Carter Brief Lives: Sigmund Freud

1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-1-78094-024-3
Verlag: Hesperus Press Ltd.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 4, 120 Seiten

Reihe: Brief Lives

Born to Jewish parents in mid-19th-century Austria, Sigmund Freud is a controversial figure needing no introduction, yet his reputation owes as much to myth as to the facts of his life and his work. Here, David Carter uncovers the man buried beneath the mythology, tracing the life of this inimitable figure from his origins as the gifted first born of eight children, through his stellar academic career and his relationships and rifts with famous figures such as Josef Breuer. Also explored is why, despite his groundbreaking work on psychoanalytic theories-including the functioning of the subconscious, the repression of trauma, and the psychological import of dreams-Freud has frequently been the subject of derision and ridicule.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Carter, David

Leseproben

Childhood and Adolescence
(1856–73)

Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones has stated unequivocally that Freud’s father, Jakob, had two wives, but Peter Gay has stated just as unequivocally that he had three. Whatever the truth of the matter, Sigmund was the son of the last of them, born Amalie Nathansohn (the most commonly accepted spellings for both names). Jakob was a wool merchant, though not very well off. His mother came from the north-eastern part of Galicia near the Russian frontier. They were married in 1855, when Jakob was already forty. She was only twenty-one when she had her first child, whose name was registered in the family Bible as Sigismund Schlomo’, the latter after his paternal grandfather. By the time he entered the University of Vienna in 1873, Freud had developed a firm preference for the form ‘Sigmund’. When Jakob married Amalie in 1855, he had two sons from his first marriage: Emanuel, already married with children; and the younger one, Philipp, unmarried. Emanuel’s son, John, was a year older than his uncle Sigismund Schlomo, who for the sake of simplicity will be henceforth referred to only as Sigmund. Sigmund and John became firm friends and Freud later admitted that this relationship had conditioned the way he was to conduct many of his friendships in later life.

Amalie was to bear seven more children: Julius, who only survived for eight months; Anna, in December 1858, when Sigmund was in his third year; Rosa; Marie (known as Mitzi); Adolfine (known as Dolfi); Paula; and Alexander. In later correspondence Freud was to admit that the death of young Julius had undoubtedly affected him deeply. He believed that the advent of the young child, depriving him of his mother’s full attention, had awoken death wishes against his young brother, and when the child eventually died he developed a sense of guilt for having had such thoughts that was to stay with him for a long time.

Most influential on his psychological development seems to have been not his relationship with his siblings but that with his nephew John. His feelings for John were alternately affectionate and hostile. Freud commented in later years that this combination of contrasting feelings was to have a determining effect on how he developed all of his later friendships with people of the same age. He felt that an intimate friend and a hated enemy had always been indispensable to his emotional life, and sometimes they had coincided in the same person, albeit not at the same time as in his childhood relationship with John. Freud was later to recall an adventure he shared with John when he was about three years old, and involving John’s sister Pauline. In this memory Sigmund and John had been collecting flowers in a meadow in the company of Pauline. They suddenly turned on the girl, attacking her physically, and possibly sexually, taking away her bunch of flowers.

Another person who featured prominently in Freud’s early life and later in his self-analysis was his nanny, a devout Roman Catholic, who was apparently old and ugly and often dragged young Sigmund off to church with her. He seems to have loved her though, and may even have learned about sexual matters from her (another one of those plausible but unverified facts). Round about the time when his mother was giving birth to his sister Anna, the nanny suddenly disappeared. Freud later discovered that she had been caught stealing and that his half-brother Philipp had insisted on her being arrested. The upshot was that she was sent to prison for ten months. Freud retained an odd memory of this incident, in which he clearly associated his mother’s ‘absence’ with the disappearance of the nanny The significance of the memory he only unravelled in the course of his self-analysis about forty years later In the memory he saw himself standing in front of a chest, which Philipp was holding half-open The young Sigmund, in tears, was asking him something Finally, his mother, looking slim and not pregnant, came into the room. Freud recalled also that when the nanny had disappeared, he had suspected Philipp of somehow being the cause of this and had asked his half-brother what had happened to her. Philipp had replied ‘Sie ist eingekastelt.’ This means literally ‘She has been put in a chest,’ but it was a current idiom meaning ‘She has been put in prison.’ Freud could thus construe his memory as a child’s literal interpretation of Philipp’s words. As Philipp and his mother were of a similar age, Freud believed that the memory indicated a childish fear that Philipp might also be responsible for his mother’s ‘absence’; in other words, that Philipp was the father of the new baby. Remembering the opening of an empty chest and the appearance of a slim mother were thus ways of reassuring himself that this was not the case.

Some writers have accused Freud of being excessively concerned with financial matters. Money did concern him, but no more than his circumstances merited, as will be explained in due course. Undoubtedly the economic hardship of his parents during his childhood made him conscious of the need to acquire a measure of financial security. When Freud was born, his parents were living in one rented room in a small house owned by the local blacksmith. His father had seen better days, but in the previous twenty years there had been a steady decline in the textile trade. With Czech nationalism on the rise there was much antipathy towards the German-speaking Austrians and the Jews. Even in the small town of Freiberg the Jewish merchants were seen to be the cause of the decline in the textile industry. Gradually Jakob Freud came to realise that there was no future for him and his family in the area, and in 1859, when Sigmund was three years old, they moved to Leipzig. But, finding few business opportunities there, they moved one year later to Vienna.

The Freuds’ first home in Vienna was in the Pfeffergasse in the mainly Jewish quarter of Leopoldstadt, not far from the famous recreational area known as the Prater. At the age of nine, in 1865, Sigmund passed the entrance examination one year earlier than was usual, enabling him to attend secondary school. The one he attended was known as the ‘Leopoldstädter Kommunalreal- und Obergymnasium’. After it expanded into the Sperlgasse in 1870 it was known as the ‘Sperlgymnasium’. Here he was an exceptionally good student, coming top of his class for the last six of his eight years there (Freud would later remember this to be the last seven years). In 1865, however, the family was to suffer the disgrace of having one of its members accused of criminal activity. Jakob’s brother Joseph was eventually found guilty of and imprisoned for dealing in counterfeit roubles.

Freud had various interesting memories of events in his childhood which are difficult to date precisely One, which he believed happened when he was ten or twelve years old, concerned his father, who often used to take his son with him on walks. During such walks his father would talk about his experiences and past events. On one occasion his father wanted to impress upon him how much the situation of the Jews in Austria had improved since he was young. He told of a Saturday evening in Freiberg when he was taking a walk with a new fur cap on, with which he was obviously very pleased. Suddenly a passing Christian knocked his brand new cap off and told him in no uncertain terms what he thought of Jews getting in his way. Obviously expecting that his father would have made some protest, Sigmund asked him how he responded, to which his father replied that he just stepped into the road and picked up his cap. Freud was clearly ashamed and hurt by his father’s demeaning behaviour and never forgot it. As though in compensation for his disappointment, he cultivated an interest in famous heroic individuals such as Hannibal and Alexander the Great.

It should also be noted that from childhood Freud was a voracious reader. He admitted that he had been greatly influenced by his early reading of the Bible, but it is likely to have been the dramatic events and moral tales that impressed him more than the specifically Christian message. By his own admission it seems that he did not read his first modern novel until he was about thirteen, though he knew already many works by classic German authors. In a letter to his future wife Martha Bernays on 14 January 1884, he claimed to have started reading Shakespeare at the age of eight, though how much he read in the original English is unclear. He was, however, developing some facility in several languages: Latin, Greek and Hebrew, English and French, and had taught himself some Italian and Spanish. Ernest Jones claims that Freud had once told him he was especially fond of English and that at one period of his life he had spent ten years reading nothing but English books.1

In 1872, when he was sixteen, there occurred Freud’s first recorded experience of love. Details of this are to be found in the correspondence between Freud and his bosom friend of those years, Eduard Silberstein. Silberstein had stayed in Freiberg, but they maintained their friendship through frequent letters. While at school together in Freiberg they had learned Spanish and developed their own private mythology and language, speaking and writing in a mixture of German and Spanish. They formed their own secret society which was called the and they addressed each other by the names of two dogs in a philosophical dialogue by Cervantes: Freud was Cipion and Silberstein was Berganza. It was on a return visit to Freiberg to see Silberstein, other old friends and the countryside he loved that Freud was smitten.

During his visit to Freiberg Sigmund stayed with the Fluss...