Chamberlain - The Secret Artist: a Close Reading of Sigmund Freud

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Table of Contents

In order to raise an accusation against the whole nature of the world, you dismal philosophical blindworms speak of the terrible character of human passions.As if wherever there have been passions there had also been terribleness! As if this kind of terribleness was bound to persist in the world!Through a neglect of the small facts, through lack of self-observation and observation of those who are to be brought up, it is you yourselves who first allowed the passions to develop into such monsters that you are overcome by fear at the word passion! It was up to you, and is up to us, to take from the passions their terrible character and thus prevent their becoming devastating torrents.One should not inflate ones oversights into eternal fatalities; let us rather work honestly together on the task of transforming the passions of mankind one and all into joys.

Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow from
Human All Too Human (tr. Hollingdale)

the great and enigmatic man in whose being one has the sense of powerful and driving passions which nevertheless express themselves in such a curiously muted way.

Freud, A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci

Acknowledgements

Professional thanks are due once again to the Society of Authors, who provided a grant from the Authors Foundation to help me complete this book.Thanks also go to my friends Ian, Maxine, and Chip for their unwavering support, my editor Jeremy Beale, but above all my daughter and my husband for their indulgence.

Introduction

Freud is often hailed as a writer by his admirers outside psychoanalysis, and many see it as opening up new ground when he is also read creatively within that profession. But in what way is he a writer? These days everyone is a writer. I wonder here to what extent he is an artist. By artist I mean not just the common claim that Freud is a good writer. Art demands a different order of talent, one which is creative and transformative, and brings with it a vision of possible imaginative structures which the artist also goes some way towards realizing. Stylishness is only an adjunct to this more fundamental business. I argue that Freud is fundamentally an artist, but that the artistic expression of his desires and fears is repressed.

Since the argument will only be complete when we have re-examined Freuds writing and his life, however, I first invite the reader to imagine, and to keep reimagining, Freuds achievement as if it had taken the form of three novels. The first two putative novels, to which I shall give the banal and already used titles Vienna 1900 and Love Story, reflect Freuds recurring psychological and social interests. Family relationships, the making of the personality, the growth of the capacity for love, the desire to be successful in the world, and everything which can upset these processes and ambitions; had we read novels on such matters by a talented Viennese turn-of-the-last-century writer called Freud, we would surely remember them with affection.Then there is a third novel, with a quite different title - something like Look What I Can Do!, which seems to come from a much more modern and subjective world. This brilliant, idiosyncratic work we would probably more admire than love.

Why imagine these novels? The answer is this. Had Freud left us these works of literature, we would find it easier to respond immediately to the question of what kind of artist he was, and to what degree of achievement he rose.The as-if-he-had-written-it-as-a-series-of-novels strategy pictures the potential truth of the argument that follows.

There is literary evidence for Freuds artistry which is not difficult to find.The richness of Freuds imagination is particularly apparent in two kinds of instances. These are when he interprets dreams, and when he writes up his famous case-studies: The Ratman, The Wolfman, Dora and Senator Schreber. Freud had a unique and pioneering gift which allowed him to construct a fantastically meaningful semblance of reality out of word-games. He also had a classical talent for characterization and narrative. But where does his other clinical, theoretical and technical writing fit in? I would suggest that overall the content of Freuds writing is based on imaginative sympathy with the human condition, together with a capacity to create character on the page, and generate action. But clearly what Freud also has is the ability to sustain a vision which gives a human life meaning. And so I also claim Freuds actual theory for art, and treat the scientific form of his arguments as part of the content of his imaginative vision.

Let me then repeat the question. Is Freud an artist? To the purely literary evidence in favor of that judgement I shall then want to add two other kinds of related, less pure evidence.

The first is autobiographical and involves threading our way backwards and forwards between the writing and the life, in a way many almost up-to-date literary critics would dislike.The greatest moment in Freuds career as an artist came with his self-analysis around the age of forty, which prompted him to write his disguised psychic autobiography in The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud comes into sharp psychological focus as an artist, and sharp artistic focus as a craftsman, whenever we consider how he reworked his own experience into the created object he wanted to present to the public.

The second body of evidence for Freuds being a kind of artist is also personal to Freud, but approaches the question negatively, necessitating a psychoanalytical questioning of Freud himself. A vexing facet of his psychology is why he offered to the world such a degraded view of art and artists as we find in the essay The Artist and Creative Imagination and The Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis of 1916-7. This view not only conflates the aims and achievements of art and artists, but also tends to belittle them as no more than profitable forms of egoism.

If Freud himself was an artist, why did he judge the artist so negatively? Because he was hostile to the repressed artist in himself? Threatened by the example of those who dared to go openly where he did not? Whatever the untestability of such speculations, it is here that we enter the territory of the secret art ist by applying original psychoanalytic theory to Freud himself. We can use the theory as a tool, while simultaneously bearing in mind that Freud invented it to make sense of all that he discovered during his self-analysis, and that therefore the theory is also an autobiographical statement about the kind of content he attributed to his inner life. Both theory and content centre on the tension between hidden/revealed.

An example is the way Freud understands repression. When a wish is unacceptable to us, it gets confined to our unconscious, where it continues to affect our daily lives and beliefs and behavior by a process we are at pains not to become aware of.Thus we deny it, and in a sense lie to ourselves, but with good reason, according to Freuds system. Freuds whole edifice is built upon the impossibility of perfect self-knowledge. From the theory of repression we are led to the idea that our consciousness is full of falsehoods.

I suggest that one of the lies Freud told himself was that he was a scientist, not an artist, and, further, that the two spheres were quite distinct. He didnt know it was a lie, because the drive behind the assertion was unconscious. From the evidence of his writing and his life I construct the following psychological situation. Freud associated the practice of art with pleasure, and also with abandoning the need for self-control. These apparently undisciplined areas of the spirit frightened him and so he repressed them in his own intense case.

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