Fenomenologie Hermeneutiek Kennissociologie Logisch positivisme Algemeen Popper SciëntismeIncididunt nisi non nisi incididunt velit cillum magna commodo proident officia enim.
Peter GAYFreud maakte het zijn biografen niet gemakkelijk: hij vernietigde een aantal keren notities, manuscripten en dergelijke.
"It is one thing to treat Freud's self-appraisals with respect; a responsible biographer can do no less. It is quite another thing to treat his pronouncements as gospel. As will appear more than once in these pages, Freud was not his own best judge."(xiv)
Er bestaan extreme opvattingen zowel over Freud als persoon als over zijn theorie van de psychoanalyse, van totale verguizing tot kritiekloze aanbidding. Ondanks alles wat er over Freud is geschreven staan er nog allerlei vragen open (zie p.xvi). Kritiek op Freud betekent overigens niet automatisch kritiek op de psychoanalyse, zegt Gay.
[Het lijkt me voor een biograaf niet verstandig om verklaringen van iemands ontwikkeling te geven in psychoanalytische termen. Toch doet Gay dat. Zijn die psychoanalytische schema's als 'oedipale relatie' aanvechtbaar - en dat zijn ze volgens mij - dan geldt dat ook voor Gay's interpretaties van Freuds ontwikkeling in die termen. 'Hou het nou maar bij de feiten', denk ik de hele tijd. Causale relaties en verklaringen zijn hoe dan ook moeilijk te verdedigen in de beschrijving van iemands ontwikkeling.]
Freud was het favoriete (oudste) kind van zijn jonge aantrekkelijke moeder en zijn oudere vader (die had een 20 jaar jongere vrouw als derde echtgenote). Er werd veel van hem verwacht en hij werd gezien als iemand met een grote toekomst. Om die reden werd er goed voor hem gezorgd, in die zin dat hij een eigen kamer mocht hebben (hij had nog vijf zussen en een broertje - even afgezien van zijn twee halfbroers die al lang en breed in Engeland woonden en werkten). Tegenover die jongere kinderen gedroeg hij zich belerend en paternalistisch. Hij was vanaf het begin een veellezer.
Freuds opmerkingen over het antisemitisme dat hem hinderde moeten volgens Gay met een korrel zout genomen worden. Het was er, verminderde en nam onder Lueger op het eind van de 19e eeuw weer toe.
"But for more than thirty-five years - while Freud grew up, studied, married, had his family, and struggled toward the propositions of psychoanalysis - liberalism had been a prominent, if more and more tattered, strand in Viennese politics. It was the kind of atmosphere in which Freud had felt at home."(16)
[Van de andere kant zegt dat niet alles over hoe concrete mensen in je omgeving of aan de universiteit of wat ook zich gedragen. Maar hij kreeg door de liberale maatschappelijke context dus meer kansen dan je bij antisemitisme zou verwachten.]
"Freud was a pessimist about human nature and hence skeptical about political panaceas of all kinds, but he was not a conservative."(17)
[Hm ... definieer 'conservatief' dan maar even. Ik denk dat Freud bijzonder conservatief was in allerlei normatieve opvattingen - bv. over het belang van seks, over de rol van vrouwen, en zo meer.]
Hij had een hekel aan arrogante aristocraten en aan repressieve geestelijken / aan de repressieve en antisemitische Rooms-Katholieke Kerk.
Het liberale klimaat waaronder Freud opgroeide tekende ook voor de enorm snelle groei van Wenen (zoals Parijs), qua populatie zowel als qua stedenbouw en architectuur. Grote groeiende Joodse bevolkingsgroep ook. Wat negatieve reacties opriep bij de allochtone bevolking en de al gevestigde Joden soms voor dilemma's stelde.
Freud was een brave hardwerkende leerling en altijd de beste van de klas. Zijn eerste verliefdheid toen hij 16 was was op Gisela Fluss, maar eigenlijk op haar moeder [een verhaal omgeven met een hoop geheimzinnigheid, vind ik.]
De keuze voor een universitaire studie ging wat moeizaam: eerst wilde hij rechten, daarna werd het toch medicijnen en daarmee een natuurwetenschappelijke richting, maar dan wel gericht op de menselijke natuur. De redenen zijn vaag. Ook zwalkte hij heen en weer tussen puur wetenschappelijk onderzoek willen doen en mensen willen helpen in hun praktische problemen.
Hij begon aan de universiteit toen hij 17 was en studeerde af toen hij 25 was (wat later dan normaal). Hij bestudeerde veel dingen die niet direct met medicijnen te maken hadden. Waaronder filosofie en dan met name Feuerbach, Brentano.
In 1875 reisde hij naar Manchester naar zijn twee halfbroers.
"Freud's excursion sharpened the focus of his interests. English scientific books, he wrote to Silberstein, the writings of "Tyndall, Huxley, Lyell, Darwin, Thomson, Lockyer, and others," would always keep him a partisan of their nation. It was their consistent empiricism, their distaste for grandiose metaphysics, that most impressed him. "I am," he added immediately as an afterthought, "more distrustful than ever of philosophy." Gradually, the teachings of Brentano were fading into the background."(31).
Weer terug gaat hij in Carl Claus laboratorium werken - een aanhanger van Darwin - , wat ook werk in Trieste in hield waar hij verlegen en op afstand naar de mooie Italiaanse vrouwen staart. Freud voelde overigens meer enthousiasme voor Ernst Brücke voor wie hij daarna ging werken (van 1876-1882 in diens laboratorium). In Brückes kring: Josef Breuer, 14 jaar ouder dan Freud, maar ze raakten meteen bevriend. Brückes aanpak was er een van precisie en exactheid, hij was positivistisch ingesteld (werkte samen met Du Bois-Reymond en Helmholtz in Berlijn).
En dan wordt Freud verliefd. Een na twee maanden al gesloten, maar vier jaar lang durende verloving. En ze leefde niet eens in Wenen. Veel brieven heen en weer, waarin Freud de aanbidder is, maar natuurlijk op de aloude manier de leiding heeft en weet wat goed is voor zijn Martha Bernays.
Professioneel leidde het tot een verandering van richting die maakte dat hij op een gegeven moment geld kon verdienen als praktiserend arts / psychiater. Vandaar ook de reis naar Parijs (Charcot) in 1885. Hysterie en hypnose als thema in zijn werk maakten dat hij meteen allerlei mensen van zijn medische kringen tegen zich innam.
September 1886 trouwt hij en een jaar later wordt zijn eerste kind geboren. Een maand later ontmoet hij Wilhelm Fliess bij Breuer. Fliess wordt zijn geïdealiseerde vertrouweling tijdens de volgende fase in zijn professionele bestaan. En later zijn vijand.
[Freuds goedgelovigheid als het om Fliess gaat is wel verklaarbaar, maar toch ook bizar voor iemand die er prat op gaat wetenschap te bedrijven. De woorden 'toetsing' en 'controleerbaarheid' kwamen in beider vocabulaire niet voor.]
"What should have given Freud pause, even before later researches made nonsense of Fliess's obsessions, was Fliess's dogmatism, his inability to recognize the wealth and the baffling complexity of causes ruling human affairs. But as long as Fliess's praise was 'nectar and ambrosia' to him, Freud was not about to raise, or even think of, inconvenient doubts."(57)
[Natuurlijk zette hem dat niet aan het denken! Freud was immers net zo dogmatisch en reductionistisch als Fliess. Bovendien was het een verwend kind dat alleen maar bevestiging zocht. Het ging pas fout tussen Freud en anderen als ze afweken van zijn dogma's of het in hun hoofd haalden kritiek op hem te hebben. Zo ging het met Fliess, en zo ging het later ook met Adler, Jung, en zo meer.]
Hij zocht iemand om vertrouwelijk mee te kunnen zijn, omdat hij dat op allerlei terreinen niet kon met zijn vrouw Martha. Martha was een typische burgerlijke, erg gereserveerde, huisvrouw die er voor zorgde dat het hele gezinsleven om Freud draaide en hij er zo min mogelijk last van had.
Breuer - aan wie hij zo veel te danken had - liet hij vallen toen die niet zijn opvatting wilde overnemen dat alle neuroses altijd een seksuele achtegrond hadden. Dat verhaal wordt uitgebreid verteld.
[Opvallend: Elisabeth von R = Ilona Weiss ontkende later dat de interpretatie van Freud klopte:]
"The patient may have chosen, more or less unconsciously, to repress Freud's interpretation of her troubles. Or Freud may have read unacceptable passions into her free, uninhibited stream of eloquence."(72)
[Dat eerste is een psychoanalytische verklaring: ze heeft het verdrongen. Maar dat is zo ontzettend scheef. Misschien stoorde het haar wel dat er over haar therapie gepraat werd die immers vertrouwelijk zou moeten zijn. Wat vond ze bijvoorbeeld van de publicatie van haar therapie als casus door Freud? Had ze daar ooit toestemming voor gegeven? Ik denk dat het alternatief even goed mogelijk is. Het is niet zo moeilijk om te zien dat Freud niets kon met de seksualiteit van vrouwen en zijn eigen reacties op Elisabeth von R. waarschijnlijk niet eens doorzag / begreep.]
Adolf von Strümpell's bespreking van Studien über Hysterie die echt niet negatief was werd door Freud als 'gemeen' en 'laag' ervaren. Gay zegt erover:
"To call such a review niederträchtig was to display a tenderness to criticism that was threatening to become a habit with Freud."(77)
[Hoe zo 'threatening to become'? Hij kon nooit tegen kritiek, al vanaf het begin niet.]
Zijn psychologie voor neurologen was een intens project, blijkt uit de brieven aan Fliess. Ook hier al legt hij de lustbeleving NA een handeling: het ontladen van neuronen gebeurt "because the state of quiescence, of calm after the storm, gives pleasure", is "the satisfaction of relaxation after the discharge of stimuli". (80)
[Ik vind dat dus een bijzonder eenzijdige invulling. Alsof de totale opwinding, het in een geprikkelde toestand verkeren, geen lustgevoelens geeft. Het lijkt verdorie wel alsof Freud dat soort extase als onlust ziet. Het is vervelend om in die staat te verkeren, het is pas lekker als het voorbij is en alles weer onder controle is. Dat laatste geeft pas lust. Aldus Freud. Merkwaardige visie die veel zegt over zijn persoonlijkheid.]
"The physiological and biological substrata of the mind never lost their importance for Freud, but for several decades they faded into the background as he explored the domains of the unconscious and its manifestations in thought and act - slips, jokes, symptoms, defenses, and, most intriguing of all, dreams."(80)
Over de woensdagavondbijeenkomsten van de Psychological Society:
Freud reactie op de dood van zijn vader in 1896.
"The dead of his father, then, was a profound personal experience from which Freud drew universal implications ..."(89)
[Dat is dus al een vorm van zelfoverschatting. Waarom zouden jouw ervaringen bij de dood van je vader hetzelfde zijn als die van anderen of zelfs een maatstaf moeten zijn voor de ervaring van anderen? "... the most significant event, the most decisive loss, of a man's life ..." zoals hij schreef in de tweede editie van Die Traumdeutung. Yeah right, wat een waardeoordeel, wat een projectie!]
"This entanglement of autobiography with science has bedeviled psychoanalysis from its beginnings. (...) ... should it really be true that a mother's death is any the less poignant?"(89)
"Since then, the objection that Freud simply - and illegitimately - translated his own psychological traumas into so-called laws of the mind has not been stilled."(89-90)
[Precies wat ik bedoel. Ik vind dat Gay het probleem nogal wegpraat. Dat Freud zijn eigen ervaringen toetst aan zijn patiënten, wat zegt dat? Wat is toetsen aan hier? Zoekt hij daarbij niet voortdurend naar bevestiging van zijn eigen ervaringen en opvattingen? Zo klinkt het naar mijn smaak overal waar hij zoiets benoemt. Ik denk niet dat Freud iemand was die zichzelf kon overstijgen naar openheid voor anderen. Starre man met een grote behoefte aan zekerheden.]
Freuds verleidingstheorie en zijn opgave ervan. Het leidde tot zijn zelfanalyse, zijn theorie over het Oedipuscomplex en over onbewuste fantasieën.
"Self-analysis would seem to be a contradiction in terms. But Freud's venture has become the cherished centerpiece of psychoanalytic mythology."(96)
[Precies. Het is wonderlijk. Als mensen met enige intelligentie bij belangrijke emotionele gebeurtenissen niemand hebben om tegen te praten (of: tegen wie ze zouden willen praten), wat is dan voor de hand liggender dan het opschrijven van alles wat je dwarszit in een soort van dagboek? Ik doe dat al zo lang. Veel andere mensen doen dat ook. Het is niets speciaals. Inderdaad zijn dat zelf-reflecties - ik vermijd de term 'analyse' hier maar even - waar je veel, zij het een beperkt, zelfinzicht aan kunt ontlenen. Dat Freud dat deed is niet vreemd. Maar om daar de eerste analyse van de psychoanalyse van te maken is mythevorming.]
"This much we know. The method Freud employed for his self-analysis was that of free association, and the material on which he principally relied was provided by his dreams."(98)
In Die Traumdeutung zit eigenlijk al heel zijn theorie. Gay is positief over het boek en zegt: "the solidity of his presentation and the elegance of his proofs remain unimpaired"(106), wat Freud zelf ook allemaal over zijn boek heeft opgemerkt.
Over het Oedipuscomplex:
"While the idea of the complex was soon strongly contested, his predilection for it steadily increased ..."(113)
[Typisch ...]
Freud bracht de psyche niet meer (alleen) terug naar neurologie, fysiologie, erfelijkheid, overprikkeling, constitutie zoals psychiaters in zijn tijd deden (krankzinnigheid is een hersenziekte).
"The mind increasingly appeared as a little machine fueled by electrical and chemical forces that can be traced, diagrammed, and measured. With one discovery after another, a physiological substratum for all mental events seemed absolutely secure. Neurology was king."(122)
Dat Freud daar vanaf week noemt Gay een revolutionaire stap.
"Like many other contemporary observers, he was persuaded that the urban, bourgeois, industrial civilization of his day markedly contributed to the nervousness which, he thought, was visibly on the rise. Yet while others held modern civilization responsible for nervousness by pointing to its haste, its bustle, its rapid communications and overburdening of the mental machinery, Freud blamed it rather for excessively restricting sexual behavior."(123)
"While he freely documented the instigating power of sexual desires and sexual conflicts in others, he refused to explore the libidinal origins of his own dreams with the same uninhibited freedom. But he paid a price for this ..."(124)
[Namelijk kritiek op dit punt van het droomboek van zelfs vertrouwde collega's als Abraham, Jung. En van vele anderen. Het is inconsequent. En hij beschermt niet alleen zichzelf en zijn familie, maar ook kennissen / cliënten en ex-cliënten. Dus: niets wordt ten volle uitgewerkt, zijn voorbeelden zijn maar zo zo.]
"His Psychopathology of Everyday Life added nothing to the theoretical structure of psychoanalysis, and its critics complained that some of its examples were excessively farfetched, or that the very concept of the Freudian slip is so loose that it does not permit scientific tests of verification."(127)
Verder over het onbewuste en verdringing.
"Freud was, of course, not the first to assert the elemental power of passionate desires any more than he had been the first to discover the unconscious."(129)
Freud las Karl Kraus' Die Fackel en Arthur Schnitzler.
"But for the most part, as we have seen, Freud kept aloof from the modern poets and painters and café philosophers, and pursued his researches in the austere isolation of his consulting room."(130)
[Wat hem waarschijnlijk een heel beperkte kijk op mensen gaf. De manier om allerlei onzekerheden te vermijden. Lekker alles onder controle in je eigen kamers.]
Na publicatie van Die Traumdeutung viel Freud in een zwart gat. Hij klaagde steen en been over het gebrek aan erkenning. Zijn reis naar Rome in september 1901 is een soort van omslagpunt en haalt hem uit zijn depressie. In 1902 wordt hij eindelijk benoemd tot hoogleraar en in de herfst van dat jaar start hij zijn woensdagavondsessies met zijn eerste volgers.
1905 verscheen Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Hij wilde een vrijer seksueel leven schreef hij aan Putnam.
"In the delicate domain of sexuality, he [Freud] came to take emphatic pride in his iconoclasm, his ability to subvert middle-class pieties."(143)
[Niet voor zichzelf blijkbaar. En voor anderen ook niet als ik zijn werken lees. Wat blijft er dan over? Het schokken om te schokken? Een man van veel woorden, maar zonder daden? De man had geen enkele seksuele ervaring behalve de op voortplanting gerichte seks met zijn vrouw totdat ze zes kinderen hadden. Wat hij wist wist hij alleen uit boeken en van zijn patiënten. Hoe kan zo iemand zelfs maar de pretentie hebben om een seksueel bevrijder te zijn? Ja, in woorden, om te schokken. Maar in de praktijk is er niets van te merken. Ik vind Gay veel te positief over Freuds opvattingen ten aanzien van seks: daar ligt echt niets revolutionairs en over perversies is hij helemaal niet zo tolerant als Gay doet voorkomen. Niet goed gelezen, zou ik zeggen. ]
[Het is opvallend dat Gay zich voor Freuds leven in deze periode zo gemakkelijk en kritiekloos baseert op getuigenissen van bewonderaars. Was er niemand met kritiek op de persoon Freud? Dat kan ik me niet voorstellen.]
"As a typical bourgeois of his time and his northern culture, Freud was not very demonstrative.(...) It is likely that what he withheld from his boys he gladly gave to his girls ..."(162)
[Hij was niet lijfelijk, niet iemand die zijn kinderen een kus gaf, formeel en gereserveerd. Althans naar jongens / mannen toe. Typisch. Freud de revolutionair ...]
Over Freuds seksleven, wat niet veel voorstelde.
[Echt open was hij er met niemand over - zoals zo vaak zijn er allerlei tegenstrijdige berichten van zijn kant. Maar na zes kinderen had hij er niet veel zin meer in. Natuurlijk vooral omdat hij zich erotisch gezien doodverveelde met zijn vrouw, maar daarover heeft niemand het. Hij hield er uiteindelijk vooral van om naar mooie vrouwen te kijken, zoals Lou Andréas-Salomé geweest schijnt te zijn.]
"Open to beauty or not, by and large Freud's tastes ran to the conventional.(...) The revolutions in painting, poetry, and music exploding all around him left Freud untouched; when they obtruded themselves on his notice, which was rarely, he energetically disapproved."(165)
"In Freud, in sharp contrast
[met veel kunstenaars - GdG], the reality principle asserted its predominance over the pleasure principle."(168)
Freud ging er ook prat op dat hij niets met muziek had (168).
Over de woensdagavondbijeenkomsten van de Psychological Society.
[Veel haat en nijd vanaf het begin. Iedereen wilde bij Freud in het gevlei komen door briljant te doen en op anderen af te geven. Een competitieve sfeer dus.]
"By 1908 such acerbic meetings were far from rare. All too often, vehemence made up for lack of penetration. But the disappointing showing of the Wednesday Society was more than just a symptom of the pall that mediocrity tends to spread over any group. The rubbing up of sensitive, often labile, individuals against one another was bound to produce sparks of hostility."(177)
En nog het een en ander over de buitenlanders. Dat zijn met name Max Eitington en Karl Abraham (Berlijn), Ernest Jones (Londen) en Sándor Ferenczi (Boedapest), actieve en trouwe volgers van Freud. Ook meer over Oskar Pfister en Lou Andreas-Salomé.
[Die term 'politics' slaat op een gegeven dat inderdaad vanaf nu in allerlei uitingen van Freud opduikt: dit of dat is goed of niet goed voor De Zaak ("the Cause"; de vestiging van de psychoanalyse wordt uiteraard bedoeld). Die Zaak heeft Freud steeds meer tijd en energie gekost en had niets meer te maken met 'wetenschap'. Integendeel, in die opkomende psychoanalytische beweging barstte het vanaf het begin van de verdeeldheid en Freud heeft jarenlang als een strenge vader de zaak bij elkaar zitten houden. Dat is hem uiteindelijk maar beperkt gelukt. Velen - als Bleuler zie p.215 onderaan - hadden geen zin in de sfeer van een religieuze groep waarin 'alles of niets' en 'wie niet voor ons is is tegen ons' de maatstaven waren, en vonden het slecht voor het wetenschappelijk onderzoek. Ik ben het erg met Bleuler eens. ]
Jung had vanaf het begin twijfels over de effectiviteit van Freuds therapie en over de centrale plaats die Freud inruimde voor de seksualiteit. Dat werden uiteindelijk ook de redenen voor hun breuk.
Freud heeft zwaar overdreven in zijn negatieve houding tegenover de Amerikanen en de VS, vindt Jones: zijn verblijf daar in 1909 verliep in een uiterst prettige sfeer.
Verder over Stekel, Karl Kraus. Bleuler, en Adler en over de breuk tussen Freud en Jung die ontstond.
"Freud, the self-proclaimed apostle of scientific candor, was placing personal authority above truth."(225)
"In their correspondence and their conversation, the psychoanalysts of the first generation employed an intrusive style that would have been wholly out of place in the discourse of other mortals. They fearlessly interpreted one another’s dreams; fell on the others’ slips of tongue or pen; freely, much too freely, employed diagnostic terms like “paranoid” and “homosexual” to characterize their associates and indeed themselves. They all practiced in their circle the kind of wild analysis they decried in outsiders as tactless, unscientific, and counterproductive. This irresponsible rhetoric probably served as relief from their austere labors in the psychoanalytic situation, a kind of noisy reward for keeping silent and being discreet most of the time. Freud played this game with the rest, even though he soberly warned his colleagues against abusing psychoanalysis as a weapon."(235)
[Te aardig. Dat gedrag buiten de therapie is onwetenschappelijk, maar hetzelfde gedrag is er in de therapiesituaties, even onwetenschappelijk maar dan wat vriendelijker. Ook daar wordt niet alleen maar gezwegen, daar wordt op dezelfde manier onverantwoord geïnterpreteerd. Ook te aardig om een andere reden. Het is haantjesgedrag, mannen onder elkaar die bluffen, elkaar vliegen afvangen, en verpiswedstrijden doen; in de therapie hadden ze voornamelijk met vrouwen te maken en dat riep traditioneel misschien het galante en ridderlijke gedrag op.]
"Apart from specific incompatibilities, Jung and Freud differed radically in their essential attitudes toward the scientific enterprise. It is noteworthy that they accused one another with equal vehemence of departing from scientific method and falling into mysticism."(238)
"This emotional trajectory raises the question of whether Freud somehow needed to make his friends into his enemies. First Breuer, then Fliess, then Adler and Stekel, now Jung, with other ruptures to come."(241)
[Ook te aardig en waarom zo ver zoeken: het was een verwend kind dat niet tegen kritiek kon.]
Over de (gepubliceerde of uitgesproken) casussen:
"Yet taken together, these histories map the broken terrain of neurotic suffering, and they hazard the most imaginative (and risky) reconstructions. Freud presents hysterics, obsessionals, and paranoiacs, a little phobic boy he saw only once during the treatment, and the psychotic inmate of a mental hospital whom he never saw at all.. The subjects of some of these elaborate and intimate portraits, notably the case of Dora, have stepped out of their frame to become, rather like characters in memorable novels, actors in their own right—or at least witnesses in the interminable controversies surrounding Freud’s moral character, competence as a therapist, and essential views of the human animal, male and female alike." [mijn nadruk](245)
Over 'Dora' (1900-1902; gepubliceerd in 1905).
"But Freud’s inability to enter Dora’s sensibilities speaks to a failure of empathy that marks his handling of the case as a whole. He refused to recognize her need as an adolescent for trustworthy guidance in a cruelly self-serving adult world—for someone to value her shock at the transformation of an intimate friend into an ardent suitor, to appreciate her indignation at this coarse violation of her trust. This refusal testifies also to Freud’s general difficulty in visualizing erotic encounters from the woman’s perspective."(249)
"Freud thus opened himself to the charge of insensitivity, and worse, of sheer dogmatic arrogance: though a professional listener, he was not listening now, but forcing his analysand’s communications into a predetermined pattern. This largely implicit claim to virtual omniscience invited criticism; it suggested Freud’s certainty that all psychoanalytic interpretations are automatically correct, whether the analysand accepts them or disdains them. “Yes” means “Yes,” and so does “No.”"(250)
"The vigorous and voluble interpretations Freud lavished on Dora have a dictatorial air about them."(251)
Over 'Kleine Hans' (1908-1909)
"Freud had deliberately said little about technique in “Dora,” and he said even less about it in “Little Hans.” With good reason: while he had visited the little boy and taken him a present for his third birthday, he now worked almost exclusively through his father, who served as an intermediary."(256)
[Een vader die zijn eigen kind analyseert, dat is al fout; dan de verhalen die de vader aan Freud vertelt, waarin hij allerlei censuur kan toepassen, ook dat is al fout; en dan Freud die op basis van gecensureerde informatie en een enkel eigen gesprek met kleine Hans al precies weet hoe het allemaal zit met kleine Hans, werkelijk, erg betrouwbaar allemaal.]
Over 'de Rattenmann' (1907-1908). Over Leonardo (2009-2010):
"the “Leonardo,” for all the brilliance of its deductions, is a severely flawed performance. Much of the evidence Freud used to establish his portrait is inconclusive or tainted."(270)
Schreber (1910). De 'Wolfman' (1910-1914; publ. 1918).
"The case history of the Wolf Man belongs in the series of papers that also includes Freud’s papers on Schreber and on Leonardo. All of them were intended as clinical and theoretical contributions, but at the same time, whatever their merits and defects as psychoanalytic literature, they also served as agents for his own cause."(286)
"The history of Freud’s recommendations to therapists over forty years is a study in the cultivation of alert passivity."(293)
[Ja, mooi gezegd, maar in de praktijk was die passiviteit er niet voortdurend, er werd ook gevraagd en geobserveerd en geïnterpreteerd, en zo verder. Want bv. ook observeren kan actief zijn. Dat zou eens onderzocht moten worden, in hoeverre die receptieve passiviteit er werkelijk was. IK vrees dat dat een van de mythen is.]
"As for himself, he had no doubt: the psychoanalytic situation invites the patient to regress, to free himself from the constraints that ordinary social intercourse imposes. Whatever arrangements foster this regression—the couch, the analyst’s silences and neutral tone—can only aid in the work of the analysis itself."(296)
[Dat lijkt me de kern van de psychoanalyse als werkzame therapie: mensen worden sterk gemotiveerd om alles te zeggen wat er in hun opkomt, los van alle maatschappelijke regels. Dat alleen al moet bijzonder bevrijdend zijn.]
"The analysand’s weapon in the campaign against his neurosis is talk; the analyst’s weapon is interpretation, a very different sort of talk. For while the analysand’s verbal activity must be as uninhibited as possible, the analyst’s, in sharp contrast, must be thoughtfully dosed. In the strange enterprise that is psychoanalysis, half battle and half alliance, the analysand will cooperate as much as his neurosis lets him. The analyst for his part is, one hopes, not hampered by his own neurosis; in any event, he is required to deploy a highly specialized sort of tact, some of it acquired in his training analysis, the rest drawn from his experience with analytic patients.* It calls for restraint, for silence at most of the analysand’s productions and comment on a few. Much of the time, patients will experience their analyst’s interpretations as precious gifts that he doles out with far too stingy a hand."(298)
"Deciding what to interpret, and when, is a subtle matter; the essential character of psychoanalytic therapy is bound up with it. In responding with irritation to wild analysis, Freud had already excoriated glib and hasty interpretations which, no matter how accurate, must bring an analysis to a premature, calamitous end."(299)
"For all his conciliatory and genial rhetoric, Freud presented these papers with an air of complete conviction, the air of a founder and seasoned practitioner. He was only setting out the methods he had found most efficient in his own practice; others might want to proceed in their own way. But despite these politic disclaimers, he left no doubt that he expected his recommendations to assume commanding authority with his followers. The authority was earned; no one else could have written these papers, and his readers candidly admired, freely cited, and visibly profited from them.(...)
Freud’s series of papers on technique came to serve as an indispensable handbook for his profession. Justly so: they are as brilliant as anything he ever wrote. It is not that they are the last word on how to conduct an analysis; they are not even Freud’s last word. Nor do they constitute an exhaustive or formal treatise. But taken together, as recommendations on how to manage the clinical encounter, on its opportunities and its pitfalls, they are so rich in sturdy analytical sense, so shrewd in anticipating criticisms, that they continue after all these years to serve as a guide to the aspiring, and a resource for the practicing, analyst."(305)
[Ik vind dit oordeel tamelijk kritiekloos, moet ik zeggen.]
"... Freud took one of his characteristic acrobatic leaps connecting one range of human experience with another. Parallel-hunting is a dangerous sport, especially if it presses inferences beyond their capacity, but valid parallels may discover hitherto unknown relationships and, even better, unsuspected causal connections."(307)
[Een van zijn - gevaarlijke - onderzoeksmethoden is dus het gebruiken en inzetten van analogieën. Bijvoorbeeld: kunstenaars fantaseren zoals kinderen spelen vanuit onbewuste wensen. Zijn psychoanalytische interpretaties van cultuuruitingen werden al in zijn eigen tijd als controversieel gezien, aldus Gay. Controversieel? Ik vind dat nog zacht uitgedrukt.]
"In general, what made Freud’s readers uneasy was less his ambivalence about the artist than his certainties about art. Probably the most controversial of his suggestions was that literary characters can be analyzed as though they were real persons. Most students of literature have been wary of such attempts: a personage in a novel or a drama, they have argued, is not a real human being with a real mind, but an animated puppet lent counterfeit life by its inventor. Hamlet had no existence before, or outside, the play that bears his name; to inquire into the states of mind that preceded his first speech, or to analyze his emotions as though he were a patient on the couch, is to confound the categories of fiction and reality."(320)
"He had moved dangerously far from the intimate concreteness of his clinical inferences, but that did not slow him down."(326)
"As students of the human animal refined their methods and revised their hypotheses, the flaws compromising the argument of Totem and Taboo emerged more and more obtrusively—except to Freud’s most uncritical acolytes."(332)
Over het ontstaan van WO I en hoe de oorlog in die tijd door velen toegejuicht werd (ook door Freud in eerste instantie):
"As their scathing critic Karl Kraus delighted to point out, the writers who issued these frantic, almost demented-sounding calls to arms, struggled energetically and successfully to evade serving at the front. But this contradiction did not trouble, certainly did not silence, them. Their outbursts were a fitting climax to decades of irritation with what they and their avant-garde ancestors had been pleased to denounce as dull, safe, threadbare bourgeois culture; they epitomized a playful, sophisticated, irresponsible infatuation with unreason and purification and death. In the summer of 1914, this sort of talk swept across whole populations in a contagious war psychosis. It was a telling instance of how susceptible to collective regression presumably sensible and educated people can be."(349)
"No doubt the principal reason why Freud’s zeal for his country soon began to fade was that the war came home to him from the start. Before it was over, all three of his sons had seen action, two of them a good deal of it. What is more, the outbreak of hostilities virtually ruined his practice; potential patients were drafted into the armed services or thought about the war more than about their neuroses."(350)
"Despite all his anxious reservations, he continued to identify the cause of the Central Powers as his own, and was irritated by Jones’s unfailing confidence in the eventual victory of the Allies."(353)
[O, daarom was hij ineens niet zo blij met die oorlog ... Had hij niet meteen kunnen bedenken dat die dingen zouden gebeuren? Vreemd soort blindheid, zwak egoïsme. Nationalisme en patriotisme leveren nooit iets goeds op. Het is niet zo moeilijk om dat te begrijpen als je ophoudt een macho te zijn. Gay heeft het over al die 'mensen' die zo enthousiast waren voor de oorlog. Ik denk dat dat vooral mannen waren.]
"In view of his alert involvement in the news, it is striking that in his Introductory Lectures, Freud should have virtually nothing to say about the war."(370)
Maar de ervaringen van WO I maakten wel dat hij zich begon af te vragen of de mens niet een ingeboren slechte kant had. Bovendien vormden de oorlogsneurosen een soort van bevestiging van een centraal idee van de psychoanalyse dat heftige emoties konden leiden tot fysieke problemen.
"The ideas of Freud, which in times of peace psychiatrists had been so reluctant to take seriously, now gathered prestigious support among physicians assigned to army hospitals and faced with shell-shocked soldiers. For some, the Great War had been a vast laboratory in which to verify psychoanalytic propositions."(376)
Over de toestand in Wenen na WO I met de opdeling van het Habsburgse Rijk. Er heerste in 1919-1921 een enorme armoede in Oostenrijk en ook de Freuds hadden het materieel moeilijk. Freud moest om steun vragen bij familie in de UK en de VS.
"Freud’s letters of these years suggest that he had to steal the time to continue thinking and writing. It is poignant to see him—the most independent of men, who really had other things to think about—engrossed in keeping himself and his family in essentials."(386)
[Nou, dat gold voor armere lagen van de bevolking waarschijnlijk al honderden jaren. Moeite moeten doen om het materieel voor elkaar te hebben en te kunnen overleven - hoeveel van Freuds stadsgenoten zouden daarmee bezig geweest zijn in die tijd? hoeveel van hen hadden geen rijke familieleden en collega's in het buitenland die pakketten konden toesturen? en zo verder. Zelfs in dit soort materiële nood proef ik weinig van een sociaal besef, van een bescheidenheid en solidariteit.]
Wat betreft de psychoanalyse verschoof zijn aandacht onder meer naar ervaringen van de dood. Wat ongetijfeld ook te maken had met de dood van zijn dochter Sophie in 1920.
"He remained the most determined of atheists, wholly unwilling to trade his convictions for consolation. Rather, he worked."(392)
"During the immediate postwar years Freud’s output was slim, measured by the number of words alone. He wrote papers on homosexuality and on that curious subject, telepathy—always intriguing to Freud. In addition, he published three short books, really brochures: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego in 1921, and The Ego and the Id in 1923. Taken together, these writings amount to no more than perhaps two hundred pages. But their size is deceptive; they set out his structural system,† to which Freud remained faithful for the rest of his life."(394)
De doodsdrift verscheen in zijn werk. Thanatos tegenover Eros dus.
"It is tempting to read Freud’s late psychoanalytic system, with its stress on aggression and death, as a response to his grief of these years."(394)
Zo simpel ligt dat niet. Agressie, conflict etc. waren er altijd al in zijn systeem. Maar nu komt het accent wat meer bij andere dingen te liggen.
"But the phenomenon of dramatic opposites seems to have given Freud a sense of satisfaction and closure: his writings abound in confrontations of active and passive, masculine and feminine, love and hunger, and now, after the war, life and death."(397)
Over Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse merkt Gay op
"... he warded off criticism by self-criticism ..."(404)
[Ja, dat merk ik zelf ook op in mijn notities bij die boeken. Maar ik voeg er aan toe: het weerhoudt Freud er niet van om door te gaan met oncontroleerbare speculaties.]
"Freud was beginning to differentiate steps in the growth of the ego and to note its tense interaction with the ego ideal—the superego, as he soon came to call it. Freud’s excursion into social psychology was a rehearsal for more definitive statements about the ego. But these were still two years away."(407)
"Sunk in his “familiar depression” after reading the proofs of The Ego and the Id, Freud denigrated it as “unclear, artificially put together, and nasty in its diction.” He assured Ferenczi, “I am swearing to myself not to let myself get on to such slippery ice again.” He thought that he had been in a steep decline since Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which had still been full of ideas and well written. As so often, he misjudged his own work; The Ego and the Id is among Freud’s most indispensable texts. In the corpus of his writings, The Interpretation of Dreams and the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality must always hold pride of place, but whatever names Freud might call it, The Ego and the Id is a triumph of lucid mental energy."(411)
[Nou ... Ik moet Freud gelijk geven ... ]
"In the spring of 1923, there was dismaying evidence that he might be suffering from cancer of the palate."(418)
Een diagnose die overigens lang voor hem verzwegen werd. Daarnaast verloor hij dat jaar andere familieleden en had hij te maken met animositeit tussen Jones en Rank.
"Yet they still kept the full diagnosis from him; even Felix Deutsch [zijn behandelend geneesheer - GdG] could not bring himself to reveal the unvarnished truth. His ill-judged delicacy was to cost him Freud’s confidence and his place as Freud’s personal physician. He had failed to appreciate Freud’s capacity for assimilating bad news, and his resentment at feeling patronized. The members of the Committee [Rank, Ferenczi, Abraham, Eitinger, Sachs, Jones - GdG], too, came to incur Freud’s displeasure; when, years later, he discovered their well-meaning deception, he was furious. “With what right?” he exclaimed to Ernest Jones—“Mit welchem Recht?” In Freud’s eyes, no one had the right to lie to him, not even from the most compassionate of motives. To tell the truth, however appalling, was the greatest kindness."(424-425)
"Once a masterly lecturer and brilliant conversationalist, he trained himself to speak once again, but his voice never really recovered its clarity and resonance. The operations also affected Freud’s hearing; he complained of a “steady rushing sound,” and gradually became almost deaf in his right ear. Hence the couch was moved from one wall to another so that he could listen with his left. Eating presented disagreeable difficulties, and for the most part he now avoided dining in public."(427)
Meer over Anna Freud die al voor 1923 een steeds grotere rol speelde in het leven van haar vader en in de psychoanalytische beweging.
"Anna Freud’s ascendancy over her father had been marked even before 1923; after his operations in that year, it was beyond dispute and beyond challenge.(...) This act sealed a shift in the Freuds’ family constellation toward Anna as its emotional anchor.(...)
At heart, Anna would have preferred to stay with her father. She was most anxious—had been anxious since her adolescence—to take care of him. (...) Anna Freud, far more than Martha, was now in charge of him."(428-429)
"More important, though, Freud was putting Jones on notice, not very subtly, to leave his daughter in peace. Yet to claim that Anna, a fully grown young woman, lacked any sexual feelings was to sound like a conventional bourgeois who had never read Freud. (...) Freud’s denial of his daughter’s sexuality is transparently out of character; it reads like the surfacing of a wish that his little girl remain a little girl—his little girl. Anna’s response to her father’s entreaties added up to another exercise in low self-esteem."(434)
In 1918 neemt Freud zijn dochter in analyse, een stap in de richting van een loopbaan als psychoanalytica. Ook blijft hij haar privéleven sturen.
[Dat is natuurlijk erg vreemd, een vader die zijn dochter analyseert met alles wat dat impliceert. Hoe eerlijk zou ze geweest zijn over alles wat ze voelde en zo? En wat met overdracht? Totaal onacceptabel. Ik zie nog geen kritiek hierop van Gay, maar misschien volgt dat nog. En dat hij zich op een gegeven moment zorgen maakt over dat ze nog niet getrouwd is is wel heel hypocriet, als je bedenkt hoe hij haar stuurde en nodig had.]
"Yet, though he was a consummate student of family politics, he failed to appreciate fully how much he must have contributed to his daughter’s reluctance to marry. Others saw the matter more clearly than he did."(438)
"This analysis was a most irregular proceeding, and Freud, like his daughter, must have known that. It was a drawn-out affair. Begun in 1918, it continued for more than three years, and was taken up again for another year in 1924. Still, Freud never alluded to this analysis in public and only rarely in private, and Anna Freud was no less discreet.(...)
No wonder. Freud’s teachings on how the analyst should manage his analysands transference and his own countertransference are unequivocal. His decision to put his daughter Anna on the couch appears like a calculated flouting of the rules he had laid down with such force and precision—for others.(...)
What, then, of the technical error that Freud was committing during this very period with his youngest daughter? Freud himself obviously did not think he had transgressed: in the early years of psychoanalysis, the rules he had propounded were casually applied and often violated; the ideal of analytic distance was still fluid and inchoate."(439-440)
[Hij verwijt anderen dat ze die regels overtreden, maar vind blijkbaar dat die regels niet voor hem gelden. Ik vind dat nogal schokkend, moet ik zeggen. En erg ongezond. Ik vind het veel negatiefs zeggen over Freud als mens. En hij brengt het ook nog eens als het probleem van Anna, als een probleem in haar persoonlijkheid, terwijl hij zelf alles gedaan heeft om haar ziekelijke aanhankelijkheid in stand te houden omd at hij dat wel prettig vond.]
"Freud no doubt had every reason to be as proud of his “Annerl” as he was fond of her. But the emotional costs that attended her training as a psychoanalyst have never been calculated. Father and daughter, all the rest of his life, remained the closest of allies, virtually equal colleagues. When, in the late 1920s, her views on child analysis came under fire in London, Freud defended his daughter ferociously; in turn, in her classic monograph on ego psychology and defense mechanisms, published in the mid-1930s, Anna Freud drew on her own clinical experience, but relied on her father’s writings as the principal and authoritative source of her theoretical insights. She was possessive of her father, sensitive to any views that might even hint at criticism of his work, jealous of others—siblings, patients, friends—who might cut into her prerogatives. [mijn nadruk] By the early 1920s the two had become, and they were to remain, intellectually and emotionally inseparable."(441-442)
De sociale en politieke spanningen in Oostenrijk waren tijdens die 20er jaren erg groot.
"During these years, Austrians went through a hectic time of social experimentation undercut by political tension: the stalemate between “Red Vienna” and the Catholic provinces, between the Social Democratic and the Christian Social parties, was never wholly resolved. Powerful political groups agitated in parliament and in the streets; the pan-Germanic People’s party, for one, volubly articulated its emotion-laden grievance, Austria’s intolerable separation from Germany. Splinter parties—monarchists, National Socialists, and others—poisoned the political atmosphere with their incendiary rhetoric, provocative marches, and bloody clashes. While the Socialist city government of Vienna enacted an ambitious program of public housing, rent control, school construction, and poor relief, the Christian Social party, which controlled the rest of the country, distinguished itself less by a positive program than by its hatreds. It was intent on ejecting the Social Democrats from power, by force if necessary, and its members were drenched in an anti-Semitism mainly, though by no means wholly, concentrated against the hapless Jewish immigrants fleeing pogroms in Poland, Rumania, and the Ukraine."(446-447)
[Typisch ...]
"The increasing acceptance of psychoanalysis, he added, had not caused him to change his low opinion of people, an opinion dating from the days when they had flatly, obtusely, rejected his ideas."(449)
De psychoanalyse werd op allerlei niveau's - van de kroeg tot de media - besproken en bekritizeerd, beoordeeld en veroordeeld. Karl Kraus was al vroeg kritisch, Karl Popper ook.
"Popper, for one—he was then all of seventeen—thought he had decisively refuted psychoanalysis, along with Adlerian psychology and Marxism: All these systems explained too much. They were so imprecise in their formulations that any event, any behavior, any fact whatever, could only confirm them. By proving absolutely everything, Popper argued, they proved absolutely nothing."(449-450)
"Few among the learned did anything to correct slanders about Freud or misinterpretations of psychoanalysis. Preachers, journalists, and pedagogues denounced his obscene notions and deplored his baleful influence.(...) The old accusation that Freud was obsessed with sex seemed ineradicable."(450)
"The discussion swirling around Freud’s ideas, then, whether sympathetic or antagonistic, was often on an appallingly low level."(451)
"Like most detractors of Freud, many of his admirers had only the faintest notions about his distinctive message. Vagueness conquered all and not just among the half-educated ..."(453)
"As the New York Times properly noted in May 1926, “Most unfortunately for Freud’s repute, his theories lend themselves with terrible ease to the uses of ignorance and of quackery.” While Freud himself “has denounced these vagaries,” his protests have had “little effect so far as the general public goes.” This was only to be expected; the large and muddy pool of psychological healing invited self-appointed therapists to fish without a license."(453)
"Such incidents abundantly document that by the mid-1920s Freud had become a household name. The number of people who would read, let alone fully grasp, esoteric texts like Beyond the Pleasure Principle or The Ego and the Id was bound to remain small. Only a select minority could be expected to do Freud’s teachings justice; unfortunately, most of those pronouncing on psychoanalysis in these years did not belong to that minority."(454)
"Freud, we know, was not indifferent to public approval; after all, he insisted on the originality of his contributions to the science of the mind, contributions for which he expected recognition. But invasive reporters and ignorant newspapers articles, published rumors about his health, error-ridden summaries of his ideas, and the stream of letters pouring in on him—nearly all of which he felt compelled to answer—robbed him of time for scientific work and exposed him, and his cause, to a vulgarization he feared and abhorred. Yet sometimes he had to admit that his new visibility had its compensations."(455)
"In self-defense, psychoanalysts made propaganda for Freud’s ideas whenever they had the opportunity, addressing theologians and physicians and writing articles they placed in more or less sophisticated periodicals."(458)
Instituten voor Psychoanalyse kwamen of bloeiden op in allerlei landen. Vooral die in Berlijn (rondom Karl Abraham) was erg actief en vormde op een gegeven moment het middelpunt van de psychoanalytische wereld.
"As time went by and institutions became established, psychoanalytic periodicals sprouted in country after country, supplementing those founded before the First World War: the Revue Française de Psychanalyse in 1926, the Rivista Psicanalisi in 1932. No less heartening was the fact that Freud’s writings were being made available in other languages. This meant a great deal to him: his correspondence of the 1920s is punctuated with expressions of intense interest in translations planned and comments on translations completed."(465)
"As we have already plainly seen, that [psychoanalytische - GdG] family was not a completely happy one. Some of the dissensions plaguing the movement from the early 1920s on were at bottom personal. Numerous analysts thought Groddeck too abrasive to be a useful public speaker at a congress—too abrasive and too indiscreet.* Ernest Jones resented Otto Rank, while Ferenczi thought Jones an anti-Semite. Freud was exasperated by news that Abraham was lending himself to the making of a film about psychoanalysis. Brill, enthroned in New York, tried everyone’s patience by not answering letters. At meetings in London, Melitta Schmideberg, a child analyst, engaged in unseemly public controversy with the pioneering child analyst Melanie Klein, who was her mother.
But incompatible, fiercely defended views about psychoanalytic theory and technique were not simply masks for personal animosities, economic anxiety, or the understandable ambition to make one’s mark in a highly competitive field. They sprang in part from conflicting readings of Freud’s texts, and in part, too, from divergent clinical experiences that opened up new directions for analytic therapy and theory. These were opportunities for originality, and Freud was there to encourage them—always within limits."(466-467)
"It was true: wherever Melanie Klein went, feelings ran high. Even those who refused to follow her theoretical innovations were fascinated by the play technique she employed in psychoanalyzing children."(468)
De Freuds namen uiteindelijk afstand van Melanie Kleins theoretische invullingen van de psychoanalyse.
"Not surprisingly, the debate between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud stimulated larger conflicts, and no more surprisingly, Freud could not stay as neutral as he professed to be. But he ventilated his most impassioned irritation mainly in the privacy of his correspondence with Ernest Jones, where he allowed himself some rather tart language. He accused Jones of arranging a campaign against his daughter’s way of analyzing children, defended her criticisms of Melanie Klein’s clinical strategies, and resented the charge that she had been insufficiently analyzed."(469)
"But Freud was concentrating his fire on other targets, reserving his energies for contentious issues that, he thought, needed his intervention more: the controversial redefinition of anxiety, the dispute over lay analysis, and that most troubling of questions, female sexuality."(469)
De problemen met Otto Rank en ook met Sándor Ferenczi, zo tussen 1924 - 1926 die uiteindelijk leiden tot een breuk tussen Freud en Rank. Rank vertrok verder naar de VS.
"After the war, Rank had shown himself such an agreeable aide—prompt, efficient, filial—that Freud wished there were a way to have multiple copies of him. But only a few years later, Freud could disparage Rank as “an impostor by nature”—a Hochstaplenatur. "(471)
Het ging weer om inhoudelijke verschuivingen in de psychoanalytische theorie. Deze keer hield Freud zelf zich lang op de vlakte, maar zijn volgers - met name Jones en Abraham - waren niet zo coulant.
"The ideas propagated by Rank and Ferenczi in their Development of Psychoanalysis and, even worse, by Rank alone in his Trauma of Birth struck Abraham as too wayward to be either ignored or condoned."(473)
"Rank was elevating the mother’s role at the expense of the father’s, and the prototypical anxiety of birth at the expense of the Oedipus complex."(475)
"Some English psychoanalysts, notably Ernest Jones and the brothers Edward and James Glover, wholly agreed with Abraham: Rank was repudiating Freud’s teaching about the father’s role in psychological development. The doctrine of the birth trauma, Jones exploded to Abraham, was nothing less than a “flight from the Oedipus complex.” Indeed, the members of the anti-Rank camp thought themselves now more consistent than the aging master, more Freudian than Freud."(476)
"So, in part, they were. Rank was called disloyal, and worse, and became the target of wild analyses by his former friends. This was an old story. Even Freud, while still paternal with Rank, had been unable to resist diagnosing him as though he were an antagonist. He veered between seeing Rank as an oedipal son and a greedy entrepreneur."(480)
[Het zoveelste voorbeeld van argumenta ad hominem in de vorm van oncontroleerbare psychoanalytische beweringen. En ook het zoveelste voorbeeld van iemand in de psychoanalytische beweging die veroordeelt wordt om herzieningen en afwijkingen van de officiële leer, waarna Freud zelf komt met een revisie die blijkbaar wel mag zoals in Hemmung, Symptom und Angst in 1926.. Dan roept hij graag dat 'we' niet dogmatisch moeten zijn etc. ]
Het vervolg gaat over de lekenanalyse, de discussies over Theodor Reik waren de aanleiding.
"Freud’s advocacy of lay analysis was not a call to lighthearted and amateurish diagnoses; he consistently held that a potential analysand should first be examined by a physician. In fact he forcefully reiterated that point in The Question of Lay Analysis. It was possible, after all, that the physical symptoms an enthusiastic lay analyst might ascribe to hysterical conversion, just as he had done in his Irma dream, could turn out to be signs of a physical illness. But this apart, Freud thought, medical training was likely to be a handicap. All his life Freud was intent on preserving the independence of psychoanalysis from the doctors no less than from the philosophers.
It is true that after the war, four-fifths of his “pupils” were physicians, but he never tired of insisting that “physicians have no historical claim to a monopoly in analysis.”"(492)
Maar in de praktijk was dat niet zo gemakkelijk, bijvoorbeeld omdat er zoveel beunhazen waren die zich opwierpen als psychoanalytici. Daarom bleven psychoanalytici van naam vragen om een medische vooropleiding voordat ze iemand wilden opleiden tot psychoanalyticus. Met name mensen in de VS waren sterk tegen lekenanalyse.
"This was a question, for many the only question, on which psychoanalysts who deified Freud, and who appealed to his writings as sacred scriptures, flouted his wishes and risked his displeasure."(495)
Het derde deel van dit hoofdstuk gaat over de opvattingen van de psychoanalyse / psychoanalytici over de psychologie van de vrouw.
"In the mid-1920s, Freud predicted that opponents would criticize his views on femininity as unfriendly to women’s aspirations and biased in favor of men. His forecast would be realized, more fiercely than he imagined.
Much of later commentary has slighted the complexity of Freud’s attitudes, which are an intricate amalgam of accepted commonplaces, tentative explorations, and unconventional insights. He said some deeply offensive things about women, but not all of his theoretical pronouncements and private opinions were antagonistic or patronizing. Nor were they at all doctrinaire; on female psychology Freud was at times almost agnostic. Late in 1924, attempting to resolve some puzzles about clitoral and vaginal sensitivity that Abraham had raised, Freud confessed that while the question greatly interested him, he knew “nothing whatever about it.” In general, he admitted, perhaps a little too cheerfully, “the female aspect of the problem is extraordinarily obscure to me.” As late as 1928, he told Ernest Jones that “everything we know of feminine early development appears to me unsatisfactory and uncertain.” He had, he thought, sincerely tried to understand the “sexual life of the adult woman,” but it continued to intrigue and puzzle him. It was something of “a dark continent." [mijn nadruk] (501)
[Ik denk dat het waar is dat hij geen bal verstand had van vrouwen. Desondanks heeft het hem niet weerhouden om de grootst mogelijke onzin over vrouwen uit te kramen.]
"Throughout his life as an analyst, he recognized the crucial importance of the mother for the child’s development. He could hardly do less. “Whoever has been fortunate enough to evade the incestuous fixation of his libido does not wholly escape its influence,” he wrote in 1905. “Above all a man looks for the memory picture of his mother as it had dominated him since the beginning of his childhood.” Yet, almost deliberately evading this insight, Freud exiled mothers to the margins of his case histories."(505)
[Precies. Typisch.]
"Freud repeatedly deplored the way that the prized respectability of his time forced women patients into reticence, and hence made them less helpfully indiscreet than the men. It followed, as he observed in the early 1920s, that psycho-analysts knew a great deal more about the sexual development of boys than about that of girls. But Freud’s professions of ignorance appear almost willful, as though there were some things about women that he did not want to know. It is telling that the only emotional tie Freud ever sentimentalized was the mother’s love for her son."(505)
"Freud’s attitudes toward women were part of larger cultural loyalties, his Victorian style."(508)
Voetnoot:
"Freud in fact respected, and quoted, some experimental verifications of his theories (note especially his comments on papers on dream formation by Otto Pötzl, to which he referred in the 1919 edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, SE IV, 18in.2). But in general he believed that the thousands of analytic hours he had spent with his analysands, to which one could add those thousands of hours spent by his adherents, provided sufficient proof of his ideas. This attitude, which has not wholly carried the day, was at the very least a tactical mistake."(523)
[Dat is wel heel voorzichtig uitgedrukt. Het is principieel onwenselijk om die psychoanalytische therapie te gebruiken als controle op theorieën, zeker als de theorieën van de persoon komen die ook de analyse uitvoert. War is de afstand? Waar de intersubjectiviteit?]
"Not long before, he had dramatized this point with two widely read speculative essays: The Future of an Illusion of 1927, ambitious and controversial, and Civilization and Its Discontents of early 1930, no less ambitious and, if anything, more controversial still."(524)
[Waarna hij zoals gewoonlijk zelf-kritisch op zichzelf loopt af te geven, zoals Gay ook zegt. Maar het is een oneerlijke zelfkritiek, vind ik, het is zelfkritiek om de kritiek van anderen voor te zijn. Als hij werkelijk zelfkritisch was geweest had hij die werkjes simpelweg niet gepubliceerd. Freud lijkt me niet het type om achteraf pas te zien hoe aanvechtbaar allerlei beweringen in die boekjes zijn. Hij wist hoe speculatief ze waren en toch prubliceerde hij ze. Wat wilde hij daar dus mee?]
Beide boeken worden hier uitgebreid weergegeven.
"He had been a consistent militant atheist since his school days, mocking God and religion, not sparing the God and the religion of his family. “For God’s dark ways,” he had told his friend Eduard Silberstein in the summer of 1873, when he was seventeen, “no one has yet invented a lantern.” This obscurity did not make the deity any more attractive to Freud or, for that matter, any more plausible."(525)
"Actually, there were far more hoots about The Future of an Illusion than Freud was willing to concede as he wrapped himself in the worn and tattered mantle of a man to whom nobody pays any attention. Indeed, he himself knew better."(535)
Meer over prinses Marie Bonaparte.
"Two weeks later, he could tell Laforgue, “the Princess is doing a very fine analysis and is, I think, very satisfied with her stay.” Her analysis did not cure her frigidity, but it gave her a firm purpose in life and the fatherly friend she had never had. Back in Paris, she worked to organize the French psychoanalytic movement, diligently attending meetings and bolstering the cause munificently from her abundant resources. An indefatigable scribbler of diaries and journals, she took down Freud’s comments to her in speaking detail, and she began to write psychoanalytic papers. Most rewarding perhaps of all was the change of her relationship with Freud from that of analysand to that of dependable friend and unstinting benefactor. She trustingly handed over to Freud her youthful notebooks, her “Bêtises,” written in three languages between the ages of seven and nine; she corresponded with him, visited him as often as she could, bailed out the Verlag, the analytic publishing house, which was always hovering on the brink of bankruptcy, supplied him with choice antiquities, and gave him a love surpassed in his experience only by his daughter Anna’s devotion. Her titles were part of her charm, no doubt, but they were not the source of Freud’s fondness for her. For Freud she had, in a word, everything."(542)
"Freud’s theory of civilization, then, views life in society as an imposed compromise and hence as an essentially insoluble predicament. The very institutions that work to protect mankind’s survival also produce its discontents. Knowing this, Freud was ready to live with imperfection and with the most modest expectations for human betterment. It is significant that when the First World War was over and the German empire had collapsed, he expressed his satisfaction at seeing the new Germany reject Bolshevism. Thinking about politics, he was a prudent anti-utopian. But to qualify Freud simply as a conservative is to miss the tension in his thought and to slight his implicit radicalism. He was no Burkean respecter of tradition; it follows from his thinking that timid traditionalism needs to be analyzed no less than ruthless idealism. What is old, Freud could have said with John Locke, is not therefore what is right. He was even willing to speculate that “a real alteration in the relation of mankind to property” was more likely than ethics or religion to bring some relief from modern discontents. This did not make socialism any more appealing to Freud."(547-548)
Over Freud en de VS. Het Woodrow Wilson-project, dat voortkwam uit zijn ontzettende hekel aan de VS en aan de Amerikanen.
"The conclusion is inescapable that, slashing away at Americans wholesale, quite indiscriminately, with imaginative ferocity, Freud was ventilating some inner need rather than listening to his experience. Even the faithful Ernest Jones, we know, had to admit that Freud’s anti-Americanism was not really about America at all."(567)
Over de erkenning van Freud en de psychoanalyse:
"During the years that Freud was working with Bullitt on the study of Woodrow Wilson, the cycle of public recognition and private afflictions accelerated."(571)
Meer over Freud en Sandor Ferenczi.
Dit is de tijd van de Grote Depressie, van de opkomst van de nazi's, en zo verder, met grote repercussies in Oostenrijk, al had Freud inmiddels wel een inkomen waar hij van op aan kon.
"The public events that embittered Freud’s last years made his gloomiest imaginings about human nature look pale."(588)
"The Nazis demonstrated to the Austrians, and anyone else who was interested, just how to assassinate democracy. Hitler was appointed Germany’s chancellor on January 30, 1933, and in the next few months he systematically rooted out political parties, parliamentary institutions, free speech and the free press, independent cultural organizations and universities, and the rule of law. From March 1933 on, Dollfuss followed Hitler part of the way: he governed without parliament. But the Nazi regime went much further; it opened concentration camps for political opponents and initiated government by mendacity, intimidation, proscription, and murder. Socialists, democrats, inconvenient conservatives, Jews, were “purged” from government posts and professorships, newspapers and publishing houses, orchestras and theaters. Racial anti-Semitism became government policy."(591-592)
[Een prachtige samenvatting van hoe een dictator de democratie en de mensheid kapot maakt. Wat later volgt ook het verbranden van boeken van alle Joden, waaronder dus ook Freud. Maar Freuds inschattingen van de situatie blijven nog lange tijd naïef, hoe somber hij ook was over de ontwikkelingen. 'Ze vallen Oostenrijk vast niet binnen', 'ik persoonlijk loop geen gevaar', etc. Het waren ontkennende rationalisaties, en dat wist hij waarschijnlijk ook wel. Daarom sloeg hij alle adviezen om te emigreren lange tijd in de wind.]
"The spirit of defiance that pressed Freud to proclaim his Jewishness in times of troubles also animates his last sustained work, Moses and Monotheism, though with a rather different target. Many of its apprehensive or infuriated readers would see it as an unfortunate reversal; with this speculative study of Moses, Freud seemed to be intent on wounding Jews instead of defending them. The work is a curious production, more conjectural than Totem and Taboo, more untidy than Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, more offensive than The Future of an Illusion. Its very form is peculiar."(604)
Duitsland valt Oostenrijk binnen ('Anschluss') en dan ziet Freud eindelijk de realiteit.
"The reign of terror began, an unsavory combination of the invaders’ planned purges and spontaneous local outbursts of cruel sport—terror against Social Democrats, against inconvenient leaders of the old right wing, above all against Jews. Freud had understated the case against his fellow countrymen. Late in 1937, we know, he had characterized the Austrians as no less brutal than the Germans; in fact, they proved more adept than their Nazi models at savaging the helpless. The bigotry and sadistic vengefulness it had taken many Germans five years to acquire, or to express, Austrians learned to act out in as many days. Many Germans had given way under the relentless bombardment of propaganda, cowed by an exigent state, vigilant party, and controlled press; many Austrians needed no pressure at all. Only a little of this behavior can be explained, or excused, as enforced submission to Nazi terror. The mobs ransacking Jewish apartments and terrorizing Jewish shopkeepers did so without official orders and thoroughly enjoyed their work. The Austrian prelates, keepers of the Roman Catholic conscience, did nothing to mobilize whatever forces of sanity and decency still remained; with Theodor Cardinal Innitzer setting the tone, priests celebrated Hitler’s accomplishments from the pulpit, promised to cooperate joyfully with the new dispensation, and ordered the swastika flag to be hoisted over church steeples on suitable occasions. These clerical testimonials to Hitler provide a devastating commentary on the mournful question Freud had asked just a few short weeks before, when he had wondered whether the powerful Catholic Church might not, in its own interest, stand against Hitler."(618-619)
"One of the most tenacious obstacles to the rescue of Freud was Freud himself. Ernest Jones, who had hastily flown to Vienna to be of assistance, has left an affecting account of his “heart to heart talk” with Freud shortly after March 15, in which Freud offered all sorts of reasons, some cogent but most of them farfetched, for wanting to remain in Vienna. He was too old; he was too feeble; he could not even climb up the steps to a railroad compartment; he would not get a permit to live anywhere. This last argument, Jones acknowledged, was unfortunately not without merit. In those days, he recalls, nearly every country, defensively looking at the unemployment figures and under pressure to keep out foreign competitors for jobs, was “ferociously inhospitable” to new immigrants."(624)
In juni 1938 vertrekt Freud met Anna via Frankrijk naar Engeland (zijn familie ging al in mei).
"He had been exceedingly lucky. The Manchester Guardian, which announced the Freuds’ arrival in a cordial article on June 7, quoted Anna Freud as saying that “in Vienna we were among the very few Jews who were treated decently. It is not true that we were confined to our home. My father never went out for weeks, but that was on account of his health.” Ernst Freud substantiated his sister’s report: “The general treatment of the Jews has been abominable, but not so in case of my father. He has been an exception.” Martin Freud added that his father “will stay in England because he loves the country and loves the people.” That was at once diplomatic and sincere."(630-631)
Freud en zijn familie werden hartelijk ontvangen. Freud was er beroemd.
"For the time being at least, Freud was not dying but living in freedom, and enjoying it as much as his poor health, his twinges of guilt, and the world would let him.
Freud’s response to the bracing effect of his reception was to go back to serious work, always a good sign."(632)
Het Mozes-boek kreeg weer zijn aandacht. Joden vroegen hem er van af te zien, gezien de situatie van de Joden op dat moment. Freud vond dat onzin, hij zag niet in dat een boek van zijn hand zo veel invloed zou hebben.
"From then on, anxious appeals, angry denunciations, contemptuous refutations, and a scattering of applause became a leitmotiv. Freud was not moved, but professed to believe that what others called his obstinacy or arrogance was really a sign of modesty. He was not influential enough, he argued, to disturb the faith of a single believing Jew. Passionately attached to his solution of the Moses question and the relevance of this solution to the history of the Jews, Freud was self-willed and surprisingly blind to its psychological implications for those who regarded Moses as their ancestral father."(632-633)
[Ook dat is erg naïef: als je inmiddels zo beroemd bent wordt een boek van je ook bekend en wordt het eventueel misbruikt door je tegenstanders. Ik vind het inderdaad meedr arrogantie dan bescheidenheid.]
"The dangers to psychoanalysis, whether in untrustworthy America or, far worse, in Nazi-dominated Central Europe, weighed on Freud’s mind."(633)
"Once Freud’s complete argument was in print, it turned out that Christians had as good reasons as Jews to find Moses and Monotheism unpalatable, even scandalous. Freud interpreted the murder of Moses by the ancient Hebrews, postulated in the second essay, as a reenactment of the primal crime against the father, the crime he had analyzed in Totem and Taboo."(644)
"The end was now near. Freud’s ulcerated cancer wound continued to give off so fetid a smell that his chow would cringe from him and could not be lured to come near its master."(649)
"He spent the last days in his study downstairs, looking out at the garden. Ernest Jones, hastily summoned by Anna Freud, who thought her father was dying, stopped by on September 19. Freud, Jones remembered, was dozing, as he did so much these days, but when Jones called out “Herr Professor, ” Freud opened an eye, recognized his visitor, “and waved his hand, then dropped it with a highly expressive gesture that conveyed a wealth of meaning: greetings, farewell, resignation.” He then relapsed into his doze.
Jones read Freud’s gesture aright. Freud was saluting his old ally for the last time. He had resigned from life."(650)