The Times Great Lives. Anna Temkin

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Sigmund Freud

      Psycho-analysis

      23 September 1939

      Professor Sigmund Freud, md, originator of the science of psycho-analysis, died at his son’s London home at Hampstead on Saturday night at the age of 83. From 1902 until recently he was Professor of Neurology in the University of Vienna. When the Germans violated Austria last year he was compelled to fly to England, where he had lived ever since.

      Freud was one of the most challenging figures in modern medicine. Indeed, though his work was primarily medical, there is something incongruous in speaking of him as a doctor. Rather he was a philosopher, using the methods of science to achieve therapeutic ends. Philosophy, science, and medicine all paid him the tributes of excessive admiration and excessive hostility.

      The truth would seem to be that even at this late date the time has not yet arrived when a just estimate of psycho-analysis and its founder is possible. The atmosphere is too highly charged with controversy. Supporters and opponents are still in too bitter a mood. One can neither affirm that Freud’s teaching will stand the test of time, nor deny that it may change permanently the whole conception of the operations of the human mind. Psycho-analysis, whatever it may have become in alien hands, possesses at least the merit of having been given to the world as a treatment of disease and not as a moral law. Freud, indeed, though he took great liberties with philosophy, though he was himself a philosopher malgré lui, always wrote and spoke as a man of science. He did not pretend to have invented his remarkable view of mental processes: he asserted that he had discovered it.

      But Freud, the man, was clearly bigger than his detractors are usually ready to admit. His influence has pervaded the world within the space of but a few years. It can be discerned today in almost every branch of human thought, and notably in education, and some of his terms have become part of everyday language, ‘the inferiority complex’ for example.

      Misunderstanding dogged Freud’s steps from the beginning. He spoke of sex in that large sense which includes the love of parents for their children, the love of children for their parents, the labours of a man to provide for his family, the tenderness of a grown man towards his mother, and so on: and immediately his intention was narrowed by his critics to their own partial view. They accused him of attempting to undermine the moral law. Again, he indicated his belief that natural impulses which have been suppressed have not, by that act, been annihilated. They remain in what he called the ‘unconscious mind’ to vex and trouble their possessors. At once the cry was raised that this man preached a doctrine of unbridled libertinism. Those raising it overlooked the fact that Freud had placed side by side with his doctrine of repression his doctrine of ‘sublimation’. We must not, he taught, regard a natural impulse as, of itself, wrong or unworthy. To do so is to abhor the law of Nature and so the order of the universe. Rather we must take that impulse and apply it to the noblest purposes of which we are capable.

      This, it may be admitted, was a little like saying that a negative produces a positive, and that man owes his spiritual development to racial and social taboos. It was a doctrine which appealed strongly to Puritanical minds, with the result that Freud’s supporters, like his opponents, included persons of the most diverse views. Psycho-analysis thus became not one but a dozen battle-grounds on which the combatants fought with the fierceness of zealots. There is indeed, in all Freud’s writing, a haunting echo of theological controversy. His conception included, under other names, many ancient doctrines and dogmas. Thus there is but little real distinction between ‘original sin’ and the ‘natural impulse’ of the Viennese professor. Freud, too, adjured his patients to recognize their human nature as the necessary first step to cure; not merely the knowledge but the conviction of sin was essential to a change of heart. Again, he bade his followers know themselves by every means and devised astonishing new methods of self-knowledge or ‘self-analysis’. Thus was the evil spirit of a suppressed emotion or desire unmasked and released to be transmuted into the good spirit serving as a mainspring of action.

      The famous theory of dreams and the various ‘complexes’ resolve themselves, when viewed as Freud meant them to be viewed, into observations of the activities of the ‘natural man’ imprisoned and ignored yet always alive within us. This original sin, if denied, possesses, he believed, the power to ‘attach’ itself to or ‘associate’ itself with other, apparently good and innocent thoughts, lending them, thereby, its own passionate energy. Hence the innumerable ‘anxieties’ and fears (‘phobias’) of the mentally sick: hence their strange apings of physical disease, their perverted ideas, their unreasoning prejudices. To resurrect this natural man and yoke his powers to fresh and useful enterprises was the life-aim of the physician.

      There are those, today, who deny the very existence of the ‘unconscious mind’ – though their numbers are diminishing. There are others who see in nervous ailments only the failure of will power, whereby they think we hold our instincts in wholesome restraint. Finally, there are many who believe that an actual physical lesion, a disease of the body, underlies every abnormality of the mind. Freud’s doctrine is anathema to all such. His doctrine, moreover, has been modified and changed, notably by Jung, who laid far less stress than Freud on the sexual character of emotional impulse. The controversy is apt to become a barren one.

      Freud was born at Freiberg, in Moravia, on May 6, 1856, and studied in Vienna and at the Salpêtrière in Paris, graduating md in 1881. Most of his numerous works have been translated into English and other languages, and he was editor of Internationale zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse and of Imago, and director of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. Last year he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, and many years ago he received the honorary degree of ll.d from Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts. Professor Freud married in 1886, and had three sons and three daughters.