George Makari - Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis

REVOLUTION IN MIND

REVOLUTION

IN MIND

The Creation of Psychoanalysis

GEORGE MAKARI

DUCKWORTH OVERLOOK

First published in the UK in 2008 by
Duckworth Overlook.
90-93 Cowcross Street, London EC1M 6BF
Tel: 020 7490 7300
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First published in the USA in 2008 by
HarperCollins Publishers Inc., New York

2008 by George Makari

The right of George Makari to be identified as the Author of
the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.

A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library

ebook ISBN 978 0 7156 3949 8

For Arabella, Gabrielle, and Jack

my kind of wonderful

Contents

Prologue

When the twenty-nine-year-old doctor stepped off the train in the fall of 1885, he was a failure. Ambitious but poor, he had tried his hand at a number of sciences but still had nothing to secure his future. As he made his way onto the boulevards of Paris, he left behind him a growing storm of controversy regarding his claims for a new wonder drug called cocaine. With hopes of marriage to his fiance pressing upon him, the doctor accepted what now seemed unavoidable: he would not become a university scientist and would have to open a medical practice to earn a living. He might be forced to emigrate to England or Australia or America. But first, he would try to make a living in his hometown of Vienna. Before that inevitable fate, in a last gasp of high-minded scientific aspiration, he had applied for and received a grant to study in Paris. What he would discover in that city would propel him forward on a long, winding journey that led to one of the great intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century.

Or, perhaps not.

Today, this young mans identity and legacy are hotly disputed. Sigmund Freud was a genius. Sigmund Freud was a fraud. Sigmund Freud was really a man of letters, or perhaps a philosopher, or a crypto-biologist. Sigmund Freud discovered psychoanalysis by delving deep into his own dreams and penetrating the mysteries of his patients. Sigmund Freud stole most of his good ideas from others and invented the rest out of his own odd imagination. Freud was the maker of a new science of the mind that dominated the West for much of the twentieth century. Freud was an unscientific conjurer who created a mass delusion. Who was Freud? Who are the Freudians, Freudian psychoanalysts, and psychoanalysts? And who are we, those of us in the West who have found the terms and concepts of psychoanalysis permeating our everyday language, changing on the most intimate levels the ways in which we think about ourselves, surrounding us in what the poet W. H. Auden called a whole climate of opinion?

For many years, these questions seemed to have been answered. The history of psychoanalysis had been handed down by Freuds compatriots. They portrayed the father of their field as a man of stunning originality, great virtue, and nearly unfathomable genius. Freud discovered everlasting truths about the mind, it was said, and these truths had been preserved by his followers. In postwar America and in parts of the Western world, this Freud became an essential coin of intellectual life. But over the last thirty years, these standard accounts have been increasingly questioned. New documents, new sources, and new histories have made the older, adoring portrait more improbable. As Freuds genius and virtue were cast into doubt, contemporary psychoanalysts struggled with numerous forces that seemed to undermine their enterpriseranging from improved pharmaceuticals and the rise of cognitive neuroscience to the exigencies of insurance companies. Soon, a new coin began to circulate. It read: Freud is dead. As the twenty-first century unfolds, it would seem we have to choose: Freud as everlasting genius, or Freud as relic and fraud.

This book offers a different choice and another kind of history. In all the recent tumult over Freud, it has often gone unnoticed that these seemingly antithetical accounts are flip sides of the same coin. The most devout admirers and fiercest detractors of Sigmund Freud both assume that the answers to the critical questions posed by psychoanalysis can be found in the biography of the young man who stepped off that train in Paris in 1885. Consequently, while hundreds of Freud studies and biographies have been written pro and con, no broader account has yet been given of the rise of psychoanalysis in its birthplace: western and central Europe. As a result, a wide array of ideas, experiences, judgments, and debates have disappeared. We have lost a good deal of the logic and illogic of what was a very human undertaking, but more than that we have lost a world, a world not so distant, but one made more remote by the European slaughters of the twentieth century. It was a world that made Freud, the Freudians, and the psychoanalysts, and it was a world in part made by them.

psychoanalysis emerged between 1870 and 1945 in European communities that were ultimately decimated and dispersed. While psychoanalysis survived on foreign shores, it was severed from its own past. Remnants of a great discussion on the nature of the mind and its troubles continued in these new lands without the contexts that had once given these debates broader definition. With the rich tapestry of Mittel Europa shredded and Germany in ruins, it became simpler to imagine that one immortal figure was responsible for this strange new mode of understanding, whether it was a science or a massive hoax.

In 1993, Time magazine captured this odd state of affairs when it ran a cover story bearing the ghoulish headline: Is Freud Dead? Not to be outdone, thirteen years later Newsweeks cover declared: Freud Is Not Dead. After leaving the earth one autumn day in 1939, a ghostly Freud, it would seem, still walked outside of time. And yet, Sigmund Freud was very much a man in time. As a large number of historians have now shown, many aspects of Freuds thinking were dependent on ideas put forth by others in medicine, politics, theology, literature, philosophy, and science, ranging from the ancients to his contemporaries. This revisionist work has been so rich, so plentiful, and at times so promiscuous in its conclusions that it has been difficult to synthesize. When we step back and take in all these attributions, they can appear to cancel one another out. If Sigmund Freud really derived psychoanalysis from Aristotle, Sophocles, and the Bible, as well as Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Goethe, and Nietzsche, not to mention Johann Herbart, Ernst Brcke, and Pierre Janet (to name but a few), it seems only fair to conclude that this strange amalgam was his alone.

But such is not the case. psychoanalysis emerged at a time when Europeans were dramatically changing the ways they envisioned themselves. It shot forth from a mass of competing theories that had all been thrown up by seismic shifts in philosophy, science, and medicine. This book is an attempt to take in those grand shifts and locate the specific origins of psychoanalysis as a body of ideas and a movement. A broad canvas is required to locate the particular influences that defined psychoanalysis, for Sigmund Freud did not derive the fields central tenets from any single thinker or field. Rather, he pulled together new ideas and evidence from a number of domains to fashion a new discipline. The goal was to win for science the traditional object of humanist culturethe inner life of human beings.