Life of Sigmund Freud

— I hate these scribblers! Freud growled, fiddling with a fresh copy of his next biography in his hands. “I repeated a thousand times that the public has no right to my private life! I’ll die — then please. And Zweig — there, he wants, you see, to perpetuate my life! I wrote to him like this: «Whoever becomes a biographer undertakes to lie, conceal, hypocrisy, embellish and hide his own misunderstanding.» Freud’s biographers were perplexed: well, wow, what a swell. All my life I shamelessly dug into other people’s lives, and here — on you!

But who is he, this Viennese professor, who attributed to all mankind the most base instincts from the point of view of this humanity? Who is he who allegedly proved that every man is attracted to his mother, and every woman subconsciously wants to share a bed with her father? Who were his parents and how is he himself with all this filth? Freud did not want to give answers to these questions, refusing audiences to potential biographers. He did not want to let anyone into the cellars of his own subconscious.

Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856 in the town of Freiberg, located near the border of Prussia and Poland. Five streets, two barbers, a dozen grocers and one undertaker. The town was located 240 km from Vienna and no aromas of the turbulent metropolitan life reached there. Freud’s father Jacob was a poor wool merchant. Recently, he married for the third time — to a girl fit for his daughter, who year after year bore him children. The firstborn was Sigmund. Jacob’s new family was located in one, however, quite spacious room, rented in the house of an eternally drunk tinsmith.

In October 1859, the completely impoverished Freuds set off in search of happiness in other cities. They settled first in Leipzig, then in Vienna. But Vienna did not provide material wealth either. “Poverty and poverty, poverty and extreme squalor,” Freud recalled his childhood. And also diligent study at the lyceum, success in languages, literature, especially ancient literature, philosophy, praise from teachers and the hatred of peers, bringing a black-haired excellent student with heavy curls to tears. From his school years, he obviously endured a complex that was inconvenient for later life: dislike to look the interlocutor in the eye.

Subsequently, as befits a poor Jewish youth, he became interested in politics and Marxism. His lyceum friend Heinrich Braun, who founded the Die Neue Zeit (an organ of the German Social Democratic Party) in 1883 together with Kautsky and Liebkhnecht, invited him to collaborate. But Freud himself did not know what he wanted. At first he thought about studying law, then — philosophy. As a result, grimacing in disgust, he went to the medical field — a typical field for a young man of his nationality at that time. The teachers treated him the same way. They did not like his inconsistency in hobbies, superficiality and focus on quick and easy success.

After graduating from the medical faculty, Freud rushed to the Institute of Physiology, where he worked from 1876 to 1882. He received various scholarships and enthusiastically studied the genitals of eels and other similar creatures. “No one has ever,” Freud fumed, “has yet seen the testicles of an eel.” “These were not the sexual organs of an eel, but the beginnings of psychoanalysis,” his psychoanalyst followers would say in chorus years later.

In 1884, Freud was fed up with eels, fish, and crustaceans, and went to the laboratory of clinical psychiatry professor Meinert to study the brains of human fetuses, children, kittens, and puppies. It was exciting, but not profitable. Freud wrote articles, even wrote a book on the then fashionable topic — aphasia, a speech disorder in patients who had a stroke, but — silence. Over the next 9 years, only 257 copies of the book were sold. No money, no fame.

About private life

Until the age of thirty, Freud remained a virgin: he was afraid of women. This embarrassed him, they laughed at him. At twenty-two, Freud let go of his beard for solidity. His belief that he would do just fine without women in his life was broken on May 7, 1883.

Once on vacation, he saw a 21-year-old, fragile, pale, short girl of very refined manners — Martha Bernays. Sigmund hurried to the printing house with another article under his arm. He was splashed with mud by a passing carriage. He did not have time to dodge, the manuscript fell into a puddle. The carriage stopped, and a pretty woman’s head peeked out. Freud froze in place: there was such sincere despair on the girl’s face that he immediately forgot about his desire to make a scandal. Moreover, he felt incredible excitement. He could not give a scientific explanation for this, since he had not encountered anything like it. After a while, he finally made a diagnosis: this is love! But the carriage had already sped off.

However, the next day they brought him a letter from a stranger, at the bottom there was a signature — Martha Bernays. The doctor was asked for forgiveness and invited to the ball, where he went without hesitation. There, another shock awaited Sigmund Freud: two absolutely identical girls approached him, and he could not tell which of them was in that carriage. And they laughed, seeing his amazement. “We are sisters,” one explained, “I am Martha, this is Minna.” Freud’s courtship was peculiar. On August 2, 1882, a few months after they met, he wrote to her: «I know that you are ugly in the sense that artists and sculptors understand it.» They quarrel and reconcile, Freud arranges violent scenes of jealousy, periods of nightmare are replaced by happy rare months of consent, but Freud did not get married much right away, postponing the wedding until the moment «when he gets rich.»

Having married Martha, Sigmund Freud «did not forget» about her sister. After one of the scandals caused by a fit of jealousy of his wife, the forty-year-old Freud vows not to meet with Minna again. And in a letter to a friend he writes that he refuses to have sex at all! By that time, Freud, however, already had five children. (Daughter Anna followed in her father’s footsteps and became a well-known psychologist).

Creativity: continued

Returning to those young years — in 1882, Freud entered the main hospital of Vienna as a student and received an assistant post there a year later. Then he conducts paid classes for interns there, but all this is mere pennies. The received title of Privatdozent in neuropathology also does not radically change his position.

In 1884, there is finally a hope to get rich. Freud brought to Vienna from Merck a then little-known alkaloid — cocaine — and hoped to be the first to discover its properties. However, the discovery is made by his friends Koenigsten and Koller: Freud went to rest with his fiancee, entrusting them to start the research, and by his arrival they manage not only to start, but also to finish it. The world will know a sensation: cocaine has a local anesthetic effect. Freud repeats at every corner: «I’m not mad at my fiancee for missing a happy opportunity.» However, in his autobiography much later he writes: “Because of my engagement, I did not become famous in those young years.” And all the time he complains about poverty, slowly coming success, difficulties in winning the favor of people, hypersensitivity, nerves, worries.

The next time Freud missed his chance in Paris was when he went to study with Dr. Charcot, the same one who invented the contrast shower. Charcot treated hysterics, and there were more of them in the Western Europe than there were mushrooms after rain. Women in unison fell into a swoon, did not see, did not hear and did not smell, hoarse, sobbed and laid hands on themselves. It was here that Freud hoped to show what he was capable of. Before leaving, he writes to his fiancee: “My little princess. I will come with money. I will become a great scientist and return to Vienna with a big, huge halo over my head, and we will get married right away.” But it was not possible to come with money. In Paris, Freud sniffed cocaine, roamed the streets, drank absinthe, resented the appearance of Parisians (ugly, bow-legged, long-nosed), writing a global work at night. About his work in one of his letters, he said: “Every night I do what I fantasize, ponder, speculate, stopping only when I reach complete absurdity and exhaustion.”

In general, Freud and Charcot did not work out. Charcot’s dark eyes, exuding an unusually soft look, looked more over the head of the young Freud, who did not hesitate to share with his friends the idea that had become obsessive by that time: “Why am I worse than Charcot? Why can’t I be as famous? On Tuesdays, Charcot held public séances, which fascinated Freud (a picture of such a séance always hung in his office afterwards). A hysterical woman writhing in a fit was brought into the hall, packed to overflowing with spectators, and Charcot cured her with hypnosis. Treatment is theater, Freud realized then. This is how a new type of clinical practice should look like.

The only thing Freud managed to get from Charcot was his works for translation into German. He translated several thick books on hypnosis, which he never managed to master.

The return to Vienna was painful. All hopes were dashed. He nevertheless got married, got into debt, moved to a large apartment at 19 Berggasse. He could not continue his research, the doctors did not let Freud near their patients. True, he was offered to manage the neuropathological service at the hospital institute, but he refused: the position, although a good one, was almost free.

And Freud wanted money. The only way out is private practice. He advertises in newspapers: «I am treating various types of nervous disorders.» Equips one of the rooms in his apartment as an office. There are no clients yet. But Freud is sure that they will. He is waiting. And here are the first ones. Sent by doctor friends. How tiresome it is to spend hours listening to their complaints! They come, stick out in the office for half a day. And it is not clear what to do with them.

“What am I to do with them, Martha, huh? — Freud is perplexed. — I have no practice. Maybe read a textbook?

A textbook on electrotherapy was brought by a university friend. Freud immediately sticks electrodes into unfortunate patients. The results are nil. He tries hypnosis in the image and likeness of Charcot. It also doesn’t work. He does not like to look people in the eye — ever since those very lyceums. Then he invents a method of concentration, puts his hands or a finger on the forehead of the patient and begins to press and ask: what worries you, what, what? Then, out of desperation, she tries massages, baths, rest, diets, enhanced nutrition. All in vain. He stopped touching patients with his hands and tormenting him with questions after 1896, when the sick Emma von N. complained that Freud was only bothering her.

After these failures, Freud changed his mind and tried to make the process of unsuccessful treatment comfortable, at least for himself. “I can’t when they examine me for 8 hours a day,” he said in the evenings to Marta. “And I can’t look into the eyes of patients either.” The solution was found: lay the patient on the couch and sit behind his head. Rationale: so that he relaxes and nothing embarrasses him. Another justification: so as not to see the doctor’s idiotic grimaces in response to the nonsense that he carries. The third rationale: that he felt the oppressive presence of the doctor. And no questions: let him say what he wants. This is the method of free association that exposes the subconscious. This is how the basic norms and dogmas of the new profession were born. Freud tried to adjust the practice and laws of psychoanalysis to suit himself. He talks about much of this on March 15 in a German medical journal, using the term «psychoanalysis» for the first time.

There is still little money, but Freud feels that things have started. He works hard, writes books and articles, avoids idleness, smokes 20 cigars a day (this helps him concentrate). His study is already different: a sofa with an armchair at the head, coffee tables with antique figurines, a painting depicting a Charcot seance, subdued lighting. Gradually, Freud thinks out other details that provide comfort to the psychoanalyst. Such, for example: the session should be expensive. “Paying for therapy,” says Freud, “must have a significant impact on the patient’s pocket, otherwise the therapy goes badly.” To prove this, he receives one free patient every week and then shrugged his shoulders: the patient is not progressing at all (why they are not progressing is a separate topic and worthy of special theories that Freud expounded in impeccably vivid literary form and for which in 1930 he received the Goethe Prize for Literature) . In general, Freud took a lot for his work. One session cost 40 crowns or 1 pound 13 shillings (that’s how much an expensive suit cost then).

Gradually, Freud discovered the rest of the foundations of the craft. For example, I limited the session time to 45-50 minutes. Many patients were ready to chat for hours, tried to stay longer, but he kicked them out, explaining that temporary pressure was exactly what would help them get rid of the disease as soon as possible. And, finally, the last and most important, the foundation of the foundations is the principle of non-intervention, non-sympathy, indifference to the patient. Also to stimulate various beneficial processes. Another thing is also clear: to feel sympathy is tiresome and unreasonable, harmful to the doctor’s mental health. The practical instruction looks like this: “The psychoanalyst should listen for a long time, show no reaction, and only insert individual remarks from time to time. The psychoanalyst should not satisfy the patient with his assessments and advice.

By the beginning of this century, Freud already knew that he had hit a gold mine. The spreading atheism recruited armies of clients for him. In his imagination, he clearly saw the marble plaques that would mark all the milestones of his great path, but glory was late. “I am already 44 years old,” he writes in another letter to his friend Fliess, “and who am I? An old poor Jew. Every Saturday I plunge into an orgy of fortune-telling cards, and every other Tuesday I spend with my Jewish brothers.

The turn to real fame and big money took place on March 5, 1902, when Emperor François-Joseph I signed an official decree conferring the title of assistant professor to Sigmund Freud. The exalted audience of the beginning of the century — ladies puffing on cigarettes and dreaming of suicide — rushed to him like a river. Freud worked 12-14 hours a day and was forced to call for help from two young associates, Max Kahane and Rudolf Reitler. Others soon joined them. After some time, Freud already regularly arranged classes at his home on Wednesdays, which received the name of the Psychological Society of the Environment, and since 1908 — the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. The decadent beau monde gathered here, meetings were conducted not only by doctors, but also by writers, musicians, poets, and publishers. All the talk about Freud’s books, despite the fact that they diverged badly (a thousand copies of «Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality» hardly sold in 4 years), only increased his fame. The more critics talked about obscenity, pornography, an attack on morality, the more friendly the decadent generation went to see him.

An indicator of real glory was the honoring in 1922 by the University of London of the five great geniuses of mankind — Philo, Memonides, Spinoza, Freud and Einstein. The Viennese house at Berggasse 19 was filled with celebrities, Freud’s appointments came from different countries, and it seemed to have been booked for many years to come. He is invited to lecture in the USA. Promise $ 10 thousand: in the morning — patients, in the afternoon — lectures. Freud counts his expenses and answers: not enough, I will return tired and even poorer. The contract is being reviewed in his favor.

However, the money and fame received at such a price are overshadowed by a serious illness: in April 1923, he was operated on for oral cancer. A terrible prosthesis and excruciating pain make the life of the father of psychoanalysts unbearable. He has difficulty eating and speaking. Freud is stoic about illness, jokes a lot, writes articles about Thanatos, the god of death, builds a theory about a person’s attraction to death. Against this background, rabid fame only annoys him. For example, the famous Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn offered Sigmund Freud $100 just to put his name in the credits of a film about the famous love stories of mankind. Freud writes him an angry letter of rejection. The same fate befell the German company UFA, who wished to make a film about psychoanalysis itself. In 1928, the movie «Secrets of the Soul» was released on European screens, in the advertising of which Freud’s name is widely used. Freud makes a scandal and demands compensation.

The advent of fascism darkens his life even more. In Berlin, his books are publicly burned, his beloved daughter Anna, who followed in his footsteps and headed the World Psychoanalytic Society, was captured by the Gestapo. When the Nazis occupied Austria, the famous scientist did not leave Vienna even after he was reminded of his Jewish origin. Freud was threatened by Auschwitz, but literally the whole world stood up for him: the Spanish king, whom he once treated, and the Danish queen were especially indignant. US President Franklin Roosevelt tried to achieve the deportation of Freud from Austria through diplomatic channels. Everything was decided by the call of Benito Mussolini, Freud was treating one of his close friends, at the Fuhrer’s headquarters. The Duce personally asked Adolf Hitler to allow Freud to leave. Heinrich Himmler offered a ransom option. There were those who wanted to. One of Freud’s former patients and then a faithful student was Napoleon’s granddaughter Marie Bonaparte, wife of Prince George of Greece. She told the Austrian Gauleiter: «I will pay any amount for a teacher.» The Nazi general named the price: two magnificent palaces of the princess — almost everything she had. “Thank God, you won’t be able to take away my grandfather’s surname from me,” Marie Bonaparte said with contempt, signing the papers.

In Paris, where Sigmund Freud was brought, he was met by Prince George and Marie Bonaparte. Under Freud’s feet, from the steps of the carriage to the «Rolls-Royce» of the high-born couple, a red velvet carpet was laid, along which Maria’s grandfather Napoleon once walked, returning to Paris after the victory at Austerlitz. Tears flowed from Freud’s eyes.

Further, the Freud family flees to London. By then, Freud’s health had become hopeless. And he determined his end himself: on September 23, 1939, Freud’s attending physician, at his request, injected him with a lethal dose of morphine.

Freud’s death left 2300 family letters and 1500 letters addressed to Minna. They are said to be sensational, but, according to Freud’s will, they could only be made public after 2000.