It all emerged, quite amusingly, from an unlikely pioneer, who, as a kid bearing a fragile, delicate frame, was, otherwise, perky in school with his relentless inquisitiveness.
While not much is known of Sigmund Freud’s early life, because he purged his personal writings, twice over, his subsequent papers were strictly embargoed in the Sigmund Freud Archives. Some were made accessible to Alfred Ernest Jones, his official biographer, and also select members of the interior circle of academicians in psychoanalysis. They are, in their essence, as indubitably fascinating as the man himself.
Freud, with his zealous interest in the human mind, behaviour, and also emotions, predictably went to medical school and graduated with relative ease. In addition, he nursed a deep liking for the baffling, mysterious, also the unexplained, from his formative years. He dwelled too, for most part, in his own diverse research activity — which the purists may not have approved. However, as destiny would deem, Freud soon came under the influence of the celebrated French neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot — and, the rest is history. Freud learned hypnosis under Charcot — which he, however, forsook later, because of its unreliability and also because he found that his patients recuperated and ‘captured’ critical memories when conscious. He used the practice of ‘free association’ instead for patients to associate to anything that came into their mind, because he believed all memories are organised in a single associative web. What’s more, Freud’s ultimate practice of psychoanalysis focused not so much on the recollection of memories as on the inner mental, or emotional, ‘battles’ that kept them submerged deep within the mind, albeit the technique of free association continues to be a useful tool for analysing the mind today.
Freud [May 6, 1856-September 23, 1939] first set up his medical practice in Vienna. Vienna was his radar and compass as he spent his decisive years in exploring the deep recesses of the human mind — this was his way of life, also passion, which was to make him famous. Freud first used the word, psychoanalysis, in 1896. He also developed a theory of the human mind and human behaviour, including clinical techniques to help irrational, neurotic patients. Most psychoanalysts and psychiatrists today maintain to have been enthused by one, not the other.
That Freud, the plumber of the human psyche, thought of society, and also culture, as structured by rubrics, or rules, from within is passé. Of guidelines intended to curb the surges of emotional surplus that stream too liberally from the inside out. The fact is: his most significant contribution to modern thought continues to reside in his idea of the unconscious. His paradigm of the unconscious was revolutionary, more so in a world ruled by positivism. He proposed that awareness existed in layers and there were thoughts occurring “below the surface.” He also explained that dreams were the “royal road to the unconscious.” In his seminal work, The Interpretation of Dreams [1900], Freud established the doctrine that the unconscious exists. He also described methods to exploring its deepest recesses.
It was, indeed, a quirk that with the publication of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality [1905], his sex-centric psychoanalytic structure, which he had defended so vehemently, began to alienate him from the mainstream of existing psychiatry and his two steadfast disciples — Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung. While Adler went on to nurture his own psychology, which gave emphasis to the bellicosity with which people lacking in some quality [inferiority complex], convey their misery by “staging,” Freud was hugely upset at ‘losing’ the former; but, not Jung so much, which was ironical. Freud and Jung were close allies for several years. It was, perforce, Jung’s spiritual aspirations and his evolving penchant for religion and mysticism that vigorously pulled them apart.
When Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a hundred years ago [1920], it also heralded a defining moment in psychoanalytic theory. Freud, who had so disreputably held that all human action was founded on the sexual drive [libido], and the pleasure principle of deriving pleasure while avoiding agony, now began to articulate the view that one is also directed by a contending instinctive enterprise — the death drive. In so doing, he categorised four elements — children’s games, recurrent dreams, self-harm and the causal principle of ‘repetition compulsion,’ or enacting unpleasant events, time and again. That he could not, perhaps, ‘list’ repetition compulsion under the proposition of the pleasure principle, may have led him to deduce that it must be detached from it.
Freud, nevertheless, went on with his oeuvre, whether he was liked, or not. He believed that societal thinking was related to regulations to placate the waves of emotive surplus that swell too freely within. He, therefore, thought that gratification ascends from attuning one’s life with one’s true feelings. Freud not only focused on the vivacity of self-awareness as being central to psychological understanding, but he also thought of the emotional brain as being filled with representative meaning — the interface of similes, symbols, stories, folklore, myths, and the arts. He intensely believed that dreams exemplified the unconscious trying to express itself consciously.
Interestingly, Freud’s aversion towards religion was, in more ways than one, fabled. He often referred to the experience of nirvana as the “awful depths” of Eastern contemplation in cadenced terms. However, his perspective, arguably, leaves too little space for descriptions that show the positive contributions of spirituality in child development. What’s more, new research has clearly demonstrated children’s capacity for profound religious thought. This does not reduce the quantum of Freud’s primary contribution with his illustrious theory of conscience. Of how it is shaped out of primeval fears, which are also in close proximity to his brilliant analyses of the human instinct, and the idea of character, or the self — from infancy to maturity.
What makes Freud’s work distinctive is its cogent ‘connect’ with the world of dreams. It quantifies the existence of dreams as being significant with a subtle sense running through it. This also includes the fundamentals of wish-fulfilment brought about by realisation, or replication — of what Freud called ‘dream work.’
Freud’s study of dreams led him straight into the real-world uses of psychoanalysis as a tool for psychoses, or neurotic fixations. It elevated his perception to unravel the difficulties and complexities of the concealed side of human nature — a subtle path into what makes the unconscious emotional life a subject to the action of the mechanisms which are not explicable by the means at hand, or commonplace rationalised thinking. His expansive experiments also balanced the domain that went beyond all negations of the unconscious. It set the whole idea rolling, while elevating Freud’s own progressing formation related to the emergence of being, or the psyche, into a much more fundamental, psychological constituent.
With his introduction of the id, the superego, and their problem-child, the ego, Freud advanced scientific thought — although this was, in effect, art — and, the comprehension of the mind expansively. In so doing, he ripped ‘open’ motivations that are normally imperceptible to our consciousness. While there’s no question that his own prejudices and neuroses influenced his observations, Freud’s psychological components are no less consequential than his paradigm shift as a whole. That he went far too overboard with some of his theories, and manipulated them, with deceitful flourish, is part of history. It is also just as ironical that his path-breaking work on sexuality catapulted the outstanding ability in him to embark on his tizzy, belligerent controversial academic walk.
Writes Richard Webster in his perceptive book, Why Freud Was Wrong: “As the intrepid intellectual adventurer he was, he [Freud] led an assault on the highest peak of human knowledge in a manner which has seemed to many observers not simply impressive, but in some respects magnificent. Yet the view that his expedition was triumphant — that Freud actually succeeded in solving the enigma of human nature — is one which, in the last twenty years or so, has been questioned or rejected by a series of increasingly hostile critics.”
He adds, “Indeed, the sheer volume of such attacks has sometimes led to the mistaken impression that psychoanalysis is already a defeated force. Freud, however, has proved more difficult to vanquish than many of his opponents have calculated. As Walter Kendrick [a professor of English at Fordham University], has written, ‘How can you simply kill the father who taught you that his death must be your desire?’ Although some psychoanalysts themselves now profess a degree of defensive agnosticism about Freud’s theories, the movement which he founded continues to show many signs of vigorous life. If the figure of Freud no longer bestrides the intellectual landscape in triumph, it seems at times that he still lies across it like Gulliver, diminishing his critics by the sheer scale and grandeur of his enterprise, and shrugging off as pin-pricks the lances which they hurl against him.”
He again elaborates: “‘Why,’ asks Phyllis Grosskurth in a study of Freud’s inner circle, ‘has [Sigmund] Freud’s life and work commanded such undiminished interest? Today — as we approach the end of the [20th] century — he appears to have been its leading intellectual force, a far more tenacious influence than Karl Marx.’ More recently still, in a book [Freud and His Critics] which sets out to answer some of Freud’s critics, the American historian Paul Robinson expressed optimism about the future of psychoanalysis: ‘Unless I am seriously mistaken… Freud’s recent critics will do him no lasting damage. At most they have delayed the inevitable process by which he will settle into his rightful place in intellectual history as a thinker of the first magnitude. Indeed, the latest scholarly studies of Freud suggest that the anti-Freudian moment may already have begun to pass.’”
All the same, the value of Freudian inquiry, any which way one may look at it, with the use of modern science and technology, remains a subject of certain disagreement, all right, though the possibility of incorporating psychoanalysis and drug therapy is gaining ground. Whatever the inference, Freud ‘meditated’ upon others’ minds as much as he explored his own. This was a huge advance. Besides, no one can take away from him his pioneering insight that it was and is plausible to unravel the essence of the unconscious if one appreciated such normal behaviours as jokes, slips of the tongue, free associations and — most importantly — dreams. When he was convinced of their significance, Freud reportedly remarked in a letter to a friend that a marble tablet, on his home, would someday read: “Here, on July 24, 1895, the secret of the dream revealed itself to Dr. Sigm. Freud.”
Well, if dreams are made this way, Freud ‘engineered’ his own. He gazed profoundly into his own psyche and into that of all human beings too. This was his amazing achievement and also virtuosity.
— First published in Madras Courier
