Chapter 1Destiny’s Child
We begin in a pastry shop. A young mother, Amalia Freud, is accosted by a strange old peasant woman who declares that Amalia has brought a great man into the world. The air is fragrant with gingerbread and poppy-seed cake, and the old woman’s smile is enigmatic. It is a prophecy that Amalia should dismiss. After all, peasant women are always dispensing charms and predicting the future, but this prophecy deserves notice, because Amalia’s little son has already been dignified by an auspicious sign. He was born with a translucent hood covering his head, a caul, believed by many to be a portent of fame and good fortune. The old woman’s body sinks a little as she executes a barely perceptible genuflection. Her eyes are bright with triumphal visions. Amalia takes a deep breath and her chest expands with pride and happiness. She can feel the truth of this prophecy in her bones.
Sigmund Freud was happy to share this story with others, but at the same time he made it plain that as far as he was concerned his mother had been persuaded by nothing more than superstitious nonsense. Even though he was keen to preserve his reputation as a committed sceptic, this didn’t stop him from telling his followers about another prophetic incident that, unlike his mother’s encounter in the pastry shop, he could remember very clearly. When he was eleven or twelve, an entertainer in a restaurant predicted that Freud would ‘probably’ become a cabinet minister. The entertainer was of course wrong, because Freud didn’t pursue a career in politics. But not wholly wrong, insofar as the prediction still suggests that a measure of greatness was, in some sense, preordained.
A remarkable nativity and encounters with prophets are narrative staples that have been used to authenticate heroes since ancient times. Reflecting on the caul and the pastry shop, Ernest Jones (Freud’s principal British disciple and biographer) wrote ‘Thus the hero’s garb was in the weaving at the cradle itself’. In mythology, omens can also be credentials. The gods distinguish champions and conquerors with signs. Freud’s life-story would contain many of the key ingredients of a perfectly constructed classical myth: humble origins, portents of greatness, struggles against adversity, banishment, descent into the underworld and a triumphant return with a precious gift: ascent – fame – glory. The pleasing shape of Freud’s legend suggests a life that was lived self-consciously and alert to the narrative potential of situations and chance.
Although Freud feigned dismay that it should have fallen upon him, of all people, to battle with demons and discover ultimate truths, there are occasional unguarded passages in his autobiographical writings that expose the unmistakable self-assurance of a man who appears always to have had one ear straining for the call of destiny. By the end of the nineteenth century he saw himself as someone fated with the responsibility of disturbing the ‘sleep of the world’. Yet, apart from the caul and the peasant woman, there really was nothing promising about Freud’s early life. It was far more likely that a person with his parentage and background would end up managing a moderately successful textile business. Disturbing the sleep of the world shouldn’t have been any concern of his.
Freud was born in a rented room above Zajíc the locksmith’s shop at 117 Schlossergasse, a two-storey house in the town of Freiberg, Moravia at 6.30 p.m. on 6 May 1856. Schlossergasse has since been renamed Zámečznická, Freiberg is now Příbor, and Moravia is now a region of the Czech Republic. Zajíc’s house is still there (the only building to survive street demolition in 1975) and in 2006 it opened its doors to visitors as the Freud birthplace museum. Amalia’s baby had a full head of black hair which prompted her to call him (disconcertingly for us) her ‘little blackamoor’. A week later, on 13 May, the baby ‘entered the Jewish covenant’, or more explicitly, was circumcised. His given names were Sigismund (derived from the German word for victory) and Schlomo (Solomon in English), although his family called him Sigi. He became a ‘lively’ infant who liked going downstairs to play with scraps of metal, which he made into small toys.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Freiberg had a population of between four and five thousand inhabitants, of which only a hundred or so were Jews. The rest were almost entirely Catholic. It was a typical Moravian town, with little to distinguish it apart from a church with an impressive steeple and chimes. Beyond the outskirts of Freiberg were farms, woods and hills, and beyond these hills the distant Carpathian mountains.
Moravia was part of the Habsburg Empire. The Habsburgs had ruled Austria from the thirteenth century and over the course of six hundred years their sovereignty extended across vast areas of Europe. The nineteenth-century Habsburgs are credited with having created an empire of bureaucrats, but behind this façade of functionaries, paper shuffling and red tape, the empire was also rather magical. The inalienable heirlooms of the royal family included a unicorn’s horn and the Holy Grail; Hector, Noah and even the god Saturn were all, at one time or another, implicated in Habsburg genealogy. In addition to securing power by conventional means, such as advantageous marriages, Habsburg rule was also buttressed by symbolism, the acquisition of special objects, and ritualistic ceremonies. They seemed to have discovered public relations in the sixteenth century. The pastry shop in which Amalia encountered the strange peasant woman (already evocative of a Grimms’ fairy tale) was located in a much larger landscape of wonder and imperial enchantment.
Freud’s immediate ancestors were from Galicia (a Habsburg border province, now western Ukraine). His maternal relatives were from Brody and his paternal relatives were from Buchach and Tysmenytsia. In An Autobiographical Study, Freud states that his family were originally from Cologne (where medieval pogroms had preceded the expulsion of Jewish residents in 1424). He supposed that his ancestors had fled eastwards in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries because of persecution, and that they had eventually made their way back to German-speaking territories in the nineteenth century via Lithuania and Galicia. Regardless of what Freud had been told or believed, it is much more likely that his distant ancestors fled Lithuania at the end of the seventeenth century and settled in Galicia.
Freud’s father, Jacob, was an impecunious wool merchant. He purchased wool from local peasants and after the wool had been dyed he sold ‘finished’ batches to manufacturers. Freud likened him to Charles Dickens’ amiable but incompetent Wilkins Micawber, who, in David Copperfield, is always over-optimistically expecting something to turn up. Jacob had grown up in a Jewish Orthodox shtetl and spoke Hebrew and Yiddish, although business was always conducted in German, and as a Jewish merchant he was obliged every year to apply to the authorities for permission to trade. He was mindful of his heritage, but not religious – and he certainly didn’t want to be regarded as an outsider.
Jacob’s first wife, Sally Kanner, bore him two sons, Emmanuel and Phillip; however, there is some confusion surrounding whether Jacob did or didn’t marry a woman called Rebecca after Sally’s death. Some biographers avoid the issue by simply omitting her. Others question whether she even existed. In 1852 a woman called Rebecca was listed as Jacob’s wife in the register of Jews maintained by the Catholic authorities. Unless the entry is incorrect, she certainly did exist and probably died prematurely like her predecessor.
Amalia Nathansohn – Freud’s mother – was from north-east Galicia, near the Russian frontier, and twenty years younger than Jacob. Indeed, Jacob was already a grandfather when he married Amalia, so Sigmund was born an uncle – and one of Sigmund’s half-brothers was older than his mother. After Sigmund, Amalia gave birth to another boy, Julius, who died in his first year after contracting an intestinal infection. Then, in quick succession, she produced five daughters – Anna, Rosa, Mitzi, Dolfi, Pauli – and her second surviving son, Alexander.
Jacob’s young bride has been variously described as slender, pretty, beautiful, amusing, alert and sharp-witted. She seems to have retained her vital energies until the very end of her life – those who knew her in old age repeatedly emphasise her vigour, with one of her grandsons even comparing her to a tornado. Ernest Jones wrote that she possessed ‘a lively personality’ and enjoyed ‘card parties at an hour when most old ladies would be in bed’. At the age of ninety she refused the gift of a shawl because she thought that it made her look old. Five years later, she expressed disapproval when her photograph appeared in a newspaper. ‘A bad reproduction,’ she said. ‘It makes me look a hundred.’
When Sigi was three years old, Jacob and Amalia moved to Leipzig. The reasons given for their departure from Freiberg were, firstly, a financial crisis that ruined the Moravian textile industry and, secondly, antisemitism; however, in 1859, many wool merchants were prospering in a relatively benign local economy and antisemitism, although ever present, was not getting any worse. It is far more likely that the Freud family had to move because of Jacob’s ineptitude and the collapse of his business.
The train to Leipzig passed through Breslau, and it was there that Freud saw gas jets for the first time. These flames made him think of souls burning in hell. This isn’t quite as implausible as it sounds because, even though he was only three, his Catholic nanny had spoken to him about hellfire and damnation. He had accompanied her to church with some regularity and he could imitate a priest delivering a sermon. The gas jets of Breslau were so sinister that they created anxieties surrounding train travel that lasted well into Freud’s adulthood.
After a year in Leipzig the Freud family moved to Vienna. Once again, Freud saw something during the journey that made a lasting impression. He spent the night with his mother, presumably in a sleeper carriage, glimpsed her naked and experienced sexual arousal. The incident is described in a candid letter written on 3 October 1897 to his friend and colleague Wilhelm Fliess: ‘libido towards matrem was aroused; the occasion must have been the journey with her from Leipzig to Vienna, during which we spent a night together and I must have had the opportunity of seeing her nudam’. Freud’s coy use of the Latin words matrem and nudam suggest that he was easing his embarrassment by using ‘medical’ language. A few weeks later he wrote another letter to Fliess, proposing that love of one’s mother and jealousy of one’s father might be a universal phenomenon of early childhood. He added that this combination of feelings, reawakened in playgoers, might underlie the ‘gripping power’ of the Greek drama Oedipus Rex. ‘Every member of the audience was once a budding Oedipus in phantasy, and this dream-fulfilment played out in reality causes everyone to recoil in horror, with the full measure of repression which separates his infantile from his present state.’ The ‘recoiling’ audience that Freud had imagined was composed entirely of men, and in years to come he would struggle to make the ‘Oedipus complex’ a truly universal phenomenon, relevant to both men and women. These reflections, inspired by the memory of his mother’s nudity, would eventually become central to his understanding of human sexual development.
The Freuds lived first in Weissgerberstrasse, then moved to Pillersdorfgasse, and finally settled in Pfeffergasse, a narrow street in Leopoldstadt, which was once a Jewish ghetto; in the 1860s it was still home to nearly half of Vienna’s fifteen thousand Jews. Some migrant families had to share a single room with their respective areas separated by a chalk line on the floor. Outbreaks of tuberculosis were common. However, Leopoldstadt wasn’t a slum district. There were prosperous enclaves, and it was also where the Prater was situated: a very substantial park with restaurants, cafés, a racecourse and spectacular amusements. In 1895, for example, one of the attractions was a recreation of Venice, with mock palazzos, canals and gondola rides. The apartment the Freud family occupied had two living rooms, a dining room, three bedrooms and a ‘cabinet’ (a small chamber set apart from the other rooms). There was no bathroom, but every fortnight a large wooden tub and barrels of hot and cold water were carried into the kitchen by porters (and collected the following morning). Personal hygiene could also be maintained by using the local bath house. The family endured several years of hardship before charitable relatives came to the rescue. And although it is unclear how Jacob got by, his Micawberish optimism wasn’t so misplaced. Every now and again something must have turned up. Perhaps in the form of counterfeit rubles. In 1865 Josef Freud – Jacob’s brother – would receive a ten-year jail sentence after being exposed in the press as a ‘Jewish forger’.
Freud retained few memories of his first years in Vienna, apart from the curious exception of having once deliberately urinated in his parents’ bedroom. He remembered being seven or eight at the time, but he was probably younger. ‘One evening before going to sleep I disregarded the rules which modesty lays down and obeyed the calls of nature in my parents’ bedroom while they were present.’ Jacob Freud, understandably annoyed, is said to have declared: ‘The boy will come to nothing.’ Even as an adult, Freud had recurring dreams about this incident. Not because he was ashamed, but rather because his father’s words had wounded his pride. He later supposed that his father had delivered ‘a frightful blow to my ambition’.
It soon became evident, however, that Jacob’s verdict was wrong. Freud started reading Shakespeare at the age of eight and he was ‘top of the class’ with such regularity it became an expectation. His school record was blemished only once, in 1869, when he was questioned about fellow pupils who had visited prostitutes. Knowledge of their behaviour was enough to reduce his conduct grade.
Freud retreated into the ‘cabinet’ – the long narrow room that contained his bed, chairs, a shelf and a writing desk – and applied himself to schoolwork with extraordinary diligence. His admiring parents became indulgent. They bought him an oil lamp, while the rest of the household had to make do with candles, and his sister’s piano was removed because her playing disturbed him. He would even eat meals in his room to maximise study time. He mastered Latin and Greek, became fluent in French and English, and taught himself Italian and Spanish. Although he was never very good at mathematics, he was interested in science (particularly evolutionary biology), and after briefly flirting with the idea of becoming a lawyer he resolved instead to become a doctor. This conversion occurred after he had heard an essay on Nature (attributed to Goethe but actually the work of a Swiss theologian) read aloud at a public lecture. It portrayed Nature as a bountiful Mother with tantalising secrets. Freud, even at the age of seventeen, was stirred by an invitation to probe beneath the surface of observed reality.
A photograph of Freud taken around this time shows a slim, well-dressed young man with thick dark hair and a slight moustache. He is leaning, casually, against a piece of furniture, but his expression is resolute. He looks assured and quietly determined; however, his sobriety is diluted by a dash of dandyism. His mother – who doesn’t look very much older than her son – is sitting next to him. They make a very handsome pair.
As Freud’s school days came to an end, the promise of the caul and the pastry shop prophecy must have been playing on his mind. He was even beginning to experience presentiments of his own. ‘I seem to remember’, he later wrote, ‘that through the whole of this time, there ran a premonition of a task ahead, till it found open expression in my school-leaving essay as a wish that I might during the course of my life contribute something to our human knowledge.’ After taking his final examination before leaving school, Freud wrote to his friend Emil Fluss: ‘People who fear nothing but mediocrity, you say, are safe. Safe from what? I ask. Surely not safe and secure from being mediocre?’
Freud began studying medicine at the University of Vienna in the autumn of 1873.
Paintings of the Viennese medical establishment in Freud’s time create a strong impression of an advanced and scientifically respectable culture: venerable professors demonstrate new surgical procedures; steeply tiered lecture theatres are crowded with serious young men in wing-collar shirts (it wasn’t until 1903 that the first woman graduated in medicine); laboratories are filled with complicated contraptions and microscopes. Around 1900, Vienna certainly was a cutting-edge research centre; however, healing wasn’t a priority. In 1850 the only treatment available at the Vienna General Hospital was cherry brandy because doctors were much more interested in understanding diseases than eradicating them. The administration of active remedies was inconvenient. They interfered with the occurrence of symptoms and made nosology impossible. When questioned about treatment, one professor responded: ‘Treatment, treatment, that is nothing; it is the diagnosis that we want.’ Wards were managed by untrained nurses, many of whom were former housemaids and washerwomen. Their duties included selling coffee, and they ignored patients who didn’t tip. It wasn’t until 1882 that a nursing school was established to attract ‘girls’ from so-called ‘good’ families.
Although patient care was perfunctory, the medical school in Vienna produced a continuous stream of outstanding scientific accomplishments: the systematisation of dermatology, the foundation of modern urology, the introduction of the eye chart to standardise spectacle prescriptions, advances in anaesthesia, revolutionary gastric and laryngeal surgery, the identification of blood types, and the utilisation of blood pressure as a diagnostic tool. The gulf between academic distinction and clinical indifference typical of hospital medicine in Vienna from the mid- to late nineteenth century can be attributed to the influence of Carl von Rokitansky, who became head of the medical school in 1844. His ambition was to make medicine more scientific by matching symptom clusters with pathological findings. Estimates vary, but he may have conducted or supervised as many as eighty-five thousand autopsies. Eventually, his labours did result in a deeper understanding of many illnesses and better patient care, but only after a protracted period of therapeutic nihilism.
Underlying Rokitansky’s method was an idea that can be traced back to Anaxagoras, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who asserted that ‘phenomena are a visible expression of that which is hidden’. Freud had encountered the same idea in the essay that inspired him to study medicine. Nature ‘is incessantly speaking to us, but betrays not her secret’.
Rokitansky became a public intellectual and his conviction that truth hides behind phenomena was discussed and debated in salons where scientists and artists mixed. Subsequently, the idea acquired general currency. To discover the ‘truth’ behind the outward form of the human body, the artist Gustav Klimt observed Emil Zuckerkandl, the professor of anatomy at the medical school, dissecting corpses.
When Freud arrived at the medical school, five years before Rokitansky’s death, he would have been encouraged to interrogate appearances, and this attitude became, much later, typical of his approach to understanding the mind. Eventually, he would assert that, as physical symptoms arise from concealed atrophies and ruptures, so it is that thoughts, dreams, impulses and emotions are the product of invisible biological and psychological processes.
In the 1870s, qualifying as a doctor in Vienna involved five years of course work followed by three examinations. Freud took six years to complete his course work and then he delayed taking his finals for another two years. It took him a full seven and a half years to qualify. This was because he took numerous extra classes, including philosophy, zoology, physics, Aristotelian logic, spectrum analysis and plant physiology – and then dedicated even more of his time to non-essential research projects.
Jacob Freud began to wonder whether his son’s academic monasticism was really in the boy’s best interests. His solution was to propose an arranged marriage; however, the match he had in mind was his granddaughter, Pauline, Sigi’s childhood playmate and the daughter of Sigi’s half-brother Emmanuel. Clearly, such a marriage would be considered somewhat incestuous by contemporary standards. Emmanuel had emigrated to England in 1859, his business was profitable, and he agreed with his father that a fresh start and married life might be good for his bookish half-brother. So, at the age of nineteen, Sigi was taken to Manchester to see Pauline. But passions failed to ignite. Ernest Jones reflected that if Pauline had aroused Freud’s amorous instincts, ‘much might have been different in our world’. Apparently, Freud often thought about his trip to Manchester and how his life might so very easily have taken an entirely different course: Mr Freud, the enterprising president of a local business association, ensconced with his family in a fine house near the new Town Hall – a relatively untroubled existence – functions – anonymity – peace and quiet. He supposed that this imaginary incarnation would have been a much more contented version of himself. He was almost certainly being disingenuous. The idea of obscurity would have made his blood run cold. Although Freud wasn’t impressed by Pauline, he was impressed by England. Without a trace of sentiment, he wrote to a friend that ‘in spite of fog and rain, drunkenness and conservatism’ and the ‘Many peculiarities of the English character’ he much preferred England to Vienna. He remained an Anglophile all his life.
Shortly after returning to Vienna, Freud resolved the long-standing issue of what name he wished to be known by. Even when Freud was a schoolboy, he occasionally shortened Sigismund to Sigmund. After his second year at university, however, he always employed the abbreviated form. The last time he used Sigismund was when he inscribed his German translation copy of Darwin’s The Descent of Man in 1875. Thereafter, he was always Sigmund. The subject of his name change was never discussed with his family or followers, so we don’t know his precise reasons; however, the dupe or stooge in contemporary Viennese antisemitic jokes was usually called Sigismund and it is likely that he didn’t want to be identified with an offensive stereotype. Freud had joined the Reading Society of Viennese German Students as soon as he had enrolled at the university. Although ostensibly a literary society, it was politically nationalist and had to be dissolved in 1878 when significant tensions arose between Jewish and non-Jewish members. Nationalists believed that Jews, even German-speaking Jews, were not really ‘German’. Freud would later write that one of his greatest disappointments with academia was that he was expected to feel inferior because of his heritage: ‘I have never been able to see why I should feel ashamed of my descent or, as people were beginning to say, of my “race”.’
Freud’s non-essential research projects took him some distance from the medical curriculum. He made two trips to a Zoological Experimental Station in Trieste where he dissected four hundred eels to find their testicles. The gonads of the eel had proved mysteriously elusive, and a candidate organ had been identified only two years earlier by a Polish scientist. Freud’s job was to check the Polish scientist’s results. It was a curious assignment and one destined to raise eyebrows retrospectively given that Freud would one day write extensively about the ‘castration complex’. He evidently enjoyed being in the south, and when he wasn’t dissecting eels his principal pastime seems to have been observing beautiful Italian women walking around the town. The first cracks were beginning to appear in his ascetic veneer.
After the second trip to Trieste and at the age of twenty Freud became a research scholar at the Institute of Physiology. This rather grand appellation is deceptive because the reality consisted of a professor and two assistants who occupied the stinking ground floor and basement of a former gun factory. There were microscopes in a large room where lectures took place and a large number of windowless cubicles that served as laboratories. Water had to be drawn outside in a yard and carried into the building by a caretaker. There was no gas supply, so chemicals had to be heated using a spirit lamp. Experimental animals were kept in a shed.
Copyright © 2024 by Frank Tallis