The First Psychoanalyst

Darwin, at the age of twenty-seven, went home with his facts and theory, and traveled no more. He gave the scientific world a few papers primarily on geological subjects; then he withdrew to the country, to work, for twenty years, on “The Origin of Species”: he made it a long and lonely discovery. He now became physically incapacitated by insomnia, nausea, and chills. His father-doctor could not diagnose his disease, but declared the son too delicate for a career out in the world. The son became a life-long invalid. If his hypersensitivity was a sign of hereditary degeneracy, as some doctors believe, then there never was a degenerate guided more wisely in the utilization of his degeneracy by an inner genius of economy. For “I could…collect facts bearing on the origin of species…when I could do nothing else from illness.” Not that Darwin did not realize what this restriction of his lifespace did to him: when, at the end, even Shakespeare seemed so “intolerably dull” as to nauseate him, he deplored the “curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes” and spoke of an “enfeeblement of the emotional part of our nature.”

I do not wish to speculate here on the dynamics of a psychoneurosis in a man like Darwin. But I do know that a peculiar malaise can befall those who have seen too much, who, in ascertaining new facts in a spirit seemingly as innocent as that of a child who builds with blocks, begin to perceive of the place of these facts in the moral climate of their day. “We physicists have known sin,” Oppenheimer has said; but it does not take the use of scientific data for mankind’s material destruction to make a scientist feel or behave as if he had sinned. It is enough to have persisted, with the naïveté of genius, on the dissolution of one of the prejudices on which the security and the familiarity of the contemporary image of man is built. But a creative man has no choice. He may come across his supreme task almost accidentally. But once the issue is joined, his task proves to be at the same time intimately related to his most personal conflicts, to his superior selective perception, and to the stubbornness of his one-way will: he must court sickness, failure, or insanity, in order to test the alternative whether the established world will crush him, or whether he will disestablish a sector of this world’s outworn fundaments and make place for a new one.

Darwin only dealt with man’s biological origins. His achievement, and his “sin,” was a theory that made man part of nature. In comparing Darwin’s approach to nature with his approach to man, a recent biographer remarks half-jokingly, “In any case, no man afflicted with a weak stomach and insomnia has any business investigating his own kind.”

As we now turn to Freud the psychological discoverer, I hope to make the reader wonder whether anybody but one at least temporarily afflicted with psychosomatic symptoms, one temporarily sick of his own kind, could or would investigate his own species—provided only that he had the inclination, the courage, and the mental means of facing his own neurosis with creative persistence. A man, I will submit, could begin to study man’s inner world only by appointing his own neurosis that angel who was to be wrestled with and not to be let go, until he would bless the observer.

What was Freud’s Galapagos, what species fluttered what kinds of wings before his searching eyes? It has often been pointed out derisively: his creative laboratory was the neurologist’s office, the dominant species hysterical ladies—“Fräulein Anna O.,” “Frau Emmy v. N.,” “Katarina” (not a Fräulein, because she was a peasant).

Freud was thirty when, in 1886, he became the private doctor of such patients. He had not expected to be a practitioner; he had, in fact, received his medical degree belatedly. His mind, too, had been “selective.” At the age of seventeen he had chosen medicine in preference to law and politics, when he heard Goethe’s “Ode to Nature”: the unveiling of Nature’s mysteries, not the healing of the sick, provided the first self-image of a doctor. Then came his professional moratorium: as in an ascetic reaction to a nature-philosophic indulgence he committed himself to the physiological laboratory and to the monastic service of physicalistic physiology. What geology was to Darwin, physiology was to Freud: a schooling in method. The ideology of the physicalistic-physiologic method of the time was formulated in an oath by two of its outstanding teachers, DuBois Reymond and Brücke: “to put in power this truth: No other forces than the common physical chemical ones are active within the organism.…One has either to find the specific way or form of their action by means of the physical mathematical method, or to assume new forces equal in dignity to the chemical physical forces inherent in matter.” New forces equal in dignity: we will return to this phrase.

When Freud exchanged the academic monastery for the medical parsonage, he had fully developed a style of work which would have sufficed for an impressively productive lifetime. He had published many papers on physiological and neurological subjects, and had two major works in preparation. Thus, when he became a practicing neurologist, he left a future behind him. But he had married the girl who had waited for him, and he wanted a family, in fact, a large one; he had earned the right to have confidence in himself.

Yet, a future anticipated in a man’s configurations of thought means more than time not yet spent. To give up the laboratory meant to relinquish a work-discipline and a work-ideology to which Freud had been deeply committed. The work of a specialist catering to the epidemiological market was lacking in what Freud nostalgically called an inner tyrant, i.e., a great principle. Luckily, he had met an older practitioner, Dr. Joseph Breuer, who had shown him that there was a laboratory hidden in the very practice of neurology.

Freud’s new laboratory, then, were patients, mostly women, who brought him symptoms which only an overly-serious and searching observer could accept as constituting a field activated by dignified forces. These ladies suffered from neuralgic pains and anesthesias, from partial paralyses and contractions, from tics and convulsions, from nausea and finickiness, from the inability to see and from visual hallucinations, from the inability to remember and from painful floods of memory. Popular opinion judged these ladies to be spoiled, just putting on airs—“attention-getting” some of us would call it today. The dominant neuropathology of the day, however, assumed some of their disturbances to be a consequence of hereditary degenerative processes in the brain. Freud, too, had learned to treat these patients like partially decerebrated bundles, or like children without a will: he had learned to apply massage and electricity to the affected body part and to dominate the patient’s will by hypnosis and suggestion. He might, for example, order the hypnotized patient to laugh out loud when encountering in the future a certain thought or person or place, the sight of which had previously caused a fit or a paralysis. The awakened patient did laugh out loud, but more often than not, she would become afflicted again, and in connection with something else.

But Freud, like Darwin, could not believe in linear descent—in this instance, of isolated symptoms from defects of the brain. In an array of symptoms he, too, looked for a common principle, a struggle for equilibrium, a clash of forces. And he was convinced that challenging phenomena must have a hidden history. As Freud listened to his hypnotized patients, he realized that they were urgently, desperately offering him series of memories which, seemingly fragmentary, were like variations in search of a theme—a theme which was often found in a historical model event.

Here no detail could be too trivial for investigation. A patient suffers from a persistent illusion of smelling burned pancakes. All right, the smell of burned pancakes shall be the subject of exhaustive analysis. As this smell is traced to a certain scene, the scene vividly remembered, the sensation disappears, to be replaced by the smell of cigars. The smell of cigars is traced to other scenes, in which a man in an authoritative position was present, and in which disturbing subjects had been mentioned in a connection which demanded that the patient control her feelings.

It fits our image of those Victorian days—a time when children in all, and women in most circumstances were to be seen but not heard—that the majority of symptoms would prove to lead back to events when violently aroused affects (love, sex, rage, fear) had come into conflict with narrow standards of propriety and breeding. The symptoms, then, were delayed involuntary communications: using the whole body as spokesman, they were saying what common language permits common people to say directly: “He makes me sick,” “She pierced me with her eyes,” “I could not swallow that insult,” or, as the song has it, “I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair.” Freud the neurologist now became “haunted” by the basic conviction that any neurotic symptom, traced along a path of associated experiences (not of neurological pathways), would lead to the revival in memory of earlier and earlier conflicts, and in doing so would yield a complete history of its origin.

As Freud proceeded with his reconstruction of the past of his patients, a dangerous insight dawned on him: such conflicts as his patients revealed were, in principle, shared by all men. It would be hard, indeed, “to draw the line and say here you must stop.” He became aware of the fact that man, in principle, does not remember or understand much of what is most significant in his childhood, and more, that he does not want to. Here, a mysterious individual prehistory seemed to loom up, as important for psychology as Darwin’s biological prehistory was for biology.

But Darwin had at his disposal the whole tradition of an ancient science. For Freud’s psychologic findings, there were, at first, only physiologic methods, his own speculations, and the sayings of writers and philosophers, who, in their way, it seemed, had known it all. Yet, it appears to be part of a creative man’s beginnings that he may change his field and yet maintain the manner of work which became part of his first identity as a worker. Freud had investigated the nature of brain lesions by slicing the brains of young animals and foeti. He now investigated memories as representative cross sections of a patient’s emotional condition. In successive memories, he traced trends which led, like pathways, to the traumatic past; there experiences of a disruptive nature loomed like lesions interfering with growth. Thus, the search for traumatic events in the individual’s forgotten prehistory, his early childhood, replaced the search for lesions in early development.

Psychology, of course, is the preferred field for a transfer of configurations of thought from other fields. The nature of things, or better, man’s logical approaches to things, is such that analogies—up to a point—reveal true correspondences. But the history of psychology also reveals how consistently neglectful and belated man is in applying to his own nature methods of observation which he has tried out on the rest of nature. That man, the observer, is in some essential way different from the observed world, is clear. But this difference calls for a constant redefinition in the light of new modes of thought. Only thus can man keep wisely different rather than vainly so. Before Copernicus, vanity as well as knowledge insisted that the earth must be in the exact nodal center of God’s universe. Well, we know now where we are. Before Darwin, man could claim a different origin from the rest of the animal world with whom he shares a slim margin of earth crust and atmosphere. Before Freud, man (that is, man of the male sex and of the better classes) was convinced that he was fully conscious of all there was to him, and sure of his divine values. Childhood was a mere training ground, in charge of that intermediary race, women.

In such a world female hysteria was implicitly acknowledged by men and men doctors as a symptom of the natural inferiority, the easy degeneracy, of women. When Freud presented to the Vienna Medical Society a case of male hysteria, the reaction of his colleagues convinced him that years of isolation lay ahead of him. He accepted it then and there: he never visited that society again. Yet, their reaction proved to be only one small aspect of a memorable crisis in which a new science was almost stillborn, by no means only because of professional isolation, but also because of disturbances in the instrument of observation, the observer’s mind. Freud’s early writings and letters permit us to see a threefold crisis: a crisis in therapeutic technique; a crisis in the conceptualization of clinical experience; and a personal crisis. I shall try to indicate in what way all three crises were, in essence, one, and were the necessary dimensions of discovery in psychology.

First, then, Freud’s change in technique. The textbooks describe it as the replacement of the cathartic and the suggestive methods by the psychoanalytic one. In Freud’s “Studies in Hysteria,” however, a pervasive change in the doctor-patient relationship is clearly described. Freud judged some of his patients to be outstanding in character and talents, rather than degenerate. He began to let himself be led by the sequence and the nature of their communications. With amused surprise he would admit that a hypnotized patient, in suggesting to him that he should stop interrupting her with his authoritative suggestions, had a point. She fortified her point by unearthing memories which he would not have suspected. He realized that in hypnosis the patients had at their disposal a depth of understanding and a freedom of affect which they did not marshal in normal life. This he had not imposed by suggestion: it was their judgment and their affect, and if they had it in hypnosis, it was part of them. Maybe, if he treated them like whole people, they would learn to realize the wholeness which was theirs. He now offered them a conscious and direct partnership: he made the patient’s healthy, if submerged, part his partner in understanding the unhealthy part. Thus was established one basic principle of psychoanalysis, namely, that one can study the human mind only by engaging the fully motivated partnership of the observed individual, and by entering into a sincere contract with him.

But a contract has two partners, at least. The changed image of the patient changed the self-image of the doctor. He realized that habit and convention had made him and his fellow physicians indulge in an autocratic pattern, with not much more circumspection or justification than the very paternal authorities who he now felt had made the patients sick in the first place. He began to divine the second principle of psychoanalysis, namely, that you will not see in another what in principle you have not learned to recognize in yourself. The mental healer must divide himself as well as the patient into an observer and an observed.

The intellectual task faced here, namely, psychoanalytic insight and communication, was a massive one. Today, it is difficult to appreciate the psychosocial task involved. Freud had to relinquish a most important ingredient of the doctor role of the times: the all-knowing father role, which was safely anchored in the whole contemporary cult of the paternal male as the master of every human endeavor except the nursery and the kitchen. This should not be misunderstood: Freud did not, overnight, become a different man. Indeed, there are many who will see nothing in the nature of renunciation of paternalism in him. But we are not speaking here of opinions and roles in the modern sense, of personalities subject to change like the body styles of automobiles which retain little logical relation to the inner motor of the thing, nor to the laws of the road. True roles are a matter of a certain ideologic-esthetic unity, not of opinions and appearances. True change is a matter of worthwhile conflict, for it leads through the painful consciousness of one’s position to a new conscience in that position. As Justice Holmes once said, the first step toward a truer faith is the recognition that I, at any rate, am not God. Furthermore, roles anchored in work-techniques are prepared in the intricacies of a man’s life history. Whoever has suffered under and identified with a stern father, must become a stern father himself, or else find an entirely different measure of moral strength, an equal measure of strength. Young Martin Luther’s religious crisis is a transcendent example of the heights and the depths of this problem.

Freud, as we have seen, had sought a new inner tyrant in a work-ideology shared with esteemed minds. He had relinquished it. Now, he discarded the practicing neurologist’s prevailing role of dominance and of license. This, then, is the first aspect of Freud’s crisis: he had to create a new therapeutic role, for which there was no ideological niche in the tradition of his profession. He had to create it—or fail.

The second problem which isolated Freud in those years was the course taken by his search for the “energy of equal dignity” which might be the power behind a neurosis; for the mental mechanisms which normally maintain such power in a state of constancy; and for those inner conditions which unleash the destructiveness of that power. The power, as we saw, was first perceived as “affect,” the disturbance in the machine, as a “damming up.” A long treatise recently found with some of Freud’s letters reveals the whole extent of Freud’s conflict between the creative urge to say in psychological terms what only literature had known before him, and on the other hand, his desperate obedience to physiology. The treatise is called “A Psychology for Neurologists.” Freud introduces it thus: “The intention of this project is to furnish us with a psychology which shall be a natural science: its aim, that is, is to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determined states of specifiable material particles and so to make them plain and void of contradictions.” Freud proceeds to develop a model of organization of these “particles,” a sensitive machine for the management of qualities and quantities of excitation, such as are aroused by external and internal stimuli. Physical concepts are combined with histological concepts to create a kind of neuronic Golem, a robot, in which even consciousness and thought are mechanistically explainable on the basis of an over-all principle of inner constancy. Here, Freud, at the very beginning of his career as a psychologist, tried to create a mind-robot, a thinking-machine, in many ways related to the mechanical and economic as well as the physiological configurations of his day. As Freud wrote triumphantly to his friend: “Everything fell into place, the cogs meshed, the thing really seemed to be a machine which in a moment would run of itself.” But one month after Freud had sent this manuscript to that friend, he recanted it. “All I was trying to do,” he writes, “was to explain defense (against affect), but I found myself explaining something from the very heart of nature. I found myself wrestling with the whole of psychology. Now I want to hear no more of it.” He now calls the psychology a “kind of aberration.” This manuscript, found only accidentally, documents in a dramatic way the pains to which a discoverer will go not to haphazardly ignore the paths of his tradition, but follow them instead to their absurd limit, and to abandon them only when the crossroad of lone search is reached.

In the meantime, clinical work had brought Freud within sight of his crossroad. His patients, he had become convinced, were suffering primarily from the "damming up" of one irrepressible “affect,” namely, sexual sensuality, the existence of which had been consistently denied by their overclothed parents, and suffered only with furtive shame and anemic degradation by many of their mothers. In the epidemiological fact of widespread female hysteria, Freud faced the specific symptoms of the Victorian age, the price paid, especially by women, for the hypocritical double standard of the sexes in the dominant classes, the masters or would-be masters of industrial power. However, the most glaring epidemiological fact (compare poliomyelitis, or juvenile delinquency) does not receive clarification until a seasoned set of theoretical configurations happens to suggest a specific approach. In introducing the energy concept of a sexual libido, which from birth onward is the fuel in everything we desire and love, and which our mind-machine must learn to transform according to our goals and ideals—in this concept Freud found at once the most fitting answer to the questions posed by his patients’ memories, and the theory most consistent with his search for a “dignified force.” But alas, it was also the most irrationally repugnant solution thinkable in his prudish times, and a solution of emotional danger to the observer. For, indeed, where “to draw the line”?

Here Freud’s genetic fervor led to a faulty reconstruction. In the certainty of being on the right track, and yet shaken by inner and outer resistances, he overshot the mark. In search for a pathogenic Ur-event, he was led to regard as historically real the patients’ accounts of passive sexual experiences in the first years of childhood, and to consider the fathers of the patients the perpetrators of such events. He later confessed: “The analysis had led by the correct path to such infantile sexual traumas, and yet, these were not true. Thus, the basis of reality had been lost. At that time, I would gladly have dropped the whole thing.” But finally, “I reflected that if hysterics trace back their symptoms to imaginary traumas, then this new fact signifies that they create such scenes in phantasy, and hence psychic reality deserves to be given a place next to actual reality.” Freud would soon be able to describe psychic reality systematically as the domain of phantasy, dream, and mythology, and as the imagery and language of a universal unconscious, thus adding as a scientific dimension to the image of man what had been an age-old intuitive knowledge.

In the meantime, had his error detracted from the “dignity” of sexuality? It does not seem so. Knowing what we know today it is obvious that somebody had to come sometime who would decide that it would be better for the sake of the study of human motivation to call too many rather than too few things sexual, and then to modify the hypothesis implied by careful inquiry. For it was only too easy to do what had become civilization’s “second nature,” that is, in the face of the man’s sexual and aggressive drives ever again to beat a hasty retreat into romanticism and religionism, into secrecy, ridicule, and lechery. The patients’ phantasies were sexual, and something sexual must have existed in those early years. Freud later called that something psychosexuality, for it encompasses the phantasies as well as the impulses, the psychology as well as the biology in the earliest stages of human sexuality.

Today one can add that Freud’s error was not even as great as it seemed. First of all, sexual seductions of children do occur, and are dangerous to them. But more important, the general provocation and exploitation of the child by parent and grandparent for the sake of petty emotional relief, of suppressed vengefulness, of sensual self-indulgence, and sly righteousness must be recognized not only as evident in case histories, but as a universal potentiality often practiced and hypocritically rationalized by very “moral” individuals, indeed. Samuel Butler’s “The Way of All Flesh” is probably the most forceful statement on record. What today is decried as “momism” in this country, existed in analogous form in the father’s role in the Victorian world: it is only necessary to think of Hitler’s official account of his father-hate and the appeal of this account for millions of young Germans, to know that here is a smoldering theme of general explosiveness. In finding access to the altogether fateful fact of man’s prolonged childhood, Freud discovered that infantile man, in addition to and often under the guise of being trained, is being ruefully exploited, only to become in adulthood nature’s most systematic and sadistic exploiter. Freud’s search thus added another perspective of as yet unforeseeable importance to the image of man.

Yet, this discovery, too, had to pass through its lonely stage. Freud had made a significant mistake, and he was not one to shirk the responsibility for it either publicly or privately. He made it part of his self-analysis.

About the first self-analysis in history we know from the letters, already mentioned, which Freud wrote to Dr. Wilhelm Fliess of Berlin. The extent and the importance of Freud’s friendship with Fliess was not even suspected until the letters revealed it.

The two doctors met for what they called their “congresses,” long weekends in some European city or town. Their common heritage of education permitted them to roam in varied conversations, as they vigorously perambulated through the countryside. Freud seems to have shared Nietzsche’s impression that a thought born without locomotion could not be much good. But among the theories discussed by the two doctors, there were many which never saw the light of publication. Thus, Fliess, for many years, was the first and only one to share Freud’s thinking.

Psychoanalysts do not seem to like this friendship much; Fliess, after all, was not even a psychoanalyst. Some of us now read of Freud’s affection for this man wishing we could emulate that biographer of Goethe who, in the face of Goethe’s claim that at a certain time he had loved a certain lady dearly, remarks in a footnote: “here Goethe is mistaken.” Freud, we now say, must have overestimated this friendship in an irrational, almost pathological way. But what, after all, do thinkers need friends for? So that they can share speculations, each alternately playing benevolent authority to the other, each be the other’s co-conspirator, each be applauding audience, and cautioning chorus. Freud calls Fliess his “Other one,” to whom he can entrust what is not ready for “the others.” Fliess, at any rate, seems to have had the stature and the wide education which permitted Freud to entrust him with “imaginings, transpositions, and guesses.” That Freud’s imaginings turned out to be elements of a true vision and a blueprint for a science, while Fliess’ ended in a kind of mathematical mysticism, provides no reason to belittle the friendship. The value of a friend may sometimes be measured by the magnitude of the problem which we discard with him.

The friendship seems to have been unmarred by irrational disturbances, until, in 1894, Freud consulted Fliess in regard to his own symptoms and moods, which he condenses in the word Herzelend—something like “misery of the heart.” Fliess had cauterized swellings in Freud’s nose and had urged him to give up his beloved cigars. Suddenly, the intellectual communication appears jammed. “I have not looked at your excellent case histories,” Freud writes, and indicates that his latest communication to Fliess “was abandoned in the middle of a sentence.” He continues: “I am suspicious of you this time, because this heart business [Herzangelegenheit] of mine is the first occasion on which I have ever heard you contradict yourself.” At that time, Freud speaks of his discoveries with the anguish of one who has seen a promised land which he must not set his foot on: “I have the distinct feeling,” he writes, “that I have touched on one of the great secrets of nature.” This tedium of thought seems to have joined the “heart misery” and was now joined by a mistrust of the friend. He wrote, “Something from the deepest depths of my own neurosis has ranged itself against my taking a further step in understanding of the neuroses, and you have somehow been involved.”

Freud, at this point, had developed toward Fliess what later, when he understood it, he called a transference, i.e., that peculiar mixture of overestimation and mistrust, which man is so especially ready to bestow on people in significant positions such as doctors and priests, leaders and kings, and other superiors, competitors, and adversaries. It is called transference, because, where it is neurotic, it is characterized by the blurring of an adult relationship through the transfer upon it of infantile loves and hates, dependencies and impotent rages. Transference thus also implies a partial regression to childish attitudes. It was this very area which, at that time, Freud was trying to understand in his patients. Yet, in Freud, it was quite obviously related to the processes of creativity. We have seen how young Freud, in his student days, had subdued an almost incestuous eagerness to “unveil nature” by the compensatory concentration on laboratory work. He had thus postponed a conflict by realizing only one part of his identity. But when, in his words, he “touched on one of the secrets of nature,” he was forced to realize that other, that more creative identity. For any refuge to the established disciplines of scientific inquiry was, as the project proved, forever closed. It is in those moments when our divided selves threaten to drag each other down, that a friend, as Nietzsche said, becomes the life-saver which keeps us afloat and together; no wonder that here we can experience a desperate dependency comparable to that of a child on his father.

Freud thus discovered another principle in his new work, namely, that psychological discovery is accompanied by some irrational involvement of the observer, and that it cannot be communicated to another without a certain irrational involvement of both. Such is the stuff of psychology; here it is not enough to put on an armor of superiority or aloofness in the hope that, like the physicist’s apron, it will protect vital organs against the radiation emanating from the observed. Here, only the observer’s improved insight into himself can right the instrument, protect the observer, and permit the communication of the observed.

In his transference to Fliess, Freud recognized one of the most important transferences of all: the transfer of an early father-image on later individuals and events. And here we can recognize the pervasiveness in these crises of the great father theme. We saw this theme in Freud’s determination not to play autocratic father to patients already crushed by autocracy; we recognized this theme as the core of his tendentious error in the genetic reconstruction of his patients’ childhood; and we observe it in his filial reactions to Fliess. A dream, he now reported to Fliess, had clearly revealed to him the fact and the explanation for the fact, that an irrational wish to blame the fathers for their children’s neuroses had dominated him.

Having established, then, both the actual and the fantastic aspects of a universal father-image, Freud now could break through to the first prehistoric Other of them all: the loving mother. He was free to discover the whole Oedipus complex, and to recognize it as a dominant theme in world literature and in mythologies around the world. Only then could he understand the full extent to which he, when sick and bewildered, had made a parent-figure out of Fliess, so that that mystic Other might help him analyze himself “as if he were a stranger.” He concluded that “self-analysis is really impossible, otherwise there would be no illness. . . . I can only analyze myself with objectively acquired knowledge.” This insight is the basis for what later became the training analysis, that is, the preventive and didactic psychoanalytic treatment of every prospective psychoanalyst.

The friendship, for other reasons too, had outlived itself. It ended when Freud, in a way, could least afford to lose it. It was after the appearance of “The Interpretation of Dreams.” Freud then, as later, considered this book his most fundamental contribution; he then also believed it to be his last. And, as he wrote, “not a leaf has stirred”: for months, for years, there were no book reviews, no sales to speak of. Where there was interest, it was mostly disbelief and calumniation. At this time, Freud seems temporarily to have despaired of his medical way of life. Fliess offered a meeting at Easter. But this time Freud refused. “It is more probable that I shall avoid you,” he writes. “I have conquered my depression, and now . . . it is slowly healing. . . . In your company . . . your fine and positive biological discoveries would rouse my innermost (impersonal) envy. . . . I should unburden my woes to you and come back dissatisfied . . . no one can help me in what depresses me, it is my cross, which I must bear. . . .” A few letters later, he refers to his patients’ tendency to prolong the treatment beyond the acquisition of the necessary insight. “Such prolongation is a compromise between illness and health which patients themselves desire, and…the physician must therefore not lend himself to it.” It is clear that he has now recognized such “prolongation and compromise” in his friendship as well, and that he will refuse to permit himself a further indulgence in the dependence on Fliess. But he will sorely miss him—“my one audience,” as he calls him.

In the course of this friendship a balance was righted: “feminine” intuition, “childlike” curiosity, and “artistic” freedom of style were recognized and restored as partners of the masculine “inner tyrant” in the process of psychological discovery. And Fliess? According to him the friendship was shipwrecked on the age-old rock of disputed priorities: Freud, he said, envied him. And, indeed, Freud had expressed envy that Fliess worked “with light, not darkness, with the sun and not the unconscious.” But it does not seem probable that Freud would have changed places.

These, then, were the dimensions of the crisis during which and through which psychoanalysis was born. But lest anyone form the faulty image of a lamentably torn and tormented man and physician, it must be reported that the Freud of those years was what today we would call an adjusted individual, and what then was a decent and an able one: a man who took conscientious care of all the patients who found their way to his door, who with devotion and joy raised a family of six children, who was widely read and well-groomed, traveled with curiosity, walked (or, as we would say, exercised) with abandon, loved good food and wine wisely, and his cigars unwisely. But he was not too adapted or too decent to approach a few things in life with decisive, with ruthless integrity. All of which in a way he could ill afford, for the times were bad for a medical specialist; it was the time of the first economic depression of the modern industrial era, it was a time of “poverty in plenty.” Nor did the self-analysis “reform” or chasten Freud. Some of the vital conflicts which pervaded the friendship with Fliess remained lifelong, as did some of the early methodological habits: in “Totem and Tabu,” Freud again reconstructed—this time on the stage of history—an “event” which, though an unlikely happening in past actuality, yet proved most significant as a timeless theme. But that early period of Freud’s work gave to the new science its unique direction, and with it gave its originator that peculiar unification of personal peculiarities which makes up a man’s identity, becomes the cornerstone of his kind of integrity, and poses his challenge to contemporaries and generations to come.

The unique direction of the new science consisted of the introduction into psychology of a system of coördinates which I can only summarize most briefly. His early energy concept provided the dynamic-economic coördinate. A topological coordinate emerged from the refinement of that early mind-robot; while the genetic coördinate was established on the basis of the reconstruction of childhood. This is psychoanalysis; any insight and only insight traceable in these coördinates is psychoanalytic insight. But these coördinates can be understood only through systematic study.

Since those early days of discovery, psychoanalysis has established deep and wide interrelationships with other methods of investigation, with methods of naturalist observation, of somatic examination, of psychological experiment, of anthropological field work, and of scholarly research. If, instead of enlarging on all these, I have focused on the early days, and on the uniqueness of the original Freudian experience, I have done so because I believe that an innovator’s achievement can be seen most dramatically in that moment when he, alone against historical adversity and inner doubts, and armed only with the means of persuasion, gives a new direction to human awareness—new in focus, new in method, and new in its inescapable morality.

The dimensions of Freud’s discovery, then, are contained in a triad which, in a variety of ways, remains basic to the practice of psychoanalysis, but also to its applications. It is the triad of a therapeutic contract, a conceptual design, and systematic self-analysis.

In psychoanalytic practice, this triad can never become routine. As new categories of suffering people prove amenable to psychoanalytic therapy, new techniques come to life, new aspects of the mind find clarification, and new therapeutic roles are created. Today, the student of psychoanalysis receives a training psychoanalysis which prepares him for the emotional hazards of his work. But he must live with the rest of mankind, in this era of “anxiety in plenty,” and neither his personal life nor the very progress of his work will spare him renewed conflicts, be his profession ever so recognized, ever so organized. Wide recognition and vast organization will not assure—they may even endanger—the basic triad, for which the psychoanalyst makes himself responsible, to wit: that as a clinician he accept his contract with the patient as the essence of his field of study and relinquish the security of seemingly more “objective” methods; that as a theorist he maintain a sense of obligation toward continuous conceptual redefinition and resist the lure of seemingly “deeper” philosophic short cuts; and finally, that as a humanist he put self-observant vigilance above the satisfaction of seeming professional omnipotence. The responsibility is great. For, in a sense, the psychoanalytic method must remain forever a “controversial” tool, a tool for the detection of that aspect of the total image of man which at a given time is being neglected or exploited, repressed or suppressed by the prevailing technology and ideology—including hasty “psychoanalytic” ideologies.

Freud’s triad remains equally relevant in the applications of psychoanalysis to the behavioral sciences, and to the humanities. An adult studying a child, an anthropologist studying a tribe, or a sociologist studying a riot sooner or later will be confronted with data of decisive importance for the welfare of those whom he is studying, while the strings of his own motivation will be touched, sometimes above and sometimes well below the threshold of awareness. He will not be able, for long, to escape the necessary conflict between his emotional participation in the observed events and the methodological rigor required to advance his field and human welfare. Thus, his studies will demand, in the long run, that he develop the ability to include in his observational field his human obligations, his methodological responsibilities, and his own motivations. In doing so, he will, in his own way, repeat that step in scientific conscience which Freud dared to make.

That shift, however, cannot remain confined to professional partnerships such as the observer’s to the observed, or the doctor’s with his patient. It implies a fundamentally new morality in the adult’s relationship to childhood: to the child within him, to his child before him, and to every man’s children around him.

But the fields dealing with man’s historical dimension are far apart in their appraisal of childhood. Academic minds whose long-range perspectives can ignore the everyday urgencies of the curative and educative arts, blithely go on writing whole world histories without any women and children in them, whole anthropologies without any reference to the varying styles of childhood. As they record what causal chain can be discerned in political and economic realities, they seem to shrug off as historical accidents due to “human nature” such fears and rages in leaders and masses as are clearly the residue of childish emotions now under study. True, these scholars may have been repelled by the first enthusiastic intrusion of doctors of the mind into their ancient disciplines. But their refusal to consider the historical relevance of human childhood can be due only to that deeper and more universal emotional aversion which Freud himself foresaw. On the other hand, it must be admitted that in clinical literature and in literature turned altogether clinical, aversion has given place to a faddish preoccupation with the more sordid aspects of childhood as the beginning and the end of human destiny.

Neither of these trends can hinder the emergence, in due time, of a new truth. The stream of world events, in all its historical lawfulness, is fed by the energies and thoughts of successive generations; and each generation brings to the existing historical trends its particular version of an inescapable conflict: the conflict with its individual “prehistories.” This conflict helps to drive man toward the astonishing things he does—and it can be his undoing. It is a condition of man’s humanity—and the prime cause of his bottomless inhumanity.

Freud not only revealed this conflict by dissecting the strains of its pathological manifestations. He also pointed to what is so largely and so regularly lost in the conflict: he spoke of “the child’s radiant intelligence”—the naïve zest, the natural courage, the unconditional faith of childhood which are submerged by fearful teachings and by limited and limiting information.

Now and again, we are moved to say that a genius preserved in himself the clear eye of the child. But do we not all too easily justify man’s ways and means by pointing to the occasional appearance of genius? Do we not know (and are we not morbidly eager to know) how tortured a genius can be by the very history of his ascendance, how often a genius is driven to destroy with one hand as he creates with the other?

In Freud, a genius turned a new instrument of observation back on his childhood, back on all childhood. He invented a specific method for the detection of that which universally spoils the genius of the child in every human being. In teaching us to recognize the daimonic evil in children, he urged us not to smother the creatively good. Since then, the nature of growth in childhood has been studied by ingenious observers over the world: never before has mankind known more about its own past—phylogenetic and ontogenetic. Thus, we may see Freud as a pioneer in a self-healing, balancing trend in human awareness. For now that technical invention readies itself really to conquer the moon, generations to come may well be in need of being more enlightened in their drivenness, and more conscious of the laws of individuality; they may well need to preserve more childlikeness in order to avoid utter cosmic childishness.

Freud, before he went into medicine, wanted to become a lawyer and politician, a lawmaker, a Gesetzgeber. When, in 1938, he was exiled from his country, he carried under his arm a manuscript on Moses, the supreme law-giver of the people whose unique fate and whose unique gifts he had accepted as his own. With grim pride he had chosen the role of one who opens perspectives on fertile fields to be cultivated by others. As we look back to the beginnings of his work, and forward to its implications, we may well venture to say: Freud the physician in finding a method of healing himself in the very practice of emotional cure has given a new, a psychological rationale for man’s laws. He has made the decisive step toward a true interpenetration of the psychological with the technological and the political in the human order.