摘要
Freud’s Work Before The Interpretation
The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung), a slimmer volume than the much-expanded version that has hitherto been available, was published in November 1899,though postdated by the publisher to 1900. Its muted but respectful reception by reviewers disappointed Freud’s hopes and let him to complain unjustly that it had been ignored. For Freud, it was and remained the central book of his prolific career. In 1932 he wrote, in the preface to the third English edition: ‘It contains, even according to my present-day judgement, the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. Insight such as this falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime’ (SE iv. P. xxiii).
When the book came out, however, Freud was more somber. Writing to his medical colleague, confidant, and fellow-Jew Wilhelm Fliess (1858-1928), he compared the effort of writing it to the struggle with the angel which left the biblical Jacob permanently lame: ‘When it appeared that my breath would fail in the wrestling match, I asked the angel to desist; and that is what he has done since then. But I did not turn out to be stronger, although since then I have been limping noticeably. Yes, I really am forty-four now, an old, somewhat shabby Jew. . .’ Behind the wry self-disparagement lies a desperate need for professional success, understandable in a member of the upwardly mobile Jewish middle class of the Fabsburg Empire. Freud’s parents, Jacob Freud, a wool-merchant, and Amalia Nathansohn, twenty years his junior, both came from Galicia (now the Western Ukraine, then the north-easternmost Habsburg province). They settled first in Freiburg(now Príbor) in Moravia, where their eldest child Sigmund, was born in 1856, then moved in 1859 to Leipzig and in 1860 to Vienna, Where Sigmund was to live until his escape from National Socialism in 1938.
Freud’s medical training at Vienna University was stamped by the scientific, positivistic spirit of the later nineteenth century. The Romantic approach to natural science, which sought to disclose a harmonious universal order and saw in it the expression of an indwelling world-soul, was now outdated. Freud’s own belief in the unity of nature was based on Darwin, whose Origins of Species(1859) explained how one living species changes into another and thus made human beings continuous with all other organisms. Freud tells us in his Autobiography(1925) that ‘the theories of Darwin, which were then of topical interest, strangely attracted me ,for they held out hopes of an extraordinary advance in our understanding of the world’( SE xx. 8). In his first year at university he chose to attend Carl Claus’s lectures on ‘General Biology and Darwinism’. However, his principal mentor was Ernst von Brücke, who was in turn a follower of the great physiologist and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, and, like him, was intent on explaining organisms entirely by physical and chemical forces. Occult forces like vital energy were to be excluded. Darwinian evolution, operating through conflict without any animating purpose, suited this hard-nosed approach. Freud adhered to the Helmholtz school’s tenets in his early neurological work. Beginning with publications on the nervous systems of fish, he moved on to the human system, exploring the an aesthetic properties of cocaine, speech disorders, and cerebral paralyses in children. He was thus a reputable neurologist before psychoanalysis was ever thought of, It is not surprising, therefore, that his first attempt at devising a psychological theory was thoroughly materialist,
This was the ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, which Freud wrote at great speed in September and October 1895 and never published. Its assumptions and method, however, are still visible in The Interpretation of Dreams and indeed underlie much of his later psychoanalytic thought , Briefly, Freud, like the Hehmholtz school, supposes that nervous or mental energy is analogous to physical energy. It works on particles, called neurons (posited by H. W. G. Walderyer in1891), which it fills like an electrical charge. This energy circulates within a closed system, occasionally inhibited by contact barriers. Within this system, wishes arise which seek satisfaction. Satisfaction takes the form of discharging energy. At the same time, the system is governed by a principle of constancy which seeks to keep the amount of energy constant. The system is in contact with the external world through the self or ego (Ich), imagined as an organization of neurons constantly charged with energy, and able to receive or inhibit stimuli from the outside world. When energy remains unconnected with the outside world, as in dreaming, it flows freely; when connected with the outside world via the ego, its flow is weakened and inhibited. This distinction between the free flowing energy of the primary process, where desire takes no account of reality, and the hesitant flow of the secondary process, where desire has to compromise with reality, will meet us again at the end of The interpretation of Dreams, and will reappear in Freud’s later writings as the contrast between the id and the ego; while the circulation of energy will also appear later as the movement of libido among objects of desire. And it is in the ‘Project’ that Freud first states that dreams ‘are wish-fulfilments—that is, primary processes following upon experiences of satisfaction’ (SE i. 340).
Also in 1895, Freud and his fellow-physician Joesef Breuer published a book, studies in Hysteria, which inaugurates the interactive thrapy soon to be known as psychoanalysis. Breuer had in 1880 met a young Viennese woman with a bizarre and varying range of symptoms: she could not drink water, she could speak only English, she had a squint, visual disturbances, partial paralyses. Under hypnosis she related the events that had initiated these afflictions: for example, she had been unable to drink water since seeing a dog drinking out of a glass. Freud applied Breuer’s ‘talking cure’ to other unfortunate women. A British governess, Miss Lucy R., suffered from a
depression made worse by a continental smell of burnt pudding Freud traced this olfactory illusion back to an occasion when, as she was cooking pudding with her charges, a letter arrived from her mother and was seized by the children; during this tussle the pudding got burnt. Not satisfied with his explanation, Freud probed further and elicited from miss R. the admission that she was in love with her employer and distressed by a scene in which he reprimanded her. Having got this off her chest, she regained her good cheer and her sense of smell. Their case studies led Breuer and Freud to maintain, in their preface to Studies in Hysteria, that ‘Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences’(SE ii. 7). Hysterical symptoms, apparently bizzare, did have a meaning they were displayed recollections of experiences too painful to remember consciously. Freud makes the further, tacit, assumption that those experiences are always sexual; and he did not scruple to confirm his assumption by asking Miss R. leading questions.
On this basis, Freud theorized that the buried memory tormenting hysterics was of sexual abuse in childhood, He attached huge importance to this theory, equating it with discovering the source of the Nile. Slowly, however, it crumbled, till on 21 September 1897 he confided to his friend Wilhelm Fliess that he no longer believed his own theory. It did not help him cure his patient; it implied that child abuse must be implausibly widespread; and it ignored his patient’s tendency to confuse reality with fantasy (especially, perhaps, when Freud was prompting them). Freud was not denying that child abuse often really occurred, though he may have underestimated its frequency. He was accepting—with a cheerfulness that puzzled him—a major defeat to his ambitions.
While gradually abandoning this theory, Freud was also reacting to his father’s death on 23 October 1896. Grief, overwork, and worry brought on what has plausibly been called a creative illness. It was a painful spell of inner isolation, following his intense preoccupation with his ideas, and resulting in the exhilarating conviction that he had discovered a great new truth. Freud worked through his illness by probing his own past. He recollected his sexual arousal in infancy by his nurse; he remembered seeing his mother naked during a training journey when he was two and a half; and he acknowledged hostility towards his father. ‘Being totally honest with oneself is a good exercise,’ he told Fliess on 15 October 1897. ‘A single idea of general value dawned on me.
