Lecture 2
The Historical Foundations of Psychoanalysis

Portrait photograph of Sigmund Freud, 1891. © Freud Museum London

The clinical scientist

According to his biographer and close colleague Ernest Jones, Freud stopped being young in 1900, at the age of 44.1 But who was this man who so shaped the climate of the last century and our own? I want to begin this lecture with some biographical comments about Freud himself, before returning to his early work and the invention of psychoanalysis.

During the years 1886, when he abandoned the neurological laboratory, until 1900, Freud built up his private medical practice. Strapped for regular income, he also took up a post as director of the neurological section of the First Public Institute for Sick Children. In this hospital, where free treatment was provided to sick children from poor families, Freud developed an expertise in childhood cerebral palsy. As late as 1897, so after the appearance of Studies on Hysteria and when he already first moots the existence of the Oedipus complex and childhood sexuality, he is publishing neurological papers that remained standard texts for many years.

During these late years of the nineteenth century, Freud not only wrote various psychoanalytic papers and Studies on Hysteria (1895) with his eminent friend and colleague Josef Breuer, but also completed an important book based on prior research - On Aphasia (1891). As the century came to its end, the epoch-defining The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), a self-examination propelled by his father's death, appeared. Despite all this and the birth in rapid succession of the six children who were so important to him and whose relations with each other and their parents inevitably played into his thinking, Freud called these early years ones of 'splendid isolation'. The psychoanalytic movement had not yet begun and from that point of view, he was indeed isolated.

In the first years of the new century, he continued to be prolific. Alongside The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (written in 1901 and published in 1904), important new cases, Dora amongst them, a book on Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious and the ground-breaking Three Essays on Sexuality (all 1905), a following was beginning to take shape around him. Between 1906 and 1914, Freud and his growing cohort of early psychoanalysts embarked on the establishment of an international movement. Now came what might be described as a 'middle-period theory' in part evident in the Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1910) he delivered at Clark University in the United States. The correspondence with Carl Gustav Jung, already an acclaimed researcher at Zurich University and a member of staff at the internationally famous Burgholzli Hospital, began in 1906. This Zurich connection marked a major scientific alliance and of course Jung, too, went with him to America, where he was, incidentally, paid higher fees than Freud, perhaps because he was a better negotiator. Freud continued to be prolific through this time, producing a series of papers on fantasy, on creative writing and more, as well as case histories - of Little Hans, the Rat Man and Schreber.

During the war years (1914-18) Freud became involved in a number of disputes with former colleagues, prompting a period of reflection. During this time, he wrote a series of highly theoretical papers on meta-psychology, as well as The History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (1914-18). By the end of the war, Freud's status as a celebrated international thinker had been solidified. Between 1919 and 1926, he set about reforming his own theories as well as building new ones, including the love and death instincts and the tripartite structure of the mind: the Ego, the Super Ego and the Id. In 1923, he was diagnosed with cancer. Although he continued to be industrious following his diagnosis, he wrote fewer technical or clinical papers, turning his attention to more expansive cultural criticism, such as The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).

From brains to dreams

Now let's deal with all this in a bit more detail. Freud was born on 6 May 1856 into a lower-middle class Jewish family in the small town of Freiberg (now Pribor) in Moravia, then a Czech part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He was the first child of his wool-merchant father and his third wife Amelia Nathanson. He was preceded in the paternal line by two half-brothers already in their twenties by the time of Freud's birth. Soon after, they emigrated to England where Sigmund twice visited them as a young man. Freud's family wanted him to be a lawyer, but his enthusiasm for nature and biology made him decide to turn to neurology and medicine. He also had an early penchant for the classics and for literature - he knew his Shakespeare in English, and his Don Quixote in Spanish. He could read (and speak) English, French, and Spanish, alongside Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He also loved philosophy. At the University of Vienna, he numbered among his professors the influential German philosopher, Franz Brentano, the founder of phenomenology in its post-Kantian mode. Another of Brentano's famous pupils was Edmund Husserl, often treated as the founder of the distinction between continental and analytic philosophy.

Freud's principal university discipline was biology, in which he carried out experimental research and field work. In the late 1870s, he travelled to the Mediterranean for the first time in order to study at the Trieste marine biological research lab. His subject was the testes of the eel. Ironically perhaps, he was already asking evolutionary questions about sex, here in relation to the eels' hermaphroditic function. He was taught by the eminent physiologist Ernst Brücke, who had him looking down a microscope and examining nervous tissue. Brücke imparted his own love of natural science and the dynamic working of cells to his young pupil who, if not constrained by funds, would have liked to continue working in labs and follow in Brücke's footsteps. Freud's training at the Vienna General Hospital, what we might now call a residency, had him living on the hospital grounds and rotating through various wards, including internal medicine, surgery, dermatology, ophthalmology, neuropathology and psychiatry, which involved laboratory research in cerebral anatomy. Freud was taught psychiatry and neuroanatomy by the director of the psychiatric clinic associated with the University of Vienna, Theodor Meynert, a leader in the field, though Freud and he later had differences.

Throughout the first part of the1880s, Freud sought to make a name for himself by pursuing neurological laboratory work. He hoped this might get him a job as a research scientist and professor at a university. During these years, he also specialized in research involving new methods of staining slices of brain. In 1883, he started to study the uses of cocaine, an episode in his life that has since become infamous, in part because in good nineteenth-century tradition he also experimented on himself. Not realizing that cocaine was itself addictive, Freud's idea was to use cocaine to wean people off morphine. He introduced this method while treating his friend, the physician Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, who had become addicted to morphine. Using cocaine as a substitute for addictive drugs and an analgesic or painkiller, Freud missed its anaesthetic properties, for which it is still used today in some eye surgeries. His friend Karl Koller picked up on these, performing the first operation using cocaine as an anaesthetic in ophthalmology. It made him world-famous. Freud was away visiting his fiancée at the time: for years after, while life was financially hard, he bitterly resented his own failure to make a breakthrough by seeing cocaine's properties as a surgical wonder drug. Instead of success, he faced the opprobrium of having misused cocaine in clinical medicine.

In October 1885, Freud travelled to Paris on a scholarship to study with Jean-Martin Charcot, then the most important neurologist in the world. His first work at the vast Salpêtrière Hospital involved not the famous hysterics, but research in Charcot's laboratory. Here he investigated children's brains. Indeed, Freud's early publications were a series of histological and physiological research papers, and the first major publication under his own name - rather than as a translator of John Stuart Mill, or Jean-Martin Charcot, or the French medical hypnotist Hippolyte Bernheim (the latter two forming the two sides of the famous hypnotism debate) - was a monograph On Aphasia (1891), the speech defects that occur usually as a result of a neurological insult such as stroke. Through the 1890s, Freud became an internationally respected clinical neurologist through his hefty monograph on the hemiplegias - brain injuries causing one-sided paralysis in children.

If Freud's enthusiasm for scientific research was his first chosen path, it wasn't the one he would ultimately pursue. In 1881 he fell in love with Martha Bernays, a charming, highly intelligent young woman of excellent family: her paternal grandfather had been the Chief Rabbi of Hamburg. But Martha, by the time Freud met her, was fatherless and had no dowry. Freud too was impecunious: with his first earnings, he had his parents and sisters to support. Love, the need to get...