by Peter Watson
Arguably the first appearance of the unconscious as we now understand the term came after the magnetisers noticed that when they induced magnetic sleep in someone, ‘a new life manifested itself of which the subject was unaware, and that a new and often more brilliant personality emerged’.9 These ‘two minds’ fascinated the nineteenth century, and there emerged the concept of the ‘double ego’ or ‘dipsychism’.10 People were divided as to whether the second mind was ‘closed’ or ‘opened’. The dipsychism theory was developed by Max Dessoir in The Double Ego, published to great acclaim in 1890, in which he divided the mind into the Oberbewussten and the Unterbewussten, ‘upper consciousness’ and ‘under consciousness’, the latter, he said, being revealed occasionally in dreams.
Among the general background factors giving rise to the unconscious, romanticism was intimately involved, says Ellenberger, because romantic philosophy embraced the notion of Urphänomene, ‘primordial phenomena’ and the metamorphoses deriving from them.11 Among the Urphänomene were the Urpflanze, the primordial plant, the All-Sinn, the universal sense, and the unconscious. Another primordial phenomenon, according to Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert (1780–1860), was Ich-Sucht (self-love). Von Schubert said man was a ‘double star’, endowed with a Selbstbewussten, a second centre.12 Johann Christian August Heinroth (1773–1843), described by Ellenberger as a ‘romantic doctor’, argued that the main cause of mental illness was sin. He theorised that conscience originated in another primordial phenomenon, the Über-Uns (over-us).13 Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–1887), a Swiss, promulgated the theory of matriarchy, publishing in 1861 The Law of Mothers.14 He believed, he said, that history had gone through three phases, ‘hetairism, matriarchy and patriarchy’. The first had been characterised by sexual promiscuity, when children did not know their fathers; the second was established only after thousands of years of struggle, but women had won out, founded the family and agriculture and wielded all the social and political power. The main virtue at this time was love for the mother, with the mothers together favouring a social system of general freedom, equality and peace. Matriarchal society praised education of the body (practical values) above education of the intellect. Patriarchal society emerged only after another long period of bitter struggle. It involved a complete reversal of matriarchal society, favouring individual independence and isolating men from one another. Paternal love is a more abstract principle than maternal love, says Bachofen, less down-to-earth and leading to high intellectual achievement. He believed that many myths contain evidence of matriarchal society, for example the myth of Oedipus.15
A number of philosophers also anticipated Freudian concepts. The following list of books is instructive but far from exhaustive (Unbewussten means ‘unconscious’ in German): August Winkelmann, Introduction into Dynamic Psychology (1802); Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious (1868); W. B. Carpenter, Unconscious Action of the Brain (1872); J. C. Fischer, Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewussten (1872); J. Vokelt, Das Unbewusste und der Pessimismus (1873); C. F. Flemming, Zur Klärung des Vegriffsder unbewussten Seelen-Thätigkeit (1877); A. Schmidt, Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der Philosophie des Unbewussten (1877); E. Colsenet, La Vie Inconsciente de l’Esprit (1880).16
In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer conceived the will as a ‘blind, driving force’. Man, he said, was an irrational being guided by internal forces, ‘which are unknown to him and of which he is scarcely aware’.17 The metaphor Schopenhauer used was that of the earth’s surface, the inside of which is unknown to us. He said that the irrational forces which dominated man were of two kinds–the instinct of conservation and the sexual instinct. Of the two, the sexual instinct was by far the more powerful, and in fact, said Schopenhauer, nothing else can compete with it. ‘Man is deluded if he thinks he can deny the sex instinct. He may think that he can, but in reality the intellect is suborned by sexual urges and it is in this sense that the will is “the secret antagonist of the intellect”.’ Schopenhauer even had a concept of what later came to be called repression which was itself unconscious: ‘The Will’s opposition to let what is repellent to it come to the knowledge of the intellect is the spot through which insanity can break through into the spirit.’18 ‘Consciousness is the mere surface of our mind, and of this, as of the globe, we do not know the interior but only the crust.’19
Von Hartmann went further, however, arguing that there were three layers of the unconscious. These were (1) the absolute unconscious, ‘which constitutes the substance of the universe and is the source of the other forms’; (2) the physiological unconscious, which is part of man’s evolutionary development; and (3) the psychological unconscious, which governs our conscious mental life. More than Schopenhauer, von Hartmann collected copious evidence–clinical evidence, in a way–to support his arguments. For example, he discussed the association of ideas, wit, language, religion, history and social life–significantly, all areas which Freud himself would explore.
Many of Freud’s thoughts about the unconscious were also anticipated by Nietzsche (whose other philosophical views are considered later). Nietzsche had a concept of the unconscious as a ‘cunning, covert, instinctual’entity, often scarred by trauma, camouflaged in a surreal way but leading to pathology.20 The same is true of Johann Herbart and G. T. Fechner. Ernest Jones, Freud’s first (and official) biographer, drew attention to a Polish psychologist, Luise von Karpinska, who originally spotted the resemblance between some of Freud’s fundamental ideas and Herbart’s (who wrote seventy years before). Herbart pictured the mind as dualistic, in constant conflict between conscious and unconscious processes. An idea is described as being verdrängt (repressed) ‘when it is unable to reach consciousness because of some opposing idea’.21 Fechner built on Herbart, specifically likening the mind to an iceberg ‘which is nine-tenths under water and whose course is determined not only by the wind that plays over the surface but also by the currents of the deep’.22
Pierre Janet may also be regarded as a ‘pre-Freudian’. Part of a great generation of French scholars which included Henri Bergson, Émile Durkheim, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Alfred Binet, Janet’s first important work was Psychological Automatism, which included the results of experiments he carried out at Le Havre between 1882 and 1888. There, he claimed to have refined a technique of hypnosis in which he induced his patients to undertake automatic writing. These writings, he said, explained why his patients would develop ‘terror’ fits without any apparent reason.23 Janet also noticed that, under hypnosis, patients sometimes developed a dual personality. One side was created to please the physician while the second, which would occur spontaneously, was best explained as a ‘return to childhood’. (Patients would refer to themselves, all of a sudden, by their childhood nicknames.) When Janet moved to Paris he developed his technique known as ‘Psychological Analysis’. This was a repeated use of hypnosis and automatic writing, during the course of which, he noticed, the crises that were induced were followed by the patient’s mind becoming clearer. However, the crises became progressively more severe and the ideas that emerged showed that they were reaching back in time, earlier and earlier in the patient’s life. Janet concluded that ‘in the human mind, nothing ever gets lost’ and that ‘subconscious fixed ideas are both the result of mental weakness and [a] source of further and worse mental weakness’.24
The nineteenth century was also facing up to the issue of child sexuality. Physicians had traditionally considered it a rare abnormality but, as early as 1846, Father P. J. C. Debreyne, a moral theologian who was also a physician, published a tract where he insisted on the high frequency of infantile masturbation, of sexual play between young children, and of the seduction of very young children by wet nurses and servants. Bishop Dupanloup of Orléans was another churchman who repeatedly emphasised the frequency of sexual play among children, arguing that most of them acquired ‘bad habits’ between the ages of one and two years. Most famously, Jules Michelet, in Our Sons (1869), warned parents a
bout the reality of child sexuality and in particular what today would be called the Oedipus complex.25
Two things of some importance emerge from even this brief survey of nineteenth-century (mainly German and French) thought. The first is to dispense thoroughly with any idea that Freud ‘discovered’ the unconscious. Whether or not the unconscious exists as an entity (an issue we shall return to later), the idea of the unconscious pre-dates Freud by several decades and was common currency in European thought throughout most of the 1800s. Second, many of the other psychological concepts inextricably linked with Freud in the minds of so many–such ideas as childhood sexuality, the Oedipus complex, repression, regression, transference, the libido, the id and the superego–were also not original to Freud. They were as much ‘in the air’ as the unconscious was, as much as ‘evolution’ was at the time Darwin conceived the mechanism of natural selection. Freud had nowhere near as original a mind as he is generally given credit for.
Surprising as all this is, for many people, it is still not the main charge against him, not the main sin so far as Freud’s critics contend. These critics, such figures as Frederick Crews, Frank Cioffi, Allen Esterson, Malcolm Macmillan and Frank Sulloway (the list is long and growing), further argue that Freud is–not to beat about the bush–a charlatan, a ‘scientist’ only in quotation marks, who fudged and faked his data and deceived both himself and others. And this, the critics charge, completely vitiates his theories and the conclusions based on them.
The best format to convey the new view of Freud is first to give the orthodox view of the ways in which he conceived his theories, and their reception, and then to give the main charges against him, showing how the orthodox view now has to be altered (this alteration, it should be said one more time, is drastic–we are talking here about critical scholarship over the last forty years but, in the main, the last fifteen years). Here, to begin with, is the orthodox version.
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 auto-hypnoses. 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
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.29
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 October1896. 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.
So much for the orthodox view. Now for the revised version. There are four main charges. In increasing order of importance they are that, one, Freud did not invent the ‘free association’ technique. This was invented in 1879 or 1880 by Francis Galton and reported in the journal Brain, where the new technique is described as a device to explore ‘obscure depths’.35 The second charge is that it is a myth that Freud’s books and theories met with a hostile reception–recent scholarship has revealed the extent of this myth. Norman Kiell, in Freud Without Hindsight (1988), reports that out of forty-four reviews of The Interpretation of Dreams published between 1899 and 1913 (which is in itself a respectable number), only eight could be classified as ‘unfavourable’. Hannah Decker, herself a Freudian, in her book Freud in Germany: Revolution and Reaction in Science, 1893–1907 (1977), concludes that ‘an overwhelming percent of the [published] lay response to Freud’s theories about dreams was enthusiastic’.36 Though The Interpretation of Dreams may not have sold well, a popular version did do well. The history of the unconscious, reported earlier in this chapter, and the evolution of such ideas as the superego, childhood sexuality, and repression, show that Freud was not saying anything that was completely new. Why, therefore, should people have taken such exception? He never had any problems getting his views published. He never published his views anonymously, as Robert Chambers did when he introduced the idea of evolution to a wide range of readers.
