Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

This concept, the unconscious, and all that it entails, can be seen as the culmination of a predominantly German, or German-speaking, tradition, a medico-metaphysical constellation of ideas, and this genealogy was to prove crucial. Freud always thought of himself as a scientist, a biologist, an admirer of and someone in the tradition of Copernicus and Darwin. Nothing could be further from the truth, and it is time to bury psychoanalysis as a dead idea, along with phlogiston, the elixirs of alchemy, purgatory and other failed notions that charlatans have found useful down the ages. It is now clear that psychoanalysis does not work as treatment, that many of Freud’s later books, such as Totem and Taboo and his analysis of the ‘sexual imagery’ in Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings, are embarrassingly naïve, using outmoded and frankly erroneous evidence. The whole Freudian enterprise is ramshackle and cranky.

That said, the fact remains that the above paragraphs describe the latest revision. At the time Freud lived, in the late nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth, the unconscious was regarded as real, was taken very seriously indeed, and played a seminal role underpinning the last great general idea to be covered by this book, a transformation that was to have a profound effect on thought, in particular in the arts. This was the idea known as modernism.

In 1886 the painter Vincent van Gogh produced a small picture, The Outskirts of Paris

. It is a desolate image. It shows a low horizon, under a grey, forbidding sky. Muddy paths lead left and right – there is no direction in the composition. A broken fence is to be found on one side, a faceless dragoon of some kind in the foreground, a mother and some children further off, a solitary gas lamp stuck in the middle. Along the line of the horizon there is a windmill and some squat, lumpish buildings with rows of identical windows – factories and warehouses. The colours are drab. It could be a scene out of Victor Hugo or Émile Zola.⁴²

The dating of this picture, which shows a banlieue

on the edge of the French capital, is important. For what Van Gogh was depicting in this drab way was what the Parisians called ‘the aftermath of Haussmannisation’.⁴³ The world – the French world in particular – had changed out of all proportion since 1789 and the industrial revolution, but Paris had changed more than anywhere and ‘Haussmannisation’ referred to the brutality of this change. At the behest of Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann had, over seventeen years, remade Paris in a way that was unprecedented either there or anywhere else. By 1870 one-fifth of the streets in central Paris were his creation, 350,000 people had been displaced, 2.5 billion francs had been spent, and one in five workers was employed in the building trade. (Note the nineteenth-century passion for statistics.) From now on, the boulevard would be the heart of Paris.⁴⁴

Van Gogh’s 1886 picture recorded the dismal edges of this world but other painters – Manet and the impressionists who followed his lead – were more apt to celebrate the new open spaces and wide streets, the sheer ‘busy-ness’ that the new Paris, the city of light, was the emblem of. Think of Gustave Caillebotte’s Rue de Paris, temps de pluie (1877) or his Le Pont de l’Europe (1876), Monet’s Le Boulevard des Capucines

(1873), Renoir’s Les Grands Boulevards (1875), Degas’ Place de la Concorde, Paris (c. 1873) or any number of paintings by Pissarro, showing the great thoroughfares, in spring or autumn, in sunshine, rain and snow.