Welcome back to the deep dive where we take that
vast just overwhelming ocean of information and
distill it down to the pure potent essence you
really need to know. And today, oh boy, today
we are strapping ourselves into what is I think
the world's most famous and arguably most controversial
piece of furniture. The psychoanalytic couch.
The psychoanalytic couch, yes. We are doing a
comprehensive deep dive into the life the work
and the very contested legacy of Sigmund Freud.
Born Sigismund Schlemmer Freud in 1856, the Austrian
neurologist who, well, founded psychoanalysis.
This is a figure whose influence is so pervasive
you don't even realize you're speaking his language
until you really stop and look closely. It's
true. And the sources we pulled for this, they
really force us to move past that, you know,
that pop culture caricature of the pipe smoking
sage of Vienna. Totally. They paint a picture
of a man with this intense, almost reckless scientific
ambition and these dramatic theoretical reversals.
And I mean, a profound cultural reach. You know,
the poet W .H. Auden said Freud created a whole
climate of opinion under whom we conduct our
different lives. That's just that's not just
a person. That's like a geological shift in how
we think. It's the atmosphere we all breathe.
That phrase, a whole climate of opinion, is so
spot on. And that's really our mission today,
to unpack what exactly changed. It wasn't just
a few new ideas. It was a fundamental shift in
what we believe about ourselves. Right. We want
to get to the bottom of how his concepts, things
like infantile sexuality, the centrality of drives,
the unconscious, the eyed, ego, superego, how
they just infiltrated everything, literature,
film. how we parent, what we even assume about
human motivation. And crucially, we have to talk
about the controversy because the same man who
gave us all these concepts is also accused of,
well, scientific rigidity, some pretty big theoretical
missteps and creating a movement that has often
been described as. frankly, cult -like. Exactly.
We'll be looking at all of it. The debates around
the scientific validity of his work, its complicated
social impact, especially when it comes to feminism,
and his relentless critique of big institutions
like religion. So this exploration is really
designed for you, the listener, who wants a thorough
but not overwhelming understanding of how Freud
went from this promising but financially struggling
neurologist to a figure who basically defined
the 20th century mind. So if you've ever wondered
what something like the compulsion to repeat
has to do with trauma or why on earth he was
once a huge advocate for cocaine. Dig with us.
You're in the right place. OK, so let's unpack
this journey. And we have to start right at the
beginning. Freud's beginnings were they were
pretty modest. He was born in Freiburg, Moravia
in the Austrian Empire. The first of eight children
born to Galician Jewish parents. And his name
at birth was Sigismund Schlemel Freud back in
1856. And there's this wonderful. biographical
detail I came across, that his mother saw the
call he was born with as a positive omen, you
know, a sign of a brilliant future. And that
background, his Jewish identity, is just absolutely
critical. Even though he was largely secular,
it profoundly shaped his intellectual development.
It fostered a kind of necessary nonconformism.
An ability to stand outside the Viennese establishment.
Precisely. Which he credited in his autobiographical
study. He saw himself as an outsider. And, you
know, that's often a prerequisite for revolutionary
thought. And it was an identity he actively kept
up his whole life. We see later in 1897, he joined
the German Jewish Cultural Association, B 'nai
B 'rith. So that suggests a deep commitment to
that cultural heritage, even if he wasn't, you
know, religiously observant. And his intellectual
horsepower was... I mean, it was never in doubt.
He graduated high school with honors, got into
the University of Vienna at just 17. Initially
planning to study law, right. Right, but it was
pretty quickly drawn into the medical faculty.
You mentioned intellectual power. The man was
proficient in seven languages. Seven. German,
French, Italian, Spanish, English, Hebrew, Latin,
and Greek. That level of linguistic and classical
knowledge meant he had access to, well, global
intellectual history in its original form. A
true polymath. But his early scientific curiosity
wasn't pointed toward the human psyche. It was
pure, hard science biology and neurology. Which
brings us to probably the most famous and maybe
the strangest early anecdote about him. The eels.
The eels of Trieste, yes. In 1876, he spent four
weeks at a zoological research station. And he
dissected hundreds of eels in the Gulf of Trieste,
searching for the male reproductive organs. They
were notoriously hard to find. Hunting for eel
gonads. That's a surprising place to start for
the founder of psychoanalysis. And what did he
find? Tell me. Nothing conclusive, which must
have been so frustrating for him. But the anecdote
isn't really about the result. It's about the
methodology. It just speaks to his early, intense
scientific rigor and this deep desire to uncover
hidden biological truths. and after that he spent
six years in ernst brooks physiology lab right
comparing the brains of different species from
humans all the way to crayfish so he was literally
doing comparative neurology physically mapping
out nervous tissue and that work was It was seminal.
Well, his detailed research on nervous tissue
was crucial context for the later discovery of
the neuron in the 1890s. So this early period
is vital because it establishes that the man
who created psychoanalysis, a field often slammed
for lacking scientific rigor, started his career
with deep empirical neurological training. He
wanted psychoanalysis to be a science. Exactly.
because his fundamental training was in the physical
sciences. So that scientific ambition was real,
but so was the pressing need to earn a living,
to support a family. And that's what drove him
out of the research lab and into clinical practice.
And this brings us to a period that is, well,
it's almost unbelievable in retrospect, and one
of the most controversial moments in his early
career. The cocaine episode. This is the moment
where that ambition collided with some very speculative
clinical practice, and his reputation... got,
as one source puts it, somewhat tarnished. He
was specializing in nervous disorders at Vienna
General Hospital, and he becomes this early,
really passionate proponent and user of cocaine
in the mid -1880s. And he didn't just quietly
use it. He championed it publicly. His 1884 paper
On Coca, it wasn't some cautious study. It was
a full -throated, enthusiastic endorsement. Praising
its virtues as a stimulant, an analgesic, a cure
for depression, even a remedy for morphine addiction.
He was completely infatuated with what he saw
as its potential. A magical drug, he called it.
He wrote that it gave him exhilaration and lasting
euphoria. What's so fascinating is that this
enthusiasm actually caused him to miss a huge...
professional opportunity. He narrowly missed
securing scientific priority for discovering
cocaine's anesthetic properties. How did he miss
that? He was right there. He was so focused on
the systemic, you know, the psychoactive properties
of the drug that he only mentioned the. anesthetic
possibility and passing. It was like a footnote,
really. Meanwhile, his colleague, Carl Kaller,
uses cocaine and eye surgery in 1884 and gets
all the scientific distinction and the fame that
came with it. Wow. So if Frui had been a bit
more cautious or maybe less personally invested
in it as a cure -all... His whole career trajectory
might have been completely different. And then,
of course, that early excitement turned tragic.
It did. The sources recount the story of his
close friend, Ernst von Fleischmarxo. He was
addicted to morphine from... chronic pain, and
Freud aggressively recommended cocaine to him
as a cure. And instead? Instead, Fleisch -Marxau
developed an acute, severe cocaine psychosis.
He suffered terribly before his death a few years
later. So Freud's medical judgment caused immense
suffering to a close friend. What was the fallout
from that? Well, despite global reports of addiction
and overdose, the medical community quickly figured
out the dangers. Freud never publicly admitted
he was wrong. He never revised his earlier enthusiastic
claims, although his reputation definitely took
a hit in Vienna. But he did stop recommending
it. Publicly, yes. But the record shows he kept
taking it occasionally for his own migraines
and depression until about 1896. This whole period
from the mid -80s to the mid -90s, it really
highlights a crucial character trait. Freud's
willingness to aggressively pursue these radical,
often highly speculative clinical paths, even
at great personal cost. That's a good way to
put it. The radical impulse. And that impulse
didn't just apply to drugs. It apparently applied
to his personal life as well. Ah, yes. The family
dynamic. Let's talk about the minute Bernays
controversy. So his domestic situation was complex.
He married Martha Bernays in 1886. They had six
children, including Anna Freud, who would go
on to become his greatest intellectual heir.
But the personal life also contains what many
people see as this major theoretical conflict
in his own life. The possibility of an affair
with his sister -in -law, Minna Bernays. Right.
Minna moved into the Freud household permanently
after her own fiancé died in 1896. And the evidence
pointing toward an affair, it surfaced pretty
controversially. It did. The key piece of initial
evidence is a Swiss hotel guestbook, an entry
from 1898, where Dr. Freud and Frau Minna Bernays
signed in together. Which is circumstantial,
but... Very suggestive of a trip taken without
Martha. But the really dramatic evidence, the
smoking gun, so to speak, didn't come out until
decades later. And it came from the mouth of
one of his great rivals, Carl Jung. Correct.
Jung, who knew both Freud and Minna well, he
confided to a friend in 1957 years after Freud's
death that Minna herself had told him about her
intimate relationship with Freud. That's a critical
piece of testimony. It suggests that the great
theorist of repression may have been living out
this very complex, repressed sexual dynamic right
under his wife's nose. Echoing the very family
triangles he was starting to theorize about.
Just think about the irony there for a second.
The man who is about to define the Oedipus complex,
the foundational family drama of Western civilization,
was potentially running this complicated domestic
triangle involving his wife, her sister, and
himself. It just adds this intensely human, contradictory,
almost novelistic layer to his biography. It
absolutely does. And we should also briefly touch
on the philosophical influences that were framing
his work around this time. Right. He was influenced
by his philosophy tutor, Franz Brentano, who
discussed the possible existence of an unconscious
mind. He also read Darwin extensively. And he
was influenced by Edward von Hartmann's The Philosophy
of the Unconscious. But the most curious intellectual
relationship he had was with Friedrich Nietzsche.
What's so fascinating there is his deliberate
resistance to studying Nietzsche. Exactly. Freud
claimed he was strongly fascinated by Nietzsche's
writings, but he actively avoided reading them
closely because he felt the philosopher's intuitive
insights were just too similar to his own emerging
theories. He didn't want his originality to be
questioned. Right. He felt Nietzsche's work was
this wealth of ideas that was already there.
He treated Nietzsche's writings as texts to be
resisted far more than to be studied. That is
an incredible insight into a man who was so determined
to establish his own originality, viewing philosophical
precursors almost as, what, intellectual competitors.
Competitors who might pollute the purity of his
scientific discovery. So the definitive shift,
then. From a rigorous but struggling neurologist
to a pioneer of psychopathology, that really
began in Paris in 1885. It did. Freud went on
a three -month fellowship to study with Jean
-Martin Charcot, the renowned neurologist at
the Salvatrier Hospital. Charcot was researching
hysteria and experimenting with hypnosis. And
Freud later called that experience catalytic,
didn't he? He recognized that Charcot's work
showing that symptoms could be induced and relieved
by psychological means, by hypnosis, was what
turned him away from less financially promising
research and toward medical psychopathology.
Charcot was known for these dramatic clinical
demonstrations. He'd often show the susceptibility
of his mostly female patients to suggestion under
hypnosis. And when Freud returned to Vienna and
went into private practice, he adopted the technique
of his friend and collaborator, Josef Breuer,
who used a less suggestive form of hypnosis.
And this leads us to the pivotal case, the one
that gave the technique its famous name. The
treatment of Anna O., whose real name was Bertha
Pappenheim. Right. She became famous because
she was the one who coined the term talking cure.
Exactly. Breuer found that when she talked about
her symptoms under hypnosis, and she managed
to retrieve memories of traumatic incidents connected
to their onset, the symptoms, things like paralysis
or chronic cough, they would actually lessen
in severity. So that established the fundamental
idea. Neurosis stems from suppressed memories.
But the claim of a cure for Anna O. has been
really heavily contested, right? Oh, it's a messy
picture. Breuer claimed a cure. He said the treatment
ended with all her symptoms disappearing. But
later authors just tore that apart. They pointed
out that Pappenheim spent three subsequent short
periods in sanatoria diagnosed with persistent
hysteria with somatic symptoms. So she was reportedly
still suffering when she left Breuer's care.
So even the foundational success story of the
talking cure is built on contested ground. That's
fascinating. It speaks to the retrospective construction
of the history of the movement. Totally. Though
some scholars do defend Breuer's original account.
But the main point for our deep dive is that
regardless of the patient's ultimate outcome,
the method was established. Symptoms are meaningful,
they're psychological, and they can be relieved
through talking. Yep. Freud didn't stick with
hypnosis. Why did he abandon it? The results
were just too inconsistent. Not all patients
could be easily hypnotized. And even when they
were, the relief was often just temporary. So
this forced the truly innovative step. Yes. Freud
switched to free association. He encouraged patients
to talk freely without any censorship or inhibition
about whatever came to mind. The idea was that
this seemingly random chatter would follow these
lines of association straight back to the repressed
core memory. And by 1896, this combination of
clinical method and the theories he was deriving
from it, using free association and dream analysis
to reveal this complex structuring of unconscious
material, it finally earned its own name. Psychoanalysis.
And this whole process wasn't just detached scientific
research for him. It was developed during an
extremely intense internal period. His father
died in 1896, which spurred his famous self -analysis.
Right, using his own dreams and childhood memories.
time he was having physical symptoms like heart
irregularities and deep depression a neurasthenia
as they called it then this self -analysis applying
the method to himself it brings us to the most
critical the most seismic shift in early psychoanalysis
the seduction theory reversal so Initially, based
on his early clinical work where he was using
what we'd now consider suggestive pressure techniques
to coax out forgotten memories. He theorized
that all psychoneuroses hysteria, obsessional
neurosis, were rooted in unconscious memories
of real sexual molestation in early childhood.
That was the seduction theory. And he was so
confident in this. I mean, recklessly confident.
He claimed 100 % confirmation of his theory.
He did. But there were problems. His colleagues
were expressing reservations, pointing out how
suggestive his methods were. And Freud himself
noticed that many of his patients, they were
often unconvinced that the scenes they described
under pressure were actual factual memories.
They felt like fantasies. They felt like fantasies.
So he was facing this professional crisis. Either
he stands by his 100 % confirmed theory and basically
implies that sexual abuse was literally universal
in Viennese society. Or he admits his foundational
theory was based on flawed evidence. What pushed
him to reverse it? It was the self -analysis.
particularly his exploration of his own feelings
of hostility toward his dead father and jealousy
toward his mother, feelings that were clearly
not based on real abuse but on powerful wishes
and fantasies. So he realized that the internal
psychic reality was far more potent than the
external biographical one, at least in forming
neuroses. And that is a massive intellectual
pivot. He replaced the idea of universal real
abuse with the idea that infantile sexual scenarios,
whether they were real or imagined, they only
became pathogenic when they were acting as repressed
memories. So the power came from the repression
and the psychic reality, not necessarily the
external fact. And that distinction. the move
from external reality to internal subjective
psychic reality. That's the foundation of modern
psychoanalytic thought. It was so dramatic that
he later admitted it in a 1924 addendum to one
of his papers. He said, I had not yet freed myself
from my overvaluation of reality and my low valuation
of fantasy. Wow, that's a huge admission for
a scientist. He realized he had prioritized documented
observable events over the invisible emotional
power of our inner lives. But you can imagine
the outcry. The reversal alienated a lot of early
colleagues and critics. They saw it as him just
dodging the social reality of child sexual abuse.
But for Freud, this transition was necessary.
It was. It laid the groundwork for the theory
that presupposed autonomous infantile sexuality.
The kids have their own sexual life, their own
internal dramas, and that allowed him to formulate
the Oedipus Complex. Without the seduction theory
reversal, psychoanalysis as we know it just couldn't
exist. He would have been stuck on the external
event, not the internal desire. So with the talking
cure established and the centrality of fantasy
confirmed, Freud then turns his attention to,
well, truly mapping the interior world. And the
starting point for all of this is, of course,
the unconscious. The unconscious, which, you
know, Freud openly admitted was already well
known among poets and philosophers. But he was
the one who wanted to establish scientific recognition
for it. And he defined it based on the theory
of repression. Right. And he distinguished between
two types. First, you have primary repression.
which he saw as innate and linked to the universal
incest taboo. It's the foundational built -in
repression you need for society to even function.
And the second type. Acquired repression. That's
where something that was once conscious gets
rejected from awareness, forced back into the
unconscious, and that's what often creates symptoms.
He used these three different perspectives to
describe the mental process, which he called
the topographies. Let's start with the first
one, from around 1915, the topographical model.
Okay, so the first topography structured the
psyche into three systems. First, the system
ux, the unconscious. This is governed by the
pleasure principle, which aims for immediate
gratification, and it functions through primary
process mentation. Okay, let's slow down on that
jargon. Primary process mentation. What exactly
does that mean? How is it different from how
we think when we're conscious? Great question.
Primary process thought is a logical... It's
timeless. And it's dominated by wish fulfillment.
It's basically how dreams work. In the unconscious,
there is no no. Two contradictory ideas can exist
at the same time. And it's timeless. Timeless.
Conscious memory follows a timeline. But in the
unconscious, everything is present, past, present,
future, all at once. And it's characterized by
what he called the mobility of cathexes. Okay,
cathexes. If I'm thinking about psychic energy
or mental energy, is this just how the mind invests
emotional energy in certain ideas or objects?
Precisely. A cathexis is the investment of libidinal
energy into an object, a person, an idea. In
the unconscious, these cathexes are super mobile.
They can easily shift from one idea to another
through processes like condensation -like combining
multiple ideas into one dream image or displacement,
shifting emotional intensity from a threatening
idea to a safer one. It makes the unconscious
sound like this high -speed emotional logic computer
that follows no rules. It kind of is. Now, the
second system is the system PCs, the preconscious.
This is the intermediate space. It's where unconscious
thing presentations become bound by language
or word presentations. It's the staging area
for material that isn't currently conscious but
can be recalled. And the third is the system
scenes the conscious. The familiar world of logic,
planning, and delayed gratification governed
by the rational reality principle. But he realized
this model had its limits. It couldn't really
account for the unconscious moral sensor that
causes guilt. which must also be partly unconscious.
So later on, in The Ego and The Id in 1923, he
introduced the second topography. The famous
one. The tripartite model. Id, ego, and superego.
The iceberg. That's the one. Let's define them,
because they're everywhere in our culture. The
id is the pure, primal reservoir of instincts
and drives. It operates entirely on the pleasure
principle, seeking immediate gratification. It's
the unbridled force. And its opposite force is
the superego. The superego is the moral component.
It's our internal policeman, embodying the ideals
and prohibitions we absorb from our parents and
society. And it is often unconsciously very,
very harsh. And stuck between them is the ego,
the rational manager. The ego's entire job is
to try and find a workable balance between the
impractical hedonism of the id, which wants everything
now, and the equally impractical moralism of
the superego, which wants total perfection. The
ego is the part that deals with external reality,
using the reality principle. I found the analogy
he used for the ego -ed relationship so powerful.
He compared it to a charioteer trying to control
powerful horses. Right. The horses are the raw
energy and drive the id, and the charioteer is
the ego, just trying to provide direction. Which
implies the id is the true source of power. It
absolutely is. The id is the engine room, the
source of all psychic energy. The ego only borrows
its power from the id. If those horses decide
to bolt, the charioteer can try to steer. But
ultimately, the raw force is in the aid. The
ego isn't stronger. It's just the coordinating
directing part. And when the ego gets overwhelmed
by the conflict, it uses the famous defense mechanisms.
Denial, repression, rationalization, all to manage
anxiety. Now let's get into those primal forces,
the drives that are in the aid. Freud believed
the human psyche is subject to two constantly
conflicting forces. The life drive. Eros or libido.
And the death drive, thanatos. The life drive
is pretty easy to grasp, I think. It's the sexualized
energy, libido, that generates erotic attachments,
aims to bind things together, maintain life,
reproduce. But the death drive or thanatos, that's
the concept that really throws people. It was
a term introduced by Paul Federn, but Freud inferred
its existence in Beyond the Pleasure Principle
in 1920. What is it exactly? It's the source
of compulsive repetition, aggression. hatred
and neurotic guilt he inferred it by observing
a seemingly contradictory behavior the compulsion
to repeat okay explain that paradox if the mind
wants pleasure and avoids pain why would it compulsively
repeat earlier often traumatic impressions that
seems to go against the pleasure principle freud
saw this dramatically in the dreams of traumatic
neurotics they would repeatedly dream of the
traumatic event not some wish fulfillment fantasy
He also saw it in children's repetitive play,
a child repeatedly throwing and retrieving a
toy, the famous Forta game. And he theorized
that this repetition was an effort to work over
and master earlier impressions that were initially
too overwhelming. Yes, repetition as an attempt
at mastery. But taking to its extreme, it reveals
this fundamental psychic tendency to restore
the original state of non -existence, a zero
-tension state, death. It's the tendency toward
the extinction of energy, a move backward. Exactly.
And this drive, when you turn it outward, results
in aggression. When you turn it inward, it results
in guilt or self -destructive behavior. And the
foundation for all this interior mapping is the
concept of psychosexual development. He proposed
that infantile sexuality starts in a state he
called polymorphous perversity. Meaning, the
infant's body can get pleasure from any zone.
This generalized sexuality then progresses through
distinct developmental phases, each defined by
the dominant erogenous zone, the oral, anal,
and phallic stages. And these phases are critical
because if you get fixated or regress to one
of them, that's supposedly what explains neurosis
or perversion later in life, right? Absolutely.
If a child gets stuck at the oral stage, you
might see excessive eating or smoking later.
Stuck at the anal stage, you might see excessive
orderliness or miserliness. These phases eventually
lead to a latency stage, a quiet period before
adult genital sexuality emerges. And the whole
system, as you said earlier, it all hangs on
the Oedipus complex. Freud called it the central
tenet of psychoanalytic theory. He did. But given
the immense modern backlash over his views on
gender and sexuality, how could he possibly call
a concept rooted in castration fears the central
tenet? Did he not see how fragile that was, theoretically?
For him, it was the necessary bridge between
nature and culture. The Oedipus Complex wasn't
just about a kid wanting a parent. It was the
mechanism that forces the child into the social
world. The normal path involves the child renouncing
their incestuous desires toward the primary parental
figure. And that renunciation is precipitated
by the fantasized threat or the fact of castration.
Which is what forms the superego, the moral structure.
The complex forces the child to identify with
the same -sex parent and internalize the rules
of society. If you don't navigate this successfully,
you're left with neurosis. He saw it as universal.
Okay, let's dive deeper into one of the most
contentious parts of his theory. His writings
on gender and sexuality. He famously called it
the dark continent. It was a dark continent because
he really struggled to explain female development
using the same phallocentric framework he built
for male development. His account of femininity
is entirely based on the different paths taken
as a result of the castration complex. So how
does it differ for a girl in his theory? For
the boy, the realization of castration ends the
Oedipal phase. It drives him to repress incestuous
desire out of fear. For the girl, the fact of
anatomical difference, the lack of a penis, is
what starts the Oedipal phase. The girl moves
from an attachment to her mother to her father
because of this sense of deprivation. Which results
in penis envy. Yes. The girl experiences this
sense of deprivation, which leads to penis envy.
And that concept doesn't just mean wanting the
physical organ, but desiring the power and privileges
that came with masculinity in that culture. And
he linked this to women being more prone to neurosis
and hysteria. He did, which sounds intensely
biologically deterministic and culturally limited
now. And the critique was immediate, even from
within his own movement. Early followers like
Karen Horney rejected penis envy outright, didn't
they? They did. She argued that Freud's structure
just failed to account for a primary femininity
that exists on its own terms, not in reference
to a male standard. Ernest Jones, a loyalist,
even coined the term phallocentrism to criticize
the fundamental bias in Freud's position. And
what was Freud's response to all this internal
dissent? He basically held firm. He maintained
a steadfast objection to critics who he felt
failed to distinguish more clearly between what
is psychic and what is biological. He insisted
on the validity of his findings, arguing that
the social reality phallocentrism mirrored the
psychic reality penis envy, whether people like
it or not. So he held firm to the idea that anatomical
difference created a different psychic path.
Which remains one of the most controversial elements
of his entire body of work. Right. Moving from
the internal world of theory to the external
world of building a movement, Freud's push for
recognition was just relentless. By 1902, he
finally got his longstanding ambition. He was
made a university professor. Professor Extraordinaries.
And this wasn't purely on merit, which is a great
anecdote about the reality of his life in Vienna.
The sources note his appointment had been blocked
for years by political authorities. Mostly due
to latent anti -Semitism and his controversial
theories. Right. And how was it finally secured?
Through influence and allegedly a bribe, it was
secured through the intervention of an influential
ex -patient, Baroness Marie Firstel. She supposedly
had to bribe the Minister of Education with a
valuable painting. It just shows that even for
a thinker of Freud's magnitude, navigating the
Viennese establishment required influence, money,
and power dynamics. In that same year, the movement
formally began with the creation of the Wednesday
Psychological Society. It was formed at the suggestion
of Wilhelm Stuckel, and the original members
were all physicians, including Alfred Adler,
Max Kahan, and Rudolf Reitler. And there's that
vivid description from Max Graf, the father of
the famous Little Hans case study. He described
the atmosphere of these weekly meetings at Freud's
apartment as being less like a medical seminar.
And more like a religious revival. He described
the ritual. A paper presentation, black coffee,
cakes, a ton of cigars and cigarettes. But the
key line was, the last indecisive word was always
spoken by Freud himself. There was the atmosphere
of the foundation of a religion in that room.
A new prophet. That's telling. By 1908, the group
formalized into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
and the first International Psychoanalytic Congress
took place in Salzburg. But the ultimate legitimizing
breakthrough came in 1909, when Freud, with Carl
Jung and Sandor Franci, traveled to America to
Clark University in Massachusetts. He gave five
lectures on psychoanalysis there, and the reception
was just transformative. He got an honorary doctorate
and crucially public endorsement from distinguished
academic figures like James Jackson Putnam, a
Harvard professor. That visit was a massive breakthrough
for the psychoanalytic cause in the United States.
It lent it an air of academic respectability
that was often denied to him back in conservative
Vienna. It was validation on a huge scale. But
movement, which was founded on this idea of theoretical
coherence, it very quickly faced these dramatic
schisms. Freud's personality, his need to be
the authority, his inability to handle major
theoretical dissent. It meant that his brightest
early stars became his greatest rivals. The first
major departure was Alfred Adler, who resigned
in 1911. And the split was fundamentally intellectual.
While Freud was insisting on the centrality of
sexuality and infantile drives, Adler was focused
on social factors, feelings of inferiority, and
the striving for superiority. He shifted the
focus from the internal eider versus ego conflict
to the individual's relationship with society.
And he took nine other members with him. He did.
He formed the Society for Individual Psychology.
It was a massive philosophical divergence. Then
came the most famous split. The one with Carl
Jung. Ah, yes. Their relationship began with
so much promise. Freud saw Jung, a non -Jew and
the director of a major Swiss hospital, as the
perfect person to carry psychoanalysis into the
mainstream. Their bond was initially strong,
but their views just diverged so dramatically.
Jung was moving toward mysticism, the spiritual,
the collective unconscious. While Freud insisted
on a biological materialist foundation rooted
in sexuality. Jung signaled the definitive break
when he published Psychology of the Unconscious
in 1912. He resigned as president of the IPA
in 1914, and the schism was total. It left a
deep wound in Freud. To manage and safeguard
the theoretical coherence against these painful
public splits, Ernest Jones initiated the formation
of the secret committee in 1912. The inner circle,
the loyalists. Yes. It included Jones, Abraham,
Ferenczi, Rank, and Sachs. They all got a golden
signet ring from Freud and pledged not to make
public theoretical departures without talking
about it first. It was designed to be the theoretical
guardian of the analytic movement. But even the
loyalists fractured. Otto Rank was the final
defection from that inner circle after he published
his 1924 book, The Trauma of Birth. Rank's focus
on the trauma of separation at birth as the central
source of anxiety rather than the Oedipus complex
was just too much for the others. They saw it
as abandoning the core tenet of psychoanalysis.
Rank eventually left for the United States, and
that was the end of the initial loyalist unity.
Despite all this constant internal turmoil, the
movement institutionalized rapidly after World
War I. It established this powerful global footprint.
Institutes and clinics, crucially offering free
treatment to the poor, were established everywhere.
Berlin, London, Budapest, Vienna. It showed a
real commitment to social outreach, making the
method accessible. There's also that strange
historical footnote about Russia, isn't there?
Indeed. The Russian Institute briefly got state
support after the Bolshevik revolution until
Stalin, in a move that other totalitarian regimes
would copy, denounced psychoanalysis on ideological
grounds in 1924. One later institutional conflict
that really highlights Freud's... principal position
was the lay analysis debate in the mid -1920s.
This is a battle against the American societies.
They were pushing hard against non -medically
qualified analysts, fearing for professional
standards and litigation. Freud was completely
opposed to this medical exclusivity. Why did
he defend the non -medical analysts so fiercely?
He laid out his case in the question of lay analysis
in 1926. He believed the practice of analysis
was fundamentally psychological, not medical.
He felt that requiring a medical degree would
limit the field's intellectual scope and exclude
gifted practitioners whose training was in philosophy
or history or literature. So he was fighting
for the intellectual independence of the method
over pure medical professionalization. He argued
that analysis needed thinkers, not just doctors.
Eventually, an agreement was reached, allowing
local societies to decide for themselves. But
the debate just showed Freud's fierce concern
for the method's integrity. OK, now we get to
the core of why Freud is still such a topic of
intense discussion today, his colossal legacy.
And we have to start with the thorny, persistent
issue of the scientific status debate. This is
where his theories meet the hardest scrutiny.
The central challenge came from philosophers
of science like Karl Popper, who famously argued
that Freud's psychoanalytic theories were unfalsifiable.
Meaning no conceivable experiment or observation
could ever prove them wrong. So if everything
a patient says, whether they agree or disagree
with an interpretation, can be explained by the
theory. Then the theory is essentially outside
the realm of genuine science. Popper put psychoanalysis
in the same category as astrology in terms of
scientific rigor. But that viewpoint is far from
universal, even among philosophers who critique
Freud. Right. The philosopher Adolf Grunbaum,
for instance, he argued that Freud's theories
could be tested. even if the clinical evidence
Freud himself provided was insufficient. Roger
Scruton made a similar point, pointing specifically
to repression as a theory with testable consequences.
So the debate really hinges on whether the concepts
can be tested or if they're just inherently unscientific
because they rely on subjective reports. And
what's fascinating is the mixed bag of results
you get when you actually try to test the testable
components. Yeah. A major 1996 review by Fisher
and Greenberg tried to systematically look at
the empirical literature. And what did they find?
Selective support. They found strong support
for some of Freud's major concepts, like the
existence of oral and anal personality constellations,
the idea that certain character traits reliably
clustered together based on early developmental
conflicts. They also found evidence supporting
the role of Oedipal factors in male personality.
But that same review contradicted other key Freudian
ideas, like the notion that dreams are primarily
wish fulfillments. So the evidence is selective.
It's not a wholesale rejection or acceptance,
but this complicated partial validation. And
now there's a strong resurgence of interest coming
from the hard sciences, from the emerging field
of neuropsychoanalysis. Founded by neurologist
Mark Solms. This group argues that Freud's 19th
century theoretical map might have actually anticipated
21st century brain imaging. That's a huge aha
moment for anyone listening. How are they connecting
the id, ego, and superego to the physical brain?
Well, Solms and his colleagues argue that modern
neuroscientific findings are broadly consistent
with Freudian concepts. For example, they look
at deep brain structures, the upper brain stem
circuits, which are linked to raw, appetitive,
seeking behavior. Which aligns strikingly well
with Freud's description of the id and the pleasure
principle. Exactly. They also look at how prefrontal
lobe damage impairs the ability to suppress unwanted
emotions, which maps neatly onto the concept
of repression. So when a Nobel laureate like
Eric Kandel argues that psychoanalysis still
represents the most coherent and intellectually
satisfying view of the mind, he's not saying
it's the best therapy, but that it's the best
model for organizing the complex dynamics of
motivation, memory, and emotion. Precisely. It
suggests that while the topographical model might
be neurologically simplified, the dynamic model,
id, Ego, superego drives. It seems to capture
some structural truths about the brain's internal
conflicts. Shifting to philosophy, Freud is almost
mandatory reading. He gets grouped with Marx
and Nietzsche as one of the three masters of
suspicion by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur. A
truly influential designation. They're the masters
of suspicion because they all share this common
ground of unmasking the lies and illusions of
consciousness. They showed us that our conscious
self is not the sole reliable narrator of reality.
Something hidden class struggle, will to power,
the unconscious is really driving the engine.
And this led to such diverse political interpretations.
Psychoanalysis was often seen as inherently conservative
by some intellectuals to focus on adjusting to
society. But it was also embraced by radical
thinkers. Herbert Marcuse, in his hugely influential
book Eros and Civilization, challenged that conservative
view. He argued that Freud and Marx were addressing
similar fundamental questions about societal
repression and the necessity of containing our
primal drives for civilization to even exist.
The Freudian left used his concepts to critique
capitalist structures and social norms. And finally,
we have to look at his provocative and consistent
critique of religion. He certainly didn't give
traditional belief any special status. Not at
all. He viewed the monotheistic God as an illusion,
rooted entirely in the infantile need for protection
from the world, a kind of supernatural paterfamilias.
He saw religion as fulfilling a psychological
consolation function against the fear of death,
nature, and the dangers of civilization. Right.
In The Future of an Illusion from 1927, he argued
that while religion might have been necessary
to restrain humanity's violent nature early on,
modern society had reached a stage where it should
set aside this illusion in favor of reason and
science. And in his anthropological work, he
doubled down on the Oedipal connection. In Totem
and Taboo, he proposed that society and religion
began with this primal patricide, the killing
of the father, and the subsequent institutionalized
reverence for him. And he later analogized this
in his last work, Moses and Monotheism, arguing
that the Roman Catholic rite of Holy Communion
could be seen as cultural evidence of the killing
and devouring of the sacred father figure. He
linked the deepest personal neurosis directly
to the broadest strokes of cultural history.
Moving to the last chapter of his life, we find
Freud facing just immense physical and historical
pressure. He was a prodigious cigar smoker, started
at age 24, believing it enhanced his work capacity.
Despite warnings from colleagues like Wilhelm
Fleiss, this smoking habit tragically led to
buccal cancer -jaw cancer, which he developed
in 1923. He initially tried to keep the lesion
a secret. The sources detail how he consulted
doctors who minimized the severity but urged
him to quit smoking, an order he pretty much
ignored. One of his doctors actually decided
to withhold the truth that the growth was cancerous
because he worried that Freud, already suffering
from severe depression, might attempt suicide
if he knew the diagnosis. So he spent the rest
of his life, over a decade, dealing with this
disease, undergoing a series of operations, his
speech severely impaired by a prosthetic device.
And that physical suffering was compounded by
the growing historical threat. The pressure mounted
dramatically after the Anschluss in March 1938
when the Nazis seized control of Austria. He
had stubbornly underestimated the danger. He
wanted to stay in Vienna, even after his books
were burned in Germany in 1933. And his famous
sardonic response to the book burning just sums
up his view. He said, what progress we are making
in the Middle Ages, they would have burned me.
Now they're content with burning my books. But
the threat stopped being theoretical when his
daughter, Anna Freud, was arrested and interrogated
by the Gestapo on March 22nd, 1938. That experience
finally convinced Freud that he had to seek exile
in Britain immediately. And the escape was a
logistical nightmare. Ernest Jones, the president
of the IPA, he flew in to convince him and then
returned to London to expedite 17 immigration
permits for Freud and his entire family party.
American diplomats also helped, resulting in
regular monitoring of their apartment to ensure
their safety. And the departure was complicated
by massive Nazi financial extortion. He had to
negotiate a Reich flight tax and other huge charges
to leave the country. He couldn't access his
own accounts, so his wealthy French follower,
Princess Marie Bonaparte, provided the funds
to secure the exit visas. And this is where the
story takes this almost unbelievable turn, the
intervention of a highly placed sympathetic Nazi.
Yes. The appointed Nazi commissar tasked with
managing Freud's assets and those of the IPA
was a Dr. Anton Sauerwald. And this man, after
reading Freud's books, the very books he was
supposed to be inventorying for seizure, he became
sympathetic to the cause. That is just astonishing.
He actively helped Freud. He did. Instead of
disclosing Freud's foreign bank accounts to his
superiors, he concealed them. He also stored
the entire IPA library in the Austrian National
Library, actively protecting Freud's intellectual
and personal property. It's one of history's
great acts of quiet intellectual defiance. And
that protection continued even after the war.
Sauerwald was tried by an Austrian court in 1945
for his Nazi activities, but Anna Freud intervened.
She confirmed in a written statement that he
used his office as our appointed commissar in
such a manner as to protect my father, which
helped get him released. So Freud, his wife,
and his daughter Anna finally left Vienna on
the Orient Express on June 4th, 1938. They settled
in Hampstead, London at 20 Mearsfield Gardens.
And despite his advanced illness, he kept seeing
patients and worked on his last books, Moses
and Monotheism and The Uncompleted, an outline
of psychoanalysis. His cancer became inoperable
by mid -September 1939. He was facing torture,
pain that he said makes no sense because of the
constant operations and prosthetics. He reminded
his doctor, Max Schur, of their contract not
to leave him in the lurch. Schur discussed the
situation with Anna. On September 21st and 22nd,
1939, Schur administered high doses of morphine.
And Sigmund Freud died shortly after, on September
23rd, 1939, just as Europe was plunging into
the war he had tried to escape. His ashes were
later placed in an ancient Greek crater, a vessel
painted with Dionysian scenes, a gift from Marie
Bonaparte that he kept in his Vienna study. A
fitting final resting place for a man who spent
his life exploring the primal Dionysian forces
of the unconscious. So we've traced this incredible
contradictory trajectory of Sigmund Freud, from
a neurological researcher hunting for eel gonads
and wildly advocating for cocaine. To pioneering
the talking cure based on dream interpretation
and free association, and ultimately mapping
the internal world with the id, ego, and superego.
And his legacy, as fiercely debated as it is,
it transformed the humanities and it remains
vital. It extends into neo -Freudian therapies,
critical theory, and, surprisingly, is finding
new life in modern neuroscience, which is looking
for physical correlates for concepts like repression
and drives. He just transformed how we talk about
ourselves, even if we never step foot in an analyst's
office. He gave us the language of self -deception
and internal conflict. You know, we noted that
Freud connected the Oedipus complex not just
to individual neurosis, but to anthropology and
culture. He argued that totemism itself reflected...
a tribal -Oedipal conflict, the killing and subsequent
reverence of the father figure. So if the foundational
concepts of our deepest psychological struggles
are, as he suggested, echoed in our most ancient
collective cultural rituals, what universal psychic
laws, beyond just individual experience, might
still be waiting for us to truly discover or
challenge within that vast, enduring continent
of the unconscious? That, I think, is the continuing
unresolved question his life leads us with.