WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.319 Welcome back to the deep dive where we take that 00:00:02.319 --> 00:00:05.860 vast just overwhelming ocean of information and 00:00:05.860 --> 00:00:08.980 distill it down to the pure potent essence you 00:00:08.980 --> 00:00:12.199 really need to know. And today, oh boy, today 00:00:12.199 --> 00:00:14.640 we are strapping ourselves into what is I think 00:00:14.640 --> 00:00:17.760 the world's most famous and arguably most controversial 00:00:17.760 --> 00:00:20.140 piece of furniture. The psychoanalytic couch. 00:00:20.379 --> 00:00:23.199 The psychoanalytic couch, yes. We are doing a 00:00:23.199 --> 00:00:26.929 comprehensive deep dive into the life the work 00:00:26.929 --> 00:00:30.910 and the very contested legacy of Sigmund Freud. 00:00:31.089 --> 00:00:34.909 Born Sigismund Schlemmer Freud in 1856, the Austrian 00:00:34.909 --> 00:00:37.649 neurologist who, well, founded psychoanalysis. 00:00:37.649 --> 00:00:40.049 This is a figure whose influence is so pervasive 00:00:40.049 --> 00:00:41.710 you don't even realize you're speaking his language 00:00:41.710 --> 00:00:43.869 until you really stop and look closely. It's 00:00:43.869 --> 00:00:45.890 true. And the sources we pulled for this, they 00:00:45.890 --> 00:00:48.250 really force us to move past that, you know, 00:00:48.250 --> 00:00:50.049 that pop culture caricature of the pipe smoking 00:00:50.049 --> 00:00:52.270 sage of Vienna. Totally. They paint a picture 00:00:52.270 --> 00:00:54.710 of a man with this intense, almost reckless scientific 00:00:54.710 --> 00:00:58.009 ambition and these dramatic theoretical reversals. 00:00:58.009 --> 00:01:00.710 And I mean, a profound cultural reach. You know, 00:01:00.710 --> 00:01:03.109 the poet W .H. Auden said Freud created a whole 00:01:03.109 --> 00:01:05.349 climate of opinion under whom we conduct our 00:01:05.349 --> 00:01:08.069 different lives. That's just that's not just 00:01:08.069 --> 00:01:10.390 a person. That's like a geological shift in how 00:01:10.390 --> 00:01:12.689 we think. It's the atmosphere we all breathe. 00:01:12.890 --> 00:01:15.829 That phrase, a whole climate of opinion, is so 00:01:15.829 --> 00:01:18.370 spot on. And that's really our mission today, 00:01:18.510 --> 00:01:21.650 to unpack what exactly changed. It wasn't just 00:01:21.650 --> 00:01:25.209 a few new ideas. It was a fundamental shift in 00:01:25.209 --> 00:01:27.329 what we believe about ourselves. Right. We want 00:01:27.329 --> 00:01:29.870 to get to the bottom of how his concepts, things 00:01:29.870 --> 00:01:32.849 like infantile sexuality, the centrality of drives, 00:01:33.250 --> 00:01:36.489 the unconscious, the eyed, ego, superego, how 00:01:36.489 --> 00:01:38.709 they just infiltrated everything, literature, 00:01:38.930 --> 00:01:41.790 film. how we parent, what we even assume about 00:01:41.790 --> 00:01:44.090 human motivation. And crucially, we have to talk 00:01:44.090 --> 00:01:46.730 about the controversy because the same man who 00:01:46.730 --> 00:01:49.069 gave us all these concepts is also accused of, 00:01:49.109 --> 00:01:52.170 well, scientific rigidity, some pretty big theoretical 00:01:52.170 --> 00:01:55.049 missteps and creating a movement that has often 00:01:55.049 --> 00:01:58.400 been described as. frankly, cult -like. Exactly. 00:01:58.400 --> 00:02:00.659 We'll be looking at all of it. The debates around 00:02:00.659 --> 00:02:02.900 the scientific validity of his work, its complicated 00:02:02.900 --> 00:02:05.219 social impact, especially when it comes to feminism, 00:02:05.359 --> 00:02:09.620 and his relentless critique of big institutions 00:02:09.620 --> 00:02:12.219 like religion. So this exploration is really 00:02:12.219 --> 00:02:15.360 designed for you, the listener, who wants a thorough 00:02:15.360 --> 00:02:17.979 but not overwhelming understanding of how Freud 00:02:17.979 --> 00:02:21.240 went from this promising but financially struggling 00:02:21.240 --> 00:02:24.240 neurologist to a figure who basically defined 00:02:24.240 --> 00:02:27.680 the 20th century mind. So if you've ever wondered 00:02:27.680 --> 00:02:29.340 what something like the compulsion to repeat 00:02:29.340 --> 00:02:31.879 has to do with trauma or why on earth he was 00:02:31.879 --> 00:02:34.759 once a huge advocate for cocaine. Dig with us. 00:02:34.900 --> 00:02:37.060 You're in the right place. OK, so let's unpack 00:02:37.060 --> 00:02:39.039 this journey. And we have to start right at the 00:02:39.039 --> 00:02:41.479 beginning. Freud's beginnings were they were 00:02:41.479 --> 00:02:44.180 pretty modest. He was born in Freiburg, Moravia 00:02:44.180 --> 00:02:47.000 in the Austrian Empire. The first of eight children 00:02:47.000 --> 00:02:49.960 born to Galician Jewish parents. And his name 00:02:49.960 --> 00:02:52.939 at birth was Sigismund Schlemel Freud back in 00:02:52.939 --> 00:02:55.919 1856. And there's this wonderful. biographical 00:02:55.919 --> 00:02:58.479 detail I came across, that his mother saw the 00:02:58.479 --> 00:03:01.180 call he was born with as a positive omen, you 00:03:01.180 --> 00:03:03.419 know, a sign of a brilliant future. And that 00:03:03.419 --> 00:03:06.199 background, his Jewish identity, is just absolutely 00:03:06.199 --> 00:03:08.860 critical. Even though he was largely secular, 00:03:09.120 --> 00:03:11.580 it profoundly shaped his intellectual development. 00:03:11.819 --> 00:03:14.659 It fostered a kind of necessary nonconformism. 00:03:14.780 --> 00:03:17.659 An ability to stand outside the Viennese establishment. 00:03:18.000 --> 00:03:20.560 Precisely. Which he credited in his autobiographical 00:03:20.560 --> 00:03:23.189 study. He saw himself as an outsider. And, you 00:03:23.189 --> 00:03:24.949 know, that's often a prerequisite for revolutionary 00:03:24.949 --> 00:03:27.629 thought. And it was an identity he actively kept 00:03:27.629 --> 00:03:31.650 up his whole life. We see later in 1897, he joined 00:03:31.650 --> 00:03:34.330 the German Jewish Cultural Association, B 'nai 00:03:34.330 --> 00:03:37.310 B 'rith. So that suggests a deep commitment to 00:03:37.310 --> 00:03:39.789 that cultural heritage, even if he wasn't, you 00:03:39.789 --> 00:03:41.810 know, religiously observant. And his intellectual 00:03:41.810 --> 00:03:44.520 horsepower was... I mean, it was never in doubt. 00:03:44.680 --> 00:03:46.659 He graduated high school with honors, got into 00:03:46.659 --> 00:03:48.780 the University of Vienna at just 17. Initially 00:03:48.780 --> 00:03:50.979 planning to study law, right. Right, but it was 00:03:50.979 --> 00:03:52.819 pretty quickly drawn into the medical faculty. 00:03:53.099 --> 00:03:55.580 You mentioned intellectual power. The man was 00:03:55.580 --> 00:03:58.159 proficient in seven languages. Seven. German, 00:03:58.180 --> 00:04:02.300 French, Italian, Spanish, English, Hebrew, Latin, 00:04:02.419 --> 00:04:05.240 and Greek. That level of linguistic and classical 00:04:05.240 --> 00:04:08.280 knowledge meant he had access to, well, global 00:04:08.280 --> 00:04:10.580 intellectual history in its original form. A 00:04:10.580 --> 00:04:13.930 true polymath. But his early scientific curiosity 00:04:13.930 --> 00:04:16.389 wasn't pointed toward the human psyche. It was 00:04:16.389 --> 00:04:19.670 pure, hard science biology and neurology. Which 00:04:19.670 --> 00:04:22.110 brings us to probably the most famous and maybe 00:04:22.110 --> 00:04:25.209 the strangest early anecdote about him. The eels. 00:04:25.290 --> 00:04:28.949 The eels of Trieste, yes. In 1876, he spent four 00:04:28.949 --> 00:04:31.620 weeks at a zoological research station. And he 00:04:31.620 --> 00:04:33.819 dissected hundreds of eels in the Gulf of Trieste, 00:04:33.899 --> 00:04:36.720 searching for the male reproductive organs. They 00:04:36.720 --> 00:04:39.240 were notoriously hard to find. Hunting for eel 00:04:39.240 --> 00:04:42.579 gonads. That's a surprising place to start for 00:04:42.579 --> 00:04:44.480 the founder of psychoanalysis. And what did he 00:04:44.480 --> 00:04:46.879 find? Tell me. Nothing conclusive, which must 00:04:46.879 --> 00:04:49.019 have been so frustrating for him. But the anecdote 00:04:49.019 --> 00:04:50.740 isn't really about the result. It's about the 00:04:50.740 --> 00:04:53.500 methodology. It just speaks to his early, intense 00:04:53.500 --> 00:04:57.199 scientific rigor and this deep desire to uncover 00:04:57.199 --> 00:05:00.519 hidden biological truths. and after that he spent 00:05:00.519 --> 00:05:04.199 six years in ernst brooks physiology lab right 00:05:04.199 --> 00:05:06.939 comparing the brains of different species from 00:05:06.939 --> 00:05:09.279 humans all the way to crayfish so he was literally 00:05:09.279 --> 00:05:11.860 doing comparative neurology physically mapping 00:05:11.860 --> 00:05:15.560 out nervous tissue and that work was It was seminal. 00:05:15.579 --> 00:05:18.019 Well, his detailed research on nervous tissue 00:05:18.019 --> 00:05:20.660 was crucial context for the later discovery of 00:05:20.660 --> 00:05:23.399 the neuron in the 1890s. So this early period 00:05:23.399 --> 00:05:26.100 is vital because it establishes that the man 00:05:26.100 --> 00:05:29.240 who created psychoanalysis, a field often slammed 00:05:29.240 --> 00:05:32.319 for lacking scientific rigor, started his career 00:05:32.319 --> 00:05:36.399 with deep empirical neurological training. He 00:05:36.399 --> 00:05:39.300 wanted psychoanalysis to be a science. Exactly. 00:05:39.740 --> 00:05:41.639 because his fundamental training was in the physical 00:05:41.639 --> 00:05:43.980 sciences. So that scientific ambition was real, 00:05:44.079 --> 00:05:47.899 but so was the pressing need to earn a living, 00:05:47.939 --> 00:05:50.480 to support a family. And that's what drove him 00:05:50.480 --> 00:05:52.459 out of the research lab and into clinical practice. 00:05:52.779 --> 00:05:54.779 And this brings us to a period that is, well, 00:05:54.899 --> 00:05:57.860 it's almost unbelievable in retrospect, and one 00:05:57.860 --> 00:05:59.720 of the most controversial moments in his early 00:05:59.720 --> 00:06:01.720 career. The cocaine episode. This is the moment 00:06:01.720 --> 00:06:04.120 where that ambition collided with some very speculative 00:06:04.120 --> 00:06:07.779 clinical practice, and his reputation... got, 00:06:07.779 --> 00:06:10.560 as one source puts it, somewhat tarnished. He 00:06:10.560 --> 00:06:12.740 was specializing in nervous disorders at Vienna 00:06:12.740 --> 00:06:14.879 General Hospital, and he becomes this early, 00:06:14.939 --> 00:06:17.100 really passionate proponent and user of cocaine 00:06:17.100 --> 00:06:20.519 in the mid -1880s. And he didn't just quietly 00:06:20.519 --> 00:06:24.759 use it. He championed it publicly. His 1884 paper 00:06:25.310 --> 00:06:28.569 On Coca, it wasn't some cautious study. It was 00:06:28.569 --> 00:06:31.569 a full -throated, enthusiastic endorsement. Praising 00:06:31.569 --> 00:06:34.569 its virtues as a stimulant, an analgesic, a cure 00:06:34.569 --> 00:06:37.410 for depression, even a remedy for morphine addiction. 00:06:37.810 --> 00:06:40.089 He was completely infatuated with what he saw 00:06:40.089 --> 00:06:42.870 as its potential. A magical drug, he called it. 00:06:42.970 --> 00:06:45.769 He wrote that it gave him exhilaration and lasting 00:06:45.769 --> 00:06:48.029 euphoria. What's so fascinating is that this 00:06:48.029 --> 00:06:51.009 enthusiasm actually caused him to miss a huge... 00:06:51.230 --> 00:06:53.589 professional opportunity. He narrowly missed 00:06:53.589 --> 00:06:55.730 securing scientific priority for discovering 00:06:55.730 --> 00:06:58.290 cocaine's anesthetic properties. How did he miss 00:06:58.290 --> 00:07:00.589 that? He was right there. He was so focused on 00:07:00.589 --> 00:07:02.870 the systemic, you know, the psychoactive properties 00:07:02.870 --> 00:07:05.519 of the drug that he only mentioned the. anesthetic 00:07:05.519 --> 00:07:07.360 possibility and passing. It was like a footnote, 00:07:07.439 --> 00:07:10.360 really. Meanwhile, his colleague, Carl Kaller, 00:07:10.500 --> 00:07:13.839 uses cocaine and eye surgery in 1884 and gets 00:07:13.839 --> 00:07:15.500 all the scientific distinction and the fame that 00:07:15.500 --> 00:07:18.220 came with it. Wow. So if Frui had been a bit 00:07:18.220 --> 00:07:20.720 more cautious or maybe less personally invested 00:07:20.720 --> 00:07:23.199 in it as a cure -all... His whole career trajectory 00:07:23.199 --> 00:07:24.959 might have been completely different. And then, 00:07:24.980 --> 00:07:26.980 of course, that early excitement turned tragic. 00:07:27.259 --> 00:07:29.980 It did. The sources recount the story of his 00:07:29.980 --> 00:07:33.199 close friend, Ernst von Fleischmarxo. He was 00:07:33.199 --> 00:07:35.600 addicted to morphine from... chronic pain, and 00:07:35.600 --> 00:07:37.800 Freud aggressively recommended cocaine to him 00:07:37.800 --> 00:07:40.680 as a cure. And instead? Instead, Fleisch -Marxau 00:07:40.680 --> 00:07:44.000 developed an acute, severe cocaine psychosis. 00:07:44.699 --> 00:07:47.459 He suffered terribly before his death a few years 00:07:47.459 --> 00:07:50.319 later. So Freud's medical judgment caused immense 00:07:50.319 --> 00:07:52.819 suffering to a close friend. What was the fallout 00:07:52.819 --> 00:07:55.920 from that? Well, despite global reports of addiction 00:07:55.920 --> 00:07:58.759 and overdose, the medical community quickly figured 00:07:58.759 --> 00:08:01.370 out the dangers. Freud never publicly admitted 00:08:01.370 --> 00:08:04.449 he was wrong. He never revised his earlier enthusiastic 00:08:04.449 --> 00:08:06.990 claims, although his reputation definitely took 00:08:06.990 --> 00:08:09.009 a hit in Vienna. But he did stop recommending 00:08:09.009 --> 00:08:11.769 it. Publicly, yes. But the record shows he kept 00:08:11.769 --> 00:08:13.569 taking it occasionally for his own migraines 00:08:13.569 --> 00:08:17.230 and depression until about 1896. This whole period 00:08:17.230 --> 00:08:19.470 from the mid -80s to the mid -90s, it really 00:08:19.470 --> 00:08:21.970 highlights a crucial character trait. Freud's 00:08:21.970 --> 00:08:24.269 willingness to aggressively pursue these radical, 00:08:24.529 --> 00:08:27.470 often highly speculative clinical paths, even 00:08:27.470 --> 00:08:29.620 at great personal cost. That's a good way to 00:08:29.620 --> 00:08:32.159 put it. The radical impulse. And that impulse 00:08:32.159 --> 00:08:34.360 didn't just apply to drugs. It apparently applied 00:08:34.360 --> 00:08:37.500 to his personal life as well. Ah, yes. The family 00:08:37.500 --> 00:08:39.700 dynamic. Let's talk about the minute Bernays 00:08:39.700 --> 00:08:43.000 controversy. So his domestic situation was complex. 00:08:43.690 --> 00:08:46.870 He married Martha Bernays in 1886. They had six 00:08:46.870 --> 00:08:49.149 children, including Anna Freud, who would go 00:08:49.149 --> 00:08:50.909 on to become his greatest intellectual heir. 00:08:51.070 --> 00:08:53.409 But the personal life also contains what many 00:08:53.409 --> 00:08:55.909 people see as this major theoretical conflict 00:08:55.909 --> 00:08:58.350 in his own life. The possibility of an affair 00:08:58.350 --> 00:09:00.809 with his sister -in -law, Minna Bernays. Right. 00:09:00.950 --> 00:09:03.149 Minna moved into the Freud household permanently 00:09:03.149 --> 00:09:07.330 after her own fiancé died in 1896. And the evidence 00:09:07.330 --> 00:09:09.669 pointing toward an affair, it surfaced pretty 00:09:09.669 --> 00:09:12.419 controversially. It did. The key piece of initial 00:09:12.419 --> 00:09:15.580 evidence is a Swiss hotel guestbook, an entry 00:09:15.580 --> 00:09:19.299 from 1898, where Dr. Freud and Frau Minna Bernays 00:09:19.299 --> 00:09:21.539 signed in together. Which is circumstantial, 00:09:21.539 --> 00:09:23.960 but... Very suggestive of a trip taken without 00:09:23.960 --> 00:09:26.879 Martha. But the really dramatic evidence, the 00:09:26.879 --> 00:09:29.340 smoking gun, so to speak, didn't come out until 00:09:29.340 --> 00:09:31.840 decades later. And it came from the mouth of 00:09:31.840 --> 00:09:34.220 one of his great rivals, Carl Jung. Correct. 00:09:34.639 --> 00:09:38.100 Jung, who knew both Freud and Minna well, he 00:09:38.100 --> 00:09:41.379 confided to a friend in 1957 years after Freud's 00:09:41.379 --> 00:09:44.139 death that Minna herself had told him about her 00:09:44.139 --> 00:09:46.860 intimate relationship with Freud. That's a critical 00:09:46.860 --> 00:09:49.000 piece of testimony. It suggests that the great 00:09:49.000 --> 00:09:51.559 theorist of repression may have been living out 00:09:51.559 --> 00:09:54.799 this very complex, repressed sexual dynamic right 00:09:54.799 --> 00:09:57.740 under his wife's nose. Echoing the very family 00:09:57.740 --> 00:10:00.019 triangles he was starting to theorize about. 00:10:00.519 --> 00:10:02.240 Just think about the irony there for a second. 00:10:02.360 --> 00:10:05.240 The man who is about to define the Oedipus complex, 00:10:05.360 --> 00:10:08.399 the foundational family drama of Western civilization, 00:10:08.720 --> 00:10:11.500 was potentially running this complicated domestic 00:10:11.500 --> 00:10:14.039 triangle involving his wife, her sister, and 00:10:14.039 --> 00:10:17.879 himself. It just adds this intensely human, contradictory, 00:10:18.399 --> 00:10:21.399 almost novelistic layer to his biography. It 00:10:21.399 --> 00:10:23.639 absolutely does. And we should also briefly touch 00:10:23.639 --> 00:10:25.740 on the philosophical influences that were framing 00:10:25.740 --> 00:10:28.090 his work around this time. Right. He was influenced 00:10:28.090 --> 00:10:30.850 by his philosophy tutor, Franz Brentano, who 00:10:30.850 --> 00:10:32.909 discussed the possible existence of an unconscious 00:10:32.909 --> 00:10:36.149 mind. He also read Darwin extensively. And he 00:10:36.149 --> 00:10:38.409 was influenced by Edward von Hartmann's The Philosophy 00:10:38.409 --> 00:10:40.870 of the Unconscious. But the most curious intellectual 00:10:40.870 --> 00:10:43.929 relationship he had was with Friedrich Nietzsche. 00:10:44.029 --> 00:10:46.370 What's so fascinating there is his deliberate 00:10:46.370 --> 00:10:50.159 resistance to studying Nietzsche. Exactly. Freud 00:10:50.159 --> 00:10:53.059 claimed he was strongly fascinated by Nietzsche's 00:10:53.059 --> 00:10:55.860 writings, but he actively avoided reading them 00:10:55.860 --> 00:10:58.860 closely because he felt the philosopher's intuitive 00:10:58.860 --> 00:11:02.000 insights were just too similar to his own emerging 00:11:02.000 --> 00:11:04.460 theories. He didn't want his originality to be 00:11:04.460 --> 00:11:06.620 questioned. Right. He felt Nietzsche's work was 00:11:06.620 --> 00:11:08.899 this wealth of ideas that was already there. 00:11:09.039 --> 00:11:12.659 He treated Nietzsche's writings as texts to be 00:11:12.659 --> 00:11:15.580 resisted far more than to be studied. That is 00:11:15.580 --> 00:11:18.480 an incredible insight into a man who was so determined 00:11:18.480 --> 00:11:21.059 to establish his own originality, viewing philosophical 00:11:21.059 --> 00:11:24.000 precursors almost as, what, intellectual competitors. 00:11:24.340 --> 00:11:26.379 Competitors who might pollute the purity of his 00:11:26.379 --> 00:11:29.299 scientific discovery. So the definitive shift, 00:11:29.399 --> 00:11:32.120 then. From a rigorous but struggling neurologist 00:11:32.120 --> 00:11:34.620 to a pioneer of psychopathology, that really 00:11:34.620 --> 00:11:38.019 began in Paris in 1885. It did. Freud went on 00:11:38.019 --> 00:11:39.879 a three -month fellowship to study with Jean 00:11:39.879 --> 00:11:42.000 -Martin Charcot, the renowned neurologist at 00:11:42.000 --> 00:11:44.539 the Salvatrier Hospital. Charcot was researching 00:11:44.539 --> 00:11:47.289 hysteria and experimenting with hypnosis. And 00:11:47.289 --> 00:11:49.529 Freud later called that experience catalytic, 00:11:49.629 --> 00:11:52.409 didn't he? He recognized that Charcot's work 00:11:52.409 --> 00:11:55.169 showing that symptoms could be induced and relieved 00:11:55.169 --> 00:11:58.269 by psychological means, by hypnosis, was what 00:11:58.269 --> 00:12:00.570 turned him away from less financially promising 00:12:00.570 --> 00:12:03.110 research and toward medical psychopathology. 00:12:03.250 --> 00:12:05.210 Charcot was known for these dramatic clinical 00:12:05.210 --> 00:12:08.190 demonstrations. He'd often show the susceptibility 00:12:08.190 --> 00:12:11.210 of his mostly female patients to suggestion under 00:12:11.210 --> 00:12:13.909 hypnosis. And when Freud returned to Vienna and 00:12:13.909 --> 00:12:16.629 went into private practice, he adopted the technique 00:12:16.629 --> 00:12:19.129 of his friend and collaborator, Josef Breuer, 00:12:19.269 --> 00:12:21.970 who used a less suggestive form of hypnosis. 00:12:22.210 --> 00:12:24.409 And this leads us to the pivotal case, the one 00:12:24.409 --> 00:12:26.570 that gave the technique its famous name. The 00:12:26.570 --> 00:12:29.169 treatment of Anna O., whose real name was Bertha 00:12:29.169 --> 00:12:31.450 Pappenheim. Right. She became famous because 00:12:31.450 --> 00:12:33.850 she was the one who coined the term talking cure. 00:12:34.110 --> 00:12:36.679 Exactly. Breuer found that when she talked about 00:12:36.679 --> 00:12:38.960 her symptoms under hypnosis, and she managed 00:12:38.960 --> 00:12:41.419 to retrieve memories of traumatic incidents connected 00:12:41.419 --> 00:12:44.360 to their onset, the symptoms, things like paralysis 00:12:44.360 --> 00:12:47.299 or chronic cough, they would actually lessen 00:12:47.299 --> 00:12:49.559 in severity. So that established the fundamental 00:12:49.559 --> 00:12:52.519 idea. Neurosis stems from suppressed memories. 00:12:52.860 --> 00:12:56.419 But the claim of a cure for Anna O. has been 00:12:56.419 --> 00:12:58.639 really heavily contested, right? Oh, it's a messy 00:12:58.639 --> 00:13:01.620 picture. Breuer claimed a cure. He said the treatment 00:13:01.620 --> 00:13:04.759 ended with all her symptoms disappearing. But 00:13:04.759 --> 00:13:07.120 later authors just tore that apart. They pointed 00:13:07.120 --> 00:13:09.299 out that Pappenheim spent three subsequent short 00:13:09.299 --> 00:13:12.320 periods in sanatoria diagnosed with persistent 00:13:12.320 --> 00:13:16.200 hysteria with somatic symptoms. So she was reportedly 00:13:16.200 --> 00:13:18.120 still suffering when she left Breuer's care. 00:13:18.320 --> 00:13:20.960 So even the foundational success story of the 00:13:20.960 --> 00:13:24.320 talking cure is built on contested ground. That's 00:13:24.320 --> 00:13:27.600 fascinating. It speaks to the retrospective construction 00:13:27.600 --> 00:13:30.059 of the history of the movement. Totally. Though 00:13:30.059 --> 00:13:32.759 some scholars do defend Breuer's original account. 00:13:32.940 --> 00:13:35.259 But the main point for our deep dive is that 00:13:35.259 --> 00:13:37.399 regardless of the patient's ultimate outcome, 00:13:37.639 --> 00:13:40.279 the method was established. Symptoms are meaningful, 00:13:40.580 --> 00:13:42.779 they're psychological, and they can be relieved 00:13:42.779 --> 00:13:45.149 through talking. Yep. Freud didn't stick with 00:13:45.149 --> 00:13:47.629 hypnosis. Why did he abandon it? The results 00:13:47.629 --> 00:13:49.850 were just too inconsistent. Not all patients 00:13:49.850 --> 00:13:51.970 could be easily hypnotized. And even when they 00:13:51.970 --> 00:13:54.389 were, the relief was often just temporary. So 00:13:54.389 --> 00:13:58.450 this forced the truly innovative step. Yes. Freud 00:13:58.450 --> 00:14:01.450 switched to free association. He encouraged patients 00:14:01.450 --> 00:14:04.090 to talk freely without any censorship or inhibition 00:14:04.090 --> 00:14:06.850 about whatever came to mind. The idea was that 00:14:06.850 --> 00:14:09.490 this seemingly random chatter would follow these 00:14:09.490 --> 00:14:12.529 lines of association straight back to the repressed 00:14:12.529 --> 00:14:15.840 core memory. And by 1896, this combination of 00:14:15.840 --> 00:14:18.200 clinical method and the theories he was deriving 00:14:18.200 --> 00:14:21.159 from it, using free association and dream analysis 00:14:21.159 --> 00:14:24.299 to reveal this complex structuring of unconscious 00:14:24.299 --> 00:14:27.919 material, it finally earned its own name. Psychoanalysis. 00:14:28.100 --> 00:14:30.639 And this whole process wasn't just detached scientific 00:14:30.639 --> 00:14:33.179 research for him. It was developed during an 00:14:33.179 --> 00:14:36.320 extremely intense internal period. His father 00:14:36.320 --> 00:14:39.700 died in 1896, which spurred his famous self -analysis. 00:14:39.899 --> 00:14:41.840 Right, using his own dreams and childhood memories. 00:14:42.759 --> 00:14:44.679 time he was having physical symptoms like heart 00:14:44.679 --> 00:14:47.419 irregularities and deep depression a neurasthenia 00:14:47.419 --> 00:14:50.200 as they called it then this self -analysis applying 00:14:50.200 --> 00:14:52.320 the method to himself it brings us to the most 00:14:52.320 --> 00:14:55.519 critical the most seismic shift in early psychoanalysis 00:14:55.519 --> 00:14:59.139 the seduction theory reversal so Initially, based 00:14:59.139 --> 00:15:01.360 on his early clinical work where he was using 00:15:01.360 --> 00:15:04.240 what we'd now consider suggestive pressure techniques 00:15:04.240 --> 00:15:07.620 to coax out forgotten memories. He theorized 00:15:07.620 --> 00:15:10.860 that all psychoneuroses hysteria, obsessional 00:15:10.860 --> 00:15:13.620 neurosis, were rooted in unconscious memories 00:15:13.620 --> 00:15:16.159 of real sexual molestation in early childhood. 00:15:16.299 --> 00:15:18.639 That was the seduction theory. And he was so 00:15:18.639 --> 00:15:21.159 confident in this. I mean, recklessly confident. 00:15:21.259 --> 00:15:24.379 He claimed 100 % confirmation of his theory. 00:15:24.580 --> 00:15:27.240 He did. But there were problems. His colleagues 00:15:27.240 --> 00:15:29.460 were expressing reservations, pointing out how 00:15:29.460 --> 00:15:31.960 suggestive his methods were. And Freud himself 00:15:31.960 --> 00:15:33.700 noticed that many of his patients, they were 00:15:33.700 --> 00:15:35.740 often unconvinced that the scenes they described 00:15:35.740 --> 00:15:38.240 under pressure were actual factual memories. 00:15:38.500 --> 00:15:40.299 They felt like fantasies. They felt like fantasies. 00:15:40.360 --> 00:15:42.700 So he was facing this professional crisis. Either 00:15:42.700 --> 00:15:45.759 he stands by his 100 % confirmed theory and basically 00:15:45.759 --> 00:15:47.820 implies that sexual abuse was literally universal 00:15:47.820 --> 00:15:50.539 in Viennese society. Or he admits his foundational 00:15:50.539 --> 00:15:52.860 theory was based on flawed evidence. What pushed 00:15:52.860 --> 00:15:55.080 him to reverse it? It was the self -analysis. 00:15:55.549 --> 00:15:58.190 particularly his exploration of his own feelings 00:15:58.190 --> 00:16:00.590 of hostility toward his dead father and jealousy 00:16:00.590 --> 00:16:03.110 toward his mother, feelings that were clearly 00:16:03.110 --> 00:16:05.990 not based on real abuse but on powerful wishes 00:16:05.990 --> 00:16:08.710 and fantasies. So he realized that the internal 00:16:08.710 --> 00:16:11.610 psychic reality was far more potent than the 00:16:11.610 --> 00:16:14.269 external biographical one, at least in forming 00:16:14.269 --> 00:16:16.470 neuroses. And that is a massive intellectual 00:16:16.470 --> 00:16:19.710 pivot. He replaced the idea of universal real 00:16:19.710 --> 00:16:22.929 abuse with the idea that infantile sexual scenarios, 00:16:23.250 --> 00:16:25.710 whether they were real or imagined, they only 00:16:25.710 --> 00:16:27.950 became pathogenic when they were acting as repressed 00:16:27.950 --> 00:16:30.009 memories. So the power came from the repression 00:16:30.009 --> 00:16:32.350 and the psychic reality, not necessarily the 00:16:32.350 --> 00:16:34.799 external fact. And that distinction. the move 00:16:34.799 --> 00:16:37.220 from external reality to internal subjective 00:16:37.220 --> 00:16:39.940 psychic reality. That's the foundation of modern 00:16:39.940 --> 00:16:42.500 psychoanalytic thought. It was so dramatic that 00:16:42.500 --> 00:16:45.100 he later admitted it in a 1924 addendum to one 00:16:45.100 --> 00:16:48.360 of his papers. He said, I had not yet freed myself 00:16:48.360 --> 00:16:51.340 from my overvaluation of reality and my low valuation 00:16:51.340 --> 00:16:53.899 of fantasy. Wow, that's a huge admission for 00:16:53.899 --> 00:16:56.440 a scientist. He realized he had prioritized documented 00:16:56.440 --> 00:16:59.019 observable events over the invisible emotional 00:16:59.019 --> 00:17:01.840 power of our inner lives. But you can imagine 00:17:01.840 --> 00:17:05.579 the outcry. The reversal alienated a lot of early 00:17:05.579 --> 00:17:08.099 colleagues and critics. They saw it as him just 00:17:08.099 --> 00:17:11.119 dodging the social reality of child sexual abuse. 00:17:11.259 --> 00:17:13.779 But for Freud, this transition was necessary. 00:17:14.569 --> 00:17:16.609 It was. It laid the groundwork for the theory 00:17:16.609 --> 00:17:19.329 that presupposed autonomous infantile sexuality. 00:17:19.710 --> 00:17:21.650 The kids have their own sexual life, their own 00:17:21.650 --> 00:17:24.250 internal dramas, and that allowed him to formulate 00:17:24.250 --> 00:17:26.950 the Oedipus Complex. Without the seduction theory 00:17:26.950 --> 00:17:30.170 reversal, psychoanalysis as we know it just couldn't 00:17:30.170 --> 00:17:32.529 exist. He would have been stuck on the external 00:17:32.529 --> 00:17:36.069 event, not the internal desire. So with the talking 00:17:36.069 --> 00:17:38.430 cure established and the centrality of fantasy 00:17:38.430 --> 00:17:41.269 confirmed, Freud then turns his attention to, 00:17:41.349 --> 00:17:44.910 well, truly mapping the interior world. And the 00:17:44.910 --> 00:17:46.809 starting point for all of this is, of course, 00:17:46.890 --> 00:17:49.049 the unconscious. The unconscious, which, you 00:17:49.049 --> 00:17:50.670 know, Freud openly admitted was already well 00:17:50.670 --> 00:17:53.230 known among poets and philosophers. But he was 00:17:53.230 --> 00:17:54.950 the one who wanted to establish scientific recognition 00:17:54.950 --> 00:17:57.309 for it. And he defined it based on the theory 00:17:57.309 --> 00:17:59.710 of repression. Right. And he distinguished between 00:17:59.710 --> 00:18:02.490 two types. First, you have primary repression. 00:18:02.890 --> 00:18:05.450 which he saw as innate and linked to the universal 00:18:05.450 --> 00:18:08.609 incest taboo. It's the foundational built -in 00:18:08.609 --> 00:18:11.369 repression you need for society to even function. 00:18:11.589 --> 00:18:15.210 And the second type. Acquired repression. That's 00:18:15.210 --> 00:18:17.089 where something that was once conscious gets 00:18:17.089 --> 00:18:19.730 rejected from awareness, forced back into the 00:18:19.730 --> 00:18:22.029 unconscious, and that's what often creates symptoms. 00:18:22.250 --> 00:18:24.309 He used these three different perspectives to 00:18:24.309 --> 00:18:26.190 describe the mental process, which he called 00:18:26.190 --> 00:18:28.500 the topographies. Let's start with the first 00:18:28.500 --> 00:18:31.420 one, from around 1915, the topographical model. 00:18:31.680 --> 00:18:33.539 Okay, so the first topography structured the 00:18:33.539 --> 00:18:36.420 psyche into three systems. First, the system 00:18:36.420 --> 00:18:39.099 ux, the unconscious. This is governed by the 00:18:39.099 --> 00:18:40.740 pleasure principle, which aims for immediate 00:18:40.740 --> 00:18:43.240 gratification, and it functions through primary 00:18:43.240 --> 00:18:45.740 process mentation. Okay, let's slow down on that 00:18:45.740 --> 00:18:48.819 jargon. Primary process mentation. What exactly 00:18:48.819 --> 00:18:51.059 does that mean? How is it different from how 00:18:51.059 --> 00:18:53.160 we think when we're conscious? Great question. 00:18:53.579 --> 00:18:56.130 Primary process thought is a logical... It's 00:18:56.130 --> 00:18:58.670 timeless. And it's dominated by wish fulfillment. 00:18:59.150 --> 00:19:01.769 It's basically how dreams work. In the unconscious, 00:19:02.150 --> 00:19:05.430 there is no no. Two contradictory ideas can exist 00:19:05.430 --> 00:19:08.009 at the same time. And it's timeless. Timeless. 00:19:08.150 --> 00:19:10.690 Conscious memory follows a timeline. But in the 00:19:10.690 --> 00:19:13.309 unconscious, everything is present, past, present, 00:19:13.410 --> 00:19:16.029 future, all at once. And it's characterized by 00:19:16.029 --> 00:19:18.869 what he called the mobility of cathexes. Okay, 00:19:18.950 --> 00:19:21.210 cathexes. If I'm thinking about psychic energy 00:19:21.210 --> 00:19:23.869 or mental energy, is this just how the mind invests 00:19:23.869 --> 00:19:26.150 emotional energy in certain ideas or objects? 00:19:26.450 --> 00:19:29.190 Precisely. A cathexis is the investment of libidinal 00:19:29.190 --> 00:19:32.880 energy into an object, a person, an idea. In 00:19:32.880 --> 00:19:35.099 the unconscious, these cathexes are super mobile. 00:19:35.279 --> 00:19:37.480 They can easily shift from one idea to another 00:19:37.480 --> 00:19:40.079 through processes like condensation -like combining 00:19:40.079 --> 00:19:42.720 multiple ideas into one dream image or displacement, 00:19:43.019 --> 00:19:45.039 shifting emotional intensity from a threatening 00:19:45.039 --> 00:19:47.259 idea to a safer one. It makes the unconscious 00:19:47.259 --> 00:19:50.039 sound like this high -speed emotional logic computer 00:19:50.039 --> 00:19:53.240 that follows no rules. It kind of is. Now, the 00:19:53.240 --> 00:19:55.579 second system is the system PCs, the preconscious. 00:19:56.190 --> 00:19:58.549 This is the intermediate space. It's where unconscious 00:19:58.549 --> 00:20:01.529 thing presentations become bound by language 00:20:01.529 --> 00:20:04.430 or word presentations. It's the staging area 00:20:04.430 --> 00:20:06.430 for material that isn't currently conscious but 00:20:06.430 --> 00:20:09.130 can be recalled. And the third is the system 00:20:09.130 --> 00:20:12.349 scenes the conscious. The familiar world of logic, 00:20:12.390 --> 00:20:14.910 planning, and delayed gratification governed 00:20:14.910 --> 00:20:17.650 by the rational reality principle. But he realized 00:20:17.650 --> 00:20:20.269 this model had its limits. It couldn't really 00:20:20.269 --> 00:20:22.349 account for the unconscious moral sensor that 00:20:22.349 --> 00:20:25.049 causes guilt. which must also be partly unconscious. 00:20:25.549 --> 00:20:29.750 So later on, in The Ego and The Id in 1923, he 00:20:29.750 --> 00:20:31.890 introduced the second topography. The famous 00:20:31.890 --> 00:20:35.589 one. The tripartite model. Id, ego, and superego. 00:20:35.730 --> 00:20:38.109 The iceberg. That's the one. Let's define them, 00:20:38.130 --> 00:20:40.069 because they're everywhere in our culture. The 00:20:40.069 --> 00:20:44.390 id is the pure, primal reservoir of instincts 00:20:44.390 --> 00:20:46.869 and drives. It operates entirely on the pleasure 00:20:46.869 --> 00:20:49.650 principle, seeking immediate gratification. It's 00:20:49.650 --> 00:20:52.210 the unbridled force. And its opposite force is 00:20:52.210 --> 00:20:54.829 the superego. The superego is the moral component. 00:20:55.130 --> 00:20:58.309 It's our internal policeman, embodying the ideals 00:20:58.309 --> 00:21:00.329 and prohibitions we absorb from our parents and 00:21:00.329 --> 00:21:03.430 society. And it is often unconsciously very, 00:21:03.549 --> 00:21:06.130 very harsh. And stuck between them is the ego, 00:21:06.329 --> 00:21:09.970 the rational manager. The ego's entire job is 00:21:09.970 --> 00:21:12.690 to try and find a workable balance between the 00:21:12.690 --> 00:21:15.369 impractical hedonism of the id, which wants everything 00:21:15.369 --> 00:21:18.430 now, and the equally impractical moralism of 00:21:18.430 --> 00:21:22.200 the superego, which wants total perfection. The 00:21:22.200 --> 00:21:24.220 ego is the part that deals with external reality, 00:21:24.420 --> 00:21:27.119 using the reality principle. I found the analogy 00:21:27.119 --> 00:21:29.460 he used for the ego -ed relationship so powerful. 00:21:29.720 --> 00:21:32.099 He compared it to a charioteer trying to control 00:21:32.099 --> 00:21:34.920 powerful horses. Right. The horses are the raw 00:21:34.920 --> 00:21:37.579 energy and drive the id, and the charioteer is 00:21:37.579 --> 00:21:40.099 the ego, just trying to provide direction. Which 00:21:40.099 --> 00:21:42.720 implies the id is the true source of power. It 00:21:42.720 --> 00:21:45.140 absolutely is. The id is the engine room, the 00:21:45.140 --> 00:21:48.079 source of all psychic energy. The ego only borrows 00:21:48.079 --> 00:21:50.250 its power from the id. If those horses decide 00:21:50.250 --> 00:21:53.130 to bolt, the charioteer can try to steer. But 00:21:53.130 --> 00:21:55.509 ultimately, the raw force is in the aid. The 00:21:55.509 --> 00:21:57.349 ego isn't stronger. It's just the coordinating 00:21:57.349 --> 00:22:00.130 directing part. And when the ego gets overwhelmed 00:22:00.130 --> 00:22:03.809 by the conflict, it uses the famous defense mechanisms. 00:22:04.150 --> 00:22:08.049 Denial, repression, rationalization, all to manage 00:22:08.049 --> 00:22:10.509 anxiety. Now let's get into those primal forces, 00:22:10.769 --> 00:22:13.549 the drives that are in the aid. Freud believed 00:22:13.549 --> 00:22:16.269 the human psyche is subject to two constantly 00:22:16.269 --> 00:22:20.450 conflicting forces. The life drive. Eros or libido. 00:22:20.710 --> 00:22:23.809 And the death drive, thanatos. The life drive 00:22:23.809 --> 00:22:26.410 is pretty easy to grasp, I think. It's the sexualized 00:22:26.410 --> 00:22:29.170 energy, libido, that generates erotic attachments, 00:22:29.430 --> 00:22:31.910 aims to bind things together, maintain life, 00:22:32.170 --> 00:22:35.049 reproduce. But the death drive or thanatos, that's 00:22:35.049 --> 00:22:37.210 the concept that really throws people. It was 00:22:37.210 --> 00:22:39.769 a term introduced by Paul Federn, but Freud inferred 00:22:39.769 --> 00:22:41.690 its existence in Beyond the Pleasure Principle 00:22:41.690 --> 00:22:43.990 in 1920. What is it exactly? It's the source 00:22:43.990 --> 00:22:46.720 of compulsive repetition, aggression. hatred 00:22:46.720 --> 00:22:49.319 and neurotic guilt he inferred it by observing 00:22:49.319 --> 00:22:52.019 a seemingly contradictory behavior the compulsion 00:22:52.019 --> 00:22:54.740 to repeat okay explain that paradox if the mind 00:22:54.740 --> 00:22:57.839 wants pleasure and avoids pain why would it compulsively 00:22:57.839 --> 00:23:00.700 repeat earlier often traumatic impressions that 00:23:00.700 --> 00:23:02.839 seems to go against the pleasure principle freud 00:23:02.839 --> 00:23:05.140 saw this dramatically in the dreams of traumatic 00:23:05.140 --> 00:23:07.619 neurotics they would repeatedly dream of the 00:23:07.619 --> 00:23:10.380 traumatic event not some wish fulfillment fantasy 00:23:10.920 --> 00:23:13.299 He also saw it in children's repetitive play, 00:23:13.460 --> 00:23:16.180 a child repeatedly throwing and retrieving a 00:23:16.180 --> 00:23:19.559 toy, the famous Forta game. And he theorized 00:23:19.559 --> 00:23:22.380 that this repetition was an effort to work over 00:23:22.380 --> 00:23:25.079 and master earlier impressions that were initially 00:23:25.079 --> 00:23:28.140 too overwhelming. Yes, repetition as an attempt 00:23:28.140 --> 00:23:31.460 at mastery. But taking to its extreme, it reveals 00:23:31.460 --> 00:23:33.920 this fundamental psychic tendency to restore 00:23:33.920 --> 00:23:36.539 the original state of non -existence, a zero 00:23:36.539 --> 00:23:39.539 -tension state, death. It's the tendency toward 00:23:39.539 --> 00:23:42.700 the extinction of energy, a move backward. Exactly. 00:23:42.819 --> 00:23:45.299 And this drive, when you turn it outward, results 00:23:45.299 --> 00:23:47.880 in aggression. When you turn it inward, it results 00:23:47.880 --> 00:23:50.019 in guilt or self -destructive behavior. And the 00:23:50.019 --> 00:23:52.019 foundation for all this interior mapping is the 00:23:52.019 --> 00:23:54.519 concept of psychosexual development. He proposed 00:23:54.519 --> 00:23:57.200 that infantile sexuality starts in a state he 00:23:57.200 --> 00:24:00.240 called polymorphous perversity. Meaning, the 00:24:00.240 --> 00:24:02.359 infant's body can get pleasure from any zone. 00:24:03.240 --> 00:24:06.400 This generalized sexuality then progresses through 00:24:06.400 --> 00:24:09.119 distinct developmental phases, each defined by 00:24:09.119 --> 00:24:11.980 the dominant erogenous zone, the oral, anal, 00:24:12.119 --> 00:24:14.579 and phallic stages. And these phases are critical 00:24:14.579 --> 00:24:17.259 because if you get fixated or regress to one 00:24:17.259 --> 00:24:19.380 of them, that's supposedly what explains neurosis 00:24:19.380 --> 00:24:21.599 or perversion later in life, right? Absolutely. 00:24:21.619 --> 00:24:24.079 If a child gets stuck at the oral stage, you 00:24:24.079 --> 00:24:26.420 might see excessive eating or smoking later. 00:24:26.740 --> 00:24:29.059 Stuck at the anal stage, you might see excessive 00:24:29.059 --> 00:24:32.670 orderliness or miserliness. These phases eventually 00:24:32.670 --> 00:24:35.809 lead to a latency stage, a quiet period before 00:24:35.809 --> 00:24:38.710 adult genital sexuality emerges. And the whole 00:24:38.710 --> 00:24:40.549 system, as you said earlier, it all hangs on 00:24:40.549 --> 00:24:43.069 the Oedipus complex. Freud called it the central 00:24:43.069 --> 00:24:45.849 tenet of psychoanalytic theory. He did. But given 00:24:45.849 --> 00:24:48.210 the immense modern backlash over his views on 00:24:48.210 --> 00:24:50.190 gender and sexuality, how could he possibly call 00:24:50.190 --> 00:24:52.849 a concept rooted in castration fears the central 00:24:52.849 --> 00:24:55.470 tenet? Did he not see how fragile that was, theoretically? 00:24:55.930 --> 00:24:58.329 For him, it was the necessary bridge between 00:24:58.329 --> 00:25:01.309 nature and culture. The Oedipus Complex wasn't 00:25:01.309 --> 00:25:03.849 just about a kid wanting a parent. It was the 00:25:03.849 --> 00:25:06.589 mechanism that forces the child into the social 00:25:06.589 --> 00:25:09.930 world. The normal path involves the child renouncing 00:25:09.930 --> 00:25:13.009 their incestuous desires toward the primary parental 00:25:13.009 --> 00:25:15.450 figure. And that renunciation is precipitated 00:25:15.450 --> 00:25:18.750 by the fantasized threat or the fact of castration. 00:25:18.930 --> 00:25:21.410 Which is what forms the superego, the moral structure. 00:25:21.750 --> 00:25:24.690 The complex forces the child to identify with 00:25:24.690 --> 00:25:27.190 the same -sex parent and internalize the rules 00:25:27.190 --> 00:25:30.140 of society. If you don't navigate this successfully, 00:25:30.400 --> 00:25:33.279 you're left with neurosis. He saw it as universal. 00:25:33.619 --> 00:25:35.700 Okay, let's dive deeper into one of the most 00:25:35.700 --> 00:25:38.079 contentious parts of his theory. His writings 00:25:38.079 --> 00:25:40.740 on gender and sexuality. He famously called it 00:25:40.740 --> 00:25:43.160 the dark continent. It was a dark continent because 00:25:43.160 --> 00:25:45.059 he really struggled to explain female development 00:25:45.059 --> 00:25:47.619 using the same phallocentric framework he built 00:25:47.619 --> 00:25:50.099 for male development. His account of femininity 00:25:50.099 --> 00:25:52.480 is entirely based on the different paths taken 00:25:52.480 --> 00:25:55.440 as a result of the castration complex. So how 00:25:55.440 --> 00:25:57.759 does it differ for a girl in his theory? For 00:25:57.759 --> 00:26:00.559 the boy, the realization of castration ends the 00:26:00.559 --> 00:26:03.640 Oedipal phase. It drives him to repress incestuous 00:26:03.640 --> 00:26:07.119 desire out of fear. For the girl, the fact of 00:26:07.119 --> 00:26:10.059 anatomical difference, the lack of a penis, is 00:26:10.059 --> 00:26:12.779 what starts the Oedipal phase. The girl moves 00:26:12.779 --> 00:26:14.880 from an attachment to her mother to her father 00:26:14.880 --> 00:26:17.680 because of this sense of deprivation. Which results 00:26:17.680 --> 00:26:21.460 in penis envy. Yes. The girl experiences this 00:26:21.460 --> 00:26:23.460 sense of deprivation, which leads to penis envy. 00:26:23.900 --> 00:26:26.319 And that concept doesn't just mean wanting the 00:26:26.319 --> 00:26:29.599 physical organ, but desiring the power and privileges 00:26:29.599 --> 00:26:32.119 that came with masculinity in that culture. And 00:26:32.119 --> 00:26:35.680 he linked this to women being more prone to neurosis 00:26:35.680 --> 00:26:38.640 and hysteria. He did, which sounds intensely 00:26:38.640 --> 00:26:40.920 biologically deterministic and culturally limited 00:26:40.920 --> 00:26:43.380 now. And the critique was immediate, even from 00:26:43.380 --> 00:26:45.279 within his own movement. Early followers like 00:26:45.279 --> 00:26:47.779 Karen Horney rejected penis envy outright, didn't 00:26:47.779 --> 00:26:50.519 they? They did. She argued that Freud's structure 00:26:50.519 --> 00:26:52.660 just failed to account for a primary femininity 00:26:52.660 --> 00:26:54.980 that exists on its own terms, not in reference 00:26:54.980 --> 00:26:57.980 to a male standard. Ernest Jones, a loyalist, 00:26:58.039 --> 00:27:00.460 even coined the term phallocentrism to criticize 00:27:00.460 --> 00:27:02.680 the fundamental bias in Freud's position. And 00:27:02.680 --> 00:27:05.200 what was Freud's response to all this internal 00:27:05.200 --> 00:27:08.220 dissent? He basically held firm. He maintained 00:27:08.220 --> 00:27:11.420 a steadfast objection to critics who he felt 00:27:11.420 --> 00:27:14.279 failed to distinguish more clearly between what 00:27:14.279 --> 00:27:17.299 is psychic and what is biological. He insisted 00:27:17.299 --> 00:27:19.799 on the validity of his findings, arguing that 00:27:19.799 --> 00:27:24.420 the social reality phallocentrism mirrored the 00:27:24.420 --> 00:27:26.799 psychic reality penis envy, whether people like 00:27:26.799 --> 00:27:29.700 it or not. So he held firm to the idea that anatomical 00:27:29.700 --> 00:27:32.140 difference created a different psychic path. 00:27:32.519 --> 00:27:34.519 Which remains one of the most controversial elements 00:27:34.519 --> 00:27:36.680 of his entire body of work. Right. Moving from 00:27:36.680 --> 00:27:39.240 the internal world of theory to the external 00:27:39.240 --> 00:27:42.160 world of building a movement, Freud's push for 00:27:42.160 --> 00:27:46.140 recognition was just relentless. By 1902, he 00:27:46.140 --> 00:27:48.789 finally got his longstanding ambition. He was 00:27:48.789 --> 00:27:51.490 made a university professor. Professor Extraordinaries. 00:27:51.490 --> 00:27:53.349 And this wasn't purely on merit, which is a great 00:27:53.349 --> 00:27:55.190 anecdote about the reality of his life in Vienna. 00:27:55.309 --> 00:27:57.250 The sources note his appointment had been blocked 00:27:57.250 --> 00:27:59.670 for years by political authorities. Mostly due 00:27:59.670 --> 00:28:02.049 to latent anti -Semitism and his controversial 00:28:02.049 --> 00:28:05.009 theories. Right. And how was it finally secured? 00:28:05.569 --> 00:28:09.450 Through influence and allegedly a bribe, it was 00:28:09.450 --> 00:28:11.450 secured through the intervention of an influential 00:28:11.450 --> 00:28:15.430 ex -patient, Baroness Marie Firstel. She supposedly 00:28:15.430 --> 00:28:17.970 had to bribe the Minister of Education with a 00:28:17.970 --> 00:28:20.809 valuable painting. It just shows that even for 00:28:20.809 --> 00:28:23.869 a thinker of Freud's magnitude, navigating the 00:28:23.869 --> 00:28:26.630 Viennese establishment required influence, money, 00:28:26.789 --> 00:28:29.750 and power dynamics. In that same year, the movement 00:28:29.750 --> 00:28:31.829 formally began with the creation of the Wednesday 00:28:31.829 --> 00:28:34.849 Psychological Society. It was formed at the suggestion 00:28:34.849 --> 00:28:37.170 of Wilhelm Stuckel, and the original members 00:28:37.170 --> 00:28:39.609 were all physicians, including Alfred Adler, 00:28:39.710 --> 00:28:42.589 Max Kahan, and Rudolf Reitler. And there's that 00:28:42.589 --> 00:28:45.329 vivid description from Max Graf, the father of 00:28:45.329 --> 00:28:47.789 the famous Little Hans case study. He described 00:28:47.789 --> 00:28:50.029 the atmosphere of these weekly meetings at Freud's 00:28:50.029 --> 00:28:52.130 apartment as being less like a medical seminar. 00:28:52.349 --> 00:28:54.390 And more like a religious revival. He described 00:28:54.390 --> 00:28:57.369 the ritual. A paper presentation, black coffee, 00:28:57.450 --> 00:29:00.089 cakes, a ton of cigars and cigarettes. But the 00:29:00.089 --> 00:29:02.890 key line was, the last indecisive word was always 00:29:02.890 --> 00:29:05.569 spoken by Freud himself. There was the atmosphere 00:29:05.569 --> 00:29:07.710 of the foundation of a religion in that room. 00:29:07.890 --> 00:29:11.359 A new prophet. That's telling. By 1908, the group 00:29:11.359 --> 00:29:13.900 formalized into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society 00:29:13.900 --> 00:29:16.519 and the first International Psychoanalytic Congress 00:29:16.519 --> 00:29:20.000 took place in Salzburg. But the ultimate legitimizing 00:29:20.000 --> 00:29:23.980 breakthrough came in 1909, when Freud, with Carl 00:29:23.980 --> 00:29:27.359 Jung and Sandor Franci, traveled to America to 00:29:27.359 --> 00:29:29.890 Clark University in Massachusetts. He gave five 00:29:29.890 --> 00:29:32.390 lectures on psychoanalysis there, and the reception 00:29:32.390 --> 00:29:36.289 was just transformative. He got an honorary doctorate 00:29:36.289 --> 00:29:38.970 and crucially public endorsement from distinguished 00:29:38.970 --> 00:29:41.549 academic figures like James Jackson Putnam, a 00:29:41.549 --> 00:29:44.329 Harvard professor. That visit was a massive breakthrough 00:29:44.329 --> 00:29:46.710 for the psychoanalytic cause in the United States. 00:29:46.809 --> 00:29:49.390 It lent it an air of academic respectability 00:29:49.390 --> 00:29:51.869 that was often denied to him back in conservative 00:29:51.869 --> 00:29:54.670 Vienna. It was validation on a huge scale. But 00:29:54.670 --> 00:29:57.210 movement, which was founded on this idea of theoretical 00:29:57.210 --> 00:29:59.630 coherence, it very quickly faced these dramatic 00:29:59.630 --> 00:30:02.230 schisms. Freud's personality, his need to be 00:30:02.230 --> 00:30:04.329 the authority, his inability to handle major 00:30:04.329 --> 00:30:06.970 theoretical dissent. It meant that his brightest 00:30:06.970 --> 00:30:09.710 early stars became his greatest rivals. The first 00:30:09.710 --> 00:30:12.190 major departure was Alfred Adler, who resigned 00:30:12.190 --> 00:30:15.210 in 1911. And the split was fundamentally intellectual. 00:30:15.839 --> 00:30:18.259 While Freud was insisting on the centrality of 00:30:18.259 --> 00:30:21.799 sexuality and infantile drives, Adler was focused 00:30:21.799 --> 00:30:25.119 on social factors, feelings of inferiority, and 00:30:25.119 --> 00:30:27.759 the striving for superiority. He shifted the 00:30:27.759 --> 00:30:30.480 focus from the internal eider versus ego conflict 00:30:30.480 --> 00:30:32.740 to the individual's relationship with society. 00:30:33.079 --> 00:30:35.160 And he took nine other members with him. He did. 00:30:35.440 --> 00:30:37.859 He formed the Society for Individual Psychology. 00:30:37.880 --> 00:30:40.380 It was a massive philosophical divergence. Then 00:30:40.380 --> 00:30:43.000 came the most famous split. The one with Carl 00:30:43.000 --> 00:30:45.759 Jung. Ah, yes. Their relationship began with 00:30:45.759 --> 00:30:49.079 so much promise. Freud saw Jung, a non -Jew and 00:30:49.079 --> 00:30:51.359 the director of a major Swiss hospital, as the 00:30:51.359 --> 00:30:53.599 perfect person to carry psychoanalysis into the 00:30:53.599 --> 00:30:55.829 mainstream. Their bond was initially strong, 00:30:56.049 --> 00:30:58.349 but their views just diverged so dramatically. 00:30:58.789 --> 00:31:01.230 Jung was moving toward mysticism, the spiritual, 00:31:01.509 --> 00:31:03.789 the collective unconscious. While Freud insisted 00:31:03.789 --> 00:31:06.650 on a biological materialist foundation rooted 00:31:06.650 --> 00:31:09.170 in sexuality. Jung signaled the definitive break 00:31:09.170 --> 00:31:11.009 when he published Psychology of the Unconscious 00:31:11.009 --> 00:31:14.029 in 1912. He resigned as president of the IPA 00:31:14.029 --> 00:31:17.150 in 1914, and the schism was total. It left a 00:31:17.150 --> 00:31:19.579 deep wound in Freud. To manage and safeguard 00:31:19.579 --> 00:31:22.880 the theoretical coherence against these painful 00:31:22.880 --> 00:31:26.259 public splits, Ernest Jones initiated the formation 00:31:26.259 --> 00:31:29.200 of the secret committee in 1912. The inner circle, 00:31:29.339 --> 00:31:32.380 the loyalists. Yes. It included Jones, Abraham, 00:31:32.720 --> 00:31:35.920 Ferenczi, Rank, and Sachs. They all got a golden 00:31:35.920 --> 00:31:38.519 signet ring from Freud and pledged not to make 00:31:38.519 --> 00:31:40.519 public theoretical departures without talking 00:31:40.519 --> 00:31:42.980 about it first. It was designed to be the theoretical 00:31:42.980 --> 00:31:45.599 guardian of the analytic movement. But even the 00:31:45.599 --> 00:31:48.259 loyalists fractured. Otto Rank was the final 00:31:48.259 --> 00:31:50.559 defection from that inner circle after he published 00:31:50.559 --> 00:31:53.619 his 1924 book, The Trauma of Birth. Rank's focus 00:31:53.619 --> 00:31:56.319 on the trauma of separation at birth as the central 00:31:56.319 --> 00:31:58.680 source of anxiety rather than the Oedipus complex 00:31:58.680 --> 00:32:01.759 was just too much for the others. They saw it 00:32:01.759 --> 00:32:03.980 as abandoning the core tenet of psychoanalysis. 00:32:04.299 --> 00:32:07.019 Rank eventually left for the United States, and 00:32:07.019 --> 00:32:08.960 that was the end of the initial loyalist unity. 00:32:09.400 --> 00:32:11.880 Despite all this constant internal turmoil, the 00:32:11.880 --> 00:32:14.319 movement institutionalized rapidly after World 00:32:14.319 --> 00:32:17.299 War I. It established this powerful global footprint. 00:32:17.859 --> 00:32:20.519 Institutes and clinics, crucially offering free 00:32:20.519 --> 00:32:22.799 treatment to the poor, were established everywhere. 00:32:23.259 --> 00:32:27.819 Berlin, London, Budapest, Vienna. It showed a 00:32:27.819 --> 00:32:30.200 real commitment to social outreach, making the 00:32:30.200 --> 00:32:32.220 method accessible. There's also that strange 00:32:32.220 --> 00:32:34.180 historical footnote about Russia, isn't there? 00:32:34.509 --> 00:32:37.049 Indeed. The Russian Institute briefly got state 00:32:37.049 --> 00:32:39.549 support after the Bolshevik revolution until 00:32:39.549 --> 00:32:42.009 Stalin, in a move that other totalitarian regimes 00:32:42.009 --> 00:32:44.970 would copy, denounced psychoanalysis on ideological 00:32:44.970 --> 00:32:49.390 grounds in 1924. One later institutional conflict 00:32:49.390 --> 00:32:52.150 that really highlights Freud's... principal position 00:32:52.150 --> 00:32:55.490 was the lay analysis debate in the mid -1920s. 00:32:55.529 --> 00:32:57.230 This is a battle against the American societies. 00:32:57.609 --> 00:32:59.329 They were pushing hard against non -medically 00:32:59.329 --> 00:33:01.390 qualified analysts, fearing for professional 00:33:01.390 --> 00:33:04.589 standards and litigation. Freud was completely 00:33:04.589 --> 00:33:07.289 opposed to this medical exclusivity. Why did 00:33:07.289 --> 00:33:09.529 he defend the non -medical analysts so fiercely? 00:33:09.730 --> 00:33:12.670 He laid out his case in the question of lay analysis 00:33:12.670 --> 00:33:16.289 in 1926. He believed the practice of analysis 00:33:16.289 --> 00:33:18.650 was fundamentally psychological, not medical. 00:33:19.299 --> 00:33:22.079 He felt that requiring a medical degree would 00:33:22.079 --> 00:33:24.819 limit the field's intellectual scope and exclude 00:33:24.819 --> 00:33:27.220 gifted practitioners whose training was in philosophy 00:33:27.220 --> 00:33:30.079 or history or literature. So he was fighting 00:33:30.079 --> 00:33:32.500 for the intellectual independence of the method 00:33:32.500 --> 00:33:35.740 over pure medical professionalization. He argued 00:33:35.740 --> 00:33:38.559 that analysis needed thinkers, not just doctors. 00:33:39.160 --> 00:33:41.559 Eventually, an agreement was reached, allowing 00:33:41.559 --> 00:33:44.180 local societies to decide for themselves. But 00:33:44.180 --> 00:33:46.039 the debate just showed Freud's fierce concern 00:33:46.039 --> 00:33:48.440 for the method's integrity. OK, now we get to 00:33:48.440 --> 00:33:51.319 the core of why Freud is still such a topic of 00:33:51.319 --> 00:33:54.279 intense discussion today, his colossal legacy. 00:33:54.559 --> 00:33:56.880 And we have to start with the thorny, persistent 00:33:56.880 --> 00:33:59.960 issue of the scientific status debate. This is 00:33:59.960 --> 00:34:01.500 where his theories meet the hardest scrutiny. 00:34:01.720 --> 00:34:03.779 The central challenge came from philosophers 00:34:03.779 --> 00:34:06.619 of science like Karl Popper, who famously argued 00:34:06.619 --> 00:34:09.380 that Freud's psychoanalytic theories were unfalsifiable. 00:34:09.659 --> 00:34:12.639 Meaning no conceivable experiment or observation 00:34:12.639 --> 00:34:16.190 could ever prove them wrong. So if everything 00:34:16.190 --> 00:34:18.690 a patient says, whether they agree or disagree 00:34:18.690 --> 00:34:21.369 with an interpretation, can be explained by the 00:34:21.369 --> 00:34:23.590 theory. Then the theory is essentially outside 00:34:23.590 --> 00:34:27.409 the realm of genuine science. Popper put psychoanalysis 00:34:27.409 --> 00:34:30.269 in the same category as astrology in terms of 00:34:30.269 --> 00:34:32.869 scientific rigor. But that viewpoint is far from 00:34:32.869 --> 00:34:35.110 universal, even among philosophers who critique 00:34:35.110 --> 00:34:37.809 Freud. Right. The philosopher Adolf Grunbaum, 00:34:37.929 --> 00:34:40.130 for instance, he argued that Freud's theories 00:34:40.130 --> 00:34:42.659 could be tested. even if the clinical evidence 00:34:42.659 --> 00:34:45.920 Freud himself provided was insufficient. Roger 00:34:45.920 --> 00:34:48.500 Scruton made a similar point, pointing specifically 00:34:48.500 --> 00:34:51.519 to repression as a theory with testable consequences. 00:34:52.300 --> 00:34:54.780 So the debate really hinges on whether the concepts 00:34:54.780 --> 00:34:57.820 can be tested or if they're just inherently unscientific 00:34:57.820 --> 00:35:00.539 because they rely on subjective reports. And 00:35:00.539 --> 00:35:02.360 what's fascinating is the mixed bag of results 00:35:02.360 --> 00:35:04.519 you get when you actually try to test the testable 00:35:04.519 --> 00:35:07.739 components. Yeah. A major 1996 review by Fisher 00:35:07.739 --> 00:35:10.539 and Greenberg tried to systematically look at 00:35:10.539 --> 00:35:12.320 the empirical literature. And what did they find? 00:35:12.730 --> 00:35:15.389 Selective support. They found strong support 00:35:15.389 --> 00:35:17.989 for some of Freud's major concepts, like the 00:35:17.989 --> 00:35:20.570 existence of oral and anal personality constellations, 00:35:20.610 --> 00:35:22.969 the idea that certain character traits reliably 00:35:22.969 --> 00:35:25.329 clustered together based on early developmental 00:35:25.329 --> 00:35:27.449 conflicts. They also found evidence supporting 00:35:27.449 --> 00:35:30.090 the role of Oedipal factors in male personality. 00:35:30.389 --> 00:35:33.750 But that same review contradicted other key Freudian 00:35:33.750 --> 00:35:36.630 ideas, like the notion that dreams are primarily 00:35:36.630 --> 00:35:39.389 wish fulfillments. So the evidence is selective. 00:35:40.079 --> 00:35:41.960 It's not a wholesale rejection or acceptance, 00:35:42.239 --> 00:35:45.360 but this complicated partial validation. And 00:35:45.360 --> 00:35:47.659 now there's a strong resurgence of interest coming 00:35:47.659 --> 00:35:49.920 from the hard sciences, from the emerging field 00:35:49.920 --> 00:35:52.880 of neuropsychoanalysis. Founded by neurologist 00:35:52.880 --> 00:35:56.039 Mark Solms. This group argues that Freud's 19th 00:35:56.039 --> 00:35:58.760 century theoretical map might have actually anticipated 00:35:58.760 --> 00:36:01.659 21st century brain imaging. That's a huge aha 00:36:01.659 --> 00:36:04.840 moment for anyone listening. How are they connecting 00:36:04.840 --> 00:36:07.500 the id, ego, and superego to the physical brain? 00:36:07.929 --> 00:36:10.269 Well, Solms and his colleagues argue that modern 00:36:10.269 --> 00:36:12.889 neuroscientific findings are broadly consistent 00:36:12.889 --> 00:36:16.030 with Freudian concepts. For example, they look 00:36:16.030 --> 00:36:18.190 at deep brain structures, the upper brain stem 00:36:18.190 --> 00:36:20.929 circuits, which are linked to raw, appetitive, 00:36:20.929 --> 00:36:23.190 seeking behavior. Which aligns strikingly well 00:36:23.190 --> 00:36:25.269 with Freud's description of the id and the pleasure 00:36:25.269 --> 00:36:28.889 principle. Exactly. They also look at how prefrontal 00:36:28.889 --> 00:36:31.590 lobe damage impairs the ability to suppress unwanted 00:36:31.590 --> 00:36:34.289 emotions, which maps neatly onto the concept 00:36:34.289 --> 00:36:37.369 of repression. So when a Nobel laureate like 00:36:37.369 --> 00:36:39.949 Eric Kandel argues that psychoanalysis still 00:36:39.949 --> 00:36:42.289 represents the most coherent and intellectually 00:36:42.289 --> 00:36:45.030 satisfying view of the mind, he's not saying 00:36:45.030 --> 00:36:47.349 it's the best therapy, but that it's the best 00:36:47.349 --> 00:36:49.750 model for organizing the complex dynamics of 00:36:49.750 --> 00:36:53.449 motivation, memory, and emotion. Precisely. It 00:36:53.449 --> 00:36:55.469 suggests that while the topographical model might 00:36:55.469 --> 00:36:58.230 be neurologically simplified, the dynamic model, 00:36:58.329 --> 00:37:02.030 id, Ego, superego drives. It seems to capture 00:37:02.030 --> 00:37:04.869 some structural truths about the brain's internal 00:37:04.869 --> 00:37:07.989 conflicts. Shifting to philosophy, Freud is almost 00:37:07.989 --> 00:37:10.429 mandatory reading. He gets grouped with Marx 00:37:10.429 --> 00:37:12.869 and Nietzsche as one of the three masters of 00:37:12.869 --> 00:37:15.489 suspicion by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur. A 00:37:15.489 --> 00:37:18.309 truly influential designation. They're the masters 00:37:18.309 --> 00:37:20.469 of suspicion because they all share this common 00:37:20.469 --> 00:37:23.489 ground of unmasking the lies and illusions of 00:37:23.489 --> 00:37:25.650 consciousness. They showed us that our conscious 00:37:25.650 --> 00:37:29.150 self is not the sole reliable narrator of reality. 00:37:29.590 --> 00:37:32.170 Something hidden class struggle, will to power, 00:37:32.309 --> 00:37:34.570 the unconscious is really driving the engine. 00:37:34.750 --> 00:37:37.190 And this led to such diverse political interpretations. 00:37:38.409 --> 00:37:41.190 Psychoanalysis was often seen as inherently conservative 00:37:41.190 --> 00:37:44.469 by some intellectuals to focus on adjusting to 00:37:44.469 --> 00:37:47.170 society. But it was also embraced by radical 00:37:47.170 --> 00:37:50.570 thinkers. Herbert Marcuse, in his hugely influential 00:37:50.570 --> 00:37:53.849 book Eros and Civilization, challenged that conservative 00:37:53.849 --> 00:37:56.469 view. He argued that Freud and Marx were addressing 00:37:56.469 --> 00:37:58.610 similar fundamental questions about societal 00:37:58.610 --> 00:38:00.969 repression and the necessity of containing our 00:38:00.969 --> 00:38:03.250 primal drives for civilization to even exist. 00:38:03.630 --> 00:38:06.210 The Freudian left used his concepts to critique 00:38:06.210 --> 00:38:09.320 capitalist structures and social norms. And finally, 00:38:09.480 --> 00:38:11.679 we have to look at his provocative and consistent 00:38:11.679 --> 00:38:13.739 critique of religion. He certainly didn't give 00:38:13.739 --> 00:38:16.639 traditional belief any special status. Not at 00:38:16.639 --> 00:38:19.659 all. He viewed the monotheistic God as an illusion, 00:38:19.960 --> 00:38:23.159 rooted entirely in the infantile need for protection 00:38:23.159 --> 00:38:27.079 from the world, a kind of supernatural paterfamilias. 00:38:27.500 --> 00:38:29.500 He saw religion as fulfilling a psychological 00:38:29.500 --> 00:38:31.980 consolation function against the fear of death, 00:38:32.139 --> 00:38:34.579 nature, and the dangers of civilization. Right. 00:38:34.659 --> 00:38:37.760 In The Future of an Illusion from 1927, he argued 00:38:37.760 --> 00:38:39.239 that while religion might have been necessary 00:38:39.239 --> 00:38:41.780 to restrain humanity's violent nature early on, 00:38:41.980 --> 00:38:44.739 modern society had reached a stage where it should 00:38:44.739 --> 00:38:47.619 set aside this illusion in favor of reason and 00:38:47.619 --> 00:38:50.500 science. And in his anthropological work, he 00:38:50.500 --> 00:38:53.420 doubled down on the Oedipal connection. In Totem 00:38:53.420 --> 00:38:55.960 and Taboo, he proposed that society and religion 00:38:55.960 --> 00:38:58.539 began with this primal patricide, the killing 00:38:58.539 --> 00:39:01.340 of the father, and the subsequent institutionalized 00:39:01.340 --> 00:39:03.820 reverence for him. And he later analogized this 00:39:03.820 --> 00:39:06.480 in his last work, Moses and Monotheism, arguing 00:39:06.480 --> 00:39:08.619 that the Roman Catholic rite of Holy Communion 00:39:08.619 --> 00:39:10.820 could be seen as cultural evidence of the killing 00:39:10.820 --> 00:39:13.639 and devouring of the sacred father figure. He 00:39:13.639 --> 00:39:15.599 linked the deepest personal neurosis directly 00:39:15.599 --> 00:39:17.699 to the broadest strokes of cultural history. 00:39:18.090 --> 00:39:20.389 Moving to the last chapter of his life, we find 00:39:20.389 --> 00:39:23.949 Freud facing just immense physical and historical 00:39:23.949 --> 00:39:27.570 pressure. He was a prodigious cigar smoker, started 00:39:27.570 --> 00:39:30.889 at age 24, believing it enhanced his work capacity. 00:39:31.150 --> 00:39:33.510 Despite warnings from colleagues like Wilhelm 00:39:33.510 --> 00:39:36.989 Fleiss, this smoking habit tragically led to 00:39:36.989 --> 00:39:39.429 buccal cancer -jaw cancer, which he developed 00:39:39.429 --> 00:39:42.400 in 1923. He initially tried to keep the lesion 00:39:42.400 --> 00:39:44.719 a secret. The sources detail how he consulted 00:39:44.719 --> 00:39:47.519 doctors who minimized the severity but urged 00:39:47.519 --> 00:39:49.739 him to quit smoking, an order he pretty much 00:39:49.739 --> 00:39:52.090 ignored. One of his doctors actually decided 00:39:52.090 --> 00:39:54.690 to withhold the truth that the growth was cancerous 00:39:54.690 --> 00:39:57.409 because he worried that Freud, already suffering 00:39:57.409 --> 00:40:00.030 from severe depression, might attempt suicide 00:40:00.030 --> 00:40:02.510 if he knew the diagnosis. So he spent the rest 00:40:02.510 --> 00:40:04.650 of his life, over a decade, dealing with this 00:40:04.650 --> 00:40:06.969 disease, undergoing a series of operations, his 00:40:06.969 --> 00:40:09.690 speech severely impaired by a prosthetic device. 00:40:10.050 --> 00:40:12.110 And that physical suffering was compounded by 00:40:12.110 --> 00:40:14.590 the growing historical threat. The pressure mounted 00:40:14.590 --> 00:40:17.150 dramatically after the Anschluss in March 1938 00:40:17.150 --> 00:40:20.010 when the Nazis seized control of Austria. He 00:40:20.010 --> 00:40:22.389 had stubbornly underestimated the danger. He 00:40:22.389 --> 00:40:24.550 wanted to stay in Vienna, even after his books 00:40:24.550 --> 00:40:27.670 were burned in Germany in 1933. And his famous 00:40:27.670 --> 00:40:30.170 sardonic response to the book burning just sums 00:40:30.170 --> 00:40:33.570 up his view. He said, what progress we are making 00:40:33.570 --> 00:40:35.190 in the Middle Ages, they would have burned me. 00:40:35.349 --> 00:40:38.329 Now they're content with burning my books. But 00:40:38.329 --> 00:40:40.429 the threat stopped being theoretical when his 00:40:40.429 --> 00:40:43.710 daughter, Anna Freud, was arrested and interrogated 00:40:43.710 --> 00:40:47.599 by the Gestapo on March 22nd, 1938. That experience 00:40:47.599 --> 00:40:50.139 finally convinced Freud that he had to seek exile 00:40:50.139 --> 00:40:52.500 in Britain immediately. And the escape was a 00:40:52.500 --> 00:40:55.219 logistical nightmare. Ernest Jones, the president 00:40:55.219 --> 00:40:58.139 of the IPA, he flew in to convince him and then 00:40:58.139 --> 00:41:00.719 returned to London to expedite 17 immigration 00:41:00.719 --> 00:41:03.159 permits for Freud and his entire family party. 00:41:03.960 --> 00:41:06.280 American diplomats also helped, resulting in 00:41:06.280 --> 00:41:08.280 regular monitoring of their apartment to ensure 00:41:08.280 --> 00:41:10.909 their safety. And the departure was complicated 00:41:10.909 --> 00:41:14.349 by massive Nazi financial extortion. He had to 00:41:14.349 --> 00:41:17.210 negotiate a Reich flight tax and other huge charges 00:41:17.210 --> 00:41:19.719 to leave the country. He couldn't access his 00:41:19.719 --> 00:41:21.980 own accounts, so his wealthy French follower, 00:41:22.159 --> 00:41:24.400 Princess Marie Bonaparte, provided the funds 00:41:24.400 --> 00:41:26.559 to secure the exit visas. And this is where the 00:41:26.559 --> 00:41:28.860 story takes this almost unbelievable turn, the 00:41:28.860 --> 00:41:31.619 intervention of a highly placed sympathetic Nazi. 00:41:31.940 --> 00:41:35.019 Yes. The appointed Nazi commissar tasked with 00:41:35.019 --> 00:41:37.739 managing Freud's assets and those of the IPA 00:41:37.739 --> 00:41:41.449 was a Dr. Anton Sauerwald. And this man, after 00:41:41.449 --> 00:41:43.289 reading Freud's books, the very books he was 00:41:43.289 --> 00:41:46.230 supposed to be inventorying for seizure, he became 00:41:46.230 --> 00:41:48.590 sympathetic to the cause. That is just astonishing. 00:41:48.710 --> 00:41:51.130 He actively helped Freud. He did. Instead of 00:41:51.130 --> 00:41:53.110 disclosing Freud's foreign bank accounts to his 00:41:53.110 --> 00:41:55.989 superiors, he concealed them. He also stored 00:41:55.989 --> 00:41:58.570 the entire IPA library in the Austrian National 00:41:58.570 --> 00:42:01.329 Library, actively protecting Freud's intellectual 00:42:01.329 --> 00:42:04.090 and personal property. It's one of history's 00:42:04.090 --> 00:42:06.929 great acts of quiet intellectual defiance. And 00:42:06.929 --> 00:42:09.110 that protection continued even after the war. 00:42:09.860 --> 00:42:12.340 Sauerwald was tried by an Austrian court in 1945 00:42:12.340 --> 00:42:15.659 for his Nazi activities, but Anna Freud intervened. 00:42:15.820 --> 00:42:17.880 She confirmed in a written statement that he 00:42:17.880 --> 00:42:20.099 used his office as our appointed commissar in 00:42:20.099 --> 00:42:22.260 such a manner as to protect my father, which 00:42:22.260 --> 00:42:24.400 helped get him released. So Freud, his wife, 00:42:24.460 --> 00:42:26.599 and his daughter Anna finally left Vienna on 00:42:26.599 --> 00:42:30.099 the Orient Express on June 4th, 1938. They settled 00:42:30.099 --> 00:42:32.619 in Hampstead, London at 20 Mearsfield Gardens. 00:42:33.119 --> 00:42:35.239 And despite his advanced illness, he kept seeing 00:42:35.239 --> 00:42:37.619 patients and worked on his last books, Moses 00:42:37.619 --> 00:42:40.699 and Monotheism and The Uncompleted, an outline 00:42:40.699 --> 00:42:43.420 of psychoanalysis. His cancer became inoperable 00:42:43.420 --> 00:42:46.780 by mid -September 1939. He was facing torture, 00:42:47.119 --> 00:42:50.219 pain that he said makes no sense because of the 00:42:50.219 --> 00:42:53.079 constant operations and prosthetics. He reminded 00:42:53.079 --> 00:42:55.780 his doctor, Max Schur, of their contract not 00:42:55.780 --> 00:42:57.659 to leave him in the lurch. Schur discussed the 00:42:57.659 --> 00:43:01.260 situation with Anna. On September 21st and 22nd, 00:43:01.300 --> 00:43:04.800 1939, Schur administered high doses of morphine. 00:43:04.860 --> 00:43:07.440 And Sigmund Freud died shortly after, on September 00:43:07.440 --> 00:43:10.679 23rd, 1939, just as Europe was plunging into 00:43:10.679 --> 00:43:13.500 the war he had tried to escape. His ashes were 00:43:13.500 --> 00:43:16.219 later placed in an ancient Greek crater, a vessel 00:43:16.219 --> 00:43:19.059 painted with Dionysian scenes, a gift from Marie 00:43:19.059 --> 00:43:21.260 Bonaparte that he kept in his Vienna study. A 00:43:21.260 --> 00:43:23.320 fitting final resting place for a man who spent 00:43:23.320 --> 00:43:26.159 his life exploring the primal Dionysian forces 00:43:26.159 --> 00:43:28.400 of the unconscious. So we've traced this incredible 00:43:28.400 --> 00:43:31.219 contradictory trajectory of Sigmund Freud, from 00:43:31.219 --> 00:43:33.599 a neurological researcher hunting for eel gonads 00:43:33.599 --> 00:43:36.619 and wildly advocating for cocaine. To pioneering 00:43:36.619 --> 00:43:38.840 the talking cure based on dream interpretation 00:43:38.840 --> 00:43:41.860 and free association, and ultimately mapping 00:43:41.860 --> 00:43:45.019 the internal world with the id, ego, and superego. 00:43:45.219 --> 00:43:47.900 And his legacy, as fiercely debated as it is, 00:43:48.000 --> 00:43:50.260 it transformed the humanities and it remains 00:43:50.260 --> 00:43:53.110 vital. It extends into neo -Freudian therapies, 00:43:53.329 --> 00:43:56.409 critical theory, and, surprisingly, is finding 00:43:56.409 --> 00:43:59.590 new life in modern neuroscience, which is looking 00:43:59.590 --> 00:44:01.969 for physical correlates for concepts like repression 00:44:01.969 --> 00:44:04.610 and drives. He just transformed how we talk about 00:44:04.610 --> 00:44:07.230 ourselves, even if we never step foot in an analyst's 00:44:07.230 --> 00:44:09.710 office. He gave us the language of self -deception 00:44:09.710 --> 00:44:12.409 and internal conflict. You know, we noted that 00:44:12.409 --> 00:44:14.730 Freud connected the Oedipus complex not just 00:44:14.730 --> 00:44:17.190 to individual neurosis, but to anthropology and 00:44:17.190 --> 00:44:20.309 culture. He argued that totemism itself reflected... 00:44:20.269 --> 00:44:23.030 a tribal -Oedipal conflict, the killing and subsequent 00:44:23.030 --> 00:44:25.590 reverence of the father figure. So if the foundational 00:44:25.590 --> 00:44:27.829 concepts of our deepest psychological struggles 00:44:27.829 --> 00:44:30.710 are, as he suggested, echoed in our most ancient 00:44:30.710 --> 00:44:33.909 collective cultural rituals, what universal psychic 00:44:33.909 --> 00:44:37.190 laws, beyond just individual experience, might 00:44:37.190 --> 00:44:39.309 still be waiting for us to truly discover or 00:44:39.309 --> 00:44:41.530 challenge within that vast, enduring continent 00:44:41.530 --> 00:44:44.269 of the unconscious? That, I think, is the continuing 00:44:44.269 --> 00:44:46.210 unresolved question his life leads us with.