The great
question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to
answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What
does a woman want?”
(Sigmund Freud)
Childhood
Sigmund Freud was born in
Freiberg, in Moravia, on 6th of May 1856. People from here were
Czechs, but Jewish people were talking German and were mostly assimilated to
the Austro-Hungarian ruling class. His father, Jacob Freud, was a textile
dealer. He married for the first time when he was seventeen and had two
children: Emmanuel and Philipp. After he became a widower, he remarried in 1851
or 1852 with a certain Rebecca, about whom we don't know if she died young or
she was repudiated, and for the third time with a young woman of twenty, Amalia
Nathansohn (1835 - 1930), whose first child will be Sigmund. He will be
succeeded by Julius, who died at eighteen months, Anna, Rosa, Mitzi, Dolfi,
Paula and Alexander.
Sigmund Freud inherited
from his father the sense of humor, the skepticism before life incertitude, the
habit of exemplifying by a Jewish anecdote when he wanted to bring out some
moral feature, his liberalism and free thought. From his mother he would have
taken "the sentimentalism", an ambiguous word in German, which would
mean that Freud was capable of intense emotional feelings.
Freud enjoyed the
unrestrained love of his mother, Amalia, who called him "my golden
Sigi". This unconditional love will make Freud notice: "When you were
incontestably the favorite child of your mother, you keep during your
lifetime this victor feeling, you keep feeling sure of success, which in
reality seldom doesn't fulfill".
From the age of eight also
comes another remembrance less pleasant that will play an important role in the
later victory dream, which the dreamer himself will interpret. The remembrance
under discussion put him in a position of humiliating inferiority before his
parents. What's this about: he would have been scolded by his father
because he intentionally had urinated in his parents' bedroom and apostrophized
by these words: "There will come nothing of this boy!" When he
narrates this happening, Freud states precisely that this phrase should have
deeply afflicted him "in my dreams the scene often repeated, always
accompanied by an enumeration of my works and successes, as if I intended to
say: <<You see, nevertheless I became somebody! >>."
Another grievous
remembrance: his father took him for a walk and narrated an unpleasant event
with a passerby who had apostrophized him: "You, Jew - get down from the
sidewalk!" Freud was extremely disappointed when he found out his father
hadn't reacted upon the insult of that stranger. "To this scene, which
annoyed me - he writes - I opposed another one, more consonant with my
feelings, the scene when Hamilcar Barcas asks his son to swear, before the
sanctuary, that he'll take his vengeance on the Romans." Hannibal becomes
a hero to Freud's view and he reappears under the form of the dreams about Rome
in his associations from "The Interpretation of Dreams"(1900), from
which we also took out this details.
When he was four years
old, as his father met with a business failure, Freud and his family settled
down in Vienna, a noisy and cosmopolitan metropolis, which will sensitively
stand in contrast with the lawns and mountains from Moravia, to which Freud
will forever feel attached. "Under deep sediments, it continue to live
inside myself the happy child from Freiberg... who has received from this air
and this earth his first unforgettable impressions", Freud remarked and he
will even state precisely: "I 've never felt within my depth in this city
[Vienna]. I believe nowadays that I've always regretted the marvelous forests
of my childhood, and one of my remembrances evokes me the fact that I used to
run as if I wanted to get off from my father, when I was scarcely able to
walk..."
Professional Career
A brilliant child, always
at the head of his class, he went to medical school, one of the few viable
options for a bright Jewish boy in Vienna those days, the opportunity gained with
the opening of the Hapsburg Empire's liberal era. At first, he had planned to study law, but
instead joined the medical faculty at the University of Vienna where his
studies included philosophy under Franz Brentano, physiology under Ernst Brücke
and zoology under Darwinist Professor Karl Claus.
There, he became deeply involved
in research under the direction of a physiology professor named Ernst Brücke.
Brücke believed in what was then a popular, if radical, notion, which we now
call reductionism: "No other forces than the common physical-chemical ones
are active within the organism." Freud would spend many years trying to
"reduce" personality to neurology, a cause he later gave up on.
Freud was very good at his
research, concentrating on neurophysiology, even inventing a special
cell-staining technique. But only a limited number of positions were available,
and there were others ahead of him. Brücke helped him to get a grant to study,
first with the great psychiatrist Charcot in Paris, then with his rival
Bernheim in Nancy. Both these gentlemen were investigating the use of hypnosis
with hysterics.
When Freud was 26, he fell madly in love with a 21-year-old woman names
Martha Bernays, the granddaughter of Isaac
Bernays, a Chief Rabbi in Hamburg, and they became engaged two months later. As a poor student still living
with his parents, Freud's science lab job did not pay enough to support a
family. "My sweet girl, it only pains me to think I should be so powerless
to prove my love for you," Freud wrote to Martha.
Six months after they met, Freud gave up his scientific career and become
a doctor. He spent three years training at the Vienna General Hospital and was
rarely able to see his fiancé who had moved to Germany. After four years of
waiting, Freud and Bernays were married on September 14, 1886. Here, in Vienna,
Freud set up a practice in neuropsychiatry, with the help
of Joseph Breuer. Sigmund and Martha had six children: Mathilde, born 1887;
Jean-Martin, born 1889; Oliver, born 1891; Ernst, born 1892; Sophie, born 1893;
and Anna, born 1895.
Freud's books and lectures
brought him both fame and ostracism from the mainstream of the medical
community. He drew around him a number of very bright sympathizers who became
the core of the psychoanalytic movement. Unfortunately, Freud had a penchant
for rejecting people who did not totally agree with him. Some separated from
him on friendly terms; others did not, and went on to found competing schools
of thought.
Latest Years
Early in life, Freud began smoking tobacco at
age 24; initially a cigarette smoker, he became a cigar smoker. Freud believed
that smoking enhanced his capacity to work, and believed he could exercise
self-discipline in moderating his tobacco-smoking; yet, despite warnings from
colleague Wilhelm Fliess, and to the detriment of his health, Freud remained a
smoker, eventually suffering a buccal cancer.
In 1930, Freud was awarded the Goethe Prize in recognition of his
contributions to psychology and to German literary culture. In January 1933,
the Nazis took control of Germany, and Freud's books were prominent among those
they burned and destroyed. Freud quipped: “What progress we are making. In the Middle
Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books.”
Freud continued to maintain his optimistic underestimation of the growing
Nazi threat and remained determined to stay in Vienna, even following the Anschluss
of 13 March 1938 in which Nazi Germany annexed Austria, and the outbursts of
violent anti-Semitism that ensued.
Ernest Jones, the then President of the International Psychoanalytic
Association (IPA), finally was able to convince Freud changing his mind and
seeking exile in Britain, but only after Freud got practical lesson for the
possible consequences of the Nazi’s occupation due the brief detention and
interrogation of Anna Freud by the Gestapo in Vienna.
Upon his arrival to London, many famous names called on Freud to pay
their respects, notably Salvador Dalí, Stefan Zweig, Leonard and Virginia Woolf
and H.G. Wells. Representatives of the Royal Society called with the Society’s
Charter for Freud to sign himself into membership. However, not all the members
of the Freud’s family successfully escaped. His four elderly sisters were not
able to get exit visas and they were all to die in Nazi concentration camps.
In the Freuds new home at Hampstead, North London, Freud’s Vienna
consulting room was recreated in faithful detail. He continued to see patients
there until the terminal stages of his illness.
Death
In September 1939, Freud, who was suffering from cancer and in severe
pain, persuaded his doctor and friend Max Schur to help him commit suicide.
After reading Honoré de Balzac's La Peau de chagrin in a single sitting,
Freud asked him, “Schur, you remember our ‘contract’ not to leave me in the lurch
when the time had come. Now it is nothing but torture and makes no sense.” When
Schur replied that he had not forgotten, Freud said, “I thank you.” and then
“Talk it over with Anna, and if she thinks it’s right, then make an end of it.”
Anna Freud wanted to postpone her
father’s death, but Schur convinced her it was pointless to keep him alive, and
on 21 and 22 September administered doses of morphine that resulted in Freud's
death on 23 September 1939.
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