Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

As a youth Sigmund Freud did not lack for ambition. Though he had a reputation for being a bookworm, his dark eyes and lush dark hair gave him an air of assurance to which the adjective ‘charismatic’ has been applied.¹ He fantasised himself as Hannibal, Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon, Heinrich Schliemann – the discoverer of Troy – and even Christopher Columbus. Later in life, after he had made his name, he compared himself less fancifully with Copernicus, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo and Darwin. In his lifetime he was lionised by André Breton, Theodore Dreiser and Salvador Dali. Thomas Mann thought he was ‘the oracle’, though he later changed his mind. In 1938, the United States president, Franklin Roosevelt, took a personal interest in Freud’s protection, as a Jew under the Third Reich, and eventually induced the Nazis to let him leave Austria.

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Perhaps no figure in the history of ideas has undergone such revision as Freud – certainly not Darwin, and not even Marx. Just as there is a disparity today between professional historians and the general reading public, concerning the Renaissance and what we might call, for shorthand, the Prenaissance – the period 1050–1250 when the modern world began – so there is a huge gap now between the general public’s understanding of Freud, and that of most psychiatric professionals.

The first act of revision, as it were, is to remove from Freud any priority he may ever have been credited with in the discovery of the unconscious. Guy Claxton, in his recent history of the unconscious, traces ‘unconscious-like’ entities to the ‘incubation temples’ of Asia Minor in 1000 BC where ‘spirit release’ rituals were common. He says that the Greek idea of the soul implied ‘unknown depths’, that Pascal, Hobbes and Edgar Allen Poe were just three who had some idea that the self has a double that is mysterious, half-hidden, yet somehow exerts an influence over behaviour and feelings. Poe was by no means isolated. ‘It is difficult – or perhaps impossible – to find a nineteenth-century psychologist or medical psychologist – who did not recognise unconscious cerebration as not only real but of the highest importance.’ This is Mark D. Altschule in his Origins of Concepts in Human Behavior

(1977). The terms ‘psychosis’ and ‘psychiatric’, as we now use them, were introduced by Baron Ernst von Feuchtersleben (1806–1849) in Vienna after 1833. Among novelists, the nineteenth century was known as ‘our century of nerves’, and the word ‘neurasthenia’ was coined by George Beard in 1858.³ The British philosopher Lancelot Law Whyte says that around 1870 the unconscious was a topic of conversation, not merely for professionals, but for those who wished to show they were cultured. The German writer Friedrich Spielhagen agreed: in a novel he published in 1890, he described a Berlin salon in the 1870s where two topics dominated the conversation – Wagner and the philosophy of the unconscious. But not even this does justice to the extent to which the unconscious, as an idea, had developed in the nineteenth century. For that we need to turn to Henri Ellenberger and his massive, magisterial work,

The Discovery of the Unconscious.⁴

Ellenberger divided his approach into three – what we might call the distal and proximate medical background to psychoanalysis, and the nineteenth-century cultural background. They were equally important.

Among the distal causes, he said, were such predecessors as Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), who was at times compared to Christopher Columbus, for he was believed to have discovered ‘a new world’, but in his case an inner world. Mesmer treated people with magnets attached to their bodies, after swallowing a preparation containing iron. After noting how some psychological symptoms varied with the phases of the moon, his aim was to manipulate ‘artificial tides’ within the human body. The method appeared to remove the symptoms in some instances, at least for several hours. Mesmer believed he had uncovered an ‘invisible fluid’ in the body, which he could manipulate: this coincided with the discovery of other ‘imponderable’ fluids, such as phlogiston and electricity, and partly accounts for the intense interest in his innovations, which were built on by the marquis de Puységur (1751–1825). He developed two techniques known as ‘perfect crisis’ and ‘artificial somnabulism’, which appear to have been forms of magnetically-induced hypnotism.⁵