Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The case of Anna O. impressed Freud deeply (he had been distinctly unimpressed by George Beard’s arguments about neurasthenia). For a time Freud himself tried electrotherapy, massage, hydrotherapy and hypnosis with hysterical patients but abandoned this approach, replacing it with ‘free association’ – a technique whereby he allowed his patients to talk about whatever came into their minds. It was this technique which led to his discovery that, given the right circumstances, many people could recall events that had occurred in their early lives and which they had completely forgotten. Freud came to the conclusion that though forgotten, these early events could still shape the way people behaved. Thus was born his concept of the unconscious and with it the notion of repression. Freud also realised that many of these early memories which were revealed – with difficulty – under free association, were sexual in nature. When he further found that many of the ‘recalled’ events had in fact never taken place, he refined his notion of the Oedipus complex. In other words, the sexual traumas and aberrations falsely reported by patients were for Freud a form of code, showing not what had happened but what people secretly wanted to happen, and confirmed that human infants went through a very early period of sexual awareness. During this period, he said, a son was drawn to the mother and saw himself as a rival to the father (the Oedipus complex) and vice versa with a daughter (the Electra complex). By extension, Freud said, this broad motivation lasted throughout a person’s life, helping to determine character.

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These early theories of Freud were met with outraged incredulity and unremitting hostility. The neurological institute of Vienna University refused to have anything to do with him. As Freud later said, ‘An empty space soon formed itself about my person.’³⁰

His response was to throw himself deeper into his researches and to put himself under analysis – with himself. The spur to this occurred after the death of his father, Jakob, in October 1896. Although father and son had not been very intimate for a number of years, Freud found to his surprise that he was unaccountably moved by his father’s death, and that many long-buried recollections spontaneously resurfaced. His dreams also changed. He recognised in them an unconscious hostility directed toward his father that hitherto he had repressed. This led him to conceive of dreams as ‘the royal road to the unconscious’.³¹ Freud’s central idea in

The Interpretation of Dreams was that in sleep the ego is like ‘a sentry asleep at its post’.³²

The normal vigilance by which the urges of the id are repressed is less efficient and dreams are therefore a disguised way for the id to show itself.

The early sales for The Interpretation of Dreams indicate its poor reception. Of the original 600 copies printed, only 228 were sold during the first two years and the book apparently sold only 351 copies during its first six years in print.³³ More disturbing to Freud was the complete lack of attention paid to the book by the Viennese medical profession.³⁴ The picture was much the same in Berlin. Freud had agreed to give a lecture on dreams at the university, but only three people turned up to hear him. In 1901, shortly before he was to address the Philosophical Society he was handed a note which begged him to indicate ‘when he was coming to objectionable matter and make a pause, during which the ladies could leave the hall’. The isolation wouldn’t last and in time, and despite fierce controversy, many people came to consider the unconscious the most influential idea of the twentieth century.