Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Sigmund Freud’s views were first set out in Studies in Hysteria

, published in 1895 with Joseph Breuer, and then more fully in his work entitled The Interpretation of Dreams, published in the last weeks of 1899. (The book was technically released in November 1899, in Leipzig as well as Vienna, but it bore the date 1900 and it was first reviewed in early January 1900). Freud, a Jewish doctor from Freiberg in Moravia, was already forty-four. The eldest of eight children, he was outwardly a conventional man. He believed passionately in punctuality and wore suits made of English cloth, cut from material chosen by his wife. He was also an athletic man, a keen amateur mountaineer, who never drank alcohol. He was, on the other hand, a ‘relentless’ cigar-smoker.²⁶

Though Freud might be a conventional man in his personal habits, The Interpretation of Dreams

was a deeply controversial and – for many people in Vienna – an utterly shocking book. It is in this work that the four fundamental building blocks of Freud’s theory about human nature first come together: the unconscious, repression, infantile sexuality (leading to the Oedipus complex), and the tripartite division of the mind into ego, the sense of self, superego, broadly speaking the conscience, and id, the primal biological expression of the unconscious. Freud had developed his ideas – and refined his technique – over a decade and a half since the mid-1880s. He saw himself very much in the biological tradition initiated by Darwin. After qualifying as a doctor, Freud obtained a scholarship to study under Charcot, who at the time ran an asylum for women afflicted with incurable nervous disorders. In his research, Charcot had shown that, under hypnosis, hysterical symptoms could be induced. Freud returned to Vienna from Paris after several months and, following a number of neurological writings (on cerebral palsy, for example, and on aphasia), he began a collaboration with another brilliant Viennese doctor, Josef Breuer (1842–1925). Breuer, also Jewish, had made two major discoveries, on the role of the vagus nerve in regulating breathing, and on the semicircular canals of the inner ear which, he found, controlled the body’s equilibrium. But Breuer’s importance for Freud, and for psychoanalysis, was his discovery in 1881 of the so-called talking cure.²⁷

For two years, beginning in December 1880, Breuer had treated for hysteria a Vienna-born Jewish girl, Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936), whom he described, for case-book purposes, as ‘Anna O’. She had a variety of severe symptoms, including hallucinations, speech disturbances, a phantom pregnancy, intermittent paralyses, and visual problems. In the course of her illness(es) she experienced two different states of consciousness, and also went through extended bouts of somnambulism. Breuer found that in this latter state she would, with encouragement, report stories that she made up, following which her symptoms improved temporarily. However, her condition deteriorated badly after her father died – there were more severe hallucinations and anxiety states. Again, however, Breuer found that ‘Anna’ could obtain some relief from these symptoms if he could persuade her to talk about her hallucinations during her autohypnoses. This was a process she herself called her ‘talking cure’ or ‘chimney sweeping’ (Kaminfagen). Breuer’s next advance was made accidentally: ‘Anna’ started to talk about the onset of a particular symptom (difficulty in swallowing), after which the symptom disappeared. Building on this, Breuer eventually (after some considerable time) discovered that if he could persuade his patient to recall in reverse chronological order each past occurrence of a specific symptom, until she reached the very first occasion, most of them disappeared in the same way. By June 1882, Miss Pappenheim was able to conclude her treatment, ‘totally cured’.²⁸