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- [00:00]
Afwa Hirsch
Wondery subscribers can binge seasons of Legacy early and ad free. Join Wondery in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
- [00:08]
Peter Frankapan
A Listener Note this episode contains reference to suicide, sexual abuse, and details of traumatic events that some people might find distressing. Listener discretion is advised, and this is probably not for some younger listeners.
- [00:22]
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Wondry.
- [00:28]
Afwa Hirsch
Hello and welcome to this brand new series of Legacy. This time we are delving into the world of Professor Extraordinarius Sigmund Freud, the pioneering psychoanalyst who mapped the human consciousness and scandalized the world with his sex fueled theories. Over a hundred years ago, he was one of the first people to try to find a cure for so called illnesses of the mind. His work has shaped modern psychology and the way we talk and think about ourselves. But Freud wasn't and still is not free from controversy.
- [01:04]
Peter Frankapan
That's right, his movement was called a mad epidemic and his theories a matter for the police. Early psychoanalysis was often men talking to each other about how to cure women, something that could lead to obvious abuses of power. But the fact is that Freud made huge advances in our understanding of the mind. He gave us access to parts of our subconscious that before he arrived, we didn't really spend much time thinking about and certainly didn't think mattered. We're on Wondery and Goal Hanger. I'm Peter Frankerpan. I'm Afwa Hersh and this is Legacy, the show that tells the lives of the most extraordinary men and women ever to have lived and asks if they have the reputation that they deserve.
- [02:03]
Afwa Hirsch
This is Sigmund Freud, Episode 1 A Formative Childhood.
- [02:18]
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- [04:06]
Peter Frankapan
So Afra, this is going to be a good one, right?
- [04:09]
Afwa Hirsch
I'm excited.
- [04:10]
Peter Frankapan
I know you're excited because you've got a few head starts on me in this area, don't you? You've been interested in Freud and psychoanalysis.
- [04:16]
Afwa Hirsch
Well, I think, unlike you, maybe, I'm used to being involuntarily and unwillingly analyzed because both my mother and sister are psychologists and I have been diagnosed with just about every problem of the subconscious imaginable. So I'm kind of excited to inflict the aim suffering on you, Peter. That's really what is making me motivated to do this series.
- [04:42]
Peter Frankapan
I knew that when we started recording this that I would have to take up my position on the couch. So you're gonna change my life again, afwa. I'm looking forward to that. But I gotta wonder, and I'm gonna ask you whether you think Sigmund Freud really is responsible for so much of how we think about psychology today. I mean, he coined terms like repression. He gave us the idea of the Freudian slip and the idea that we have a subconscious. So it's quite hard to imagine how we talked about the mind before him. But I mean, is he important? As you're going to tell me he is.
- [05:11]
Afwa Hirsch
So much of our language, as you just said, comes from Freud. Every time we talk about anal retentiveness or defense mechanisms or displacement, phallic Symbols being in denial, transference, projection. It's totally pervasive in our contemporary thinking. And, you know, I read something where someone said, there's psychoanalysis, Freud, who is a serious theorist, that people engage with his voluminous works. And then there's pub Freud, which is the way he's filtered down into culture in a way that people who've never read Freud and maybe don't even know what he was about are fluent in his language. And I think that in itself sets us up to acknowledge that this is someone who, for good or ill, left a huge legacy. And that's why I think it's gonna be so interesting to delve into what the actual nature of that legacy is.
- [06:02]
Peter Frankapan
It's gonna be interesting. I mean, just as you said it, I would love to do a spinoff show of pub legacies, right? What people think compared to what the reality is. Because I think half the thing that we do, I think, is that we go right to the beginning. We really look properly, we turn over all the pages because we spend four episodes on each person. I think pub Napoleon, pub Picasso. What people think they know. It's quite a good game to play because normally people have a completely different idea what they think someone has said or means and does. But all those things you mentioned, afwa, about denial and the worries about how you project, I'm definitely feeling a little bit like I'm squirming when we do this, but it's gonna be interesting to hear about Freud. And as all of you lovely listeners know, here on Legacy, we spend a lot of time thinking about the reputations that some of history's most famous figures have. And we also spend a lot of time doing our homework to bring you the latest thinking about them. This time, we're going to try something slightly different. We're going to have a couple of experts to come and talk to us about how history has treated them. We got two of the best people in the world to come and talk to us. So first we have Professor Brett Carr, who's a renowned psychoanalyst himself, but is also honorary director of research at the Freud Museum, London. And he's written plenty of books about Freud, the latest couple being Freud's pandemics, surviving Global War, Spanish Flu and the Nazis, and hidden histories of British psychoanalysis, from Freud's deathbed to Laing's Missing tooth.
- [07:24]
Afwa Hirsch
And I'm super excited about this. We have the writer, broadcaster and brilliant, famous psychoanalyst Susie Orbach. And it's not necessarily a given that a psychoanalyst becomes a famous figure in popular culture. But Susie Orbach really has, and she's the author of books like Fat is a Feminist Issue, which had a huge impact on me, mainly because my mother was reading it when I was growing up. And she has very strong opinions about the role of feminism in psychoanalysis and the role of Freud and the importance of Freud.
- [07:59]
Peter Frankapan
So Brett, you've described Freud as transforming modern medicine and modern mental health. He's the first physician in history who did not touch the bodies of his patients. How do you think we should start evaluating his importance and his impact?
- [08:14]
Brett Carr
I really do believe that Sigmund Freud, more than almost anybody else, really did transform modern healthcare because he literally did not touch his patients bodies other than shaking their hands when they would enter his consulting room on a daily basis before lying down on his psychoanalytical couch to talk about the intimate details of their private lives. And back in the 19th century, people were treated absolutely horrifically. Anyone considered a so called lunatic in inverted commas, anyone considered insane in inverted commas would be locked away in an asylum for decades at a time and many would literally be chained to their beds or chained to the wall. Many would even be beaten. We have in this country here in the United Kingdom an extraordinary report in parliament in the 1860s complaining that lunatics were being actually hit while they were in a lunatic asylum. And Freud actually said, let's just welcome you into the room in a safe bodily way so that you can tell us what is on your mind. So I think he really, really did transform medicine and healthcare generally.
- [09:37]
Afwa Hirsch
Suzy, Freud's big impact on the development of psychoanalysis is this idea that human behavior is driven by. It might not be a fair question to ask you, but what does a world without Freud look like compared to the world in which we have him? And this idea, what would a world.
- [09:55]
Susie Orbach
Without Freud look like? Well, every culture creates myths, every culture creates stories. Every culture wants to have some kind of origin story and some kind of way that human beings are meant to relate to each other. So I don't think we were that far from the understanding of the individual. You can't really have an understanding of the individual until you have a particular moment in history when the individual becomes important and the 20th century is par excellence the time of the individual.
- [10:26]
Peter Frankapan
And talking about individuals then, Susie, I mean, is one challenge to get away from the figure of Freud and to focus on his ideas? I mean, how does one separate the individual from what he wrote about and what kind of doors he opened?
- [10:39]
Susie Orbach
I think what's so interesting about Freud is that he was continually revising his ideas. So there isn't one Freud at all. And I think that's been very interesting for those of us who are clinicians or theorists. Everybody makes their own Freud, everybody makes their own psychoanalysis, Everybody engages in the practice of it in a unique and bespoke and particular way. He was obviously a very important listener, and then he reflected on what he listened to in his practice and he engaged with all the cultural practices of the day. So the man himself was very open and very, very curious, as well as being very learned.
- [11:29]
Peter Frankapan
Susie will be joining us again in our fourth episode to discuss Freud's legacy in all its many forms. And Brett will be helping us along the way with some of the historical details. So let's go back to the beginning. So Sigismund Shlomo Freud, the first child of parents Jacob, is 40. And Amalia Nathanson, who's 20, was born on 6 May, 1856. So there's a big age difference between his parents. He grows up with two stepbrothers, Emmanuel and Philip, sons from Jakob's previous marriage, who are just a few years older than Amalia.
- [12:02]
Afwa Hirsch
And his first playmate is Emmanuel's son John, who's only a year older than him, but also, because of the age gap, his uncle. And this was confusing for Jung, Freud. And he later writes that he wondered if Philip should be Amalia's husband.
- [12:18]
Peter Frankapan
That's got to be quite complicated. You've got your playmate as your uncle. But age 4, Freud and his family move from Freiburg to Vienna. And Jakob's business as a wool merchant isn't very successful. So they're living in modest circumstances in a small apartment. Freud's parents are Jewish. We're gonna talk about that. That plays such an important role in Freud's life and also in his legacies and reception. But his father's not very religious. Jakob and Marla have married in a reform ceremony. But Freud always regarded himself as being Jewish.
- [12:49]
Afwa Hirsch
And for the first 10 years of his life, Amalia is constantly pregnant, giving birth to a further seven children.
- [12:56]
Peter Frankapan
Seven. That's gotta be a typo.
- [12:58]
Afwa Hirsch
I'm just exhausted thinking about the labor, like actual labor, but also domestic labor, just constantly being pregn. Raising children, I mean, in such quick succession is unbelievable. And her second child, Julius, who's born a year after Sigmund dies, age around eight months. And that has a big effect on young Freud. He felt this new sibling as a rival for his mother's affection. And then when that Sibling dies, he feels guilt as if he somehow wished it.
- [13:32]
Peter Frankapan
I mean, these tragedies are all awful, but in the context of the time, you know, like when we talked about Charles Dickens, childhood infant mortality and childhood death is just everywhere. So Freud's experiences are not completely unusual. Having loads of brothers and sisters and having one that dies, but it still sort of scars a child seeing one of their siblings die.
- [13:52]
Afwa Hirsch
And it's part of the reason why people had so many children, that death is a part of life. And I think that's also something that's later reflected in Freud's work. But for now, he has a nursemaid helping to raise him. She's a Catholic woman, and she sometimes takes young Sigmund to church. And he'll later in adult life recall Amalia telling him, when you got home, you would preach and tell us all what God Almighty does. So she had a formative role in Freud's early life. He learns to speak Hebrew, Latin, Greek, French and English. At school, he's top of his class and rarely even asked to do exams. He loves reading, teaches himself Spanish so that he can read Don Quixote in its original version. And he gets preferential treatment at home. His sister Anna remembers Sigmund's word and wish were respected by everyone in the family. The household became familiar with the fact that Siggy constantly won prizes for excellent schoolwork. And she says, no matter how crowded our quarters, Sigmund always had a room to himself. He even takes meals in his room so he can keep studying. When he complains to his parents that Anna's piano playing is distracting him, they get rid of the piano. I'm actually quite triggered by that story, Peter. I have to say.
- [15:16]
Peter Frankapan
I don't know, Afro. You know, this sort of person is always top of their class and eats on their own so they can keep on studying. It's also not normal for a young child. And before you get carried away thinking that he's a child genius, when he's seven, Freud decides that the right thing to do one evening is to urinate in his father's bedroom. And he hears his father say, that boy will never amount to anything. And that incident is another one of those formative things that burns into his memory. And throughout his life, he says that he dreams of telling his father, you see, I've amounted to something after all. So he's a kind of child genius and prodigy, but he's also a bit of a loser. I wonder, Brett, what you think the significance was of Freud's early experiences. Do you Think he could have done the work that he did later in life without them?
- [16:03]
Brett Carr
Well, regrettably, we don't have any YouTube videos of Freud's childhood as he happened to have arrived on the planet in the year 1856. But Freud was very, very honest in his publications and in his correspondence and actually shared an unus amount of material about his infancy and his early years. And I would say that on the whole, he had a fairly sturdy, fairly securely attached childhood. You know, the good news is he was never, as far as we know, raped or beaten. He had two loving parents, a very dedicated mother and a very dedicated father. So he had a lot of core reliability. And I think if he didn't have that, he would not have become a reliable physician to his patients.
- [17:00]
Afwa Hirsch
His ideas and theories about a son's relationship with his mother is such a big, and also such a controversial part of his work, Brett. And he said he felt sexually motivated feelings towards his own mother at the age of four. I'm going to resist the temptation to ask you whether that's normal, because I think that's probably a criminal thing to ask in the psychoanalytic world. But could you just help us unpick that? What was his relationship with Amalia like? What do we make of what seems to many of us troubling feeling and theory?
- [17:33]
Brett Carr
I think Sigmund Freud, like most human beings, will have enjoyed a very complex relationship with his mother. She lived to the age of 95 years, which is extraordinary, certainly at that point in history. And Freud maintained regular, regular contact with his mother. He always knew that he was the eldest child and very special, but he did have potentially, at times ambivalent feelings towards his mother. You're quite right, she had to look after many, many additional siblings. So I think that family experience may have made Freud more sensitive to the sheer complexity of what it's like growing up in something called a family.
- [18:18]
Peter Frankapan
And just on that, Brett, Freud said of his relationship with his mother that a man who'd been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror. How important was that sense of confidence that his mother gave him alongside all of his other brothers and sisters? Did Sigmund Freud stand out? Was he given that sense of self belief by his mother and by his father?
- [18:42]
Brett Carr
We don't know a great deal about the details of the relationship of the siblings to the parents compared to Sigmund Freud with his parents, but we certainly know that both Freud's mother and father were, in my estimation, very, very attentive. To him. You know back then mothers as you know, did most of the daily, moment by moment care of the children. But Freud's father, Jakob Freud took a great deal of interest in his son and we know that from the correspondence which has survived. So I think there was something very special about Sigmund and I think they were very proud that he was literally the first member of the Freud family to attend a university which was rather unusual in the 1870s for someone of Jewish origin in Vienna.
- [19:35]
Peter Frankapan
So he gets through his quite intense and eventful childhood and in 1873, age 17, Freud joins the University of Vienna. He had planned to study law but finally has his head turned by Charles Darwin. In his 1925 autobiographical study Freud wrote the theories of Darwin which were then of topical interest strongly attracted me for they held out hopes in an extraordinary advance in our understanding of the world. And it was hearing Goethe's beautiful essay on Nature read aloud at a popular lecture by Professor Carl Bruhl just before I left school that decided me to become a medical student. So it's a critical move at a critical juncture that puts him on a path to becoming a doctor.
- [20:19]
Afwa Hirsch
And he studies under Ernst Wilhelm von Brucker who belongs to the procedure prestigious Helmholtz School of Medicine. He publishes papers with titles like A Histological Method for the Study of Brain Tracts and A Case of Cerebral Haemorrhage.
- [20:35]
Peter Frankapan
His work is really pioneering and it helps back up existing theories about evolution. But he's soon moving on to other investigations too.
- [20:43]
Afwa Hirsch
He graduates on 30th March 1881 with a passing grade of excellent and he begins working as a technician in Brooker's lab.
- [20:52]
Peter Frankapan
So this studious boy has spent his childhood and adolescence with his head in his books and has started a brilliant career. There's been no time so far for a private life. But that's about to change, isn't it?
- [21:04]
Afwa Hirsch
Absolutely Peter. In 1882 Freud meets Martha Bernays, a friend of his sister's when she visits his house. Freud, who is almost 26 at the time, this is quite a late starter to start getting interested in relationships and he's transfixed by the slim, pale and petite 21 year old woman.
- [21:24]
Peter Frankapan
He describes the meeting as the first sight of a little girl sitting at a well known long table talking so cleverly while peeling an apple with her delicate fingers. And that had disconcerted him lastingly during courtship.
- [21:38]
Afwa Hirsch
He calls her Princess and sends her a red rose and a poem in Latin every day. That mandatory ritual of seducing someone, that's.
- [21:48]
Peter Frankapan
What you need to win somebody's heart. A poem every day in a language that's almost impossible to read.
- [21:52]
Afwa Hirsch
I did have somebody who once in my early 20s tried to win me over by sending me a poem in French every day inspired by Baudelaire. And I will say that is one of the most off putting seduction rituals I have ever encountered. But anyway, I digress.
- [22:09]
Peter Frankapan
Well, you're not like Martha because Martha finds it extremely exciting. So two months after they met, Freud proposes and she accepts. But their engagement needs to be kept secret because her strict orthodox Jewish mother doesn't approve.
- [22:22]
Afwa Hirsch
Martha's family is very respected in the Jewish community, held in high esteem and disapproving of this secular Jewish family, this rather unsuccessful merchant father that Freud has. And Martha's mother moves the family to Wansbeck, Germany, which Freud thinks is an attempt to sabotage the relationship and break them up.
- [22:41]
Peter Frankapan
Yeah, I mean throughout their engagement Freud behaves extremely possessively and with a great deal of jealousy and in fact to the point of almost breaking down their relationship. One week after they get together he tells Martha that he feels insecure over her close relationship with her cousin Max. So I mean he's inventing problems in his own mind at this point.
- [23:01]
Afwa Hirsch
Now for maybe the second time in his life, Freud sees professional success as a way of proving his worth and in this case as a way to win Martha's hand. His early letters really show how much he wanted to accomplish. He writes to his friend Emile Fluss, I'm not really a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador, an adventurer if you want it translated, with all the curiosity, daring and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.
- [23:33]
Peter Frankapan
His match with Martha, like you said, AFW, is a very ambitious one. Her family comes from the intellectual world that he's really keen to join. So her father, Isaac Bernays was the chief rabbi of Hamburg with close connections and friendships with Heine and Karl Marx. And two of her brothers are lecturers at German universities. So they're kind of intellectual blue bloods.
- [23:54]
Afwa Hirsch
It's familiar story, isn't it? This ambitious young man wants to increase his social standing. It's kind of social mobility really. And we get to see a different side of the sober scientist Freud in the emotional stakes he has in both this relationship and the chances it offers him to advance in the world. He writes to Martha, can there be anything crazier? I said to myself, you have won the Dearest girl, quite without any merit of your own. And you know no better than only a week later to reproach her with being taught and to tomorrow torment her with jealousy. The feeling I had about Max Mayer, that's Martha's cousin that he's jealous of, came from a distrust of myself, not of you, at least. He's analyzing himself here and showing some introspective ability to see how unreasonable his.
- [24:42]
Peter Frankapan
Jealousy is, some self awareness. So I agree with that. But at this stage, for all of his signs of huge promise, Freud has settled into a pretty uninspiring job in Brucker's lab. His emotional insecurity also means that it makes his long distance relationship with Martha really tumultuous.
- [24:59]
Afwa Hirsch
But Freud is about to receive an unexpected piece of advice from his mentor which could change his life and prospects forever.
- [25:28]
Peter Frankapan
Freud is a year into working in the lab and his boss, Ernest Brucker, is concerned about his perilous financial position. So he persuades Freud to resign and to pursue work in medical practice. Freud is engaged and he needs to raise the funds to marry. So he takes a job as an aspirant, that's a kind of clinical assistant at Vienna General Hospital under the chair of medicine. And here he swaps microscopes for patients. It's such an important turning point in his career. The hours are long and the work is really demanding. But after three years he reaches the rank of privat dorsent. And you know this now for Germans, they've got so many different ranks. There isn't really an equivalent in British medical schools, but it's pretty much the most elite status below the rank of professor.
- [26:17]
Afwa Hirsch
And armed with this new very German high status, in 1885, Freud applies for a grant to study in Paris under Jean Martin Charcot, one of the world's leading neurologists. He passes the competitive selection process, thanks to Brucker's support. He observed Charcot in the Salpetriere hospital hypnotizing patients for groups of students and others. Charcot believed that a hypnotized state was very similar to a bout of hysteria. So he hypnotized his patients in order to induce and study their symptoms, such as fear, fainting or paralysis. However, Charcot's emphasis was on observation and classification over treatment.
- [26:58]
Peter Frankapan
And Freud is incredibly impressed by this. I think the idea not just of using alternative methods, but to measure scientifically what the implications and consequences are. So he writes to Martha. Charcot is one of the greatest physicians, a genius and a sober man. He simply uproots My views and intentions. After some lectures, I walk away as from Notre Dame with a new perception of perfection. So he's incredibly engaged by seeing something that feels and looks like it's cutting edge. And Charcot's influence is so acute that it leads Freud to consider quitting laboratory work to consult on neurological cases.
- [27:37]
Afwa Hirsch
Brett, what was groundbreaking about Charcot's work and why was Freud so attracted to it?
- [27:44]
Brett Carr
Jean Martin Charcot was really the Sigmund Freud of the neurology field. In my estimation, he did more than any other neurologist at that point in time. In the mid and late 19th century, he helped to identify what we would now refer to as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease and als, a myotrophic lateral sclerosis. He was really, really a pioneer. So although he was very theatrical in certain ways, would often interview patients in front of large audiences of doctors. I think had Charcot lived today in the 21st century, he might well have hosted his own neurology podcast or had all kinds of social media postings. Freud was not a showman at all, and I think he never really identified with that part of Charcot. Freud was much more quiet. He wrote a lot, but he was very hesitant about working with any media. He often refused opportunities to talk to newspaper journalists and so forth. And when the radio was first invented, Freud absolutely hated the radio. So I don't think it was the more public aspects of Charcot that appealed to Freud. I think it was his real seriousness in tackling conditions such as hysterical neurosis from a more psychological perspective.
- [29:16]
Afwa Hirsch
Brett I'm trying to process my own feelings of discomfort to have a woman suffering from this mysterious condition in front of this large audience of men, and they're all hypothesizing and examining what's wrong with her.
- [29:29]
Brett Carr
Much of what we know about Charcot's public work was based very much on a beautiful portrait that was undertaken by a French artist called Pierre Brouillet, in which Charcot, a male physician, is standing next to other male physicians, and they are displaying the dress body of one female with lots of male doctors in the audience. But the reality is that Charcot did have female members of the audience, and he did have male hysterical patients as well. So we just have to be more historically accurate when considering the gender of this. Charcot, as well as Freud, were the two pioneers in Europe in really saying that, yes, women have long since suffered from hysteria, but men also suffer from hysteria.
- [30:24]
Afwa Hirsch
What is hysteria in today's language?
- [30:27]
Brett Carr
It's a term that's Very, very rarely used nowadays. And hysteria was generally considered in the late 19th century as one of the most common forms of neurosis, namely an outburst of emotion. People who could not control their emotions, many would be depressed, many would be anxious. And one of the biggest features of the condition then known as hysteria is what we would now think of as psychosomatic symptoms. People would have sudden paralyses in a body part, they'd have sudden migraines, they'd have acts of temporary blindness in one eye. And the physicians would examine them very closely and not detect any medical damage, any abnormalities. But it was really the impact of the emotional life on the body, I think, to be honest, learning how to put sexuality, our sexual thoughts into words, our angry thoughts into words. We're all good speakers nowadays about our private lives. Whereas back then you were not allowed to talk about any of your emotions, sadly never allowed to talk about having sexual feelings or indeed a premarital sexual history or premarital sexual desires. And I think that alone contributed hugely to this disruption of emotional outbursts from patients.
- [31:58]
Afwa Hirsch
Paris gave Freud a new direction for his work. But back in Vienna, there are a few things getting in the way of him setting himself up. First of all, since 1884, Freud has been experimenting with a, at the time, little known drug called cocaine.
- [32:16]
Peter Frankapan
How has he heard about cocaine? Where does the cocaine come from?
- [32:19]
Afwa Hirsch
He's heard about this German army doctor who's been using it to bolster the physical endurance of his men. And he's also found that it helps ease mild depression and even, and I've never heard cocaine marketed this way, indigestion. So there you go. Step away from the Tums. He starts prescribing it to patients, giving it to his family and even to Martha to make her strong and give her cheeks a red color.
- [32:46]
Peter Frankapan
Freud trialed cocaine as a morphine substitute for his close friend, Ernst von Fleischel Markov, who'd suffered from terrible nerve pain. And Freud's idea was that he could use cocaine to help treat illnesses and particularly to alleviate pain. And the idea was he would publish a paper based on this.
- [33:03]
Afwa Hirsch
If cocaine was going to be a magic cure for illness, we would know about it by now. It isn't. And by April 1886, Freud was cottoning onto that reality. He was losing faith in that path. Ophthalmologist Karl Koller beat Freud to it and did publish a paper suggesting cocaine could be used as an anesthetic for eye surgery. But Fleishel Marshault's condition worsened with new problems like insomnia, convulsions and, and delirium tremens. Freud is forced to concede cocaine is not the answer he's been looking for.
- [33:34]
Peter Frankapan
Yeah, and the next issue has even more serious implications for his future. Freud returns to Vienna from Paris and he gets ready for marriage, borrowing money from his friends, including Breuer. But just three months before the wedding, Freud accuses Martha's brother Eli of betrayal for withholding her dowry, which she had tied up in investments.
- [33:55]
Afwa Hirsch
Freud then expects Martha to take his side in this dispute and feels betrayed when she doesn't immediately side with her future husband over her brother. Eventually, the money is delivered, but the rift is there and Freud demands that Martha not write to him again until she's broken all ties with Eli, her own brother.
- [34:16]
Peter Frankapan
Martha refused to give in to his demands. And if that wasn't bad enough, you've got the missed cocaine dreams that don't turn into what Freud had hoped for his academic career he's moved across into different scientific disciplines. And now Freud is in danger of losing his fiance too. That part of him of the feeling of infallibility and of being a conquistador is now giving way to real self doubt.
- [34:37]
Afwa Hirsch
And for Freud, the question is now becoming not will his work succeed in the external world, but can he overcome his own emotional insecurities and find a way to solve his own problems.
- [34:55]
Peter Frankapan
Foreign. So the good news is that Freud and Martha put their differences behind them and they managed to overcome that last minute wobble and eventually they tie the knot on September 13, 1886. The less good news is that it's mostly down to Martha's patient handling of Freud's emotional mood swings and outbursts that gets him to tie the knot.
- [35:30]
Afwa Hirsch
Freud starts his own private practice where he's treating patients suffering from neurosis. He's constantly looking for new ways to diagnose disorders. He recalls this study he heard about years earlier. And he thinks that this study might hold the key to unlocking the secrets of treating hysteria. So he seeks out his former mentor and friend, the renowned physician Joseph Breuer.
- [35:53]
Peter Frankapan
Between 1880 and 1882, Breuer had treated a patient known as Anna O. Her real name we now know as Bertha Pappenheim. Breuer discovered that by allowing Bertha to speak about her symptoms, which included paralysis, hallucinations and a nervous cough, that they could be alleviated.
- [36:11]
Afwa Hirsch
Breuer uses hypnosis to help Bertha recall traumatic memories. And there's this significant breakthrough when during a spell of hydrophobia, the fear of water Bertha uncovers that it subconsciously linked to her seeing a friend let her dog drink from a glass of water. Once her suppressed disgust came out into the open, her hydrophobia disappeared.
- [36:36]
Peter Frankapan
So that patient led treatment came to be known as the talking cure or cathartic method. And it supported the hypothesis that physical maladies could have a psychological basis. And that Anna O case made a huge impression on Freud when he first heard about it. And Freud experiments on his own patients in consultation with Breuer, using the cathartic method and documenting his progress. And he shares his findings with Breuer and together they publish a book that's called Studies on Hysteria that comes out in 1895.
- [37:06]
Afwa Hirsch
Freud theorizes that hysteria is rooted in repressed childhood trauma, often repressed sexual abuse. This is highly controversial at the time.
- [37:17]
Peter Frankapan
So one significant incident had occurred during Breuer's work with Anna where he'd encountered her writhing on the bed, undergoing what was described as a hysterical pregnancy. And asked what the matter was, she replied, here comes Dr. B's child. And Breuer saw this as a link to unresolved emotional conflicts and her attachment to him as a father figure. But Freud interprets the hysterical pregnancy as evidence of the sexual underpinnings of hysteria, while the theories in fact lead to a split with Breueer, who says, I confess that plunging into sexuality in theory and practice is really not to my taste. Freud saw himself as having the courage to take on Breuer's discoveries and to push further and to look at erotic undertones rather than pretending that they weren't there.
- [38:02]
Afwa Hirsch
The idea that sexual abuse, childhood trauma, that these are things that could have a huge impact on someone's mental health and physical wellness, were basically unknown at the time and really went against contemporary ideas about respectability. I mean, you didn't talk about sex. It didn't belong in polite society, it didn't belong in scientific conversation, especially when we're talking about women who were not expected to have sexual lives, sexual feelings. So just taking seriously a woman's sexual experience, how it could impact her life, was very uncomfortable for many people.
- [38:39]
Peter Frankapan
Freud had taken ideas from Charcot and combined them with Breuer's case study to advance a whole set of new theories. Is it a trait of geniuses to draw other people's findings together to make something new? Is that what Freud is really doing, taking strands and weaving them together?
- [38:55]
Afwa Hirsch
Absolutely. Freud is an incredible synthesizer of ideas. He's also, I would say, a literary genius, because as well as taking scientific ideas like those from Charcot and combining them with those of Breuer that we've just seen. He's also digging into myth, legend, seminal texts in the European canon. The best example of that is his work on the Oedipus complex, which is one of the things he's most famous for, where he's taking this ancient Greek myth about the relationship between a mother and son and presenting it as this kind of foundational truth in human psychology. And he's saying that a woman like Anna owes symptoms are rooted in unresolved Oedipal conflicts, which is an incredibly inventive and creative, if scientifically dodgy idea.
- [39:44]
Peter Frankapan
I mean, I think the thing that's most exciting about Freud is that it's just a sort of one idea after another. And I think that the ideas about how to reformulate and to come up with theories of why things are as they are. That doesn't mean that Freud has to be right, I think, for these ideas to be provocative and to be thinking in new directions. And Freud is a good provocateur. I think that's what often interesting good scholarship is.
- [40:07]
Afwa Hirsch
And I think it is important to say that it wasn't necessarily effective at the time. And let's just go back to Anna. Oh, who started this conversation after being treated with this new approach of talking therapy and understanding her repressed trauma. She didn't get better. In fact, she experienced relapses and ended up being hospitalized in the long term. She went on to become a prominent social worker and feminist activist. So it was kind of a happy ending for her. But it's not that these initial treatments were miracle cures and really necessarily justified the emphasis Freud put on them as effective evidence of the way he was going to move his theories forward.
- [40:46]
Peter Frankapan
But Freud is moving those theories forward a lot. So studies on hysteria give Freud a framework, but he keeps on modifying and advancing and progressing. So in 1896, he abandons hypnosis in favour of free association, which is the idea of getting people to relax and say whatever comes into their mind without censorship. And very significantly, he comes up with a word that has become incredibly famous and also controversial. That word is psychoanalysis, which he uses to describe the new clinical method and its underlying theories.
- [41:16]
Afwa Hirsch
This is a completely new idea that much of human behavior is driven by unconscious processes. The mind is like an iceberg and the conscious is the tip, the part that sticks up above the water. But the large hidden part, the unconscious, the underwater mass, is repressed and it's desires, memories and instincts that we repress ourselves because they're not in line with what we think is acceptable or respectable, or because they're ideas that are taboo.
- [41:49]
Peter Frankapan
And the challenge there is that what it's saying is that human behavior is not rational, as well as not being conscious that humans are reacting constantly to impulses that they don't even understand themselves. And that's a real challenge in a world with science, the Enlightenment, the idea that humans are the highest form of life. So you can see why people at the time would feel extremely threatened by the idea of saying that humans are not necessarily aware what they're thinking most of the time.
- [42:15]
Afwa Hirsch
It is a revolutionary and very threatening idea. However, from a modern perspective, it's very clear that psychoanalysis was starting to cross ethical barriers that we would absolutely recognize today. And one of Freud's most famous case studies illustrates this perfectly.
- [42:34]
Peter Frankapan
So in the summer of 1898, Freud meets Eda Bauer, who's 16 years old, whose worried father brings her to Seafroid after she'd expressed suicidal thoughts. Two years later, when Eda was 18, she returns and begins treatment. And Freud doesn't publish his case study for another seven years. And in that he refers to Ida as Dora. Dora has symptoms including aphonia, a nervous cough, depression and suicidal ideation. And through conversation, Freud learns about Dora's family entanglement with another family, which she anonymizes by calling them the K's. Dora's father was having an affair with Frau K. And her husband, Herr Kay, had made sexual advances to Dora when she was 14.
- [43:20]
Afwa Hirsch
When Dora turns 16, Herr Kay renews his advances, which she's rejected. And when she tells her father about this essentially predatory man, the same age as her father, who is making advances to her, her father dismisses the claims. And this, though, prompts him to refer her to Freud.
- [43:39]
Peter Frankapan
And Freud's analysis is that Dora's hysteria stems from repressed sexual trauma and unconscious conflicts. He interprets her cough as a somatic symbol of imagined oral sex between her father and Frauke, linking it to penis envy and displaced desire. Her aphonia, or loss of voice, signifies unconscious identification with Frau K, whose vocal absence during affairs was a parallel to Dora's symptom.
- [44:08]
Afwa Hirsch
Freud also analyzes two of Dora's dreams, one involving a burning house and a jewel case, which he thinks symbolizes fear of sexual violation, the jewel case representing her virginity and arousal, with the fire representing passion. The second dream, where Dora is wandering a train station alone, Freud thinks, reflects her desire to escape familial betrayal. Freud asserts these dreams reveal Repressed longing for Hare Kay and her father, masked by anger. After 11 weeks, Dora prematurely brings her analysis to an end. It's really hard to read about the Dora story because it's such a painful example of betrayal of a young girl who is bringing a very real problem to to adults who should help her, who instead so caught up with their own ideas about what the causes of women's problems are that they can't hear her and are ironically projecting their theories onto her. Brett, my question for you is whether we should regard Freud as having been aware of the moral and ethical pitfalls of this situation.
- [45:18]
Brett Carr
At the time when Freud worked with this young person, Eda Bauer, known as Dora, he really examined her very, very carefully. He would have seen her six times per week for a period of 11 weeks. And he really attempted to consider what had happened to her sexually. And Freud gave her a space to listen to this and to talk about it, but he also went deeper in the conversations because he not only considered what impact this chap known as Her K might have had on Dora at that time, he also wanted to know what her own erotic feelings were and whether she might have had any erotic feelings towards her father. So that is really what we think of nowadays as the Oedipus complex, appreciating that human beings have a range of complex feelings towards both parents, both warm and erotic feelings, attachment based feelings, also hateful feelings, and it doesn't have to be very gender specific.
- [46:32]
Peter Frankapan
At the time, there was criticism that Freud was fitting analysis into a preconceived idea. How was his ideas about the Oedipus complex received by his critics as well as by the rest of the scientific community.
- [46:45]
Brett Carr
Freud has been criticized for every single piece of writing that he has ever published, and he has been hugely admired by literally millions and millions of people over the last century for every single one of his writings. He is a very, very powerful person, a very powerful writer, and he provokes all kinds of reactions from people. No two people have the same assessment from Freud. What I would say in answer to your question, Peter, about the theory, it's not that Freud said, okay, I now have a theory of the Oedipus complex and I'm going to pin that on all of my patients. It was really talking to all his patients six times a week over months and months, often years and years, that made him appreciate how very complicated the child parent relationship is.
- [47:40]
Peter Frankapan
Freud was a pioneer and brought a whole set of new ideas, so it's not surprising that they would antagonize because he's challenging how people want to think, but that doesn't mean that he's necessarily right or wrong. But it'd be great to get a sense of how people were threatened by these new ideas.
- [47:58]
Brett Carr
Many people were threatened simply by the fact that he wrote very bluntly in his native German language about a topic called sexuality. If you look at most of the medical literature prior to Freud's time, large amounts of it was written in a language called Latin. The most famous sexology book of the 19th century, written by Richard von Krafft Ebing, was published by a German publisher, but with a Latin title, Sico Partia Sexualis Pathological Sexuality. It was considered grotesque to even mention sex in one's native language. Back at that time, Freud was very, very bold to create the language of modern sexuality.
- [48:47]
Peter Frankapan
So Freud's quest for a new discovery has come to fruition through scientific endeavor and really careful observation. And through doing that, he's discovered a new understanding of how the mind and body work together. I should say a new hypothesis anyway. But he knows that this is just the tip of the iceberg and that everything he's learned only begs more questions.
- [49:07]
Afwa Hirsch
For now, there's little general interest in the niche work being done in his consulting room. But Freud feels he's on the cusp of something that could bring him the success and recognition he has longed for.
- [49:20]
Peter Frankapan
But to test his theories, to really understand the depths of the human unconscious conscious, he's going to turn his investigation inwards and test his theories of the mind on himself. That's next time on Legacy.
- [49:50]
Afwa Hirsch
Follow Legacy on the Wondery App, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge seasons early and ad free right now by joining Wondery plus in the Wondery App or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey@wondery.com survey.
- [50:09]
Peter Frankapan
From Wondery and Goal Hanger. This is the first episode in our series on Sigmund Freud.
- [50:14]
Afwa Hirsch
We've used many sources for this series including A Life for Our Time by Peter Gay and the Life and Work of Sigmund Freud by Ernest Jones. Legacy is hosted by me, AFWA Hirsch.
- [50:26]
Peter Frankapan
And me, Peter Frankapen for Goal Hanger. Our series producers are Jane Morgan and Anoushka Lewis. Jack McKay is Associate Producer. Our production managers are Izzy Reed and Alex Hack Roberts. The executive producers are Tony Pastor and Jack Davenport.
- [50:43]
Afwa Hirsch
This series of Legacy is sound engineered and designed by Will Farmer.
- [50:47]
Peter Frankapan
Music supervision is Scott Velasquez for Fritz and Sink.
- [50:50]
Afwa Hirsch
Our producer for Wondery is Emanuela Coinati Francis. And our managing producer is Rachel Sibley.
- [50:56]
Peter Frankapan
Executive producers for Wondery are Estelle Doyle, Chris Bourne, Morgan Jones and Marshall Louie.