ABC National Radio

ALL IN THE MIND

SIGMUND FREUD

Podcast: file Mp3

Transcript
(27 May 2006)

Lynne Malcolm: Hello, Lynne Malcolm with you now for All in the Mind. Today we examine the life, ideas and influence of Sigmund Freud one hundred and fifty years after his birth. Doctor, philosopher, therapist and writer, Freud was a hugely controversial figure, both idolised and vilified. But regardless of your take on Freud there's no doubt that his theories still dominate the way we think about our minds.

Sharon Carleton takes you on this Freudian journey, beginning with a ceremony to mark the death of Dr Freud.

Preacher Man: Dearly beloved listeners, we are gathered here today to bury not Sigmund Freud himself but rather his ideas. We offer our most sincere sympathy to those of you for whom this loss will be a severe setback. But it is a setback you must bear together with the loss of the hopes and the dreams of this Jewish, atheistic philosopher, doctor and psychoanalyst, Professor Sigmund Freud.

Jim Crawley: Whoa, stop a minute, Freud may be dead but his ideas certainly aren't, you can't bury them.

Sharon Carleton: Jim Crawley is the former president of the Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia. He's also a practising psychotherapist in Perth.

Jim Crawley: Freud's often been described as one of the two or three most influential thinkers of the twentieth century or, in his case, late nineteenth century. And he radically changed the way that we understand the human mind, he introduced the idea of the unconscious and from that introduced some startlingly different ways of understanding human behaviour, human motivation, the way that we function in relationships. And probably most models or approaches to trying to help people these days through counselling or psychotherapy directly or indirectly draw on Freud's ideas.

Sharon Carleton: Sigmund Freud was born one hundred and fifty years ago yet he still stirs passions today almost as much as he did in his prime. He had a profound impact on twentieth century thinking, on its art, literature and its language. This doctor/philosopher/therapist and populariser was also a damn good writer. This is Freud on psychoanalysis:

Sigmund Freud: We are only at the beginning of a new science. I was successful in digging up buried monuments from the substrata of the mind. But where I discovered a few temples, others may discover a continent.

Jim Crawley: Freud himself understood the human person as being largely governed by unconscious drives, the search to discharge what he termed libido or sexual or pleasure drive, and an aggressive or destructive drive. And that was essentially a one-person psychology and I guess probably the most fundamental change occurred in the 1940s, 1950s; people started to see the person not so much as governed by drives but rather as being inherently relationship seeking. And that moved to a two-person psychology and these days we have a number of different strands of psychoanalysis. There are those who still function more or less according to some of Freud's basic ideas, but there are also people who are termed 'object relations' theorists, those who seek to understand unconscious ways in which the person experiences others and particularly their relationship with others.

There are people who focus on what's termed 'self psychology', the way in which the unconscious sense of self has developed from early infancy onwards and how that impacts on the way the world is understood and experienced. There's a school of 'relational psychoanalysis' and so on, but they all very much have their roots in Freud and indeed training in any of those methods of psychoanalysis would, I think, usually involve a fairly solid understanding of Freud's original theory.
Song:

Well it started in Vienna not so many years ago when not enough folks were getting sick

That a starving young physician tried to better his position by discovering what made his patients tick

He forgot about sclerosis and invented the psychosis and a hundred ways that sex could be enjoyed

He adopted as his credo down repression of libido and that was the start of Dr Sigmund Freud

Sharon Carleton: Freud's parents came originally from the Austrian countryside but moved to Vienna when Freud was three or four. They wanted to bring up their family in a society where there was less discrimination against Jews and where their children – especially their first-born, bright young Sigmund – would get a decent education. In 1873 Freud entered medical school at the University of Vienna where he concentrated initially on biology. He worked first in the rather specialised area of eel's testicles but later turned to the, then, even more specialised area of neurology.

By 1882 Freud was working at the General Hospital and came under the direction of a famous brain anatomist, Theodore Meynert. Freud was unusually adept apparently at diagnosing organic brain disorders. As Meynert's top student, Freud then won a scholarship to study in Paris with the French neurologist Jean Charcot. At the time Charcot was using hypnosis to treat women with the medical condition called hysteria where there were physical symptoms but no apparent physical causes, in other words the whole gamut of neurotic behaviour. Freud's lifelong interest in psychiatry had begun.

Neville Symington is a former president of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society.

Neville Symington: When he came back and he qualified as a doctor and started off as a neurologist, the method he used most, in terms of trying to cure people of their neurological disorders, was hypnotism.

Sharon Carleton: Dr Freud first used the term psychoanalysis in 1896. By then he was forty years old, married and with a private practice in Vienna, treating the mentally ill. Neville Symington.

Neville Symington: The year 1897 was like a sort of crisis year in which a whole lot of things crystallised. The first thing, when he was treating this young woman with hypnotism she suddenly jumped up and threw her arms around him and said 'I love you, I love you'. He says the unexpected entrance of a servant put a stop to this. But he then said he gave up, that in the end he found it what he called a coarsely interfering method, and he decided that it was possible to get to what lay behind people's symptoms without having to hypnotise them.

Sharon Carleton:This was the birth of traditional Freudian psychoanalysis.

Neville Symington: He had a scientific mind and said, so what is it that made this woman suddenly do this? And what he put it down to was that it was a sexual erotic attraction for someone in her earlier childhood that then got transferred onto him. So a whole lot of things came out of that. One was the idea that even a child has a sexual attraction for the mother or the father and then there's a conflict that arises between, in that case, the young girl that wants the mother out of her life because she wants the father to herself. At the same time, Freud realised that a lot of neurotic symptoms were because these, as it were forbidden, impulses were blocked, so they came out in a physical symptom, whether it might some hysterical type of paralysis, or it might be some obsessional bit of behaviour.

And it was then, when he started treating people in this way, he developed the idea that if you just let someone freely speak and not let anything interfere with what they wanted to say, he found that they quite often then would suddenly report a dream. And he then began to realise that forbidden sexual desires were revealed in the dreams, but it meant decoding the dreams. And then in year 1900 he wrote his classic book on the interpretation of dreams and really, in that book, he formulated all his theories about the unconscious. It wasn't that the unconscious wasn't known before, it was that he mapped it out and pioneered a methodology for making it available.

Song:

If you've certain problems that must be solved
If your love affairs have been involved.
If you're bothered by the way you look
If your son just eloped with your favourite cook
Make a date with a great psychoanalyst and lie down.

Sharon Carleton: Freudian psychoanalysis spawned competitive, and aggressively competitive, schools of thought. But from the 1920s through to the 50s Freud reigned supreme. Then for the next 50 years he was more often vilified and debunked. According to Newsweek magazine in America, Freud is now more likely to be taken seriously as a literary figure than a scientific one. Whether in the Lancet or the popular press, arguments over psychoanalysis are often heated, nasty and intensely personal. What is it about Freud and his theories that still cause so much angst? This is Sigmund Freud talking at the end of his life.

Sigmund Freud: I had to pay heavily. People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavoury. The struggle is not yet over.

John McLean: It's quite legitimate to question theories and to challenge them but, as you say, there's a personal level of vitriol and I think it's because it stirs up very disturbing things in us all.

Sharon Carleton: Dr John McLean is a member of the Australian Psychoanalytic Society.

John McLean: The most disturbing thing was to suggest that children have sexual thoughts and fantasies, but it also puts us in touch with such things as our own aggression and our own cruelty, which none of us wants to know about. It's a very painful thought that 'well under certain circumstances, I could be cruel or violent, or I could behave in a very sexually uncivilised way'. I think all of us would like to say 'no, no that's not ordinary', none of us have got that special circumstances. But it's unfortunately not true, these things are the most extreme versions of very normal conflicts and anxieties in us all. I think that's part of the struggle in coming to terms with the insights that psychoanalysis puts forward.

Sharon Carleton: So do we still believe in Freud's original idea of what the unconscious was, in that it harboured so many of our aggressive and our sexual predatory drives and we were fighting against it in a civilised society? Is that still part of psychoanalytic thought today?

John McLean: It is. It's not so much our thoughts versus civilisation, it's much more the conflicts within ourselves, between intentionally loving thoughts and feelings and equally very aggressive thoughts and feelings. And I think it's accepted by all psychoanalysts that that's an ongoing internal struggle for all of us throughout our lives. So yes, and most of the full impact of that and intensity of that is relatively unconscious to us, so I think that's persisted from Freud's day, that insight.

Sharon Carleton: And do psychoanalysts today, or psychotherapists, do they still believe that the way into the unconscious is, as Freud believed, via dreams and jokes and Freudian slips?

John McLean: Yes, they're ways in which the unconscious can reveal itself. Dreams are a particularly valuable way of getting an insight into the unconscious world, the internal world. The other way that was absolutely central to Freud's thinking was what he called 'transference', the way in which in the course of therapy a person begins to act towards the therapist, the analyst, as if they were the mother or the father of childhood. And so very important ways of thinking and feeling show themselves in action which – certainly the patient and for a while the therapist – is unconscious of the significance of. But that's a very valuable way in which the unconscious reveals itself in the course of therapy.

Sharon Carleton: And I suppose we can't really talk about Freud without talking about sex, and one of the basic tenets of his hypothesis was, as I understand it, that the power of sexuality on our own identity and on our relationship with others was vital to us as beings, even from infancy. And this idea of infantile sexuality was enormously controversial.

John McLean: Absolutely, and still is, I think. I know it's more accepted, we're much more aware of how rich and complex childhood mental life is. I think he was saying that adult sexuality is a kind of amalgam, it's a weaving together of a number of threads from childhood experience, intense emotional, bodily experience with all the intensity of sexuality that weaves together to form the adult amalgam, and he was able to unpick the threads, so to speak, and see the different components from the different periods of development in childhood.

Song:

There once was a man named Oedipus Rex
You may have heard about his odd complex
His name appears in Freud's index cause he loved his mother.
His rivals used to say quite a bit
That as a monarch he was most unfit
But still and all they had to admit
That he loved his mother.

Sharon Carleton: Freud's theories are still being argued over, and so is his life. How significant was his Jewishness? Certainly his parents moved to Vienna because Emperor Joseph II was less anti-Semitic than his predecessor. Freud studied medicine, it was one of the few courses still open to Jews. Like his younger friend Einstein, Freud was an atheist but said he rediscovered his identity as a Jew when he faced growing anti-Semitism. But he always rejected religion as such, regarding it almost as the ultimate neurosis.

Sigmund Freud: Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses. Their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.

Lynne Malcolm: You're listening to All in the Mind on ABC Radio National, Radio Australia and via podcast. I'm Lynne Malcolm and today we're commemorating the life, theories and enormous influence of Sigmund Freud. Sharon Carleton is your guide.

Sharon Carleton: A paper in the British Journal of Psychology in the mid 1990s argues that because Freud was shunned by mainstream Austrian society his patients and colleagues were consequently predominately Jewish. When Freud uncovered cases of sexual misconduct in the families of his neurotic female patients he would have been well aware of the anti-Semitic propaganda value in that bit of news.

Here was a Jewish doctor basing his analyses on Jewish patients, saying that Jewish fathers regularly seduced their daughters. So, in the face of the fearful politics of the day, did Freud abandon his original belief that actual abuse had caused the neuroses and instead came up with his theory of infantile fantasy? And if he did, was it done consciously?

What we do know is that after Hitler came to power, psychoanalytic work in Austria came to an end.

Sigmund Freud: What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

Sharon Carleton: When the Nazis invaded Austria in March 1938, Freud, now 81, left his beloved Vienna for London and safety. He was accompanied by his wife Martha and eldest daughter Anna. Freud had been suffering from cancer of the mouth for more than twenty years and he died three weeks after the outbreak of World War II. This is a recording made in England. It's a bit indistinct because of a mechanical jaw he used to help him talk.

Sigmund Freud: I started my professional activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients. Under the influence of an older plan and by my own efforts I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious in psychic life, the role of essential urges and so on. Out of these findings arose a new science, psychoanalysis, a part of psychology and a new method of treatment of the neurosis.

Sharon Carleton: Sigmund Freud's work has been controversial since the start and particularly his views on women and sexuality.

Elizabeth Wilson: Well I think there are a number of women who identify as feminist who find Freud very, very objectionable. For various reasons they find the theory of 'penis envy' distasteful, castration, all of that kind of thing. But in my experience when you ask them a little bit more about that, what you'll find is that the women who are angriest about him are the ones who have read the least, and those who have read him often, you know, rather like him.

Sharon Carleton: Dr Elizabeth Wilson is a research fellow in the Women's and Gender Studies program at the University of NSW.

Elizabeth Wilson: Little girls and little boys develop slightly differently for Freud in the first five years of life. And one of the important psychological discoveries for infants and for young children is the difference in bodies, different kinds of bodies that people have. And that for a long time, Freud argued, little girls and little boys think that everybody has the same kind of body as them. And that there are different consequences for the boys and the girls when they find out this is not the case. And for the little girl when she realises that other people, some people have penises, Freud suggested that the little girl's reaction to this is instantaneously one of envy for the penis. So that sets little girls and then women up in a certain kind of relation to men from that point onwards and that for Freud and for the Freudians, penis envy will be an important part of the little girl's psychic life from that point onwards.

Little boys, it's slightly different, when they see that some people don't have penises there's an alarm about castration, that they used to have a penis and one's been taken away. So that reaction is not usually as immediate as the little girl and it has again different kinds of consequences and will set little boys up and men up to be in a relation often of fear of castration in relation to the world and to women.

Sigmund Freud: The only bodily organ which is really regarded as inferior is the atrophied penis, a girl's clitoris. A civilisation which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.

Elizabeth Wilson: There was a lot of enthusiasm from some of his female contemporaries for his work. Saw it as very useful for freeing women, if you like, from certain kinds of social constraints. So a lot of women were trained in the 1920s as analysts and they would have used a theory of penis envy as quite central to their analyses of women. Other psychoanalysts were less enthusiastic about the detail of some of this and so some of them tried to bring in supplements or adjustments to the theory. So Karen Horney, who was a contemporary of Freud's, talked a little about the envy for the womb and that she wanted to have envy on both sides. Girls envied boys for some things and boys envied girls and women for the capacity to reproduce.

Sharon Carleton: If nothing else Freud at least acknowledged that there was such a thing as female sexuality and female desires, because prior to that there was no theory of female sexuality, was there?

Elizabeth Wilson: I think he was very empathic about the kinds of situations that women in his day found themselves in, and I think that his capacity in his early years in private practice to understand the constraints that women were living under and to see the terrible situation that they got themselves into psychologically, was often a consequence of these circumstances. And whereas a lot of his contemporaries would have thought that these women were somehow weak, or degenerate, or something wrong with their biology, Freud saw it much more as a consequence of certain kinds of demands being made on them that they couldn't meet as a consequence of social constraint.

Sharon Carleton: So what happened with that next wave of feminism in the 60s and 70s, because that was pretty violently anti-Freud - why?

Elizabeth Wilson: Oh yeah, they hated him. I think they hated him for a number of different reasons. I mean the importance of anti-psychiatry in the 1960s, and that psychoanalysis had been practised often in very, very conventional ways in America After Freud had died, women were encouraged to return to circumstances that feminists wanted to say were unliveable. And the distress that they were living with was seen as their fault rather than the fault of a certain kind of social setup that was basically sending women crazy. So they saw Freud I think as an individualising bourgeois conventionalising figure, whereas they wanted to think about feminism in terms of social constructs and in terms of what patriarchy was doing to women. And so they had no place for Freud.

Sharon Carleton: And so where do the feminists stand with Freud today?

Elizabeth Wilson: Well today we have two co-existing, very strong, strands of feminist interest in Freud - an academic one and a clinical one. If you're an undergraduate student in psychology you'll just get told Freud is rubbish, you'll get told a little bit about the unconscious and then you'll be told to not worry about it any further. But interestingly if you go into an English department or a fine arts department, or a philosophy department or history department, you might find a Freudian there and you might find someone who will teach Freud very carefully and say these are things of his that are useful for helping us understand how to interpret an image, how to read a text, how to understand history.

He's also - there's been a return in a lot of the clinicians to Freud, and particularly I think over his capacity to respond empathically to his patients.

Sharon Carleton: But you're talking feminist clinicians here?

Elizabeth Wilson: Feminist clinicians yes. So I think that they see that there's a lot in his treatment of women in particular that has been really important for understanding how the relationship between an analyst and their patient plays out. Which is what is called 'the transference', you know, that the relationship is what does the curing work, and I think Freud had a gift for 'the transference. He was very good at being able to interpret it, he was very good at being able to elicit it and especially, not so much in the later days when he was tired and ill and cranky but in his early days, I think he could really connect to those women and he could really understand what it was like to be them. And he was able to help a lot of them.

Sharon Carleton: Dr Elizabeth Wilson. Dr. John Basson, director of Forensic Mental Health in NSW, has just been announced as the state's first Chief Psychiatrist. He deals with mentally ill people who have broken the law and he often sees the darker side of psychiatric disorders working with the addicts, the sex offenders, violent criminals and arsonists.

John Basson: I think that Freud gave us probably three or four particular lessons. The first one was about listening to the patient. The second was about making just occasional important interjections. The third is then about understanding an interaction of the patient with other people in their lives and also the way that the patient grew up emotionally. And the final bit was that there was something to be gained therapeutically in the listening and talking to one another.

Sharon Carleton: So how is that used today with the sort of patients that you see?

John Basson: You've got to separate the idea of understanding the way that the patient grew up emotionally from the therapeutic work that Freud did, and the dynamics are often very useful in understanding why the person is in the situation they are. How they came to be ill, the context of their illness, and also the style of their criminality can sometimes be very quickly understood using some of the Freudian psycho-dynamic concepts.

Sharon Carleton: In latter years we seem to have veered more towards something like cognitive behaviour therapy. I suppose it's quicker and it's cheaper. How do you use CBT?

John Basson: Alot of the people who originated CBT had a background in psychoanalytic work and I think they were looking for a form of therapeutic work which perhaps was building on their understanding of the dynamics, but also would be more accessible to a much broader range of patients. Doing psychoanalysis three times a week, the analyst is not going to take on many patients. To see somebody once a week and to give them some homework to do and not to see them for many years but to see them just for a short period of time and have an effect, was really quite a major breakthrough, and that is what the cognitive behavioural therapists managed to achieve.

Sharon Carleton: With Freud's original focus on the infantile sexuality and that so much of the neurotic behaviours in adult life go back to these origins, is that what we still see today, is that what you believe so many of the people, your patients, is that what they suffer from?

John Basson: No, I think we would now believe that that was a bit overplayed, the sexual drive. But in an age when sexuality was very repressed and people often had lots of yearnings and ideas but never would manifest them, we now live in quite a different age where there is some considerable opportunity. There are still however people who may find themselves being ill at ease with their sexual feelings, and where they're so ill at ease that they become quite ill. Or at least it plays into their illness, and is a text within their illness, then cognitive therapies would deal with it. If the patient brings it to the table then it's a valid thing for the discussion, whereas I think Freud would go almost hunting for it.

Song:

Well he analysed the dreams of the teens and libertines
Substituted monologue for pills
He drew crowds just like Will Sadler when along came Jung and Adler
And they said by God there's gold in them there ills.

Sharon Carleton: Let's leave the final words to Dr Sigmund Freud.

 

Sigmund Freud: I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador, an adventurer with all the curiosity, daring and tenacity characteristic of a man of that sort. I may have made mistakes but I am quite sure that I made no mistake when I emphasised the predominance of the sex instinct. The only unnatural sex is no sex.

Lynne Malcolm: Thank you, Sigmund Freud, for those final reflections on sex. Today's program was put together by Sharon Carleton with production by Pauline Newman and sound engineer Jenny Parsonage. Our website address is abc.net.au/rn and click on the link to All in the Mind in the program list to find more information about our programs and the downloadable audio from our last four shows.

Join me next week for All in the Mind when, in memory of Sigmund Freud, we put modern psychiatry on the couch. How does it shape up when analysed from a gender and cultural perspective? I'm Lynne Malcolm, bye for now.

Guests

Jim Crawley
Psychotherapist

Dr Elizabeth Wilson
ARC Australian Research Fellow Women and Gender Studies Program, University of New South Wales

Dr John Basson
Chief Psychiatrist for New South Wales

Dr John McLean
Senior Lecturer, School of Psychology, The University of Queensland

Neville Symington
Psychoanalyst and Author