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10 Fascinating Case Studies From Sigmund Freud’s Career

Sigmund Freud’s ideas and theories might look outdated today, but there’s no denying the influence that he’s had on the advancement of psychology and psychoanalysis techniques. We’ve all heard the stories about how everything goes back to sex with Freud, but it’s worth taking a closer look at some of his most fascinating patients.

10 Mathilde Schleicher

Within a month, however, her depression had turned into mania and insomnia. She talked constantly about the fame and fortune that she was going to find with her music career, and she also experienced regular convulsions. Freud referred her to the private medical practice and clinic of Dr. Wilhelm Svetlin, where she was diagnosed not only with what would later become known as manic depression or bipolar disorder, but also as a nymphomaniac, since she regularly stripped and called out for Freud. Other notes suggest that her problems were even deeper. She apparently believed that every one of her bowel movements was a birth and would try to hide her “children” beneath her pillow.

Schleicher spent the next seven months on a continuous cocktail of sedatives like opium, morphine, chloral hydrate, and even cannabis. Gradually, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the manic episodes subsided, and she was released in May 1890. She died in September, with Freud still treating her now-returned depression with chloral hydrate and a new drug called sulfonal. No one noticed that her urine had been filled with blood—a sign of liver damage caused by her medication—until it was too late.

9 Little Hans

Because he’s Freud, you can probably guess that his explanation for the little boy’s fear wasn’t just due to witnessing the traumatic death of one. According to Freud, Hans was particularly scared of horses that had black muzzles, and he saw this as an association with his father’s mustache. He didn’t like horses wearing blinders, either, which Freud took to mean that he was associating them with his father’s glasses.

Eventually, Freud diagnosed the little boy’s fear of horses as an extension of his Oedipus complex. The horse represented his father, largely because of the mustache-and-glasses comparison, along with the tendency of male horses to be very well-endowed. Little Hans, Freud said, was right in the middle of developing an intense, sexual love for his mother and saw his father as a rival for her love and attention. His father was, of course, considerably bigger and stronger than he is, leading to the development of a fear not only of his father, but, by extension, of horses .

Because much of the therapy was done with Hans’s father acting as intermediary, Freud determined that his fear of horses wasn’t going to be going away anytime soon, as his therapy was dependent on the person whom he was afraid of. When Freud sat down to talk to the boy, he reported that everything that went on in the counseling session only supported his theories and what he had already determined about the Oedipus complex.

Don’t worry about what became of Little Hans; Freud followed up with him when he was 19. Not only had he grown up to be completely normal, but he couldn’t even remember any of what he’d believed when he was five.

8 Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O)

For years, this patient of Dr. Josef Breuer and Freud’s was referred to only as “Anna O” in order to protect her real identity—Bertha Pappenheim. Pappenheim began treatment with Breuer for a strange sort of hysteria that began when her father fell ill and got worse when he ultimately died from his illness. She was suffering from a wide range of symptoms, including mood swings, hallucinations, a nervous cough, destructive outbursts, and partial paralysis. At times, she also forgot how to speak her native German tongue and was able to only read and speak in English and French.

Breuer spent hundreds of hours with her, getting her to talk through the problems at the root of her suffering. At first, she would only speak in fairy tales, making up stories about what she was thinking and feeling in what she called “chimney sweeping.” Gradually, he was able to hypnotize her to take her back to the moments that disturbed her the most, encouraging her to talk about them, forming the basis of a therapy method that’s pretty familiar today.

Just how much of her mental illness was real and how much of it was a way to keep the attention of her therapist has been up for debate. Freud, who had been a close friend as well as colleague of Breuer’s (Freud even named his oldest daughter after Breuer’s wife), condemned him as being a bit foolish for absolutely missing the sexual component of her treatment. He argued that clearly, part of her problem was her absolute infatuation with Breuer . Freud was so outspoken about his belief that it led to the sudden, bitter end of the friendship .

Publicly, Freud used Pappenheim’s case as the basis for his work in psychoanalytic therapy. At the same time, however, he lambasted Breuer to his students and used the case as an example of what can happen when a therapist ignores what are clearly sexual fantasies. Freud claimed that Pappenheim’s heartbreak over her father’s death was actually because of the incestuous, sexual fantasies she had toward him. She transferred these fantasies to Breuer as the new authority figure. According to Freud, Breuer had told him of an episode late in her treatment where he had fled her home after finding his patient in the grip of “hysterical” (and false) childbirth. She had become convinced that she was pregnant with Breuer’s child. Pappenheim’s horrified estate denied that any of it was ever true when her real identity was released after her death.

7 Irma’s Injection

The dream checked off all the boxes when it came to Freud’s own desires and wish fulfillment. He said that chief among his deepest desires was to be able to prove that an illness comes from someone else. He could blame other doctors for treating her wrongly (using dirty needles), and he could blame the patient, too, for not doing as she was told by her doctors. He said that he was quite happy with his proof, and her continued suffering wasn’t his fault. Analyzing Freud analyzing himself, it’s been suggested that Freud’s guilt over Emma Eckstein could be directly applied to Irma’s Injection.

6 Ernst Lanzer (Rat Man)

When Lanzer came to Freud, he was afflicted with an impressively large range of obsessive thoughts. Lanzer feared that he would eventually succumb to the thoughts he had about cutting his own throat, and he had an absolutely paralyzing fear that something terrible was going to happen to either his father or a young woman whom he rather fancied. He also had a major fear of rats after overhearing a story while he was in the army about a particularly horrible torture that he became terrified would be used on himself, his father, or the aforementioned lady. The torture in question involved rats being placed in a bucket, the bucket turned upside down and pressed against the guilty man’s buttocks, and the rats being allowed to eat their way inside via the anus. It’s clearly a distressing image.

Freud’s first observations were of an expression on the Rat Man’s face, which seemed to indicate that he was pretty excited about the whole idea of some anus-entry rats. He was diagnosed with an Oedipus complex that led to an emotional imbalance between love, hate, and fear, all directed, in varying amounts, toward his lady, his father, and his rats. Freud also brought up what he believed was the powerful symbolism of the anus rats, which involves preoccupations with cleanliness, a comparison between money and excrement, and the symbolism of rats as children, linked to the childhood belief that babies are born through the anus . Freud also found that the one time that Lanzer’s father had ever spanked him occurred about the same time (when he was around five years old) that a governess let the boy touch her naked body, cementing the association between the two things.

Lanzer’s case is also unique in that it’s the only case in which we have Freud’s case notes in addition to his official report, showing that there were some things that were definitely left out of final drafts, like Freud’s lack of neutrality when it came to things like sending his patients postcards when he was away on holiday.

5 Ida Bauer (Dora)

Years later, Ida was propositioned by a family friend—the father of the children she used to babysit and the husband of Ida’s own father’s mistress. Ida refused, and her refusal triggered a hysterical, downward spiral into depression that went as far as threats to kill herself. Freud, who had treated her father for his venereal disease, was asked to help Ida as well.

Freud diagnosed Ida (or Dora, as his published work called her) as suffering not because of the unwanted advances from a once-trusted family friend, but from a repressed lesbian attraction to her would-be suitor’s wife. Her attraction to the woman was further complicated by the fact that she was already Ida’s father’s mistress, making the relationship between Ida and her father a strained, competitive one. Freud interpreted a dream for Ida: Her family’s house is burning down, and while Ida’s father just wants to get them out of the house, her mother wants to look for a jewelry case. The case, Freud says, symbolized Ida’s genitals, which her father had failed to protect.

Ida cut her treatment with Freud short . She continued to struggle with mental illness for the rest of her life, which ended in 1945. After a lifetime of resistance to turning into her father, she effectively became her mother, acquiring a fanatic devotion to cleanliness. Ironically, she also continued to stay in touch with the family that started it all, particularly her father’s mistress, who became her favorite bridge partner.

4 Fanny Moser

She first consulted with Josef Breuer, and Freud was also brought in on the case when she was moved to a sanatorium in Vienna. Suffering from severe depression and nervous tics, she was hypnotized by Freud and encouraged to recount every trauma that ailed her, with the end goal of erasing it from her memory. Traumas ranged from the death of her husband to a scary toad she once saw. Although her condition seemed to improve, it wouldn’t for long. Less than a year later, she was back in a clinic. Even though she claimed a strong dislike for Freud (blaming him and Breuer for the poor relationship between herself and her daughters, which stemmed in no small part from her outrage that one of them wanted to be a scientist), she returned again and again as a patient.

She continued to relapse in spite of repeated treatment. Estranged from her hated younger daughter and refusing aid from her older daughter (who became an accomplished zoologist), she instead turned to a lover who would extort millions from her. She died in 1925. Freud wrote to her daughter, apologizing for his failure in diagnosing the correct nature of their relationship and their estrangement.

3 Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)

Hilda Doolittle was a writer and a poet, and through a series of letters she wrote while under Freud’s care and a follow-up book, we have the most complete documentation of his actual methods of analysis and therapy.

Doolittle gave birth to a stillborn child in 1915. After that, she gave birth to a daughter in 1918. Recovering from the birth and a prolonged illness, she and her companion, Winifred Ellerman (Bryher), headed to Greece so she could recover. Along the way, she had a brief romance with one of the men on their ship. (Her husband, who wasn’t the father of her child, had long since left.) Doolittle was included in every part of the marriage between Bryher and Robert McAlmon. When McAlmon was incapable of putting up with the two women, he left and was replaced by Kenneth Macpherson. Bryher and Macpherson married, adopted Doolittle’s daughter, and included Doolittle in their threesome partnership. Freud must have loved hearing this story.

Perhaps strangely, one of the things that doesn’t turn up either in Freud’s case studies on “H.D.” was the question of sexuality. Regardless of her rather confused personal life, Doolittle went to see him because she was suffering from writer’s block . His therapy worked; she would go on to write Tribute to Freud , an entire memoir documenting their sessions and their personal connection. Her writing after her therapy sessions would explore many of Freud’s theories, from the parent-child relationship to gender identity, in a literary format .

Doolittle’s letters also talk about the others that sat in on their analysis and therapy sessions—Freud’s dogs. Either one or both of his dogs, described as chows that looked like little bears, were always present and were known to cause quite a distraction. Doolittle talks about them fighting and one instance where two puppies were introduced to the chaotic mix, a strange setting for a therapy session, no doubt.

2 Daniel Paul Schreber

Freud analyzed the case of German judge Daniel Paul Screber with nothing more to go on than Schreber’s own memoirs. Initially attracted by phrases like “soul murder,” Freud found in Schreber a fascinating story of psychosis.

The story started in childhood. Schreber’s father was a doctor who taught that children should not be allowed to cry (and should be beaten until they stopped), given baths in cold water to make them tougher, and forced to wear an orthopedic device at least between the ages of two and eight to ensure that they stood up straight all the time. A child’s day was to be rigidly scheduled, and if the child missed switching from one activity to the next, they went hungry. If punishments and beatings needed to be administered, the child must be made to go to the punisher, so they wouldn’t hold a grudge.

His father died when Schreber was 19, and when he was 35, his older brother committed suicide. Schreber himself suffered a mental breakdown after being defeated in a run for political office. Committed to a hospital, he was diagnosed as highly sensitive to stimuli (particularly noises), highly emotional, a hypochondriac, and suffering from speech impediments. He was released after six months.

He enjoyed eight years of relative normalcy, but he relapsed, and this time, his hospitalization lasted for another eight years. It was during those eight years that he wrote the book that Freud was so fascinated by. This was also the period during which he believed his body was being turned into the body of a woman (with assistance from little men who lived in his feet and ran the pumps that evacuated his old organs and pushed in the new) and that his ultimate purpose in life was to become pregnant with God’s child .

Freud concluded that Schreber’s delusions centered around first the man who was treating him, Professor Flechsig, and then, later, God. The idea that he needed to become a woman in order to fulfill his purpose in life—become the mother to a new race of men—indicated that Schreber still feared his father (rightfully so), and latent fears of castration performed by his father manifested themselves in a belief that he was becoming a woman. When God became the central figure to his delusion, Flechsig became a hated figure rather than a savior, suggesting to Freud that Schreber was also dealing with an intense, sexual attraction to Flechsig. When that wasn’t fulfilled, the Flechsig role morphed into the role of God, with Schreber filling the subservient, female role his father’s abuse had pushed him toward .

1 Sergei Pankejeff (Wolf Man)

Born in 1886, Sergei Pankejeff would be haunted by death, depression, and suicide for most of his life. Depression was chronic in his family. In 1906, his sister committed suicide, followed by his father in 1907. Even his wife would later commit suicide in 1938. When he began suffering from depression, he sought help.

Freud saw him as a patient from 1910–14, concentrating on a dream that he remembered having as a young child. It involved him sleeping in his bed and waking to look out of an open window. There was a walnut tree outside, and in the tree sat six or seven giant white wolves , watching him. Although he was originally diagnosed with what Dr. Emil Kraeplin called “manic-depressive insanity,” Freud disagreed and diagnosed him with “obsessional neurosis” that stemmed from episodes of anxiety that began at a young age which were colored with the religious upbringing that his mother imposed on him.

Freud believed that the wolf dream was the key to unlocking what was going on in Pankejeff’s psyche. Animals, Freud said, were often a substitute for a father figure in dreams. The idea of the window opening and the predatory wolves waiting and watching was clearly a sign of a sexual fantasy that Pankejeff was repressing, in which his father was the predator and he was the prey. Part of that, he said, came from a repressed memory that had surfaced. Supposedly, Pankejeff was only 18 months old when he witnessed what he had thought was a violent act between his mother and father, one that he had come to understand was somehow pleasurable.

Freud also looked at the relationship between Pankejeff and his pious female role models—his mother and his beloved Nanya, the nurse who took care of him when he was young. Even though he tried to be good and do as they told him, his baser urges inevitably got the better of him and were released in violent outbursts. His sister stood for not only incest, but unresolved issues, as she took her own life before they could be sorted through. For Freud, the Wolf Man was the perfect depiction of the damage that unresolved sexual issues in infants can do.

Pankejeff ultimately sought help elsewhere and became an insurance lawyer .

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After having a number of odd jobs from shed-painter to grave-digger, Debra loves writing about the things no history class will teach. She spends much of her time distracted by her two cattle dogs.

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Sigmund Freud’s Theories & Contribution to Psychology

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

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Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

Sigmund Freud (1856 to 1939) was the founding father of psychoanalysis , a method for treating mental illness and a theory explaining human behavior.

Freud believed that events in our childhood have a great influence on our adult lives, shaping our personality. For example, anxiety originating from traumatic experiences in a person’s past is hidden from consciousness and may cause problems during adulthood (neuroses).

Thus, when we explain our behavior to ourselves or others (conscious mental activity), we rarely give a true account of our motivation. This is not because we are deliberately lying. While human beings are great deceivers of others; they are even more adept at self-deception.

Freud’s life work was dominated by his attempts to penetrate this often subtle and elaborate camouflage that obscures the hidden structure and processes of personality.

His lexicon has become embedded within the vocabulary of Western society. Words he introduced through his theories are now used by everyday people, such as anal (personality), libido, denial, repression, cathartic, Freudian slip , and neurotic.

Who is Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud, born on May 6, 1856, in what is now Příbor, Czech Republic (then part of the Austrian Empire), is hailed as the father of psychoanalysis. He was the eldest of eight children in a Jewish family.

Freud initially wanted to become a law professional but later developed an interest in medicine. He entered the University of Vienna in 1873, graduating with an MD in 1881. His primary interests included neurology and neuropathology. He was particularly interested in the condition of hysteria and its psychological causes.

In 1885, Freud received a grant to study with Jean-Martin Charcot, a renowned neurologist who used hypnosis to treat women suffering from what was then called “hysteria.” This experience sparked Freud’s interest in the unconscious mind, a theme that would recur throughout his career.

In 1886, Freud returned to Vienna, married Martha Bernays, and set up a private practice to treat nervous disorders. His work during this time led to his revolutionary concepts of the human mind and the development of the psychoanalytic method.

Freud introduced several influential concepts, including the Oedipus complex, dream analysis, and the structural model of the psyche divided into the id, ego, and superego. He published numerous works throughout his career, the most notable being “ The Interpretation of Dreams ” (1900), “ The Psychopathology of Everyday Life ” (1901), and “ Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality ” (1905).

Despite controversy and opposition, Freud continued to develop his theories and expand the field of psychoanalysis. He was deeply affected by the outbreak of World War I and later by the rise of the Nazis in Germany. In 1938, due to the Nazi threat, he emigrated to London with his wife and youngest daughter.

Freud died in London on September 23, 1939, but his influence on psychology, literature, and culture remains profound and pervasive.

He radically changed our understanding of the human mind, emphasizing the power of unconscious processes and pioneering therapeutic techniques that continue to be used today.

Sigmund Freud’s Theories & Contributions

Psychoanalytic Theory : Freud is best known for developing psychoanalysis , a therapeutic technique for treating mental health disorders by exploring unconscious thoughts and feelings.

Unconscious Mind : Freud (1900, 1905) developed a topographical model of the mind, describing the features of the mind’s structure and function. Freud used the analogy of an iceberg to describe the three levels of the mind.

The id, ego, and superego have most commonly been conceptualized as three essential parts of the human personality.

Psychosexual Development : Freud’s controversial theory of psychosexual development suggests that early childhood experiences and stages (oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital) shape our adult personality and behavior.

His theory of psychosexual stages of development is predicated by the concept that childhood experiences create the adult personality and that problems in early life would come back to haunt the individual as a mental illness.

Dream Analysis : Freud believed dreams were a window into the unconscious mind and developed methods for analyzing dream content for repressed thoughts and desires.

Dreams represent unfulfilled wishes from the id, trying to break through to the conscious. But because these desires are often unacceptable, they are disguised or censored using such defenses as symbolism.

Freud believed that by undoing the dreamwork , the analyst could study the manifest content (what they dreamt) and interpret the latent content ( what it meant) by understanding the symbols.

Defense Mechanisms : Freud proposed several defense mechanisms , like repression and projection, which the ego employs to handle the tension and conflicts among the id, superego, and the demands of reality.

Sigmund Freud’s Patients

Sigmund Freud’s clinical work with several patients led to major breakthroughs in psychoanalysis and a deeper understanding of the human mind. Here are summaries of some of his most notable cases:

Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim) : Known as the ‘birth of psychoanalysis,’ Anna O . was a patient of Freud’s colleague Josef Breuer. However, her case heavily influenced Freud’s thinking.

She suffered from various symptoms, including hallucinations and paralysis, which Freud interpreted as signs of hysteria caused by repressed traumatic memories. The “talking cure” method with Anna O. would later evolve into Freudian psychoanalysis.

Dora (Ida Bauer) : Dora, a pseudonym Freud used, was a teenager suffering from what he diagnosed as hysteria. Her symptoms included aphonia (loss of voice) and a cough.

Freud suggested her issues were due to suppressed sexual desires, particularly those resulting from a complex series of relationships in her family. The Dora case is famous for the subject’s abrupt termination of therapy, and for the criticisms Freud received regarding his handling of the case.

Little Hans (Herbert Graf) : Little Hans , a five-year-old boy, feared horses. Freud never met Hans but used information from the boy’s father to diagnose him.

He proposed that Little Hans’ horse phobia was symbolic of a deeper fear related to the Oedipus Complex – unconscious feelings of affection for his mother and rivalry with his father. The case of Little Hans is often used as an example of Freud’s theory of the Oedipal Complex in children.

Rat Man (Ernst Lanzer) : Rat Man came to Freud suffering from obsessive thoughts and fears related to rats, a condition known as obsessional neurosis.

Freud connected his symptoms to suppressed guilt and repressed sexual desires. The treatment of Rat Man further expanded Freud’s work on understanding the role of internal conflicts and unconscious processes in mental health disorders.

Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff) : Wolf Man was a wealthy Russian aristocrat who came to Freud with various symptoms, including a recurring dream about wolves.

Freud’s analysis, focusing on childhood memories and dreams, led him to identify the presence of repressed memories and the influence of the Oedipus Complex . Wolf Man’s treatment is often considered one of Freud’s most significant and controversial cases.

In the highly repressive “Victorian” society in which Freud lived and worked, women, in particular, were forced to repress their sexual needs. In many cases, the result was some form of neurotic illness.

Freud sought to understand the nature and variety of these illnesses by retracing the sexual history of his patients. This was not primarily an investigation of sexual experiences as such. Far more important were the patient’s wishes and desires, their experience of love, hate, shame, guilt, and fear – and how they handled these powerful emotions.

Freud’s Followers

Freud attracted many followers, who formed a famous group in 1902 called the “Psychological Wednesday Society.” The group met every Wednesday in Freud’s waiting room.

As the organization grew, Freud established an inner circle of devoted followers, the so-called “Committee” (including Sàndor Ferenczi, and Hanns Sachs (standing) Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, and Ernest Jones).

At the beginning of 1908, the committee had 22 members and was renamed the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

Neo-Freudians

The term “neo-Freudians” refers to psychologists who were initially followers of Sigmund Freud (1856 to 1939) but later developed their own theories, often modifying or challenging Freud’s ideas.

Here are summaries of some of the most notable neo-Freudians:

Carl Jung : Jung (1875 – 1961) was a close associate of Freud but split due to theoretical disagreements. He developed the concept of analytical psychology, emphasizing the collective unconscious, which houses universal symbols or archetypes shared by all human beings. He also introduced the idea of introversion and extraversion.

Alfred Adler : Adler (1870 – 1937) was another early follower of Freud who broke away due to differing views. He developed the school of individual psychology, highlighting the role of feelings of inferiority and the striving for superiority or success in shaping human behavior. He also emphasized the importance of social context and community.

• Otto Rank : Rank (1884 – 1939)  was an early collaborator with Freud and played a significant role in the development of psychoanalysis. He proposed the “trauma of birth” as a critical event influencing the psyche. Later, he shifted focus to the relationship between therapist and client, influencing the development of humanistic therapies.

Karen Horney : Horney (1885 – 1952) challenged Freud’s views on women, arguing against the concept of “penis envy.” She suggested that social and cultural factors significantly influence personality development and mental health. Her concept of ‘basic anxiety’ centered on feelings of helplessness and insecurity in childhood, shaping adult behavior.

• Harry Stack Sullivan : Sullivan (1892 – 1949) developed interpersonal psychoanalysis, emphasizing the role of interpersonal relationships and social experiences in personality development and mental disorders. He proposed the concept of the “self-system” formed through experiences of approval and disapproval during childhood.

Melanie Klein : Klein (1882 – 1960), a prominent psychoanalyst, is considered a neo-Freudian due to her development of object relations theory, which expanded on Freud’s ideas. She emphasized the significance of early childhood experiences and the role of the mother-child relationship in psychological development.

• Anna Freud : Freud’s youngest daughter significantly contributed to psychoanalysis, particularly in child psychology. Anna Freud (1895 – 1982) expanded on her father’s work, emphasizing the importance of ego defenses in managing conflict and preserving mental health.

Wilhelm Reich : Reich (1897 – 1957), once a student of Freud, diverged by focusing on bodily experiences and sexual repression, developing the theory of orgone energy. His emphasis on societal influence and body-oriented therapy made him a significant neo-Freudian figure.

• Erich Fromm : Fromm (1900-1980) was a German-American psychoanalyst associated with the Frankfurt School, who emphasized culture’s role in developing personality. He advocated psychoanalysis as a tool for curing cultural problems and thus reducing mental illness.

Erik Erikson : Erikson (1902 – 1994)  extended Freud’s theory of psychosexual development by adding social and cultural aspects and proposing a lifespan development model. His theory of psychosocial development outlined eight stages, each marked by a specific crisis to resolve, that shape an individual’s identity and relationships.

Critical Evaluation

Does evidence support Freudian psychology? Freud’s theory is good at explaining but not predicting behavior (which is one of the goals of science ).

For this reason, Freud’s theory is unfalsifiable – it can neither be proved true or refuted. For example, the unconscious mind is difficult to test and measure objectively. Overall, Freud’s theory is highly unscientific.

Despite the skepticism of the unconscious mind, cognitive psychology has identified unconscious processes, such as procedural memory (Tulving, 1972), automatic processing (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Stroop, 1935), and social psychology has shown the importance of implicit processing (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Such empirical findings have demonstrated the role of unconscious processes in human behavior.

However, most evidence for Freud’s theories is from an unrepresentative sample. He mostly studied himself, his patients, and only one child (e.g., Little Hans ).

The main problem here is that the case studies are based on studying one person in detail, and regarding Freud, the individuals in question are most often middle-aged women from Vienna (i.e., his patients).

This makes generalizations to the wider population (e.g., the whole world) difficult. However, Freud thought this unimportant, believing in only a qualitative difference between people.

Freud may also have shown research bias in his interpretations – he may have only paid attention to information that supported his theories, and ignored information and other explanations that did not fit them.

However, Fisher & Greenberg (1996) argue that Freud’s theory should be evaluated in terms of specific hypotheses rather than a whole. They concluded that there is evidence to support Freud’s concepts of oral and anal personalities and some aspects of his ideas on depression and paranoia.

They found little evidence of the Oedipal conflict and no support for Freud’s views on women’s sexuality and how their development differs from men’.

Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American psychologist, 54 (7), 462.

Breuer, J., & Freud, S. (1895). Studies on hysteria . Standard Edition 2: London.

Fisher, S., & Greenberg, R. P. (1996). Freud scientifically reappraised: Testing the theories and therapy . John Wiley & Sons.

Freud, S. (1894). The neuro-psychoses of defence . SE, 3: 41-61.

Freud, S. (1896). Further remarks on the neuro-psychoses of defence . SE, 3: 157-185.

Freud, S. (1900). The interpretation of dreams . S.E., 4-5.

Freud, S. (1901). The psychopathology of everyday life. SE, 6.  London: Hogarth .

Freud, S. (1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality.  Se ,  7 , 125-243.

Freud, S. (1915). The unconscious . SE, 14: 159-204.

Freud, S. (1920) . Beyond the pleasure principle . SE, 18: 1-64.

Freud, S. (1923). The ego and the id . SE, 19: 1-66.

Freud, S. (1925). Negation. Standard edition , 19, 235-239.

Freud, S. (1961). The resistances to psycho-analysis. In T he Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (1923-1925): The Ego and the Id and other works (pp. 211-224).

Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (1995). Implicit social cognition: attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes. Psychological review, 102 (1), 4.

Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of experimental psychology, 18 (6), 643.

Tulving, E. (1972). Episodic and semantic memory. In E. Tulving & W. Donaldson (Eds.), Organization of Memory , (pp. 381–403). New York: Academic Press.

What is Freud most famous for?

Why is freud so criticized, what did sigmund freud do.

His conceptualization of the mind’s structure (id, ego, superego), his theories of psychosexual development, and his exploration of defense mechanisms revolutionized our understanding of human psychology.

Despite controversies and criticisms, Freud’s theories have fundamentally shaped the field of psychology and the way we perceive the human mind.

What is the Freudian revolution’s impact on society?

The Woman Behind Freud’s First Case Study

The case of anna o. showed that psychoanalysis worked. did freud tamper with it.

There is perhaps no one more devoted to the cause than a convert, and there is no one more violent toward it than a person who has lost their faith. The faithful turned faithless take up the act of crusade, but in reverse: new atheists confronting the world with secular eyes, children who learn that their parents aren’t omnipotent. They have suffered the loss of an organizing principle, the very thing they built their life around. Now, they may seek revenge on the object that caused an earlier delusion. The commitment doesn’t end—it just takes on new guises.

Beyond the reactions of former lovers and former zealots, we see this in the history of psychoanalysis, perhaps because the practice attracts and demands those same qualities of immersion and devotion. Many have justly loved psychoanalysis, and many have justly despaired of it. This includes the very founders of rational emotive behavioral therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy, who brought about a sea change in mental health care, and the critics Frederick Crews, Jeffrey Masson, and Philip Rieff, who turned against Freud even after he had been unthroned as king of the twentieth century. This hatred can feel quasi-personal, aimed at the originator, their father figure, Sigmund Freud.

This loss of faith looms over Gabriel Brownstein’s book, The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim: The Woman Who Invented Freud’s Talking Cure . On its face, the book is a study of the first analytic patient (although she didn’t exactly receive psychoanalytic treatment), Bertha Pappenheim. Pappenheim, who was treated by Freud’s mentor Josef Breuer in Vienna, was the subject of one of Breuer’s case studies and was much discussed by Freud throughout his own career. The book’s stated aim is to offer a full portrait of someone flattened and circulated as a specimen. For Pappenheim is best known by another name—Anna O.—and is best known not as her full person, who left a legacy of feminist and activist patronage, but as the world’s most famous hysteric.

But quietly, this is also a book about the birth and death of psychoanalysis—which is to say that the narrative of Freud’s ascendance and betrayal is the engine that drives the book. Brownstein argues, sometimes contradictorily, that Freud’s brilliance and his drive to make his way as a medical doctor propelled him to tamper with Bertha’s story.

Given that Pappenheim’s stunning cure is the origin story of psychoanalysis, Brownstein seeks to denigrate the whole endeavor on these grounds. If the Anna O. case was a fraud, so, too, would the cure be that she discovered.

Hysteria, much like psychoanalysis, has a storied past, one with a powerful crescendo followed by a caesura. Though the term “hysteric” is now assumed in common speech to be either a pejorative epithet, synonymous with performative hyper-emotionality ( he was hysterical ), or a historical diagnosis made up by misogynistic doctors (like, some argue, Breuer and Freud), the condition was once quite common. For the uninitiated, hysteria is an illness where the body speaks, where neurotic symptoms appear in and on it. It was treated by an array of cures, from gynecological massage (prescribed orgasm), hypnotism, rest, and drugging, to change of scenery, and, yes, for a very few patients, starting in the late nineteenth century, Breuer and Freud’s cathartic method. This eventually became psychoanalysis. This was, it must be said, a treatment that seems preferable to the other options.

Bertha Pappenheim was in many ways a typical hysterical patient, and an extraordinary woman. When she went to see Breuer in 1880, she presented with the typical hysterical complaints: partial paralysis, disturbances of appetite and language, pain. She couldn’t recall her native German and only spoke in English. She wouldn’t drink water. She had fallen ill while nursing her father, and her condition deteriorated upon his death. She was treated both in her home and in an asylum, often with high doses of drugs. What marks her case as special is that Pappenheim was the first person on Earth to be treated by the cathartic method, in large part because she invented it. Anytime you hear someone say “talking cure,” they’re using the very term Pappenheim ascribed to the yearslong experiment she undertook, morning and night, with her doctor. As she chattered on, as she engaged in the “chimney sweeping” of her mind—so the story goes—she felt better.

Freud and Breuer went on to co-write the groundbreaking Studies on Hysteria , published in 1895. The two doctors, one senior and one junior, open the book with a co-written introduction and end it with a pair of stand-alone essays (Freud’s undermining Breuer’s) in which the nascent theories of repression, defense, catharsis, and abreaction first appear. Each supplied case material of hysteric women treated by this nascent cathartic method. Freud wrote up four cases, and Breuer only contributed the case of Pappenheim, now disguised and named “Anna O.” The two detailed the symptoms of their patients and how each was aided, if not outright cured, by this new talking protocol.

In Breuer’s write-up of Anna O., which only runs about 25 pages, he elaborates on the case study, telling his readers how ill Anna was, when, and why. He then goes on to describe his therapeutic practice of sitting with her at night, and how, while Anna O. was under hypnosis, the two came to “develop a therapeutic technique” of linking each of her symptoms to the moment it appeared. The water she will not drink, for instance, is linked to a moment she saw her English ladies’ companion let a little dog drink from her glass. After the connection is revealed under hypnosis, Breuer tells us, Anna O. drinks water once more. The process repeated until there were no symptoms left, and Anna O.’s mental state presumably returned to normal.

The problem is—and basically all historians of psychoanalysis agree on this point—that even though Breuer and Freud reported a miracle cure, Anna O. didn’t get better. In fact, she got worse and was put in a sanatorium. The question is why. Brownstein, following the anti-Freud tradition, attributes this failure to the treatment. Freud, of course, attributed this failure to the person who offered the treatment—Breuer—not because he couldn’t cure her, but because he didn’t finish doing so.

Like all origin myths, the case has been subject to endless interpretation and reinterpretation. Even the original case study is retrospective: Breuer didn’t write up the Anna O. case at the time of treatment. He did so at Freud’s urging, so that the two might document this new technique of psychotherapy. Anna O. thus became the first patient of psychoanalysis only after the fact, and even though her treatment has just about nothing in common with psychoanalysis today, she is celebrated as such. Freud then revised the case multiple times across his life (in private letters, then in publications in 1910 and 1914), often to diminish Breuer’s role in the origin of psychoanalysis. This is in part due to what Freud thought of privately as Breuer’s failure: When Anna O. showed Breuer she had transferred onto him—by fantasizing about having his baby—Breuer ran away. Breuer could have invented psychoanalysis had he stayed in the room—but he didn’t dare. And thus Anna remained ill, but, in Freud’s understanding, psychoanalysis was not at fault.

Once Freud died, others revised the case in their own ways. Stacks of books can be called up in any research library by those who either defend or revile Freud—and nearly all of them, at one point, turn to Anna O. These studies often seek to collate and correlate Breuer’s flattened write-up of the case with historical reality, trying to reconstruct both Anna O.’s illness and her medical treatment. Some are feminist rereadings of the case, arguing that Anna O. was sick with patriarchy; others center squarely on Freud’s obsession with the case, excavating his letters about Anna O. to various ends.

What’s plain as day: Pappenheim has become the Rorschach test for the field. What we see in her case tends to be run through our feelings about psychoanalysis. The great historian of psychoanalysis John Forrester has argued that the baby that Anna O. spoke of wanting to have with Breuer was psychoanalysis—something she conceived with Breuer, even though he wouldn’t stick around and take responsibility for it. Anti-Freudian Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen sees Anna O.’s case as entirely fabricated, a young woman taken in by her handsome doctor and given huge quantities of drugs; if she invented psychoanalysis, she was the first to be duped by it. As the late Peter Gay observed, “There are contradictions and obscurities in successive versions of the case, but this much is more or less beyond dispute: In 1880, when Anna O. fell ill, she was twenty-one.”

But because very little besides Breuer’s documents is known of her life at the time of treatment, we project what we want onto her, and we can, for her history is a mere fragment. That we continue to do so makes exquisite sense: Psychoanalysis teaches us we must go back to our origins to go forward. And the treatment of Anna O. by Breuer is one way—a decent way—to conceptualize the start of Freud’s theory of mind.

Brownstein’s main critique of Freud’s use of Anna O. is this: that he took her case for his own material ends (though, by the same token, we might ask after Brownstein’s book advance). Freud was a broke young doctor; he needed to get married, and, to do so, he needed to press Breuer into writing Studies on Hysteria so that he could practice this new treatment with a kind of paternal authorization, styling himself as a doctor of “the cathartic method of J. Breuer.”

Brownstein agrees with anti-Freudians like Borch-Jacobsen and Crews that Anna O.’s treatment was a dismal failure. And even though that would make the lie—that Anna O. was cured—Breuer’s, Brownstein argues it was Freud who metaphorically had a gun to his mentor’s head and forced him to write it. More softly, Brownstein argues that Anna O. obscures Bertha Pappenheim, whom Brownstein now promises to deliver to us. Here’s the problem: Brownstein wants to make Freud the (very) bad guy of a story that had little to do with him, even if he had a great deal to do with the case becoming a story. So much so that Brownstein treats the possibility of Freud seeing Bertha Pappenheim at a party years after the treatment as corroborating evidence for some kind of misdeed.

Brownstein thus rewrites up the notorious case, with his chatty, negative asides and interpretations taking center stage. His first close reading from the book is, appropriately, from the first page. He argues that, though Studies purports to be “about the sex lives and sex drives of young bourgeois women,” it “begins by announcing that, for the purposes of propriety, any discussion of their actual intimate lives will be avoided.” Brownstein argues that this is a cover—that Breuer and Freud are maliciously withholding evidence for their theory because there isn’t any and because the doctors wanted to appear respectable. But if we read the first page of Studies , here’s what Breuer and Freud actually wrote: “It would be a grave breach of confidence to publish material of this kind, with the risk of patients being recognized and their acquaintances becoming informed of facts which were confided only to the physician.” There is a deep truth to what Freud and Breuer argue: They were working in a small coterie of largely wealthy Viennese Jewish patients. Everyone knew one another (hence, the great possibility of Freud running into Pappenheim). If you circulated reports of the ills of a young woman’s “marriage bed” or lack thereof, it would have meant no father would refer his daughter to Breuer or Freud, let alone the greater ethical considerations Brownstein says are gestured to half-heartedly.

Elsewhere, Brownstein accuses Freud of having a faulty memory and disguising the patient (despite the authors’ own opening warning to the reader not to go looking for biographical information of Pappenheim). To cover over the lack of details about her, Brownstein freely narrativizes the case, turning it into a historical fiction. At other times, Brownstein seems furious that Freud tends to write beautifully—Brownstein takes this as a sign of fudging the facts—while he then turns to close reading it like a literary critic.

By the end, we know from Brownstein that we’re supposed to find Breuer largely unobjectionable, but in the grips of a young Freud. The cardinal sin for Brownstein, though, is that Anna O. wasn’t made better. (Brownstein believes that she was in fact suffering from a functional neurological disorder, a contemporary diagnosis that overlaps with hysteria.) She was transported back to the asylum, so ill that Breuer reportedly told Freud his beloved patient might be better off dead, so that she might be free of suffering. Yet we might pause and say something did indeed happen in that treatment: Pappenheim was ultimately able to recover enough. By 1889, at 29 years of age, she was able not only to get out of bed, to talk, but to work in a soup kitchen. From this year on, she published—first anonymously and then pseudonymously, under the name Paul Berthold. Soon, Pappenheim was finally known not as Anna O., not as Berthold, but as herself. She also became famous as herself, a powerful, feminist leader, founding the Jewish Women’s Association and centralizing Jewish women’s organizing toward both employment and charity.

Why a book about Bertha Pappenheim now? One answer: With its claim that it will deliver readers Pappenheim in full, Brownstein’s book sits on that ever-expanding shelf of nonfiction books that seek to tell the stories of women who have been relegated to the margins of history, returning them to their larger, unobfuscated import. The book, too, in trying to bring Pappenheim’s story up to the present by rediagnosing her with functional neurological disorder, joins the book market for explorations of contested illness. Yet this book isn’t exactly proper to either of these subgenres. Instead, we might make sense of it as a work of backlash: Just as a range of analysts and writers have turned once more to Freud (as The New York Times proclaimed in an article not quite aptly titled “Not Your Daddy’s Freud”), so have others returned to maligning him. Brownstein has offered us, perhaps, the first book of the Freud Wars 2.0.

Brownstein, in fact, inherits the role of Freud skeptic from an earlier generation. His father, Dr. Shale Brownstein, was a prominent New York psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with a Rolodex of famous patients. Sometime in the 1980s, Dr. Brownstein became disillusioned with psychoanalysis and became an anti-Freudian—though we are never quite told why. One night, when Brownstein went to visit his father, he found him in his underwear, speaking wildly. The subject: Bertha Pappenheim. His father held a thick envelope filled with scientific and historic papers, newspaper clippings, reviews of books, and his own essay on the subject.

His father gave him the manila envelope. The younger Brownstein went home to Brooklyn, and the next day his father was dead. As if in a novel, Brownstein then becomes fixated on the envelope and its contents only to discover he has misplaced it. His own book is as much an attempt to decipher his father’s theory about Bertha Pappenheim as to understand his father’s turn against Freud. Brownstein makes clear that his father was a devoted doctor, and treated luminaries in downtown New York, including Peter Hujar and Richard Serra. Dr. Brownstein tended to babies with HIV in the 1980s who languished otherwise in their cots, when others wouldn’t dare go near. Dr. Brownstein gave everything to psychoanalysis, but then something changed. We don’t quite know what, but his father became so disillusioned that he burned all 24 volumes of Freud’s Standard Edition .

Was it the homophobia of mainstream psychoanalysis that rightfully made him repudiate his training? Was it indeed the legacy of Anna O.? I wish we knew what Brownstein felt as he wrestled with Freud via his father. As author and son, Brownstein is overwhelmed by the research subject he must now try to understand and, more importantly, terribly overwhelmed by the pain of being alive when life is most brutal. Shortly after his father’s death, his wife is diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, and when the global pandemic arrives, Brownstein must weather it without them.

While Brownstein seemingly hates Freud, he, like many others, can’t escape him. Early in the book, he disparages two Freudian terms: “secondary gain,” which can be described as the unconscious advantage patients acquire through their illness (stereotyped here as attention), and “ la belle indifférence ,” a calm character in the face of crisis. But toward the book’s close, Brownstein suddenly tips his hand: He comes to a form of self-understanding through these concepts. In not getting treated for a heart problem, he says he has a case of la belle indifférence . In writing the book, he self-analyzes, he can be understood as having a case of secondary gain—after all, Brownstein was quite literally paid for producing it.

But Brownstein uses these concepts defensively—to show his reader he is in on the joke. The book itself, more movingly, is a testament to yet another set of Freudian concepts: the return of the repressed, as evidenced by his return to the use of Freud; working through (here, loss of his father, his wife); and, indeed, sublimation. Writing the book then might be an act of Freudian sublimation; it is also an act of devotion. This article has been updated.

Hannah Zeavin is an assistant professor of history at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy .

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Sigmund Freud

Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born on 6th May 1856 to Jewish parents, Amalia and Jakob Freud, in a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire now in the Czech Republic. When Sigmund was three, the Freuds moved to Vienna. He excelled academically, developing a passion for literature, languages and the arts that would profoundly influence his thinking about the human mind. Freud became very interested in medical and scientific research, and went on to study medicine at the University of Vienna. While studying, Freud developed a particular fascination with neurology, and later trained in neuropathology at the Vienna General Hospital. In 1885, Freud travelled to Paris to study at the Salpêtrière Hospital with Jean-Martin Charcot, a famous neurologist studying hypnosis and hysteria. Freud was deeply affected by Charcot’s work, and upon returning to Vienna he started using hypnosis in his own clinical work with patients.

Out of these experiments in hypnosis, and in collaboration with his colleague Josef Breuer, Freud developed a new kind of psychological treatment based on the patient talking about whatever came to mind – memories, dreams, thoughts, emotions – and then analysing that information in order to relieve the patient’s symptoms. He would later call this process ‘free association’. Early forays into this new ‘talking cure’ by Breuer and Freud yielded promising results (notably in the famous case of ‘Anna O.’) A year before marrying his fiancée Martha Bernays, Freud published Studies on Hysteria (1895) with Breuer, the first ever ‘psychoanalytic’ work. In this book, Freud and Breuer described their theory that the symptoms of hysteria were symbolic representations of traumatic, and often sexual, memories. By 1896, Freud had abandoned hypnosis and started using the term ‘psychoanalysis’ to refer to this new clinical method and its underlying theories. The following year, Freud embarked upon a self-analysis, which he deemed necessary both as a means of expanding and testing his theory of the mind, and as an exercise in honesty and self-knowledge. This self-investigation led him to build upon his and Breuer’s original theory that neurosis was caused by early trauma, and to develop substantially his ideas about infantile sexuality and repression. In the coming years and decades, Freud’s clinical work with his patients – among them the famous ‘Dora’, ‘Rat Man’, and ‘Little Hans’ – would remain the basis and core of his work, and would provide the vital material for his continual advancement and refinement of his theory of the mind.

In 1899 Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. In this, one of his most important works, he described dreams as a form of wish-fulfilment, and asserted that: “[T]he interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” In his formulation, dreams were the result of the unconscious trying to resolve conflicts or express desires that, in our conscious minds, are not allowed to be acknowledged. He saw the preconscious mind as a kind of censor or bodyguard, only allowing unthreatening thoughts into the conscious mind. According to Freud, in dreams this censorship becomes weaker, and forbidden wishes can become visible to our sleeping minds, albeit in some kind of symbolic disguise or code. Freud believed these dream symbols were far from simple to interpret, often embodying several meanings at once. It was also in The Interpretation of Dreams that Freud introduced perhaps his most famous concept of the Oedipus Complex, and it was here that he first mapped out his topographical model of the mind. Between 1901 and 1905 Freud continued to elaborate and expand his model of human psychology, and he wrote two more very important works. In 'The Psychopathology of Everyday Life', he introduced the idea of ‘Freudian’ slips and ‘verbal bridges’, and in 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,' he delineated his early thinking about psychosexual development and infantile sexuality.

By the beginning of the twentieth century Freud’s ideas were drawing interest from several colleagues in Vienna. In 1902 a group of physicians and psychiatrists formed the Wednesday Psychological Society, which met every week in Freud’s apartment at Berggasse, 19. The original group was made up of Freud, Wilhelm Stekel, Alfred Adler, Max Kahane, and Rudolph Reitler, all Viennese physicians. By 1906 the group had grown to a membership of sixteen, including Carl Jung and Otto Rank, both of whom would go on to be highly influential psychoanalytic thinkers. At this point the group decided to re-name and establish itself as the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Freud and Carl Jung quickly became close colleagues and friends, both fascinated and enthused by the possibilities of psychoanalysis. In 1909 they travelled, along with Hungarian analyst Sándor Ferenczi, to the USA, where Freud gave a series of psychoanalytic lectures. It was after these American lectures that Freud’s renown and influence began to grow far beyond the confines of the Viennese medical community. American psychologists and neurologists were galvanised by Freud’s new ideas, and within a few years both the New York Psychoanalytic Society and the American Psychoanalytic Association were founded.

A year after the outbreak of the First World War, at the age of sixty, Freud gave his ‘Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis’ at the University of Vienna. In them he outlined the key tenets of psychoanalytic theory, as he had developed them over the past two decades, including his ideas of repression, free association and libido. The lectures were published two years later, and went on to become his most popular publication. The year after the end of the war, in 1919, Freud examined soldiers traumatized by their experience of fighting. He did not write much explicitly about the psychological damage done by warfare, but it nevertheless influenced his thinking significantly, for example in his concepts of repetition compulsion and the death instinct.

In 1920 Freud suffered a personal tragedy when his daughter Sophie died from the influenza eviscerating an already war-damaged Europe. She was aged only twenty-seven when she died, pregnant, and a mother of two. Three years later Freud would also lose Sophie’s son Heinerle, his grandson, at the age of four. He wrote in a letter: “I have hardly ever loved a human being, certainly never a child, so much as him.” He said he had never felt such grief. The year of Sophie’s death, Freud published 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', a paper introducing his concepts of repetition compulsion and the death instinct, and building upon his earlier description of the function and operation of dreams. It is in this work that he revised his theory that human behaviour is almost entirely driven by sexual instincts, instead portraying the psyche in a state of conflict between opposites: creative, life-seeking, sexual Eros; and destructive, death-bent Thanatos. In Freud’s formulation, the death instinct was an expression of a fundamental biological longing to return to an inanimate state. This new theory was not well received by most of his analytic colleagues in Vienna, though it would, in time, have a big impact on the thinking of several preeminent psychoanalytic thinkers, notably Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein.

In 1923 Freud published his important paper, 'The Ego and the Id'. Here he further developed and elucidated his model of the human mind, introducing his ‘Superego-Ego-Id’ formulation to supersede the 'conscious-preconscious-unconscious' structure described in The Interpretation of Dreams. In this year Freud also discovered a pre-cancerous growth in his jaw, certainly caused by his regular and liberal consumption of cigars. He nonetheless found himself unable to give them up, and likened his addiction to them to his obsessional collecting of antiquities. The growth later turned into cancer and would ultimately cause his death sixteen years later.

At the invitation of the League of Nations and its International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation at Paris, in 1932 Albert Einstein initiated an exchange of letters (for subsequent publication) with Freud, concerning the subject of war and how it might be avoided. Einstein and Freud had met several years earlier in Berlin, and were very interested in one another’s work. Only a year after this epistolary exchange, 1933 Hitler was elected Chancellor of the German Reich. In 1930 Freud had been awarded the Goethe Prize for his contributions to psychology and German literary culture, but in January 1933, the newly empowered Nazis seized Freud’s books, among many other psychoanalytic and Jewish-authored works, and publicly burned them in Berlin. The Nazis described this destruction as acting, "[A]gainst the soul-destroying glorification of the instinctual life, for the nobility of the human soul!” Meanwhile Freud’s comment on these barbaric proceedings was rather more ironic: "What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books."

As the Nazis gained power and territory, and their policies grew ever more flagrantly discriminatory, Freud continued to write and practise in Vienna. As the 1930s wore on, friends and colleagues encouraged him to consider leaving Vienna but, even after the Anschluss in March 1938 and the ensuing displays of anti-Semitic brutality, he showed no desire to move. Ernest Jones was very worried about this determination to stay in what was becoming an increasingly dangerous place for Jews, and he flew into Vienna soon after the annexation, determined to get Freud to move to Britain. Freud at last agreed and, after much financial and political negotiating with the Gestapo on the part of Jones and others, he and his daughter Anna left for London in June 1938. They moved into 20 Maresfield Gardens, in Hampstead (now the Freud Museum ), where Freud continued to write and treat patients, despite the painful advancement of his jaw cancer. In London Freud worked on his final books, Moses and Monotheism, and the incomplete Outline of Psychoanalysis. He was visited by Salvador Dalí – a passionate devotee –, his fellow Viennese writer Stefan Zweig, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and H.G. Wells.

By the autumn of 1939, the progression of Freud's cancer was causing him severe pain and had by this point been declared inoperable. He asked his doctor and friend, Max Schur, to euthanize him with a high dose of morphine, and he died on 23rd September 1939, not long after the outbreak of World War Two. His body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. Ernest Jones and Stefan Zweig spoke at his funeral.

Eleanor Sawbridge Burton 2015

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Freud’s Case Studies: The Rat Man

In 1907, Sigmund Freud treated a young attorney in his late twenties named Ernst Lanzer, who was suffering from unbearable obsessive thoughts and compulsions.  The young patient was especially worried that “something terrible” would happen to two people — his father and the woman with whom he was in love.  In this course, we will carefully study Freud’s published case history of the so-called “Rat Man,” which illuminates his theories of the unconscious, of obsessional neurosis, and of psychoanalytic treatment.  Supplemental readings will be suggested, and no prior knowledge of Freud is necessary.  This will be the first in a series of classes that focus upon Freud’s most influential clinical case studies.

What the Voyage of the Beagle was to Darwin, case studies were to Freud. Freud’s case histories are more than just compelling character profiles and lively literary narratives; they are the transformational investigations that inaugurated the body of knowledge and clinical practices that became psychoanalysis, the so-called “talking cure.” Among the most fascinating and influential of these is the case of the so-called “Rat Man,” the story of one man’s obsessional compulsions that is also a provocative inquiry into the many psychological meanings of money, religion, masculinity, sado-masochism, and more. Instructor Loren Dent will guide students through a close reading of the original case history, relevant secondary literature, and reflections on the meanings of the “Rat Man” case for the development of psychoanalysis and Freud’s thought. This course offers an opportunity for an in-depth engagement with one of the foundational case histories in psychoanalysis and a watershed text in Freud’s oeuvre, and will grant a multifaceted perspective — at once historical, literary, and clinical — otherwise unavailable outside of the context of formal psychoanalytic training.

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Freud (1909)

Last updated 10 Feb 2023

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Analysis of a Phobia of a Five-Year Old Boy.

Background & Aim

Little Hans’ father was a supporter of Freud and when his son developed a phobia, he referred him to Freud. Freud agreed to help and believed Hans’ phobia was due to things going on in his unconscious mind. Freud used the study of Little Hans to support his views on the origins of phobias, childhood sexuality and the Oedipus complex , as well as his belief in psychoanalysis as an effective therapy. Freud believed Hans’ fears, dreams and fantasies were symbolic of his unconscious passing through the phallic stage of psychosexual development .

As this was a detailed study of a single individual (Little Hans was Herbert Graf) over a period of time, we can classify it as a longitudinal case study . The study describes Hans’ fears from when he was three years old until he was five. He was five years old at the time of this study, but historical information from when Little Hans was three years old was also used. Qualitative data was gathered by Little Hans’ father through observations of and conversations with his son. This information was then sent to Freud by letter, who replied with interpretations of Hans’ behaviour and with advice.

During his correspondences with Freud, Hans’ father reported some of the following information about his son: Just before the age of three, Hans started to develop an active interest in his ‘widdler’ and he started to masturbate. This caused his mother to threaten to send for Dr A. to cut it off. At three and a half Hans’ sister Hanna was born; he resented her and hoped she would drown in the bath. A short time afterwards Hans developed a fear of white horses and being bitten by them. This seemed to relate to two key incidents: Firstly, overhearing a man say to his child “Don’t put your finger to the white horse or it will bite you”; secondly, seeing a horse that was pulling a carriage fall down. As a result, Hans’ phobia was generalised to carts and buses.

It was also reported that before and after the development of the phobia, Hans was anxious that his mother would leave and he experienced fantasies including one about a giraffe, two plumber fantasies and finally a parenting fantasy. The analysis/ investigation of Little Hans ended soon after the final fantasy when the phobia stopped due to the help he was given by Freud.

The information about Little Hans was analysed by Freud and he came up with the following findings: Because Han’s was experiencing the Oedipus complex (a sexual desire for his mother and rivalry with his father) he was subconsciously scared of his father. This fear was manifested in a fear of horses, particularly those with dark around the mouth (representing his father’s beard) and blinkers (which represented his glasses). Hans’ obsession with his ‘widdler’ was another sign of being in the phallic stage of development and experiencing the Oedipus complex. Other behaviours relating to the Oedipus Complex also included the giraffe fantasy which represented the desire to take his mother away from his father; the plumber fantasy was interpreted as him identifying with his father, as was the fantasy of becoming a father. The final family fantasy was interpreted as the resolution of the Oedipus Complex.

Conclusions

Freud concluded that the study of Little Hans provided support for his theory of psychosexual development and childhood sexuality, including the idea that boys in the phallic stage experience the Oedipus complex. He also concluded that phobias are caused by unconscious anxiety being displaced onto harmless external objects. Furthermore, Hans is an example of unconscious determinism which suggests that people are not consciously aware of the causes of their behaviour. Finally, Freud claims that psychoanalysis was an effective treatment for Little Hans because it identifies the unconscious cause of the abnormality which is then brought into the conscious to be discussed and resolved.

A strength of the case study method is that in-depth qualitative data can be gained through various methods such as observations and interviews. This allowed Freud to make detailed conclusions. However, as the data was gained by Hans’ father, who was also a fan of Freud, it may lack objectivity. There may also have been bias in the questions that were asked and in the recording of the data.

Furthermore, as the sample was only a single individual the study lacks population validity and therefore it is questionable as to whether the findings concerning the Oedipus Complex and psychosexual development can be generalised to all children. This is especially true as Hans was a middle class European boy in the early 20 th Century. It can be suggested that this study and much of Freud’s other research is ethnocentric.

As Little Hans was a five-year old boy he was unable to give informed consent; however, Hans’ father clearly did. Some of the questions Hans’ father asked his son may have caused psychological harm and the detailed description of Hans’ personal information within the research article would be invasion of privacy. On the other hand, Hans’ father was very open with his son and told him that notes he was taking were for the professor who was going to fix Hans’ ‘nonsense’, which he seemed to do!

• Unconscious
• Psychosexual

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Psych Reviews

Psychology, Meditation, and Philosophy book reviews

Case Studies: Dora – Sigmund Freud

The bauer’s and the zellenka’s.

In  Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905) , Freud first published a case study on Ida Bauer, under the pseudonym “Dora”, a daughter of parents in a loveless marriage. Her father, a merchant, and mother, immigrated from Bohemia to Vienna. In Freud’s case study, the 18 year old subject was stuck in what could be called an imbroglio, with a couple the family befriended, under the pseudonym “the K’s”: Hans and Peppina Zellenka, also in a loveless marriage.  Dora’s mother was described by Freud as having a “‘housewife’s psychosis’. She had no understanding of her children’s more active interests, and was occupied all day long in cleaning the house with its furniture and utensils and in keeping them clean – to such an extent as to make it almost impossible to use or enjoy them. This condition, traces of which are to be found often enough in normal housewives, inevitably reminds one of forms of obsessional washing and other kinds of obsessional cleanliness.” Fights between the family led to Dora supporting her father and her brother supporting their mother. The typical Oedipus Complex pattern.

Dora was forced to enter analysis by her father, after failed hydro and electro treatments with physicians. With nervous obsessive thoughts, difficulties breathing, a shuffled step, and a persistent nervous cough, Freud put her under the label of hysteria. Dora at the time would introduce to Freud what he termed as transference: See below. Psychologists today are readily aware of how their patients can project emotions they have for other significant people in their lives, onto the them. There is often a difficulty in finding the concealed truth behind the patient’s resistance and transference, or even more difficult to be aware of one’s own countertransference response as an analyst. Reacting with contempt towards the patient naturally leads to them becoming more hostile and quitting early, but in the early days of psychoanalysis it was something new to investigate. Freud delved deeper into Dora’s resistance and eventually found that transferences could be useful for him, and future therapists. Especially to harvest information to make the client aware of their unconscious material, and defenses.

Does Psychoanalysis work?

Freud’s famous and controversial case studies are considered by some critics a fiction, and even to Freud himself to a smaller extent, simply incomplete. Psychoanalysis has the tendency to over-analyze or under-analyze manifesting as a lack of resonance with the patient. On the other hand, what these case studies do well, is to show the reader the different theories, and how they  might   apply. The problem with Freud, and all psychology, and even all science, is understanding the correct context and applying the right interpretation at the right time. As science moves on, and more data is collected, the theories are forced to become more refined. Though, the danger of throwing out a particular psychologist’s entire bibliography, because it’s been surpassed, means throwing out all the good insight already found.

This is the particular the problem with Freud’s work. He conflates experiences together from different clients into theories and then tries to interpret case studies in a way that can be too general, and invites outright dismissal. His insights hit the mark some of the time, and at other times individuals are put into boxes that don’t give the full picture, or are misleading. Also having notes on clients written farther and father away from the session in question can lead to errors by the analyst. Freud did this to avoid distracting the client, but this could lead to forgetfulness and a conflation of material from different patients. Ultimately, interpretations have to predict behaviour and allow others to test their validity to gain wider acceptance. Even more difficult with Freud’s work is that some situations are untestable. For example, can we really test what was running through the mind of a patient at a particular time in the past? Or, how do you test dreams? In those cases, we are only left with theories to rally around. This is even more the case as later critics and authors re-read his case studies with more facts than Freud had, and also with new interpretations based on data from later patients in similar circumstances.

Deliberate falsification and Screen Memories

The opposite extreme of dumping psychoanalysis is believing patients who have resistances and needs for impression management to avoid stigma and ostracism. They will resist correct interpretations because they hit the mark and are threatening. In many cases the reader will never really know which interpretation is more correct, the therapist’s, or the client’s interpretations. For example, Freud talks about forgotten knowledge of the client. “[Patients] can, give the physician plenty of coherent information about this or that period of their lives; but it is sure to be followed by another period as to which their communications run dry, leaving gaps unfilled, and riddles unanswered; and then again will come yet another period which will remain totally obscure and unilluminated by even a single piece of serviceable information.” Accounts from patients can seem realistic, but still untrue.

For Freud this comes from clients being “consciously or unconsciously disingenuous.” Recollections in the first stage of repression are full of doubts trying to disguise the memory. The second stage of repression involves actual forgetting, or a falsification of memory. Here is where screen memories can fill in the blanks. These are narratives from a later period in adolescence, which can include justifications, or disguises caused by displacement and condensation, that are believed by the subject to be situations that actually occurred. [See:  Dreams – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gtf6j-dreams-sigmund-freud.html ]

Freud favours the recollections that are being attacked by doubt over the later censored ones that are comfortable for the client. This is also keeping in mind there is another goal of the analyst: “Whereas the practical aim of the treatment is to remove all possible symptoms and to replace them by conscious thoughts, we may regard it as a second and theoretical aim to repair all the damages to the patient’s memory.”

Psychoanalysis when all else fails

In Freud’s narrative, Dora was emotionally attached to her father, especially during his illnesses. Her mother’s constant attention to domestic affairs, plus her father’s illnesses led to their estrangement. As Dora continued being dissatisfied with her family life, she left a suicide letter in a desk for her parents to find. 

For many people who run away from friendships and romantic relationships it’s often because of the unexpected and unwanted entanglements and expectations. Dora’s family connected with the K’s, and like in many situations, friends start helping each other. Over time, the family roles can get interchanged. For example, Freud says of Dora that she “had taken the greatest care of the K.’s two little children, and been almost a mother to them.” Dora had private conversations and influences from governesses, Frau K., Herr K., on top of her own family’s influence. As the different values are imitated, an ambivalence is already starting. When friends exchange help they naturally think of utility and how these friends can help in other ways. As emotional claims are made unconsciously, some of those claims conflict with the claims of others. This is especially true when values are different and are violated.

Dora’s example was when she was 14, (possibly 13 in reality) she was approached by Herr K., alone in his workplace, and forced into an embrace and a kiss. She ran away in disgust. Later on she was approached again for a kiss by Herr K., at a lake. She rejected him and complained to her father. Herr K. said that she was reading “Mantegazza’s  Physiology of Love  and books of that sort in their house on the lake. It was most likely, he had added, that ‘she had been over-excited by such reading and had merely ‘fancied’ the whole scene she had described.'” When denials like this happen, the result is neurosis for the victim when they can’t find anyone to believe them.

“Dora”

Dora’s father brought her to Freud, a man who helped him with his syphilis in prior appointments, to sort her out. “‘I have no doubt’, [he said], ‘that this incident is responsible for Dora’s depression and irritability and suicidal ideas. She keeps pressing me to break off relations with Herr K. and more particularly with Frau K., whom she used to positively worship formerly. But that I cannot do. For, to begin with, I myself believe that Dora’s tale of the man’s immoral suggestions is a phantasy that has forced its way into her mind; and besides, I am bound to Frau K. by ties of honourable friendship and I do not wish to cause her pain. The poor woman is most unhappy with her husband, of whom, by the way, I have no very high opinion. She herself has suffered a great deal with her nerves, and I am her only support. With my state of health I need scarcely assure you that there is nothing wrong in our relations. We are just two poor wretches who give one another what comfort we can by an exchange of friendly sympathy. You know already that I get nothing out of my own wife. But Dora, who inherits my obstinacy, cannot be moved from her hatred of the K.’s. She had her last attack after a conversation in which she had again pressed me to break with them. Please try and bring her to reason.’”

During their sessions Freud found that, “Dora’s criticisms of her father were the most frequent: he was insincere, he had a strain of falseness in his character, he only thought of his own enjoyment, and he had a gift for seeing things in the light which suited him best.”

Freud concurred: “I could not in general dispute Dora’s characterization of her father; and there was one particular respect in which it was easy to see that her reproaches were justified. When she was feeling embittered she used to be overcome by the idea that she had been handed over to Herr K. as the price of his tolerating the relations between her father and his wife; and her rage at her father’s making such a use of her was visible behind her affection for him.”

These were the early days in psychoanalysis, and Freud was bound to make some big mistakes, including not seeing his own sexism. The year was 1900 and his attitude towards women was irritating Dora. He said that “the two men (Dora’s father and Herr K.) had of course never made a formal agreement in which she was treated as an object for barter; her father in particular would have been horrified at any such suggestion. But he was one of those men who know how to evade a dilemma by falsifying their judgement upon one of the conflicting alternatives. If it had been pointed out to him that there might be danger for a growing girl in the constant and unsupervised companionship of a man who had no satisfaction from his own wife, he would have been certain to answer that he could rely upon his daughter, that a man like K. could never be dangerous to her, and that his friend was himself incapable of such intentions, or that Dora was still a child and was treated as a child by K.” Yet Freud is conscious enough to see. “But as a matter of fact things were in a position in which each of the two men avoided drawing any conclusions from the other’s behaviour which would have been awkward for his own plans.”

That pattern, as can be seen in the Irma injection dream in  The Interpretation of Dreams , shows a willingness for men to collude together, and ignore each other’s actions, while also having an opposite attitude of increased scanning of women and their foibles. Freud emphasizes, in the illicit kisses, how this could arouse sexual feelings in the girl, and be hysterical if rejected. His point was that she should have been more flattered at these attentions. “The behaviour of this child of fourteen was already entirely and completely hysterical. I should without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasurable; and I should do so whether or not the person were capable of producing somatic symptoms.” Naturally an adolescent would, even in 1900, find this invalidating.

Transference and counter-transference

Freud admitted that he “did not succeed in mastering the transference in good time.” This was his reason for the failure of the treatment. He recounts “at the beginning it was clear that I was replacing her father in her imagination, which was not unlikely, in view of the difference between our ages. She was constantly comparing me with him consciously, and kept anxiously trying to make sure whether I was being quite straightforward with her, for her father ‘always preferred secrecy and roundabout ways.’ But when the first dream came, in which she gave herself the warning that she had better leave my treatment just as she had formerly left Herr K.’s house, I ought to have listened to the warning myself. ‘Now,’ I ought to have said to her, ‘it is from Herr K. that you have made a transference on to me. Have you noticed anything that leads you to suspect me of evil intentions similar to Herr K.’s? Or have you been struck by anything about me or got to know anything about me which has caught your fancy, as happened previously with Herr K.’ Her attention would then have been turned to some detail in our relations, or in my person or circumstances, behind which there lay concealed something analogous but immeasurably more important concerning Herr K. And when this transference had been cleared up, the analysis would have obtained access to new memories, dealing, probably, with actual events…In this way the transference took me unawares, and, because of the unknown quantity in me which reminded Dora of Herr K., she took her revenge on me as she wanted to take her revenge on him, and deserted me as she believed herself to have been deceived and deserted by him.”

Freud also had trouble seeing his own transferences of sexual interest in Dora, calling her “a girl in the bloom of youth, with intelligent and pleasing features,” and his being titillated with the sexual conversation similar to the position of Frau K. talking to Dora about sexuality. He also had trouble seeing his low attitude towards her by using the pseudonym Dora, a name given to a nursemaid of his sister.  

Freud goes on describing the phenomenon of transference. “They are new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity, which is characteristic for their species, that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician. Some of these transferences have a content which differs from that of their model in no respect whatever except for the substitution.” It becomes difficult to develop rapport if the therapist is dealing with negative transferences, but “psycho-analytic treatment does not  create  transferences, it merely brings them to light… All the patient’s tendencies, including hostile ones, are aroused; they are then turned to account for the purposes of the analysis by being made conscious, and in this way the transference is constantly being destroyed. Transference, which seems ordained to be the greatest obstacle to psycho-analysis, becomes its most powerful ally, if its presence can be detected each time and explained to the patient.” [See: The ‘Ratman’: https://rumble.com/v1gu9qj-case-studies-the-ratman-freud-and-beyond.html ]

The pot calling the kettle black – Projection

In particular Freud was trying to detect a form of projection originating in Dora by her efforts to enable the relationship. One of the clues for Freud is how the person who accuses another person of an indiscretion seems to know every detail about it, and this may in fact tell about similar situations in the accuser, that they also know a lot about, but are repressing. Freud uses the example of her accusations towards her father’s infidelity, “there were no gaps in her memory on this point.”

Just like the ambivalence that Freud often describes, people have similar goals, like romantic love, and it’s easy to point out what others are doing while ignoring that we have the same goals, and similar approaches to them. Our consciousness is like a spotlight and when it’s on someone else, it’s not on ourselves. Freud says, “a string of reproaches against other people leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self-reproaches with the same content. All that need be done is to turn back each particular reproach on to the speaker himself. There is something undeniably automatic about this method of defending oneself against a self-reproach by making the same reproach against some one else. A model of it is to be found in the ‘you too’ arguments of children.” It’s a kind of “I feel better if other people are doing it too.” Pride is maintained if everyone else is guilty. Also if two people make the same claim for another individual, based on an interest like love, they usually have reasons that are justifiable to only to themselves.

Behind these reproaches is also another layer of unconscious material. Freud says, “but it soon becomes evident that the patient is using thoughts of this kind, which the analysis cannot attack, for the purpose of cloaking others which are anxious to escape from criticism and from consciousness.”

The partially conscious, or unconscious agreements happen when a person’s self-interest becomes front and center. Freud used as evidence Dora’s past attitude of leaving her father and Frau K. alone, and taking the K.’s children for a walk, since they would have been sent out anyways. The scene at the lake was when she realized that she was being passed off onto Herr K., to make it convenient for her father and Frau K. Being slighted in that way enraged her. Dora described similar behaviour in her governess. “So long as the governess had any influence she used it for stirring up feeling against Frau K. She explained to Dora’s mother that it was incompatible with her dignity to tolerate such an intimacy between her husband and another woman; and she drew Dora’s attention to all the obvious features of their relations. But her efforts were in vain. Dora remained devoted to Frau K. and would hear of nothing that might make her think ill of her relations with her father. On the other hand she very easily fathomed the motives by which her governess was actuated. She might be blind in one direction, but she was sharp-sighted enough in the other. She saw that the governess was in love with her father. When he was there, she seemed to be quite another person: at such times she could be amusing and obliging. While the family were living in the manufacturing town and Frau K. was not on the horizon, her hostility was directed against Dora’s mother, who was then her more immediate rival. Up to this point Dora bore her no ill-will. She did not become angry until she observed that she herself was a subject of complete indifference to the governess, whose pretended affection for her was really meant for her father. While her father was away from the manufacturing town the governess had no time to spare for her, would not go for walks with her, and took no interest in her studies. No sooner had her father returned from B– than she was once more ready with every sort of service and assistance. Thereupon Dora dropped her.”

Freud said, “the poor woman had thrown a most unwelcome light on a part of Dora’s own behaviour. What the governess had from time to time been to Dora, Dora had been to Herr K.’s children. She had been a mother to them, she had taught them, she had gone for walks with them, she had offered them a complete substitute for the slight interest which their own mother showed in them. Herr K. and his wife had often talked of getting a divorce; but it never took place, because Herr K., who was an affectionate father, would not give up either of the two children. A common interest in the children had from the first been a bond between Herr K. and Dora. Her preoccupation with his children was evidently a cloak for something else that Dora was anxious to hide from herself and from other people.”

Freud at this point offered the conclusion that she was in love with Herr K. more than she let on. This Dora did not assent to. Yet later on “when the quantity of material that had come up had made it difficult for her to persist in her denial, she admitted that she might have been in love with Herr K. at B–‘ but declared that since the scene by the lake it had all been over.” 

Freud then gets caught in a bind. He asks “the question then arises: If Dora loved Herr K., what was the reason for her refusing him in the scene by the lake? Or at any rate, why did her refusal take such a brutal form, as though she were embittered against him? And how could a girl who was in love feel insulted by a proposal which was made in a manner neither tactless nor offensive?”

Oedipus complex, or just envy?

As expected, Freud brought up the Oedipus Complex in how Dora missed her father. The way Freud describes it, it’s a form of envy where the subject is putting themselves in the place of others, imitating their desires, and therefore their identity, and not recognizing the influence. In particular it’s a fear of losing social rewards. Each time you find an object, or person to desire, you step into a similar identity of all the people who want the same things, causing rivalry. This is where you see in the case study people playing people off of each other, and are only nice to people because they get something out of it, like her governess. There was also another governess, but she worked for the K.’s. She had a relationship with Herr K., but he never left is wife, and the governess eventually left. She told Dora about the line he gave her saying “there was nothing between him and his wife.” That was the same line given to Dora at the lake. This is the reason for her rejection of Herr K.

What was not expected was Dora’s possible attraction to Frau K. Freud recounts, “when Dora talked about Frau K., she used to praise her ‘adorable white body’ in accents more appropriate to a lover than to a defeated rival. Another time she told me, more in sorrow than in anger, that she was convinced the presents her father had brought her had been chosen by Frau K., for she recognized her taste. Another time, again, she pointed out that, evidently through the agency of Frau K., she had been given a present of some jewellery which was exactly like some that she had seen in Frau K.’s possession and had wished for aloud at the time.” Yet Frau K. betrayed Dora when she let Herr K. know of her reading of Mantegazza’s  Physiology of Love , without disclosing her influence on Dora. Freud says, “Frau K. had not loved her for her own sake but on account of her father. Frau K. had sacrificed her without a moment’s hesitation so that her relations with her father might not be disturbed. This mortification touched her, perhaps, more nearly and had a greater pathogenic effect than the other one, which she tried to use as a screen for it, – the fact that she had been sacrificed by her father.”

Like an Agatha Christie style extra twist at the end, Freud adds the deeper layer. “I believe, therefore, that I am not mistaken in supposing that Dora’s supervalent train of thought, which was concerned with her father’s relations with Frau K., was designed not only for the purpose of suppressing her love for Herr K., which had once been conscious, but also to conceal her love for Frau K., which was in a deeper sense unconscious. The supervalent train of thought was directly contrary to the latter current of feeling. She told herself incessantly that her father had sacrificed her to this woman, and made noisy demonstrations to show that she grudged her the possession of her father; and in this was she concealed from herself the contrary fact, which was that she grudged her father Frau K.’s love, and had not forgiven the woman she loved for the disillusionment she had been caused by her betrayal. The jealous emotions of a woman were linked in the unconscious with a jealousy such as might have been felt by a man. These masculine or, more properly speaking,  gynaecophilic  currents of feeling are to be regarded as typical of the unconscious erotic life of hysterical girls.”

So Dora is now implicated in desire for her father, Herr K., and now Frau K., albeit in a more unconscious attitude. This ambivalence is very typical of Freud, and is maddening for critics who want something that is more testable and clear. Freud says, “thoughts in the unconscious live very comfortably side by side, and even contraries get on together without disputes – a state of things which persists often enough even in the conscious.” I think Freud’s statement that  “an intention remains in existence until it has been carried out” , is the key to how he views desire. Once desires latches onto a target, but have too many obstacles, it can be repressed, and a new target is chosen. Yet when given the opportunity to be satisfied, the old desire can resurface. In a way, the Oedipus Complex is simply because a child has a lack of objects to pursue, and are around parents most of the time. As soon as other people enter the child’s life new influences are pursued.

Freud describes how this bisexual fluid desire can become convoluted. “In the world of reality, which I am trying to depict here, a complication of motives, an accumulation and conjunction of mental activities – in a word, overdetermination – is the rule. For behind Dora’s supervalent train of thought which was concerned with her father’s relations with Frau K. there lay concealed a feeling of jealousy which had that lady as its  object  – a feeling, that is, which could only be based upon an affection on Dora’s part for one of her own sex…I have never yet come through a single psycho-analysis of a man or a woman without having to take into account a very considerable current of homosexuality. When, in a hysterical woman or girl, the sexual libido which is directed towards men has been energetically suppressed, it will regularly be found that the libido which is directed towards women has become vicariously reinforced and even to some extent conscious.”

Cultural influences on psychological health

This being one of the famous Freud cases, there were other books written about it. One of the great books on this subject belongs to Hannah Decker,  Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900. It gives the necessary background to Dora’s life and the life of Jewish immigrants and their ordeals in assimilating in Europe. A lot of psychological problems are in fact cultural problems. Survival fears of ostracism and abandonment wreak havoc on the psyche. Hannah says, “historically, hysteria has appeared prominently among groups – such as slaves, soldiers, and servants – who feel they have little control over their lives.” The ups and downs of life take their toll on people who feel constant insecurity, and these can lead to all kinds of desperate behaviour to regain that feeling of security. Learning the backgrounds of clients, and their ordeals helps to explain why they behave the way they do. This is often the weakness of psychotherapy. The therapist only has a small window of time to work in, and client’s lies and resistances keep back important information.

Uncertainty and mental health

Hannah describes the life of the Jews in Bohemia, where the Bauer’s had come from: “Although characterized by cruel social and economic injustices that readily slipped into extremes of murder and massacre, the history of the Jews in Bohemia was not one of unbroken misery. Its particular curse was eternal uncertainty. Frequent expulsions were usually followed by some limited permission to resettle, and life would once more resume, but never with ordinary surety. The legacy bequeathed to Philipp and Katharina Bauer and their two children by centuries of state-decreed inferiority, familial upheaval, and spasms of dubious quiet was the trauma of hopes raised only to be brutally dashed. This pattern appeared yet again once the Jews were formally emancipated, and it colored the background of Freud and Dora’s encounter…The result of many generations’ precarious existence was an inherent sense of vulnerability. Although this psychological state accurately reflected their history, it led to the Jews readily agreeing with anti-Semitic explanations of why they were more disposed to neurosis than the non-Jewish population. Evidence of the Jews’ belief in their own ‘hereditary taint’ is rife…In keeping with Darwinian and anthropological emphases of the time, they discussed their vulnerability in terms of centuries of ‘inbreeding.’ Or, taking refuge with – generally anti-semitic – critics of modernity, that pointed to the Jewish obsession with money or their high-strung, ‘overly civilized’ nature, stemming from generations of ‘cosmopolitan’ living. However, if nineteenth-century Jews felt themselves weaker and more susceptible to life’s risks – and certainly this was not true physically, Jews having a lower mortality rate than that from the surrounding peoples – such notions had to come in part from the sense of imminent danger Jewish parents continued to transmit, in countless small ways, to their children. It is a convergent conclusion of modern psychological, sociological, and historical literature that ethnic discrimination and the stresses of acculturation are sources of mental ill health, and experimental studies have buttressed this view.”

Homeland and Identity

Humans can be very self-critical and look for imperfections naturally, from years of critical upbringing and experiences in school. By the time a person who is a visible minority becomes an adult, there can be a habit of self-hatred. Criticisms from a ruling class can be absorbed into a masochism that emphasizes one’s weaknesses and ignores one’s strengths. A form of splitting against oneself, leading to neurosis. As a visible minority moves from location to location, only to be a minority again, but in a different location, it can bring up the same feelings of alienation. We need to seek approval from those in power to get our needs met, and stay stuck in helplessness.

Hannah describes this very well in her descriptions of Austria’s liberalization of immigration. The pattern of economic collapses, then followed by scapegoating and ostracism. “The old pattern – of the Jews raising their expectations only to be disappointed – reasserted itself.” One doesn’t have to look too deep to see the same pattern throughout history. Economic collapse, then blame and hostility aimed at an ethnic minority. The pattern existed before the NAZIS and the holocaust, and reactions towards immigrants today after the 2008 collapse, however mild compared to the massacres of the past, betray a certain human tendency to blame those who have less power, because they are accessible, and for frustrating the goals of the majority. A lot of the labels of inferiority aimed at immigrants cover another motivation, anti-competition from people who may not be so “inferior.”

Hannah describes the “Viennese artisans [who] reacted with anger and some desperation when faced with the lack of guild protection, encroachment by industrialization, depression following the 1873 crash, and, finally, competition from newly arrived Jews who peddled whatever and whenever they could. Traditionally anti-Jewish, the artisans now held the Jews responsible for the dislocations inflicted by the modern world. Moreover, an unending stream of Eastern Jews – either Austria’s own, seeking relief from the grinding poverty of Galicia, or Russia’s, fleeing for their lives from a czar set on destroying them – fired the native Viennese lower classes to action. By their language, dress, and distinctive customs, the new immigrants were highly visible on the streets of Vienna, and ‘the growth of the Jewish population of Vienna lent exaggerated emphasis to the impression of Jewish omnipotence.’ In 1882 the artisans’ groups amalgamated, forming the Austrian Reform Association, which became the main organ of the Viennese anti-semitism. Speeches at meetings of the Reform Association were highly inflammatory. At one rally in March 1882, the speaker urged the hundreds of workmen to “violence against the [Jewish] capitalists.” The meeting became rowdy, fights broke out, and furniture and beer glasses were smashed.”

Disturbing questions were asked, like “what would the Jewish ‘influence’ do to Austrian life? There was a feeling that a decisive struggle, which would have profound consequences, was taking place in all areas of society.” For the Jews there was a damned if you do and damned if you don’t situation as described by Arthur Schnitzler. He said a jew “had the choice of being counted as insensitive, obtrusive and fresh; or of being oversensitive, shy and suffering from feelings of persecution. And even if you managed somehow to conduct yourself so that nothing showed, it was impossible to remain completely untouched…An assimilated Jew could not avoid being pained.”

As people split hairs, blame got thrown around within the Jewish community. “The questioning of the Jewish right to exist freely often took crude forms. But it also expressed itself in polite Christian society as a condemnation of the Jews’ ‘bad manners.’ Soon Jews, especially youthful ones, were saying the same thing about themselves. Jews began to blame each other for the antisemitism that surrounded them. Assimilated Jews blamed Eastern Jews and vice versa. Intellectual Jews were embarrassed by both. Modern Jewish self-hatred raged.”

Loss of pride, envy and self-destruction

A curious example of self-hatred is described by Hanna, “one of these Jews was the disturbed and brilliant Otto Weininger (1880-1903), Dora’s contemporary. The son of a Jewish anti-Semite. Weininger secured his doctorate in philosophy by the age of twenty-two, immediately converted to Protestantism, achieved fame for his expanded dissertation,  Sex and Character , became depressed, and shot himself in the same house where Beethoven had died. Weininger’s bestseller was a diatribe between his self-hatred as a Jew and his misogyny. Weininger argued that a woman is pure sexuality, contaminating a man ‘in the paroxysm of orgasm.’ All women are prostitutes, even those who appear otherwise. Men could only elude women by avoiding sexual intercourse, and indeed, Weininger took a vow of sexual abstinence several months before he committed suicide. Weininger wrote that even the most superior woman was immeasurably below the most debased man, just as Judaism at its highest was immeasurably beneath even degraded Christianity. Judaism was so despicable because it was shot through with femininity. As women lacked souls, so too did Jews. Both were pimps, amoral and lascivious. Both sought to make other human beings suffer guilt. Women and Jews did not think logically, but rather intuitively, by association. Weininger declared his era to be not only the most feminine but the most Jewish of all eras. Jews were even worse than women; Jews were degenerate women.”

Fliess’ and Freud’s theories of human bisexuality, and even presaging Jung’s work on the Anima and Animus, showed the difficulty people back then had with expressing different sides of themselves. One is compelled by culture to pick a masculine or feminine side and repress the other side in oneself. It’s repressed but never really gone. Hannah describes, probably one of the best examples of psychological projection I’ve ever read. She says “Weininger killed himself because he felt he could not overcome the woman and Jew in him.” With projection one is disturbed by cultural influences found in oneself. One can see that one can live a life possibility that might be attractive, but that possibility may also be dangerous in a society that might punish it. Then the person who is projecting aims contempt at oneself at the same time aims contempt to those cultural influencers. If enough people are caught up in this ambivalence, then the same reaction of self-hatred and projection, with overt contempt, can motivate a cultural movement. A cleansing purge. To clean oneself, and then, if aggravated enough, ethnically cleanse the rest of society. Hannah says, “the truth is that Weininger had only expressed flamboyantly what many believed: that women were an inferior order of being and that all other inferior groups could be compared with women when one was trying to explain the essence of their deficiencies.” The self-hatred in this situation is to look at femininity as weakness and to have contempt towards weakness in part of oneself and blame others for their influence, and also the humiliation. Right here envy can be summed up as the pain of losing pride. In Weininger’s case, the pain was so large that suicide was his escape.

Hannah describes a warning by “Rosa Mayreder, the Austrian feminist, [who] gave a telling example of its widespread and authoritative existence [of these views]. “The Germans,” she pointed out, “ascribe womanly characteristics to the Slavs – a piece of national assumption expressed by Bismarck…in April, 1895. ‘I believe [he declared] that we Germans, by God’s grace, are fundamentally stronger; I mean, manlier in our character. God has established this dualism, this juxtaposition of manliness and womanliness, in every aspect of creation…It is not my wish to offend the Slavs, but they have many of the feminine advantages – they have grace and cleverness, subtlety and adroitness.'” Therefore, the Germans in Austria, Bismarck advised, should remember that they are the superior race and predominate, ‘just as in marriage the man ought to predominate.'”

Modern example of bigotry:   https://ktla.com/2017/09/07/lousy-speaking-immigrant-oklahoma-woman-records-racist-rant-at-goodwill/

David Duke:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Yx3c0i5Fyk

A reminder that everyone can be traced back as a descendant to someone who was originally an immigrant with the same struggles: White Stripes – Icky Thump:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OjTspCqvk8

Inferiority or superiority?

Yet if we go to that Bismarck quote extolling “might is always right”, there is an admission that femininity has advantages, meaning not inferior, but different. Since conflict is based on fighting over identities, identities being how well we can feed our pride, what people are complaining about is not inferiority, but superiority. If the Jews were considered “clever women”, then it was simply fear of competing with their cleverness, not their inferiority. Consciously or unconsciously, people want their competitors to be inferior. Going back to Bismarck’s quote one can also see the self-hatred of the feminine side of one self. If what Freud says is true, that most people have some bisexuality, that means this attitude requires a lot of internal and external repression.

Naturally Dora would have been affected by an environment like this and bring her frustrations towards men and aim them at Freud. Freud would also be transferring emotions towards Ida based on his upbringing and the contemporaneous understanding that women should know their place.

There were attempts to change this situation for the Jewish people by socialists. Otto, Ida’s brother, felt socialism was the method to help people integrate harmoniously in European society. By eliminating differences, exacerbated by the competition in capitalism, humanity would mix together in such a way as to make ethnic differences disappear. This motive led him to want to join politics. Yet Freud disagreed with Otto and “advised him to give up politics and become a teacher or university professor, a career better suited to his idealistic temperament than the volatile and hazardous arena of Austrian politics…[He] tried to talk Otto out of changing the world, warning him: ‘Don’t try to make people happy, people don’t want to be happy.'” This attitude would colour much of psychology all the way up to the beginning of positive psychology in the late 20th century. “Because his view that human nature was instinctive and not likely to be changed fundamentally by environmental manipulation, Freud believed that socialist and communist efforts to reform human society could not succeed,” as Otto had wished.

Yet this is partially disingenuous. Freud’s system is that of getting clients to accept the world as it is and to make changes to the environment, and to gain love. To repress the negative affect, and to be helpless, leads to self-destructive emotions. To deal with the world as it is, like a labour of love, or a laboured love in how it feels to make it happen, produces realistic positive emotions that can be achieved. Even if communism as tried, failed, a democratic socialism is accepted in most western countries. There is also generational socialist experiments that get partially accepted by conservative groups, when they are popular enough. If anything this is possibly the reason why there is ambivalence. People don’t actually know what a better future will be, and there will be experiments and failures along the way. There will also be some successes. People do want to be happy, but they are ambivalent on how to go about it, and may go down on paths they think are happiness, but end up being the opposite.

Blur – Tender:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaHrqKKFnSA

Economic influences

The pattern of ups and downs of life keep repeating throughout humanity, surprising new generations without the experience of loss. The typical pattern: Economic success, a following complacency, reckless investments, economic collapse, scarcity, a gathering together in groups of the same ethnic and cultural backgrounds for safety and pride. Then there’s scapegoating of people of weaker power with excuses that their habits or cultures are at fault, weak and contemptible, but in reality this is a disguise for a fear of competition. This is especially true if some of ethnic minorities manage to achieve status, despite being labeled with contempt, while some from an ethnic majority lose status. If they really were so contemptible, there would be nothing to fear from their competition. What used to be a downward comparison that gave special treatment for some, becomes a painful and humiliating upward comparison. A threat to an identity, is based on emotional feeding and addictions to stable sources of pride and pleasure. Pride needs a core identity that supports it, and when lost, makes people want to identify as a “superior” race, identify with “superior” past generations, a distorted “golden age” nostalgia. The hope to regain a lost identity, is the desire to step into the shoes of some kind of recognition of value. Pride.

Emotional Feeding: https://rumble.com/v1gqvl1-emotional-feeding-thanissaro-bhikkhu.html

Girardian Primers:

Totem and Taboo – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gsmvn-totem-and-taboo-sigmund-freud.html

The Origin of Envy & Narcissism – René Girard: https://rumble.com/v1gsnwv-the-origin-of-envy-and-narcissism-ren-girard.html

Stalking: World Narcissistic Abuse Awareness Day: https://rumble.com/v1gvhk1-stalking-world-narcissistic-abuse-awareness-day.html

Love – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gv5pd-love-freud-and-beyond.html

Psychoanalysis – Sigmund Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvgq7-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v1gvuql-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-2.html

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 7: https://rumble.com/v3ub2sa-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-7.html

Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 8: https://rumble.com/v50nczb-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-8.html

Conflation of enemies

Now this isn’t to say that Jewish people are perfect, and that there shouldn’t be some assimilation to values, principles and laws of a country, I mean that’s why you want to move to that country, because it has values you like! Yet there’s a tendency to take bad apples, which exist in all cultures, and lump them together with their entire ethnicity. The embarrassment is described very well by Freud. He “attended the funeral of a friend, Nathan Weiss, who had committed suicide. Weiss’s family and friends publicly blamed his death on the family of his new wife. Freud described one censorious funeral orator who ‘spoke with the powerful voice of the fanatic, with the ardor of the savage, merciless Jew.’ The reaction of Freud and his medical colleagues was to be ‘petrified with horror and shame in the presence of the Christians who were among us. It seemed as though we had given them reason to believe that we worship the God of Revenge, not the God of Love.'”

Self-respect

Yet this need for revenge, or at least an assertive response to bigotry, seems to be extremely hard to avoid, and also a qualification for healthy self-respect. This is something that Freud eventually came around to. Freud had to decide what his response to antisemitism would be. When Freud’s father told the story of being told to get off the sidewalk because he was a Jew, and his response to do just that and walk away, was too submissive of a response for him. Freud said,  “I never understood why I should be ashamed of my descent or, as one was beginning to say, my race.” 

“Freud’s son Martin recalled that in 1901, in the Bavarian summer resort of Thumsee, Freud routed a gang of about ten men, and some female supporters, who had been shouting antisemitic abuse at Martin and his brother Oliver, by charging furiously at them with his walking stick. Freud must have found these moments gratifying contrasts to his father’s passive submission to being bullied.”

One doesn’t have to start something with people to feel safe, but if agitated and provoked over and over again, it only stops if there is an assertive response. We have to respect the rights of others, be we also have to respect our own rights. This way we avoid being passive or aggressive, which all involve boundaries being violated.

Assertiveness – An Introduction: https://www.skillsyouneed.com/ps/assertiveness.html

The cycle of disappointment

Freud was right that communism wouldn’t work to eliminate conflict and racism, but he wasn’t able to see much further than that. The 2008 economic crash, as bad as it was, proved that a form of democratic socialism was something that people couldn’t do without. It prevented the fallout on the poor from being as bad as it was in prior generations, vindicating some of Otto’s idealism for a future with more stability. 

Freud’s advice, based on his patient’s inability to deal with reality, and make healthy changes to the environment, was prophetic with his result with Ida. In Hannah’s book, accounts of Ida’s outcome identified her as being similar to her mother, with her “excessive cleanliness. She and her mother saw the dirt not only in their surroundings, but also on and within themselves. Both suffered from genital discharges.” Richie Robertson in the introduction of the Oxford World Classics version, hints that Ida’s mother, instead of having a psychosis of cleaning, was performing a form of revenge, since “you have made me a housewife; very well, I’ll be a perfect housewife and make you suffer for it.” Some of these feminist interpretations are quite modern. Another interpretation was that Ida’s mother wanted revenge for getting syphilis or gonorrhea from her husband. My interpretation is that the obsession to clean is more about cleaning a person’s self-esteem, to avoid rejection from others.

“Nothing is good enough to join us!”

Hannah’s book goes further into Dora’s Christian conversion, and her, and Freud’s escape from the NAZIS. Again the pattern repeated of destroyed hopes for the Jewish. Even when deliberate attempts to imitate the culture of the ruling ethnic groups, her brother Otto said that “assimilated Jews [were] still obviously Jews according to their facial characteristics. Race instincts and race prejudices live on after assimilation.” Otto felt that Christian conversion wasn’t going to work, and only intermarriage with Christians would solve the problem. This differed at the time with the Zionists who felt that the only solution would ultimately be to live in a Jewish nation.

This is a great lesson for all people who want to immigrate to another country. The lesson is that if you compete with the status and identities that others have already claimed, they will split hairs in every way to put you down. “You’re too Jewish! Oh you’re Christian now, but you still look Semitic. Not good enough!”  This goes more into my influences from René Girard’s Judeo-Christian works, but to enter into any new society, even if you are not that different from the culture you are joining, because you are a HUMAN, you have to be different in a way that is useful to others. This means creating new businesses, new products, and have something new to trade with the established identities of others.

Blue Ocean Strategy – W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781625274496/

If one can’t create those situations, then filling positions that are needed as opposed to competing for the most alluring hierarchies everyone else wants, creates the harmony that Otto was so desperately trying to seek. There will always be competition for pride and social rewards that leads to conflict, especially in economic crashes and the resulting scarcity of opportunities. People are forced to step on each other’s toes to hold onto an identity in a recession.

Circling around, zeroing in – Thanissaro Bhikkhu:  https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/y2018/181116_Circling_Around,_Zeroing_In.mp3

I remember coming out of the Spike Lee movie BlacKkKlansman , and seeing an interracial couple walking out with looks of relief of validation. They were obviously maintaining their identities and going to mind their own business and live their lives, which looks the same as everyone else’s lives. 

But a society where people are trading their advantageous differences with each other means people can see value in those differences, and therefore less bigotry, and if there is intermarriage, it’s more authentic because the marriage isn’t a means to an end, to gain an identity. They have a healthy identity beforehand and appreciate each other’s. There’s always a commonality that can be found if people are willing to look for it. In my travels, most people are worried about the same things. Getting a good job, having their kids find success in school, and trying to gain a good marriage. After a period of culture shock, people eventually find new cultural habits to graft onto the ones they want to keep. Sometimes this takes a couple of generations, but it happens.

Flexible goals

With the help of her son, Ida was able to move to New York. She lived with the same physical problems as before and died of colon cancer in 1945. One can imagine that Dora would have loved to have lived long enough to see how things had changed for women, or visible minorities, but I think she would still notice the same cycles of dissatisfaction in modern people as in the past. As long as people are struggling with identities that have mutual claims, they will be stuck in the same conflicts, regardless of what their success looks like from afar to those followers outside their milieu. “Control of consciousness determines the quality of life,” as Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi reminds. A lot of people at the top of the pyramid feel they don’t have as much control over their life as they think they do. Having to make appearances, networking, dealing with politics and keeping allies satisfied, reduces a lot of that sense of control. René Girard, also noticed the intensity of the desire, and how it dissipates when the desired object is obtained, or how it intensifies again when the object is lost. The freedom of knowing this is that I can always look for a new object when there’s a rivalry, because ultimately, I will be bored with any possession, because no possession can make you eternally satisfied like an omnipotent God. New objects will always be desired. I can instead look at objects for their actual value, not whether the object will add to social proof that I’m a human deity. I also don’t have to worship an idol, like a missing parent, or pretend to be a God and all the effort at impression management that narcissists go through. The great value of this knowledge is that it doesn’t have to be hidden. I don’t need to hide this knowledge to one-up someone else. The knowledge is flexible, no matter how many people know it, and having more people know this, the better. Much like Galadriel’s “I pass the test” speech in Lord of the rings, we have to see this in ourselves. It’s not so much the ambition, which can be noble, but how aggressively we look at “Others”, as Girard emphasizes, with this ambition. It’s actually hard to let go of the sadomasochism of bullying and revenge. But for the one who does, narcissistic neurosis cools off into a beautiful peace and self-acceptance.

Finding personal meaning

Another solution to a lack of personal meaning and identity in life comes from Viktor Frankl, in  Man’s Search for Meaning .  He emphasized the need for people to actively find their own meanings in their current lives. His message was similar to Freud’s of actively using ingenuity and realistic choices and actions that have personal meaning, to reduce that sense of helplessness that makes people neurotic or violent. These negative feelings come from chasing activities to “be somebody important”, while at the same time putting oneself down for not being there already. Yet there are many important things in our lives we are doing now that should allow us to be as we are, without shame and envy. We remind ourselves what we are trying to achieve when we are taking care of someone who is sick, or serving a customer, or communicating important values. It doesn’t mean we let go of healthy ambitions, but we know that it’s okay to just start somewhere, and all these early activities are important stepping stones to where you want to go.

If we can’t control our consciousness all the time, if we have to change objects of desire, if we choose to see the meaning and importance of our current mundane activities, they become intrinsically satisfying, and then the self-hatred disappears. This meaning doesn’t require imitating a narcissistic idol providing a parental meaning for us. We don’t have to gather into the safety of ethnic groups and scapegoat others for our problems. A lot of Viktor’s message resonates with me, because meaning is found in those overlooked opportunities that are available to us right now. We shouldn’t get locked into objects that we are not ready for or are not available to us. ◊

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A Case of Hysteria – Sigmund Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780199639861/

Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900 – Hannah S. Decker: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780029072127/

Physiology of Love and Other Writings – Paolo Mantegazza: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781442691728/

Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780061339202/

Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780671023379/

Ellis, A. W. & Raitmayr, O. & Herbst, C. (2016). The Ks: The Other Couple in the Case of Freud’s “Dora”.   Journal of Austrian Studies  48(4), 1-26. University of Nebraska Press.

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning – René Girard: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781570753190/

René Girard and Creative Mimesis – Thomas Ryba: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781498550574/

René Girard and Creative Reconciliation – Thomas Ryba: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780739169001/

The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780261103207/

A Survey of the Woman Problem – Rosa Mayreder: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781330999349/

Psychology:   https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

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An Overview of Sigmund Freud's Theories

How the Father of Psychology Came to Be

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Emily is a board-certified science editor who has worked with top digital publishing brands like Voices for Biodiversity, Study.com, GoodTherapy, Vox, and Verywell.

Library of Congress / Contributor / Getty Images 

• Talk Therapy
• Personality
• Psychosexual Development
• Dream Analysis
• Defense Mechanisms
• Female Psychology

Frequently Asked Questions

If you've ever taken or are currently taking psychology, chances are that you've spent a fair amount of time learning about Sigmund Freud's theory. Even those outside the psychology field often have some awareness of Freudian psychoanalysis, the school of thought created by Sigmund Freud.

In simple terms, Freud's theory suggests that human behavior is influenced by unconscious memories, thoughts, and urges. This theory also proposes that the psyche comprises three aspects: the id, ego, and superego . The id is entirely unconscious, while the ego operates in the conscious mind. The superego operates both unconsciously and consciously.

Knowing more about Freudian psychology, along with the key concepts in psychoanalysis—like the unconscious, fixations, defense mechanisms , and dream symbols —can help you understand the influence Freud's theories have had on contemporary psychologists .

Click Play to Learn More About Sigmund Freud's Theories

This video has been medically reviewed by Daniel B. Block, MD .

In this brief overview of Freudian theory, learn more about some of the major ideas proposed by Sigmund Freud.

Sigmund Freud's Theory of Talk Therapy

One of Freud's greatest contributions to psychology was talk therapy , the notion that simply talking about problems can help alleviate them. It was through his association with his close friend and colleague Josef Breuer that Freud became aware of a woman known in the case history as Anna O .

The young woman's real name was Bertha Pappenheim. She became a patient of Breuer's after suffering a bout of what was then known as hysteria . Symptoms included blurred vision, hallucinations, and partial paralysis.

Breuer observed that discussing her experiences provided some relief from her symptoms. It was Pappenheim herself who began referring to the treatment as the "talking cure."

While Anna O. is often described as one of Freud's patients, the two never actually met. Freud often discussed her case with Breuer, however, and the two collaborated on an 1895 book based on her treatment titled Studies in Hysteria .

Freud concluded that her hysteria was the result of childhood sexual abuse , a view that ended up leading to a rift in Freud and Breuer's professional and personal relationship. Anna O. may not have actually been Freud's patient, but her case informed much of Freud's work and later theories on therapy and psychoanalysis .

Freud's Theory of Personality

According to Freud's theory, there are a few different factors that affect personality. They include cathexis and anticathexis, along with life and death instincts.

Cathexis and Anticathexis

According to Freud's psychoanalytic theory, all psychic energy is generated by libido . Freud suggested that our mental states were influenced by two competing forces: cathexis and anticathexis .

• Cathexis was described as an investment of mental energy in a person, idea, or object.
• Anticathexis involves the ego blocking the socially unacceptable needs of the id. Repressing urges and desires is one common form of anticathexis, but this involves a significant investment of energy.

If you are hungry, for example, you might create a mental image of a delicious meal that you have been craving. In other cases, the ego might harness some energy from the id (the primitive mind) to seek out activities related to the desire in order to disperse excess energy from the id.

Sticking with the same example, if you can't actually seek out food to appease your hunger, you might instead thumb through a cookbook or browse through your favorite recipe blog.

According to Freud's theory, there is only so much libidinal energy available. When a lot of energy is devoted to suppressing urges via anticathexis, there is less energy for other processes.

Life Instincts and Death Instincts

Freud also believed that much of human behavior was motivated by two driving instincts: life instincts and death instincts .

• Life instincts (Eros) are those that relate to a basic need for survival, reproduction, and pleasure. They include such things as the need for food, shelter, love, and sex.
• Death instincts (Thanatos) are the result of an unconscious wish for death, which Freud believed all humans have. Self-destructive behavior was one expression of the death drive, according to Freud. However, he believed that these death instincts were largely tempered by life instincts.

Sigmund Freud's Theory of the Psyche

In Freudian theory, the human mind is structured into two main parts: the conscious and unconscious mind .

• The conscious mind includes all the things we are aware of or can easily bring into awareness.
• The unconscious mind , on the other hand, includes all of the things outside of our awareness—all of the wishes, desires, hopes, urges, and memories that we aren't aware of yet continue to influence behavior.

Freudian psychology compares the mind to an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg that is actually visible above the water represents just a tiny portion of the mind. On the other hand, the huge expanse of ice hidden underneath the water represents the much larger unconscious.

There is some question as to whether the iceberg metaphor came from Freud himself or one of his biographers, as some researchers indicate that there was no mention of an iceberg in Freud's writings.

In addition to these two main components of the mind, Freudian theory also divides human personality into three major components: the id, ego, and superego .

• The id is the most primitive part of the personality that is the source of all our most basic urges. The id is entirely unconscious and serves as the source of all libidinal energy.
• The ego is the component of personality that deals with reality and helps ensure that the demands of the id are satisfied in ways that are realistic, safe, and socially acceptable.
• The superego is the part of the personality that holds all of the internalized morals and standards that we acquire from our parents, family, and society at large.

Freud's Theory of Psychosexual Development

Freudian theory suggests that as children develop, they progress through a series of psychosexual stages . At each stage, the libido's pleasure-seeking energy is focused on a different part of the body.

The five stages of psychosexual development are:

• The oral stage : The libidinal energies are focused on the mouth.
• The anal stage : The libidinal energies are focused on the anus.
• The phallic stage : The libidinal energies are focused on the penis or clitoris.
• The latent stage : A period of calm in which little libidinal interest is present.
• The genital stage : The libidinal energies are focused on the genitals.

The successful completion of each stage leads to a healthy personality as an adult. If, however, a conflict remains unresolved at any particular stage, the individual might remain fixated or stuck at that particular point of development.

A fixation can involve an over-dependence or obsession with something related to that phase of development. For example, a person with an "oral fixation" is believed to be stuck at the oral stage of development. Signs of an oral fixation might include excessive reliance on oral behaviors such as smoking, biting fingernails, or eating.

Freud's Theory of Dream Analysis

The unconscious mind played a critical role in all of Freud's theories, and he considered dreams to be one of the key ways to take a peek into what lies outside our conscious awareness.

He dubbed dreams "the royal road to the unconscious" and believed that by examining dreams, he could see not only how the unconscious mind works but also what it is trying to hide from conscious awareness.

Freud believed the content of dreams could be broken down into two different types:

• The manifest content of a dream included all the actual content of the dream—the events, images, and thoughts contained within the dream. The manifest content is essentially what the dreamer remembers upon waking.
• The latent content , on the other hand, is all the hidden and symbolic meanings within the dream. Freud believed that dreams were essentially a form of wish fulfillment. By taking unconscious thoughts, feelings, and desires and transforming them into less threatening forms, people are able to reduce the ego's anxiety.

Freud often utilized the analysis of dreams as a starting point in his free association technique. When working with a client, he would focus on a particular dream symbol, then use free association to see what other thoughts and images immediately came to the client's mind.

Freud's Theory of Defense Mechanisms

Even if you've never studied Freud's theories before, you have probably heard the term "defense mechanisms." When someone seems unwilling to face a painful truth, you might accuse them of being " in denial ." If they try to look for a logical explanation for unacceptable behavior, you might suggest that they are "rationalizing."

For instance, rationalizations for smoking might include "one cigarette won't hurt me" or "if I quit, I'll just gain weight."

Denial and rationalization represent different types of defense mechanisms, or tactics that the ego uses to protect itself from anxiety. Some of the best-known mechanisms of defense include denial, repression , and regression , but there are many more.

Freud's Theory of Female Psychology

Freud's perspective on women was, and continues to be, one of his most controversial. One of his theories relating to female psychology is known as the Electra complex, also sometimes referred to as penis envy.

According to Freud, females start out close to their mothers. But once they realize they don't have a penis, they start to hate their moms for mutilating them, then become close to their dad. At the same time, females start to imitate their mom because they fear the loss of her affection.

The Electra complex is the opposite of the Oedipus complex , which Freud contended is when a male child develops a sexual attachment to his mother, viewing his father as a sexual rival.

Freud's Theory of Religion

Freud theorized that religious beliefs are essentially delusions, and also that turning away from these types of ideologies is preferable because religion does not lead to happiness and fulfillment; in fact, it is a belief structure not based on evidence.

Freud felt that a person's religious views were, at least in part, a result of their relationship with their father. He believed that people tend to depict their idea of a "God" based on the qualities and traits of the father figure in their life and that these qualities changed as their relationship with their father changed.

It is believed that Freud's theory of religion was influenced by his relationship with his own father. Freud had a Jewish upbringing, which he said he had no desire to change, yet he also stated that he was "completely estranged from the religion of his fathers—as well as from every other religion."

Impact of Freudian Theory

While Freud's theories have been widely criticized, they are still important because his work has made contributions to psychology as we know it today.

Psychotherapy

Many contemporary psychologists do not give credence to Freud's ideas, but the theories remain important. And research has validated the effectiveness of various forms of talk therapy, such as one finding that psychodynamic therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy were both effective for treating anxiety in college-age students. Freud's belief that mental problems could be resolved by actually talking about them helped revolutionize psychotherapy.

When the patient and analyst are well suited to work together, they can see how the patient's past gets reactivated in their current therapy and much learning takes place.

Freud's theories have also sparked a major change in how we view mental illness by suggesting that not all psychological problems have physiological causes.

Freud's contributions have also impacted the foundational science of what we know about psychology today. His idea that our thoughts are largely unconscious has withstood scientific scrutiny, for instance, retaining their importance in understanding human development and behavior.

Freud has even influenced thoughts about how society has formed into what it is today. Some believe that his theories help explain some of the successes of modern society while also explaining some of its failures.

Final Thoughts

To understand where psychology is today, it is essential to take a look at where we've been and how we got here. Freud's work provides insight into an important movement in psychology that helped transform how we think about mental health and how we approach psychological disorders .

By studying Freud's theories and those that came after, you gain a better understanding of psychology's fascinating history. Many terms such as defense mechanism , Freudian slip , and anal retentive have become a part of our everyday language. By learning about his work and theories, you can understand how these ideas and concepts became woven into the fabric of popular culture.

After starting his career as a doctor at Vienna General Hospital, Freud entered private practice, specializing in the treatment of psychological disorders. It was during this time in private practice that Freud started to develop his theories.

These theories were later refined through Freud's associations with Josef Breuer, a colleague and friend who was treating a patient with hysteria. Based on this case, Freud developed the theory that many neuroses originate from trauma that has transitioned from the conscious mind to the unconscious mind.

While Freud's psychosexual theory is rooted in basic needs and physiological driving forces, Erikson's psychosocial theory places more emphasis on one's environment.

Erikson's and Freud's theories also vary in terms of stages of development. For instance, the first stage of development according to Freudian theory is the oral stage, while the first stage of development according to Erikson's theory is trust versus mistrust.

Another difference is the length of development, with Freud believing that most development occurs in early childhood and Erikson contending that people continue to develop well into their adult years.

Freud's theory has shaped the field of psychology, both in theory and treatment applications. It has also inspired others in the field to better understand the mind and how it develops, developing their own theories in turn. Without Freud, we might not have talk therapy, which research supports for helping people manage and treat mental health issues such as anxiety and depression.

Freud's psychosexual theory is hard to test scientifically, leaving questions about its validity. Another concern is that the theory is based on case studies versus research. Some have issues with Freud's theory being focused more on male psychosexual development, offering very little insight into females.

It also refers to homosexual preferences as a deviation of normal psychosexual development, though many psychologists today feel that sexual orientation is more biological in nature.

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Lantz S, Ray S. Freud developmental theory . In: StatPearls [Internet]. StatPearls Publishing.

Eremie MD, Ubulom WJ. Review of psychoanalytic approach to counseling . Int J Innov Psychol Social Develop . 2016;4(2):22-25.

Zhang W, Guo B. Freud's dream interpretation: A different perspective based on the self-organization theory of dreaming . Front Psychol . 2018;9:1553. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01553

Khan M, Haider K. Girls' first love; their fathers: Freudian theory Electra complex . Res J Language Literature Humanities . 2015;2(11):1-4.

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Sigmund Freud: Religion .

Monti F, Tonetti L, Ricci Bitti PE. Comparison of cogntive-behavioural therapy and psychodynamic therapy in the treatment of anxiety among university students: an effectiveness study . Brit J Guid Counsel . 2014;42(3):233-244. doi:10.1080/03069885.2013.878018

Gedo JE. The enduring scientific contributions of Sigmund Freud . Perspect Biol Med . 2002;45(2):200-211. doi:10.1353/pbm.2002.0026

Library of Congress. Sigmund Freud: Conflict & Culture .

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Freud S. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud . The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

• The Wolf Man’s Dream

Explore one of the most famous dreams in the history of psychoanalysis.

• Introduction
• The Patient
• The Analysis
• The Primal Scene

The Wolf Man's dream is one of the most famous dreams in the history of psychoanalysis.

“Suddenly, the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on a big walnut tree in front of the window.”

It was the harrowing childhood nightmare of  Sergei Pankejeff (1886-1979), who was one of Freud’s most famous patients. The dream is so famous that Pankejeff later became known as the ‘Wolf Man’.

The night before his 4th birthday, Pankejeff dreamed that he was lying in bed when all of a sudden the window swung open.

Peering out, he saw six or seven white wolves sitting in the tree outside his bedroom, their eyes fixed on him. Terrified by their gaze, he woke up screaming.

He made a sketch of the dream for Freud, and in later life produced several paintings of it, two of which are on display in the Freud Museum London.

This is one of Pankejeff's paintings of his dream:

The Wolf Man’s Dream by Sergei Pankejeff

The dream intrigued Freud, who soon discovered that it marked a turning point in Pankejeff’s childhood.

In the months leading up to the dream he had been going through a ‘naughty phase’, but after the dream this was replaced by a period of intense anxiety.

A good deal of his treatment with Freud was devoted to unravelling this peculiar dream. What did it mean? And why did it bring about such a dramatic change in Pankejeff’s personality?

This resource explores the Wolf Man’s dream.

We will be considering:

• Sergei Pankejeff’s life
• The dream and its relation to his early childhood
• Freud’s method of interpreting dreams
• The meaning of the dream
• The Wolf Man’s later life

In this resource:

• Meet the Patient

Sergei Pankejeff's life, especially his childhood, and why he consulted with Freud.

• The Analysis Begins

As Freud's analysis of Pankejeff progressed, a curious story began to unfold.

• The Dream of the Wolves

Freud's method of dream interpretation, as he applied it to the Wolf Man's dream.

What did the interpretation of the Wolf Man's dream reveal?

• The Wolf Man in Later Life

Sergei Pankejeff's life was not a happy one.

Related resource

The interpretation of dreams.

A guide to Sigmund Freud's theory of dreams and his method of dream interpretation.

From our shop

Get the book.

From the History of an Infantile Neurosis , or the ‘Case of the Wolf Man’, as it became known, is one of the most important of Sigmund Freud’s published case histories.

In This Section

Related resource.

Plan your visit to the Freud Museum: opening times, directions and admission fees.

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Hayek, the Accidental Freudian

In November, 1977, on a still-sticky evening along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, the Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek boarded a flight bound for Chile and settled into his seat in first class. He was headed to the Valparaíso Business School, where he was scheduled to receive an honorary degree. Upon arrival in Santiago, the Nobel laureate was greeted at the airport by the dean of the business school, Carlos Cáceres. They drove toward the Pacific Coast, stopping for a bite to eat in the city of Casablanca, which had a restaurant known for its chicken stew. After their meal, they steered north to Viña del Mar, a seaside resort city in Valparaíso, where Hayek would take long walks on the beach, pausing now and then to study the stones in the sand.

To the casual observer, it seemed like a typical autumnal recessional, the sort of trip that illustrious scholars enjoy at the end of their careers. This one had a wintrier purpose. In addition to being a fan of Hayek, Cáceres sat on a special board of advisers to the military dictator Augusto Pinochet , who had overthrown Chile’s democratically elected Socialist leader, Salvador Allende , in a violent coup four years earlier. Cáceres would go on to serve as Pinochet’s central banker, finance minister, and interior minister. He helped design the country’s 1980 constitution, which nested a neoliberal economy in the spikes of an authoritarian state. Like many of his market-minded colleagues in the regime, Cáceres wanted the world to see the dictatorship—steeped in kidnapping, torture, and murder—as he saw it: on the road to freedom. A visit from Hayek, an internationally renowned theorist of capitalism and liberty, might help.

If Hayek had any qualms about his role, he did not express them. To the contrary: after a personal meeting with Pinochet, the philosopher told reporters that he had explained to the tyrant that “unlimited democracy does not work.” Pinochet “listened carefully” and asked Hayek to send his writing on the topic. Hayek had his secretary mail a chapter from his forthcoming book, the third volume of “ Law, Legislation and Liberty, ” which included a discussion of emergency rule. After commending the dictatorship for not “being obsessed with popular commitments or political expectations of any kind,” Hayek reported to the media that “the direction of the Chilean economy is very good,” and “an example for the world.” The regime, Cáceres later told Hayek, welcomed his words.

In the following years, Hayek continued to defend the regime, describing its leaders as “educated, reasonable, and insightful men” and Pinochet as “an honorable general.” To a doubting public, Hayek explained that dictators can cleanse democracies of their “impurities.” He reassured critics that he had “not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende.” It was one of the rare instances when his perception of the country matched reality; as a respondent pointed out, “such absolute unanimity only exists when those who disagree have been imprisoned, expelled, terrified into silence, or destroyed.”

Hayek made his voyage to Santiago more than a quarter century after the years covered in “ Hayek: A Life ,” the first half of Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger’s projected two-volume biography. The trip is naturally not discussed in this volume, which ends in 1950, yet it is embedded in virtually every sentence of Hayek’s developing thought and being. Decades before he set foot on Chilean soil, Hayek envisioned economic freedom as a form of élite domination. His economy required no intervention of an authoritarian state to be coercive and unfree. It was already coercive and unfree, by design. The question we’re left with, at the end of 1950, is not how Hayek, theorist of liberty, could have come to the aid of Pinochet but, given his theory of the economy, how could he not?

Friedrich August Edler von Hayek was born on May 8, 1899, in his parents’ apartment in Vienna. Two miles away, Sigmund Freud was putting the finishing touches on “ The Interpretation of Dreams .” “ Fin-de-siècle Vienna ” invokes a century-straddling city whose violent metamorphosis, from the crown jewel of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the capital of the Austrian Republic, released into the world a distinctive swirl of psychoanalysis and logical positivism, fascism and atonal music. Though often omitted from the city’s syllabus, Hayek’s writings are among its lasting texts.

His family story reads like a novel by Joseph Roth or Thomas Mann. Hayek’s paternal great-great-grandfather, a textile manufacturer in Moravia, was ennobled at the end of the eighteenth century; his son squandered his wealth in the course of the nineteenth. Hayek’s maternal great-grandfather was knighted for service to the Emperor at the siege of Arad. Both sides of the family were beneficiaries of a century’s creative accounting that, by the collapse of the Empire in 1918, had bestowed a “von” upon eight thousand members of the bourgeoisie. Though the Republic abolished the use of titles in 1919, Hayek continued to use his until 1945, when it became a liability in his arguments with the left.

A high-minded liberalism is often attributed to these branches of the Austrian bourgeoisie, but fascist and proto-fascist ornaments adorn the Hayek family tree. His grandfather ran for political office, twice, as a follower of Karl Lueger, whom Adolf Hitler claimed as an inspiration. Hayek’s father helped found a racially restrictive association of physicians to oppose the increasing number of Jews in the medical profession. His mother pored over “Mein Kampf” and welcomed the Anschluss. His brother Heinz, who had moved to Germany for a job in 1929, joined the S.A. in 1933 and the Nazi Party in 1938, for reasons of conviction and career, then underwent a de-Nazification trial after the war.

Whatever hold Hayek’s family had upon him in his youth, it loosened during the First World War. While serving at the Italian front, he briefly fell under the spell of the writings of the German Jewish industrialist Walther Rathenau. Upon returning home, Hayek enrolled at the University of Vienna, where he studied with the author of the Austrian constitution, Hans Kelsen, a Jewish social democrat. When capitalism became his passion and economics his profession, Hayek helped found a discussion group of students and faculty, most of them Jewish or of Jewish descent. Exposed “to the best type of Jewish intelligentsia . . . who proved to be far ahead of me in literary education and general precociousness,” Hayek planted his flag of free markets in the field of enlightenment and cosmopolitanism.

Its perimeter extended only so far. In 1923, he travelled to the United States, believing that an “acquaintance” with the country was “indispensable for an economist.” Already primed by Oswald Spengler ’s “ The Decline of the West ,” which he read in 1920, Hayek was appalled by what he saw. The culture was lowbrow, its tastes crass and banal. The women were “horrible . . . walking paint pots.” New York City was crowded and noisy. Americans cared too much about money. Good living required inordinate wealth. Like a socialist who can’t abide the working class, Hayek couldn’t bear the reality of commercial civilization. He chose enchantment instead.

The task of psychoanalysis, Freud wrote in 1917, is “to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind.” Despite his animus toward Freud, whom he called “probably . . . the greatest destroyer of culture,” Hayek launched a similar strike at the “economic man” of mainstream analysis. Against the idea of the “quasi-omniscient individual” who operates in a “perfect market in which everybody knows everything,” Hayek created what he would later call an “anti-rationalistic” approach to economics and social life.

Before 1937, Hayek, by his own account, was a conventional thinker. He had joined the London School of Economics in 1931, where he hewed to the conservative maxims of Austrian economics. He argued for tight money and the gold standard, supported wage cuts and austerity, and tried to assemble a theory of prices and the business cycle from pieces he had been collecting since his dissertation days in Vienna. With his articles “Economics and Knowledge” (1937) and “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945), Hayek broke free of these strictures and started his “own way of thinking.” It was “the most exciting moment” of his career, generating a “feeling of sudden illumination, sudden enlightenment.”

Hayek believed that what we see in the economy, what we can know, is limited and constrained. We know small facts: how to jiggle the handle of a machine in our office; who’s available on the weekend to fix that part that always breaks just so; which supplier will replace it when it’s beyond repair. If we, or a limited group of us, were alone in the world with those facts, like Robinson Crusoe on his island, we might know the whole of the economy. But we’re not. We share the economy with a great many others, scattered across the globe. We can’t know their infinitesimal facts any more than they can know ours. Straitened by time and place, each of us possesses only a “special knowledge of circumstances of the fleeting moment not known to others.”

These fragments of economic knowledge are often unconscious; we can’t render them as propositions or in words. A skilled manager can inspire his employees to do excellent work without being able to explain what he did to inspire them.

But if all this knowledge is local and unique, if much of it is unspoken and inferred, how do we produce and consume on a global scale? How does my knowledge get registered by buyers and sellers thousands of miles away? And if the facts of my economic situation change, as they invariably do, how do those buyers and sellers learn of those changes and respond in kind?

For Hayek, the answer lay in the movement of prices. Imagine the global market in lithium, which is crucial to batteries. One day, the price of lithium increases. Maybe demand has gone up: an affordable electric car has rolled off the assembly line, or an efficient energy grid has come online. Maybe supply has come down: a vein of ore in Australia has been thoroughly mined, or workers at a salt flat in Chile have gone on strike. The source of the scarcity is irrelevant to us. Not only does it not matter, Hayek says, “it is significant that it does not matter.” All we know and need to know is the facts of our economic situation. The higher price of lithium raises the price of a new cell phone, so I hold off on upgrading my phone. When the price of lithium goes back down—the Chilean workers settle with management or suppliers find a new source in Australia—I get my phone.

Hayek marvelled at this concert of unknowingness. Like a psychoanalytic symptom, prices condense and communicate fragments of knowledge that are obscure to the conscious mind. The movement of prices effects a change in our “dispositions”—what we want, how much of it we want, what and how much we’re willing to give up to get it—again, without our knowing why, or that we even had such a disposition in the first place. Hayek called this a sort of “social mind”—though, unlike the Freudian mind, he thought it must remain inaccessible. We are all prisoners of a knowledge that allows us to move in dimly lit corridors, bumping into one another, our weight shifting ever so slightly as we try to keep moving in line.

Hayek’s market seems to conjure a wondrous democracy of unreason. No one has comprehensive vision; we coöperate without supervision or sight. But it also invites a question: Where does something like innovation come from? It can’t be from the masses or the majority, the wageworkers whose horizons are limited. Conforming to their values would probably “mean the stagnation, if not the decay, of civilization.” For innovation to occur, he wrote, a few “must lead, and the rest must follow.”

It turns out that knowledge is distributed unequally across Hayek’s market. “Only from an advanced position does the next range of desires and possibilities become visible,” he wrote. A few men, of discrete outline and distinctive purpose, occupy that position, imposing themselves on the many. “The selection of new goals” is made by an élite “long before the majority can strive for them.” There is much unreason but little democracy. There is also little freedom. Hayek cares a great deal about freedom, but he believes that it, too, does its most important work in exclusive quarters. “The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million,” he wrote, “may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use.”

Hayek’s contortions—his attempts to preserve commitments both to freedom and to élitism—are most evident in his concept of coercion. Coercion, Hayek tells us in the first chapter of “ The Constitution of Liberty ,” his magnum opus on free societies, is “such control of the environment or circumstances of a person by another that, in order to avoid greater evil, he is forced to act not according to a coherent plan of his own but to serve the ends of another.” By way of example, let’s say an investor pulls his money out of a company that I work for, forcing me to lose my job. Thanks to my salary and benefits, I’d taken out a mortgage, started a family, and enrolled my children in school. I had a plan and a purpose for my life. Because of that investor, both are now threatened. His actions have rendered “the alternatives before me . . . distressingly few and uncertain.” Because of him, I may be “impelled” by the threat of starvation “to accept a distasteful job at a very low wage,” which leaves me “ ‘at the mercy’ of the only man willing to employ me.” Even so, Hayek insists that I have not been coerced.

How can that be? Hayek suddenly introduces a new element to his analysis, which is scarcely mentioned in that opening chapter on freedom. “So long as the intent of the act that harms me is not to make me serve another person’s ends,” he writes, “its effect on my freedom is not different from that of any natural calamity.” The investor didn’t seek to harm me, to make me give up my plans and purposes, in the service of his ends. He just happened to harm me in the service of his ends. He’s like a monster wave. Monster waves aren’t coercive; they’re simply telling us to take our surfboard elsewhere.

Hayek’s is an economy in which a few can act, with all the power of nature, while the rest of us are acted upon. That domination is directly derived from his vision of the economy and his conception of freedom. It is a commitment obscured by Hayek’s readers, not only his right-wing defenders but also his left-wing critics. The latter tend to focus on other sources of domination or unfreedom: the cruel and carceral state that enforces Hayek’s neoliberal order; the remote global institutions that put that order beyond the reach of democratic citizens; the patriarchal family that offers tutorials in submission to the market; and the construction of the enterprising self that is so emblematic of contemporary capitalism.

Persuasive as these readings are, they don’t quite capture that moment of élite domination in the Hayekian market, when the “innovations” of a seeing and knowing few have “forced a new manner of living” on the unseeing and unknowing many, whose function is neither to invest nor amass but to yield, not to the economy or the state but to their superior. It was a moment that Hayek came to know all too well in his personal life.

The great trial of Hayek’s life was his twenty-four-year marriage to Helena (Hella) Fritsch, much of which he spent trying to get out of. Caldwell and Klausinger devote the last three chapters of their biography to the divorce—and for good reason, even if they can’t see it. In Hayek’s anguished bid to end his marriage, we find, just as Freud would have anticipated, the private pathology of the public philosophy, the knowledge problem in practice. That we should discover those pathologies in a marriage is less remarkable than it might seem. From the treatises of antiquity to the novels of Jane Austen to the economics of Thomas Piketty , writers of all sorts have understood the overlap between unions of soul and contracts of need.

Before Hella, there was Lenerl—Helene Bitterlich, a distant cousin whom Hayek fell in love with after the First World War, and who shared his feelings. Sexually inexperienced and hopeless around women, Hayek didn’t make a move. Eventually, another man did, and Lenerl accepted his proposal. Hayek began seeing Hella, and they married in 1926. Within a decade, he confessed to Hella that he had married her on the rebound from Lenerl. He secretly arranged to be with Lenerl at a future point and asked Hella for a divorce. She refused the divorce and any further discussion of it.

After the Second World War, Hayek resumed his efforts. Because he intended to support Hella and their children after the divorce, he resolved to get a higher-paying job in America. For two years, he crisscrossed the Atlantic, sometimes without telling Hella the purpose of his trips. By 1948, he had an offer from the University of Chicago. When he disclosed his plan to Hella, she again refused to grant him a divorce. He had his attorney scour the country’s various divorce laws, including Reno’s. Hella, too, spoke with a lawyer, who made clear that Hayek could not divorce her without her consent.

That Hayek and Hella should have found themselves in the marital equivalent of a Hayekian market—uncertain about each other’s plans, ignorant of each other’s moves, captive to each other’s tacit knowledge—did not give him perspective or pause. Instead, he did what victims, and left-wing critics, of the market often do. In a letter to Hella, he insisted on the objective facts of the situation and asserted the rationality and right of his position. He forgot the first rule of Hayekian economics, that all data is subjective. Hella told him that if he left her, she would have a nervous breakdown, forcing him to return to take care of their children. Then she resumed her silence.

Hayek tried a different tack, drawn from another page of his economic writing. In “The Meaning of Competition,” Hayek had taken issue with the economist George Stigler’s claim that “economic relationships are never perfectly competitive if they involve any personal relationships between economic units.” Hayek countered that the corollary of imperfect knowledge in a competitive market is the trust that we must invest in other individuals, who supply us with goods and services. We depend on our personal connections—and connections to those connections—to send us to the best doctor, restaurant, or hotel. Personal networks, and the reputations that move along them, make markets work and give market actors a competitive edge.

Seeking to alter the terms of his contest with Hella, Hayek leveraged his power and connections to get a better vantage, to see further than Hella and to make the world work for him. He knew he couldn’t take the job at Chicago without resolving his divorce, but he couldn’t put Chicago off indefinitely. With his network of academic friends and private donors, he secured a temporary appointment at the university for the winter quarter of 1950. That bought him time. It also involved considerable subterfuge, toward his wife, friends, and colleagues and supervisors at the London School of Economics, who were led to believe that he would return to Britain.

To get a divorce in America, Hayek needed to establish residence in a state other than Illinois, which had restrictive divorce laws. There could be no whiff of his using the state simply to get the divorce; he’d have to get a job there and give up his appointment at L.S.E. He secured a temporary post at the University of Arkansas for the spring quarter of 1950. He arranged for his mother to move to London, if necessary, to help take care of the children and make sure Hella made no sudden moves.

“The choreography was precise,” Caldwell and Klausinger write. In the course of two days in February, while he was in America, Hayek resigned from L.S.E. and informed Hella that he was leaving her. If she wanted him to support her and the children, she had to grant him the divorce. On the advice of a lawyer, Hayek gathered more evidence of their incompatibility. He hired a handwriting expert from Vienna, who determined, from letters written by Hella and Hayek, that she was “remote from the facts of life” and he “prevails in life and knows how to master it.” In July, they were divorced. A month later, he was married to Lenerl.

The story has a final Hayekian twist. Responding to the Labour government’s drastic devaluation of the pound, Hella’s attorneys had wisely stipulated that Hayek’s alimony payments be set out in dollars. Hayek agreed, though not without sniffing that her lawyers “were interested solely in their fees.” Hayek’s L.S.E. colleague, the economist Lionel Robbins, tussled with him over whether he had got a raw deal. Robbins, once Hayek’s best friend, had sided with Hella during the divorce and become one of her close advisers. He dismissed Hayek’s complaints: “Your conception of justice is very different from mine.” ♦

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• BOOK REVIEW
• 26 June 2024

Freudian scripts and sensory slips: Books in brief

• Andrew Robinson 0

Andrew Robinson’s many books include Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts and Einstein on the Run: How Britain Saved the World’s Greatest Scientist . He is based in London.

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Nicky Hayes Yale Univ. Press (2024)

Aristotle proposed that humans have five senses, but ignored internal ones. Today — as Nicky Hayes, president of the British Psychological Society, describes in her engaging global history from ancient Greece onwards — neurologists count more than 40 human senses used to receive information. The study of people “only becomes psychology when it is fully backed up by research evidence”. That said, it must include more than statistical methods, and must value asking subjects about their experiences, she argues.

Robert Zatorre Oxford Univ. Press (2024)

Charles Darwin appears twice in cognitive neuroscientist Robert Zatorre’s investigation of music. In 1871, Darwin pondered music’s apparent irrelevance to human survival as “most mysterious”, but he later admitted that listening regularly to music might have kept parts of his “atrophied” brain “active”. In Zatorre’s view, “to understand musical pleasure” we must grasp both the brain’s “perceptual/cognitive system” and its “reward system”. His pioneering book, based on profound research, is technical but always accessible.

Frank Tallis Abacus (2024)

Psychoanalysis, proposed by Sigmund Freud in Vienna in the 1890s, is probably science’s most controversial field. “Few major thinkers have been attacked and vilified more than Sigmund Freud,” emphasizes clinical psychologist Frank Tallis, who is overall an admirer, and author of a Freud-inspired detective series, the Liebermann Papers , adapted for television as Vienna Blood. Still, he often criticizes Freud in this biography, which is also a study of Vienna’s golden age, around the turn of the twentieth century.

Salman Khan Viking (2024)

Khan Academy is a non-profit online educational organization with more than 150 million learners in some 50 languages. It was started in the United States in 2006 by Salman Khan, who studied computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and is the son of immigrants from Bangladesh. His practical, inspiring book considers how artificial intelligence can transform education — mostly for the better — and “create a new golden age for humanity, a time that will make today look like a dark age”.

Judith Butler Allen Lane (2024)

In the past decade, gender has been attacked by conservatives from many fields, notes philosopher and gender-studies scholar Judith Butler. This includes Pope Francis in his 2015 comment, quoted by Butler, that teaching gender in schools is “ideological colonization … think of Hitler Youth”. The book’s purpose is, however, neither primarily argumentative nor philosophical. Instead, it considers: “What kind of phantasm has gender become, and what anxieties, fears and hatreds does it collect and mobilize?”

Nature 630 , 812 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02084-3

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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Plastic-eating fungus caused doomsday[2][3]

Futures 12 JUN 24

[DGIST] 2024 Tenure-Track Faculty Public Invitation

South Korea (KR)

Postdoctoral / Research Scientist / Research Assistant positions in Molecular Immunology

Postdoctoral / Research Scientist / Research Assistant positions in Molecular Immunology / Cancer Immunology

Dallas, Texas (US)

The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UT Southwestern Medical Center)

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) Researcher/Associate Researcher

Xiaoliang Sunney XIE’s Group is recruiting researchers specializing in Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Beijing, China

Changping Laboratory

Osaka University Immunology Frontier Research Center Postdoctoral Researcher

IFReC, Osaka University in Japan offers Advanced Postdoc Positions for Immunology, Cell Biology, Bioinformatics and Bioimaging.

Suita Campus, Osaka University in Osaka, Japan

Immunology Frontier Research Center, Osaka University

PostDoc Researcher, Magnetic Recording Materials Group, National Institute for Materials Science

Starting date would be after January 2025, but it is negotiable.

Tsukuba, Japan (JP)

National Institute for Materials Science

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