Sigmund Freud* (6 page)

Fliess’s writings were dismissed even in journals of his day as “gobbledygook” and “nothing to do with medicine or natural science.” Besides his obsession with noses, he believed in the magical powers of numbers, or numerology. He liked to manipulate the numbers 28 and 23 in various ways, including predicting life spans. Few took this seriously, except Freud. For years he was convinced he was going to die at fifty-one (the combination of 23 plus 28), and he celebrated his fifty-second birthday with great relief.

Fliess wasn’t even a competent nose surgeon. Once he operated on one of Freud’s patients. He left in a gauze bandage by accident, and the patient suffered terrible complications, almost bleeding to death. Freud was shocked at the botched operation, but he continued to support his friend, and it was several more years before he and Fliess cut off all contact with each other.

Still, it’s a condition of geniuses to have an open mind. Fliess may have been a wrong turn, but he was important to Freud, a deliberate broadening of his horizons outside the traditional scientific community. It was to Fliess that he confided in 1900, “I am actually not a man of science at all. . . . I am nothing but a conquistador by temperament—an adventurer.” On this question, Freud was forever flip-flopping, unable to decide whether he preferred seeing himself as a respectable man of science or a solitary genius above and beyond traditional science.

In other words, was it possible that even the realm of science was proving too small in his quest to be a hero?

CHAPTER SIX

The Famous Couch

AND EXACTLY WHERE did Freud spend hour after hour listening and observing? In a cluttered office and consulting room next to his apartment. He and his family lived at Berggasse 19, on the floor above a butcher shop, in a respectable neighborhood in the heart of Vienna. Berggasse 19 was to remain the address of his consulting room for almost half a century.

Always the room would be hazy—he smoked as many as twenty cigars a day, claiming they helped focus his mind. The floor was covered with plush Persian carpets, the walls lined with books and sculptures displayed in oak bookcases. Gas lamps gave a soft glow, while a small coal-burning stove provided warmth, as well as moist air from the glass tubes attached to it. No noises came from the street, because the office was in the back of the building. Later he had the room soundproofed. “There was always a feeling of sacred peace and quiet,” one patient said.

This was his laboratory, and these were his “experiments”—hour-long visits with hundreds of patients. Through this work he tested and confirmed his theories, achieved new insights, and developed his celebrated technique of psychoanalysis.

He, the analyst, would have the patient (the “analysand”) take off his or her shoes and then lie on a couch. The couch, stuffed with horsehair, had lots of comfy pillows on it, and a Persian rug to use as a blanket if needed. Given to him by an appreciative patient, the couch became arguably the most famous one in history. Hanging on the wall above was a painting of Oedipus and the Sphinx, a reference to the famous riddle. Displayed even more prominently was a plaster cast of an idealized Roman woman known as Gradiva.

Freud sat in a large green armchair behind the couch, out of the patient’s sight. “Say whatever comes into your mind,” he would begin. An hour of listening to the patient talk would pass. Any other noise—a male patient’s spare coins falling out of his pants pockets and clattering to the floor, for example—would be jarring.

Before Freud’s time, chances for people to talk about their problems were few—perhaps to the clergyman at church or the bartender at the local pub. Even then you would leave out the embarrassing, the outrageous, the frightening feelings you didn’t want to admit in public. Here at Berggasse 19 the point was to
not
censor thoughts, wishes, dreams, fantasies. And Freud was neutral—he would not tell a patient what to do, or make judgments, or act in a punishing way. He was on to something new, and he established guidelines as he went along.

Not looking directly at the analyst was supposed to allow patients to relax and feel comfortable revealing their innermost thoughts. They were free to fantasize or say anything at all with no intrusion from the analyst. Mostly Freud spoke just to establish a bond or to reinforce what the patient said.

Partly the seating arrangement was Freud’s preference—“I cannot stand being stared at eight hours a day.” Partly it was for scientific reasons. In his university training, he learned not to contaminate a specimen with foreign matter of any kind. A patient was a specimen, the analyst the foreign matter, and he didn’t want to contaminate his data with his own talk. (Some strict Freudian analysts later interpreted this to mean not even saying “hello” or “good-bye” to a patient.)

Freud believed psychoanalysis should start with a trial week, during which he said even less than usual, so that if he didn’t accept the patient it wouldn’t appear as rejection. Patients had to be intelligent, in a stable period, motivated, younger than fifty (Freud wasn’t sure older people could benefit). Treatment would last months, even years—five or six hours a week for a set fee, paid in advance. So the patients were people with time and money, mostly the wives and daughters of Vienna’s wealthy families.

Observation was the key, a carryover from his days in the lab studying organisms under a microscope. Now observation meant listening, but it was more than that. The initial consultation was always face-to-face. Anyone who ever met him commented on his X-ray eyes—once he said, “See, always see, always keep your eyes open, be aware of everything. . . .”

During the patient’s hour he didn’t take notes, and instead concentrated on active listening, gazing out the window or at items from his precious collection. Freud’s office was as congested as the inside of someone’s brain. He adored ancient archeological artifacts—shelf after shelf of ancient Greek heads, Chinese gods, all-knowing Buddhas, Egyptian death masks, mosaics. He would stare at them, pick them up during sessions. A friend said his room was more like “an archeologist’s study” than a doctor’s office. Actually, he often compared himself to an archeologist, digging through the past, excavating layers, helping patients fill in missing pieces of their past. Indeed, one of his heroes was Heinrich Schliemann, whose excavations of ancient Troy and other cities in the 1870s he followed avidly. Freud seldom traveled except to collect more artifacts for his office. He called his first visit to Rome, with its ancient ruins, the “high point of my life.”

Ultimately his collection reached 2,000 items (almost rivaling his collection of 2,500 books) and included a bust of himself. His favorite was a bronze statue of Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom.

Freud’s collection inspired him—he was able to turn to ancient mythology for insights. He believed universal truths were imbedded in these myths just as he believed that his theories, based primarily on observations of middle-class Viennese, were universally valid. As for his patients, some felt as if these heads of marble or clay were listening to them along with their doctor.

Freud was most interested in helping people suffering from emotional pain. He sincerely wanted to help. “It is essentially a cure through love,” he once wrote of psychoanalysis, but not romantic love, which he strove to avoid at all costs. His job was to stay emotionally detached, just as a surgeon “puts aside all his feelings, even his human sympathy, and concentrates his mental forces on the single aim of performing the operation as skillfully as possible.” Therapy was like “surgical intervention,” and detachment was crucial.

As treatment progressed and he gathered more data, his function changed. He now acted “like a mirror,” reflecting the patient’s dreams, wishes, but also interpreting, explaining what was
really
being said, what wishes were being repressed, and pointing to the source of those wishes. In this way, he allowed the patients to cure themselves, restoring emotional balance by breaking the cycle of repression.

Freud argued that words were scientific tools: “Words are the essential tool of mental treatment. . . . Nothing takes place in psychoanalysis but an interchange of words.”

He wasn’t after miracle cures—he hoped to transform “hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” An all-out cure would certainly be welcome, but was usually out of reach. The goal of therapy was to bring repressed thoughts and feelings to the conscious level. Once brought to light, they would lose some of their crippling power. At this point a patient would be freed of the symptoms caused by the repressed feelings, and better able to go on with life, to find love and meaningful work.

Did Freud always follow his own rules? No. Tending to place too much faith in his abilities, he once saw a patient for exactly one session and declared the analysis a success, the patient cured. Occasionally, patients bored him and he fell asleep.

During the last ten years of his life, his beloved chow Jofi lay at the foot of the couch and would get up promptly at the hour to indicate the session was over. After a patient left, Freud went to his desk in a study next to the consulting room. Writing up his notes was step two of his scientific research, and he took great care with them. He presented his observations in the form of case studies, so detailed and well-written they read like detective novels.

Freud was no doubt familiar with Arthur Conan Doyle’s literary creation Sherlock Holmes. This master of logic and deduction made his first appearance in 1887, and many have compared Freud’s accounts of his patients to these mystery novels. Later in life Freud himself enjoyed a good murder mystery, especially ones by the classic detective-story writers Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.

Even if he didn’t cure them, patients were usually grateful. For many, it was the first time in their lives that someone had listened to them with full attention. They gained new insights and felt better after treatment—and they told others about it. Some patients were so devoted to their analyst that they went on to become psychoanalysts themselves.

As his reputation spread, Freud was able to charge more, especially once he was promoted from lecturer to full professorship at the University of Vienna. This promotion took several years longer than it should have, partly because anti-Semitism was on the rise once again, partly because he lacked the confidence to go after the promotion aggressively. But he was finally appointed Professor Extraordinarius in 1902. At one point he was supporting his family comfortably with only eight patients.

He saw patients between eight and noon, then wrote up his notes. Martha—besides running a household that included six children, nannies, servants, and her sister Minna—made sure her husband’s day ran like clockwork.

Lunch, the main meal of the day, was served precisely at one o’clock. A maid would enter the dining room with a giant soup tureen. Soup was followed by meat, vegetables, and dessert. The doctor liked roast beef with onions, and preferred artichokes to cauliflower. Martha would come to the table with a pitcher of hot water and a napkin so she could immediately blot any spills. Freud usually ate in silence. Sometimes he brought one of his newest artifacts, perhaps a Greek urn with red figures, to the table and contemplated it while munching.

Then he took a walk along the boulevard lined with trees, the fabled Ringstrasse. He’d stop at the barber (he had his mustache and beard trimmed every day), the cigar store, a bookshop, or antique dealers.

He saw more patients between three and nine, ate supper, then played cards with Minna, or walked with Martha or his daughters to a café for ice cream or pastry. Not overtly affectionate, never kissing or cuddling, he was a doting father in his way to his children (all named for friends of his, not his wife’s). His letters told about when a baby’s first tooth came in, poems they’d written, their accomplishments in school, special talents they had, news about their health. He nursed them when they were ill, which without benefit of modern medicines, was often.

Every Saturday he lectured at the University of Vienna, then played cards with old friends. Every Sunday he had dinner with his adored mother, who still called him “My golden Sigi,” and five sisters. In the summers, the Freuds vacationed in the German Alps, and he would take the children on hunts for strawberries or edible mushrooms.

Martha later claimed that during their fifty-three years of marriage, “not one angry word fell between us.” She kept a low profile, believing in the popular saying that “The best
Hausfrau
[housewife] is the one about whom the least is said.” She did everything for Sigi, laying out his clothes (he always dressed meticulously), even putting the toothpaste on his toothbrush. In matters of religion, she also bowed to her husband’s will. Freud, an atheist, banned traditional Jewish customs and ceremonies from his home. (The week after his death, however, she resumed them.) She never interfered with his work and didn’t seem to appreciate the newness of what he was doing. He discussed his evolving ideas about therapy more with Minna, her sister. (Some have speculated that Freud and Minna had an affair, but there is no evidence for this.) His marriage was typical of his time; for all his revolutionary ideas, Freud was in many ways a tradition-bound nineteenth-century man.