PART B: MODERN HISTORY

Section 11. Sigmund Freud

To even begin to try to summarize the life and work of a genius is of course impossible. Also, to pick out specific incidents in his life and in describing these, expect one to understand the intricate working of the mind of Freud would be as ridiculous as describing George Washington as "a boy who chopped down a cherry tree." There have been hundreds of volumes written on Sigmund Freud, possibly the most complete of which is The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud by Ernest Jones (1879 - 1958) in three volumes. For a complete understanding of Freud, this three-volume work surpasses all others, but such an undertaking being beyond the scope of this work, we must be satisfied with a short summary of Freud's connection with the development of hypnosis.

It was Breuer's work that attracted Freud and caused him to publish his famous book co-authored with Breuer, Studien uber Hysterie, which was published in 1895. Breuer and Freud correctly concluded that hysterical symptoms developed as a result of repressing damaging experiences and that if these damaging experiences were once again released from the subconscious mind by a mental catharsis, the hysterical symptoms would be eliminated. Breuer accomplished this through the use of hypnosis, but Freud, a poor hypnotist, found that free association coupled with psychoanalysis were vehicles by which he could better accomplish his work. Parlour has pointed out that although Freud spurned formal "hypnosis" he nevertheless used many hypnotic techniques constantly such as "touching the patient's forehead," "the concentration of the patient's mind," "the relaxation of the body on a couch," and "the abundant use of the imagination." This was largely overlooked during Freud's lifetime and attention was given to Freud's words that did not always explain Freud's actions.

It was during this period that the greatest misconception regarding hypnosis first gained a foothold, and which even now is still regretfully difficult to dislodge in the minds of a number of learned medical men and hundreds of lay persons. Because of Freud's denunciation of hypnosis in favor of psychoanalysis, people began to associate hypnosis with "direct suggestions" (only one aspect of hypnotism). Hence, the general public and lay people as well began to think in terms of psychoanalysis versus direct suggestion. What was not sufficiently explained was that the science and art of hypnotism contains both analysis and suggestion and when correctly applied not only breaks the problem into its component for analysis but puts the individual back together again with a Synthesis.

Conventional psychoanalysis, however, with its lack of directive guidance, eliminates the latter entirely and renders the former slow, cumbersome and often times ineffective. Nevertheless, because of Freud's great brilliance and popularity, the words "free associations and "psychoanalysis" became the passwords of the day, and hypnosis again took a nosedive into obscurity.

A few experts such as Pierre Janet of France, Bramwell and Moll of Great Britain, Morton Prince and McDougall of the United States, and Pavlov in Russia continued to use hypnotism. Most other neurologists (most mental disease was approached from the standpoint of "neurology" in those days) immediately were influenced by Freudian theory and methods.

Freud, himself was a fascinating man. He was born on the 6th of May in 1856, in the Moravian town of Freiberg, a tiny, ancient industrial town that then belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His mother, Amalia, to whom he had a strong oedipal attachment, was 20 years younger than his father, Jacob. The family moved to Vienna, where he spent his life. When Freud was four years old, his father died in October 1896, and it profoundly affected Freud, which he expressed in a letter to his close friend, Dr.Fliess.

The Freud family was Jewish, but Freud himself ignored Jewish feasts, and instead celebrated Christmas and New Year because "it was easier." This would seem a highly unusual behavior pattern from such a nonconformist, but as stated above, Freud was actually a paradox who said some things and practiced others. For one thing, he constantly maintained that he was a scientist of the first quarter, seeking only truth first, last, and always. He continued to believe until his death, Lamarch's theory that acquired traits could be inherited, which no true scientist of that age believed any more than they still believed the world was flat. Freud also dabbled in occultism and telepathy, and openly stated his belief in it, although he never published such works. Freud was a great believer in the magic of numbers, and his close friend, William Fliess, who was mentioned previously, has stated that Freud believed that important things happen to men in cycles of 23 to 28 days. He predicted his own death at age 61 or 62, and seemed quite dismayed after passing this age, and thereupon raised his prediction to 85 1/2, the age at which his father and half-brother both died. Freud's eldest son, Jean Martin Freud, who was named after Charcot, whom Sigmund admired so much, published a relatively new book of Freud's home life as a father and a man. Freud first met his wife in April of 1882, and fell in love at first sight, although they were not married until after his one month of service on maneuvers with the Austrian Army in 1886, when he was promoted from First Lieutenant to Captain.

Freud practiced as a specialist in nervous diseases, and was a junior lecturer at the University of Vienna when Jean Martin was born. He lived at Suenhaus, facing Ringstrasze, but wrote many of his best books in naturalistic settings. Interpretation of Dreams, probably one of Freud's most famous books, was written at a Villa in Berchtesgaden, a beautiful resort high in the Bavarian mountains, later to become infamous as the well-guarded retreat of Adolph Hitler.

Freud was always immaculately and carefully dressed, even during the last 17 years of his life in which he painfully suffered one operation after another for the incurable cancers that beset him. Even after much of his mouth and palate and jaw structure had been dissected away, and he was forced to wear a monstrous prosthesis in order to close the opening between the nasal cavity and the throat so that he could talk, he maintained his sense of humor. Weak and unable to speak except in his native German (although previously he spoke both French and English well), he once said to French singer Yvette Guilbert, "Meine Prosthese Spricht Keine Franzosisch" (my prosthesis does not speak French).

Freud had a total of 33 operations in all, including a sterilization operation which he hoped would in some way change the hormonal setup of his body and prevent the cancer from spreading. He flew to England to escape Hitler in 1938, and at 82 years old, while in London, he recovered sufficiently to do four analysis treatments daily. Freud hated drugs and only took aspirin occasionally. In February of 1939 his cancer finally caught up with him, being determined inoperable and completely incurable at that time, and on September 21 of that year, he asked his personal physician, Max Schur, for a sedative.

"It is only torture now, and it has no longer any sense," Freud said, and days later, at the age of 83, he was dead. His daughter Anna, remained at his side during his long protracted illness, and kept him comfortable. "Most important," says biographer Jones (who himself was perhaps the number one English speaking psychoanalyst of his time), "is the increasing sense people have of being moved by obscure forces within themselves, which they are unable to define. Few thinking people nowadays would claim a complete knowledge of themselves or what they are consciously aware of comprises the whole of their mentality, and this recognition with all its formidable consequences for the future of social organizations we owe above all to Freud. Man's chief enemy and danger is his own unruly nature, and the dark forces pent up within him. If our race is lucky enough to survive for another thousand years, the name of Sigmund Freud will be remembered as that of the man who first ascertained the origin and nature of those forces and pointed the way to achieving some measure of control over them."

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