It will be 75 years since the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, died in London on September 23, 1939, from a self-administered dose of morphine after struggling with cancer for decades. Regarded as one of the most influential—and controversial—minds of the 20th century, Freud’s work and theories helped shape our views of childhood, personality, memory, sexuality and therapy.
Though his theories have been the subject of considerable controversy and debate, his impact on psychology, therapy, and culture is undeniable. As W H Auden wrote in his 1973 poem, In Memory of Sigmund Freud, “he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion.”
Freud’s work was enormously influential, but subject to considerable criticism both now and during his own life. However, his ideas have become interwoven into the fabric of our culture, with terms such as “Freudian slip,” “repression” and “denial” appearing regularly in everyday language. “You don’t have to read Freud to live in a world where Freud is important or to think in a Freudian way,” says Stefan Marianski of the Freud Museum in London.
Other 20th Century intellectuals may have made equal, or better contribution to contemporary thought. But few have caught the popular imagination as Freud did. Not even Albert Einstein, Jean Paul Sartre or Noam Chomsky. Film reviews in red-top tabloids rarely refer to Foucault or de Beauvoir. But everyone knows what you’re on about when you mention Freud.
It’s not just Freud’s terminology that is all over the popular lexicon. He’s an adjective in his own right. Freud’s writings changed how we perceive human behaviour. The founder of psychoanalysis pioneered insights into perhaps the original unreliable narrator—the self—and opened the pathway toward increasingly complex literary characters with motives beyond the obvious.
From the beginning, his work was intertwined with the canonical literature of his time. He drew upon Sophocles, Goethe’s Faust and Shakespeare —especially Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth—to explicate his understanding of unconscious motivations and the complex metaphors and displacements of dreams. He used the language of poets and novelists to outline irrational behaviour, pioneering concepts we have come to think of as commonplace.
Freud’s psychoanalytic theories and emphasis on the unconscious have shaped decades of conflicted characters. His theory of the Oedipus complex underpins many a literary work, from the incestuous relationship between Paul Morel and his mother in DH Lawrence’s 1913 novel Sons and Lovers to the present.
And then you have the stream-of-consciousness novels of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, Salvador Dali and the Surrealists—anything featuring a repressed memory, a dream sequence or a character with incestuous impulses.
Another reason why Freud became a major cultural force is that he was brought into popular culture first through feature films. Cinema and psychoanalysis were born at the same time. Just as the Lumiere brothers were screening the results of their newly developed “cinematograph”, in 1895, Freud and Joseph Breuer published their groundbreaking Studies on Hysteria. Just as the patients at the Salp Triere hospital where Freud had been a student jerked into hysterical fits and behaved with a certain “automatism”, the cinema brought what had previously been inanimate to life, in mechanical fits and starts.
The birth of cinema offered a collective sense of what Freud called the uncanny: the images on screen were familiar and somehow strange, alive and yet lifeless, real but illusory. In early Hollywood psychoanalysts were mostly seen as evil quacks or hopeless fools, but after the Second World War, when psychoanalytic ideas had more currency in America, they took on a new role. They became, as Hitchcock has it, “dream detectives”, the private eyes of the private consulting room, who would solve the mystery as they resolved a trauma.
Starting with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 psychoanalysis-themed thriller Spellbound, overt references to Freud have abounded in cinema. Now psychoanalysts are so frequently portrayed on screen that they almost constitute a genre. Woody Allen turned them into a running joke, and today’s TV viewers accept the jargon in Frasier and the transference in The Sopranos with a familiarity that would have been unthinkable some years ago.
Freud’s influence continues, but today he is as likely to turn up as a character as a theoretical catalyst. We’ve seen postmodern feminist novels such as the European Union Award-winning Freud’s Sister by Goce Smilevski, translated from the Macedonian by Christina E Kramer (2012). This novel fictionalises the melancholy tale of Freud’s youngest sister Adolfina, who perished in the Theresienstadt concentration camp (four of Freud’s five younger sisters died in the Nazi death camps). Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman’s historical romance Freud’s Mistress (2013) spins a tale out of Freud’s alleged affair with Minna, his wife Martha’s younger sister. The producers of Downton Abbey have a TV series in the works called Freud: The Secret Casebook, set in fin de siecle Vienna, positing Freud as the first “profiler”, and delving into his own tangled and provocative personal life.
Just when we seemed to be pushing him out of medicine because his brand of the talking cure was inconvenient for insurance and drug companies, he has begun appearing in college humanities programmes, theatre, novels, television. A generation ago, he animated Woody Allen’s jokes; more recently, we could find him in the The Sopranos, and today he is all over Mad Men.
Freud may have been dead these 75 years, yet there he sits, behind us. Later 20th century saw a boom of the discipline of psychiatry that went against the Freudian method of psychoanalysis and relied back on a medical material culture based on laboratory experimentations that offered a more definitive insight into the human nervous system. However, 21st century neuroscience seems to move back towards a re-appropriation of the mental model of understanding neurosis from an over-reliance on genetic and neural determination. Freud himself maintained that his case histories read more like short stories rather than scientific experiments. Perhaps this is precisely what makes Freud suddenly important again to present-day neuroscience; the propensity to tell stories that makes the Homo sapiens unique among all species.
The writer is a former professor of sociology, IIT-Kanpur.
Email: upendrasarojsharma@yahoo.com