Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties Read Free

to regard those who diverged from him as themselves unstable and in need of treatment. Thus Ellis’s disparagement of his scientific status was dismissed as ‘a highly sublimated form of resistance’. 15 ‘My inclination’, he wrote to Jung just before their break, ‘is to treat those colleagues who offer resistance exactly as we treat patients in the same situation’. 16 Two decades later, the notion of regarding dissent as a form of mental sickness, suitable for compulsory hospitalization, was to blossom in the Soviet Union into a new form of political repression.
    But if Freud’s work had little true scientific content, it had literaryand imaginative qualities of a high order. His style in German was magnetic and won him the nation’s highest literary award, the Goethe Prize of the City of Frankfurt. He translated well. The anglicization of the existing Freudian texts became an industry in the Twenties. But the new literary output expanded too, as Freud allowed his ideas to embrace an ever-widening field of human activity and experience. Freud was a gnostic. He believed in the existence of a hidden structure of knowledge which, by using the techniques he was devising, could be discerned beneath the surface of things. The dream was his starting-point. It was not, he wrote, ‘differently constructed from the neurotic symptom. Like the latter, it may seem strange and senseless, but when it is examined by means of a technique which differs slightly from the free association method used in psychoanalysis, one gets from its manifest content to its hidden meaning , or to its latent thoughts.’ 17
    Gnosticism has always appealed to intellectuals. Freud offered a particularly succulent variety. He had a brilliant gift for classical allusion and imagery at a time when all educated people prided themselves on their knowledge of Greek and Latin. He was quick to seize on the importance attached to myth by the new generation of social anthropologists such as Sir James Frazer, whose The Golden Bough began to appear in 1890. The meaning of dreams, the function of myth – into this potent brew Freud stirred an all-pervading potion of sex, which he found at the root of almost all forms of human behaviour. The war had loosened tongues over sex; the immediate post-war period saw the habit of sexual discussion carried into print. Freud’s time had come. He had, in addition to his literary gifts, some of the skills of a sensational journalist. He was an adept neologian. He could mint a striking slogan. Almost as often as his younger contemporary Rudyard Kipling, he added words and phrases to the language: ‘the unconscious’, ‘infantile sexuality’, the Oedipus complex’, ‘inferiority complex’, ‘guilt complex’, the ego, the id and the super-ego, ‘sublimation’, ‘depth-psychology’. Some of his salient ideas, such as the sexual interpretation of dreams or what became known as the ‘Freudian slip’, had the appeal of new intellectual parlour-games. Freud knew the value of topicality. In 1920, in the aftermath of the suicide of Europe, he published Beyond the Pleasure Principle , which introduced the idea of the ‘death instinct’, soon vulgarized into the ‘death-wish’. For much of the Twenties, which saw a further abrupt decline in religious belief, especially among the educated, Freud was preoccupied with anatomizing religion, which he saw as a purely human construct. In The Future of an Illusion (1927) he dealt with man’s unconscious attempts to mitigate unhappiness. ‘The attempt to procure’, he wrote, ‘a protectionagainst suffering through a delusional remoulding of reality is made by a considerable number of people in common. The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.’ 18
    This seemed the voice of the new age. Not for the first time, a prophet in his fifties, long in the wilderness,