by Philipp Blom
The writer Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) saddled himself with an undeserved reputation as a pornographer when he combined the two motifs of casual liaisons and the never-ending circle of activity in his scandalous play Der Reigen (‘The Daisy Chain’, 1903), in which couples of different social backgrounds meet in a series of random sexual encounters, beginning with a whore and a soldier, rising up to an actress and a count, only to have count meet whore in the last scene, a succession that is meaningless, endless, and knows no social boundaries. More naughtily, the writer Felix Salten (1869-1945), the creator of Bambi, the soft-eyed fawn loved by little girls the world over and pure as the driven snow, also wrote a notoriously pornographic romp, Josefine Mutzenbacher (1906), which left nothing at all to the adult reader’s imagination.
Duplicity had become an institution in Vienna as in other European societies - a fact very clearly exemplified by Oscar Wilde’s disastrous libel trial in London or the Eulenburg affair in Germany, in which respected public figures were ruined when their homosexuality, an open secret, was made public. In the Dual Monarchy, this principle was upheld with iron strength: as long as the fiction of imperial greatness and public morality could be upheld, everybody could have a good time. The public dogma of looking the other way made the double eagle, whose heads face opposite directions, appear the perfect emblem for the state, and for the state of mind. Habsburg Vienna was certainly not the only place where a rigid code of behaviour was offset by a sphere in which different rules applied, but this fact had a particular flavour here.
The origin of this collective escape into pleasure was political and it applied not just to popular entertainment, but also to high art. Ever since Metternich’s rule at the beginning of the nineteenth century and even more so after the abortive revolution of 1848, a leaden autocracy had done much to discourage the bourgeoisie from participating in politics, and the rising middle classes had found a solution which echoed that of German Romanticism almost a century before: if they could not have a national life through political participation they would recreate their freedom and their values through a vibrant cultural life, an emotional projection dissimulated into the scripts and costumes of the stage.
Throughout the Habsburg empire, in Vienna, Prague, Budapest and Lemberg, theatre, literature and music mattered as nowhere else in the world. Only here could an actor such as Joseph Kainz or Eleonora Duse become national celebrities, their careers and appearances discussed (even by people who had never seen them) in every greengrocer’s shop, their signatures collected by excited schoolboys, as Stefan Zweig relates. Only here could the funeral of an artist turn into a national event attended by tens of thousands of mourners, with black ribbons on portrait photos in every shop window. A general, humanistic education belonged to the repertoire of the middle classes, and in their salons busts of Goethe and Beethoven stood directly underneath the picture of the Emperor, if not replacing it altogether, while rich industrialists like Karl Wittgenstein, father of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, made it a point of honour to be patrons of the arts.
To Dr Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the doctor whose professional advancement had been announced in the Wiener Zeitung of 18 March 1902, the dichotomy between moral principle and social reality was a fact of life. He had grown up here, and he knew all there was to know about the climate of duplicity. The son of a struggling Jewish cloth merchant, Freud had worked his way up to becoming a fashionable ‘modern’ doctor whose reputation rested on work he had done with the great Paris psychiatrist Jean Martin Charcot and on a capacity for listening to patients without being shocked by anything they told him. Freud’s consulting room in the Berggasse was filled with members of Vienna’s good society, most of whom had ailments that could not be treated conventionally.
Family man: Sigmund Freud with his grandchildren.
As a young doctor, Freud had wanted to do strictly scientific work. His earliest research was devoted to the physiology of eel testicles and his doctoral dissertation dealt with the functions of bone marrow in lower fish. From these creatures of the deep the scientist had graduated to human brains, to experiments with cocaine and to a research visit to Professor Charcot in Paris, where Freud studied the powerful effects of a psychological approach to mental illness, a diagnosis and a cure based on analysing patients’ statements and trying to find emotional reasons for their symptoms and behaviour. His own interests had already led him in a similar direction, to a talking cure in which words would take the place of scalpels, cutting through uncontrollable growths of the imagination in order to eliminate them and restore a healthy constitution.
It was around 1895 that Freud had discovered the Archimedean point at which he believed he could unhinge the universe of the mind. Freud was a good listener, and he had noticed that sooner or later his patients would talk about sexual disorders, wishes or fears, and that the symbolism of their accounts pointed strongly in a sexual direction. This in itself was nothing new: among doctors treating mental disorders it was an accepted fact that sex played an important part. Freud, however, went a crucial step further, as he explained in a letter to his colleague and then close friend Wilhelm Fleiss: ‘Have I already communicated the great clinical secret to you, orally or in writing?…Hysteria is the consequence of a presexual sexual scare.
Obsessional neurosis is the consequence of a presexual sexual pleasure, which later transforms itself into [self-]reproach.’ All afflictions of the mind, Freud implied, were in fact sexual, and had their roots not in recent experience but in buried memories, half recalled or strenuously suppressed. The talking cure he envisaged would therefore have to use the methods of archaeologists looking for hidden structures under metres of accumulated rubble, deep truths concealed by new façades. These truths, he was convinced, would lead unfailingly to sexual feelings deemed unacceptable, to forbidden lusts, thoughts of incest, sexual jealousy and fear.
In Vienna such a theory was bound to have a particular resonance. La théorie, c’est bon, mais ça n’empêche pas d’exister, theory is all very well, but that does not prevent facts from existing, Freud’s teacher Charcot had said - a heretical sentence in the Viennese context. The young doctor had taken him at his word; even if theory or social convention decreed that troublesome impulses did not exist, that people were rational and moral and that honour lay in the fulfilment of duty, the outlawed impulses were nevertheless real, and their suppression must result in internal conflict. The clash between one’s desires and the needs of society, of order and decency, led to repression, sublimation and displacement of wishes and emotions of which the individual might not even be aware.
The destructive conflict between conscious values and subconscious desires was fought out through dreams, Freud hypothesized in his path-breaking Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1899, dated 1900):
…the dream affords proof that the suppressed material continues to exist even in the normal person and remains capable of psychic activity. Dreams are one of the manifestations of this suppressed material; theoretically, this is true in all cases; and in tangible experience, it has been found true in at least a great number of cases, which happen to display most plainly the more striking features of the dream-life. The suppressed psychic material, which in the waking state has been prevented from expression and cut off from internal perception by the mutual neutralization of contradictory attitudes, finds ways and means, under the sway of compromise-formations, of obtruding itself on consciousness during the night.
Dreams rule the subconscious, a realm of the mind as deep and as uncontrollable as Homer’s wine-dark sea. The rational mind may be filled with normative ideas and good intentions, but if reason and subconscious pull in different directions, a personality must finally be torn apart. The result may be a neurosis, a displacement of subconscious needs expressing itself through a variety of symptoms. It is the role of the physiotherapist to uncover their hidden origin through questions and careful guidance, setting the sufferer free to deal with his or
her impulsions rationally:
By the analysis of dreams we obtain some insight into the composition of this most marvellous and most mysterious of instruments; it is true that this only takes us a little way, but it gives us a start which enables us, setting out from the angle of other (properly pathological) formations, to penetrate further in our disjoining of the instrument. For disease ... does not necessarily presuppose the destruction of this apparatus, or the establishment of new cleavages in its interior: it can be explained dynamically by the strengthening and weakening of the components of the play of forces, so many of the activities of which are covered up in normal functioning.
The obvious conclusion from this theory was that all ‘normal functioning’ was a simple lie, exclusively designed to dissimulate an inconvenient truth, namely that the functioning of society itself rested on the suppression of the individual, on a denial of pleasure:
In the last analysis, the motive of human society is an economic one: as there is not sufficient food to maintain its members without the need to work the number of members must be kept small and their energies diverted from sexual acts to work. This is the eternal, primordial anguish of life [Lebensnot] which is continued to this day.
Society as a great collective dream designed to force people into being useful instead of enjoying themselves and fulfilling the primary (sexual) function imposed on them by nature - in the context of Viennese politics this theory read like a comment on reality in Austria-Hungary.
As a young man, Sigmund Freud had decided not to become a philosopher but a clinician, a scientist. His interest in the metaphorical had fortunately diverted him from the laboratory, and it was the philosopher Freud whose work was truly groundbreaking and most influential; almost in passing, his analysis of personality structure and early experience defied the dominant tradition of the European Enlightenment, in which all understanding and all morality is based on reason and reason alone. Already during the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant had claimed that we can never truly know what the outside world is like, because all knowledge of it is based on perception, and all perception based on the structure and limitations of our senses and the way in which they communicate the world to us. The only truly secure knowledge, Kant had written, must therefore be found inside the mind itself: the universal moral law governing our judgements and our actions, a law that could be discovered by reason alone.
Freud’s theory of personal development flatly contradicted this noble idea. Morality was by no means universal, he argued, but a result of narcissism. As the ‘narcissistic perfection’ of early childhood dawns into a world full of interdictions and limitations, the loss is experienced as a personal failure, guilt sets in and, struggling to regain paradise, the ego develops norms such as conscientiousness, cleanliness and compassion. Morality itself was of sexual origin, and its structure depended on the contingencies of personal experience. In the final analysis, there was no universal law, only impulse and guilt, represented by internal metaphors: the normative SuperEgo, the rational Ego and, supporting and undermining all, the boundless realm of instinct and lust, the Id. Morality, Freud claimed, was even more radically contingent and subjective than perception. Nobody could claim to discover or to act from universal principles, as these were nothing but a projection of a neurotic failure to live up to the perfection of life in the womb.
The experience of living in Vienna, the city of competing idioms and nationalist feuds, arguably contributed to this abolition of the fiction of universal values and rational morality. Freud’s textual fidelity (in his dream interpretations every word, every inflection, every detail counts and holds significance) predestined him for reading between the lines, and his insistence on the text may also be an unacknowledged legacy of methods and attitudes of Jewish learning. Freud had not been given a Jewish education, but his father had still grown up in an orthodox environment, and the parallels between Talmudic learning and Freudian analysis are striking. In both, the text (of the Bible, of a dream) is sacrosanct in all its apparent arbitrariness, language is held to cover more secrets than it revealed, and the text is to be interpreted in the light of others and of principles which can be acquired through rigorous application of scholarly observation. In both, deep structures are revealed between an apparent multitude of signs and symbols. Despite Freud’s rigorously secular outlook, which made him one of his time’s most eloquent critics of religion, the line dividing the medical scholar from Rabbi Freud is thin and often permeable.
From today’s perspective, Freud’s method has proven more useful for analysing social or literary universes than for the treatment of individual patients: even his own patients did not show the dramatic improvement the master himself claimed, and many relapsed after their sessions had been terminated. Seen from the perspective of his own time, his critique of social and personal façades was subversive in the extreme. In a society relying even more than others on appearance and convention to hide the lack of solutions to the unsolvable questions at its heart, the Jewish doctor declared all convention to be corrosive of the soul, society no more than a necessary evil, the most anarchic figments of the imagination representative of deep realities. But if a society’s values are based on repression and psychological violence likely to make its members sick and to twist their minds, what then is their validity?
And what about the individual? Could it really be the case that all of culture was nothing more than a sublimation of the ‘basest instincts’, of things one could not possibly talk about with ladies present, things of which many young girls learned nothing before finding themselves in the marriage bed? What about the dominion of dark, unspeakable impulses in the human soul and particularly in the souls of innocent children? Was such a theory not simply an attack on public morals? In a city struggling to keep up appearances, these ideas threw up unanswerable questions.
There are obvious parallels between Freud’s theories and the work of Viennese artists and philosophers. Novels described how rigid social conventions broke and distorted individuals: they tortured the eponymous hero of Robert Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless (Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless, 1906), who witnesses the sadistic customs at a cadet academy training imperial officers, and they were most visible in the work of that great diagnostician of the Viennese soul Arthur Schnitzler - another Jewish doctor. In a novella named after its protagonist, Schnitzler’s anti-hero Lieutenant Gustl spends a sleepless night in anguish anticipating a senseless duel he is about to fight to guard his honour because of a trivial misunderstanding. In another stream-of-consciousness novella a young woman, Miss Else, is struggling with her bankrupt father’s demand that she sleep with a creditor. ‘They send you to school and see that you learn French and the piano and you spend the summers in the country,’ she reflects about her upbringing. ‘But what’s happening inside me, what is tormented and frightened inside me, have they ever been interested in that?’ They had not. In the context of good society the very question was heretical.
Schnitzler, who knew and admired Freud and was in turn admired by him, made it his life’s work to show these repressed and bewildered people on the page and on stage acting out their neuroses like electrons spinning around an empty core, unable to control their trajectory, propelled by unseen forces and often uncertain whether they are awake or dreaming. Any attempt to escape the rigidity of convention is immediately attacked. In Ruf des Lebens (The Call of Life, 1906) a young woman, Marie, tries to let fresh air into the small drawing room, only to be reprimanded by her father who sees soldiers riding past.
FATHER: What are you doing? Are you mad? I could catch my death! MARIE: The air is hot; and the doctor always says how stifling it is in here.
FATHER: Stifling! That’s why you suddenly throw open the windows? Stifling! Do you think I don’t know what you really want? There. Yes, there they are riding, proud, young, healthy…healthy and young today! ... Ho! We have our flat in the middle of the city - a look around the corner - and life pass
es you by!
Appearances could not be trusted in a social world in which the windows of the soul had to stay firmly shut to keep out temptation. Repressed impulses will out, was one of Freud’s central claims, and if they cannot articulate themselves directly they will find another way. Everything that is said, imagined, or done, will be coloured by these unacknowledged central impulses.
The conclusion to draw from this claim was that words and gestures always stood for something hidden, that there was a meaning other than what was being said, and that all action must ultimately be paralysed by internal conflict, as it famously was in Musil’s Man Without Qualities in which the ‘great patriotic action’, the celebration of an imperial anniversary, becomes mired in interminable deliberations, consultations and committees. The ironist Musil was endlessly diverted by his countrymen’s capacity for procrastination and dissimulation. Other writers found it more difficult to deal with the unreliability of the very words they used. The writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Vienna’s young poetic star, was so tormented by this distrust of language that he gave up writing poems. ‘Briefly, my case is as follows,’ he had one of his characters say in his Chandos-Brief (Letter from Lord Chandos, 1902), ‘I have entirely lost the ability to think or speak about anything in a coherent way.’ Language had turned against the poet. ‘Terms suddenly adopted such a kaleidoscopic colouring and flowed into one another’ that Hofmannsthal’s hero found solace only once he was alone, and silent.
Language could not be relied upon to express truth, as Freud had proved and Hofmannsthal had felt. The multilingual philosopher Fritz Mauthner (1849-1923) knew about the impossibilities of literal translation between languages and became fundamentally suspicious of what could and could not be said with words. Mauthner analysed the ability of language to transport definite meaning, after having noticed that concepts and their connotations were subtly different in every language he would use. Experience is unique and immediate, and the very moment it receives a name it loses these crucial qualities, Mauthner contended, and in his Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Contributions to a Critique of Language, 1901-3) it took him three hefty volumes to explain that language was unable to convey thought content - one of the more paradoxical achievements of Western philosophy.
