by Peter Watson
The third charge is that the picture Freud himself painted of one of Breuer’s most famous patients, ‘Anna O.’, or Bertha Pappenheim, was seriously flawed and quite possibly based on deliberate deceit. Henri Ellenberger himself traced the clinics where Pappenheim was treated and unearthed the notes used by Breuer. Since some of the wording in these reports is identical with the later published paper, we can be sure that these are indeed the original notes. Ellenberger, and others since, found that there is no evidence at all that Pappenheim ever had a phantom pregnancy. This is now believed to be a story Freud invented, to counter the apparent lack of sexual aetiology in the Anna O. case as recounted by Breuer, which was completely at odds with Freud’s insistence that sexual matters lay at the root of all hysterical symptoms. In his biography of Josef Breuer (1989), Albrecht Hirschmüller goes so far as to say that ‘The Freud–Jones account of the termination of the treatment of Anna O. should be regarded as a myth.’37 Hirschmüller himself was able to show that many of Pappenheim’s symptoms went into total or partial remission spontaneously, that she went through no catharsis or abreaction–in fact the case notes end abruptly in 1882–and that, following treatment by Breuer, she was hospitalised in the next years no fewer than four times, each time being diagnosed with ‘hysteria’. In other words, Freud’s claim that Breuer ‘restored Anna O. to health’ is false and, moreover and equally important, Freud must have known it was false because there is a letter of his which makes clear that Breuer knew Anna O. was still ill in 1883, and because she was a friend of Freud’s fiancée Martha Bernays.38
The significance of the Anna O. case, or at least the way Freud reported it, is threefold. It shows that Freud exaggerated the effects of the ‘talking cure’. It shows that he introduced a sexual element when none was there. And it shows that he was cavalier with the clinical details. We shall see that these tendencies all repeated themselves in important ways throughout the rest of his career.
The fourth charge against Freud is by far the most serious but stems from the case of Anna O. It is that the entire edifice of psychoanalysis is based on clinical evidence and observations that are at best dubious or flawed, and at worst fraudulent. Perhaps the single most important idea in psychoanalysis is Freud’s conclusion that infantile sexual wishes persist in adults, but outside awareness, and can thus bring about psychopathology. ‘At the bottom of every case of hysteria,’ he reported in 1896, ‘there are one or more occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood but which can be reproduced through the work of psychoanalysis in spite of the intervening decades.’ What is strange about this is that, although in 1896 he had never before reported a single case of sexual abuse in infancy, within four months he was claiming that he had ‘traced back’ unconscious memories of abuse in thirteen patients described as hysterical. Allied to this was his argument that the event or situation that was responsible for a particular symptom could be revealed through his technique of psychoanalysis, and that ‘abreacting’ the event–reliving it in talk with the associated emotional expression–would result in ‘catharsis’, remission of the symptom. He became convinced that this was, in his own words, ‘an important finding, the discovery of a caput Nili [source of the Nile] in neuropathology…’39 But he then went on to add–and this is what has brought about the great revision–‘these patients never repeat these stories spontaneously, nor do they ever in the course of a treatment suddenly present the physician with the complete recollection of a scene of this kind’. For Freud, as he presented his findings, these memories were unconscious, outside the patient’s awareness, ‘traces are never present in conscious memory, only in the symptoms of the illness’. His patients, going into therapy, had no idea about these scenes and, he confessed, they were ‘indignant as a rule’ when they were told. ‘Only the strongest compulsion of the treatment can induce them to embark on reproducing them’ (the early circumstances of abuse). As Allen Esterson and others have shown, Freud’s techniques in the early days were not those of a sensitive analyst sitting quietly on a couch, listening to what his patients had to say. On the contrary, Freud would touch his patients on the forehead–this was his ‘pressure’ technique–and he would insist that something would come into their heads–an idea, image or memory. They were made to describe these images and memories until, after a long stream, they would alight on the event that caused the (supposed) hysterical symptom. In other words, say the critics, Freud had very fixed ideas about what lay at the root of various symptoms and rather than passively listen and let the clinical evidence emerge from observation, he forced his views on his patients.
It was out of this unusual approach that there came his most famous set of observations. This was that the patients had been seduced, or otherwise sexually abused, in infancy, and that these experiences lay at the root of their later neurotic symptoms. The culprits were divided into three: adult strangers; adults in charge of the children, such as maids, governesses or tutors; and ‘blameless children…mostly brothers who for years on end had carried on sexual relations with sisters a little younger than themselves’.40 The age at which these precocious sexual experiences were alleged to have taken place occurred most commonly in the third to fifth year. To this point, what the critics chiefly argue is that Freud’s allegedly ‘clinical’ observations are no such thing. They are instead a dubious ‘reconstruction’, based on symbolic interpretation of the symptom. It is necessary to repeat that a close reading of Freud’s various reports shows that patients never actually volunteered these stories of sexual abuse. On the contrary they vehemently denied them. Invariably, it was Freud who ‘informed’, ‘persuaded’, ‘intuited’ or ‘inferred’ these processes. In several places he actually admitted to ‘guessing’ what the underlying problem was.
However, and this is another event of some significance, within eighteen months Freud was confiding to his colleague Wilhelm Fleiss (but only to Fleiss) that he no longer believed in this theory of the origins of neurosis. He thought it improbable there should be such widespread perversions against children, and in any case he was failing to bring any of his analyses based on these ideas to a successful conclusion. ‘Of course I shall not tell it in Dan, nor speak of it in Askelon, in the land of the Philistines, but in your eyes and my own…’ In other words, he was not prepared to do the scientifically honourable thing, and acknowledge publicly that he was withdrawing his confidently-claimed ‘findings’ of the previous year. It was now that he began to consider the possibility that these events were unconscious fantasies rather than memories. However, even then this new variation took time to coalesce fully, because Freud at first thought that infants’ fantasies occurred in order to ‘cover up the auto-erotic activity of the early years of childhood’. In 1906 and again in 1914 he said that, around puberty, some patients conjured up unconscious memories of infantile ‘seductions’ to ‘fend off’ memories of infantile masturbation. In 1906 the ‘culprits’ of the fantasies were adults or older children, while in 1914 he did not specify who they were. In that report, however, he did at last fully retract his seduction theory. Even so, it was only in 1925, nearly thirty years after the events in question, that he first said publicly that most of his early female patients had accused their father of having seduced them. The size of this volte-face cannot be overstated. In the first place, there is no question but that he radically changed the scenario of seduction–from real to fantasised, and further, he changed the identity of the seducers from strangers/tutors/brothers to fathers. The important point to take on board is that this change occurred as a result of no new clinical evidence: Freud simply painted a different picture, using the same ingredients, except that this time he was a quarter of a century away from the evidence. Second, and no less important, during the long years between the late 1890s and 1925, during which time he treated many female patients, Freud never reported that any of them mentioned early seductions, by their fathers or anyone else. In other words, it seems that once Freud stopped looking for it, th
is syndrome ceased to show itself. This is surely further evidence, say the critics, that the seduction theory, and by extension the Oedipus and Electra complexes, perhaps the most influential aspect of Freudianism, and one of the most important ideas of the twentieth century, in both medical and artistic terms, not to say common parlance, turns out to have the most unusual, tortured–and quite frankly improbable–genealogy. The inconsistencies in the genesis of the theory are blatant. Freud did not ‘discover’ early sexual awareness in his patients: he inferred or intuited or ‘guessed’ it was there. He did not discover the Oedipus complex from careful and passive observations of clinical evidence: he had a pre-set idea which he forced on the ‘evidence’, after previous ‘impositions’ had failed even to convince himself. Furthermore, it was a process that could not be reproduced by any independent, sceptical scientist, and this is perhaps the most damning evidence of all, the final nail in the coffin so far as Freud’s claim to be a scientist is concerned. What sort of science is it where experimental or clinical evidence cannot be replicated by other scientists using the same techniques and methodology? Anthony Clare, the British psychiatrist and broadcaster, has described Freud as a ‘ruthless, devious charlatan’ and concluded that ‘many of the foundation stones of psychoanalysis are phoney’.41 It is hard not to agree. Given Freud’s ‘pressure’ technique, his ‘persuading’ and ‘guessing’, we are entitled to doubt whether the unconscious exists. Essentially, he made the whole thing up.
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.
It was in the cities of the nineteenth century that modernism was born. In the later years, the internal combustion engine and the steam turbine were invented, electricity was finally mastered, the telephone, the typewriter and the tape machine all came into being. The popular press and the cinema were invented. The first trades unions were formed and the workers became organised. By 1900 there were eleven metropolises–including London, Paris, Berlin and New York–which had more than a million inhabitants, unprecedented concentrations of people. The expansion of the cities, together with that of the universities, covered in an earlier chapter, were responsible for what Harold Perkin has called the rise of professional society, the time–from roughly 1880 on–when the likes of doctors, lawyers, school and university teachers, local government officers, architects and scientists began to dominate politics in the democracies, and who viewed expertise as the way forward. In England Perkin shows that the number of such professions at least doubled and in some cases quadrupled between 1880 and 1911. Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert were the first to put into words what Manet and his ‘gang’ (as a critic called them) were trying to capture in paint: the fleeting experiences of the city–short, intense, accidental and arbitrary. The impressionists captured the changing light but also the unusual sights–the new machinery, like the railways, awesome and dreadful at the same time, great cavernous railway stations, offering the promise of travel but choking with soot, a beautiful cityscape truncated by an ugly but necessary bridge, cabaret stars lit unnaturally from footlights underneath, a barmaid seen both from the front and from behind, through the great glittering mirror on the wall. These were visual emblems of ‘newness’ but there was much more to modernism than this. Its interest lies in the fact that it became both a celebration and a condemnation of the modern, and of the world–the world of science, positivism, rationalism–that had produced the great cities, with their vast wealth and new forms of poverty, desolate and degrading.45 The cities of modernism were bewildering, full of comings and goings, largely contingent or accidental. Science had denuded this world of meaning (in a religious, spiritual sense) and in such a predicament it became the job of art both to describe this state of affairs, to assess and criticise it, and, if possible, to redeem it. In this way, a climate of opinion formed, in which whatever modernism stood for, it also stood for the opposite. And what was amazing was that so much talent blossomed in such bewildering and paradoxical circumstances. ‘In terms of sheer creativity, the epoch of modernism compares with the impact of the romantic period and even with the renaissance.’46 There grew up what Harold Rosenberg called ‘the tradition of the new’. This was the apogee of bourgeois culture and it was in this world, this teeming world, that the concept of the avant-garde was conceived, a consecration of the romantic idea that the artist was ahead of–and usually dead against–the bourgeoisie, a pace-setter when it came to taste and imagination, but whose role was as much sabotage as invention.
If anything united the modernists–the rationalists and realists on the one hand, and the critics of rationality, the apostles of the unconscious, and the cultural pessimists on the other–it was the intensity of their engagement. Modernism was, more than anything, a high point of the arts–painting, lite
rature, music–because cities were an intensifier: by their nature they threw people up against one another–and better communications ensured that all encounters were accelerated.47 As a result exchanges became sharper, louder, inevitably more bitter. We take this for granted now but at the time stress increased, and people found that was a creative force too. If modernism was often anti-science, this was because its pessimism was sparked by that same science. The discoveries of Darwin, Maxwell and J. J. Thomson were disconcerting, to say the least, seeming to remove all morality, direction and stability from the world, undermining the very notion of reality.
