unusual, tortured-and quite frankly improbable-genealogy. The inconsistencies in the genesis of the theory are blatant. Freud did not 'discover' early sexual awareness in his patients: he inferred or intuited or 'guessed' it was there. He did not discover the Oedipus complex from careful and passive observations of clinical evidence: he had a pre-set idea which he forced on the 'evidence', after previous 'impositions' had failed even to convince himself. Furthermore, it was a process that could not be reproduced by any independent, sceptical scientist, and this is perhaps the most damning evidence of all, the final nail in the coffin so far as Freud's claim to be a scientist is concerned. What sort of science is it where experimental or clinical evidence cannot be replicated by other scientists using the same techniques and methodology? Anthony Clare, the British psychiatrist and broadcaster, has described Freud as a 'ruthless, devious charlatan' and concluded that 'many of the foundation stones of psychoanalysis are phoney'.41 It is hard not to agree. Given Freud's 'pressure' technique, his 'persuading' and 'guessing', we are entitled to doubt whether the unconscious exists. Essentially, he made the whole thing up. This concept, the unconscious, and all that it entails, can be seen as the culmination of a predominantly German, or German-speaking, tradition, a medico-metaphysical constellation of ideas, and this genealogy was to prove crucial. Freud always thought of himself as a scientist, a biologist, an admirer of and someone in the tradition of Copernicus and Darwin. Nothing could be further from the truth, and it is time to bury psychoanalysis as a dead idea, along with phlogiston, the elixirs of alchemy, purgatory and other failed notions that charlatans have found useful down the ages. It is now clear that psychoanalysis does not work as treatment, that many of Freud's later books, such as Totem and Taboo and his analysis of the 'sexual imagery' in Leonardo da Vinci's paintings, are embarrassingly naive, using outmoded and frankly erroneous evidence. The whole Freudian enterprise is ramshackle and cranky. That said, the fact remains that the above paragraphs describe the latest revision. At the time Freud lived, in the late nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth, the unconscious was regarded as real, was taken very seriously indeed, and played a seminal role underpinning the last great general idea to be covered by this book, a transformation that was to have a profound effect on thought, in particular in the arts. This was the idea known as modernism. In 1886 the painter Vincent van Gogh produced a small picture, The Outskirts of Paris . It is a desolate image. It shows a low horizon, under a grey, forbidding sky. Muddy paths lead left and right-there is no direction in the composition. A broken fence is to be found on one side, a faceless dragoon of some kind in the foreground, a mother and some children further off, a solitary gas lamp stuck in the middle. Along the line of the horizon there is a windmill and some squat, lumpish buildings with rows of identical windows-factories and warehouses. The colours are drab. It could be a scene out of Victor Hugo or Emile Zola.42 The dating of this picture, which shows a banlieue on the edge of the French capital, is important. For what Van Gogh was depicting in this drab way was what the Parisians called 'the aftermath of Haussmannisation'.43 The world-the French world in particular-had changed out of all proportion since 1789 and the industrial revolution, but Paris had changed more than anywhere and 'Haussmannisation' referred to the brutality of this change. At the behest of Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann had, over seventeen years, remade Paris in a way that was unprecedented either there or anywhere else. By 1870 one-fifth of the streets in central Paris were his creation, 350,000 people had been displaced,2.5 billion francs had been spent, and one in five workers was employed in the building trade. (Note the nineteenth-century passion for statistics.) From now on, the boulevard would be the heart of Paris.44 Van Gogh's 1886 picture recorded the dismal edges of this world but other painters-Manet and the impressionists who followed his lead-were more apt to celebrate the new open spaces and wide streets, the sheer 'busy-ness' that the new Paris, the city of light, was the emblem of. Think of Gustave Caillebotte's Rue de Paris, temps de pluie (1877) or his Le Pont de l'Europe (1876), Monet's Le Boulevard des Capucines (1873), Renoir's Les Grands Boulevards (1875), Degas' Place de la Concorde, Paris ( c . 1873) or any number of paintings by Pissarro, showing the great thoroughfares, in spring or autumn, in sunshine, rain and snow.
It was in the cities of the nineteenth century that modernism was born. In the later years, the internal combustion engine and the steam turbine were invented, electricity was finally mastered, the telephone, the typewriter and the tape machine all came into being. The popular press and the cinema were invented. The first trades unions were formed and the workers became organised. By 1900 there were eleven metropolises-including London, Paris, Berlin and New York-which had more than a million inhabitants, unprecedented concentrations of people. The expansion of the cities, together with that of the universities, covered in an earlier chapter, were responsible for what Harold Perkin has called the rise of professional society, the time-from roughly 1880 on-when the likes of doctors, lawyers, school and university teachers, local government officers, architects and scientists began to dominate politics in the democracies, and who viewed expertise as the way forward. In England Perkin shows that the number of such professions at least doubled and in some cases quadrupled between 1880 and 1911. Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert were the first to put into words what Manet and his 'gang' (as a critic called them) were trying to capture in paint: the fleeting experiences of the city-short, intense, accidental and arbitrary. The impressionists captured the changing light but also the unusual sights-the new machinery, like the railways, awesome and dreadful at the same time, great cavernous railway stations, offering the promise of travel but choking with soot, a beautiful cityscape truncated by an ugly but necessary bridge, cabaret stars lit unnaturally from footlights underneath, a barmaid seen both from the front and from behind, through the great glittering mirror on the wall. These were visual emblems of 'newness' but there was much more to modernism than this. Its interest lies in the fact that it became both a celebration and a condemnation of the modern, and of the world-the world of science, positivism, rationalism-that had produced the great cities, with their vast wealth and new forms of poverty, desolate and degrading.45 The cities of modernism were bewildering, full of comings and goings, largely contingent or accidental. Science had denuded this world of meaning (in a religious, spiritual sense) and in such a predicament it became the job of art both to describe this state of affairs, to assess and criticise it, and, if possible, to redeem it. In this way, a climate of opinion formed, in which whatever modernism stood for, it also stood for the opposite. And what was amazing was that so much talent blossomed in such bewildering and paradoxical circumstances. 'In terms of sheer creativity, the epoch of modernism compares with the impact of the romantic period and even with the renaissance.'46 There grew up what Harold Rosenberg called 'the tradition of the new'. This was the apogee of bourgeois culture and it was in this world, this teeming world, that the concept of the avant-garde was conceived, a consecration of the romantic idea that the artist was ahead of-and usually dead against-the bourgeoisie, a pace-setter when it came to taste and imagination, but whose role was as much sabotage as invention. If anything united the modernists-the rationalists and realists on the one hand, and the critics of rationality, the apostles of the unconscious, and the cultural pessimists on the other-it was the intensity of their engagement. Modernism was, more than anything, a high point of the arts-painting, literature, music-because cities were an intensifier: by their nature they threw people up against one another-and better communications ensured that all encounters were accelerated.47 As a result exchanges became sharper, louder, inevitably more bitter. We take this for granted now but at the time stress increased, and people found that was a creative force too. If modernism was often anti-science, this was because its pessimism was sparked by that same science. The discoveries of Darwin, Maxwell and J. J. Thomson were disconcerting, to say the least, seeming to remove all morality, direction and stability from the world, undermining the very notion of reality. Of the many writers who struggled to find their way in this bewildering world, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) is as reasonable a starting-point as any, for he clarified a good part of the confusion. Von Hofmannsthal was born into an aristocratic family, and blessed with a father who encouraged-even expected-his son to become an aesthete. Despite this, Hofmannsthal noted the encroachment of science on the old aesthetic culture of Vienna. 'The nature of our epoch,' he wrote in 1905, 'is multiplicity and indeterminacy. It can rest only on das Gleitende [the slipping, the sliding].' He added that 'what other generations believed to be firm is in fact das Gleitende '.48 Could there be a better description about the way the Newtonian world was slipping after Maxwell's and Planck's discoveries? (These are covered in the conclusion.) 'Everything fell into parts,' Hofmannsthal wrote, 'the parts again into more parts, and nothing allowed itself to be embraced by concepts.'49 Hofmannsthal was disturbed by political developments in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in particular the growth of anti-Semitism. For him, this rise in irrationalism owed some of its force to science-induced changes in the understanding of reality; the