Reviews by Hubie Goode: Still Living With Freud?

After all our advances in science and medicine, Are We Still Living With Freud? Pt. 2

Born in 1856 into a most interesting family, he was the eldest son of his Father’s second wife. He had two step brothers that where as old as his own mother, Amile Nathanson. His father was Jacob Freud. Sigmund had several younger brothers and sisters but also had these 20 something brothers, and later in life he was to consider that his network of family members was responsible for the shaping of his own personality. He admitted that he had a lasting feeling of guilt over the death of a younger brother, since he no longer had to compete for his mother’s love and attention.

For Freud, the slightest remembrancers from a person’s yesteryear were not something to merely mull over casually and then dismiss as the construct of immature perspective mixed with inexperience. Freud believed that his own memories had far more import in the who, why, what and where of his own person than most anyone would bother with today. "Kids will be kids" was not a part of his paradigm. For Freud, memories had a paramount place in his development as an adult, and he believed this to be a universal construct.

When he was quite young, he and his family moved around several times for both economic and anti-Semitic reasons. It was this moving around that led him to believe in later life that his fear of travelling and trains was the result of those experiences. While he was in school he notes, he was considered a top athlete in his physical education classes and was not challenged to pass many examinations for promotion. His own father guided him in the choice of career in telling him to follow his own inclinations, and Freud notes that when in school he had NO inclinations for becoming a physician.

His own biographers note that his school years developed a kind of self confidence that was a major characteristic of his life throughout his remaining years. This explains in part his relative disinterest in conforming, or fitting in and also his reputation for being an oddball. And according to those who have written about his younger years, he was indeed an oddball.

Though part of a Jewish family, he never fully adopted the Jewish religion. He knew that the Jews of his day felt a sense of pride over his affiliation, despite the fact that he never really pronounced or denied his Jewish roots. Regardless, his positions in later life never did include a God who deals with man on a personal basis.

His interest in the naturalistic side of science developed in his later education where he preferred experiments and research in the lab. He received his degree in medicine in 1881 at the age of 25. He took three years longer than most to complete his studies due to all the sideline interests he had.

In 1885 he went to Paris to study with Dr. J. M. Charcot, where he spent the better part of the year in medical practice. A short time later he returned home and opened a medical practice in psychiatry. Although he was immanently more interested in the theory and experimentation than in the actual practice of medicine, he realized that he had to pay the bills with something. This resulted in a medical-psychiatry practice mix.

An early interest in the practice of neurology led Freud to become enamored with the use of cocaine. He believed that one day it would overtake morphium in usefulness. He was convinced of it’s potency and harmlessness and promoted its use in cases involving indigestion and depression, and developed an idea that it could also help in the field of psychotherapy. Unfortunately, there was soon a wave of cocaine addiction in Vienna and he found himself being publicly fingered as an enabler.

This first encounter with controversy painted a picture of what was to come from the house of Freud. Throughout his life he would pursue his own ideas as to what was true even to the cost of his own place among classical medicine, as he was soon ostracized and considered persona non gratat among his contemporaries and civilized society as well. Many who write about him contend that he maintained his position on his own theories with an astonishing stubbornness that belied the obvious truth.

Freud’s achievement was that he turned the realm of the religious gurus, the sideshow hypnotist and the crystal ball reader, the inner unknown, into something resembling a measurable science. (Always keep in mind that science is observable, or it’s not science) The terms science and medicine lending a kind of cache of truth that until that time had remained a fringe concern. He assumed to provide the answers between character and the hidden impulses inside of mankind. He spoke of all impulses being of sexual origins and deciphered dreams, like an Old Testament prophet. He believed that one could find in the stock of mankind’s symbols and legends down through history a kind of collectivity that could not only condense a person’s being but also explain his great unknown.

Working alone at first and then surrounded by disciples at a later time, he stood firm in his theories despite the immense growing crowd of those who rebuffed him from almost every corner of professional and private society. He groped around in his own darkness for several years, trying to find some path to follow, being neither respected or included for his work. He passed from several types of medicine, mastering them and then moving on when they were inadequate to prove his own theories. He went from physiology to neuropathology and then psychopathology with dogged determination to make his own theories somehow coalesce into reality. Eventually, he became the thing for which he was attempting to find verification. He gave birth to psychoanalysis all by himself, and a new so called science was born. Not of proof, but of unwavering determination in a field best left to carnival barkers.

more to come in part 3