The nineteenth century was also facing up to the issue of child sexuality. Physicians had traditionally considered it a rare abnormality but, as early as 1846, Father P. J. C. Debreyne, a moral theologian who was also a physician, published a tract where he insisted on the high frequency of infantile masturbation, of sexual play between young children, and of the seduction of very young children by wet nurses and servants. Bishop Dupanloup of Orléans was another churchman who repeatedly emphasised the frequency of sexual play among children, arguing that most of them acquired ‘bad habits’ between the ages of one and two years. Most famously, Jules Michelet, in Our Sons (1869), warned parents about the reality of child sexuality and in particular what today would be called the Oedipus complex.25
Two things of some importance emerge from even this brief survey of nineteenth-century (mainly German and French) thought. The first is to dispense thoroughly with any idea that Freud ‘discovered’ the unconscious. Whether or not the unconscious exists as an entity (an issue we shall return to later), the idea of the unconscious predates Freud by several decades and was common currency in European thought throughout most of the 1800s. Second, many of the other psychological concepts inextricably linked with Freud in the minds of so many – such ideas as childhood sexuality, the Oedipus complex, repression, regression, transference, the libido, the id and the superego – were also not original to Freud. They were as much ‘in the air’ as the unconscious was, as much as ‘evolution’ was at the time Darwin conceived the mechanism of natural selection. Freud had nowhere near as original a mind as he is generally given credit for.
Surprising as all this is, for many people, it is still not the main charge against him, not the main sin so far as Freud’s critics contend. These critics, such figures as Frederick Crews, Frank Cioffi, Allen Esterson, Malcolm Macmillan and Frank Sulloway (the list is long and growing), further argue that Freud is – not to beat about the bush – a charlatan, a ‘scientist’ only in quotation marks, who fudged and faked his data and deceived both himself and others. And this, the critics charge, completely vitiates his theories and the conclusions based on them.
The best format to convey the new view of Freud is first to give the orthodox view of the ways in which he conceived his theories, and their reception, and then to give the main charges against him, showing how the orthodox view now has to be altered (this alteration, it should be said one more time, is drastic – we are talking here about critical scholarship over the last forty years but, in the main, the last fifteen years). Here, to begin with, is the orthodox version.
Sigmund Freud’s views were first set out in Studies in Hysteria, published in 1895 with Joseph Breuer, and then more fully in his work entitled The Interpretation of Dreams, published in the last weeks of 1899. (The book was technically released in November 1899, in Leipzig as well as Vienna, but it bore the date 1900 and it was first reviewed in early January 1900). Freud, a Jewish doctor from Freiberg in Moravia, was already forty-four. The eldest of eight children, he was outwardly a conventional man. He believed passionately in punctuality and wore suits made of English cloth, cut from material chosen by his wife. He was also an athletic man, a keen amateur mountaineer, who never drank alcohol. He was, on the other hand, a ‘relentless’ cigar-smoker.26
Though Freud might be a conventional man in his personal habits, The Interpretation of Dreams was a deeply controversial and – for many people in Vienna – an utterly shocking book. It is in this work that the four fundamental building blocks of Freud’s theory about human nature first come together: the unconscious, repression, infantile sexuality (leading to the Oedipus complex), and the tripartite division of the mind into ego, the sense of self, superego, broadly speaking the conscience, and id, the primal biological expression of the unconscious. Freud had developed his ideas – and refined his technique – over a decade and a half since the mid-1880s. He saw himself very much in the biological tradition initiated by Darwin. After qualifying as a doctor, Freud obtained a scholarship to study under Charcot, who at the time ran an asylum for women afflicted with incurable nervous disorders. In his research, Charcot had shown that, under hypnosis, hysterical symptoms could be induced. Freud returned to Vienna from Paris after several months and, following a number of neurological writings (on cerebral palsy, for example, and on aphasia), he began a collaboration with another brilliant Viennese doctor, Josef Breuer (1842–1925). Breuer, also Jewish, had made two major discoveries, on the role of the vagus nerve in regulating breathing, and on the semicircular canals of the inner ear which, he found, controlled the body’s equilibrium. But Breuer’s importance for Freud, and for psychoanalysis, was his discovery in 1881 of the so-called talking cure.27
For two years, beginning in December 1880, Breuer had treated for hysteria a Vienna-born Jewish girl, Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936), whom he described, for case-book purposes, as ‘Anna O’. She had a variety of severe symptoms, including hallucinations, speech disturbances, a phantom pregnancy, intermittent paralyses, and visual problems. In the course of her illness(es) she experienced two different states of consciousness, and also went through extended bouts of somnambulism. Breuer found that in this latter state she would, with encouragement, report stories that she made up, following which her symptoms improved temporarily. However, her condition deteriorated badly after her father died – there were more severe hallucinations and anxiety states. Again, however, Breuer found that ‘Anna’ could obtain some relief from these symptoms if he could persuade her to talk about her hallucinations during her autohypnoses. This was a process she herself called her ‘talking cure’ or ‘chimney sweeping’ (Kaminfagen). Breuer’s next advance was made accidentally: ‘Anna’ started to talk about the onset of a particular symptom (difficulty in swallowing), after which the symptom disappeared. Building on this, Breuer eventually (after some considerable time) discovered that if he could persuade his patient to recall in reverse chronological order each past occurrence of a specific symptom, until she reached the very first occasion, most of them disappeared in the same way. By June 1882, Miss Pappenheim was able to conclude her treatment, ‘totally cured’.28
The case of Anna O. impressed Freud deeply (he had been distinctly unimpressed by George Beard’s arguments about neurasthenia). For a time Freud himself tried electrotherapy, massage, hydrotherapy and hypnosis with hysterical patients but abandoned this approach, replacing it with ‘free association’ – a technique whereby he allowed his patients to talk about whatever came into their minds. It was this technique which led to his discovery that, given the right circumstances, many people could recall events that had occurred in their early lives and which they had completely forgotten. Freud came to the conclusion that though forgotten, these early events could still shape the way people behaved. Thus was born his concept of the unconscious and with it the notion of repression. Freud also realised that many of these early memories which were revealed – with difficulty – under free association, were sexual in nature. When he further found that many of the ‘recalled’ events had in fact never taken place, he refined his notion of the Oedipus complex. In other words, the sexual traumas and aberrations falsely reported by patients were for Freud a form of code, showing not what had happened but what people secretly wanted to happen, and confirmed that human infants went through a very early period of sexual awareness. During this period, he said, a son was drawn to the mother and saw himself as a rival to the father (the Oedipus complex) and vice versa with a daughter (the Electra complex). By extension, Freud said, this broad motivation lasted throughout a person’s life, helping to determine character.29