The Story of Psychology (34 page)

But the wish fulfillment of many dreams is far subtler and more recondite. Often, wishes that have been hidden in the unconscious threaten to break through into consciousness during the relaxed condition of sleep; if they did, they would produce distress sufficient to awaken the sleeper. To protect sleep, Freud supposed, the unconscious mind disguises disturbing elements, transforming them into relatively innocuous ones; the dream is mysterious precisely because what it seems to be about is not what it is really about. But by free-associating to what we remember of dreams, we may be able to recognize the real content behind the disguise and so peer into our unconscious mind.

Freud arrived at this view after he first analyzed a dream of his own. In July 1895, he dreamed about “Irma,” a young woman he was then treating. The dream is complicated and Freud’s analysis of it very long (over eleven pages). In brief, he meets Irma in a large hall where guests are arriving and learns from her that she has been having choking pains in her throat, stomach, and abdomen; fears that he has incompetently overlooked some organic trouble; and after many other details, discovers that his friend Otto, a physician, had given Irma an injection with an unclean syringe and that this was the source of her trouble.

Pursuing the real meanings of the many components of the dream through free association, Freud recalled that the previous day he had met his friend Oscar Rie, a pediatrician who knew Irma, and who had said to him, “She’s better, but not quite well.” Freud had felt annoyed; he had taken this to be veiled criticism, meaning that he had been treating Irma with only partial success. In the dream, he disguised the truth by turning Oscar Rie into Otto, changing Irma’s remaining neurotic symptoms into physical ones, and making Otto responsible for her condition—unlike himself, who was always scrupulous about the cleanliness of needles he used. Freud’s conclusions:

Through ruthless self-examination of his own less than creditable motives in the dream, Freud had discovered a technique of incomparable value. Within the next five years he analyzed over a thousand dreams of his patients and reported in
Interpretation
that the method was one of the most useful tools of psychoanalytic treatment and of research on the workings of the unconscious mind.

The use of psychoanalytic procedures for research purposes has been much criticized as methodologically unsound. Free association leads the patient and analyst to an interpretation of a dream, but how can one prove that the interpretation is correct? In a few cases there may be historical evidence that a trauma, reconstructed from a dream symbol, did in fact occur, but in most cases, as in Freud’s Irma dream, there is no way to prove objectively that the interpretation has revealed the real dream content.

Yet as anyone knows who has ever interpreted his or her dreams in therapy, there comes a moment in the effort when one feels a shock of recognition, an epiphany, a sense of having stumbled on emotional truth. In the end, dream analysis is authenticated by the analysand’s own response—“Yes! This must be the true meaning of it because it
feels
true”—and because that response enables him or her to begin grappling with the problem that generated the dream.

In Freud’s case, free association and dream analysis led him to just such experiences of illumination and rescued him from a serious scientific error. Very early in his practice of psychotherapy, he suspected that sexual difficulties were at the basis of many or most neurotic disorders. He might have got that idea from the
Zeitgeist.
Although Viennese society was still thoroughly prudish and hypocritical about sexuality, in medical and scientific circles it had become a matter of much interest. Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing had published a lengthy account of sexual deviations, and anthropologists were reporting the sexual customs of peoples around the world.

But these works dealt with adult sexuality; children were thought to be innocent, pure, and untouched by sexual desires or experiences. Freud, however, had repeatedly heard patients recall, after much effort, that they had had sexual feelings in childhood and, astonishingly, that they had been sexually molested by adults, their experiences having ranged from being fondled to being raped. Hysteria was one outcome;
obsessional neuroses, phobias, and paranoia were others. The guilty adults were nursemaids, governesses, domestic servants, teachers, older brothers—and, most shockingly, in the case of female patients, fathers.
²⁵

Freud was amazed, and thought he had made a major discovery. By 1896, after half a dozen years of hypnotherapeutic and analytic experience, he announced his so-called seduction theory in a published paper and in a lecture before the local Society for Psychiatry and Neurology presided over by the great Krafft-Ebing.
²⁶
The lecture was received icily, and Krafft-Ebing told him, “It sounds like a scientific fairy tale.”
²⁷
In the weeks and months after the lecture Freud felt shunned by the medical community and totally isolated, and referrals of patients fell off alarmingly. But although he clung to his belief in his discovery for a while, eventually he too reluctantly began to doubt its validity.

For one thing, he was having only partial success treating patients who had unearthed recollections of molestation; some, in fact, who he thought were doing best, broke off treatment before being cured. For another, he was finding it ever harder to believe that perverse acts by fathers against their daughters were so widespread. Since there was no unarguable indication of reality in the unconscious, these recollections of seduction might actually be fictitious.
²⁸
This was a depressing thought; what he had considered a major discovery and “the solution of a thousands-[of-]years-old problem” might be an error.

Although he had recently been able to move his growing family to a spacious apartment at Berggasse 19 and was doing well enough to indulge in his keenest pleasure, an annual trip to Italy, he had many other reasons for being depressed and anxious. His father’s death, in October 1896, had affected Freud far more deeply than he had anticipated (he felt “torn up by the roots”); his long friendship with Breuer, who had been so helpful to him but who would not accept his increasingly radical ideas about neurosis and therapy, was disintegrating; and although he had held the unpaid but prestigious position of
Privatdozent
(lecturer) in neuropathology at the university for nearly a dozen years, he still had not been appointed a professor, a far more prestigious status that would have aided his career. For all these reasons, Freud’s neurotic symptoms became exacerbated, particularly his worries about money, fears of heart disease, obsession with thoughts of death, and a travel phobia that made it impossible for him to visit Rome, which he desperately wanted to do but the thought of which filled him with inexplicable fear.

In the summer of 1897 the forty-one-year-old Freud began to psychoanalyze
himself in an effort to understand and combat his own neurosis.
²⁹
To a degree, he had already been doing this by analyzing some of his dreams, but now he subjected himself daily to his own scrutiny in a rigorous, systematic fashion. Descartes, Kant, and James—even, perhaps, Socrates—had examined their conscious minds, but only Freud sought to unlock the secrets of his unconscious mind.

Self-analysis may seem a contradiction in terms. How can one be guide and guided, analyst and analysand, at the same time? How can one be the patient and also the therapist onto whom the patient transfers feelings that he then analyzes? But no one else was trained or able to serve as Freud’s analyst, and he had to do it himself. To some extent, however, he made Wilhelm Fliess, to whom he was developing a powerful attachment, a surrogate analyst. Fliess, although an ear, nose, and throat specialist, had many interests, including psychology, about which he formulated a number of theories, some brilliant and others mystical and absurd. Freud wrote regularly and often to Fliess, telling him what was happening in his research and self-analysis, and met him from time to time for what Freud called “congresses”—two or three days of intense discussion about his and Fliess’s work and theories. Fliess’s letters in response to Freud’s do not exist nor is there any record of what he said in their congresses, but it is generally believed that he helped in the self-analysis or at least that Freud clarified his own thinking in the course of telling the results of self-analysis to a trusted confidant.

Every day, for several years, Freud used free association and the examination of each night’s dreams to seek hidden memories, early experiences, and the concealed motives behind his daily wishes, emotions, slips of the tongue, and little memory lapses; he sought to understand himself and, through himself, psychological phenomena common to humankind. “This analysis is harder than any other,” he wrote to Fliess early in the process. “But I believe it has got to be done and is a necessary stage in my work.”
³⁰
Time and again he thought he was finished, only to discover otherwise; time and again he came to a standstill, fought to make progress—and made it, as a later letter tells:

No wonder it was hard work. He was unearthing from his “dung heap,” as he called it, memories that had been deeply hidden because they were repellent and guilt-producing, such as his childish jealousy of a younger brother (who died in infancy, leaving a permanent residue of guilt in Freud), his conflicting feelings of love and hate for his father, and particularly a time when, at two and a half, he saw his mother nude and was sexually aroused.
³²

Ernest Jones, in his monumental biography of Freud, said that the self-analysis produced no magical results and that Freud’s neurotic symptoms and dependence on Fliess actually became more pronounced in the first year or so as disturbing material came to light. But by 1899 Freud’s symptoms were much improved and he felt far more normal than four or five years earlier. By 1900 the task was largely complete, although for the rest of his life he continued to spend the last half hour of every day analyzing his moods and experiences.

The self-analysis, imperfect though it was, had considerable personal benefit but yielded a far greater one, according to most Freud scholars. Through it Freud arrived at a number of his theories about human nature or confirmed theories he had been deriving from his experience with patients.

The most important of these was that children, even in their early years, do have powerful sexual feelings, which are particularly apt to involve sexual attraction toward a parent, usually of the opposite sex. But children sense that these desires and fantasies are so wicked in the eyes of their parents and other adults that they thrust them into the unconscious and forget that they have ever had them.

Now at last Freud understood why so many of his patients had told of being seduced in childhood. The “memories” they had unearthed were of childish fantasies, not of actual seductions.
³³
He had been on the right track; he simply hadn’t gone far enough to reach the psychic truth. Jeffrey Masson, an apostate psychoanalyst and ferocious Freud critic, has alleged that Freud gave up his seduction theory because it offended his fellow physicians and was bad for business, but in fact Freud’s contemporaries found his new theory of infant sexuality and incestuous desires even more repugnant than the seduction theory. Yet Freud, despite his money worries, sense of isolation, and desire to be publicly recognized, felt compelled to publish the truth, and did so, partly in 1900 and more fully in 1905.

By 1900, he had done much more than invent a new therapy for neuroses and discover childhood sexuality. He had developed a number of
highly consequential theories about human psychology, both normal and abnormal. While he drew on the latest findings and ideas of certain psychologists (the French psychologist Pierre Janet would even accuse Freud of plagiarizing his ideas about the “subconscious,” as he called it), what was original in Freud’s work—and much of it was—was based on what he had gleaned from his own mind and his patients’ by a form of exploration without precedent in the history of psychology.

The theories that would make Freud famous and would profoundly affect Western culture describe mental processes in purely psychological terms. Freud had begun as an adherent of the mechanistphysiologist school, in which all mental events supposedly were, or someday would be, explicable in physiological terms. Not until he gave up that view did he make his major discoveries.

Freud had clung to the physiological doctrine for some time after turning to hypnotherapy and psychoanalysis. In 1895, the very year in which Breuer and he published
Studies on Hysteria
, a predominantly psychological approach to that subject, he wrote an eighty-page rough draft of a “Project for a Scientific Psychology” in which he ambitiously sought to explain mental processes in terms of the physiological events taking place in the brain.
³⁴
While the “Project” contained a number of his budding psychological theories, it accounted for them in such physical terms as the laws of motion, the quantity of nervous excitation in neurons, the inertia or discharge of that energy, the pathways of discharge, and the principle of the conservation of energy.