Sierra Prasada

It seemed to me almost indecent in a country which is devoted to practical aims to make my appearance as a ‘dream-interpreter,’ before you could possibly know the importance that can attach to this antiquated and derided art. The interpretation of dreams is in fact the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious.

Only in the third of his five 1909 lectures on psychoanalysis, delivered at Clark University during what would turn out to be his sole U.S. visit, did Sigmund Freud feel comfortable enough to raise the topic of dreams, but when he did, he allowed for no resistance to their gravity. He declaimed:

If I am asked how one can become a psycho-analyst, I reply: ‘By studying one’s own dreams.’

He once described himself as seeking “to agitate the sleep of mankind,” or, as we might now say, to waken us from the dream of our pre-20th century existence. Dreams offered Freud a doorway into an otherwise unreachable internal labyrinth, a glimpse of an infinite galaxy within, and an undertaking that would initiate a big bang in the history of ideas: mapping the unconscious mind.

The map remains unfinished and Freud can take credit neither for discovering the unconscious nor for coining the term, but his work made this axial idea so prominent that it could not be forced back into obscurity.

It seems helpful to read Dora alongside both the earlier Interpretation of Dreams (full text) and the later Five Lectures on Psycho-analysis, because the lectures offer one of the clearer explications of Freud’s then-new “science.” On top of that, his Dora case analysis arguably rests on his interpretation of two of his patient’s dreams. It does not rest easy.

In his introduction to a 2010 illustrated edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, editor, trained psychoanalyst and Freud critic Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson touches on some of the challenges to Freud’s treatment of dreams:

We will forever be in Freud’s debt for his recognition of the importance of dreams, but we are less bound by his insistence on the one and only way to interpret them or indeed even accord them importance for the personal life of the dreamer.

In 1909, Sigmund Freud made his sole journey to the U.S., having been invited, along with colleague (and then-annointed son and heir) C.G. Jung, to lecture at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. According to the book’s editor, Freud biographer Peter Gay, the lectures found an appreciative audience at the time, and they have endured as a “lucid general introduction to what is, after all, a difficult discipline.”

The unidentified editor of what appears to have been the 1961 edition of the lectures (which formed the basis for this more recent edition), noted that they “give an excellent idea of the ease and clarity of style and the unconstrained sense of form which made Freud such a remarkable expository lecturer.”

Is it any surprise, then, that creativity fascinated Freud? In one of his five lectures, he explains that the roots of both human neuroses and creativity lie in the natural conflict between the obligations of reality and the temptations of fantasy. In creativity, Freud recognized a possible escape from the enduring problem of neuroses, a doorway drawn with chalk (or perhaps a crayon) in an otherwise blankly solid wall:

The deeper you penetrate into the pathogenesis of nervous illness, the more you will find revealed the connection between the neuroses and other productions of the human mind, including the most valuable.

You will be taught that we humans, with the high standards of our civilization and under the pressure of our internal repressions, find reality unsatisfying quite generally, and for that reason entertain a life of phantasy in which we like to make up for the insufficiencies of reality by the production of wish-fulfillments…

The energetic and successful man is one who succeeds by his efforts in turning his wishful phantasies into reality. Where this fails, as a result of the resistances of the external world and of the subject’s own weakness, he begins to turn away from reality and withdraws into his more satisfying world of phantasy, the content of which is transformed into symptoms should he fall ill. In certain favorable circumstances, it still remains possible for him to find another path leading from these phantasies to reality, instead of becoming permanently estranged from it by regressing to infancy. If a person who is at loggerheads with reality possesses an artistic gift (a thing that is still a psychological mystery to us), he can transform his phantasies into artistic creations instead of into symptoms. In this matter, he can escape the doom of neurosis and by this roundabout path regain his contact with reality.

If there is persistent rebellion against the real world and if this precious gift is absent or insufficient, it is almost inevitable that the libido, keeping to the sources of the phantasies, will follow the path of regression and will revive infantile wishes and end in neurosis. To-day, neurosis takes the place of the monasteries which used to be the refuge of all whom life had disappointed or who felt too weak to face it.

In some “prefatory” remarks to his case study on Dora, even before the title character has made her first appearance on the page, Sigmund Freud openly frets that his work will be mistaken for a roman à clef aimed not at treatment but at titillation:

Now in this case history . . . sexual questions will be discussed with all possible frankness, the organs and functions of sexual life will be called by their proper names, and the pure-minded reader can convince himself from my description that I have not hesitated to converse upon such subjects in such language even with a young woman. Am I, then, to defend myself upon this score as well? I will simply claim for myself the rights of the gynaecologist – or rather much more modest ones – and add that it would be the mark of a singular and perverse prurience to suppose that conversations of this kind are a good means of exciting or of gratifying sexual desires.

It is hardly astonishing that mere mention of sex might have agitated straitlaced Victorians, but the radical nature of the “talking cure” appears in a more bizarre light when one realizes that medical doctors had long practiced a far more effective means of “exciting” and “gratifying sexual desires” i.e. treating hysteria, a female disorder named as early as the 4th century BCE by Hippocrates.

Beginning in ancient times and continuing up until the 1920s, doctors routinely performed what they called “vulvular massage” ultimately producing “nervous paroxysm” which (temporarily) relieved their patients of symptoms that strongly resembled prolonged sexual frustration, according to Christopher Ryan’s and Cacilda Jetha’s Sex at Dawn. If this wildly popular treatment (undertaken at least once by as many as 75 percent of American women according to an 1873 publication) fell out of favor by the roaring 20s, it may be because vibrators, first introduced for home-use in 1902, had become more common than toasters in American homes by 1917.

That vibrators became so popular despite widespread condemnation of auto-eroticism testifies to the pervasive (and persisting) hypocrisy of social attitudes toward sex, attitudes that dermatologist Iwan Bloch, the acknowledged father of sexology, strived to change with his 766-page tome The Sexual Life of Our Times in Its Relations to Modern Civilization.

Published in German in late 1906 and in English in 1909, Bloch’s polemical, anthropological tract made an impassioned case for free love as compatible with moral life. John Kerr included an excerpt from Bloch’s work in his 1998 biography of Jung’s and Freud’s friendship, A Most Dangerous Method:

. . . modern European society . . . simultaneously makes fun of the “old maid” and condemns the unmarried mother to infamy. This double-faced, putrescent “morality” is profoundly immoral, it is radically evil. it is moral and good to contest it with all our energy, to enter the lists on behalf of the right to free love, to “unmarried” motherhood . . . Two million women [in Germany] in a condition of compulsory celibacy and – coercive marriage morality. it is merely necessary to place these two facts side by side, in order to display the complete ethical bankruptcy of our time in the province of sexual morality.

Another later volume, The Birth of Sexology – appearing in summary on The Kinsey Institute’s website – offers a clue as to what would be one of the more transformative if glacially slow-developing aspect of Bloch’s approach:

Bloch, a man of enormous erudition, who spoke several languages and possessed a personal library of 40,000 volumes, knew from his readings that many supposedly pathological and degenerate sexual behaviors had always existed in many parts of the globe and among both “primitive” and civilized peoples. Therefore, he gradually came to the conclusion that the medical view of sexual behavior was shortsighted and needed to be corrected by historical and anthropological research. He began to see the “sexual psychopathies” as timeless and universal manifestations of the human condition and finally, in the first years of our century, attacked the notion of sexual degeneration in a seminal study.

To be continued…

. . . continued from Monday’s post:

Freud’s anxieties concerning Dora‘s reception may seem strange given some of the prevailing medical treatments of the age, but sexologist Iwan Bloch’s provocative writings undermining the very concept of sexual degeneration were no more likely to please.

More importantly, for decades, Bloch’s findings fell mostly on deaf ears. As reported in Sex at Dawn, hysteria would only be excised from the list of medically recognized diagnoses in 1952, homosexuality not until 1973.

As for the present day, according to The Kinsey Institute, “the goal envisioned by Ellis, Freud, Bloch, Hirschfeld, Moll, Marcuse and other sexological pioneers has not nearly been approached, much less reached everywhere.”

Bloch’s research-supported campaign, not to mention Freud’s own body of work, seems to suggest a more general principle: When it comes to sexuality, history does not so much chronicle dramatic changes in human behavior as it does a gradual and still ongoing, erosion of hypocrisy and an expansion of awareness as to what’s normal for our own mystifying selves i.e. far more than we’re yet willing to accept as a global community.

In other words, we’ve all been doing it since the beginning of time; we just haven’t been openly talking about it or feeling very good about it.

The strong connection drawn at the time between sexual deviancy and hereditary degeneration does much to illumine the agonizing transition between 19th and 20th century ways of thinking – a struggle nicely summarized by Sir Ken Robinson in a recent TED talk.

Diagnoses of “nervous” disorders in women and men had become so common at the turn of the century that, as John Kerr writes in A Most Dangerous Method, “it was generally conceded, even if the specific causes were disputed, that there was something about the pace of modern civilization that regularly resulted in a pathologically overtaxed nervous system.”

Shortly after, Kerr puts the theory of hereditary degeneration in context:

The theory of hereditary degeneration was a kind of speculative psychiatric attempt to align the discipline with the new concepts of Darwinian evolution. Specifically, it was contended that in certain families hereditary taint would manifest itself in progressively more severe conditions over successive generations. Thus, in the first generation, one might find only such mild disorders as nervousness and a general psychological eccentricity (perhaps manifest in unusual religious ideas or else in an artistic bent). In the next generation, more severe illnesses would emerge, such as epilepsy or severe hysteria. In the third generation, these in turn would be replaced by psychosis and overt criminality. And so on, until the line died out.

The theory strikes the modern reader as quite odd, even if upon a moment’s reflection he or she will realize that it is based on a true-enough observation, namely that mental illness does indeed seem to run in families, with increasing pathology seen at least in some of them.

Where we differ in the nineteenth-century view is to our predilection for attributing any progressive deterioration to psychological causes, and for seeing in bad parenting the causes of pathology in the next generation. At the turn of the century, however, it seemed equally reasonable to assume that such psychological causes were supplemented by physical ones, that the familial protoplasm was deteriorating along with its mental health. And though sharper minds were beginning to object to this theory, too, its day was not yet done.

Kerr goes on to attest that ideas about hereditary degeneration played the role of handmaiden to rife theories of racial inferiority. In and after the publication of Bloch’s sexology tome in late 1906, just across the Atlantic, Booker T. Washington tirelessly campaigned for the advancement of his race; the string of political defeats that would define his career came at the time when blacks represented the ground floor in the school of inevitable hereditary degeneration.

In Up from History, biographer Robert Norrell delineates whites’ presumption that differences in pigment spelled doom:

By the 1890s Darwinian thought fostered the widespread belief that competition among races would inevitably bring the demise of blacks. Most white intellectuals were certain that the black population was on the road to extinction. Joseph Le Conte, a nationally respected scientist, insisted that blacks’ fate was either disappearance or mixture, and he quickly added that mixing races yielded offspring who were weak physically and mentally and therefore doomed demographically…The predictions of disappearance were bolstered by the widespread belief that blacks were degenerating into beasts. “The Negro has not progressed,” [Virginia novelist Thomas Nelson] Page wrote in 1892, “not because he was a slave, but because he does not possess the faculties to raise himself above slavery.”

In order to transcend the preceding theories, we’ve needed the tools that Freud and his colleagues passed down to us. Primitive as they still are, they offer a starting point if not a guide book to the vast microcosm within, a vehicle with which we’ve been burning the rubber of the mind’s intercontinental highway for more than 100 years.

Image: Kiera Knightly portraying Sabina Spielrein in the 2011 film A Dangerous Method.

From Dorothy Parker’s poem, originally published in Life magazine on 28 April 1921:

Only name the day, and we’ll fly away
In the face of old traditions,
To a sheltered spot, by the world forgot,
Where we’ll park our inhibitions.
Come and gaze in eyes where the lovelight lies
As it psychoanalyzes,
And when once you glean what your fantasies mean
Life will hold no more surprises.
When you’ve told your love what you’re thinking of
Things will be much more informal;
Through a sunlit land we’ll go hand-in-hand,
Drifting gently back to normal.

Read on.

In David Cronenberg’s 2011 film about the brief, intense, profoundly important friendship between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, it is Jung who takes center stage.

Twenty years younger than Freud, Jung had a far sexier role to play in this particular story – he was, in turn, psychiatrist, supervisor, lover and colleague to Sabina Spielrein, played by Keira Knightly in A Dangerous Method, which comes out on DVD tomorrow.

Contrary to expectation, Jung actually deserved the greater prominence, according to John Kerr, upon whose book Christopher Hampton’s screenplay and play are based and to which they are remarkably faithful:

At the time [i.e. the early 1900s], the people who mattered were Jung and his Zurich mentor, Eugen Bleuler, not Freud. Jung and Bleuler already possessed international reputations as pioneering psychiatrists. Moreover, they had the prestige of the Zurich medical school behind them and they commanded the Zurich Psychiatric Clinic with its attached psychological laboratory, where interested physicians could receive training. In short, it was Jung and Bleuler who possessed the institutional resources needed to turn psychoanalysis into a scientific movement. The rise of psychoanalysis directly reflected these institutional realities. It was when Jung and Bleuler first began reporting that they could confirm some of Freud’s theories with their own patients that the controversies began in earnest.

It was Zurich where almost all of Freud’s most important early followers first received training in the new methods. And it was Zurich that ultimately provided psychoanalysis with its first official institutions: the first congress, the first journal, the International Association when it was founded – all these initially were run out of Zurich, not Vienna. It was Jung and Bleuler who put Freud on the scientific map, not the other way around.

Just a page later, Kerr makes the point even more explicitly:

…the story of the psychoanalytic movement cannot be adequately told without Jung. Indeed, such was his pivotal role in it that were one to put it in the form of a drama, one would perforce make Jung the protagonist: dramatically speaking, he is the motor of the story, the engine that makes things happen.

Image: Freud (front, far left) with Jung (front, far right) at Clark University, September 1909.

The above video presents just one take on the subject. Here’s another excerpted from a 2010 illustrated edition of The Interpretation of Dreams:

To Freud, the id, one’s amoral primal instincts, governs a desire for pleasure, for instant gratification, and the fear of pain; the ego, on the other hand, rational will, accepts that enduring pain or deferring pleasure may be a necessary means to a positive end, and functions as a mediator between the id and the world. He named this idea the reality theory. The super-ego, or one’s conscience, he thought, was a socially responsible opposing force to the id, and capable of harsh cruelty – therein lay one’s sense of guilt or shame. Yet he identified the ego as one’s true source of anxiety, the instrument that plunged unacceptable thoughts below the surface of one’s consciousness, in an effort of self-preservation.

Freud classified various psychological problems as imbalances of these three forces: “Transference neuroses correspond to a conflict between the ego and the id; narcissistic neuroses, to a conflict between the ego and the super ego; and psychoses, to one between the ego and the external world” (The Ego and the Id, 1923). Freud saw the ego and super ego developing as a natural resolution to the Oedipus complex: since we can’t eliminate the parent we view as a romantic rival, our recourse is to identify with him or her, to internalize and absorb his or her authoritarian features.

Video: Excerpted from Freud: The Hidden Nature of Man.

No matter the titillation factor, Sigmund Freud’s Dora demands a lot from readers. The HBO television show In Treatment may just be the perfect companion, a full-fleshed prompt to read between the lines of the much earlier work.

Psychotherapist Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne), the show’s protagonist and reigning shrink, is certainly better looking than “Sigi” and his couch a whole lot more conventional, but Dr. Paul’s comfortably pervasive on-screen presence also serves to remind Freud’s readers that, even if Dora abruptly quit treatment after just eleven weeks, something about the cigar-sucking father of psychoanalysis first kept her coming back, week after week, within that same period.

Like Freud’s famed case study, In Treatment consists of abbreviated snapshots of the conversation-that-isn’t-quite-one. More significantly, it finds drama in engaging the most basic questions about the “talking cure”: What exactly is it, anyway? And: Does it work?

In the third, and final, season of the American series – a departure from the original Israeli version, BeTipul – Paul makes one of his last direct attempts to sum up just what it is he does. He tells a patient:

My job is to help you discover what you think of yourself and if you’re displeased with what you discover, to help you change that.

Over the course of the entire series, however, Paul expresses serious concerns as to whether his work has a clear purpose or even any value at all. In the week before he made the preceding statement, he’d spoken with considerably more cynicism to his own therapist:

It’s all a crock of shit anyway. It’s all designed to give power and thrills to the Sphinx-like doctor at the expense of the humiliated patient.

In attacking their shared profession, Paul incidentally articulates enduring criticisms directed at Freud himself. It’s easy to read Dora and view Freud as the “Sphinx-like doctor” and Dora as the “humiliated patient.” Likewise, it’s not much of a stretch to suggest that Paul also invokes Freud’s specter when he describes his therapist as “smug,” “judging,” “superior” and “remote, like a Freudian ice queen, convinced I’m some kind of cripple.”

Surely we can imagine Dora appropriating these words for herself and, in therapy, she’d have been free to use them; they might even have been correct – though not necessarily therapeutic. Sociologist Philip Rieff makes this informative distinction in his 1962 introduction to Dora:

[Dora's] own understanding of life had in no way given her any power to change it; precisely that power to change life was Freud’s test of truth. His truth was, therefore, superior to Dora’s.

In other words, patients go to doctor’s to avail themselves of a treatment (or cure) that they themselves have been unable to furnish; if doctors are to help, their truths must be superior.

Of course, we have little way of knowing if Freud’s own truths were, in this case, superior, if his interpretation (what Rieff defines secondarily as “indoctrination”) of Dora’s “hysteria” actually changed her life for the better, but the principle stands and the intended purpose of psychoanalysis becomes that much clearer.

We can see that same principle enacted in session after session of In Treatment, and we can also see the way therapy, more than just a treatment, has always been a kind of laboratory for human conversation, its everyday uses, evolving borders and unexplored frontiers. At one point, Paul tells his therapist that he has lost faith in people’s capacity to listen:

There was a time, a time I used to believe that you could say something clearly and the other person would hear it, digest it, respond. I don’t think I believe that anymore. Maybe any serious communication between two people is useless. Even without outright lying, people only hear what they really want to hear or what they’re capable of hearing, which often has very little resemblance to what was actually said.

It is possible to see from the show why Paul might feel this way, but it’s also possible to recognize that even he can’t possibly believe what he’s saying.