Freud, to be fair, had seen the split with Jung coming and, in 1912, had begun a work that expanded on his own earlier theories and, at the same time, discredited Jung’s, trying to ground psychoanalysis in modern science. Finished in the spring of 1913 and published a few months later, this work was described by Freud as ‘the most daring enterprise I have ever ventured.’66 Totem and Taboo was an attempt to explore the very territory Jung was trying to make his own, the ‘deep ancestral past’ of mankind. Whereas Jung had concentrated on the universality of myths to explain the collective – or racial – unconscious, Freud turned to anthropology, in particular to Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and to Darwin’s accounts of the behaviour of primate groupings. According to Freud (who said from the start that Totem and Taboo was speculation), primitive society was characterised by an unruly horde in which a despotic male dominated all the females, while other males, including his own offspring, were either killed or condemned to minor roles. From time to time the dominant male was attacked and eventually overthrown, a neat link to the Oedipus complex, the lynchpin of ‘classical’ Freudian theory. Totem and Taboo was intended to show how individual and group psychology were knitted together, how psychology was rooted in biology, in ‘hard’ science. Freud said these theories could be tested (unlike Jung’s) by observing primate societies, from which man had evolved.
Freud’s new book also ‘explained’ something nearer home, namely Jung’s attempt to unseat Freud as the dominant male of the psychoanalytic ‘horde.’ A letter of Freud’s, written in 1913 but published only after his death, admitted that ‘annihilating’ Jung was one of his motives in writing Totem and Taboo.67 The book was not a success: Freud was not as up-to-date in his reading as he thought, and science, which he thought he was on top of, was in fact against him.68 His book regarded evolution as a unilinear process, with various races around the world seen as stages on the way to ‘white,’ ‘civilised’ society, a view that was already dated, thanks to the work of Franz Boas. In the 1920s and 1930s anthropologists like Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict would produce more and more fieldwork confirming Totem and Taboo as scientifically worthless. In attempting to head off Jung, Freud had shot himself in the foot.69
Nevertheless, it sealed the breach between the two men (it should not be forgotten that Jung was not the only person Freud fell out with; he also broke with Breuer, Fliess, Adler, and Stekel).70 Henceforth, Jung’s work grew increasingly metaphysical, vague, and quasi-mystical, attracting a devoted but fringe following. Freud continued to marry individual psychology and group behaviour to produce a way of looking at the world that attempted to be more scientific than Jung’s. Until 1913 the psychoanalytic movement had been one system of thought. Afterward, it was two.
Mabel Dodge, in her letter to Gertrude Stein, had been right. The explosion of talent in 1913 was volcanic. In addition to the ideas reported here, 1913 also saw the birth of the modern assembly line, at Henry Ford’s factory in Detroit, and the appearance of Charlie Chaplin, the little man with baggy trousers, bowler hat, and a cunning cheekiness that embodied perfectly the eternal optimism of an immigrant nation. But it is necessary to be precise about what was happening in 1913. Many of the events of that annus mirabilis were a maturation, rather than a departure in a wholly new direction. Modern art had extended its reach across the Atlantic and found another home; Niels Bohr had built on Einstein and Ernest Rutherford, as Igor Stravinsky had built on Claude Debussy (if not on Arnold Schoenberg); psychoanalysis had conquered Mann and Lawrence and, to an extent, Proust; Jung had built on Freud (or he thought he had), Freud had extended his own ideas, and psychoanalysis, like modern art, had reached across to America; film had constructed its first immortal character as opposed to star. People like Guillaume Apollinaire, Stravinsky, Proust, and Mann were trying to merge together different strands of thought – physics, psychoanalysis, literature, painting – in order to approach new truths about the human condition. Nothing characterised these developments so much as their optimism. The mainstreams of thought, set in flow in the first months of the century, seemed to be safely consolidating.
One man sounded a warning, however, in that same year. In A Boy’s Will, Robert Frost’s voice was immediately distinct: images of the innocent, natural world delivered in a gnarled, broken rhythm that reminds one of the tricks nature plays, not least with time:
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason.71
9
COUNTER-ATTACK
The outbreak of World War I took many highly intelligent people by surprise. On 29 June, Sigmund Freud was visited by the so-called Wolf Man, a rich young Russian who during treatment had remembered a childhood phobia of wolves. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary and his wife had taken place in Sarajevo the day before. The conversation concerned the ending of the Wolf Man’s treatment, one reason being that Freud wanted to take a holiday. The Wolf Man later wrote, ‘How little one then suspected that the assassination … would lead to World War I.”1 In Britain, at the end of July, J. J. Thomson, who discovered the electron and soon after became president of the Royal Society, was one of the eminent men who signed a plea that ‘war upon [Germany] in the interests of Serbia and Russia will be a sin against civilisation.’2 Bertrand Russell did not fully grasp how imminent war was until, on 2 August, a Sunday, he was crossing Trinity Great Court in Cambridge and met the economist John Maynard Keynes, who was hurrying to borrow a motorcycle with which to travel to London. He confided to Russell he had been summoned by the government. Russell went to London himself the following day, where he was ‘appalled’ by the war spirit.3 Pablo Picasso had been painting in Avignon and, fearing the closure of Daniel Henry Kahnweiler’s gallery (Kahnweiler, Picasso’s dealer, was German) and a slump in the market for his own works, he rushed to Paris a day or so before war was declared and withdrew all his money from his bank account – Henri Matisse later said it amounted to 100,000 gold francs. Thousands of French did the same, but the Spaniard was ahead of most of them and returned to Avignon with all his money, just in time to go to the station to say good-bye to Georges Braque and André Derain, who had been called up and were both impatient to fight.4 Picasso said later that he never saw the other two men again. It wasn’t true; what he meant was that Braque and Derain were never the same after the war.
World War I had a direct effect on many writers, artists, musicians, mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists. Among those killed were August Macke, the Blaue Reiter painter, shot as the German forces advanced into France; the sculptor and painter Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who died in the French trenches near the English Channel; and the German expressionist painter Franz Marc at Verdun. Umberto Boccioni, the Italian futurist, died on Italy’s Austrian front, and the English poet Wilfred Owen was killed on the Sambre Canal a week before the Armistice.5 Oskar Kokoschka and Guillaume Apollinaire were both wounded. Apollinaire went home to Paris with a hole in his head and died soon afterward. Bertrand Russell and others who campaigned against the war were sent to jail, or ostracised like Albert Einstein, or declared mad like Siegfried Sassoon.6 Max Planck lost his son, Karl, as did the painter Käthe Kollwitz (she also lost her grandson in World War II). Virginia Woolf lost her friend Rupert Brooke, and three other British poets, Isaac Rosenberg, Julian Grenfell, and Charles Hamilton Sorley, were also killed. The mathematician and philosopher Lieutenant Ludwig Wittgenstein was interned in a ‘Campo Concentramento’ in northern Italy, from where he sent Bertrand Russell the manuscript of his recently completed work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.7