Sigmund Freud* (3 page)

The university was famous for its brilliant science professors, particularly in medicine, most of them trained in Germany. These sterling professors attracted men (women were barred) from all over Europe and even the United States. At the time, students and faculty alike shared a sense of optimism about science, particularly biology. “Biology is truly a land of unlimited possibilities,” Freud wrote late in life.

In 1859 Charles Darwin had rocked the world with his book
On the Origin of Species
, containing his theory of evolution by natural selection. His aim was to explain scientifically how the diverse species of plants and animals evolved over time from common ancestors. The constant struggle to exist was a survival of the fittest: Living things born with unusual but useful traits were more likely to find food, ward off prey, and bear young to whom their useful traits would be passed on. Organisms without useful traits were more likely to die before they could reproduce.

Darwin’s ideas were reverberating throughout biology and all the sciences—not to mention coffeehouses, parlors, and churches. In university classrooms, the search for physical and chemical forces in nature was on—more natural laws that governed the world of living things.

Darwin’s theories were enormously controversial, but Freud was firmly in the camp of those who believed they amounted to “an extraordinary advancement in our understanding of the world.” Darwin for Freud was always “the
great
Darwin.”

Once at the university, Freud “evolved.” He switched from zoology to medicine. He didn’t exactly see himself as a traditional doctor tending to patients’ physical ailments, although eventually he would have some experience doing this. All Austrian men had to serve in the army, and near the end of his time at college he had to take a year off to nurse sick soldiers. Official reports called him “very considerate and humane” with patients.

But what really motivated him was a general “greed for knowledge.” He simply believed that by studying medicine he could learn more.

He took all the required classes for a medical degree and beyond—physiology (the study of the functions of living organisms), physics, botany, chemistry, and every available course in biology. He memorized long passages from medical textbooks. His favorite time was in the laboratory, using a microscope, always careful not to contaminate a specimen with foreign matter of any kind. At first all he wanted in life was “a laboratory and free time.”

Later he would change his goal to “a large hospital and plenty of money.” From the very beginning, Freud’s medical curiosity had unusually lofty aims: He wanted to “restrict some of the evils which befall our bodies.”

He was attracted to bacteriology, the new branch of biology dealing with the study of bacteria. Scientists in this field were the first to realize that infectious diseases were caused by small living organisms such as bacteria and other germs. One of the pioneers was German doctor Robert Koch, who was currently trying to isolate the bacteria responsible for tuberculosis. This new germ theory of disease was fascinating—imagine such tiny things, invisible to the naked eye, causing such havoc in the body. Louis Pasteur, the great French biologist, had proven the theory correct, that germs indeed caused disease (and also fermentation). Pasteur was perfecting the process—called pasteurization in his honor—of destroying harmful germs with heat, and was on his way to developing useful vaccines that could actually protect an organism from germs.

Freud admired both Pasteur and Koch, but he was
most
interested in Darwin. And Nicolaus Copernicus, the fifteenth-century Polish astronomer who theorized that the earth was
not
the center of the universe, as everyone thought, but rather the sun. And Johannes Kepler, the German astronomer who built on Copernicus’s work and proved that the earth’s orbit is oval in shape. Men like these made fundamental changes in the way people saw the world. Freud wanted to be like them, working in a huge arena. Though he was studying medicine, he did not want to heal as much as to be a hero—a scientist-hero, someone who would make a gigantic breakthrough.

Like all of his professors, Freud was a positivist. Positivism was a philosophy that defined real knowledge as only what could be perceived by the senses. People could accumulate such knowledge about themselves and their world, and exercise rational control over both. The dominant trend in Europe during his day, positivism discounted mysticism and spirituality as magic, hocus-pocus, nonsense. The positivist method relied on observation, experimentation, comparison—proof in the form of hard data. Very scientific.

One influential professor was Franz Brentano; Freud took five courses from him. Brentano was a philosopher who called himself an “empirical psychologist”—someone who uses systematic, exact methods in learning about the human mind. Freud also read widely in the works of Ludwig Feuerbach, who moved away from philosophy and theology in favor of anthropology, the science of human development.

His most important mentor was Ernst Brücke, one of the leading scientists of his day. Professor Brücke was a physiologist, one who studies living organisms, including the functioning of their cells and tissues. Freud always referred to him as “the greatest authority I ever met.” He worked for five years in Brücke’s lab, later saying they were the “happiest years of my youth.” Brücke taught that anything in biology could be explained by physical or chemical laws, formulated not from vague ideas, but from painstaking observation and measurements that could be reproduced by others doing the same experiments. In later life Freud always described mental processes with precise words like “drive,” “force,” “energy”—scientific terms he learned from Brücke.

Freud’s first papers had sleep-inducing titles like “The Posterior Roots in Petromyzon” and “The Nerve Cells of Crayfish.” But a burning question of the day was whether the nervous systems of lower animals resembled those of humans. If so, that would be further proof of Darwin’s theory of evolution. So researchers in biology were paying lots of attention to simple forms of life. Brücke was working on how the crayfish resembled a human. By assisting him, Freud was helping to prove the theory of evolution in the nervous structures of fish. In the process, he came up with a new method for staining tissue samples with chemicals that would show up the nerve cells.

Freud also studied the structure of eels to learn how they reproduce. Eel reproduction may sound like an early sign of Freud’s later fascination with sex. But that was the assignment from his teacher—to test another researcher’s claim that he had observed male gonads (sexual organs) in eels. Freud dissected eel after eel after eel—a total of four hundred. Even in the adults, he could find no males. So he theorized that their sex organs came far later in their development. (In the twentieth century, this theory was proved correct.)

He was mastering the scientific method: working carefully with data (observations), drawing logical conclusions consistent with known facts, and then testing the conclusions. The eel project, with its long hours huddled over a microscope, developed his powers of concentration and observation. Freud was fascinated but torn. He realized that making an actual scientific breakthrough in this labor-intensive fashion could take years. And the pay was notoriously low.

In 1881, after completing the work for his medical degree, he graduated with an M.D. But torn between the need to earn money and the desire to continue research, he kept on learning, living his life of the mind, continuing to live with his parents.

For the next three years, Freud kept a harsh, demanding schedule at the Vienna General Hospital. In what would today be called an internship, he worked under different specialists—surgeons, ophthalmologists, neurologists—gaining experience in different branches of medicine. Almost every department head at the hospital was a celebrity in his field. It had the first-ever dermatology department (formerly called the rash room), where Freud learned about skin diseases. He was a clinical assistant to the influential professor of internal medicine Hermann Nothnagel, who limited his assistants to five hours’ sleep a night; Nothnagel approved of Freud and recommended him for promotions.

Even at the prestigious Vienna General Hospital, medicine had far to go. Surgeons often operated by candlelight. British surgeon Joseph Lister had established in 1867 that surgical instruments needed to be sterilized, but it was taking decades for hospitals to implement the practice. Many women at the hospital died during childbirth from a common infection, child-bed fever. It was here that Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis discovered the basic fact that doctors needed to wash their hands to lower the spread of infection. With antibiotics still a long way off, infection was much dreaded.

Freud hated the sight of blood, so continuing on in surgery was not a practical option. He also couldn’t stand causing pain. He
was
very much interested in curing serious diseases, especially diseases of childhood. But what most attracted him was neurology, the study of the nervous system.

The word “neurology,” meaning “study of the nerves,” had been coined in 1664 by Thomas Willis, professor at Oxford University in England. He dissected corpses in a theater, held the brain up for all his audience to see, and wrote the first textbook on the brain, detailing its nerves and blood vessels. By 1861 Paul Broca, a Paris surgeon doing autopsies on stroke victims, had discovered that speech was controlled by a particular spot on the left frontal region of the brain. It was the first anatomical proof that individual parts of the brain had specific functions. Scientific study of the brain was an exciting new field.

Freud spent six months training with his mentor, Theodor Meynert, who hoped to treat diseases of the mind by finding physical causes in the brain. A pioneer in brain dissection and research (particularly the cerebrum and the brainstem), Meynert was in charge of the hospital’s Psychiatric Clinic, the first of its kind, established especially for him. His book on psychiatry attempted to classify mental illnesses in purely anatomical terms.

For ten years Freud worked at a private hospital for children. He published several papers on childhood diseases, in particular cerebral palsy, then known as “infantile cerebral paralysis.” He hoped to disprove the prevalent theory on the cause of the disease—that a difficult delivery resulted in a lack of oxygen to the newborn. Instead, he suggested that a difficult delivery was only a sign that the baby had the disease. It was not until the 1980s that Freud’s speculations were confirmed, for at least some cases.

Freud gave lectures on brain anatomy to visiting doctors. He dissected brains and researched the medulla oblongata, the part of the brain that controls automatic functions such as the respiratory system and the heart. He was getting more and more interested in how the brain worked. Wouldn’t that be heroic—to be the one to unlock its mysteries, solve its riddles?

Not to mention finding out how his own brain worked. In his late teens and twenties, he was developing his own “issues”—periods of anxiety, mood swings, heart palpitations, upset stomach. Neurology could be just the avenue toward understanding himself.

Freud was most interested in the patients at his hospital who were classified as emotionally or mentally ill. He was disturbed at the way they were treated, or rather mistreated—just locked away for years, kept from family and friends. Most doctors didn’t dream of listening to their patients, thinking that would only make them more delusional. A good shock was believed helpful—dropping someone into a bathtub of live eels, dripping boiling wax onto someone’s palms, a prodding with electric shocks.

Electroshock therapy was the only treatment that seemed to show results, and Freud dutifully learned how to apply it. He consulted the standard textbook, Wilhelm Erb’s
Elektrotherapie
. The method helped some patients, which it does even today. But not enough was known about electricity in Freud’s day to make electroshock safe; sometimes the patient suffered total memory loss or was severely burned or even killed.

There had to be a better way of helping people already in pain.

CHAPTER THREE

Why Cocaine?

AT AGE TWENTY Freud wrote that the beautiful women he saw in Italy were like “specimens” to him: “Since it is not allowed to dissect human beings, I really have nothing to do with them.”

Then in 1882, one year out of medical school, he met Martha Bernays, a friend of his sisters’. He caught sight of her peeling an apple in the Freuds’ apartment and fell in love on the spot. Gentle, calm, well-educated for a woman of her day, she came from a family of rabbis and well-off intellectuals. He began sending her a rose daily and eventually proposed, even though he had zero funds to set up a household. Martha said yes. But her family’s move to northern Germany meant they were apart during their engagement—four long years. They got to know each other not in person, but by exchanging mushy letters—hundreds of them.

In his letters, Freud revealed some very typical nineteenth-century biases. He was going to support Martha, and in return she would obey and take care of him. The end.

He insisted that Martha give up a favorite activity, ice skating, because if she ever lost balance, she might have to lean on another man to stop from falling. He chastised her for “disobedience” when she refused to give up certain customs of her Jewish faith just because he had. Women getting the right to vote? No, politics would only distract them from domestic chores.

And Martha’s response? Equally old-fashioned, on the whole. “I want to be the way you want me to be,” she wrote back. She didn’t show interest in the things that fascinated him, but he didn’t expect her to. There is little evidence he ever discussed his work with her.

Freud’s notions were more or less in lockstep with those of other middle-class men in Vienna in the nineteenth century. Rigid. It was considered a fact that women were irrational, passive, inferior, pliable. At the University of Vienna, when an anatomy professor argued for women being admitted, the dean responded, “You ought to know perfectly well that women’s brains are less developed than those of men.” A scholar named Otto Weininger was working on what would become a hugely popular book, about the difference in “cell structure” between the sexes: the male nature was creative and spiritual—the female nature was not. This came cloaked in the guise of scientific “proof” of women’s limitations.