The Story of Psychology

by Morton Hunt

  The group grew gradually; its early members included Otto Rank, Alfred Adler, Sandor Ferenczi, and Ernest Jones, all destined to become important in the psychoanalytic movement. By 1906 there were seventeen, and two years later the expanding group, now factional and acrimonious, became the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Many such societies sprang up in other cities in Europe and America, and by 1910, at a congress in Nuremberg, the International Psychoanalytic Association was founded.

  Freud’s professorship and the formation of the Wednesday Psychological Society brought an increase in his practice and income. In his office suite, completely separate from the family’s spacious living quarters, he began collecting the Roman and Greek statuettes and other antiquities that he loved, arranging them on a table in his line of vision where he sat behind the head of the patients’ couch. He also could now afford more luxurious vacations to more remote areas. It was his custom to work extremely hard for nine months of the year and then take a three-month summer break. He would spend the first part of the vacation in the mountains with his large family—Martha, their six children, and Martha’s unmarried sister, Minna. Although in photographs he always looks stern, even severe—he is said to have had a piercing gaze and a commanding air—in private life he could be warm, relaxed, and informal, and on vacation would put on a backpack, hiking clothes, and boots and take his older children walking in the forest, climbing, hunting mushrooms, and fishing.

  After some weeks of this, he would leave the family and go to Italy, where, as a result of his self-analysis, he was now able to visit Rome. Martha did not accompany him; Freud was very much a conservative, middle-class Viennese paterfamilias whose wife was the chatelaine of the household, her only purpose in life being, she said, to serve “our dear chief.” She maintained peace and order, relieving Freud of all mundane concerns, laid out his clothes for him each day, and even put toothpaste on his toothbrush.58 With such support, it is not surprising that Freud, a compulsive worker, could accomplish so much. Although he saw patients eight or nine hours a day, he wrote prolifically in the evening and on weekends, and his lifetime output of psychological writings fills twenty-three good-sized volumes.

  Among the many works, both short and long, that Freud completed in the early years of the new century were two that are particularly important, one because it added greatly to his renown, the other because it added greatly to his notoriety.

  The first, published in 1901, was The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. It dealt with such topics as forgetfulness, slips of the tongue, and bungled actions, which Freud viewed not as mere accidents but as having significant unconscious causes. Although the purpose of the work was serious, it was filled with entertaining anecdotes from Freud’s own life, from his patients’ lives, and from the newspapers and other sources. One example is a favorite of Freud’s, which he used again in several later writings. The President of the Lower House of the Austrian Parliament, expecting a particular session to yield little good and secretly wishing it were already over, formally opened it with the announcement, “Gentlemen, I take notice that a full quorum of members is present and herewith declare the sitting closed!”59 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life became Freud’s most widely read book; it went through eleven editions and was translated into twelve languages in his lifetime.

  The second notable work, which appeared in 1905, was Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; it went much further than his previous work in picturing sexuality as a fundamental force in human behavior. The first essay dealt with sexual aberrations, picturing them as the consequences of incomplete or distorted development. The second dealt with infantile sexuality, enlarging Freud’s earlier views of the subject and maintaining that all human beings are innately perverse but that in healthy development the perversity is mastered. The third essay dealt with the development of sexuality in puberty and the differentiation of male and female personalities as a consequence of anatomical differences.

  The explicit details in Three Essays and its theoretical ideas about infantile sexuality outraged the straitlaced burghers of middle-class Europe and America. Freud was called a dirty-minded pansexualist and “Viennese libertine,” and the book was labeled “pornography” and a befouling of the purity of childhood. According to Jones, writing in 1955, “It was this publication that brought the maximum of odium on his name; much of it still remains, especially among the uneducated. The book was felt to be a calumny on the innocence of the nursery.”60 But the book struck a responsive note. It was widely discussed in psychological and psychiatric circles, reissued a number of times, and translated into nine languages. James Strachey says that it and The Interpretation of Dreams are Freud’s “most momentous and original contributions to human knowledge.”61

  Three years later Freud received an invitation to be a key speaker at the psychology conference that would be part of Clark University’s twentieth-anniversary celebration. It was the first international recognition of the man and his work. He accepted, went to Worcester, Massachusetts, accompanied by two colleagues, Sandor Ferenczi and Carl Jung, and delivered five lectures before an audience of leading psychologists and psychiatrists on the history of psychoanalysis, its major theories, and its therapeutic technique. A few listeners found the material offensive (Weir Mitchell, an eminent physician, called Freud a “dirty, filthy man,” and a Canadian dean said that Freud seemed to advocate “a relapse into savagery”62), but most listeners, including William James, were impressed. The lectures were favorably discussed in the daily papers and in The Nation, were published in the American Journal of Psychology, and greatly widened the impact of Freud’s ideas. By the time Freud returned from the conference, he was famous.

  Not that this brought him tranquillity. Proud, sensitive, stubborn, and egotistical, like many other great pioneers, Freud became deeply embroiled in the politics of the movement he had started, and he struggled to control the disputes arising within it over theory and therapeutic methods. He seems to have felt that the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society should be run not as a democracy but as a hierarchy, an attitude perhaps natural to one who lived in a monarchy. But his view may also have been reasonable in one who had made important discoveries and wanted to preserve them from distortion or contamination. The resulting wrangles over theory and practice, and the bitter schisms, became a recurring pattern in the psychoanalytic movement.

  To some extent the pattern may have been only an institutionalized version of a trait in its founder’s personality. Freud had been very close to Breuer and then to Fliess, and in each case the friendship cooled and ended in bitterness when they developed views differing from his. Similar breaches occurred over the years in Freud’s friendships with three of his closest followers and colleagues.

  Alfred Adler came to believe that the main factors affecting the child’s development had to do with his or her position in the family and the parents’ child-rearing practices. When these were pathogenic, they created in the child an “inferiority complex,” leading to behavior that sought to compensate for it. Adler was critical of Freud’s ideas about the role of sexuality in character development and the neuroses, arguing, for instance, that women’s character is shaped not by the lack of a penis so much as by envy of men’s social position and privileges, and that the boy’s conflicts at around age five stem less from Oedipal desires than from the conflict between his competitive urges and his feeling of powerlessness. After a prolonged struggle with Freud, who tried unsuccessfully to harmonize Adler’s views with his own, Adler and a group of his followers resigned from the Vienna society in 1911 and formed one of their own.

  Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, disagreed with Freud’s central doctrine of the sexual origin of the neuroses. He interpreted them as manifestations of current maladjustment, not as disorders arising from traumas in infancy or childhood. Jung also held religious and mystical convictions, and a belief in the “collective unconscious,” a psyche common to all individuals; these doctrines were a s
ource of contention between him and Freud. After having been an enthusiastic follower, Jung gradually drew away from Freud, and in 1914 he formally broke with the Freudian movement and founded his own.

  Otto Rank, a faithful disciple and close associate of Freud’s for many years, slowly developed a theory of his own in which the chief source of anxiety is the trauma of birth, and the male sexual urge is a desire to return to the mother’s womb. Efforts by Freud to reconcile Rank’s views with his own failed; the relationship grew strained and finally ended in 1926.

  Once, when the subject came up at dinner in the Freud home of his inability to hold on to his followers, an aunt of Freud’s spoke up: “The trouble with you, Sigi,” she said, “is that you just don’t understand people.”63

  Remarkably, Freud remained immensely productive through all these stressful developments, the deprivations and social disruptions of World War I, which caused his practice to dwindle alarmingly, and the postwar inflation, which wiped out his life savings.

  He continued to develop psychoanalytic theory through his clinical work with patients and to share ideas with a number of fellow analysts by letter and at conferences, although he never again collaborated with anyone as he had with Breuer and Fliess. Until his later years he did not cease extending and adding to his body of psychological theories in an outpouring of articles, case histories, and books.

  Freudian psychology is, of course, only a part of human psychology, as Freud himself recognized.64 It has little to say about all those conscious processes of learning, reasoning, problem solving, and creativity which seem the peak achievements of evolution and culture, and nothing whatever about behaviorism, the strictly external approach to psychological research that swept through university psychology departments in the United States by the 1920s and that Freud dismissed in a footnote.65

  Freud’s psychology was and remained entirely inward-looking and seemingly timeless, in contrast to so much that was happening in the world around him. Electricity, internal combustion engines, the automobile and airplane, the telephone and radio, were radically altering daily life and social patterns; wars and revolutions were dismantling empires and breeding new democracies and dictatorships; class structures and the Victorian foundations of family life were eroding and yielding to widened suffrage, social mobility, women’s rights, and divorce. Amid all this, Freud remained focused on primal and eternal inner verities: sexual and other instincts, inner conflicts between them and the demands of the outer world, and the events of childhood and their influence on the development of personality and the emotions.

  Yet perhaps the speed of social change, the disintegration of traditions, and the emergence of a bewildering array of social options made Freud’s psychology particularly appealing, especially in America (except in academic, behaviorist circles). In a time of rapid change, it spoke of unchanging aspects of human nature; in a time of tremendous emphasis on material goods and the physical sciences, it stressed humanistic phenomena—desires, frustrations, conscience, moral values; to a culture of individualism and optimism, it spoke of the personal determinants of behavior, and offered theory and therapy supportive of the hope that people can change themselves for the better. In 2004, the neuropsychologist Mark Solms wrote, “For the first half of the 1900s, the ideas of Sigmund Freud dominated explanations of how the human mind works,” and the historian Eli Zaretsky credits Freud with having created the “first great theory and practice of ‘ personal life’ … the experience of having an identity distinct from one’s place in the family, in society, and in the social division of labor.”66

  Explorer of the Depths: Sigmund Freud 215

  Whatever the reasons for the success of psychoanalysis as a therapy and a psychology, Freud’s fame grew from 1909 on and reached a peak between the two world wars. His name indeed became a household word. Though relatively few people had read any of his works, every reasonably well-read person knew who he was. He was likened to Einstein in his influence on modern thought, and many noted intellectuals wrote to him or sought him out and lionized him. Media bigwigs attempted to capitalize on his name and fame. In 1924, at the time of the Leopold and Loeb murder trial, Colonel Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, offered Freud $25,000 to come to Chicago and analyze the two young killers; Freud declined. Samuel Goldwyn offered Freud $100,000 to assist in making a film portraying famous love stories of history; Freud’s reply earned him a New York Times headline: “FREUD REBUFFS GOLDWYN. Viennese Psychoanalyst Is Not Interested in Motion Picture Offer.”67

  Freud was unimpressed by these indications of his fame, but when he was awarded the Goethe Prize in 1930, he called it “the climax of my life as a citizen.”68

  In 1923, at sixty-seven, Freud developed cancer of the upper jaw from his lifelong heavy cigar smoking and underwent the first of what would be thirty operations over the next sixteen years to remove recurrent pre-cancerous or cancerous tissue. He had to wear a prosthesis—a kind of large denture—to separate his mouth from his nasal cavity; it made talking and eating difficult, and had to be removed regularly, a painful procedure, so that the affected area could be cleaned.

  His final years were darkened by the rise of the Nazis in Germany, who began burning his books in 1933. As the danger grew that the movement would overwhelm Austria, friends and family tried to get him to leave, but he adamantly refused. Only when Germany took over Austria in March 1938 and the Nazis confiscated his passport did the fragile, aged Freud, nearing eighty-two, recognize his peril and agree to leave if he could. Partly through the intervention of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his ambassador to France, William C. Bullitt, the Nazis were induced to let him go, and late that year he and the faithful Martha moved to London. Although his cancer had become inoperable, he was still of perfect mind and continued to write and to see a few patients. At last, in intolerable pain, he asked his physician to end his suffering by an overdose of morphine; he died on September 23, 1939, three weeks after the outbreak of World War II.

  Dynamic Psychology: Extensions and Revisions

  Between 1900 and 1923 Freud expanded and altered his theories of psychology but thereafter, he said, he made “no further decisive contributions to psychoanalysis.”69 He did produce three major works between 1923 and 1939, but they deal with issues reaching beyond the bounds of psychology and are not our concern.*

  He also further elaborated his ideas about psychoanalytic technique in a number of papers, but the fundamentals remained unchanged. In truth, Freud was not much interested in therapeutic technique except as a means to two ends—earning a living and, more important, exploring human nature and adding to the science of the mind.70 “Psychoanalysis,” he said late in life, “which was originally no more than an attempt at explaining pathological mental phenomena… [has] developed into a psychology of normal mental life.”71

  As a method of investigating mental life, psychoanalytic therapy sees the world in a grain of sand. Freud derived some of his largest and most daring theoretical ideas from tiny details—an image or name in a patient’s dream, a slip of the tongue, a joke, an odd symptom, a remembered scene of childhood, a facial expression. In a lecture on the “parapraxes” (little slips and mistakes), Freud told his listeners he knew they might regard these as too trivial to merit study, but, he explained in his inimitably charming manner, they are clues to hidden psychological realities:

  The material for [psychoanalytic] observations is usually provided by the inconsiderable events which have been put aside by the other sciences as being too unimportant—the dregs, one might say, of the world of phenomena… [But] are there not very important things which can only reveal themselves, under certain conditions and at certain times, by quite feeble indications?…If you are a young man, for instance, will it not be from small pointers that you will conclude that you have won a girl’s favor? Would you wait for an express declaration of love or a passionate embrace? Or would not a glance, scarcely noticed by other people, be enough? a sligh
t movement, the lengthening by a second of the pressure of a hand? And if you were a detective engaged in tracing a murder, would you expect to find that the murderer had left his photograph behind at the place of the crime, with his address attached? or would you not necessarily have to be satisfied with comparatively slight and obscure traces of the person you were in search of?72

  It was from patient attention to endless trivia that Freud pieced together the main elements of his psychology. The chief extensions and revisions of his early discoveries are as follows:

  Infantile sexuality: 73 Although Freud had early recognized sexuality as a powerful force in childhood, not until 1905, in Three Essays, did he state the far more radical conclusion that the sexual drive is present even in infancy. What convinced Freud was his own accumulating clinical evidence plus confirming observations reported in the medical literature. His conclusion: “A child has its sexual instincts and activities from the first; it comes into the world with them.”74

  But what he meant by sexuality in infancy and childhood is a broader and more pervasive impulse than the sexuality of adulthood; although Freud called it sexuality or libido, he was speaking of the general desire for sensuous pleasure of any kind. Gentle stimulation of any part of the infant’s body yields such pleasure; the infant is, in Freud’s term, polymorphous perverse. At first, the mouth is the major site of sensuous pleasure, obtained initially by sucking, then by mouthing and eating; when the child is between one and a half and three, the anal region becomes a chief source of sensuous pleasure as he or she begins to control and be aware of the expulsion or the willful retention of feces; and between the ages of three and six the child derives pleasure from self-stimulation of the genitals.