Sigmund Freud

His Life and Mind

Helen W. Puner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000679045
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

Freud's development of psychoanalysis is one of the great fault lines of twentieth-century cultural history. The field as such provides one of the great professional dramas of our time: a classic struggle between a new, vital idea and the ignorance, prejudice and refusal that so often attend major breakthroughs and innovations. Helen Puner's biography is far more than a professional appreciation. It is the story of a complex, by no means flawless individual, whose personal characteristics helped sow the seeds of controversy as well as ultimately establish a new field. Upon its initial appearance, the Herald Tribune identified the book as "the first authoritative and profoundly perceptive biography of the man who more than any other has shaped the thinking of the Western World." It was summarized as a "brilliant performance, done without fear."Puner did precisely what irritated Freud most: probe the sources, social no less than personal, religious no less than scientific, that made Freud such a towering figure. Dorothy Canfield caught the spirit of this work when she noted that in this book, we see Freud "as we never saw him before, as most of us never knew he was, a rigidly virtuous, deeply troubled, upright, dutiful Jewish son, husband and father. We see him tracing the significance of clues he hit upon in the practice of medicine, and then fit these clues into the bewildering mastery of human behavior."In his Foreword, Erich Fromm indicates that Puner looks at Freud with genuine admiration, but without idolatry. "She understands his own psychological problems and has a full appreciation of the pseudo-religious nature of the movement which he created." And the late Ernest Becker, in The Denial of Death, seconded this estimate by calling the Helen Walker Puner effort "a brilliant critical biography." This new edition contains a new introduction by Paul Roazen; with this, and the appreciation of the author by her husband, Samuel Puner, we can better locate the author of the book as well as the famous object of her analysis.

1

Prophecies and Premonitions

Sigmund Freud, whose profound and vigilant mind became the laboratory for psychological discoveries which have shaken the complacent conventions of Western civilization, was born into a world of perplexing reality whose problems he spent a lifetime trying to solve. Perhaps the world which greeted the infant Freud on May 6, 1856, was no stranger than that which has greeted and continues to greet countless other infants. But as he grew older, Sigmund thought it was.

The house in which he was born, at 117 Schlossergasse, in Freiberg, Moravia, a town of some 5,000 Germans and Czechs then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was commonplace enough. It was a modest, simple, old, two-story house, detached from its neighbours, built of plastered bricks, topped by a slate roof and without ornament. The household into which he was born was not quite so commonplace. Two women looked after him. There was Nanny, old, ugly, acerb, and harsh when the rules of cleanliness were transgressed, but knowing and able. Her wise eyes looked down into the cradle with affection; but the love that shone in the eyes of his mother was so effulgent that it not only lit up the low-ceilinged, close room in which the infant lay, but continued to light the years of his life.

The mother, Amalia Nathanson Freud, was young—twenty-one when she bore her first child, Sigmund. Slender and pretty, she was the intelligent descendant of a famous Talmudic scholar, the eighteenth-century Nathan Halévy Charmatz of Brody, Poland. The love she radiated for her first-born son was matched only by her vitality. She cooked, she baked, she tended the child; she was alert, sharp-witted and gay. She had borne a child whose destiny it became to make rational the exploration of the irrational and the extra-scientific; but she herself was a believer in signs, portents and premonitions—in all the superstitions of the dark world which begins where reason ends. Sigmund had come into the world covered with a growth of pitch-black hair. His mother interpreted this as a special sign of distinction, and called him in his childhood her “little Moor.” She firmly believed and endlessly repeated the prophecy of the old peasant woman who, assisting at the birth, had assured her that she had brought a great man into the world.

This prophecy, a family belief and faith, became a part of the atmosphere in which the child grew up. Later, when Sigmund was a boy of eleven or twelve in Vienna, his mother was to fortify the early legend by interweaving it with a new prophecy. “One evening at a restaurant on the Prater, where my parents were accustomed to take me,” Sigmund Freud wrote when he was a man of forty-four, “we noticed a man who was going from table to table and for a small sum improvising verses upon any subject that was given him. I was sent to bring the poet to our table and he showed his gratitude. Before asking for a subject he threw off a few rhymes about myself, and told us if he would trust his inspiration I should probably one day become a ‘minister’. I can still distinctly remember the impression produced by this second prophecy. It was in the days of the ‘bourgeois Ministry’; my father had recently brought home the portraits of the bourgeois university graduates, Herbst, Giskra, Unger, Berger and others, and we illuminated the house in their honour. There were even Jews among them; so that every diligent Jewish schoolboy carried a ministerial portfolio in his satchel. The impression of that time must be responsible for the fact that until shortly before I went to the university I wanted to study jurisprudence, and changed my mind only at the last moment.”¹

Out of the mother’s mystic belief in her first-born’s destiny, out of her simple love and pride in him, out of her twice-told tales of the prodigy’s progress, she sewed a hero’s robe for the child. “Perhaps,” one of Freud’s sisters once said, “my mother’s trust in Sigmund’s future destiny played a definite part in the trend given his whole life.” Sigmund certainly thought so. Over and over again, in the course of his mature writing, he was to sound this theme: “A man who has been the undisputed favourite of the mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that frequently induces real success.”² And when on his seventieth birthday, an occasion of world-wide celebration, he came to review the years he had spent as a child in Freiberg, he found no better way to characterize himself than “the happy child of Freiberg, the first-born son of a youthful mother.”

But it was not a simple, unalloyed happiness this child of Freiberg knew. He had an indulgent and admiring mother, but he was also faced with the fact of his father, a man who was forty-one years old when Sigmund was born, virtually twice the age of his wife.

Jacob Freud had owned and operated a small weaving mill against increasing odds. Sigmund’s mother was his second wife; and close to the newlyweds’ home lived the evidence of Jacob’s first marriage—Emmanuel, Jacob’s eldest son by that earlier marriage, together with Emmanuel’s wife and two children: John, then one year old, and Pauline, a newborn infant.

While it was in no sense extraordinary to become a father again at the age of forty-one, Jacob had the distinction of being a grandfather at the time of Sigmund’s birth. Delighted as he may have been at the arrival of a new son in his middle age, he could not have viewed the child with the same rapture as his wife. Babies and sons were an old story to him. His life, more than half over, had been a hard one—a constant struggle to earn a decent livelihood for his family. The losing fight had to a certain extent formed him: he was neither dour nor markedly bitter, but he was stern and jealous of that area of authority he had not succeeded in establishing in the outside world: his authority as a father in the bosom of his family could not be questioned. The traditional Jewish injunction to honour the father must be upheld. Jacob Freud was, none the less, a just man, an intelligent man, one who walked in the faith of his fathers.

But the child, accustomed to the gratification of every wish by an indulgent mother, saw in the father denial, restriction and command. The authority of his father reverberated down the years of Sigmund Freud’s life. He brooded over every paternal reproof. He recalled, as a man in middle life, that once when he was an infant barely able to walk he had invaded his parents’ bedroom. Driven out by his father’s vehement command, he pondered the echo of this denial for a long time, as his recollection of the incident in later life shows.

At the age of two he would still wet his bed. It was his father, not his mother, who reproved him. One of these many reproofs the child remembered all his life. On this occasion he said to his father: “Don’t worry, Papa. I will buy you a beautiful new red bed in Neutitschein [the district capital].”

John, the son of Jacob’s son, Emmanuel, was Sigmund’s closest friend and playmate. In the quarrels which frequently developed between the two children, Jacob would act as judge and hanging jury. “Why did you hit John?” the father would demand. And whether the young Sigmund answered or not, the posing of the question alone seems to have been for him evidence of an unwarranted exercise of authority difficult to absorb in the face of his mother’s unquestioning acceptance of him.

The contradiction between Jacob’s attitude towards him and Amalia’s attitude towards him puzzled the child. But there was a further contradiction, even more difficult to understand. For while his father stood for grim authority, he was oddly also his playmate, a provider of a kind of delight that was to afford for the mature Sigmund Freud inspiration and solace. Jacob would take him, even before he was old enough to walk, into what he always remembered as “the beautiful forest.” Freiberg was only a half-mile from a dense forest in the gentle foothills of the Carpathian mountains—then a peaceful pastoral countryside. These walks with his father, which became a regular part of their life together, were times of happiness for the child. They provided a truce in their embattled relationship. Alone together in the quiet of the woods, the father would seem to the child not the care-worn, middle-aged man who addressed him with the forbidding voice of authority, but a gentle companion. The forest itself, with its constant change and renewal, was a place of wonder. It became in a sense a home of the heart for the child to which he continued to resort, and in which he found renewal all his life.

Despite his instinctive recoil from and unconscious rebellion at the stern voice of parental authority, Sigmund came to regard his father (as most children do!) as the wisest, most powerful and wealthiest man in the world. In fact, Jacob Freud was by virtue of his patriarchal position, and by the aura of authority which he imposed, the summit of the hierarchy of family authorities. First to be feared in Sigmund’s eyes was Father. Next came Emmanuel, that equivocal figure who was at once his own half-brother and the father of his contemporary, John. Then Nanny, who was as often forbidding as she was kind and affectionate. Then John, the Janus-faced nephew who, by reason of his slightly greater age and strength, could oppress Sigmund as readily as he could co-operate with him. Last, Mother, who rarely exerted any arbitrary authority at all.

The family hierarchy confused the child not only because so many people were in positions of authority over him, but because of the virtually incomprehensible relationship of the people who constituted it The sharp eyes with which he had been born, lustrous, brown and scrutinizing, puzzled over the family constellation, sought an answer beyond the understanding of a three-year-old. He found, of course, no satisfactory solution, but his eyes and mind grew sharper in the search.

There was his mother, young and pretty. She looked, acted and was in fact a contemporary of his father’s sons by his first marriage, Emmanuel and Philip, and Emmanuel’s wife. Jacob, Sigmund’s father, was closer to Nanny’s age and outlook than he was to Amalia’s. The evidence of his eyes told the child that by all laws of congruity, Jacob should be married to Nanny and Amalia to Emmanuel. Jacob, his father, was the grandfather of John, his playmate. His own relationship to his father in point of time as well as of family configuration was more nearly that of a grandson than a son. Sons were grown-up men, like Emmanuel.

In his earliest dreams and the childhood fantasies he recorded in later life, the child attempted to reconcile this fantastic world of incongruous realities with one more reasonable and easier to grasp. Sigmund was just two and a half years old when his mother gave birth to another child, Anna. Sigmund was not amused. Here was another riddle: How and why had this little usurper been born? Were more and more little sisters, in engulfing succession, to make their appearance and deflect the warm stream of his mother’s love for him? There was another puzzling circumstance to contend with. Immediately after his sister was born, Nanny disappeared. Two riddles then: where had Anna come from? where had Nanny gone to? Although this concern for solving ultimate riddles might seem precocious in a two-and-a-half-year-old, Freud in later life recalled that he had at the time found an answer. Emmanuel—for Sigmund sensed that it was he who had played a decisive rôle in Nanny’s disappearance—had made Nanny vanish. (Nanny had been caught stealing, and it was Emmanuel who had her jailed.) And, he concluded, it was the same culprit, Emmanuel, who had slipped the baby inside mother.

In other dreams and fantasies of his early childhood, the boy substituted Emmanuel for Jacob. Emmanuel, not Jacob, was the father, the voice of fantasy said, reasonably enough. The child needed to find a substitute to take on the heavy burden of hostile emotion he bore for his father. If, the wish behind the fantasy said, Emmanuel and not Jacob was the father, terrifying, omniscient, the creator of the mother’s child, then there would be no necessity to be torn between love and fear of Jacob. Jacob, the wish said, could then be loved as wholeheartedly as Amalia.

The wish was not father to the fact. The child’s feeling for Jacob remained divided. His relationship to his father and to the family circle grew more paradoxical as he grew old enough to attempt to unwind the tangled skein. Young “Sigi” was the eldest son of his parents, but at the same time, he was the youngest son in the augmented family circle. He was for the first two and a half years of his life the only child of Jacob and Amalia; yet he had two elder half-brothers, Emmanuel and Philip, and for all practical purposes, a young brother and sister, John and Pauline, the children of Emmanuel. To compound the confusion, these brother and sister equivalents were in reality his nephew, one year older than himself, and his niece, roughly his own age. So his position in the family was full of uncertainty. He was an eldest and an only son with all the privileges of his uniqueness. At the same time he was junior to his nephew—the younger of two children brought up as inseparable companions with all the drawbacks inherent in that relationship. An uncle in name only. his equality with John was in John’s eyes always debatable. And so was the whole question of his relation to John—for John, his playmate and his contemporary, called Sigmund’s father “grandfather.”

In a sense, young Sigi’s life with John reproduced in miniature the emotional colour of his relationship to his father. First, he must have felt as uncertain of the nature of the blood tie which linked him to John as he was of the nature of the one which linked him to his father. John, he was told, was his nephew. But by virtue of his seniority and strength, by virtue of all the evidence with which Sigi’s eyes presented him, John should have been the uncle and he the nephew. John and he were brought up as brothers. But John was no brother; he was the child of a brother. Second, while John was a dearly loved comrade, he was also a threatening rival. John loved Sigi, but in the immemorial manner common to children of all ages and societies, he beat him up when he had the chance.

Thus John came eventually to symbolize to the bewildered Sigi the same mixture of conflicting emotions—of love against fear, friendship against enmity, equality against authority—that he felt for his father.

The two children were inseparable companions. They loved each other and fought each other. They were one day David and Jonathan, and the next day Caesar and Brutus. John was frequently a tyrant who took advantage of his greater age and strength to bully his young uncle. But Sigi, young as he was, was bent on warding off permanent submission. He fought back, despite the unequal odds and despite the love he felt for John.

When, as a man, Sigmund Freud came to review his childhood, he said over and over again that his ambivalent relationship with John had conditioned the course of his character. He never tired of emphasizing and re-emphasizing this point in the pages of The Interpretation of Dreams. In speaking of his boyhood hero, Hannibal, he said: “And perhaps the development of this martial ideal may be traced yet father hack, to the first three years of my childhood, to wishes which my alternately friendly and hostile relations with a boy a year older than myself must have evoked in the weaker of the two playmates.”

Then, speaking of a dream in which Brutus and Caesar appeared, he said: “Strangely enough, I once did play the part of Brutus. When I was a boy of fourteen, I presented the scene between Brutus and Caesar in Schiller’s poem to an audience of children, with the assistance of my nephew, who was a year older than I, and who had come to us from England…. Until the end of my third year we had been inseparable: we had loved each other and fought each other, and, as I have already hinted, this childish relation has determined all my later feelings in my intercourse with persons my own age. My nephew John has since then had many incarnations, which have revivified first one and then another aspect of a character that is ineradicably fixed in my unconscious memory. At times he must have treated me very badly, and I must have opposed my tyrant courageously… .”³

Again: “My present … annoyance … draws reinforcements from springs that flow far beneath the surface, and so swells to a stream of hostile impulses towards persons who are in reality dear to me. The source which furnishes the reinforcement is to be found in my childhood. I have already said that my warm friendships as well as my enmities with persons of my own age go back to my childish relations to my nephew who was a year older than I. In these he had the upper hand, and I early learned how to defend myself; we lived together, were inseparable and loved one another, but at times, as the statements of other persons testify, we used to squabble and accuse one another. In a certain sense, all my friends are incarnations of the first figure; they are all revenants. My nephew himself returned when a young man, and then we were like Caesar and Brutus.. An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensable to my emotional life. I have always been able to create them anew, and not infrequently my childish ideal has been so closely approached that friend and enemy have coincided in the same person; but not simultaneously, of course, nor in constant alternation, as was the case in my early childhood.”⁴

But there can be little doubt that all this discussion of John, a playmate who was after all not so different from many other playmates who have tormented countless other little boys, screens the memory of the man in whom Sigmund first encountered the bitter brew of divided love—his father. Even as a man, Sigmund Freud could not bring himself to desecrate his father’s memory by admitting that the love he bore him was something less than wholehearted.

Beyond the oddly augmented family circle which was the immediately perceived world of the child, stretched the larger, more dimly perceived world of the town and the country.

Freiberg was a peaceful little town with a beautiful name—Free Mountain—about one hundred and fifty miles north-east of Vienna. Pastoral, sleepy, it clung to a steep bank over the Lubina River, a little trickle in summer, but swollen and broad in spring. Dominating the town was the steeple of St. Mary’s Birth Church, which stood more than two hundred feet high and had the best chimes in the province. Around the large square in the centre of the town stood arcades of substantial houses, one of them decorated conspicuously with a memorial of the Thirty Years War—a coat of arms, granted “For Valour.” It displayed on a field of gold and red two big, vicious-looking pruning knives. In those glorious days, the Freiberg citizenry had distinguished themselves for their endurance, toughness and belligerence. “Brieg, Freiberg and Bruenn make Swedish arms thin,” ran the local proverb. Off the market-place, with its religious and martial reminders, its steeple and its pruning knives, close to fields and pastures, lived the Freud family.

It was not by chance that the steeple of St. Mary’s dominated the town of Freiberg. Fully ninety-five per cent of the Moravian population was Roman Catholic. Less than three per cent was Protestant, and only two per cent were Jews. Since 1851, Austria had been governed by the political reaction of the Restoration which had been set off by the short-lived liberal revolution of 1848. This return to a darker era did not directly affect people who kept away from politics as the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Foreword
• Preface
• Afterword
• 1. Prophecies and Premonitions
• 2. The New Home
• 3. A Boy in Vienna
• 4. The Choice of a Path
• 5. Paris in the Spring
• 6. La Chose Genitale
• 7. The Stuff of Dreams
• 8. See How It Grows
• 9. See How It Splits
• 10. Husband and Two Fathers
• 11. War Outside, War Inside
• 12. Old Man of the Horde
• 13. Day to Day
• 14. The Passionate Will
• 15. The Larger World of Psychoanalysis
• 16. Hans im Glueck
• Sources and Acknowledgments