it is clear that from the start he was a very brilliant man, and not only in the black art of self-promotion.
He was possessed of exceptional literary gifts. There can be no question that he was a great writer: to read him is to be beguiled by him. Just as with Sherlock Holmes (with whom the late Professor Michael Shepherd of the Maudsley Hospital once entertainingly compared him), one is inclined to overlook the faults of his logic and lacunae in the evidence for his conclusions because of the sheer brio involved. His imaginative leaps dazzle; his ability to find significance in small details — for example, slips of the tongue (and who among us does not use the concept of the Freudian slip?) — leave us feeling that we have been in the presence of a genius.
Freud was a deeply cultivated man, too. He was a good linguist and his knowledge of literature, especially Shakespeare (which he read and memorised), was vast. Highly intelligent men, such as the great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, were deeply impressed by him; when Freud arrived in England as a refugee after the Anschluss in 1938, the Royal Society immediately conferred an exceptional honour on him.
The Royal Society, I need hardly point out, is not composed of fools. If Freud’s errors are quite so obvious as they now seem to his detractors, why were they not spotted much sooner? Something akin to a psychoanalytical explanation would be necessary to explain it. Thus we cannot dispose of Freud’s mode of thinking as easily as we should like.
Freud’s views were not simplistic. Indeed, his view of human life was tragic rather than optimistic in any facile way. Contrary to the uses to which his writings and ideas have sometimes been put, he was no advocate of libertinism. Indeed, he was notably reticent in his public behaviour. He certainly did not believe that if only a man could give practical expression to all his instincts, whenever and however they prompted him, he would lead a life permanently free of frustration and sorrow.
On the contrary, as a deeply civilised Viennese bourgeois intellectual, he believed that frustration was part of the price mankind had to pay for civilisation: but it was a price well worth paying. He believed that we were but a veneer’s thickness away from barbarism — and in the light of subsequent events in the 20th century, who can say that he was not prescient?
Although his writings were not scientific in any rigorous sense, and although he was not the lone pioneer that he claimed to be, supposedly charting a completely unknown psychological continent, there is no doubt that it was he who made us aware, in a straightforward and coherent fashion, just how hidden and contorted human motivation could be, how little reliance we could place on our consciously avowed intentions, and how important, though also how difficult, it is for us to know ourselves.
Freud was not a great scientist, nor did he discover anything in the sense that Robert Koch discovered the germ that causes tuberculosis, and Watson and Crick discovered the double helix. He did not contribute any store of positive facts to human knowledge. Science would be deprived of practically nothing had he not lived. His theories are now universally dismissed, either as having been disproved or, somewhat contradictorily, as being incapable of disproof and therefore not scientific theories in the first place.
Yet his influence on all of us was enormous, and it would be as impossible to return to a pre-Freudian way of thinking as to return to a pre-heliocentric theory of the solar system. Freud is a little like Nature in Horace’s famous line: though you may throw him out with a pitchfork, yet he returns. It is as if he enunciated deep if unprovable truths about ourselves that had never been so clearly enunciated before. He did not arrive at these by scientific means but instinctively, in the manner of a great writer.
If I may be allowed a little instinct of my own, I don’t think it is possible to look at photographs of Freud and doubt that he was a very considerable human being. And the two words that he wrote in his diary when the Gestapo came to turn him out of Vienna (he was too world-famous for them to lay a finger on him) have a poignant, moving and infinitely dignified greatness about them: Finis Austriae.
Life and work of a complex man
1856: Sigmund Freud born in Moravia
1860: The Freud family settles in Vienna
1873: Freud enters Vienna University
1882: He takes a job at Vienna Hospital
1886: Freud experiments with hypnotism; he marries Martha Bernays
1896: He uses the term “psychoanalysis”
1897: He becomes interested in the Oedipus complex
1899: Freud publishes The Interpretation of Dreams
1920: Freud’s daughter Sophie dies; he publishes Beyond the Pleasure Principle
1923: He publishes The Ego and the Id and mouth cancer is diagnosed
1938: Freud and his family escape Vienna and settle in Hampstead, London
1939: Freud dies from mouth cancer
Are you a Freud fraud?
1. Sigmund Freud was:
a) One of Britain’s greatest artists with a penchant for warts-and-all nudes b) A public relations whizz
c) An Austrian neurologist and the founder of the psychoanalytic school
d) A rather pompous former Liberal MP, food writer and regular on Radio 4 quiz shows
2. Freud came up with the concept of the dynamic unconscious — that we have thoughts which occur below the surface. The best way of gaining access to our unconscious life is through:
a) Drugs
b) Dreams
c) Hypnosis
d) Alfresco sex
3. The superego is:
a) Michael Winner
b) Michael Winner
c) One of the divisions of the psyche that symbolises the father figure and cultural norms
d) Michael Winner
4. Freud argued that people often pass through a phase when they have an Oedipus complex. This is:
a) A fixation on the mother as a sexual object and jealousy of the father
b) A fixation on the father as a sexual object and resentment of the mother c) A psychosexual desire to blind oneself in the manner of the eponymous hero of Sophocles’s greatest work, Oedipus Rex
d) A skincare “serum” for Mother’s Day by L’Oréal
5. The Elektra complex is:
a) A fixation on the mother as a sexual object and jealousy of the father
b) A fixation on the father as a sexual object and resentment of the mother c) A very complex washing machine
d) A fixation on a very complex washing machine as a sexual object and a resentment of anyone who attempts to interfere with it
6. A Freudian slip is:
a) A public relations disaster
b) An accident caused by an awkward couch dismount
c) A phenomenon called parapraxis or Fehlleistung when the unconscious mind catalyses an incorrect or seemingly nonsensical turn of speech, such as a man using a former girlfriend’s name to address his mother-in-law.
d) A new, semi-sheer item of lingerie created by Ann Summers
7. Freud said which of the following:
a) “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”
b) “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’ ”
c) “Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity”
d) “ ‘Itzig, where are you riding to?’ ‘Don’t ask me, ask the horse’.”
ANSWERS
1) c. 2) b. 3) c. 4) a. 5) b. 6) c. 7) all of them.
If you scored six or seven correct answers: you are a complete couch potato and possibly a sex maniac.
Three to five right: you may have some penis envy issues.
Zero to two: You think that psychoanalysis is the study of Hannibal Lecter.
