FREUD, SIGMUND (1856–1939)

Austrian psychiatrist, founder of psychoanalysis.

Sigmund Freud was fifty-eight years old in 1914 when the long nineteenth century came to an abrupt end and Europe plunged into four years of intense, internecine war. The adventure in thought that was his career was roughly half over, and the core ideas of classic Freudian psychological theory, known as psychoanalysis, were already in place. Formulated between the years 1893 and 1911 in a series of essays, case histories, and scientific monographs, psychoanalysis centered on the concepts of unconscious mental activity, childhood psychosexuality, the Oedipal scheme of psychological development, the repressive origins of neurotic symptoms, and the symbolic role of dreams in mental life. Although familiar in the early twenty-first century, these ideas were strikingly original when Freud first published them. A tiny group of intellectuals, mostly in the Germanic world, was familiar with and excited by Freud's work before 1914. A larger minority found his teachings improbable, subversive, or disgusting. Most Europeans remained unfamiliar with Freud up to this time.

FREUD'S CAREER AFTER 1914

This situation changed dramatically in the years following 1914. During and after the First World War, Freud continued his tireless productivity. His intellectual career during the interwar period is marked by a continuing rethinking and refashioning of his ideas in the light of new clinical and historical experience. His major psychological publications during the war and postwar years concerned the psychological drives and psychical structure and function as well as ancillary subjects such as psychological sublimation and the nature of femininity. He also devoted himself to exploring the implications and applications of psychoanalysis to nonclinical domains, including anthropology, sociology, religion, literature, art, and biography. Another characteristic of the latter half of Freud's career is the drive to achieve a comprehensive model of human psychology capable of accounting for everyday normal mental life as well as psycho-pathology. Freud also during the 1920s and 1930s addressed the training of psychoanalysts and aspects of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. And he produced highly readable codifications of his ideas that succeeded in publicizing psychoanalysis to a wider audience. During these same years, Freudian psychology developed from a small, sectarian community in a few central European cities into both a highly dynamic professional movement and a radical cultural force across the European American world.

Two texts—Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and The Ego and the Id (1923)—lie at the center of Freud's postwar output. In the latter, Freud announced his famous tripartite or "structural" theory of the human psyche. Entirely unconscious, the Freudian id, he proposed, was laid down at birth and consists of the deepest, inherited human desires and instincts. In contrast, the superego is an internalized composite of the many authority figures—parents, babysitters, educators, public heroes—encountered in a person's upbringing that collectively form his or her conscience. The ego attempts rationally to mediate between the imperious and persistent id, the strictures of the superego, and the outside environment with its incessant demands for sociable, civilized behavior. Freud's three psychic agencies or processes correspond, in short, with what one wants to do, what one feels one ought to do, and what one will do. An additional line of thought that flowed from The Ego and the Id was the concept of "mechanisms of psychological defense." Freud, and later his psychoanalyst daughter Anna Freud (1895–1982), hypothesized that in daily life people routinely deploy a series of psychological strategies to avoid ideas, situations, and realizations would cause anxiety or "unpleasure." These mechanisms, in Freud's terminology, include denial, rationalization, projection, externalization, and displacement.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle offered Freud's new theory of the human drives. Freud previously had conjectured that Eros, consisting of the intertwined instincts for love, sex, propagation, and self-preservation, was the central psychological drive in human life. In a controversial modification in 1920, however, he broadened his drive theory to include a second, primary impulse derived from the human capacities for aggression, destruction, and self-destruction. This change reflects in part Freud's growing pessimism as he observed the carnage of World War I. Freud labeled this second drive "Thanatos" or "the death instinct," which in his rather biologized view reflected a desire for organic life to return to its original, unorganized, and inorganic state. The concept of a human death instinct tends to be rejected by most psychoanalysts in the twenty-first century, although Freud's wider emphasis on aggression's role in human nature is accepted.

Freud's vision of the psychoanalytic project during the generation following 1914 was stunning in breadth. In several memorably titled monographs, he applied his new system of ideas to social and cultural phenomena outside medical psychology. Totem and Taboo (1913) explores the speculative origins of patriarchal authority in society and the family. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freud ventured into social psychology. Individuals in crowds, organizations, and movements, he maintained, tend to submerge their personal identities into that of a charismatic leader in return for a sense of security and group identity. "The Moses of Michelangelo" (1914) and "Dostoevsky and Parricide" (1928) are among Freud's explorations in psychoanalytic art and literary criticism. Finally, in The Future of an Illusion (1927), he took on organized religion. Candid and courageous in his atheism, Freud argued in this provocative work that the idea of God was an illusion, created by humanity in order to comfort it in the face of its mortality and helplessness when individuals outgrew the protection of their parents. Despite its moral and psychological consolation, he continued, the belief in an absolute, supernatural authority should be jettisoned as the human species matures intellectually. Theologians, cultural conservatives, and believers of all sorts, needless to say, furiously contested Freud's critique of religion.

Freud's most widely read interwar publication was Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Appearing in the aftermath of the stock market crash in New York City, Freud's famous rumination interprets human civilization as a continuing and precarious balance between the deep-seated human tendency toward destructive behaviors and the unique capacity to channel or "sublimate" primitive aggression into constructive, nonviolent cultural activities, such as economics, sports, art, science, and the life of the mind. The necessary psychological cost, or "price of civilization," was the frustration and suffering that follows the continual renunciation of instinctual gratifications required by stable, communal living. This in the Freudian view is the essential human predicament. If The Future of an Illusion features Freud as a latter-day Enlightenment thinker championing rational, critical thinking over age-old dogmatic superstition, Civilization and Its Discontents showcases Freud's increasingly despairing view of human nature as dark forces began to gather across Europe. Freud brought this latter line of thinking to bear on current events in "Why War?" (1932; published 1933), a magnificent exchange of letters with the physicist Albert Einstein, written at the invitation of the League of Nations, that addresses the reasons for human warfare and its possible prevention.

Despite the troubling historical circumstances of these years, Freud continued to push his ideas in ever more directions. This drive toward theoretical and clinical comprehensiveness is yet another distinctive feature of his overall intellectual career. The Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis of 1916 clarifies and systematizes his ideas for a general reading public. From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (1918), known colloquially as the Wolf Man case, is Freud's longest published case history. And in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926), he revised his earlier theory of psychological anxiety. As more people sought to study psychoanalysis formally, Freud needed to set out the guidelines for proper training. In The Question of Lay Analysis (1926), he rejected the notion that psychoanalysts must be medical doctors. Other publications addressed questions about the psychodynamics of the doctor/patient relationship—or, in psychoanalytic parlance, the analyst/analysand relationship. In a well-known essay written near the end of his life titled "Analysis Terminable and Interminable" (1937), Freud forthrightly acknowledged the limitations and even dangers of psychoanalytic therapy with certain types of patients. In all of his later writings, his focus remained on the neurotic, rather than psychotic, forms of psychopathology. Within the field of the neuroses, he concentrated in the second half of his career on anxiety, obsessions, narcissism, and melancholia rather than the hysterical neuroses, which had absorbed his attention in the 1890s.

Biographically, the last fifteen years of Freud's life were intensely difficult, plagued by two mounting menaces. First, in 1923, at the age of sixty-seven, Freud underwent an operation on his jaw and palate for what turned out to be cancer. Soon thereafter he began wearing a painful and unwieldy prosthesis. Many other surgeries followed; he was in continual, growing pain throughout these years. Second, after a decade of electoral vicissitudes, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany late in January 1933. Freud had struggled against Austrian anti-Semitism since the 1880s, but the ascent to power of the Nazis ushered in a new level of racism across German-speaking Europe. In the spring of 1933, Freud's books were included in the book burnings carried out in Berlin; later that year the Nazis began to close down psychoanalytic societies across Germany. Across the 1930s, vandalism against Jews rose steadily. With the annexation of Austria in March 1938, the Nazis entered the native city of psychoanalysis. They dissolved the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and briefly seized Freud's daughter Anna. Two months later, Freud departed Vienna for London, via Paris, in order "to die in freedom," as he put it. On 23 September 1939, at the age of eighty-three, he died peacefully in his new home in the north London suburb of Hampstead. Three weeks earlier, Hitler had invaded Poland, confirming, it seemed, Freud's somber assessment of humanity's self-destructiveness. Because Hitler clamped down early in his murderous regime on psychoanalysis, the overwhelming majority of analysts were able to leave Germany and Austria safely. Most emigrated, in body, mind, and spirit, to Britain or the United States. The so-called psychoanalytic diaspora enriched immeasurably the psychological communities in these countries.

THE SPREAD OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

Knowledge of and fascination with psychoanalysis spread extensively between the two world wars. During the first decade of the twentieth century, small groups of admirers and enthusiasts had gathered at Freud's own home in Vienna and in a few other central European cities to ponder his ideas. With the diffusion of psychoanalysis, however, Freud found it more and more difficult to control or contain his creation. The post-1914 years are marked by schisms within the psychoanalytic community, with participants emerging as loyalists or dissidents. Freud had already, in 1913, broken with the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, once judged his most important adherent. The History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, published in 1914, is Freud's reckoning with a number of newly independent followers, including Jung and Alfred Adler. In 1924 Otto Rank, another early enthusiast, published his own twist on psychoanalytic theory in The Trauma of Birth. Freud was troubled by and intolerant of these departures, which he saw as misguided defections rather than independent, psychoanalytically oriented explorations. From this time onward, factionalism plagued the movement.

At the same time, psychoanalysis as a formal doctrine and practice—with its own conferences, organizations, publications, and membership—spread widely. In 1908 the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society had been founded and the first international congress of psychoanalysts had met in Salzburg. In 1919 the International Psychoanalytic Press was established. A year later, Freud's devoted British disciple Ernest Jones launched the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. As Freudian psychology gained a foothold in one Western country after another, a striking pattern emerged: distinctive national schools or trends took shape that reflected the cultural and intellectual heritages, as well as medical and scientific traditions, of different countries.

Snubbed by the prudish public and conservative medical establishment in Freud's native Austria, psychoanalysis nonetheless achieved brilliant prominence in the German capital during the interwar period. In 1920 a psychoanalytic polyclinic or out-patient clinic, the first of its kind in the world, opened in Berlin. The Berlin clinic assembled a gifted coterie of theorists and therapists, and it accepted paying and nonpaying clients alike from all social classes. Psychoanalytic societies were also founded during the 1920s in Heidelberg, Dresden, and Hamburg. Typically, the staffs of these early societies were heavily Jewish, with political sympathies overwhelmingly on the left. Imperial Wilhelminian Germany had been conservative and repressive in its official moral atmosphere. In contrast, Freud's frank, exploratory attitude toward sexuality corresponded well with the freer, experimental environment of the German Weimar Republic.

Characteristically, Freud's ideas in France followed their own path. Although French intellectuals were slow initially to embrace Freud—they argued that Jean-Martin Charcot, Henri Bergson, and Pierre Janet had been there first—the first translations of Freud's texts into French appeared in the mid-1920s, and the Société psychanalytique de Paris was registered in 1926. Still, at the time of Freud's death and the fall of France in 1939–1940, there was no mass movement around psychoanalysis in the country. "French Freud," as it came to be called, emerged only after the 1968 uprisings in Paris. Since then, a rich, if somewhat overheated, psychoanalytic culture formed in France, dedicated to the working out of Freud's ideas in literature, philosophy, linguistics, and feminist theory.

For a decade after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Freud's thinking found quite receptive ground in Soviet Russia. In the 1920s his most important books and articles were translated into Russian. A Russian psychoanalytic journal appeared, and institutes with sizable memberships were founded in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Peaking in 1921–1923, Soviet Freudianism was drastically curtailed by the late 1920s as Joseph Stalin consolidated his dictatorship.

The British reaction to Freud's ideas was divided: residual Victorianism caused much of the British public to recoil at Freud's forthright discussion of childhood sexuality. Nevertheless, in 1913 Ernest Jones established the London Psycho-Analytic Society. The Bloomsbury circle of avant-garde intellectuals also took up Freud's work with alacrity. In 1924 the Hogarth Press, which had recently been founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, began to publish an ambitious and authoritative edition of Freud's complete psychological writings in English. This definitive edition, which eventually ran to twenty-four volumes, was immensely influential in the spread of Freudian thought throughout the anglophone world. Furthermore, for different reasons both Melanie Klein and Anna Freud eventually moved to London and set up psychiatric shop. A productive institutional and intellectual rivalry developed between the two woman psychoanalysts. Child psychoanalysis became a national specialty, and the prestigious Tavistock Clinic in London was heavily psychoanalytic in orientation.

Beyond doubt, psychoanalysis found its most enthusiastic and wide-ranging reception in the United States. Freud personally disdained America. In 1909, however, he had delivered a powerful set of lectures at Clark University in Massachusetts, which launched a movement in the country. The New York Psychoanalytic Society opened its doors in 1911. In 1914 Boston followed suit, and an American Psychoanalytic Association was created. New translations into English of key texts, as well as the larger libertine social and sexual atmosphere associated with the decade, allowed intellectual and popular interest in psychoanalysis to burgeon in the 1920s. A long period of American enchantment with Freud ensued that waned only in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The American psychoanalytic community's requirement that practitioners obtain a medical license deeply influenced the character of Freudian practice in the country.

The decades from the 1920s to the 1950s also witnessed a remarkable cultural diffusion of Freud's ideas. In many forms—some of them inaccurate, simplified, or bastardized—Freudian motifs flooded films, novels, plays, paintings, advertising, and popular culture during the second quarter of the twentieth century. The distinctive Freudian vocabulary of id, ego, superego, wish fulfillment, sibling rivalry, penis envy, Oedipus complex, and the like cropped up ubiquitously. Not only physicians and mental health workers but the general educated public read Freud's writings, which were clear and concise, full of memorable coinages, and cast in compelling metaphorical language. Inevitably, cultural and popular responses to Freud—in his time and in the early twenty-first century—ranged extravagantly from fascination and adulation to skepticism and hostility.

The "golden age of psychoanalysis" extended into the 1970s. After that time, a new wave of biologically oriented psychiatry supplanted psychoanalysis institutionally and intellectually in many parts of the world. Likewise, shorter-term therapies aimed at symptomatic relief gained currency. After Freud's death, a tendency also developed among some of his well-meaning but reverential followers for his many profound and original insights to harden into doctrine and then dogma.

At the outset of the twenty-first century, Sigmund Freud's standing and legacy are warmly contested. But this much is certain: among European thinkers, only Karl Marx has had as great an influence on the thought and culture of the twentieth century as Freud. For fifty years, he was incontestably the central psychological thinker of the age. During these years, the cultural appeal and prominence of his ideas were tremendous. The volume of his output and the breadth of his thinking remain astonishing. Much of his lifework has become integrated into commonsense psychology and entrenched in modern thought generally. This heritage includes the ideas that a person's early biography is crucial to his or her subsequent psychological development, that psychosexuality is a fundamental part of human personality, that repressed painful or traumatic experiences can over time be harmful, and that speaking systematically with a trained and sympathetic listener about psychological difficulties can be beneficial. This last practice in particular represents the beginnings of the so-called verbal psychotherapies—what the early psychoanalytic patient "Anna O." dubbed "the talking cure"—and may well be his most basic and enduring contribution.

See alsoJung, Carl; Psychiatry; Psychoanalysis; Sexuality.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Mark S. Micale