So today we continue our class, by going onto Sigmund Freud.
The, father of psychoanalysis, the, neurologist turned, therapist, turned
social commentator, who is writing, mostly in Vienna.
at the end of the 19th century, his great work The Interpretation of Dreams comes
out in 1900.
and the work we're reading for today, Civilization and its Discontents, after
World War I. Freud dies just on the eve of World War
II, and so his lifetime, he was born in 1856, spans a crucial period in the
transformation of European intellectual history and, European politics and
culture. he's working in Vienna, and Vienna is, a
hot house of cultural activities, at the end of the nineteenth century.
Fin-De-Diecle Vienna, as it's called, is a place where you have a concatenation
of, of, of different cultural forms that, in Western Europe, exist over a long
period of time.
They're smushed together in Vienna in the end of the 19th century.
So you have the romantics from the middle of the 19th century and the realists from
later on in the century.
You have the reaction against realism by the kind of populist right-wing people;
you have the communists and the anarchists.
All of these people are flocking to Vienna making it a, this, this cruciable
of cultural, intensity of, of, of, of a ferment, and, and it is a place of
enormous interest and a place, that cultural historians have had a wonderful
time trying to understand.
As a, as a symptom, really, of modernity, Vienna becomes a kind of emblem for, the
modern world.
And part of that is, that in Vienna in the turn of the century, from the 19th to
the 20 century In Vienna, you have, a turn away from politics at the surface
level, of the street level, of the public sphere, and a turn towards the
psychological, a turn towards "the depths," as, as, Sigmund Freud sometimes
talked about it.
the greatest historian of this period in, is Carl Schorske who was, my teacher I
should say both as an undergraduate and a, a graduate student.
Carl Schorske's book, Fin de Siecle Vienna Politics and Culture laid out a, a
paradigm for understanding, this turn away from the public, a turn away from
the historical and towards the psychological, towards the instinctual or
the elemental in music, in poetry, in politics and in psychoanalysis.
Today we're going to focus on Freud. and we're going to focus on Civilization
and It's Discontents, but Freud is one of those figures that most of you, or many
of you, will have heard a lot about.
Sigmund Freud is a kind of pop culture figure and not just a, a, a, person of
interest in history of science or intellectual history.
He's a, he's a figure that a, appears in movies and TV shows and, his influences
is, is felt not only in medicine and, and in debates around psychiatry but his
influence is felt across the cultural spectrum.
And a, a lot of the, the what I'll be talking to you about today, a lot of that
comes from an exhibition I curated at the Library Of Congress, in the 1990s and,
you can see lots of information about Freud and, examples of his, his notebooks
and his, his correspondence.
As well as some really fun and interesting film clips,[LAUGH] .
at a Library of Congress exhibition site, and, and, we'll put the link here for you
to see, so you can, you can, you can check out, some of Freud's key ideas as
they get translated into popular culture.
>> So, the first thing that comes into your head when I say the word Freud is, what?
>> [UNKNOWN] Sorry?
Mother.
>> Mother, sex.
We're done.
[LAUGH] Mother, sex, anything else?
Great, uninhibited here in the front row.
It's typical.
People in the back row has the most oppression, right?
So psychoanalysis, right, good tame thing.
So other things come to your mind?
>> Killing your father.
>> This is a healthy class.
[LAUGH] When I was a student at we did this exercise with a renowned professor,
Henry Abelove, and, he went on for, I don't know, 12 minutes, and he kept
saying there's another thing you should say.
And everybody was, you know, oh, I >> You know, sex, mother, mother, sex,
mother, sex, mother.
you know, all kinds of stuff.
And then he probably said the hardest thing for anyone to remember, according
to Freud, is the, the desire to kill your father.
What did I just do there?
>> Repressed.
>> Repressed, right?
I had an almost Freudian slip.
Instead of saying the desire to kill your father, I almost said I'm not going to
tell you[LAUGH], because I don't know.
It's repressed.
But so what are we doing now?
We're doing free association.
Free association.
Why is free association important for Freud?
This is kind of background, "Civilization and Its Discontents," in case you just
tuned in.
>> Why is free association important?
Try again.
>> It helps you overcome repression.
The idea is, the idea is that if I can get you to somehow loosen up, to say what
comes into your mind before your conscience kicks in, your superego, as
Freud sometimes calls it, right.
before the forces of impression kick in you might say something you don't expect
to say, and of course you won't do it in the beginning, according to Freud.
but eventually if you get into the habit, you, you, you'll loosen up, the
inhibitions so that the desires come out more clearly.
>> Freud was very interested in, the role of
sexuality in the formation of human consciousness.
he, he, he's focused on this early on in his career, because he felt that the
stories he kept hearing from his patients Invariably came back to questions of
desire, questions of desire and you know early in his career Freud didn't do what
I just did, close your eyes, tell me the first thing that pops into your mind.
What do we call that?
We call that free association right.
We call that free association, that is when the psycho analysis says okay what's
the first thing that comes into your mind.
And, you as you say something quickly before you have a chance to censor
yourself.
All right, that's what free association is suppose to be, before you have a
chance to censor yourself, you say what pops into your mind.
Now before Freud came to that idea of free association, he, he was a hypnotist.
Freud, was very interested in getting beyond the censorship, getting beyond the
conscious control of the, of the mind by hypnotizing patients to find out what
really was plaguing them.
And so he would do this same, you know, with the watch, back and forth, and back
and forth, and you're getting sleepy, you're getting sleepy, and, and, he
learned this technique from the great French neurologist, Jean, -Martin
Charcot, who was working in Paris at the end of the 19th century, and Freud went
to, study, with Charcot. he was already interested in hypnosis.
He went to study with Charcot, and he was very impressed by Charcot's ability to
take a person who seemed just completely contorted by pain and spasm and
unconscious or automatic, bodily movements and under hypnosis find out
how, what had happened to this person and, and give them some suggestions about
how to change.
Now Freud was not a good hypnotist and that's in some ways some of the reasons
why he, he moved away from this, this mode of getting past censorship, getting
past our, unwillingness to face what we really desire, as he comes to think of
it.
That is, Freud was working with a patient, he calls Emmy Fonen, we know her
now as Fanny Moser, she was a very wealthy woman.
who had plenty of physicians, and she could use the different physicians, and
Freud was, he was hypnotizing her and he was saying something like, you are
getting sleepy, and she would, she said nah, I'm not getting sleepy, she's like,
you're not, and she, you know, I think you're not a very good doctor, or you
know, you're not helping me.
And Freud was frustrated, he, he needed this patient actually, he needed the
money, he was not a rich man, he Ebin engaged, engaged for long, long time
because he couldn't put together the money e thought necessary to start an
independent household.
He is frustrated with his inability to really get this patient, to to fall into
the hypnotic trance so she would be able to both talk about.
who she was and what she remembered and also received suggestions from the
doctor.
He was frustrated about tha,t and then at some point, Emmy Fonen Fanny Moser, her
real name, says to Freud, listen, okay you can hypnotize me, you can hypnotize
me, but first before you hypnotize me let me tell you my story.
This is a big moment for Freud, because she says, "Let me tell you my story."
And then, Freud says, "I fell in with her
stories."
This is when Freud becomes a Freudian, if I can put it that way.
Freud becomes a Freudian when he says, "I don't hypnotize so I can tell people what
to do."
To give them a suggestion, like a medication we would give today.
Freud says, I fell in with her stories because I needed to understand what she
had to say and to interpret what she had to say.
To help her interpret the meaning of what she was telling me.
This is the beginning of modern, what we call today, the psycho-dynamic therapy.
It's the beginning of Freudianism; it's the beginning of psychoanalysis.
And so, in the 1890s, Freud is doing this, and all the stories he listens to,
all the stories he listens to come back to questions of desire.
He says questions of sex, but he knows that people don't want to hear that word
sex, and so he likes to say it.
He thinks that he's making people confront their hypocritical moralities,
so it always comes back to questions of sex, and what was really offensive in
what he had to say is that Freud insisted it comes back to questions of sex in the
family, in the family.
And so he finds that children, as they are remembered as adults, that our
childhood memories, our childhood memories are memories of of, sexuality or
sex gone awry.
And for a long time, in the 1890s,he actually believes that a parents,are most
of the time, sexually abusing their children and that the, the, the,
neurotics or the sick people that he see's are people who's, who have been
abused by their parents and, that abuse has resulted in a, in psychopathology, in
some kind of mental illness.
By the end of the 1890s Freud changes his mind about this.
Instead of thinking these people have been abused, he starts to think, in fact,
what people are remembering is their desire.
That they can't act on.