Posts Tagged ‘Sigmund Freud’

In Vienna ten years ago: Irvin Yalom with Mayor Michael Häupl for “Ein Stadt. Ein Buch.”

The stack of books I mean to read gets taller by the day. One of the volumes that has been there for quite some time is a book by a friend – Irvin Yalom‘s celebrated When Nietzsche Wept. It was the toast of Vienna for its annual Ein Stadt. Ein Buch event a decade ago – and also the subject of the second Book Haven post ever. (I discuss the retrospective on his career as a psychiatrist, Yalom’s Cure, here.) Yet the book itself remains right there, stubbornly atop of one of the precarious ziggurats that surround my desk.

Fun and games with Salomé in 1882: she had rejected proposals from both Rees and Nietzsche.

So, on a cheerless weekend night, imagine my surprise to find out the 1992 book has already been made into a 2007 film, starring Armand Assante and Ben Cross. Let me dissemble no more, gentle reader, I put aside my pressing deadlines to watch it online – and that returns me to Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and the book. I didn’t know the beginnings of psychoanalysis with the “talk treatment” of Dr. Josef Breuer, nor the details of the overlapping lines of thought in fin-de-siècle Vienna.

The Stanford professor offers this disclaimer in his author’s note: “In 1882, psychotherapy had not yet been born; and Nietzsche, of course, never formally turned his attention in that direction. Yet in my reading of Nietzsche, he was deeply and significantly concerned with self-understanding and personal change.”

But history is a series of close calls and what-might-have-beens. This book was born in the discovery of a letter: an 1878 message where a friend tries to get Nietzsche to come to Vienna to see Dr. Breuer for treatment.

Author Yalom continues:

Friedrich Nietzsche and Josef Breuer never met. And, of course, psychotherapy was not invented as a result of their encounter.

Nonetheless, the life situation of the major characters is grounded in fact, and the essential components of this novel—Breuer’s mental anguish, Nietzsche’s despair, Anna O., Lou Salomé, Freud’s relationship with Breuer, the ticking embryo of psychotherapy—were all historically in place in 1882.

Friedrich Nietzsche had been introduced by Paul Rée to the young Lou Salomé in the spring of 1882 and, over the next months, had had a brief, intense, and chaste love affair with her. She would go on to have a distinguished career as both a brilliant woman of letters and a practicing psychoanalyst; she would also be known for her close friendship with Freud and for her romantic liaisons, especially with the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

On to better things…

Read more from Irv here.

As for the film, I don’t recommend it, but I do point it out. (The excellent youtube clip below is one of the films best moments.) In general, accents and orchestration are obtrusive (Brahms‘s Requiem, bits of Wagner here and there, and I can’t remember what else), the dream sequences clownish. The females are badly miscast and underfed, given the curvacious standards of the period. The casting is made with a modern eye to beauty, so the hairstyles and makeup concede too much to our own times and so are jarring. We shake what we’ve got: the women have no internal qualities, but are happy to roll their eyes and their hips. Someone should have looked at a real-life portrait of the time – Salomé’s, for example. If she could hold Rilke’s attention, I suspect that there was more to her than this manicured floozy. The exception to this rule is Breuer’s stiff, estranged wife, played by Joanna Pacula, who has a great final scene where a flicker of hope rekindles beneath the years of mistrust.

One of the best parts of the film are in the credits afterwards: we learn that Crazy Berthe, Beuer’s patient and Freud’s “Anna O.”, in fact becomes a groundbreaking social worker, while Salomé becomes an important early psychoanalyst. Breuer gives up his “talk therapy” – but Freud picks it up. Nietzsche takes the train to Switzerland where he will write Thus Spake Zarathustra. And Lou Salomé… well, we’ve all read Rilke’s letters…

“THE BEAST WE HAVE WITHIN US WILL STICK ITS HEAD UP THE MINUTE HE CAN GET AWAY WITH IT.”

Thomas Harrison

When Halley’s Comet passed over the world in 1910, newspapers prophesied doom. The era was already overshadowed by social, spiritual, and political unease. That year, Sigmund Freud published Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and formulated his first sketch of the Oedipal complex. Rainer Maria Rilke published his only novel, Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Writer and philosopher Carlo Michelstaedter completed his thesis and shot himself, one of the era’s many suicides. Meanwhile, Arnold Schoenberg was emancipating dissonance with his Theory of Harmony, which was written in the summer of 1910. The following year, Oswald Spengler would begin his landmark Decline of the West.

“The nihilism of the First World War was presaged, summarized, and mourned in the music, poetry, and thought which a great many artists and thinkers produced in the year 1910,” said Entitled Opinions host Robert Harrison. “It seemed to play out all the worst nightmares that had obsessed the Expressionists.”

Just warming up with Oedipus

This episode of Entitled Opinions at the Los Angeles Review of Books is a family affair. Said Robert Harrison, “Brothers punctuate cultural history. We have the Brothers Grimm, the Marx Brothers, the Schlegel brothers, the Goncourt brothers. It so happens I have a brother, too, who like me, is a professor of literature who has written a few books.”

In the introduction to his 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance (University of California Press, 1996), UCLA professor Thomas Harrison wrote, “Nineteen ten is the spiritual prefiguration of an unspeakably tragic fatality, heard in the tones of the audacious and the anguished, the deviant and the desperate, in the art of a youth grown precociously old, awaiting a war it had long suffered in spirit.”

First and only novel

In this fraternal conversation, Thomas and Robert Harrison discuss leading figures in the umbrella movement called “Expressionism,” including poet Georg Trakl, painter Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Filippo Marinetti, as well as Rilke, Spendler, Schoenberg, and others.

What do the Expressionists say to us today? “Of course, the darkness of their vision didn’t turn a lot of people on,” explains Thomas Harrison. “During the reconstruction of Europe after World War I, we had to forcibly leave that stuff behind. But don’t forget that every time you leave something behind it comes back. So it came back in World War II. Human nature does not change, although we think we’re getting better and more rational. The depths of the soul that they probed are the same depths that people try to keep hidden and secret, over and over and over. While it may not be not much fun to listen to Schoenberg’s atonal music, it’s a reminder that the beast we have within us will stick its head up the minute he can get away with it.”

Listen to the podcast of this fascinating Harrison-on-Harrison discussion here.

“HUMAN NATURE DOES NOT CHANGE, ALTHOUGH WE THINK WE’RE GETTING BETTER AND MORE RATIONAL.”

More potent quotes from Thomas Harrison:

“These artists were perhaps the most ethically and philosophically committed generation of artists since the Romantics.”

“They developed a metaphysics of negativity. Being itself was considered a rotten set-up.”

“We no longer share this negative metaphysics today. We do everything we do to ignore it and forget about it and put it under the rug – to repress it again.”

What better way to celebrate Christmas than with a secular Turkish-American writer discussing Charles Dickens‘s A Christmas Carol, in light of modern (Jewish) Freudian psychotherapy?

Elif Batuman tried explaining the relationship of the book to her therapist, but he didn’t get it: “The Ghost [of Christmas Past] in particular reminded me of someone, with his kindness and spookiness, the way he said almost nothing, except to repeat back to Scrooge his own remarks. A few days later, I figured it out, and told my therapist: the Ghost reminded me of him. He didn’t reply, only smiled gently, in a way that I interpreted to mean, ‘I’m an Israeli Freudian, please don’t make me talk about A Christmas Carol.'”

She explains:

At first, it seemed strange to me that such a Jewish discourse should be anticipated so plainly by a Christmas story—one written a decade before Freud was born. But when I thought about it more, it started to seem less strange. Freud read and admired Dickens; his first gift to his fiancée, in 1882, was a copy of David Copperfield. Why wouldn’t he have read A Christmas Carol, which is so much shorter? O.K., he was Jewish, but he was secular. He had a Christmas tree. When I was little, my parents also bought a tree every year, and we would put presents under it, and it was a little bit magical, even though we weren’t Christian. Wasn’t that a big part of Freudianism: that magic is often displaced, but never destroyed?

Was he just recycling Dickens?

Read the “The Ghosts of Christmas: Was Scrooge the First Psychotherapy Patient?” in the New Yorker here. She describes the darker side of Christmas and Dickens’s dystopian world, but some argue that the classic Christmas story It’s a Wonderful Life does the same thing. According to Wendell Jamieson of the New York Times, the movie portrays “a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife. It is also a nightmare account of an endless home renovation.” Well, we wrote about that a few Christmases ago here. This theme was picked up in the mock poster below, which is making the Facebook rounds.

Was Dickens just recycling him?

On the other hand, was A Christmas Carol as a Victorian spin on Dante Alighieri’s much older tale?

“First of all, both main characters begin in a dark wood—vividly illustrated as such in the Comedy and similarly rendered in chimney tops, alleyways, and dense fog in the Carol. The Pilgrim and the Miser have lost their way. Hence, they are taken on a mystical journey for the sake of their reclamation: Dante through Hell, Purgatory, & Heaven; Scrooge through the Past, Present, and Future. The three beasts that Dante meets before his journey begins (leopard, lion, and wolf) function similarly to the omens that Scrooge encounters on Christmas Eve: the hearse, the transformed door-knocker, the ringing bell.”

Read more about that here.

Whatever spin you put on the day, the Book Haven wishes you a Merry Christmas!

Octogenarian Sigmund Freud was ailing from cancer and it was long past the time to leave Vienna. Hermann Göebbels and Joseph Himmler had set out to kill psychoanalysts, especially Jewish ones. Hermann Göering had their property and assets seized, which included Freud’s publishing company. Moreover, a month after the Nazis took over Austria on March 12, 1938, every business owned by Jews had a Nazi appointed to run it. The appointed “commissar” was a 35-year-old chemist, Anton Sauerwald.

“By the time he finally decided he could not live at 19 Berggasse anymore, Freud and his extended family were already living under a form of self-house arrest, his daughter Anna had been interrogated by the Gestapo, and the family’s assets were being confiscated. Freud could look out his window and watch Jewish shops being looted by ‘respectable’ Viennese; he could see Jews being beaten and shot dead by thugs.” So writes Bettina Berch for the Jewish Book Council. Why did he wait so long?

I hadn’t heard of The Escape of Sigmund Freud when it was released. I ran across it in my usual internet wanderings. The book, by David Cohen, was published by one of my favorite houses, Overlook Press. It sounds riveting.

Freud was an especial target but, as Debbie Hagan at Psych Central writes, “the Nazis couldn’t escape the fact that Freud was a well-connected, international figure, who they grudgingly had to respect. Freud did have friends throughout the world, such as William Bullitt, the American ambassador in Paris, and President Roosevelt, who telegrammed Hitler, warning him that any harm done to Freud would be considered a deplorable act. Still it didn’t stop Nazis from hanging swastikas on Freud’s stoop or the Gestapo from harassing him, claiming that he had not paid his taxes and his publishing company had outstanding debt. Thus, military police  confiscated the family’s cash and passports. These actions reached a climax when the  Gestapo arrested Freud’s daughter Anna, a noted analyst in her own right, which shook Freud into a stark reality: His life in Vienna was over.” 

In Freud’s 1927 The Future of an Illusion, he concludes that all religious beliefs are “illusions and insusceptible of proof.” He notes that “civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers,” but “the great mass of the uneducated and oppressed” were of more concern. Freud concluded with the “hope that in the future science will go beyond religion, and reason will replace faith in God.” Yet he could not have conceived of the Nazis, and what the “educated people and brain-workers” might have been brought to by their own thinking. And there might be a little more to the oppressed than he had suspected. In fact, he had become one of them.  

On March 13, 1938, the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society met and Freud reached into his knowledge of Jewish history for the right story to give them hope. He told his friends: “After the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by Titus, Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai asked for permission to open a school at Jabneh for the study of the Torah. We are going to do the same. We are, after all, accustomed by our history and tradition, and some of us by our personal experience, to being persecuted.”

In the end, he was saved, not by intellectuals or grand thinking, but by bourgeois kindnesses– of friends, admirers, and a Nazi who, in the course of his relationship with Freud, developed an old-fashioned conscience and chose to look the other way as the Freuds escaped. That’s right, Anton Sauerwald himself. (Read his story here.)

“Thus, the Freud family (including his daughter, Anna, his wife, Martha, and their faithful housekeeper, Paula), fled to Britain. They toted along Freud’s famous couch, some of his books, and many objets d’art. Four of Freud’s sisters stayed behind. Even though Freud made many attempts to contact them, he never succeeded. Years after his death, researchers would discover that three had died in concentration camps. The fourth most likely died of malnutrition.”

One week until the “Another Look” book club event for Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 28, at the Stanford Humanities Center.  I wrote about it here.  Read the book, join us, have some fun, and come up and introduce yourself to Humble Moi.  I’ll be there.

Meanwhile, enjoy this selection from the book, in which Lorelei Lee meets Dr. Froyd in Vienna, which she explains is somewhere in “the Central of Europe.”

From Lorelei’s May 27 diary:

Cultivate a few inhibitions and get some sleep.

“Well finaly I broke down and Mr. Spoffard said that he thought a little girl like I, who was trying to reform the whole world was trying to do to much, especially beginning on a girl like Dorothy. So he said there was a famous doctor in Vienna called Dr. Froyd who could stop all of my worrying because he does not give a girl medicine but he talks you out of it by psychoanalysis. So yesterday he took me to Dr. Froyd. So Dr. Froyd and I had quite a long talk in the English landguage. So it seems that everybody seems to have a thing called inhibitions, which is when you want to do a thing and you do not do it. So then you dream about it instead. So Dr. Froyd asked me, what I seemed to dream about. So I told him that I never really dream about anything. I mean I use my brains so much in the day time that at night they do not seem to do anything else but rest.  So Dr. Froyd was very very surprised at a girl who did not dream about anything.  So then he asked me all about my life. I mean he is very very sympathetic, and he seems to know how to draw a girl out quite a lot. I mean I told him things that I really would not even put in my diary. So then he seemed very very intreeged at a girl who always seemed to do everything she wanted to do. So he asked me if I really never wanted to do a thing that I did not do. For instance, did I ever want to do a thing that was really vialent, for instance, did I ever want to shoot someone for instance. So then I said I had, but the bullet only went in Mr. Jennings lung and came right out again. So then Dr. Froyd looked at me and looked at me and he said he did not really think it was possible.  So then he called in his assistance and he pointed at me and talked to his assistance quite a lot in the Viennese landguage.  So then his assistance looked at me and looked at me and it really seems as if I was quite a famous case. So then Dr. Froyd said that all I need was to cultivate a few inhibitions and get some sleep.”

Hubba, hubba.

It’s always pleasant when Andrew Sullivan visits the Book Haven and takes a souvenir of his visit back to his “Dish” column – this time it’s a mention of our recent post about David Foster Wallace‘s review of Joseph Frank‘s massive, multi-volume biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky.  (Hat tip to Martha Girard for alerting me to the article.)

Contrary to what one of his readers posted on “The Dish,” however, while it’s true I didn’t “dig up” the review, I didn’t read it in the collection of essays, Consider the Lobster, either – in fact, Joe’s widow Marguerite Frank handed me the ancient xerox copy, and it’s still on my dresser, waiting to be returned.

Coincidentally, while truly digging around today for some papers I never found, I rediscovered René Girard‘s 2002 review of Joe’s biography, in an article called “Dostoevsky’s Demons.”  Apparently, he thinks Fyodor may have been a rather sexy fellow.  He writes:  “The most stubborn myth about Dostoevsky is his ‘sexual abnormality,’ a thesis countersigned by Sigmund Freud himself.  In the course of his five-volume biography, however, Joseph Frank quietly demolishes it.”  Freud was certain that “bad political ideas mean a bad sex life.”  Hence, poor Anna Grigoryevna is usually portrayed as an unfulfilled woman hooked up to a weirdo husband.

No one, it seems, bothered with the original sources before Joseph Frank – who has come up with a letter to Anna mailed from Germany, where his physician had sent the novelist “to take the waters.” Dostoevsky does more than politely insist he misses his wife; he mentions an erotic dream he had about her and refers to a prior letter from Anna in which she mentioned “some indecent thoughts” that she had about her husband.

Sexy letters between the Dostoevskys, seven years after their marriage! Who could have imagined it? Frank quotes this precious correspondence without even alluding to the myths crashing to the ground all around him. But it is a massive joke on the postmodern sex police and their hostile profiling of the novelist whose understanding of human motivation in such books as Notes from Underground, The Gambler, Demons, and The Eternal Husband – to say nothing of Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov – is almost incomprehensibly far beyond their simple and easy explanations.

 René’s interest in Dostoevsky is longstanding, of course.  Dostoevsky is one of the handful of writers studied in the landmark Deceit, Desire and the Novel. However, René thinks the Russian author’s “most profound book” is not The Brothers Karamazov or Crime and Punishment, but rather the comparatively little-known The Eternal Husband.

According to René:

Not underground.

The two main idols of that modern, godless universe are money and sex. After Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky dealt with money in The Gambler (1866) and sex in The Eternal Husband (1870), …  the story of a man driven underground by the infidelity of his wife. The rather ordinary fellow who has cuckolded him turns into an object of hatred and worship combined. Freud was correct in noticing the attraction the wife’s lover exerts on the eternal husband, but Freud went on to decide that the author’s own unconscious desire was expressing itself in the story – and hence Dostoevsky was a latent homosexual.

The simpler reading is that what the eternal husband wants to learn from his wife’s seducer is the secret of seduction. What he desires is not his rival’s body – a ridiculous idea, really – but that rival’s expertise as a lover. He would like to become an eternal lover himself, rather than an eternal husband and an eternal cuckold. Like all underground people, the eternal husband is modern and liberated, especially in regard to sex. Far from solving his problem, however, this makes it worse. The idolatry of sex is destructive not merely of the old structure of the family but of sex itself. The eternal husband is a victim not of superstition but of obsessive rationality. He sees the seducer of his wife as a sexual expert whose services he tries to enlist.

The Dostoevsky marriage was an improbable one:  a 22-year-old stenographer marries a 42-year-old convict who was also an epileptic and a pathological gambler.  René thinks it was a match made in heaven:  “She was the greatest blessing in his life … Joseph Frank is too conscientious a biographer to lapse into hagiography.  He does not hide, for example, Anna’s tendency to make both her husband and herself look better than they were. But Frank’s uncompromising honesty ends up making Anna seem almost heroic.  There was great suffering in her marriage, no doubt, especially the death of children, but there was more happiness.”