In photographs, Freud often appears rather severe. Perhaps it is the war which has made him that way: the lack of food, the cold. Or perhaps it is just age. His face is so much gaunter than it used to be, the skin drawn tightly over his bony features, the all-seeing eyes peering out with such intensity. (Some think Freud looks like Moses, a conceit in which he secretly delights, and occasionally plays up to.) Even in these difficult times, however, a smile can often be seen playing on Freud’s lips, in the expectation of the punchline of some new joke or other. (Like most Viennese he considers humour an essential attitude to take towards a world at once tragic, comic and absurd.) Conscientious on matters of physical appearance, Freud dresses neatly in sober fashions that would once have marked him out as a man of style, but which now reveal him only as a man of substance. When seeing patients, he appears, rather stiffly, in a frock coat. It is on holidays in the mountains that Freud truly lets himself go, donning shorts, braces and a Tyrolean feathered hat.
Freud’s eccentricities are a combination of the daft, the amusing and the superstitious: he hates umbrellas, is fascinated with porcupines, finds railway timetables impossible to understand and wonders if there is something in numerology (as a result of which he fears he will die at the age of sixty-one, or else in the month of February 1918). He is at his happiest when mushroom-picking; he is reputed to be able to pick out particularly promising patches of forest from a fast-moving train. When asked to recommend a good read Freud plumps for Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. When Freud decides to initiate a select few of his closest associates as guardians of the sacred flame of psychoanalysis–the ‘inner circle’, some call it–he uses the gift of ancient seal rings to consummate the arrangement. Here is a man who does not shy away from the symbolic gesture.
Somewhere in the artefacts of the ancient world he senses the outlines of the basic drives and fears and beliefs which inhabit us all, which modern civilisation has tried so hard to suppress. He is an inveterate hoarder. Every surface of his study is covered with Roman busts, clay pots, ancient Chinese figurines or statuettes of winged Greek deities, primed for flight. His study is his private imaginarium, a place to commune with the past. It is also, of course, the room where Freud’s patients are psychoanalysed, the doctor making infrequent notes and odd remarks and asking occasional questions while his patients lie on a rather elegant chaise longue and empty their minds at a hefty rate of Austrian crowns an hour. High on one wall, and almost always in Freud’s line of sight, hangs a lithograph of the great French neurologist Charcot, under whom Freud studied in the 1880s, demonstrating hypnosis to a class at La Salpêtrière. There is a brass spittoon on the floor. On Freud’s desk sits a curious porcupine paperweight he was given in America.
America. Now there’s a conundrum to break one’s head against, as much of a conundrum for Freud as for the Kaiser and his men. In many ways Freud would be most happy if America could be somehow made to disappear, sinking like the Titanic into the icy Atlantic, never to be heard from again. If physical removal is impossible, Freud would like it very much if he himself could just forget the existence of that brash, rich, uncivilised country (and the place where he had the worst attack of indigestion he has ever experienced in his life). And yet, like a disturbing thought one cannot quite shake off, America is always there lurking at the back of Freud’s mind, and occasionally brought to the fore by news from family members across the Atlantic. Like many complex relationships in life, this one began with childhood infatuation: a visit to the American pavilion at the Vienna World Fair in 1873 and an intense curiosity in the facsimiles of the letters of President Lincoln on display. The young Freud, it is said, learned the Gettysburg Address by heart. As a newly minted graduate, he briefly considered moving there. It was only much later, well into middle age, that Freud finally consummated things by visiting the country. In 1909 he spent an entire week-long Atlantic crossing to America joyfully psychoanalysing his fellow passenger and erstwhile friend, Carl Jung.
Both relationships have since soured. Jung is an apostate, a Judas, these days. As for America, Freud has taken a violent dislike to it. He views Americans’ love of money as a misdirection of natural human sexual urges. He worries that if psychoanalysis ends up being viewed as a sham medicine, it will be because of the New York hucksters simply calling themselves psychoanalysts–and then trying to make a quick buck from fleecing gullible Americans with the kind of voodoo remedies that would make a witch doctor blush. In America, Freud finds, his work is either crudely and inaccurately popularised in breathless articles in Good Housekeeping and Everybody’s Magazine or else puritanically condemned, even by well-known physicians and psychologists, as ‘filth’ liable to corrupt public morality.
The whole business of ‘filth’ pains him. For, whatever his theories as to the origins of neurosis in childhood sexuality or the primordial role of what he terms the Lustprinzip, the pleasure principle, in driving human behaviour, Freud is far from being a bohemian or a sex addict. Rather he is a devoted middle-class family man, a good son to his ageing mother and a self-conscious patriarch to his children. Though the physical passions of youth have long subsided, Freud is rarely separated for long from his wife Martha, except in the holidays. (When a student in Paris, Freud found himself constantly turning around on street corners at the imagined sound of his beloved Martha calling out his name, so ever-present was she in his thoughts.) Some say Sigmund has eyes for her sister Minna, but the tittle-tattle doesn’t seem to bother him. Freud is forever publicly anxious and privately solicitous of his children’s health and safety. His letters to them often consist of little more than brief expressions of affection, followed by hungry demands for information.
In early 1917 it is the twenty-one-year-old Anna Freud, sick with the flu, who most exercises the doctor’s paternal instincts. Freud organises her dispatch to a clinic in the nearby Wiener Wald, cross at himself for not being able to secure a room in a more salubrious sanatorium in the mountains. Freud’s other daughters–Mathilde and Sophie–give no cause for concern. A greater worry are the three boys of the Freud family, all engaged in the Austro-Hungarian war effort in one way or another. ‘It is better not to think in advance about the painful experiences that this spring will bring for the world’, Freud writes to his friend Karl Abraham, imagining the next offensive which must surely come. But, for the moment, Freud’s sons all seem to be out of harm’s way: Martin in Vienna, Ernst recovering from tonsillitis in the Tyrol and Oli, a tunnel engineer, still in training in Cracow. (Earlier in the war, a dream of his son Martin’s death at the front troubled Freud deeply, sparking bouts of furious self-analysis as the theorist of wish fulfilment tried to uncover what hidden desires his dream revealed.) Freud keeps photos of all his children in his study. A group portrait of the proud father with his soldier-sons hangs on one wall. Nothing could be more bürgerlich.
Freud’s critics accuse him of manipulation of his patients, or even dabbling in the dark arts of the occult. It is true that Freud has tried out hypnosis (as taught by his teachers in Paris). The technique of free association, essentially persuading patients to blurt out the first thing that comes into their head when Freud gravely utters some such word as Schnurrbart (moustache) or Eisenbahntunnel (railway tunnel), strikes many as too suggestive. But how else to discover the secrets the conscious mind seeks to keep under lock and key? As for Freud’s curiosity in the paranormal, his interest is not so uncommon, even for men of science. When quizzed on such matters as telepathy, he is fond of misquoting Hamlet: ‘There are more things between heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy’.
Freud’s lifetime has shown how previously fantastical ideas can turn into great discoveries or technological innovations: the transmission of radio signals through the empty air, the harnessing of invisible rays to peer inside the human body. In 1913, Freud’s natural inquisitiveness into the possibilities of unseen communication led him to host a seance in his own home, led by a man claiming power a
s a medium, Professor Roth. The medium proved a dud. Fear of embarrassment prevented Freud from asking for the return of his brown envelope stuffed with Austrian crowns. But open-mindedness should be no crime, Freud pleads. For the scientist, it should be a duty, however apparently odd the theory proposed.
In a time of peace and plenty, the theories of such an unlikely revolutionary might get no further than the private consulting rooms of Mitteleuropa’s larger cities and a handful of American universities. But war has changed all that. What was once outlandish now appears prophetic. The world is out of joint: the unconscious is the accepted culprit. Jabbering, spasmodic soldiers tumble into military hospitals across the Continent by the truckload every day, with disorders of the mind and body immune to rest or surgery–or even to electric shocks. As Freud himself might have remarked, people are more receptive to new gods when their old gods have proved false. And so it is that at the very moment when Freud himself feels most isolated, when his psychoanalytic associates are cut off from him by war and when his list of patients in Vienna has dwindled, Freud’s ideas begin to take on a life of their own, spreading from the consulting couch to the hospital bed and into the cultural ether of the age.
THE BRONX, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A Jewish dairy restaurant on Wilkens Avenue in the East Bronx. A regular customer–late thirties, medium height, black hair, glasses, moustache, slightly wild look about the eyes, dreadful English–shuffles in off the street. That man again! He comes in almost every day. He never tips. (The waiters occasionally spill hot soup on him by way of suggesting he should.) It is against his political beliefs, he says.
As a revolutionary agitator in wartime Europe the principled non-tipper attended the same political gatherings as his rival Vladimir and called, like him, for unflinching class struggle. But Lenin has never really trusted him, with regular spectacular fallings-out on ideological matters; he is too obstinate, too capricious, too individual. Vladimir once wrote to Inessa describing him as ‘always the same, evasive cheating, posing as a leftist but helping the right while he can’. As a journalist–his off-again on-again profession–the principled non-tipper once interviewed the shadowy figure behind the Sarajevo murders. ‘My young friend never thought his heroic bullet would provoke the current world war’, Gavrilo Princip’s mentor explained, ‘and believe me, when I read the war reports, a horrible thought goes through my mind: did we indeed incite all this?’
The principled non-tipper’s entry papers into the United States–off a ship from Barcelona called the Montserrat, on which he travels first class–list his profession as ‘author’. The customs officials who let him into the country without a second look that rainy day note down his name, incorrectly, as Zratzky. Others pay closer attention. A local Yiddish-language newspaper prints a photograph of the new arrival on its front page by way of welcome. The principled non-tipper wears a three-piece suit for the shoot.
The new arrival soon finds a reasonably priced apartment for which his wife Natalya pays the rent three months in advance and where his children are fascinated by the telephone. Natalya has lost count of the number of homes they have had since they married, shortly after her husband’s escape from exile in Siberia. Since then they have lived in Petrograd (where her husband made his name in the 1905 revolution), Vienna, Paris. Her husband was even briefly in Cádiz in Spain after the French tired of his presence and decided to unceremoniously deport him.
In America, Leon Trotsky is given a job writing for a Russian-language newspaper, Novy Mir. Typically, his first article is headlined ‘Long Live Struggle!’ When not writing, he tours around making fiery speeches about revolution and getting into arguments with local socialists about the direction their own movement should take. Particularly if war should come.
THE VATICAN: The Pope writes an early birthday card to Kaiser Wilhelm offering his warmest wishes and the rough outlines of a peace proposal he has been working on. ‘First, we have to win’, Wilhelm scribbles on the Vatican letter. How ‘unworldly and utopian’ of the Pope to think of future arms control at a time like this. Peace will only come, the Kaiser writes in the margins, ‘through a German victory brought about with the help of God’.
WASHINGTON DC, THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: There is something of the romantic crusader spirit about this upright man–suspicious of emotion, yet highly emotional himself–who carries a poem by Rudyard Kipling in his breast pocket and who now sits behind his desk in the Oval Office, working on a speech.
He wants so badly to be a peacemaker, this man, who remembers the fires of America’s Civil War from his childhood in Confederate Virginia. He wants so much to be the world’s friend (except to Republicans, whom he despises). He wants to show the world the shining path to righteousness which he fervently believes it is America’s destiny to light up. (‘America First’ is one of his political slogans.) Perhaps he, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian pastor, can personify that moral righteousness. Perhaps history will offer him, in his sixty-first year on earth, the opportunity to bring to worldwide fruition the political principles he has spoken about all his life. Perhaps his own blessings–and those of America–can be made universal. Would it not be a wonderful thing if the world could be made more American? Would not humanity benefit from a healthy dose of American-style self-government or from America’s spirit of commercial enterprise?
Woodrow knows his Bible: ‘blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God’. America must keep out of the war. It would be a ‘crime against civilization’, he tells his friend and adviser Colonel Edward House, for the last of the ‘great White nations’ to ruin itself in a contest between German and British ambitions. His concern with race is unexceptional. Many Americans view the European fighting as a white civil war, selfishly endangering the future security of the race itself. Last year, Madison Grant, chairman of the New York Zoological Society, described the war as race ‘suicide on a gigantic scale’. Woodrow worries about a future war of the white nations against the Japanese.
America must keep itself chaste. It must prepare for the time when Europe’s ‘mechanical slaughter’ has ceased and a new crusade for peace can begin under American tutelage. Woodrow understands his own particular authority in this regard. An American President, directly elected leader of the world’s most populous white republic, burnished by the prestige of its wealth and power and not engaged in the war’s present butchery, can speak directly to the peoples of Europe, over the heads of their leaders, man to man, as it were. An American President can speak to the world. He can speak for the world. There is a moral force in the affairs of humankind, that only the truly far-sighted can perceive. He must be that force.
Thinking through America’s duty to itself and to the world, a noble idea takes root in Woodrow’s mind: a plan not just to end this bloody war, but to end all wars. He writes and rewrites his text. He tosses around different versions of it with his confidants. And finally, when he is ready, he summons the elected representatives of America’s forty-eight states to the Capitol to hear his shining vision for the future: a cooperative league of nations for world peace, with America its chief backer. No more the temporary truces and unstable alliances of the past, but a perpetual peace built on common democratic principles, enforced by common action. ‘These are American principles, American policies’, he tells the law-makers of the republic, ‘they are the principles of mankind and must prevail’. One Democrat Senator declares it ‘the greatest message of the century’. Another commends ‘a fine literary effort’. Most Republicans find the peroration woolly, arrogant, even dangerous. ‘The President thinks he is president of the world’, notes a Senator from Wyoming. ‘Ill-timed and utterly impossible of accomplishment’, remarks his colleague from New Hampshire.
The speech is circulated to Europe’s capitals. There is one phrase in particular which angers many: ‘peace without victory’. A lasting peace, Woodrow lectures, as if back at Princeton, cannot be built on an equilibrium of te
rror but only on the equality of nations. An end to the present war which leaves one European power crowing triumphantly over the carcass of another would be a temporary expedient. ‘Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser’, the President explains, ‘accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand’. True peace will only come when both sides exchange the mirage of victory for something greater.
Easy for an American to ‘sell so cheaply the interests and sacrifices of others’, says a French newspaper. What insufferable arrogance.
LA SALPÊTRIÈRE HOSPITAL, PARIS, THE FRENCH REPUBLIC: A man stands naked in a room, one leg contorted and at rest, the other jacking up and down spasmodically against the parquet floor. His eyes are as vacant as the dead.
In front of him, a table, and on the table an array of objects: a cushion stuffed with pins, a reflex hammer, two batteries and a tuning fork. Not instruments of torture, but tools of diagnosis. On the other side of the table stands Dr Babinski, one of France’s most famous neurologists (Marcel Proust’s mother was once a patient) and a former student of Charcot (he is one of the students depicted in the engraving on Freud’s wall in Vienna). The doctor raises his eyes to assess the patient, a soldier recently returned from the front. The doctor’s notes fall from the table and land flat against the floor. A report echoes through the room.
Suddenly, the soldier’s eyes come alive. He speaks, he raves, he rants. It is gibberish: associations, memories, stories that stop and start, a terrifying cannon burst of words. For Babinski’s new assistant, a handsome plump-lipped boy newly arrived from Verdun, it is poetry. He watches enraptured as if the wounded man’s speech were a transmission from another world. He searches for meaning in the torrent of words. Is the soldier describing what happened to him at the front, or a dream of what will happen if he is sent back? In his head perhaps he is there already, hot steel hurtling towards him from every side. And who, in this moment, can say which is more real: the hospital or the front, the memory or the fear, the inner or the outer experience?
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