SECRETA OF

THESOUL
ALSO BY ELI ZARETSKY

A Soca'.:il
and Ct4lturalHÍstory
Capitalism,theFamily,andPersonalLide
oJPsycboana lys fs
Editor ofWilliam 1. Thomas and Flori&n Znaniecki,
Fbe Polisb Peasant in Europe andAmerica

ELI ZARETSKY

DEDALUS - Acervo - FFLCH

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FIRST 'nNTAGE BOOKS EDIT10N, AÜGUST 2005

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The Libras of Congresshascatalogcdthe Knopf cdidon asbllows:

Zarelsky,Eli.
Secrctsof the soul : a socialand cultura history of psychoanalysis/ Eli Zaretsky.--lst ed.
crn

2.:Psychoailalysís--o
1. Psychoanalysis--Hcludcs bi21i.lgraphical refercnccsand nda Histary. 1. Tido.
BF173.2372004
150.19'5'09--dc22
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Prlnted in the United StatusofAmerica

i0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
Far removed from the immediate rationality ofpolit-
ical discourse, the . family appears to constitute the

other pote of our societiés, their darker lide, an enig-

matic figure to which oraclesare drawn in arder to
peer unto the depths where it moves and read the
inHections ofour collective unconscious, the encoded

messageof our civilization.

--Jacques Donzelot
 Cotltents

Lht ofILLustrt[tiom::' ]À

,4rénaw&é©menü., xiii

/n ad#rriam.-The Ambiguous LegacyofPsychoanaJysis 3

Pari One
CHARISMATIC ORIGENS: THE CRUMBLING
OF THE VICE'ORIAN FAMILY SYSTEM

CBaP/er O/ze.. The Persona] Unconscious i5

CBaPrer7üa. Gender, Sexuality, and Personal Lide 4i
C%aPirrZ%rre.'Absarption and Marginality 64
C%aPipp'
Xa#r.. The Birth ofthe Ego gi

Pari Tmo
FORDISM) FREUDIANISM} AND THE THREEFOLD
P ROMISE OF MODERNITY

CBapí?r/?z,e.-The Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution n7

CBaP/rrS&.- Fordism, Freudianism, and Modernity i38
CBapiPrSez,fn.Autonomy and Resistance i63
C»aPí?rZlkóf.- The Turn Toward the Mocher i93
C%apí?r
AÇ e.. Fascismand the Destruçtion ofClassical
European Analysis zi7
 ConteKn
X

Pari 'rbree
FROM THE PSYCHOLOGY OF AUTHORITY lllustratjoms
TO THE POLITICS OFIDENTITY

CÉapfef Ze/z.. The Mother InEant Relationship

and the Postwar Welfare Skate z49
CBaPfa'E7ez/en..Charisma or Rationaltzauon?
z76
U.S. Psychoanalysisin the Epoch of the Com Wn
Cbapfer 7 e/z/e.-The ig6osl Post-Fordism, 2,5 mean-MartinCharçot.(Nacional Libras ofMediçine, 'a?ashingtonD.C.)
and Ehe Culture ofNarcissism 3o7 z7 Sigmund Freud'sbirthptace in rural Moravia.(Sigmund Freud
Copyright/Mary Evans Piçture Library)
Ep//ag e.. Psychoanalysisin Our Time
SigmundFreud'i i885visiting card.(Prints and PhotographsDivision,
Library ofCongress, Wa$hington, D.C.)
33 Emma Eckstein, i8gS.(Prints and PhocographsDivision, Library of
/Vofef 345 Congress, Washington, D.G.)
34 Freud's early atrempt ta canceptualizc the unconscious.(By permission
ZnzZm 4i5
ofA. WI Freud et al./ Paterson Marsh Ltd.,,: London)
43
Erma Goldman, igioi:;(Raro Book and SpeçialCollections, Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C.)
45 Edward Carpenter,c. xgio.(Prints and PhorographsDivision, Library
of Congress;: Wnhington, D.C.)
7z Carl GustavJung, c. leio(Prints and PhotographsDivision, Libruy of
Congress, Washington, D.C.)
95 AHred Adler, c. zgn.(By permission ofA. WI Freud et al./ Paterson
Marsh Ltd., Londan)
io6 The ]H2/zpzerówm2, or: "Committee," in igzz. ;(By permission ofA. 'WI
Fréud et al./ Paterson Marsh Ltd., London)
110
Lou Andreas-Salomé,ç. igi4.(Sigmund Freud CopWights/Mary Evans
Piçture Library)
n3 Freud's study.(© Edmund Engelman)
ll8 Trençh waifme during the Great War.(Still Pictures Brançh, National
Archives and Record Administrador, College Pmk, Md.)
122 Shel! shoçk and its tréacment.(Wellcome Library, Londan)
zz9 Sándor Ferenai and Sigmund Freud, igi8.(Sigmund Freud
Copyrights/Mary Evans Piçture Library)
i39 Fordism and the assemblylhe, ç. i94o(Prints and Phorographs
Division, Library ofCongress,,Washingtonj D.C.)
l46 Sti!!süom S mfÊ]afróf Saw/(igz6).(Rights: Friedrich-Wiihelm-
Murnau-Stiftung. Distributor: Transit Film GmbH)
l6o
Max Ernst, Z%rRabi'ngafrge Balde(!939).(© zoomArtisrs Rights Sociely
IARS] Neu' York/ADAGlt Paria. Phoca çredit: Cameraphoco Arte.
Venice/ Art Resource, NevarYork)
 lilw#adons
xll
The grave ofAntonio Gramsci.(Courtesy of the Internadonal Gramsci

l67 Sociey) oral theory, laken fiom his Mru' /npad#r/aT Lf llrfr.(By
pcrmission ofA. W Freud et al,/ PatersonMarsh Ltd» London) ,..
t78 Lettcr from Sigmund Freud to the mother ofa homoscxual, t93ó..\ l ne
Klnscy Insütute for Rcsearçhin Sa, Gendcr, and Rcproduçtion, Inc.J
.AcknowZedgments
t9o AJapaneseuanslationofFreud printed ater a letter written by Frcudta
Kenji Otsuki.(lwasaki ShotenPublishing Co« Tokyo)
200 Edita Jaçkson, Melanie Kleln, and ABRAFreud, ç. i935'(Wcllcome
Libré, London)
lÇarenHorney, i9SZ.(© Bertmann/CORAIS)
2,z8 Group photo ofthe most importancmembersof thc Gõring hstitute,
(Reprintcdfiam HeraEt#?CãesOn jn 4 golf Pzm/jar %y.
Copyright © for the English edidon by Kellnn Verlag, Hamburg. AE
The origins of this book lie in the great trans6ormatiansof our
societythat beganin the late ig6os. Among my generation--
z33
='==H:=RH n:
Frcud, i938.(Prinrs and Phatographs Divisian, Library ofCongress,
'''*'
l wasbom in i94c>--Freud had a grip on the imagination com-
parable to that exerted by the figures about whom he wrote:
Leonardo, Goethe, Dostoyevsky. During the ig6os, my involve-
Wuhington,D.C )
Melanic Klein, igoz.(Wellcome Library,Londan)
ment in the New Left and my encounterwith the women'slib-
eration:movement; first !ed me to :think abouc the relation of
2,66 SheHicld. EngJand, i94i.(Sul! Piçrures Brançh, Nacional Arçhives and
Record AdministraÚon. College Pack, Md.) capitalism to the Eamily; in the course ofwriting (=2p/íuZ;lsm,f#f
z67 Londonersslnping in a tubosution during theBlitz, l94o'(Prinn md num/# a/zd /;k'rxana/E/@?.l realized that- it was impossible to
PhotographsDivision, Ubraty of Congress,Washingtan,l).(--)' pursue this subjeçt at any depth without studying Freud. When
z87 I'sychoanalysis pcrvadcs mass çulture, i955(© William M. Caíres, . the New .Left disintegrated, l turned yet again to psychoanalf-
Agent. Inc. ® EC Comlcs logo is a registeredtrademark belonglng to
sis, teaching in clinical training programa. As a historian and as
WilliamM. Games,
Agent)
Psychoanalysis, women, and mass consumption, i95}
a political person, l not only learned from psychoanalysisbut
(Tletgens/.B/a2emoÍJr/& © Conde Nast Publicaüons Inc) wrestled with and against it. This book sums up a protraçted,
3o3 Frcud encerathe çounterculture through Tom L=hrer's folk musiç i96i confiict-ridden but immensely productive encounter, oné; in
(Thk álbum maybe obtained through Vlckers Musiq 7i35 Hollywaod which l accumulated more debts than l could possibly detail
Blvd. Suite io9, Hallywoad, Calif., 9o046.Musiç by Leoa Pober below.
IASCAP], lyriçs by Bud Freernan IASCAP] )
The massimportant of theseis to Nancy Fraser.Although l
3o6 Donald Reilly cartoon.((9 zo03Donald Reilly Gom cartoonbank.cam.
Allrightsreserx-ed.) sp'::-,:. «: -'' had been thinking about the problem of psychoanalysislince
3l9 Herbcrt Marçusclecturing to studentsat Üe FreeUniversity afBerliti, ehesixties, it was only after meeting her that the project took
i968. (AP/Wide World Photos) chape.In the courseofwriting this book, she oãered unstinting
Jaçques
Lacan
inEhe
ig6os.(©
Colleçtion
Corais
Ripa):' :! í'' . moral support, editorial advice, and intellectual guidance, Some-
Womcn'slibcration, l97o-(Prints and PhotographsDivisian, Library of
times neglecting her own work. Among other contributions, she
Cangrus) ' ' i:' coined the formulation "threeíold promise ofmodernity," one of
WiUlam Stcig cartoon.(O The New Yorker (;ollntion i995' Wllliam
rhe many:times she brought clarity to what had beenmerely
336
338 IRH l:Gll :i:ul;=''
Das Deutsche Naçhrichten-Magazin)
intuition.
Many ofthose who read the manuscript arealgodose friends
or family members.These include Richard Bernstein, Alexander
343 Z'mf magazine mover,i993.(Mare hiahurin/Time L3fe Piçtures/Getty
Etkind, Martin Fleischer, Jim Gilbert, : Leonard Helfgott, John
Imagem)
xlv Açknowk{ gnents
Judis, Doreen Rappaport, Jonathan Wiesen, and Natasha Zaret-
sky (who algo edited one fulo draR). My agente,Charlotte Sheedy,
==,.lli;: l:.. .-:h ;i«m fo. .h' p''i":' My «P«i"". "i.h
Knopfbelies the cliché that today's publishers are interesced only
in proíits«Victoria Wilson, my editor, patiently and incisively
readand rereadtais book'smany drafts. Lexy Bloom, my paper-
back editor, made it possiblefor me to make chances in the
paperbackversion, including a changed chapter title.
No book of tais scope can be based upon archival sources
clone l tope my debts to the many great scholars.who preceded
me in the history of psychoanalysisare sufhciendy indicated in
my notes. l am not fure, however, that my equally great debts to
my "'fellow
"'' '"
cultural histori is, social historians,
Açknowleãgmen xv
the Hiscory and Understanding of Medicina in London, the
Columbia University Oral History Collection, the Freud Col-
lection at the Library of Congress,the New York Public Library,
Bobst Library at New York University, the archivesand libraries
of the PsychoanalyticSocieties ofNew York, Chicago, San Fran-
cisco, London, Berlin, Frankfurt, and Buenos Abres, the Freud
Museums in London and Vienna, and rhe Wright Inscitute in
Berkeley, Cali6ornia.
Finally, as one who is of an analytic [urn ofmind, l want to
thank my parents, David Zaretsky and Pauline Silverman Zaret-
sky,undoubtedly the strongestinfluenceson my thought. They
would cavebeenproud of this book, but then, theywere proud
of me without it. l algo receivedmuch support from my broth-
and historians of

women and Faceare as maniÍest. Tais book owes a great deal .[o ers,Allen and Aaron Zaretsky, and their eamilies.And while l
the revolutionin historicalthinking that hasoccurredoverthe cannot yet thank my grandson, Daniel Zaretsky Wiesen, he cer-
courseofmylifetime.; ,:i. .; . - - . tainly brightened the book's completion.
In the courseof writing it, l made new friends and renewed
older relationships.
StuartHall first directedme to Antonio
GramsCi's observations on psychoanalysis. Paul .Roazen and
Robert Wãllerstein saved me Eram many errors, while bearing no

==lql#':::.i=
=.:1=:B á.='€1
=1;
chek, Loura Kipnis, RebeccaPlant, and Lynne Segalhelped with
individual chapters. Everywhere l traveled, l interviewed psy-

::='a=::.==.!'=
==:'H''.=='='==;
Mlarcello Virar in Montevideo; and Carlos Aslan, José Fischbein:
and Susana Fischbein in Buenos Abres. Carmen llizarbe and
Hanako Koyama provided excellent researchassistance.Athena
Angelos tracked down pictures. My father-in-law Ed Shãpiro,
provided moral support, but in the end l dçcided not to use his
suggested title: /}nPúff '
Over the years, l received researchgupport from the New-
berry Library in Chicago, the Ameriçan Council of Learned

=Ú=#.Fn:t=i:='Ü=urU.l=:!=Tl:;
received a blessed year off, and much inspiration). l benefited
from the hospitality and excellentresearchfacilities of the Insti-
tut für die Wissenschaftenvom Menschenin Vienna, the Insti-
tut Mr Sozial$orschung in Frankfurt, the Wellcome Library for
SECRETAOF THE SOUL
 /

IHtroductiott

THE AMBIGUOUS LEGACY

OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

Fteud always stres$es what gréat forcesÍareJ: ;in the mind, what
strong prejudicas bork against the idem of psycho-analysis. But hc
Deversayswhat an enormous charm thac idea has 6orpeople. Juscas
ít haseorFreud hihselíi

--Ludwig Wittgenstein

0 ne century after i+s founding, psychoanalysis presents us üith a para-

dox. Almost inst4ntly recognized as a great force âor human emanci-
pation, it played a central role in the modernism of the igzos, the English
and American welfue stbtes of the i94os and 5os, the radical upheavalsof
the i96os, and the eeminist and gay-liberation movements ofthe i97os. Yet
it simultaneous]y becamea fount of antipo]itica], anti6eminist, and homo-
phobic prejudice, a deghded proíession, a "pseudoscience"whose survival
is how verá much in dqubt. This book is an exploratian of tais paradox;
it aims to identi& andaafErm the emancipatory dimension of analytic
thoughtwithout denyingthe validity of the crieicismsor Eheneed-to
rethink its legacy.
The explanation oüered here is social and historical. Psychoanalysisper-
rnanentlytransformedthe ways in which ordinary men and womeh
throughout the world understand themselvesand one another.Yet in spite
of uncounted studies, nflt to mention special pleadings and tendentious at-
tacks, we have still not 4istoricized psychoanalysis; we apparently still lack
the large social, culturali and intelleccual fume necessary [o understand a
phenomenonse central to our am/zself-constitution. In arder to situate
 SECRETA OF THB S-OUL TbeAmbiguomLegal) ofPsJcboattal)sis S
Today, in contrast, it has become possible to see psychoanalysis whole,
acknowledgingboth its repressiveand its liberatory aspectoThe key is to
seeit asthe .#rsfgxpafíÁfor7 amZ.pxncf/rfaf >'riso/za//e#?.
"By personal lide, l
mean the experiente of having an identitydisdnct from one's peacein the
Éamily, in society, and in the social division oflabor. In one senso,the possi-
bi[ity ofhaving a persona] bife is a universal aspectofbeing human, but tear
is not the sensel cave in mind. Rather, l mean a historically specific experi-
ence of singularity and interiority, one that was sociologically grounded in
modem processesof industrialization and urbanization, and in the history
of the Eamily.
Prwiously, the eamily was the primary locus of produçtion and repro-
duction.' As a result, the individual's sente of identity wâs rooted in his or
her peacein the family. In the nineteenth century, however, the separadon
(both physical and emocional) óf paid work from the household,.which is
to saythe piseof industrial capitalism,gaveride to óew forma of privaW-
domesticiW, and intimacy. At first these wcre experiencedas the eamilial
counterparts to the impersonal world of the market. Later they became
associated with the possibility and goal of' a personal lide distinct from and
even outside of the eamily. Tais goal 6ound social expressionin suco phe-
nomena as the "new"r((or independent) woman, the emergence of public
homosexual identities, and the turning ofyoung people away from a preoc-
cupation with businessand toward sexual experimentation, bohemia, and
artistic modernism. In the period that initiated what historians have called
the "second industrial revolution," roughly from the i88os [o the lgzos,
new urban spacesand media--populu theater, music halls, the kineto-
scope rovided referencepoints from which individuais could imagina-
tively construct extrafamilial identities.qAs a result, personal identíty
becamea problem and a project for individuais, as opposed to something
given to them by their peacein the Éamily or the economy. Psychoanalysis
wàsa theory and practice of this new aspiration for a personal li6c. Its origi-
nal historical geloswas 2P$aml#&lmffo/z,the freeing of individuais from
unconsciousimagesof authority originally rooted in the eamily.
The founding idea of psychoanalysis,the idea of a dynamic or prrsonlz/
#/zramr/am,reflected this new experiencc ofpersonal lide.According to that
idea,stimuli that Gameto the individual from üe societyor culturewerç
not directly registeredbut were first dissolved and internally reconstituted
in such a way as to gire them personal, even idiosyncratic, meanings. Thus,
there was no direct or necessary connection between onc's social condition
and one's subjectiviW. Equally imporcant, Freud's idem of the unconscious
classesand to women.
 TbeAmbigmm LegacyofPs)cboan sis 7
': S'E
CRETS
, 0 F'THE.,$0'UL
project ás a persona]and provisional hermeneutic ofself-discovery, one that
a psychoanalyst could Eacilitate but not contrai. In this way, he cave expres-
sion to possibilities of individuality, authenticity, and freedom that had
only recently emerged, and opened üe way to a new understanding of
sociallife.
The result was two-sided. As Schorske argued, psychoanalysiscould,
indeed, undermine the emancipatory promise ofthe Enlightenment insoEm
as it served to mystify the bases6or personal lide, and thus to obscure che
politicas, economic, and cultural preconditions necessary6or its flourish-
ing. But that tendency was contingent, not' necessary.More important, the
Enlightenment was not a high point to be emulated but an incomplete
project to be developed.The status ofAthena evoked by Schorskesymbol-
ized the "Copernican revolution" of eighteenth-century modernity, which
put a new principie of subjective freedom at the center of all modem pur-
suits such as art, morality, politicsj and even science (which liberated the
human subject at the some time as it objectiâed natura).'But. the larger
implications of that principie remained to be unGoldedin a "secondmoder-
nity." -Contrary to Schorske'snarrative of decline, the fin de siàcleera inau-
gurated that second modernity, which was associatedwith massproduction,
mass democracy, and the rise of women, homosexuals, and racial and
nationalnminorities. While the firso}modernity--the Enlightenment--
viewed the individual as úe locos of:reason in the penseof universal and
necessarytruths, the second--call it "modernism"--viewed the individual
as a concreteperson, located in a particular time and placesubject to histor-
ical contingency and possessinga unique psychical bife.Whereasphilosophy
wasthe hallmarkof the first moderniy, psychoanalysis,
alongwith mod-
ernist art ahd literatura, was the hallmark of the second.
Seenchiaway, the classical liberalism that Schorske extolled was based
on three historically limited ideas. First, mid-nineteenth-centuryliberais
equatedautonomy with self-control. Second, despite feminist subcurrents,
most believed that women's character and psychology diKered fundamen-
tally from men's. Third, . liberais believed that even modem, democratic
societyrequirednatural or social hierarchy"to function. All three of these
beliefswere challenged in the fin de siêcleera. The emphasison self-control
was challenged by ideologies of "release" and "relaxation" that developed
alongwith massconsumption. The belief in en bloc gender difFerencewas
challengedby the entry of women indo public lide and by a new openness
concerning sexualiW.Hierarchy was challenged by mass democraWI trade
unionism, and socialism.' These developments deepened and radicalized the
ideais of the Enlightenment; theywere not merely negations of it. As the

.]
o SECRETAOF THE SOUL Thc Ambiglous Legal) ofPs)cboanal)sis g
society(i8go-lgl4) when psychoanalysis
wasa sect and expressed
in an

H:::n,snxHH::: intensely charismatic âorm the then-new asÉ)irationsíor personal lide; part
two coversthe period between the world wars(tgig-i939) when it supplied
a kind of utopian ideology accompanying the rideof the large corporation;
pare three covers rhe period after World War ll (i945i976), when analysis
was integrated into the Keynesian welEarestatusbecoming, in beber's
phrme, a "this-worldly program ofethicai rationalization."
Just as men and women did not embark on the transition from agrari-
anism to industrial capitalism for merely instrumental or economia reasons,
se in the twentieth century they did not become consumersin ordemto sup-
ply markets. Rather, they separatedfrom traditional Eamilial morality, game
up their obsessionwith self-control and thrift, and entered inca the sexual.
ized "dreamworlds" ofmass consumption on behalfofa new orientation to
personal lide,'Psychoanalysiswas the Calvinism of this shift. Just as Jesus
gathered the early Christians and Cromwell gathered thel Protescant
'Saints," Freud brought his íollowers together . unto a charismatic seca.
RaEherthan sanctify the family, however, Freud urged chem to leavebehind
their "Eamiliesl'---thearchaic imagemof early childhood--not to preach but
to develop mare genuine, that is, more personal, relations. Over .time,
Freud's disciples went through the familiar Weberian cycle of idealization,
rebellion,udissemination, institutionalization, and routinizacion. Ulti-
mately, analytic charisma was adapted to a conÉormist culture, and to the
mother-centeredideologias of the Keynesianwelfare skate.But in its heyday
men and wamen used it to complicate, deepen, and radicaliza the three
emancipatorypromisesofmodernity.
Somedrew on psychoanalysis,.first, to help recâstthe promise ofauton-
omy. Originally, autonomy meant the freedom to decide the diKerence
between right and wrong âor oneselÊ instead offollowing a path ordained
by birth, custam, or class.Although prefigured in the great philosophical
and religious tradidons of every civilization, the project of autonomy was
6rst articulated in a universalizable way during the Europeanand American
Enlightenment, u Schorske rightly suggested. But the changes associated
with the second industrial revalution expanded its meaning.nNo 1onger
restrictedto the sphere of moralitB .ê11Eg!!gnly
now applied as well to such
extramoral experiences as creativity, lave, and- happiness. Psychoanalysis
was associated with this new, modernist idem ófpeESQwêl osed to
coral--autonomy. In their efForts to grasp why suco autonomy was se dif-
ficult to achieve, analysts devised such concepts as ambivalence, resistance,
and the deGenses.Yet, they also fostered,the misleading idea that autonomy
wassimply a self-relation and not a socially grounded possibiliy
,. S IC KBT'B:. O P!?THE S O UL TbeAmbigüousLegal afPs)cboanal)sis w
patriarçhal arder. Sometimes in uneasy alliance, sometimes in confiict with
aesthetic modernism, surrealism, women's emancipation, and socialism, it
acceleratedthe demite of already frayed Victorian ideologias of character,
fender, and sex. In the conservative democraciesof postwar England and
the United States,in contrast, analysisplayed a quite diüerent role, con-
tributing to the medicalization of psychotherapy and the psychologization
of authority. In the first case,it was a force for democratization; in the sec-
ond, an agent of social control.
In general, then, the second industrial revolution spawned new experi-
entes of personal bife that complicared and radicalized the emanciparory
promises of modernity. But it also encouraged psychologization, an empty
consumerism,and refamiliaJization. Psychoanalysis,as the Calvinism of the
secondindustrial revolution, was at the heart of this ambivalente. On the
one hand, it freed individuais [o lave more refiective, hller lives, enriched
the ans, humanities, and sciences,and deepenedan understanding of the
trust and solidarity on which political progress dependa. On the other hand,
it wasabsorbed,transfigured,and ultimately consumedby the sociology
and culture ofpersonal lide to which it originally gavecriticamexpression.
Tais book recounts that ambivalent trajectory.Situating the history of
psychoanalysisin the context of the second industrial revolution, it covers
what may be called ehegolden ageofpsychoanalysis,its classicalepoch, and
ends by explaining the declina ofanalysis that began in the ig6os. The ig6os
and i97os witnessedthe transition from massproduction to a globalized
service- and in6ormation-based economy. Accompanied by Ear-reaching
attempts to repudiace the Enlighrenment fazlf caurr, this "third industrial
revolution" changed the way in which personal lide was understood. Its
intrapsychic--private, infernal, and idiosyncratic---characterfaded in
importante as it became politicized and increasingly subject to cultural
manipulation. New conceptions of the selfemerged, alternatively more nar-
row[y rationa] and more expressive.Much of the charismaofpsychoanalysis
entered indo such new cultural 6ormations as identity politica, Lacanian cul-
tural criticism, and second-wave Heminism. All that had been suppressed
within psychoanalysis--visuality,
narcissism,the body--now camaunto
prominence. Psychoanalysissurvived, but it was no longer a charismatic
force. In its day it had hem together at least three diüerent projecta: a quasi-
therapeutic medical practice, a cheory ofcultural hermeneutics, and an ethic
ofpersonalself-exploration, one that wasimbued with the devotion ofa call-
ing. These split apara.The age of Freud came to an end, but aswith all great

llX RH Ih ili.:n: upheavals, it continued to shape everyday lide as well as the landscape of
intuitions, dreams,and shadowy memories that we all inhabit.
 Pari One

CHARISMATIC ORIGINA:
THE CRUMBLING OF
THE VICTORIAN FAMILY
SYSTEM
 CbaPter One

THEÉPERSONAL
UNCONSCIOUS

The dirty seçretof anãJysis

i$ that for the collaborationto suççeed
the doctof.has to be giÊedt;. . :: What the analyst eeelsis as crucial as
the analysand's sorrow$. Teus it faltam,s that there is a fatal 8aw in all
scienEifically presented case historias because they are solely con-
cerned wieh the pauent's bife and çharacter. To understand why the
treatment proceeded the ®ay it did one musa alsollknow about
üe doccor--his brilliancies, his mistakes,and his own psychology.
The [rue SEory of a therapeutic exchange begins not wirh the
patient's present problem but with the healer's post.

,--:Rafae] Yg]esias, Z)n ]y?r ü :Core;/8r EP//

n the modem West there have been two episodes of genuine, widespread
introspection: Calvinism and Freudianism. In both casesthe turn inward
accompanieda grearsocialrevolution: the riseofcapitalism in the first, and
its transformation into an engine of massconsumption in the second.In
both cases,too, the resultawere ironic. Calvinism urged people to look
incide themselvesto determine whether they had been saved,but it wound
up contributing to a new discipline of work, savings,and family lide.
Freudian introspection aimed to posterthe individual's capacity to lavean
authentially personallide,yet it wound up helping to consolidatecon-
sumer society. In both cases,finally, the turn toward self-examination gen-
erated a new language. In the caseof Calvinism, the language centered on
the Protestant idea ofthe soul, an idea that helped shape such later concepts
as character,integrit)ç and autonomy. The new Freudian lexicon, by con-
[rast, centeredon the idea of the uncanscious, the distinctive analytic con-
tribution [o twentieth-century personal lide.
Of course, the idea of the unconscious was well known be6ore Freud
publishedrBf /nferprfiaf/a afDrfami in 1899.Medievalalchemists,
Ger-
man idealist philosophers,:bandromantic poets had all taught thac the
f
i6 SXCRITS 0F THI SOUL
ultimate reality was unconscious.The philosopher Schopenhauer,a pro'
6ound inHuence on Freud's teacher Theador Meynert, maintained that
human beings fere the playthings ofa blind, anonymous will. Toward the
end of the nineteenth century. the idea of the iwZ'çonsciouswas especially
widespread. Often termed a "secondaq' seE," Íarger than the mere ego and
,ccessible through hypnosis or meditation, the subconsdous implied the
ability to transcend everyday reality. Whether .ascosmic force,,jmpersoqal
will. or subconscious, the unconscious was understood, before Freud, to be
,nonymous and transpersonal. Frequently Itkened to the ocean, it aimed to
leavethe "petty" concerns of the ego behind. . Suddenly, the liberal conception of the human subject seemedproblematic
Freud, too, thought ofthe unconscious as impersonal, anonymous, and
radiçally other to the individual. BuEharboredlwithin it, generally dose to
consciousness, he discerned something new: an interóal, idiosyncratic
source af motivacions peculiar to the individual. In his conception, contin-
gent circumstances,: especially in childhood, . farged links .between desires
and impulws on the one hand, and experientesand memoriason the
other. The result was a.pfrsana/ /zronifiaws'unique, idiosyncradcl and con-
cingent. For Freud, moreover, there was no escaping unto a "larger' ar
transpersonal realiy. The goal, rather, was to understand and accept one's
own idiosyncratic natura, a talk that, in principie, .could never be com-
pleted' While Freud was certainly concerned with universal problems
inherent in human lide, suco as those set in motion by inEancy, gender, sex-
uality, and death, his focus remained the concrete and particular ways in
whichindividualsfacedthoseproblems.i ! ç.'í {,,.'!f.i il:'!i ::'
As Schorske suggested,Freud formulated the concept of.fhe personal
unconsciousin respondeto a crisesin the nineteenth-centuryliberal world,
view. This crisesbeganwith industrialization. Associatedwith the early hc-
tory system, the #rlr industrial. revolution seemed to reduce individuais to
fàmous "haven in a heartless world"--the nineteenth-century middle-class
Eamily---againstwhat they viewed as "the petty suite and brutal.tyranny" of
the workplace. Heavily gendered, the Victorian worldview was in one pense
prato'Freudian: it located the "trufaself" in a private or familial context :
Nonetheless, it viewed that context as a counterpart to' or compen.sauon
for, the economy--not asa discreteand genuinely personal sphere.The lat-
ter undcrstanding emergedonly with the çrumbling of the Victorian Eamily
ideal during the secad industrial revolution, amid the beginnings of mass
production and massconsumption in the l89osl
-r To be sure, massproduction deepenedthe crisesin the liberal worldview
6or example,by introducing the assemblylhe. But it algo revealedthe
TbePersonal
Unconsciows
'l t \7
emancipatory potencial of capitalism in massculture, leisure, and personal
lide. By the mid-nineteenth century, cultural modernit» foretold by Baude-
laire in Paria, Whitman in Brooklyn, and Dostoyevsky in St. Petersburg,
had already weakenedVictorianism's separace-spheres ideology and 6ostered
an interest in hysteria, decadente, artistic modernism, the "new womaú,
and the hamosexual. Fin de siêclecultura exacerbatedthe crises.As women
entered public lide, there emerged polyglot urban spacesand new 6orms of
sensationalist, mass entertainment, such as amusement parks, dance halos,
and. fiam. The result was a conflict over the heritage of the Enlightenment.
to maná, as did its highest vague:individual autonomy-
For the Enlightenmenc, autonomy meant the ability to ride above the
"merely" private, sensory, and passive or receptive propensities of the mind
in ordemto reach universally valid rational conclusions. Convinced tha{ fin
de siêcleculture undermined this abiliq, many observerslamented the new
formes of "degeneration," "narcissism," ande "decadente." Freud's Êellow
Viennese Oito Weiningeri íor example, warned of the threat to autonomy
from what he êalled the "W" factor--passivity or dependency--which
rended to be concentrated in women, homosexuals, and Jewsi Thus, he
joined an extensivechorus calling Éora return to self-contrai, linked to hard
work, abstinence,and savings.At the gametime, the beginningsof mass
consumption algo gave rise to a party of "release." Especially among the
middle classes,many people 6oundgthat the consciousefFort they had
' devoted to working hard and saving only made them(in William James's
words) "twoâold more the children of heU." Contending that modernity
required "an anti-moralistic method," James and others commended "mind
cure" and hypnosis as méthods that allowed individuais to relax their eüorts
at self-contrai.'
It was in the context ofthis division that Freud developed his idea ofthe
personal unconscious. In particular, he was responding to the alternation
between "contrai" and "release" that characterized late-nineteench-century
psychiatry.'Ononelide, the tradition ofpsychiatry that descendedfrom the
Enlightenment sought to restore contrai by strengthening the will and
ordering the reasoning processem of "disordered" individuais.'On the other
sêde,a laser generation of "dynamic" psychiatrists and neurologista sought
to hcilitate "release"through hypnotism and meditation' Freud'sidemof
the personal unconscious represented an alternative to bota positions.
Treating neither self-control nor releaseas a primary value, it encouraged a
new,nonjudgmental or "analytic" attitude toward the self The result wasa
major modification of the Enlightenment idea of the human subject.iNa
i8 SBCRETS :0 F.:THE SOUL TbePersonatUnconsciom \9
everyday lide, such ascic# building and public health, were based on associ-

:l:B RI
choanalytic thought and practice.
ationist principles. So pdvasive was its influence that one philosophe called
associationism "the centir whence the thinker goes ouEward to the circum-
âerenceofhuman knowledge."'
Modem psychiatry,of which psychoanalysis
wasoriginally a part, was
bom out ofEnlightenm$nt associationism.Initially termed "moral" or psy-
chological treatment, it Waspremised on the idea that reasonwas universal
and therefore only a .prr of the mad person's mind was inaccessible.
Accordingly, the advoca+esof moral treatment sought to reach the accessi-
ble part. Rejecting the i:lolation of the insone and the use of coercive tech-
niques such as swaddliqg and chains, they championed psychological or
"moral" merhods, aimed at rescoring the individual to his reason.Not sur-
prisingly, the founders of modem psychiatry were all participante in the
democratic revolutions: :Thus, Philippe Pinel, the 6ounderof French psy-
chiacry,helped strike the chains oH'the menta]]y i]] during the French Rev-
olution, and Benjamin Rush, the íounder of-American psychiatry,signed
the Declaration of Independence.s
The psychiatristsof the Enlightenmentaimed to cure Tfolly"or mad-
ness,by which they meant a disruption in the reasoning process.Accord-
ingly, they described the goal ofpsychiatry asthe reordering of associations.
At first they experimented with external regimes or asylums in the hope that
an inner arder would come [o mimic an externas one. Soou, however, they
beganto realize that there was more to the dynamics ofcontrol than could
be accounted for by treating control as a function of an ordering environ-
ment. The great discovery made by nineteenth-century psychiatrists, one
chat began to undermine moral treatment, .was that auchority was per-
sonal--the primary instrument availableto induce arder in the disturbed
individual's mind wasthh doctor's own person.ÓThus, Benjamin Rush gave
a series of tules to the dhysician entering the chamber of the I'deranged"
"catch his EYE, and look him out ofcountenance . : . there are keys ió the
eye . .,:. A second : mean#Hof securing .i. . obedience . . «shouldtbe by his
VOICE. [Next,] the COUNTEN.\NCE . . . shou]d be accommodated to
the stateof the patient's Inind and conduct."7
In spite of their discovery of the psychological character of authoriq,
Enlightenment psychiat+istshad no concept of the unconsciousas a sphere
of idiosyncratic individualiqc. Their single goal was to [estore che individual
[o rhe "normal' reasonidg processescommon to all membersofthe human
communiW. In the first hall of the nineteenü century, however, two new
developrnents began to çransform Enlightenment associationism: romanti-
cism and the "somatic Áódel," or the emphasis on heredity. Both stressed
 TbePersonaí
Unconsciow:?* z\
zo SEC RETS 0F T H X.'SO U L . f.
Freud'stime the somaticmodel, in which lesionsin the nervoussystem
the idem,lacking in associatianism,that the mind itsclt was a shaping torce
explained hysteria and other "neuroses," was the dominant theory among
psychiatrists.
For all the impact of romanticism and phrenology, midcentury psychia-
rry retained the original Enlightenment goal -of moral treatment: to adapt
the individual to the universal laws governing the associationof idem. The
parcicu[ar qua[ities ofan individual psyche were of]ittle interest to psychia-
trists, who followed Enlightenment precedent in valuing the universal over
the particular, the rational over the emotional, the communal over the pri-
vate, and the permanent over the transient. The momentary, transient, and
fügitive experiencesthat Baudelaire defined in i859 u being central to
modernity had little or no place in the psychologiesthat developed in the
wake of the Enlightenment. Even magnetism did not challenge tais orien-
tation. On the contrary, by reducing individual to objects in order ta make
them subjects, it retained Enlightenment psychology'sideal of arder, evên
© it revealed the tensions within it.

l he origina of the second industrial revolution lay in the z86osand '7os,

the yearsof Freud's childhood and youth. These were the decides that saw
the ride of its distinctive science and technology (the dynamo, steel, and
chemicals),along with its distinctive âormsofeconomic órganization (large-
scalebanking, the corporation, international frade). Economic growth was
accompanied by politicas re6orm, for example, in England, Austria, the
United States,Germana, and Japan. Eng]and began its ]ong decline and
America its even longer ascent.An emerging worldwide network of rail-
raads and steamships brought standardized weights, measures,time, and
moneX Literacy,schooling, and researchinstitutions, especiallyunitersities,
advanceddramatically, setting in motion the increased productivity that
underlay üe ân de siêcle turn toward massconsumpdon.
Fromlthe beginning, the second industrial revolution witnesseda
tremendousHourishing of psychologicalsciencesand practices.Whereas
the Enlightenment had known only psychiatry, che second half of the
nineteenth century saw the riso of neurology (Freud's original pro6ession),
laboratory-based or academic psychology, and investigation inca intelli-
gence,psychopathology,and crime. Great researchand teachinghospitais
suchas the Salpêtriêrein Paria, Burghõlzli in Zurich, and Bellevue in New
York expanded,in pari to deal wiü new "social problema" such as crime,
alcoholism,and prostitution. Whereas Enlightenment psychiatry had been
defined by the problem of "madness," the psychologists of the second
 ,..a SE C RE.TS 0F TI'l E."S'QUL Tbe Personal Unconscious -' l B

the "neuroses," histeria was the most important, not only because of its
prevalence but ako becauseit manifested itself in physical symptoms such
as pa'alyses or fainting spells that could not be correlated with any known
anatomical or neurological lesion. Casting doubt on the somatic model, it
those of scientists, researchers,and professionals. m; seemedto compel a psychological explanation.:3
Charles
lla.LI Darwin's
n& i859 Or@f/z
VnW// = a afSpecles,
J X followed twelve yearsHlater
R/qby his .4]1ofthis would have remained a mero episodein üe history ofmedicine
had not the outbreak of the neurosesconverged with the larger social trans6or-
mation ofthe eamily and society üat arose with the second industrial revolu.
tion. When, in the precedingperiod, the Êamilyhad hnctioned asthe unir of
production, it had grounded identiy in socially-recognizedand established
Foles,including men and women's coinplementary labor. But üe transGerof
production from the household to the oMce and corporadon psychologizedand
inda«id-«lied Emily lide.Childhood,-ne to be understoodH a füny sepa"t'
stageofli$e at the sometime that men and women were attempting tó develop
rms of relationship, no longer mediated by Êamily-basedproduction.
Meanwhile, the young were emancipating themselvesfrom local communities
and:6romtradicional Éormsofdependence, and urban lidewasgenerating a new
largelysexual,excitement. Suco medical terms as"hysteria" "invert," and "neu.
rotic" inscribed themselveswithin a new linguisdc landscapethat aJsoincluded
"dando," "flaneur," "avant-garde," "dude," and "young Turk." The main term
of the subconscious enEeredmedicine. There it came to re.fer.to the "lower'

l:H$ÚHiiK:ii
11 scious,u did catalepsy,sleepwalking,hypnotic trances:automaticwnung,
and fugue statesor absences.As a protopsycholagical eftort to grasp pn"li
tive" or nonlogical thinking, the medical idea was intrinsically connected
to the populm notion õf the subconscious as a transpersonal sphere to
which the ego gainedaccessthrough meditation or hypnosis,aswell asto
the somatic modem,which by the i86os had demonstrated that some psy-
chical disturbances, notably aphasia,were the result of lesions localized in
the.brain or nervoussystem and causedeither by heredity ar by trauma. :{
The application ofthe somatic modemto the neuroses.and to the closely
1 Far from enloying the benefits of self-mastery, hysterics felt overwhelmed
1! related problem of "inversión" or homosexualiW- was the. seedbed,,within
lll which psychoanalysisarose.Neurologists coined the term "neuroses"in tne
eighteenth century to signi$ an overly sensitive or irritable nervous system,
but the term had beenlittle used, Betweení869 and i873,.however, its usage
used in describing the füll range ofnew modem experience was "nervousness.
George Beard,who propounded the ârst medico-psychologicaltheory
of nervousnessin i86g, explained it asa respondeto the overstimulation of
modem lide, asrefiected in railroads, electricity, women'seducation, and rhe
sensationsof city streets. Paul VãJéry explained it as a symptom of the
groxvEh
of the "delirious pro6essions,"
by which he meant thoseproíes;
sions---:suco as teaching, law, or writing--in which one's principal resource
was "the opinion that others cave of one." Baudelaire extolled the "ner-
vousness"ofPoe'swriting, and JosefBreuer, Freud'smentor, commented on
the overfiowing productivity" of the hysterical mihd.:4
Hysteria, the most prevalent expressionof nervousness,exemplified che
contradictions in the Victorian understanding ofautonomy or self-mastery.
by their eüorts at self-contrai. Alice Jades, for example, describedher hys-
teria as a lifelong struggle to get tive minutes' rest. Only through hypnosis
had she learned to suspend, at least for brief intervals, :'the individual warch
dog, worn out with his ceaselessvigil to maintain the sanita ofthe modem
complicated mechanism.":s in its association with overexcitement and the-
atricali% on the one hand, and wiEh passivity, on the other, hysteria con-
vergedwith "femininiEy,"which the Victorian ageopposedto autonomy.
 Tbe Pepsona! Unto»seio%s
,b. SECRETS 0F THE SOUL

q M

mean-Mardn Charcos studying üe brain, not {he mind

Charcot's conception of the nervous system was simultaneously spatial,

visual, and hierarchical. The elementary or earliestleveisof the psychewere
refiexes; higher up fere instincts, çhen sensations, perceptions, and finally,
at the top, the conscious mind ar ego. Hysteria was causedby an "unruly"
preceofthe "lower" mind that had not been brought indoconnectionwith
the higher pari af the mind or consciousness. Thc purpose of hypnotism,
Charcos taught, was to access the "lower" or "6eminine" paras ofthe mind,
those that were outside consciousness and that became available when con-
l sciouscontrol was relinquished. Charcos algofollowed the widely hem view
11
that the "weakness"
of the "upper leveis"of the mind washereditaryand
linked to racial diüerence.B. H. Morei's 18577;u/r/ lúT zi(Ü/n/rzxcenres
had
taught him that hysrerics "were caught up in complex networks of patha-
logical inheritance."" Follawing Morei, Charcoslinked nervousness
to
Lll
other problema supposedly shaped by heredity, suco as crime and suicide.
1! Charcos exemplified the neurological thinking that characterized the
earlyyearsof the second industrial revolution. In his work the locus ofpsy-
IL who would cave been burned in former limes.:" Chologicalinvestigation had shifted from reason to thc nervoussystem,and
 Tbe Petsonat Unconsc cus z7
z6 SECRZTS O F#iTliE S 0UL

from madness to the subconscious. By using hypnosis, Charcot encouraged

a turn from self-contraito release.Still, he wasno more interestedin the
psychology
of individuaisthan the proponen:s
of Foral treatment.lad
reen: Wes, not uniquely personal sublects, were his focus; visual ordering
and mapping, not languageand interpersonalunderstanding, consututed
hismethodl ê ã$ i @# l!!i : .. . .
Nonecheless,the Salpêtriêrein the i88os oHered a kind ofwindow unto
modem personal lide,a spacein which dramasofadolescent rebellion, frus-
under-
trated sexuality, and female outrage were acted out without being
and
stood. As such, it attracted the interest of a lide range of altists
intellectuals. Those in attendanceincluded not only social thinkers like
Émile Durkheim and Gustave Le Bon, the police psychologist who wrote

and Sigmund Freud." it was these last who transformed Charcos's ideal
nto a dynamic theory of the subconscious,one that nonethelessremained
The house in whiçh Sigmund Freud was bom
prepsychoanalytic.. in 1856ia rural Moradia

F.eud was boro in t856 and came of age at some distance from .the great
l fiam the start. He took ave courses with Franz Brentano, a lapsed Catholic
urban centersof the second industrial revolution. He was a second-
priest and a founder of phenomenolog}, who had come to Vienna in i874
generation easEernEuropean Jew, whose ancestors had relocated from lande propounding an empirical scienceof consciousness. Freud mainrained a

hliiã: :ã=::n.::;: \ Jt 4n
ern Poland, .the poorest region of Europeên Jewry, to settle in Freiberg, a
friendshipwith Brentano outside the university and dependedupon him
6or work asa translator, but he did not share the philosopher's religious aims
and eventually broke with him.'3
cown of about ave thousand inhabitants set amid meadows and forests in
Freud's education was algo shaped by scientist-teachers suco as Ernst
Mloravia. His mother, Amalie -Nathansohn, Jacob's third wife, algo emi-
Brücke, who laser oversawhis laboratory research,and Theodor Meynert,
grated from Galicia: in i859, when. Freud was three, businessfailure forced who supervised him at the Vienna General Hospital. Themselves influ-
b'"'-- '-'to move to Vienna. The Freudsthereby joined the wavesof
enced by Hermann von Helmholtz, these men were involved in empirical
migranu--Bohemians, Moravians, Hungarians: Ruthenians, and Croats--
investigations into the processesby which we gain knowledge of the exter-
who were turning Vienna into the most multinational and polyglot city
nal world. In contrastto many neurologista,however,they did not aim to
In Europe,as well as the cita with the largestJewishpopulation outside explain the mind in physiochemical termo(an eüort eventually known as
Warsaw.
psychophysics and integral to academic psychology). Rather, they were
11 A railroad hub, a city of congested and unsanitary housing,; seventy-
neo-Kantianswho were redefining Kart's innate or a priori categoriesand
hour workweeks and a thriving prostitution industW-Vienna algoboasted
âormsof intuition" asevolutionaryproducts,outcomesof adaptationand
lil suco exemplaryEnlightenment institutions as the Parliament,Gity Hall, ofstruggle within nature.:4
and :the universiEy.Freud entered the latter in i873 as.put of.a dramatic
In i876 Freud abandoned the plan of a double doctorate and entered
inHux ofJewish students and Eaculty," Originally planning to take a double
Ernst Brücke's physiological laboratory, where he did researchfor six years
doctorate in zoology and philosophy, he had a deep interest in psychology
z8 SERRE.T'S ',OP. THE SOUL
FbePersonaLUnconsciousl
i l9
unconscious was an idée fixe or split-oH' idem located somewhere in the
lower or subconscious realms ofthe psyche, cut ofF 6rom the conscious ego,
inaccessibleexcept by hypnosis. 'William James summarized: in "the won-
derful explorations by Binet, Janet, Breuer, Freud, Mason, Prince and oth-
efs, of the subliminal çonsciousness
of patients with histeria, we have
revealedto us whole systemsof underground lide, in the chapeofmemories
of a painel sort which lead a parasitic existence buried outside of the pri-
mary fields of consciousness.:À . ... Alter or abolish by suggestion these
unconsciousmemories, and the patient immediately Setswell."3:
Nevertheless, the book did contam one idem that was truly new: óz:#ênff
(.4óu'f#r), an idemthat was connected to dynamic psychiatry's:emphasison
anima. In accord with standard neurological thinking, Breuer and Freud
viewed hysteria as a splitting of consciousness, a releaseof tension, a Êailure
of synthesis."The working hypothesisof SmZlfswasthat this splitting
reflecEedan excessof stimuli--more stimuli than could be dealt with by
consciousness. An event that could not be integrated indo consciousness
they called a trauma. But while the two authors agreedthat trauma caused
hysteria, they disagreed concerning what made a person iwire7dóZe to the
splitting of consciousness
or breakdownof synthesisthat followed trauma.
Breuerçlbelieved that if an event did not reach consciousness,}that was
becausethe hysterichad been in a susceptibleor hypnoid state(a ligue
skate)when the event occurred. A predisposition toward a state of lessened
psychological tension, he maintained, was hereditary. Freud, by contrast,
believed the splitting occurred because the hysreric úl#;ndr# against aware-
nessof the traumatic event; he believed, in other words, that the splitting
l was motivated:?}
Freud'semphasison de6ense
wasthe threadthat led to the ideaof the
personal unconscious. Dependent on Breuer for a long time, Freud became
increasinglyunhappywith what he look to be the older man'seRortsto
dampen his enthusiasm, andFwith Breuer's attempts to [orgive Freud's
financiamdebts. Another source of tension was Freud's conviction that the
causesof hysteria were always sexual, an idea that is barely mentioned in
S dfe /# .flbsr?r/#but that lay behindFreud'sinsistenceon deeense.
'What
enabled the break, however, was Freud's intensifying friendship with Fliess.
At first, although-Fliess was two yearsyounger than Freud, he was the dom-
inant figure in their new twosome. He tolerated and even encouraged
Freud'sgrandioseambidons and servedas Freud'sdoctor at a time when
OJJlnllljlS Freud and Breuer published ave caseitudies ünder the title Siü-
Freudhad death 6earsand tried to stop smoking. Freud called Fliess
"teacher,""the only other, the a/lm" pro6using that "I can write nothing if
l bate no public at all, but l am perÉectlycontent to write only 6oryou."H
 Tbe Personat U enscieas
en SEÇ.RELI'i.S. 0F%ãTH.E ,SO(JL

But Fliessalso had a profound intellectual iníluence on Freud, especially

through his vier of the nervous system as a conduit of sexual energy. Most
neurologistsof the time thought of the sexualdrive in exclusivelygenital

Hlh :í:,=üu.Ji::='=L : :41

the some." Freud reported this incident to Fliess in a letter, commenting,
U, ]' %tÕ .. )!Í iêtWTF"
Do you understand this? l don't."'s slít i,©
Until ]895 Freud had pursuedan eclecticcareer,working on brain
anacomy, cocaine studies, hypnosis, aphasia, and childhood cerebral paraly

$ilKi:ÜÜ.=
çiiixi
%H:
Commentingon a first attemptto skeçcha theóryof the psyche,he brote
Fliess:'hall [was trying to do was to explain defense,but just try to explain
something from the very core of natural l had to work my way through the
Sigmund;Freud's i885 +isidng Card
problemofquality, sleep)úemory-in short,all ofpsycholog)r."37
Trying to
think through the meaning ofdefense 6ocusedhis energies.In an 1895letter
he informed Fliessthat his characterwassucothat he could not lavewithout
others, and the concluding chapter, which put forth his most original ideal.
"a consuming passion:i . . a tyrant." "I cave found my tyrant," he contin-
His ability to completethe book dependedon Fliess'sreceptivityto his
11 ued;"mytyrantispsychology."'' « ? \';'©:.:; - - , .' n;.-.:.. ideal.]When Freud finished the book, he algo ended his relacionswith
In July i895 he interpreted a dream ot his own tor thc nrst time. wnunB Fliess.4:
Fliessthat someday the eveDt might be commemorated with a plaque, he
may well cave dreamt the dream with a view.to ,jnterpreting it. In the year
,nd a half that followed, he wrote out a drlt of ZBf /nrrPreiaríon d'
l he greatest innovation of ZZe Zn/fr7rfiaüa/z (fDrf zmi lay in its subject: a
Z)rfami.}PYet he did not complete the book 6or three more years:He laser
sleepingindividual. In contrast to the active, rational subject ofthe Enlight-
explained the delay as the reguleof his "self-analysis," the:introspection and
enment, this subject has no accessto the external world. The ego nes in
mourning precipitated by his father's death in October i896. Whatever the
darkness; all stimuli crise from within.:..Only occasionally do perceptual
reasons,his Eather'sdeath uprooted him, awakening his past and prompting
him to surmise thaü the death ofa father was invariably the most signiíicant. stimuli--light, colar, figures, sounds, representational fragments--break in
upon it. The book'sthesis,heir to the eulier emphasison deeense
and not
event in a man'slide." The processos
of completing Zbf /nfrrPrfía//on of 6ormulateduntil i8g8, was that dreams result when wishes or worries left
Z)reais and ofcoming to grips with his father's death went on together.The
over from daytime experiences become associated with childhood memo-
book contains a theory of the mind and recorda the genesisofthe theory in
riesthat areforceful enough to disturb sleep.A single,overriding, biologi-
callydetermined wish ( Wnnscó)nesbehind everydream: the wish'ta remam
asleep.The dream protects sleep by portraying the dreamer'swish as fiil-
filled, but in a disguised6orm. Thus, the semanalwork announcingthe
culta íinishingwerelthe literatureircview which recountedhis debtsto
 Tbe PersoKal UncoKscàous 33
ao SE CRETSbOF TH E 'tSO UL

emergenceof modem personal bifecenteredon dreaming, a state chaJ..-r-

ized by withdrawal from ;ealiW,the omnipotenc: of thought, and deeply
introverted and convoluted processesofwish hlfillment.. ,.
'Freud offered the dream of Irmã's injection, which he dreamt in July
i895, as the centerpiece ofthe book. On the:night he had the dream, Freud

$Hülnl HWB
ÜH X l;l$
leasing gauzein her nasal'caviy. Freud then compounded the injury by
insisting that her continuei symptoms were psychological. Laser,a seçond
operauon revealedthe truta. On the night ofthe.dream, a doctor friend of
Freud's had informed him that Eckstein was still not responding to treat-
ment. The dream was precipitaced by Freud's guilt and anxiety but algo by
his desire to triumph over numerous adversities.

/-" '' " Freud thenassumed he was missing an organic prob-

lem.' He looked down her thrüat--her "unconscious"--where he saw ;$@ã«a llúil?prÉ
"extensivo whitish grey scabs . . . çurly suuctures." He callcd his 6ellow doc-
:ors over One saia "There'sno doubt it's an infection." Not long be6ore,
she had receivedan injection. The formula Gora chemiçal-trimethj'l' Emma Eckstein: the "Irmã" ofthe Irmã dream(i8gS)

amine--that Fliess believed was the basesof sexuality íloated before the
dreamer'svision. "lnjections of that sort ought not to be madese thought-
lessly,"Frcud thought; "probably the syringe had not been clean.'':: 'l: ::.' .-;
The dream exêmplifies the workings of the personal unconscious. It
shows Freud transforming both early and contemporary events of his bife
unto a meaninghl psychical structure in an eüort to satis$' his unconsçi-
ous wishes while slceping. On the most immediate levei, it is motivated
dreamer worries that his "thoughtless injeccion' is responsiblefor Manha's
lll}l unwanted pregnancyaüd for his misguided experimentswith cocainea
11 decadcearlier. At a deeperlevei, the dream refiects Freud's inÊantile ambi-
tions, his need to always be right. The medical figures are all incompetente
Fliessbungled Eckstein'soperation and is now caught up in absurd sexual
theories. In contrast to such bungling, the dream reíiects Freud's then-
ongoing effarts"to formulate his theory of the ünconscious. It has a tripar-
tite structure--hallway, Irmã's mouth, trimethylamine--which anticipates
his 6rst model of the mind: preconscious, unconscious, organic.l Freud's
wish to believe that sexuality was at the root ofthe neurosesmay have been
the deepestwish of the dream.4'
Freuds interpretatioú of the dream demonstratesthe way in which he
hadalready transÉormedthe outvrardly ordered, hyperrational, visual space
af the Sãlpêtriêre unto the infernal, dynamic, psychological, and linguistic
spaceOfpsychoanalysis. Nonetheless, the pach Eram intcrpreting a dream to
developingthe theory of the unconscious still lay ahead.To fallow it, Freud
hadto abandon the idea, intrinsic to .9wdzes//z Hyffrr/ and, indeed, to thc
whole oflate-nineteenth-century psychiatry, that a particular went causeda
 S E-CRETS OF THE S oul TbePersonalUncottsci05 3S
branch indo diverse nejghborhoods, suburbs, and slums; disconnected
archaeological strata; t4e--proliferacing fields of mathematics; chemical
processem;rivers, pasrur#s, and Éorests;the universe itself! the algorithmi-
cally generatedspacesof twenty-first-century üought. The unconscious, in
Freud's emerging view Wasa kind of infinite archive or classification sys-
[em; consciousness could bring unto 6ocus,.through perception) only some
ofits contents, and then only momentarily.47
Freud'sletters to Flàessbetweenl8g6 and l8g8 show his developing
conception of how the unconscious mind in general works. In December
i8g6 he informed Fliess fhat he was working on the assumption that mem-
ory developed by a pr4cess of stratification. Memory tracei, 6or which
Freud used such diverse terms as trace (Sp#r), breaching (.Baón#ng), sign
(Zr/róen), and transcription (ZI/mirór@), were subjected to "rearrangement
in accordance with fresh circumstances . . . as it were, cranscribed..'3.What
specificuaunu.
distinguished his theory from thaE ofhis predecessors,Freud explained, was
the thesis that memory is present not once but several tomesover."'8 in
other words, memories derived.:their meanings from being connected to
other memories and not from the evento from which Eheyderive.
In 1897FreudsenoFliessa drawingof the architecture
of the mind;
an accompanying letter explained the diagram. Consciousness,indicated
by the small triangles, was perception. The Roman numerais indicated
"scenes." Some were accessible directly, "others only by way of fantasiem set
up in Êont of them." The higher Roman numeraisreferred [o leveis of
decreasing accessibiliW. The leis "repressed" scenes came [o light first, "but
only incompletelyt} on account of cheira association with the severely
repressed ones." Analysls had to proceed by "loops" (indicated by the
Arabic numerais); "Fantasiemare formed by amalgamation and distortion
analogousto the decomÉ)ositionof a chemical body which is compounded
with another one." A fragment ofa visual scenecombined with a fragment
of an auditory anel:The leftover fragment "links up with something
else.Thereby"--a key observation--"an original connection has become
untraceable."4P
Freud'searly actempt to çonceptualizethe unconscious (1897)
Here, then, was a step toward a new theory of the unconscious, neither
asa disturbance of reason nor as a split-off idemconnected to the lower
reachesof the hervous bystem. As Freud took this step, he encountered
Somethingthat would rejnain at the center ofpsychoanalysis rhroughout its
history,namely, the idea ofresistance. A dream, he beganto theoriie, was a
compromise between wishes and the rei/ria/zcf to revealing those wishes.
Sincethe writing of the book was a deeply personal attempt at emancipa-
Eionfor him, many of his dreams eocusedon his own resistances,as exem:
 a6 SECRETS OP THX SOUL
plified in his reladonswith his Eatheror Eathersubstitutes.One recordahim
giving a deceaÉed
fiiend a piercing look ünder which the fiiend m»Ited
away Tais dream reversedan expericncein which he gamelate to work and
was humiliated by the accusatoryshareofhis supervisor, Brücke. In another
üeam, he saw his Eatheras a political figure among the Magyars; it made
him recall how like Garibaldi his Eatherhad looked on his deathbed. A late
dream in which Brücke gave him the talk "of making a dissecdon of my
own body, my pelvis and lega"suggeststhat even his project of self-analysis
wasan act ofpiety. Oüer dreamsreíiected larger, policial concerne.In one:
1' ovoked by seeing a Zionist play by Theodor Herzl, Freud saw himself
depressedand almost in tears: "a female figure----an attendant ar nun--
brought two boys out and handed them over to their fatherj who was not
elf."í' He interpreted tHs dream as concerned with; "the Jewish prob-
lem, concern about the future of one'schildren, to whoh one cannot give a
country of their own, concern about educating trem in suco a.way that
they can move freely acrossfrontiers."s:Finishing the book ànd working
through his resistancewent together.A responsive,nonpurposehl, uncriti-
cal skateoffree-Hoating attention wasthe prerequisite to the free associatión
that wasnecessary
to recall, muco lesainterpret, a dream.Attaining that
skate,Freud wrote, meant taking the psychical energl' normally devoted to
self-criticism and turning it to self-observation.''
Between;March 8xand;'Marca io, l8g8, Freud had a dream that
announced his ability to complete the book by 6ormulating the theory of
the unconscious--hehad written a botanicalmonograph,which he saw
lying open before him. The dream pivoted around a.childhood incident in
which his father rebuked him for buying expensive books."Soar afterward
he brote the final, theoretical chapter of Z%e/nfePr?iafíon afDrfzz#fzi.He
was able to finish the book when he conceived of the unconsciaus as the
locus of dynamic, personal motivations arising in inÊancy: his core insight
inca modem personalbife.
In contrast to preconsciousthinking--thinking that is directly available
to consciousness--henow describedthe infinite field of the unconsciousin
terras ofwhat he callcd "primary processthought." As he understood it, the
primary processwasunbound and disorganized,in energiesHowing freely
betweendiüerent streams.Not logic, but suco mechanismsascondensa-
tion, by which lide memory traces were combined, and displacementl by
which the emotion associatedwith one traje was transferred onto another,
governedits movement.The study of dreamshad given Freud a win-
dow inca primary-process thinking. The primary-process thinking that lay
behind a dream wasabre to enter consciousnessonly when it toak on a
ThePersonal
Unconscious ..
=iSRH==1'Ê :: :::::::
calling unconsciousthinking "primary," Freud had in mind that it
prcceded secondary-process or conscious thinking in the cvolutionary con-
text. But he thought ofit as primary in another scnseas well: bcginning in
inÉancy,.it was associated with the motivational core of the individual.
.Accordingto Freud'seorhulation, the dynamicsof the persona]uncon.
lcious took shape,when early experiencestransmutedthe instinctually
driven, unmet needsofinEancy indo w/sóis.The wishes ofchildhood. more-
over, were immortal; a siap sufFeredby a three-year.old child retained its
undiminished in the unconscious fify years latir. Unconscious wishes
were "the core of our being." They were the source of thc creativity that
erupts in normal discourse and ofall mental intensity, that is, of the
aüKt that addsse much weirdnessand unpredictabilit# to daily lide.While
everyday "entrepreneurial" worries provoked dream thoughu. only ineantile
wishescould supply the "capital" thosethoughtsneedto createa dream.
Freudls Irmã dream, for examplq took.chape when cveryday worries about
Eckstein éombined with inEandle Mshes 6or omnipotente and revenge.
To be fure, many; late-nineteenth+century thinkers recognizc(i thar the
mind does not merely mlfror reality but talher crcativelyorganizeiand
reorganizessigns that derive their meaning from their reladon tó other
gns.Tais wu cspeciallytrue ofthose thinkers groupcd together under the
rubric "the linguistic turn,I':such as Stéphane Mallumé or Ferdinand de
Saussure.
But they lackedany conceptionof motivation. Freudwasvirtu-
aliy alone.:jn supplying such a Conception. He argued that it. was unique
wishes and memories, 6ormed in the closest relation to one's parents and
siblings, that drive the reconstitution of experience, giving k its personal
cn.aracter.}{}.{í t: ã iEd4 ifl:lê s, $ii:},:«ú{ ü. ;,, t. ;, ;
At first Freuddid not graspthe fuloimplicationsof this idea.When he
in6urmedFliess that he intended to title the concluding, theoretical chapter
of his book "Dreams and Neuroses," he made his first aplicit obsermtion
that the somemechaóism--infantile wishesguided by primary-preces
thinking..--underlay both phenomena.í3 Later he eitcnded the idca of the
unconsciousto explain clips of the tongue, jokes, daydreams,and works of
art. All human products, he began to believe, arosc in. the uncanscious and
fere subtiy revised and given representable âorm as they made thenlselves
consc10us.
Even se, finishing the book gave Freud no immediate joy. "lnwudly,"
hewrate Fliess,"I am deeply impoverished, l have had to demolish all my
 Tbe Personat Uncanscious Rq
l8 SE CRETSi'.0 FtüTH E S 0UL

casdes in the :air."S' Perhaps. Yet compledng it changed him dramatially.
:=.==':=i.=:=1=.n:=H==:
::: .:::===.i;
= ism, psychoanalysisdirected introspection toward noninstrumental ends.
writing style; abandoning the persona ofprofasional ano-nymity, he began to
addressthe reader directly.sóCompletion led him to.reject his earlier posi-
tiüsm although nbt his lave ofscience. Unlike muco ofwhat later became psy-
sometimes
choanalysis, which he always understood to. be tentative and
speculative Zbe Znfr@HEfün ofZ)rrúz7z.f
gave him what he alwayssought in
science: certainW. In his seventies, he wrate: "Whenever l began to have doubts
ofthe correctnessofmy wavering conclusions, the successhl transÊormation of
a senselasand muddled dream inca logial and intelligible mental processin
the dreamer would renew my confidence ofbeing on the right track."s'
F.eud publishei ZBe /nfnPrffada :afZ)reais in i899 but dated .it i9oo.
Ear- one's pltssive rendencies in check, keep one's will like a bow always
bens:theseall descendedfrom the CaJvinist idea ofthe calling. Like Calvin-
But whereasCalvinismi the secretphilosophyof the first industrial rev-
olution, was 6ocused on detecting any hino of the Devil in oneselfl psy-
choanalysis, ;the secret philosophy of the second, sought to transmute
self-criticism indo self-observation.
In its relationto both the Enlightenmentand the Protestantethic, ZBe
/ni !vP fzaf/a ofZ)reagi refiected the optimism that accompanied the sec-
ond industrial revoluEion. Personal lied was the outcome of an epochal
advance:the socializationof production in the nineteenthcentury,which
relieved the Eamily of its most visible economic functions. Encapsulating
the possibilities of existencebeyond necessita,personal lidewas the site of
deep wishes and utopian imaginings, including the promise of releasing
women, young people, and homosexuals from the confines of the Eamily.

The book presageda new way ofbeing human, one that was psychological, Reflecting its deep, inner connection to such promises, psychoanalysis
interpersonal,andnonjud.
r'"'''' gmental,..All of...,
the new . .:....-.
-, fin de..'siêcle tenden- would be doggedthroughout much of its history by its intimate connec-
tion to utopian thinking. Nonetheless,
contra Schorske,Freud'sideaof a
cles separation-of the individual from concrete time and
release,the explo- dynamic, personal unconscious did not represent a retreat from the core
place, the new encouragementgiven to instinctual ..IJ. .L..:" ". values of the Enlightenment. On the contrary, as we shall see, in the new
tive force ofsexuality, the building up of complex inner worlds thàt in no
Soon to be
way reproduced an 'outer realiq'- were visible in its pares. conditions of fin de siêcle reality only a new conception of,pfxsonúé---as
:.rmed "modemism," this new way of being human would transform the opposed to moxaÉ--autonomy could validade individual strivings for free-
dom and happiness.
nineteenth-century liberal tradition. ;'h' ÍQ 3 ;v':i-' =, 'Fn :l "
"" To be sure, psychology had occupied a central peacein the bourgeois or What Schorske's perspective does accurately refiect, however, is that the
liberal worldview:, especially since the Enlightenment. Thus: psychoanalysis fin de síêclehopes for personal lide were premature. For the overwhelming
wasthe culminacionof;a long history.But in arguingthat instinctsor majority of men and women, the historic task was not [o deepenself-
drives,which existat the bounduj' betweenthe body and the mind, give understanding but rather to stabilize the working-class eamily and commu-
piseto psychicalwishesthat constitute the idiosyncratic and contingent nity. As a iarü/ possibilita, personal lied depended upon political and
core of our being, Freud remade Ehat history. The Enlightenment stress on economic conditions, including a democratic ethos and a securematerial
the autonomous, rational subject cave;«'ay to the modernist idea of a bases
for childhood.Theseconditionsonly óqan to existin the ageof the
unique individual, the product of a highly specificand::localized
hlstory, largecorporation that ÉollowedWorld War 1, and then only in a small part
driven by a complex setofmotivacions that could not be understood except of the world. Until then, psychoanalysis
could fiinction only as a charis-
m the context ofa genuinely personal,nonrep'oducibleinner world. 3 matic sect,confined to a small segment of the population: the educated
'ln moúng personal, unconscious wishes ta the center oíi psychology, middle classes,artists, and bohemians, and others with the freedom to
Freud was algo tacitly êngaging with a second stream of thought, whose experiment with personal bife. In this pense, early psychoanalysis exempli-
inHuence was at least as strong as that of the Enlightenment. This second íied the pathos of a new understanding available primarily to the few.
stream was Calvinism, which had given nineteenth-century psychology its An avatar ofwhat H. Stuart Hughes called the "discovery of conscious-
moral core while alsoinspiring what beber called the "spirit of capitalism." ness,"the efFortsduring the early years of the secondindustrial rwolution

Not merely''psychiatry,but the whole Enlightenment: identification ot to 6ormulatea éonception of üe active but not merely rational subject to
'with self-control, the injunction to harness one's energies, supplant the associationistpsychology, ZBe /nfev?rPlaüo/zofZ)reagi added
dO SECRETSóOF THE S OUL

something unique: the shaping afmodvation by the contingencies ofearly

childhood, and even adulthood; teus its intrinsically personaldtaracter.s'
Becauseof that character,what Freudianawould soon cala"intrapsychic
lide" constituted a kind of second world, set alongside and camplicating
modem subjectivity. The Freudian unconscious stood for the /zonre2wció//-
íg of the individual to his or her surroundings, a nonreducibiliy or í#lP/m
that was itself a social praduct. This idea clone, however, would not cave
turned psychoanalysis unto a charismatic force. Freudianism became hiitor-
ically powerfiil becauseüe idemof the personal unconscious was insepara'
ble from a new understandingofsexuality. Sexuality,asMax Weberwrote,
laomed in the epoch of massproduction as the :'gareindo the post irra-
donal and thereby real kernel of bife ;: ) eternally inaccessibleto any ratio-
nalendeavor.:l'sP
CbaPterZwo
GENDER. ÓSEXUALIT'Y
AND PERSONALLIDE
Thc hrunsts cave grasped sharply and clearly thar our age,the age
of big industrB of the largoproletariancita and of intcnseand
[um ultuous lide, was in need ofnew forma ofart, philosophy, behav:
iour and language This sharply rwolutionary and absolutcly ZZan-
üf idca cume to ehemwhen the Socialistawcre not evenvaguely
:interestedin suco a quesrion, when the Socialistacenainly did not
havc: as precise an idea in politica and economias. . .:; it is like+ ;co
be a long time beâoreüe working classeswi]] manageto do any-
üing mon çreative.

--Antonio Gramsçi, "Marinetti the RevolutionaryÚ(igzi)

T he reason-centeredsubject extalled by Enlightenment thinkers was

freighted with gendered assumptions: the rational, autonomous, ac-
tive subject was mate; the passive,sensuous,private person, female. In the
course of âormulating his idea of the unconscious, Freud algo challenged
thosegender assumptions.Just as he 6ound it necessaryto reject an inher-
ited schema that opposed self-contrai to release, se he 6ound it necessary
to reject the receivedbasesâor distinguishingthe sexes.Jcttisoning the
nineteenth-century Vier that sexualwishes correspondeddirectly with gen-
der diRerence, Freud foregrounded individuality in sexual lide. The result
was a new conception of sexuality, one that stressed"each person'sspecial
individuality in the exerciseof the capacityto love.":This conception, tao,
resonateddeeply with the new currents of personal lide.
Ear[ier, women and men had ]abored within a common Éamilial enter-
prise, albeit at separate tasks. Among the nineteenth-century middle classes,
however, they came [o occupy diÊFerentworlds: the public and the private,
the economy aqd the Êamily.AJthough this divisian was central to the self-
understanding of the Victorian age, it was unstable and contradictory.
Women were viewed as dependent on men, yet their labor as wives and
 4z SECRETA 0F THE' SOUL Gendev, SentaLity, and Personal Lifc 4.3

mothers laid the bases6or men's autonomy. Gender difference also pervaded
the cultural order. "Failures" of autonomy, such as labor strikes, were coded
li as Geminine.When imperialista portrayed the globe as inhabited by a Éamily
of racesand peoples,"the Eamily"took on mythic proportions,while the
actual Eamilywas emptied of history.' in fin de siàcleEurope and the Amer-
icas, however, tais entire way ofviewing the world began to crumble.
The key sourceof pressureon the genderarder wasthe sair from a
commercial society to one based on mass production and massconsump'
tion. The first industrial revolution had inaugurated a century-long struggle
Gorthe materialprerequisites
of family bife:shorterworking hours,hous-
ing, sanitation, and social insurance. It moved the mother to the conter of
working-class eamily lide, while promoting what one observer called the
"waning of domestic monarchy."' in face,the working classespioneered
nearly all the innovations in the sphere of personal lide: birth control, the
sexualization ofstreet and café lide, Women'sopen expression ofsexual inter-
est.4With the' secondindustrial revolution, however,a new middle class
appeared.The economia surplus brought the lengthening of infanWI the
el.vation of childhoad, and the elaboration ofadolescenceas a new stagein Erma Goldman: sexual radical, new woman
the lidecycle. New 6emaleoccupations arosein shopsi oHices,schools, and muçhist (i9iÓ)

che profwions; 'While conservatives criticized women's increased indepen-

dence, small families, and "spoiled" children, a progressivefamily critique
algo emerged. In lbsen's i879 play d Z)aZ7}JZouir, Nora's husband admon-
ished her; "You arefirst and foremost a bife and mother," [o which Nora
replied: "I don't believe that any longes."s
Like the changesin the meaning of autonomy, the fin de siêcle changes
in gender relations produced a divided responde.Some woMen lamented
the eRectsof economic progress.In i895 Marianne Nigg, a Viennese femi-
nist writing in the newly minted journal /#uwen-Wêrér bemoanedwhat she
viewed as the decline in women'spower brought about by industrialization.
In preindustrial society,she noted, woman was a "universal genius," respon'
sible for kitchen and cellar, fields and garden, linen and embroidery, public
and private lide. As a result she marched forward "step by step" with men;
That washow it wasin the golden age."óManá others,;however,wel-
comed "modernity," asembodied in the secondindustrial revolution. They
believed that its cechnologicalinnovations, opportunities for women to
work oucsidethe come,and cultural liberalizationwould benefitwomen,
especiallyby freeihg trem from üe family.
Debates over the implicationsd of modernity. for gender{.relations
revolved around the cultural rolei of two new dramatis personae:the "new
woman" and chepublic male homosexual.Both of them pioneered personal
lidein the senteof lide outside ofl or at leastnot definedby, the family.
AIEhough both encompassedrelatively small numbers, they were highly vis:
ible figures who hem special significante 6or psychoanalysis.As we shall see,
Freud's intervention transeormed these debates, bringing about a new
understanding ofwomen's equality, aswell as ofhomosexuality.
Historians generally restrict the term "new woman" to mean the unmar-
ried, middle-class women who entered public spaceat the turn of the cen-
tury. The type included social reformers like Florence Kelley, travelers like
Jane Dieula6oy, writers like Natalie Barney, photographers like Juba Mar-
garet Cameron, and radicaislike Emma Goldman. Despite their differ-
ences, all were independent, assertive, self-supporting; some were openly
sexual. 'IAny woman who shows herself dishonors herselfj" Rousseau had
written in the eighteenth century.' A century later the entry of the middle-
classwoman indo public spaceredefined the urban landscape.
The new woman presaged a new strand of gender consciousness,one
whose governing norm was //zdyz,/dwa#O. Wümen first expressedthis norm
in terms ofa desire6or a lidebeyond the family. Thus, in her i8gz talk beâore
the U.S! SenateCommittee on Women Suarage,Elizabeth Cada Stanton
voiced women's wish to move beyond "the incidental relations of lide, such
 44 l:sECRE'tido pí:iene s o UL Genür. Snçuiatit),and PwsonaILift 45
as mother, wife, suster,daughter" to focus instead on what she called the
"individuality of each human soul."; Closely relaced to sexuality, individu-
ality was at odds with the organized women's movement, which stressed
female virtue and domesticity. Twenty-two yearsater SEanton'sspeech,the
6eminist Edna Kenton wrote: "We have grown accustomed in theseyears to
something known as the Woman movement. That has an old sound--it is
old." Shewent on: "The new wonderful, final stepwhich woman musa
rake is to enter upon the free unfolding of her personality as an end in
itself."9
S

Even more than the new woman, the mate homosexual pioneered per-
sonal lide in the penseoflife outside ofl or not deíined by, the íamily. He algo
made explicit its sexualdimensions. The dando, the .#znezíBthe rake, the
fop, the man of peelingpreâgured the homosexual, while also anticipating
the fin de siêcle reorientation to leisure, receptivity, and cansumption.:'
Except for a few highly publicized exceptions,the figure of the lesbian
tended to jade indo that of the new woman, but an explicit male homosex-
ual identity emergedin the i8gos. The three i895 trials of OscarWilde
marked the turning point. Even ater severalyoung men tesEifiedthat they
had had sexwith him, his supporters found the charge inconceivable. "You Edward Carpenter: pioneer ofhomosexual
talk with passion and conviction, as if l were innocent," Wllde exclaimed to !iberation (c: iria)
the journalist Frank barris. "But you arr innocentl" cried Harris ín amaze-
ment.l"No," saidWllde, "I thought you knew that all along.""I did not
know " Harris replied. "I did not believethe accusation.l did not believeit enmentfeminism had maintained that asrational beingsmen and women
11 6ora second.I'j: sharedailcommon nature. The nineteenth-century middle classeshad
Just as the new woman rejected a sharp dichotomy between man and rejectedthat vim, insisting that men and women fere fundamentallydif-
woman, se the new homosexual rejected sexual dichotomy. Edward Car- 6erent.,Bota views restedon assumptiansabout women'snatura. By
penter, auEhor of the i8g6 Zopf Com/ng cfHgr, described his great leap of contrast, the new .woman;. aüd the homosexual presaged the unfolding
Joy upon reading Whitman and finding there a capacious altitude toward of personal lide. They aspired to relations whose governing norm was nd-
lidethat accorded
with hisown. RejectingHavelockEllas's
defende
ofhomo- cher sameness nor difFerence but rather individuality. Psychoanaiysis game
sexuality asa "sport," Carpenter termed homosexuality "perfectly natural, a expression to tais nora.
pari of Nature'sinfinite variety,the diversiy and richnessof which defies ThaEnorm, however was doubly utopian. First, individuality depends
society'scrude moral and sexual classifications." Eras was the great leveler; upon a securechildhood, freedom from want, shared cultural institutions.
homosexuality existed in all classes.InRuenced by the .Bóírgnz'azlkíí#, Car- rough social equality. Yet the gamehistorical eorcesthat produçed the
penter cited Krishna: 'Only by lave can men seeme, and knów me, and aspiration toward individuahty were undermining its social prerequisites.
comeunto me.''' In addition, individuality in lave could not fiourish widely in a period in
The new woman and the mate homosexual were only the most visible
which women fere denied suarage, excluded from higher education, and
Êgureson the new horizon of personallide.They made explicit norma of banned from many proâessions.Just as the emerging working classeshad
individuality that had a widef following. The result wasa deepeningof limited opportuniries âor autonomy, sa the sexualfreedom that gamewith a
the meaning ofwomen's emancipation, one that prepared the way for the genuineb personal bife was still a dangerous option Forwomen. This aware-
It
redefinition that occurred in the igzos. Centered on equal rights, Enlight- nesslay behind Mary Wollstonecraft's cautiously 6ormulatedwish that the
l
46 gsE CRr TSiçO re#Tnx so u L
difference between the sexesbe confined to the sphere ofsexual lave; in the
absenceof social equaliW-she herself had attempted suicida over one love
aííàir and wasto die from complications following childbirth in another.
Thus, the promiseof individuality in sexualand romantic lidewasp:ema'
tire. As a result, Freud's second contribution to modem personal lide, his
conception of a personal sexualiW-left an ambiguous legacy.
As an upwardly mobile young researcherand doutor, Freud hem typical
Victorian ideas cohcerning gender. In i883 he brote his fiancée: "The mob
lives vens to its appetites, and we deprive ourselves. We.depnve ourselves in
arder to maintain our integrity, we economizein our health, our capacity
6or enjoyment, our emotions; we caveourselvesfot something, not know-
ing for what. And this habit of constantsuppressionof natural instincts
givesus the quality ofrefinement." Reânement, he contiüued, presupposed
women's place within the come. ScoHing at Harriet Taylor's essas "The
Enfranchisement of Women," which he had just translated unto German,
Freud conceded that "law and custom cave much to give women that has
beenwithheld from trem, but theposition ofwomen will surelybewhat it
is: in youth an adored darling and in mature yearsa loved wife."'
Yet, despite his conventional attitudes, Freud unwittingly hastened the
crumbling of the nineteenth-century gender arder. Overturning one of.its
central features,he undid the knot çhat tied the sexual instincts to the dif-
íerencebetweenthe sebes.From the standpoint ofthe biology ofhis time, a
man's:sexual "instinct" was directed toward women, a woman's toward men.
To stresssexuality was to stressthe.';natural" attraction of men and women
toward one another, while algo assuming men's activity and women's passiv-
ity. These dichotomies had pervaded discussions of hysteria. In Freud's
milieu, however,the link betweenthe instincts and heterosexuality
was
being questianed.
Sexologists,exponents of a new Êeld of study based on the application
ofDarwinism to sexuality,pioneered the questioning. Havelock Ellis, lwan
Bloco, Albert Mail, and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Freud's colleagueat the
University af Vienna, were the best-known researchers
; in the field.'+ in
the l87os and '8os they developed three new limesof thought that weakened
the presumption of innate heterosexuality.
First, the discovery of inEantile sexuality loosened the nes between sexu-
ality and the genitais and thereby weakened the idea that heterosexual
attraction was built unto the instincts. By the i88os, sexologicalinterest
Gcn&r. SexmLit),and Pnional Lide 41
in nongenital impulses had given ride to suco terms as "líbido,'? "compo-
nent instincts," "erotogenic zones," "autoeroticism," "orality," "anality,
ãnd. "narcissism.".Thumb sucking was considered a sexual expression.
Fliess's1897book, i ZBr Re&fja7zS
.Bffwrf?z/Ée ]Mole nd Wbmfzz}Sm O/ga/zj,
presented sobbing and diarrhea, as well as infant bale erections, a$sexual
acts.As we saw, Fliess taught Freud that inEantile sexuality was causally con-
nected to the neuroses.:5
Second, new work on âemale sexuality, pioneered by Havelock Ellas,
loosenedthe tie to reproduceion. Rejecting earlier theories ofa reproductive
instinct, which he hem were "unconsciously dominated by a superstitious
repugnance[o sex,".;Ellis sought to identify the distinctiveâeaturesof
women's sexuality. ]n his 1894 ]Uan 'znd ]Woman...4 S]M7 zn ]Z#m.za Sef-
a óÜ7 Xamã/ CBazar/mK, he argued that while mole sexualitywas predomi-
nantly open and aggressive, female sexuality was elusive. The sexual impulso
in women wasat onde larger and more difFuse,involving more of both the
mind and rhe body, whereas male sexuality was âocusedon a single goal, the
ejaculation ofsemen into the vagina.:ÕSuch theories were still imbedded in
nineteenth-century assumptions concerning men's and women's natures.
Nonetheless,they opened the way for an understanding offemale sexuality
that did not reduce it [o the complement ofmale desire.
Finally,new work on homosexualityand on the "perversions"chal-
lenged the assumption of innate heterosexuality, Here the sexologisrs
had been preceded by English Hellenists, who used Placa to redefine male
rolei, and by French writers who»linked homosexuality to moderniy.
But sexology brought awarenessofhamosexuality to a new levei. The coin-
ing of the term ':homosexual"in t86g was 6ollowedby other neolo-
gismo: such as, "urning," "tribade," "third sex," "uranian,':. "sapphic," and
arcadian. ' "lnvert"(Freud's original usage) was introduced .to replace the
legalterm "sodomite."'' Kraat-Ebing's i886 /)gcÉopúrÉ/úSexo/,z#s,
ofiginally
a brief study published in Latin, mushroomed to z38 case histories and
437pagesby the twelfth edition in igo3, largely as a result of confessional
leetersseno to the author.'' Some 3zo publications about homosexuality
appearedbetween i895 and igo5 in Germany alone.-s Maná attributed
homosexuality's new prominence to the rise ofthe cities. In TBerlins Drittes
Geschlecht"(igo4), published in Dar mr ll ofZ,{#?//z /óe .BzgClg the sex-
ologist Magnus Hirschfeld catalogued the clubs, restaurante,hotels, and
bathhouses of gay men. .lwan Bloch's Z)aJ Sexo/ zZZfÓf/z z Jfrfr Zr/f(l9o6)
studied the homosexual "vibrations" that emanated Eram ballrooms, dance
Hoors,cabarets,and cita screets."
 48 SBCKX't.s op 'lnx se ul Gender, Sext4aliq. and Pnsonal Lide õ. q

The emerging awarenessof homosexuality could have challenged the

presumption óf normative heterosexuality.But the twentieth-century
meaning ofhomosexuality did not yet exist. Rather, homosexualiEywasstill
subsumed within the general framework of fender difFerence; The relevant
distinction amongmen, which had come down from antiquiy, wasnot
whether one slept w'ith men or with women, but whether one adopted the
active or passivosexual role. The receptive partner was stigmatized as a
'sissy," "hiry," "pussy-foot," "Miss Nancy," "Mary-Anne,?' or "she-man,"
while the man who penetrated another man was simply a man. There was
sçarcely
anymentionof the lesbian.A womanwho steppedóut of her
assignedgender role might be termed a new woman, a cross-dresser,
or a
dose friend, but her sexuality was barely remarked upon. Thus, gender
structured the entire field of meanings within which sexuality was under-
stood. Sexuality wasa funccion of fender.
Sexologists, too, assumed,that gender binarism was the proper fume Éor
analyzing sexuality. That assumption structured the master concept they
used to explain homosexuality, namely, ó/fexwa/íg Bisexuality in the late
nineteenth century did not have its present-day meaning of taking sexual
partners from bota mexes.Rather, it meant androgyny: the condition of an
individual with characteristics ofboth sexes. The idem descends from Placa's
$mpaifwm. In the z8gosartista and writers revived it as a way of describ-
ing deviations fiam the established gender arder. For some, androgyny
expressed
a new ideal to be distinguishedfrom hermaphroditism,which
was consideredan aberration of nature, For Oscar Wilde, for example, the
androgyne combined the grace ofAdonis with the beauty of Helenl" For
acto Weininger, by contrast, admixture of the "M"- and "W" íactors
entailed degeneration; the presente of the "W" factor corrupted autonomy,
which was found in an unadulteratedform only in Placa,Christ, and
Immanue}Kart.q
Bisexuality was central to the sexologists' thinking." They viewed all
human beings as internally divided between the masculine and the femi-
nine. At a time when the endocrine system was unknown, Havelock Ellas
intermediate sex, éombining elements of the mate and eemale'Third-sex
imagery pervaded Magnas Hirsch6eld's Scientiâc Humanitarian Commit-
tee in its early years, as well as Havelock Ellis's six-volume SNdyes/ zÁr .7)9.
c4aÚ7Wof Sa. HirschGeld :and Ellas used this imagery to destigmatize
homosexuality and [o argue Eor its decriminalization at a time when Ger-
rnany and England had harsh nationwide antihomosexuality laws.
Desplte its progressivouses,the concept.ofbisexuality did not challenge
the principie of gender binarism. Rather,:by describing the individual as
composild of masculine and âeminine currents, the sexologists a#rmrd
fender bina:tsm even as they sought to encouragetolerante eor sexual
deviance." Thus, bisexuality as the sexologisrs used.it was a transitional
concept. It represented an unstable compromise between the older empha-
sison lixed fender diüerencesand the dawningawareness
of the idiosyn-
craticnatureofsexualityandlove. i:uií íx -,.. } .., Ú-.:''
In the i8gos Freud look up the sexologists'idemof bisexuality. His inno-
vauon was to apply:it.not to homosexuality but to the neuroses,especiaUy
hysteria. Psychoanalysis was bom when he eailed. ')ni 'pKu;i ! -r"'""/
Freudb interestin bisexuality took oH'around z895.Pareof the excitement
that characterizedhis relations with Fliess lay in the fàct that the mo men
red what thi# regarded as-the secret of the concept. 'l was still lying in
bed, Fliesslaser reminded Freud, when "you raid me the.casehistory ofa
BW x: iã'=.=ti:::'i
::=iÜiÜ
from the masculine paras of her psyche."' Play$ul allusioãs to bisexuality
i.:eresprlnkled throughout théir correspandence. At tomesFreud portrayed
himself as a young woman. Approaching a "congress" With F iess as they
termed their infrequent méetings, Freud described his "tempora] robe lubri.

11
argued that each individual contained male and female "germe.'?Krafh:
Ebing analyzed sadism and masochism in termo of the male's activity and
the femalc'spassivity respectively;both currents, he maintained, were found
in everyone.'4gamesG. Kiernan describedthe primates ás bisexual.'sOther
researçhersemphasized the feminization or masculinization of the opposite
#XHB:!a:!H:
ül@1l$
Fliesssincerestin bisexuality centered on its relation to periodicit»
the intermittent character of organic dwelopment He believed that all
11 $ex:men with breasts,women with facial cair.
urewasregulated by male and 6emalesubstances,to which temporal cycles
rn '#SE C RE TS 0 F TlíE SO.U L'
corresponded--twenty-three days for the malcl, twenty-eight . for the
female. Combinations of these cycles determined the lied cycle, including
the moment of death.Teus, Fliess sawbisexuality ps an organic face. h
At first Freud shared Fliess'sconception and sdught to use it to explain
was that there
hysteria. His working assumption, .he tom Fliess in í897,
were male and female substances in bota seres and that the male substance
«proiuces pleasure "'8 But as his thinking grei il+reasingly psychological,
Slã'E=uf:i:=::1;=:J'=n:ll
ÇB
a:i::llüi:i:RHii01$
moved to an increasingly psychological conceptio+, .he continued at first to
think of masculinity and femininity as discrete psdchological currents.
Attempting to &plain hysteriain termsof majculinity and femininity,
ud brought the gender assumptionsofVictoria+ culture to a new levei of
:i!: =ü=::i. :J ,rzls=J"ç==='#;l
masculinity in men helped explain their intellectual nature as well as their
greater propenstty toward perversion. Women were more inclined toward
repression. Their "natural' sexual passvlty," Freüd elaborated,
their being more inclined to hysteria."'' His equation of líbido with mas
culinity also seemedto explain why women a(jmitted more readily to
llomosexual experiencesthan men. For women, ad experiencewith another
nomuscxuaS
masculineand there6orenot se prole to being represa.ed.
By
contrast, a man's experientewith another man was linked to femininity and
teus likely to be repressed."What men essentially [epress'" Freud observed,
"isthepederasticelement."': d- ; l
" As he sought.to explain hysteria in termo of thé dichatomy between the
mexes,Freud found his explanations increasingly unsatisfying: :jXvomonths
ater rejecting the seduction theory, he informed Fliess that he had "given
up the idemofexplaining líbido asthe masculine factor and repressionasthe
6eminine one. " Instead,he turned to the idea that each sex repr'ssed .the
opposite sex in itself. Then he suggested that bota sexesrepressed masculin'
'rr '';i ' nse oflibido.3' in i899 a transitional formulation appeared in a
let:er to Fliess:"Bisexualityl You arecertainly right about it. l am accustom-
ing myself to the idea of'regarding every sexual act as a process in which
tour individuais are involved;"" uu:l'l; ç*:a:,
Formulatians super6cially similar to thoseof tHelate l8gos can be found
.oughout Freud's bater writings, but after i8Pg they no longes VL'
explanatory.force The' reasonwasthat in the cdurseof completing Z»e
Gc(taet, SexttaLit avia Personal Lifc S\
/nrfrPrfzaf/o ofDrf.z/pzi, Freud Éormulated an idem that rendered irrelevant
both the nineteenth-century concept of bisexuality and the assumption of
fixed gender diüerences upon which it was predicated. The idea was the
personalunconscious.
A,:;:, U' - :t;';b;' ,?; , =ç' :b' ''líFlf'rl;.i':l''4'!'i'
rlrter lormulatlng his tPeory of the personal unconscious, Freud stopped
trying to explain hysteriJLin [erms of a conflict between the masculine and
Gemininesidesof the individual. .Althoughhe would continueto regerto
bisexuality throughout his lide, he changed the term's meaning. Masculinity
and âemininity were no longer psychological currents 6or Frêud; nor did
he ever again use the diéhotomy between trem .asan explanation. Freud's
redeânition of bisexuality began when he started to think abóut sexuality as
distinct from fender.
Throughout much of the z8gos, Freud tended to deter to Fliess on the
subject of sexuality. But in i8g8, as he was finishing rXf /nizr7 fza/ío of
Z)reappzf,
he in6ormed Fljess that he did not intend to leave thc psychology
described in the .dreaq book 'fhanging in the air without an, organic
basis."'sA year laser he trote, ':A theory ofsexuality may be the immediate
successorto the dream book."3' As he began to work on this theory, the
explai.:s
implications of the idembf the personal unconscious were not immediately
clearto him. In igoi he in6ormedFliessthat hisnexowork would be titled
'Human Bisexualit)c" it would be his fase and most profound, because
repression,thé "core prpblem, is possible only through reaction between
two sexual cürrents," that is, between masculinity and 6emininity.SZ A
monthjter he askedFlifss to collaborate on the:work: eveWhing he knew
i''.:..
about the subject he dwed to him,nhe tonceded. Then he reiterated:
"Repressionand the neuroses, and thus the independence of the uncon-
scious,presupposebisexuality."38
ZBreeEiiagf o Sex /íg is the work Freudoriginally intendedto cala
'Human Bisexuality."'PYet it barely mentioned bisexualiy. The osrensible
reasonwas that Freud was protecting Fliess'sclaim to publish on the subject
first. In igo3 Otto Weininger's Sex fzd C»úxuríprhad introduced the idea of
bisexualityto a wide audience:}
Fliessfelt that Weiningerhad stolen his
ideal, and charged Freud with being the source of the leak, becauseFreud
had commentedon an early draft of Sexand CBaxurferand algobecause
,-: :LH l
Freudhad explained bisexuality to a patient, Hermann Swoboda, who was
algoa friend ofWeininger's." To conciliate Fliess,Freud promised to not to
discussthe subject except where unavoidable, as "when l mention the
homosexual current in neurotics."P in Éact, anything resembling Fliess's
. .;S E'CRBTSk O F 'THE S 0 UL Gcttàr, SexmLi$ and PasonatLide S3
and female object choices, on:+the other, could be fa/znffí?Z with one
another.'; But they did not fa/ c/zü,as they would have had to according [o
nineteenth-centurythinking
As the dichoEomy of gender began to lose its 6oundational character,it
was replaced by a new dichotomy, however, that between a heterosexual
and a homosexual object choice. Thus, "homosexual," as a designation for
someone who chooses a sexual parrner of the same sex, is a .pofr-Freudian
concept.Although the consequences
of this shift were ambiguous,as
we shall see, ZZ ef Eísa7sconstituted an extraordinary moment. With his
redefinition of bisexuahty, Freud efEectivcly reâormulated Wollstonecraft's
wish. On the one hand, he limited the relevanceof fender to the sphereof
sexuality, asshe had urged. At the game time sexuality, in its new, extended
senso,which led eventually to ab)ect choice, supplied much of the chape
and motive power of the unconscious, and thereby of the relations between
men and women. The consequentesbecameapparent in the "Fragment of
an Analysis ofa Case of Histeria," the "Dará" case, in which Freud formu-
lated his solution to the problem of hysteria.

Ida Bauer ("Dota") was a new woman. An eighteen-year-old Jewish stu-

dent, whom Freud described as "ofvery independent judgement," she reg-
ularly visited the secessionistshowsof Klimt and Hoffmann. Apara fTom
her studies, her main interest lay in feminist lectures.,Influenced by the
General Austrian Women's Association's advice to women, she had sworn
not to marry until she was older. She had becomeseverelydepressedwhen
shewas eight yearsold (a Facethat many oftoday's political readings of the
casecendto ignore), and again in adolescence,when shewastreated by elec-
trotherapy Her father, an industrialist who had emigrated from Bohemia,
had himselfconsulted Freud for ruberculosis and syphilis. In igoo, describ-
ing his daughter asmoody, hostile, and with a symptomatic cough, he talk
her to see Freud.
The resultingstory is well known. During her adolescence,Ida'sÉather
subtly encouragedher relationship with an older man, Herr K., in arder
that he might pursue a liaison with Hera K.'s wi6e. Ida becameespecially
upsetwhen Hera K. propositioned her using the phrase"I get nothing from
my wiâe," which she had overheard him use with a servant girl. Freud even-
tually tom Ida that she had been attracted to Herr K., but in the published
casestudy he asserted rhat she was more deeply in love with /kam K., her
Eather'sparamour. It is unclear whether he ever discussed the significante of
this with Ida. After eleven weeks she broke off treacment.
{ d. :ãS E C RE T.S 0 F;?T H: E S.0 U L
The caseshows the great impact the idea of the personal unconscious
had on the nineceenth-century conception of gender.:Freud's main interesE
lay'in Ida Bauer'sinfantile or nongenital sexualwishes. He traced the vicis-
situdes of those wishes as if they were elemento in a dream. For example,
awareof the significante of íellatio in the liaison between Frau K. and her
impotent father, Freud's"Dará" had displacedgenital excitementsto her
mouth; their repressionled to her cough." Freud treated Ida as a hlly sex-
ual person--somethingthat wasunusualin the contextof his times,and
that has receivedmuch criticism since then. But his main point wasthat she
was unable to consolidate her oWn sexuality. Inclined toward both grau K.
dnZHerr K., she was unable to decide between trem. The conRict between
a male and female object choice, Freud argued, was the predominant con-
flict in hysteria. ZBisambivalencehe now called bisexualiy.
In "Dará," accordingly, there are no preexisting masculine and feminine
currents. Rather, Freud portrayed a woman struggling to consolidate a plu-
rality of sexual aims, impulsos, and oblects. Ida's conHict was not between
masculinity and femininity but rather betweenchoosing a man and choos-
ing a woman. Her hysteria lay in her inability to resolvethis canflict, not in
ehefacathat shewasinclined in both directions.In breakingoH'treatment,
Freud claimed, she hoped to resolve the conflict. Since she associated Freud
with her father, and with men in general, the meaning of the break was=
Men areall se detestable
that l would rathernot marra.Tais is my
revenge."'sBut this action did not resolveher confiict; she neither becamea
lesbian nor settled on men.
After "Dou," Freud.took hysteriato mean the inability to choosebetween
mole and 6emaleobjecto.The causeof the inability, he believed,was that the
hysteric idendfied with both. So Freud likened the hysteric to a masturbating
man who vacillatedbetweenimagining himselfas a dominating man and asa
submissivewoman; ór to a female who pressedher dressagainst her body with
one hand while tearing it oHwith the other. Freud also linked hysteria to resis-
tance in the transference;the patient constantly switched associations,"as
though on to an adjoining track, unto the field of the contrary meaning.""
Ultimately, howwer, the roots ofbisexuality lay in the structure of the Éamily.
As Freud later wrote, a vacillation between mate and Eemale"characterizes
everyone'schoice ofa lave-object. It is first broughç to the child's notice by the
time-honoured question: 'Which do you lave most, Daddy or Mummy?' ""
By lgoo, then, Freud had broken with the conceptual.paradigm of
nineteenth-century sexology.The sexual instincts were no longer bound
Ge7t&r,Sexualiq.andPevsonaILi$ 5S
to two genders conceived as opposites. The idea that masculiniy and femi-
ninity fere independent psychological currents had given way. to the idem
of an individual, psychical organization of sexualiW.Likewise, the distinc-
tion beEweenaim and object undermined any charak:terizationofhomosex.
uals in terms of a set of behavioral traits.'8 in challenging the notion that
homosexualmen were effeminate, or homosexual women mannish, Freud
went Earbeyond the sexologists.4s
His rehsal to believethat an object
choice, such as;homosexuality, implied any particular psychological traits
exempliíied the general tendency of analytic thought to bleak down corre-
lations of individuais with "types," such as man and woman, heterosexual
and homosexual,Christian and Jew. It thereby expressednewly salient,
sociocultural aspirations âor individuality;
Nonetheless, in spite of these potentially emancipatory implications,
Ida Bauer walked out on Freud. She apparently did not appreciatebeing
tom that her problem was due to her Eailureto resolveher sexualvacillation.
Indeed, [o interpret her difHculties exclusively in these terms was mislead-
ing and patentially harmful in a time and peacewhen women like Bater
were systematicallyintimidated and exploitedby men. Under thesecondi-
tions, when women could neither vote nor earn their own living, Freud's
exclusiveinsistente on intrapsychic emancipation seemedone-sided. This
doesa long way toward explaining the unfriendly reception he got not only
from Bauer but also from the Viennese women activists with whom she was
associâted.
This point shauld not be overstated::From the first, women constituted
the main group of Freud's readers,aswell as of analytic patients.They were
drawn to psychoanalysis for the same reason that men were: at the very least
it promised releasefrom suffering, when it did not articulate a radically new
and deep conception of sexuality and of individuality. Emma Goldman,
who first heard Freud speakin Vienna in the mid-nineties, and waspresent
at the Clark University lecturesin igog, is a casein point. Linking the sex-
ual emancipation ofyounger working-class women to revolution, Goldman
6elt rhat the "merely externasemancipation" sponsoredby âeministsturned
the modem woman into an artificial being, a "praâessionalautomaton." At
the same time, however, many other "new Women" rejected what Charlotte
Perkins Gilman called the "philosophical sex-mania of Sigmund Freud,
now poisoning the world."" Thus, Phyllis Blanchard, an American psy-
chologist who read Freud in college in the mid-igios, was shocked to dis-
cover that "the necessita of a normal sex lide 6or women was a scientific
Eact."One ofthe most disturbing innovations ofmoderniW, she added,was
the emergence of the sex element in marriage."s'
 s6 SECRETAOFI'TnE soul
Women's wariness of sexuality reHected their economia dependence on
men and their nes to the family. Accordingly, most women activists of the
time fere preoccupiedwith support 6ormotherhood. Ccrtainly, this wasa
high-priority issuefor the Catholic and socialist women's organizations that
rejected psychoanalysis. But even activista sympathetic to psychoanalyus
sought to connect sexual emancipation with re6ormed conditions for
women's mothering. A paradigmatic example was Greve Meiscl-Hcss,
Freud'smost important feminist follower in Vienna. Mêisel-Hess'sigo9
book, l)jf Sex fZb Xrüe used Freudian ideas to ergue that patriarchy was
based upon sexual repression." But unlike Freud, Meisel-Hcss argued that
sexual emancipation had to be based on women's economic independence
and on social and economiasupport for motherhood. Similarly, Auguste
Fickert was the Viennese representative of Ellen Key, the Swedish educator
who propounded a "new love" basedsolely oH the "natural attractión of
man and woman to éach other."s' in i893 Fickert helped 6ound the General
Austrian Women's Association, which inspired ida Bauer's decision not to
marry. Fickert algo led in building thc Bund ftir Mutterschuez,which
demanded social support for women's right to bear children under any-cir-
cumstances they chose. Freud was a member ofthe Band. Yet there was lit-
tle in his writings that reflectedits politicasand materialist concerne.
The reception ofpsychoanalysis algo reHected more concreto sexual con-
Hicts. Rosa Mayreder, cofounder with Fickert of the General Ausuian
Women's Association, called Freud "an outstanding dialectician" but a
monomaniac," and brote a book restating his Oedipal theories in nonsex-
ual terras.Far many yearsher supportive husband, Kart, worked sine by
sido with her in the middle-class women's movement.5' After igiz, however,
Karl suHered from severedepressions and bouts of. insanity, Together hus-
11 band: and wiEe consulted fifW-mne doctors, coming eventually to Freud.
According to Harriet Anderson, the leading historian of Viennesetemi,
nism, 'Freud suggested that Kart's depressions were the expression of a
sensoof inferioriW in the faceof a strong, intellectual woman who domi-
nated:her husband." Soon after, at breakfast her husband stated: "I cave
written my obituary. lt has thc heading: RosaMayreder's husband dead." in
her diary Rosawrote: 'IAt first l laughedbut then l s&wrhat it confirmed
Freud's vier that he suüers fiam my personaliW because l suppress his mas-
culine prerogative. :b . If l had to admit that, it would be the ultimate mar-
yfdom for me, the completeloasof everyüing «'hich madeour bife
11i
together valuable." Anderson glossesMayreder's phrase.'masculine prerog'
avive" as "the need of men to feel superior to women."ss Be that as it may-
l
Gcn&r, Sexmlit], andPnsotiat Lide SI
despiresome agreementon the levei of intellectual content, Mayreder's
âeminism and Freud's psychoanalysis were at odds in daily lide.
Freud was sometimes retrograde in his attirudes toward women. But the
deepersourceof his reticente vis-à-vis Geminismwas that {he implications
ofhis work lay elsewhere:in establishing the autonomy of intrapsychic lide
and the irreducibly personal character oflove. For the women's movement.
however, the nes that bound women to family relations needed to be loos-
ened and re6ormed óegoPP
the fu]] range of women's desires,including the
füll range of women's bisexuality, could fiourish. Thus, 6eminism and psy-
choanalysis were out of phase. Sociologically prematuro, Freud's stress on
individuali$ in lave was simultaneously attractive and problemadc. Yet it
was precisely the ."deconrextualization" of psychoanalysis--,-the separation
of the sexualand the psychical from the social---tha{ gave it suco authoriy.
(=iven the eact that âeminism and psychoanalysis fere oút of phase, '&hat
would be the implicaeions of psychoanalysisfor the relations between men
and women? To answer this question, let us return to our analogy with
Calvinism. As Max beber showed, the birth of capitalism was associated
with a revolucionary
reappraisalof the role of women,basedupon height-
ened respect Éor their labor within the Eamily. The second industrial rev=lu-
don, by contrast,promoted éiã:êam/ZüzZimdan,
or the piseof a persona]lide
beyond the confines ofthe Éamily.To be fure, it was only after the ente of
women into the ranksofanalysis, and the consequentreorientation ofanaly-
sis to the role of the mother, that anal»is becameespeciallymeaninghl to
the messesof women. But dcEamilializadon: had ihmediate meaning âor
men. It implied, before anything esse,a new consciousnessconcerning their
relation to their Éathers,and to other men.
Moer he published Z»r /ni?r7xPaaf/a#ofZ)reagi, Freud 6ounded a small.
all-mate group, :the Wednesday Psychological Society, which met in his
houseand eventuallybecamoltheVienna Psychoanalytic
SocieW.Com'
pasêd. of ]ower-middle-club Jewish doctors, and expanded gradually [o
include studen [s fiam outside Vienna, the society was eHectivejy a Mdlzner
ó#/zd a circle ofyounger men drawn to a charismatic eather figure and hnc-
tioning u an alternative to convencional domesticiW.As was oHtenthe case
with suco groups, the psychoanalytic MZn eró /zZ mobilized the passive,
dependent, and homoerotic Éeelingsof its members. In that context, Freud
continued to work out the implications of his rejection of ninereenth-
century fender psychology. The result was a series of new case studies, all
ç8' SECKET''S' OP, THEÊS 0UL
of whose subjects were men. Aimed at elucidating general psychical pro-
cesses
yet unwittingly taking the mole asthe norm, thesestudiescan be read
as explorations of men's bisexuality in the context of the dawn of personal
liÊ
Classicalbourgeois liberalism of the sort Schorske valorized had set its
ideal of. masculinity against that of the aristocracy.'Whereasthe aristocracy
esteemedphysicality and marcial virtues, liberais equated mascultnity with
.eason,loyaly to the domesticEamily,and self-control.By the late
:eenth century, however, the rise of ehecorpo'ation and the declina af pri-
vâte productive property had shaken the meaning of masculiniy by
weakening the band betweenfather and son. Many regarded this as a loas.
Basal Ransom in Henry games's ZBe .Boironiani complained that "the mas-
culine tomeis passingout of the world."só When Charcot first encountered
z#zaühysteria, he noted that his patient behaved "just like a woman." Tais is
something, he added, "that has never entered the imagination of some peo'
ple."s7 Neurologists commented on young men's "weakness,?' which they
attribuced to their inability to refr4in from masturbating, the telltale symp-
tom of neurasehenia.s8 Suco neolagisms of the i8gos as "stuffed short," "com
Geet,':and "sissy" reflected the widespread perceptioó. that masculinity was
in declina,.Boy Scouts, the Olympics, and college athletics were among:the
antidotesproposed.SP ' di .$htÓ :;{3 ,; ,1 ;üaÜliuJ !C;z'H
Recently, severalauthors cave assimilated Freud to those defending a
waning and embattled masculine ideal. Sander Gilman has argued that
Freud was se fearful of being viewed as Jewish that he projected onto
women the identi6'ing marks (circumcision) and negative traits (emotional
lability and insinceriy) thacthe anta-Semiticliterature of the'time ascribed
to the Jews.6'The result, for Gilman's 6ormer colleague Eric Santner, was
an aggressively heterosexual psychoanalytic theory,' a "compulsive elabo-
ration . . ofthe se-called positivo Oedipus complex."': There is some truta
to these characterizations, but very little. The main point of Freud's case
studies was to reject the idea that being a man necessitated being in central.
To be sure, Freud's subjects repudiated their passiveand submissive wishes.
But that was the problem Freud analyzed, not the course óf action he
recommended.
, Far !from. aggressivelypromoting heterosexuality, Freud's casestudies
were:;.early êxplorations of mole ó/sexuality, .concerned not
ambivãlence over object choice but also with boys' identification with their
mothers, and with their passivity and narcissisticsensitivity. In their back-
jjround lay a new awarenessof male vulnerability in the epoch of mechas
nization. Freud's casestudies ater "Dou" should be read alongside such
Ge7tder,Sen alia), arü PersonatLife S9
works as Gustave Caillebotte's i8g8 painting of a naked man caught Eram
behind, his ânus refiecting opennessand frailty, while his pasture reflecte
srrength, and Franz Kafka's lgiz "The Judgment," whose hero is driven to
his death when his Eatherimitates his son'sfiancée: " 'Becauseshe lifted up
her skirts,' his eatherbeganto fiute 1. .: and mimicking her he lifted !his
nightshirt se high that one could seethe soaron his thigh from his war
wound, 'becauseshe lifted her skirts like this and this yõu made,up [o
ninfa-
, .
hera' "õ' These and other early-twentieth-century works fere concerned
with male vulnerabiliey, but not with homosexuality as the terá is under-
srood today.
Men's vulnerability in relation to other men was hardly unknown to
Freud, as we have seen.After completing ZXf /n/el7lr?zaf/onofZ)rf.zms,he
wrote Fliess:"No one can replaceÊorme the relationshipwith the friend
whicha special-:--possibly
Éeminine--sido
demanda."
ButçÍ
in igio he
in6ormed his disciple Sándor Ferenczi that he no longer had "any need to
uncover [his] personality comp]ete]y. . . .: lince F]iess'scase. . . that need
hasbeen extinguished. A part of homosexual cathexis has been wichdrawn
and made use of to enlarge my own ego."ó3.Asin this passage,Freud often
used the term ".homosexual" tó describe men's passive wishes in regard to
er men: and especiallyin regard to what came to be known as"Eatherfig-
. ura." But he did not mean an a#uZrsame-sexobject choice exceptwhere, as
in his study of Leonardo da Venci, he made that senteexplicit. Rarher, he
meant an lzt#anf/Zrwish, a boy's passivo, narcissistic, bisexual desire to be the
object of his father's lave.
Such wishes, along with the deepening of individuality that can occur
when men understand trem in themselves, were the 6ocus ofthe "Rat Man"
(i9o9), "Little Hans" (igog), Schreber (ign), and "WolfMan" (igi5) stud-
ies. In each caseFreud analyzed what he eventually called the "negative
Oedipus complex": the boy's identification :with his mother, which'leads
him to seekto win his Êather'slove through submission rather than through
rivalry and achievement.
Freud'sÊrst casestudy after "Dou," the "Rat Man," which he wrote in
igo7, wasalgohis first exploration ofthis "homosexual" dimension in men's
psycholog},. Ernst Lanzer, the patient, was a young lawyer who 6elt that he
had wasted years fighting against his own ideas. Fulo of doubt and confii-
with
only sion, he [ound it impossible to recount the simple story of his inability to
retu= a paio ofglasses sent him in errar. His greatesr shame was his excite-
ment over a torture he had read about, in which rats chewed indo a pris-
oner'srectum.While he spoke,Freudfelt that Lanzerdemonstrated
a
horror at pleasure of his own ofwhich he himselfwas unaware."'4
 11 6o ''SE C RETS OP T HE SO UL
Freud argued that Lanzer'smaddening and self-contradictary associa-
ns would become comprehensible once they were understood asthe otn-
come of wo coRRiGEs.
The first was Lanzer'sconílict betweenloving a
woman and laving his father. Tais conHict was hysterical or bisexual in
exactly thc sente that Ida Bauer's was: it corresponded to a vacillation
between mole and female objects. At a deeper stratum, however, lay a sec-
ond conflict-between.Lanzer'spusive wishestoward his Eatherand his
rebellion against trem. A conRict between passivo and active aims, such ,as
Lanzer's, Freud argued, "çan not be described as 'masculíne' or 'feminine,
1.1 but it "can persist throughout bife and . .:: perm.anently attract a large por-
tion of sexual activity to itself"ó} Lanzer's problem, then, was not that he
had passivo wishcs. It was rather that to him these wishes signified "cmtra-
tion " Not his wishesbut his attempt to repudiate trem led to his neuroses.
Freud's ign account .ofthe caseofJudge Daniel Schreber continued this
logic« in lgoz Schreberpublished a memoir while attempdng to win release
from a mental hospital. The work attracted lide interest among psychia-
the years,he felt his mateorgans retract, his beard and moustache disappear
and his height diminish, and he believed that he was being sexuaUyusedby
IH his psychiatrist Ultimately, he "wholeheartedly inscribed the cultivation of
6emininityon my banner,"admitting that he wasvoluptuous "Eramthe top
af my head to the foles of my lcet as is the case only in the adula 6emale
»66
bo
In ign Freud published his analysis of Schreber s case. As in the: case of
the Rat Maá, Freud did not explain Schreber'sproblem in termo of "femi-
ninity.'; Nor did he consider Schrebcr a homosexua] in the senso that
Leonardo da Venci, for example, had been a homosexual. Instead,-Freud
explained Scheber's experiente in terms of the judge's narcissism or self
lave, as it had taken chape in his early relation to his eather. Sçhreber had
had two breakdowns,only the secondofwhich had resulted.in hospitaliza-
tion. Both were provoked by blows to his self-esteem: a humiliating election
loss in the first case ("Who is Sçhreber?" asked the newspap'rs) and a eãlure
11 to: father children in the second. In!'Freud's interpretation,. Schreber's
attempts to compensate 6or these b]ows ]ed him .back [o his inEantile, nar-
ctssistic i:elations to his Eather, whom he identiÍied with his psychiatrist. His
paranóia was a defende against tais early grandiosity: 'A man movesme"
became:'A man batesme." According to Freud, Schreber'sbeliefthat he was
a woman was not a worsening of his illness but a stop toward recovery,
Gen&r,Sexmt&D
atd Persona!
Li$ 6\
becausethrough it he aimed to retrieve the epoch in which he had been the
object of his father's lote.
The last of Freud's studies of the "negativo Oedipus complex" was his
igi4 account ofSergei PankejefE the "WolfMan." Pankejee a Russianaris-
[ocrat bom in i886, broke down after an attack of gonorrhea.His fàmily
consulted severalpsychiatriscs beÉorethey sought out Freud in igio. In
childhood PankejeHhad degraded his older susterout of resentment of.her
intellectual superiority. As an adult, he chore women whose education and
intelligence fere beneath his own. Nonetheless, Freud explicitly rejected
the vier that PankejeH'was asserting his "masculiniy." Instead he described
PankejefF'sbasiç wishes n passivoand masochistic, derived fiom seeingor
imagining his mother having sex with his bullying eather.Like Lanzer and
Schreber,PankejeH could nat tolerate those wishes becausethey signified
castrationto him. A man'swish to super or be htimiliated, Freud argued,
could be at least as powerful as his wish to dominate, and moreover was
more likely to be unconscious.Õ7
With such formulations, Freud eüectively cracked the gender bode
of nineteenth-century liberal culture. The case scudies showed that hav-
ing "passivo"and ''submissive"wishesdid not make a man a woman, ãs
nineteenth-century psychology had seemed to suggest. Nor did having suco
wishesin relation to another man make a man a homosexual.Specifically,
hiswork implied that the "problema"--hysteria,
:passiviy,dependency--
rhat Victorians had assignedto women, to the working class,or to "infe-
rior" ori: "uncivilized" people were universal--and,: Tindeed, í'fere?i not
problems at all but rather timeless characteristics of human psychology.
Teus, the logic of the distinction between those in contrai (white business-
men and&professionals)band those-in need of contrai (women, blacks,
homosexuals,and Jews)began to break down. In a pense,Freud can be
described as outing the white mole profissional's passive and dependent
wishes.
Here we see the force of Cara Schorske's emphasis on the introspective
roots of psychoanalysis.Analysis was bom out of reílection upon experi-
encesof deâeat,loas, mourning, and withdiawal. It was not a heroic ethic.
What was new in it, as revealed in the letters between Freud and his Gollow-
ers,was the emergente of a language çentered on recaem/z/ngthe universal-
ity not only of dependency needs but of cear and vulnerability. "I con6ess
chiato you with a struggle," Jung wrote to Freud in igo7; "veneration 6or
you is disgusting and ridiculous becauseof its undeniable erotic under-
tones."ói "]l wish you] had tom yourself Eram your inEantile role to peace
yaurselfnexoto me asan equal companion," Freud wrote Ferenczia few
62 SE CRE TSà1O F :TH E S O UL Geri&r, SexmLit) andPersana!LiÊ 63

yearslater; "I would rather Lave an independent friend but if you make Freud'sidea of a personal unconscious, and of a distinctively individual
suco diMculties, l will cave to accept you as a $on. "); íl:; :ã. M+ }., ; isí: .' constellation of sexual wishes that firsc take chape in relation to one's par-
enta, resonatedwith still broaderÊ.
currents. The Freudian unconscious
The deepestcontribution ofpsychoanalysis lay not in its ideal but in the
range of experiences it made available. Its early studies of masculinity appearedalong with such inventions as ehetypewriter, film, the moving-
pointed to the universality of suco experientes as passivity, vulnerability, picture camera, and the first mass daily newspapersread by bota men and
and, indeed, the dread ofcastration: These experiences.werenot alternativos women. The new media had, along with crime, two main topics: wars, suco
to reasonand control but rather their dark, neglectedcomplement. Far as the Spanish-American War, the Boer War, and the Moroccan crisis; and
from being especiallyappropriate[o the middle classes,:
then, in the lona sexual scandals,suco as the igo7 Eulenberg scandal in Germany, which
run psychoanalysishad the greatestmeaning 6or tbose who vete marginal- revealed that the kaiser was surrounded by a coterie of homosexuals, and
ized or excluded from the dominant $ources of power, .and onto whom the r88g Cleveland Street scandal in England, which concerned the discov-
these experiences had been projected: -those.confined to the Eamily; those ery of a homosexual brothel allegedly run by several lorde. Robert Musil's
who lived in the homosexual subculture, the Jewish ghetto, ;the ex-clave ZZf Man Wrgozlf Q ú#/lfi çaptui:edtais emergingworld by describingfin
urban neighborhood; those in conditions of exile, diáspora, and homeless- de siêcleVienna's eascinatian with Moosbrugger, a carpenter on trial 6or
ness.It is part ofthe irony ofthe history ofpsychoanalysis that thesegroups cutring up a young girl. "By what qualities did Moosbruggercausethe
receivedthe leastbenefit from it. Yet, as we shall see,in the long run the iate excitementand gooseflesh that for half of the two million peopleliving in
of analysis would depend on the powerless and the excluded, whose num- tais city amounted to p.ractically as,much as a Eamily quarrel?" the hera
bers at tomesincluded cheanalyststhemselves.-;'}.: :#$üi;!'ó Ol:'H . wonders. "ln the last resort all these casesare like a loose end of a thread
Like its approach to autonomy, the psychoanalytic approach to gender hanging out, and if one pulls at it, the whole tightly knit fabril ofsociety
look of a broader outlook and sensibility, one thac would lead in time begins to come undone."7:
outlook--
to a reformulation of the meaning of women's .equality. This
early-twentieth-çentury modernism--,was highly developed in Freud's
Vienna.While it did not assumeits hll statureuntil ater World War 1, a
common insistence on clarity, directness,and honesty ran through prewar
dressreform, architecture, philosophical work, and aestheticmovements, as
well as new forma of personal and collective lide. As the philosopher Rudolf
Camap later recalled, modernism demanded clarity everywhere but.realized
"that the fabril af lide can never quite be comprehended." it paid careful
attention to detail but sought to identi6' "the great lhes which run through
the wholé:"Z'
In describing sexuality asthe idiosyncratic expressionof the individual's
unconsciouswishes, Freud partook of this emerging modernist sensibiliW,
but he algo distinguished psyçhoanalysisfrom it. As we shall see,it was not
sexuality se muco as anne#?relzre--#he enfant'searly relations to authonty as
representedby the two parents--that Freud placed at the center of analysis.
That, as we shall algosee,wasthe reasonfor his insistente on the cearofcas-
tration. NoneEheless,transference was algo the key to the analytic method
becauseonly through the creation of the trans6erence could: the analyst dis-
cern the patient's "special individuality in the exercise of his capacity to
love--that is, in the conditions which he sets up for loving, in the impulses
he grarifiesby it, and in the aims he setsout to achievein it."':

CbaPter Tbree
ABSORPTION.AND
MARGINALITY
[[n ign] Wâ]tcr Lippmann]first] intloduccd us to the ideathat the
miüds of meti :were distorted by: ünconsçiaussuppressions. ll ;.
There were no warmer. quieter, more intensely thoughtful çon-
versaeionsat Mabe] Dodge's [sa]on] than those on Freud and his
implicaticns.
-Linçoln SteKens, 4 fa&/í2ynP/y
A s personal lide emerged out of the traditional family, it had an ambigu-
ous relation to the rest of socieW As the product of surplus labor--
labor bcyond what wasnecessaryto simply reproduce üe society--personal
bifepointcd beyond political-economia necessity.While the economy called
íor active and cooperativestrivings, personal lidewas the site of passiveand
l analysts would eventually
regressivo dcsires--to relax, to rest, to be cared fora to be loved 'for oneselC"
Idiosyncratic though it was, personal lide nonetheless had a social meaning.
It pointed toward the utopian but increasingly realistic possibility ol a socl-
ety that subordinatedeconomiaconsiderationsto human wishes--a post'
economia soçtety. .:. , .
The utopian charaçter of personal bife created a dilemma for those who
struggledto realizeits potential Either they could remam true to ,the
utopian impulse and risk becoming marginal, elitist, and sectarian;ar they
could âdopt a pragmatic,outward-laoking stançeand risk being absorbed
unto a roudnized hnctionalist regime. Marginality and absorption seemed
to represent the mutually exclusive peles ofan inescapable choice. Psycho-
anal»is was not alone in facing this choice. Artistic modernism, the other
11
\
main charismaticforce of the second industrial rwolution, algoencoun-
l
AbsoQtion andMargtnaliD 6S
tered it. Beginning with romanticism, the artist had symbolized :the free
individual who brought to socieq' not the peúormançe ofan assignedhnc-
tion but his or her own expressiveand emotional selfl During the second
industrial revolution, however, the culture industries began to integrate
artista indo mass-production-based entertainment Eactories.Avant-garde
artista resistedthis absorption by defining themselvesas unique individuais,
geniuses," thereby encouraging elitism and obscurantism. Thus, artises
were caught between absorption and marginality.
Psychoanalysis encountered this dilemma in a particularly sharp form.
On the one band, there was pressure to con6orm to the norms ofthe escab-
lished pro6essions,especially medicine, and to accept a constricted notion
ofscience. (American ego psychology of the i95os was one outcome of this
pressure.)On the other band, to resist absorption meant [o emphasizethe
unconscious, sexuality, and the instincts, those dimensions of the psyche
that were most removed from everyday reality. Absorption and marginality
weretwo hornsofthe gameimpossibledilemma,'ásin the caseofart. Either
waB the critical dimension ofpsychoanalysis would be blunred.
In the early yearsof psychoanalysis, Freud and his followers had some
awareness
of this dilemma. As the products of a charismaticexplosion,
Freud'sideal seemedto them to imply somethingmare or Qtherthan a
therapeutic practiçe, but chefe was no consensusas to what. Should psy-
choanalysisbecomepart af a branch ofmedicine (psychiatry, neurology), a
disciplinewithin the university(psychalogy), a reform organization, an
adjunct to revolucionary politica or avant-gardeculture, a new proâession,
or some combination of the above?Thei+pull toward absorption was
reHectedin the analysts'searçh Êorrespectability and scientiâc acceptance.
The pula toward marginaliW, in contrast, was reflected in the termo that
use to describe the analytic enterprise: .Bew(gzfng,
movement,",and de Saróe,"the cause."
The dilemma of absorption versusmarginality washeightenedby the
Face
that the twa main institutions through which psychoanalysis
could
gain legitimacy, namely, the new therapeutic proíessions and the research
.
university,were bota closely tied to the corporate reorganization that
accompanied the second industrial revalution. New theories and disciplines
of social' reproduction such as eugenics,hygiene;mental health, psy-
chotherapy,psycho]ogica]testing, social work, and counseling developedin
responde
to immigration and urbanization.Typically preoccupiedwith
degeneration," racial stereotyping, the prevendon of crime and insaniy-
and the maintenance of gender norms, thesedisciplines aimed at incorpo-
rating the massesunto the Qew industrial arder. By World War 1, they had
 SE C SETS: O F TH REIS O UF
assumed:tasksof largo-scaleclassification and sorting in the military, ih- the
educacional system, and in industry. For psychoaihalysis to gain entry unto
tais new array of disciplines and professions, it qould have to give up. its
distinctive concern with personal autonomy and reorient its goals toward
socialcontrol.
The other means by which psychoanalysis cotlld have become a legiti;
mate discipline was through the researchuniverslW- especially its medical
schools.This, too, posedenormousproblems.Lide the new disciplinesof
social reorganization, the researchuniversity was a responseto the second
industrial revolution. Its goal was not merely ço advance knowledge but to
organize it in a systematic, practical manner adapted to the corporate,reor-
ganizationof society.In particular,it possessed
thb authority to certify the
scientific statusofpsychoanalysis. Broadly speaking, empiricism is the basis
Eor all scientific research, but the early-twentieth-century research univer-
sity tended to define sciencein a narrowly positivisl way. Aiming to separate
knówledge into observable,. quantifiable facts, and to 6ormulate lama relap
bons between trem, the positivist conception ofscience had diMculty deal-
ing with many aspectsof the study ofthe human mind, such asthe plane.of
motivation, language,and experience.Nor did it.allow room for specula-
tion, which is intrinsic to all scientific discovery. Even the most rigorous
philosophersof the Enlightenment had a more open, flexible concept of
reason,and a more sympathetic understanding ofifs relation to "sensibility
and."the passions,"than did the positivistsof jreud's day.:As a .result,
Freud's empirically based but interpretive and soinetimes speculative psy-
chology was largely.excluded from the university, :jnd from the mainstream
of sdence at that time. The eüect was to encourdge its tendencies toward
grandiosity, paranóia, and defensiveness.í; l ín.
The dialectic of absorption and marginality liso reflected the uneven
development of Europe and the United States. Late-nineteenth-century
Europe was still primarily a continent oflandlords aód peasan.tsclustered in
rural settlements, hamlets, and farm villages. An older arder dominated the
church,the military, the upper reaches
of the skate,muco of bankingand
commerce, the universitie$- the academies,and higher stations of law and
medicine. In most countrieÉ, kings and emperors rçmained the centerpieces
of authority.' in Europe, consequently, psychaanálysiscame by its critical
stancemore or leis naturally; like everything "modem," it emerged aga/nif
an older, traditional, patriarchal ordem one that persisted until the end of
World War ll.
In the United States,by contrast, traditional àuthority, with its feudal
and Catholic roots wasweak Interest in psychoadalysisrefiectedthe ideais
AbsorptionandMarg17iaLityt= 67
ofself-management and :"empowerment": characteristic ofa mass, democra-
tic society. As a result, American analysis became a method of cure and a
6orm of self-improvement rather than a .cridcal stance. The e#ect was [o
give the overa:llhistory ofpsychoanalysis a geographical slant: absorption in
the United States, margihality
v 1 / in '''vl'w'
Europe. This
'"4u generalization
ÕUÀ& should lloL
nnz.aLlllllOlilJLiiU. not De
be
Qverstated:there were marginal and criticamcurrents in the United States;
and psychoanalysisgainj:d legitimacy in paras of Europe be6orethe ig6os.
Nonetheless,in Europe fnalysis tended to find its grcatestsupport:among
intellectuals and elites,. while in the United States it became a,mass phe-
nomenon, but one that jacked a critical dimension.: l tlii.:.&; ç:,.n: ,'
DifFerences between.furope and the United States algo shaped the psy-
chiatric pro6usions. In $urope the asylums had originally been connected
to churches,and psychi4trists relinquished their connections'to traditional
authority only slowly.3 EI,en as they pro6essionalized, they retained a deepJy
conservativeboas.Infiue+ced by the tradition of psychological healing that
had begun with moral treatment, yet drawn to somatic explanationsof
degeneration," they weTeusually not impressed by Freud. Emil Kraepelin,
professorof,psychiauy at Heidelberg and at Munich and the leading Euro
pean.psychiatrist of Freud's da» is an example. Kraepelin's game rested on
his distinction between dementia praecox, which he deemed the result of
externascauses(traumas) and possibly treatable through psychological tech-
niques,:on the one handj :and hereditary and incurable diseases
ofthe brain,
on the other. lince psycHoanalysiswas removed from any biologically based
researchprococol, it re+ained marginal to the mainstream of European
psychiarry, even though +t oüered a psychological approach. #- $ .ap ':
In the United Statesa diüerent set of circumstances
prevailed.There
psyéhoanalysis did not have to contend with an established psychiatric
p'o.Gession. Rather, the medical schools were still struggling to esEablish
cheir monopoly against popular âorms of healing and self.help'such as
sm, "mind curo" and homeopathy. As in. England, pro6essionals
sougheto distancethemlselves
from the "íemaleemotionalism"of poPulu
therapeutlcs. Thus, the ibzo Flexner Commission insisted upon the rriority
of proÉusionalization add credentialing. Open to European ideal- Ameri.
can psychiatrists saw pskchoanalysisas a scientific alternative to popular
íormsof mentalhealingl For them, the key issuewasthat any new tech-
nique be practiced by ]q.D.s and not by uncredentialed "amateurs." As a
result,American psychoánalysisrode thewave ofprofessionalizãtion, scien-
tism, and the growth ofja mass culture characteristic of the second indus-
trial revolution:
Where analysis won jnstitutional acceptance, as in the Uniced Status, it
 68 SECRETA roF TnE soUL
l ll tended to become alien in spirit and content ta its original insights. Where
find a creative way through. Since absorption would cave destroyed the
identi+ of psychoanalysis marginality seemedto many the better starting
D01nt. í.i!$®:b?€3.;zUG $ :iJ;$i ÉP''' q-;3 :4'; *' " ..
}n By World War 1, in any case,the core af analysiswas â small, marginal
up centered on: Freud. Far ftom destroying psychoanal»is, dle disci-
õ'--
pline'sinward-turnedchar crer shapcd . its
. preoccupation
.. . ., with authority,
.......-. its
..
self-awareness,its tolerante for speculation, and its intellectual courage.At
thc sametime, marginality led to grandiosity, scapegoating, and division.
Freud himself.'however; never accepted the marginal status of analysis, and
consistently sought to articulate the sçientific dimensions of the analytic
enterprtse'
Muco of the response
to the first industrial rcvolutionhad beenpes;
simistic and reactionary,basedon idealization of the preindustrial order.
Respondesto the secondindustrial revolution, in contrast, .tended toward a
fuulre-looking optimism. The yearsbetweenthe turn of the century and
World War l sawa dramatic contrast between an older order in which
emperorsstill pretended to tule and a newer one in which the motorcar and
lE
,i plane were pari of everydaylide: The result was.a terrific rejection.of the
put and a proliferation of 'prophedc and utopian thinking, of ."arenas
and agitation for the announced rcvolution,'t :of fxpressionists and htur-
ists. Narodniks and Bolsheviks, sexual experimenters and communitar-
ians, avant-gardes, manifatos, and secas.+Psychoanalysis was bom in tais
environment.
As we saw, its first expression, the Wednesday Psychological Society, wm
a .A4Z7z?zfró
nd a countercultural alternative to the conventional family,
resembled
organized around a charismatic. mala: As such, psychoanalysis
other charismatic, mole-centered circles in Vienna, including the Secession
(Gustav Klimt), -twelve-tone music(Arnold Schoenberg), literary mod-
ernism (Arthur Schnitzler), Zionism (Theodor Herzl), and the group cen'
tered around Kart Kraus's satiric newspaper, Z)ír Xz#eZ. Edward Timms has
describcd these circles as "a condensedsystem af .micro-circuito.'?Circúts
overlapped: many ofFreud's early associateswrote for Dír far#e6 and Huno
Hcller, Freud's publisher, organized the ârst exhibit of Schoenberg'spaint;
ings.sMost such circles met at the university or in café. Freud's met in hig
4bsorption andMarginality 69
home, however, suggesting the early assóciationof psychoanalysiswith the
private sphere.
analytic circle began in ígoz when Freud senoout postcard invita-
tions to tour medical colleagues. Meetings were hem weekly in Freud's non-
descript, overcrowded, marginally middle-class home at Berggassetg, a dull
street that began at the Tandelmarkt, a Jewish fICa market, and ended, on
top of the hil!, at the University ofVienna.' By lgo6, there were seventeen
members, al] made, inc]uding Paul Federn, lsidor Sadger,Max Grau Viktor
Tausk,David Bach,Eduard Hitschmann, Hugo Heller, and Fritz 'Wittels.7
Apara from Freud, the key figures were .Alfred Adler, an eye doctor, bom in
i87o, Wilhelm Stekel, a publicist and doctor from Czernowitz in Bukovina
(in today's Romania), and Otto Rank.8 Bom Otto Rosenfeld in i884, Rank
was a machinist by day and a writer by night when his doctor, Alfred Adler.
tom him about Freud. Rank met Freud in igo5, became the group's salaried
secretary,and attended üe gymnasium and university at Freud'surging and
expense;
The composition of Freud'scircle reHectedthe shift in the makeup of
rhe middle classesEram skate-dependent civil servants to self-employcd pró-
Gusionals.In contrast to traditional intellectuals who identified with cen-
ters of authority such as the church, court, and universiW, these men were
ctars and writers. Their prestige come from their intellect and expertise,
not from their social:standing. Largely: unafHliated with institutions, they
resented the traditional centérs ofauthority and the moneyed interests asso-
ciatedwitl}.them. Thus, Paul Federn, Freud's first secretary,describeddoc-
tors as an "intellectual proletariat."P Vicnna's Jews were ió the vanguard of
this shift Érom tradicional to what Antonio Gramsci hascalled organic intel-
lectuals--intellectuals integral to the emerging system ofcorparate produc-
tion. By the i8gos, Jews were dose to the majority in law medicine, and
journalism. [)isproportionate]y representedin commerce, manufacturing,
and industry, underrepresented in agriculture and primuy-gaods produc-
tion, they weFecloselytied to the new arenasofpersonal lifb: urban devel-
opment, the ans, and the proâessions.
As Schorskeplausibly suggested,the tfaumatic disintegration af the
nineeeenth-century liberal tradition in the face of the second industrial rev-
olution wasone precondition 6orthe piseofpsychoanalysis. In Austria, doer
an economia crash in i873, liberalism come under attack. Czech and Hun-
garian nationalisms challenged liberal principles, while anticapitalist and
anta-Semitic peeling mounted. A úinority in a multinacional skate, the lib-
eraiswere dcpendent on the traditional power struçture. Only rhe emperor
prevented the seating ofthe populist and abri-Semitic Kart Lueger as maior
 l
vn SE C*RETS 0 Fi:TlIE S QUL
ofVienna, and that only undl i897.:' Freudrespondedto Luegers rise,as
well asto the DreyfusaHair,by joining B'nai Brith. He steppeddown the
social ladder, from the medical and academia intelligentsia [o a stratum of
ordinary Jewish doctors and businessmen who, "if they could not, assist or
further his scientific pursuits, did not threaten or discouragehim..": it was
11 from this stratum that he recruited cheWednesday PsychologicalSociety.
The fact that #ZZof Freud's early associateswere Jewish guaranteed that
psychóanalysis would remam marginal. The Jews were the racialized other
in European lide of the period. As the researchesof Sander Gilman and oth-
ers cave shown, the Jewish base, the Jewish foot, Jewish sexualiy,. the Jew-
ish language, Jewish "greed," and Jewish "disrespect" 6or commun:iti values
werê matters of obsessiveconcern for European doctors and social scien-
tists. Even 'Charcos, who was breaking with racially based theories :af neu-
rology, associatedJews with the neuroses, and his student Henry Meige
:racedthe "wandering"of the Jewsto their incessant
demandfor atten-
tion." The Jewish mate was algo ofcen feminized, as in Weininger's ascrip-
tion of the "W" factor [o women,homosexuals,
and Jewi. Excludedfrom
idealized êorrelations of masculinity with valor, supposedly imprisoned by
the "hyper-trophy of the Jewish family," Jewish men were more likely to bê
cognizant of the passive,vulnerable, and "homosexual" qualities that lay
behind the masculine ideal. Under these conditions, the Jewish composi-
tion of psychoanalysis guaranteed that all analysts regarded the dominant
culture as hypocritical--an assumption shared by all oppressedor margin:
alia:d groups for obvious reasons.As they saw it,: tnuch ofAustrian politica
was a Eaçadebehind which the emperor and.the aristócracy ruled.. -{ ': .]. ,
Social democracy oüered one possible solution to the problematic social
peaceof psychoanalysis. Austrian socialism opposed anta-SeMitism and was
lesseconomistic and more oriented toward cultural questions than most
socialist traditions.:' Many of the Original figures in Freud's circlê fere
Social Democrata. Alfred Adler's first book, Hrê/fÓ BooÉ#or fbe Za/Zor7}a&
(i8gg), attacked inedicine for ignoring "social illnesses." Wittels met Freud
out of a shared commitment to legalizing abortion, and made his nome by
attacking Jewish converts to Christianity as motivated by economic ambi-
tion :4 Another member, David Bach, organized Viennals workers' sym-
phonies, served as music critic for .4róelifr Ze/f ng, the socialist newspaper
and advocateda Wagnerian communal theater.'sMany analytic patients
vete algosocialists.Bertha Pappenheim(Anna O.) translatedMary Woll:
stonecraft's UZ Zlcaf/a afIAr Rzg&ísofWb/ isto German and founded
the Jewish Women's Union (/ÜZficÓfr Fr móK/zd).:' Emma Ecksteió
Absorption andMarginality 7\
(Irmã) was an associateof Karl Kautsky, the leader of the German Social
Democrats, and the misterof Therese Schlesinger, a Social Democrat who
was one of the first eemale members of Parliament.'7 These nes between
social democracy and psychoanalysis refiected not only the politics of class
but algoan interest in maternalist âeminism. In the long run, however,cen-
tral Europeansocialism was too closely lied to the defendeofthe traditional,
working-classfamily and community [o support the analytic focus on per-
sonailiâe.
In faca, autodidacticism and countercultural pursuits were combined
with a socialisc sensibility in early psychoanalysis. Discussions at the
Wednesday-night meetings ranged over such topics as Nietzsche's Erre
Mama, the .woman question, the psychology of Marxism, and the sexual
enlightenment of children.:8 As in his university course, Freud required
every member to participate in discussion, the order determined by choos-
ing slips from an urn. Ideaswere deemedcommon praperty, to be used
without citation. This they called "intellectual communism.":P
Analytic marginality wassocioeconomicaswell ascultural. Vienna was
a center ofEuropean psychiatry. The decriminalization and scienti6c study
ofthe "perversions"and the first chemical treacmentsfor mental illnessboth
originated there." But Freud was outside the psychiatric establishment,and
his only contact with the university was through a coursehe taught without
ply: He had neiüer jobs to dispense nor patients to reger.The marginality
of analysis converged with Freud's oppositional persona and lifelong con-
cerns about money. In i899 he wrote Fliess: "Money is laughing gas 6or me.
l know from my youth that once the wild horses of the pampas cave been
lassoed,they retain a certain anxiousnessÉorlide. Thus l game to know the
helplessness:ofpoverty and continually tear it.?'" in the last eight months of
i899 he had only one new case.In May igoo he averagedthree and a half
urs paid work per day." That someyear,one day doer his âorty-6ourth
birthday and a few months after publishing ZBe/n/frprfiar/an cfDre.zmí, he
would describehimselfas "an old, somewhat shabbyJew."3
l hough marginal in Vienna, Freud's ideal were seriously studied at
Burghõlzli, the prestigious asylum connected to the University of Zurich.
Founded in the i86os, Burghõlzli had among its early directors such well-
known psychiatristsas Auguste Farei and Wilhelm Griesinger.Eugene
Bleuler became director in 1898 and in a âew years transeormed it unto
the 6oremost psychiatric teaching hospital in the world;noutstripping
 l

SECRETA :0P THE SOUL Absarptiott atdÀ argimEiO\ l 73

7z
Cul Gusrav Jung: Freud'sstudent, rival, and
thc founder of analytic psycholagy(c. i9lo)
=::U,=::t=;1==.:=T=:=:=Ul:,:E
l:
HisinterestinFreudarasefromthiscontention. :. ; .. n- ' ':
.: : in igo4 Freud heard from Bleuler that his staff, intluencea oy oieuier s
assistant Cara Jung, had been studying Freud's writings for severasyears.
Eram an elite family, Jung was brilliant and attractive,.with an unusually
he was
forcehl 'personality. Although a generation younger than Freud,
Freud's social and prafwional superior. In igoz he had achieved early fama
with a seriesaf experimentathat demonstrated the existenceof unconscious
ideational "complexes." By igo5, he was clinical director of Burghõlzli and
pnuaf züzfnf at the University. of Zulich: By lgo8, he was wealt.í .er)ough
r' "' "'rge house of his own design.'' He algo had a mystical sido that
attracted him to psychoanalysis.His father was a pastor. who. originally
wanted to bccome a Hebraist. His mother was a spiritualist, who usei to
stand behind her husband as he wrote his sermons to make sure the Devil
did not visit him." in igo6 Freud and Jung begaó to correspond, and Jung
visited Freud a year laser.The two men were strongly drawn to eachother.'
In igo5 Freud published JaWc#op ígoá)WofEUfr7(Ü7Z,#t W7fá Z i»f
Unto ir;am, "Dará," and ZB2'fe
Axagí an Sex%a#gin respondeto tais out-
pouring, other medical men contacted him. Ernest Jones,a Welsh doctór of
rural, religious,and working-classbackground living in London, read üe
Dou caseand was shocked to discover a doctor who "listened closely to
everyword his padent spoke."' He was attracted to Freud, he baterbrote.
out of his awarenessof "the injustices, stupidities, and irrationalities of our
social organization."s in igo6 Jadesbegan an analytic discussiongroup in
London, but clasheswith the medical establishment and accusations ofsex-
ual involvement with a patient senohim unto exile in Canada.3'Freud'sfirst
impression ofJones was of a Êanatic. "He dentes all heredity," Freud wrote
Jung; "to his mind even l am a reactionary.""
Aside 6romJones, almost every doctor who came to Freud from outside
Vienna Gamethrough Burghõlzli. Karl Abraham, a sriH and formal Berlin
Jew, Max Eitingon, a self-efEacing Russian, and Sándor Ferenczi, an engag-
ing Hungarian, encountered Freud'swritings as medical students chefe.
LaserEitingon and At)raham joined Magnus HirschÉeld,Europe's leading
advocateofthe decriminalization ofhomosexuality, and !wan Bloçh, whose
massivestudy of sexual mores appearedin igo5, in an analytic discussion
group in Berlin.3' "lfmy reputation in Germany grows," Freud brote Abra-
ham in lgo7, "it will be helpfiil to you, and if l may designateyou directly
asmy pupil and 6ollower--youdon't soemto be the man who would be
ashamedof it--then l can energetically [back you professionally]."s3By
i9io, psychoanal»iswaswell enough known in Berlin Éora prominent neu-
rologist to cal16or its boycott, and subscriptions to psychoanalyticjournals
were Ear more extensivo than in Vicnna.34
In Hungaryin igoo Ferenczihad rehsedto reviewZBe/nfer7x?zar/o/z
af
l)rPamifor a local medicaljournai::."Not worth the eaort," he had
remarked.Jung convinced him to take Freud seriously. Ferenczi was two
yearsolder than Jung, a member of a Cultivated Budapestfamily, and a
proli6c writer of essaysand poetry as well as a doctor.31His father wasa
bookstore owner who had emigrated from Poland and "Magyarized" his
Yiddish-sounding name (Fraenkel) out of enthusiasm Eor Hllngary's i848
revalution. His mother was president of the Union ofJewish Women. A
memberofthe:7\5wgar (Occident) circle, which included Georg Lukacs, the
Hungarian poet Endre AdX, and composersBÓIABartók and Zoltán Kodály,
Ferenczihad a gang-standinginterest in hypnotism, autosuggestion,and
both mole and female homosexuality. Be6orereading Freud,he had servedas
74 SECRETA OF TnE SOUL
AbsoQtion andMar$naLit) l :

the Budapest representative of Hirsch6eld's International Humanitarian l

Committee 6or the Defense of Homosexuals. Bilingual and laser a member
of the Vienna PsychoanalyticSociey- he reproachedhimself in lglo for cre:
ating "propaganda , . . but no trace otan organization" in Budapest.;í
At Burghõlzli,Freudwaswidely read.A. A. Brill, the key figurein early
U.S; . analysis, first encountered Freud's writings chefe in igo8. A Jewish
immigrant from Austria who arrived in New York pennilessin i88g at the
ageoffifteen, Brill worked his way through medical school by playing chess
[or money. A bri]]iant c]inician, he ]oved medicine, worked with the Amer-
ican psychiatrist Adolf Meyer, and translated Kraepelin unto English. Lud-
wig Binswanger,the nephewof Nietzsche'spsychiatristand a Gounderof
Freud wasopen uncomÉortable with his paternal rale. Hewas drawn to
existencial analysis, algo encountered Freud's writings at Burghõlzli. Oskar
Pfister,a Protescantminister and an associateofJung's in Zurich, felt upon nerenczi but had troublcwith Ferenczi'sChildlike relation to himl in lgog

reading Freud "as if old premonitions had become reality." Freud in turn
assured Pfister that "our eroticism includes what you cala 'love' in your pas-
toral care."37Even Freud's most.radical early follower, Otto Gross, come ta
him through Burghõlzli, where Jung treated him 6or drug addiction.í

('harismatic secasare marked by 6ounding momento and historical turn-

ing points that help trem consolidatetheir identity and achieverecogni-
tion. For psychoanalysis,
thenfirst few yearsof theltwentieth century
constituted such a moment. On one hand, Freud gathered around him a
group offollowers who sawin his thought a breakthrough unto a whole new
levei ofcivilization. On the other hand, a regressivepenseof traumatic hurt,
de6eat,and exclusion was equally central to the consolidation of analytic
identity. Both sentimencswere based on identification with Freud and were
sustained by the .A4Z#znfró Zcharacter ofpsychoanalysis.
The cement holding the circle Eogetherwas a shared view of Freud as a
;father."Max Grafwrote ofthe WednesdayPsychologicalSocieEy
that there
was an.."atmosphere of the 6aundation of a religion in that room.
Freud's pupils , . .were his apostles."3sBut tais statement is misleading.
Although Freud was clearly central, the minutes suggest a fractious envi-
ronment with many strong personalities.As we saw, what was historically
new about the emerging analytic circle wasnot Freud's paternal role but the
members'attempt to be self-consciousabout their relation to it. In fact,
personal contact with a ceacher was historically necessary to all education
involving inward development(Z?/&/ung).Identification with Freudwas a
way to lcarn to üink in a new way, "analytically" or self-refiectively, and
muco analytic theory was generated out of the no doubt flawed filiations
 76 SKCKrTSL{OP ,THE sou L
admiration for you bota asa man and a researcher.. . my veneration far
=';;j"=hnnKin:i;i;:si
complex,"! and Jones queried Freud as to who understood his theories best.
As Hanns Sachaobserved, rivalry eor Freud's acclaim and approbation was
the mainspring of the movemenE'swranglings.47
Sometimes Freud verged on the seductive in exposing his vulnerability
and lonelihess.When Abraham visited him in Vienna, Freud not only gave
the younger man gins but Raid 6arhis hotel roam. In: lgt4, smarting, as we
shall see,'hom his break with Jung, Freud wrote gratefully to Abraham: 'HI
my lide l have been looking for.friends who would not explott and then
betray me, and DOWnot ür from its natural end, l hope.l have 6ound
them."4; Pari of Freud's attractiveness cama from his ability to expose
aspectsaf his weaknessselectively "My prevailing mood," he brote Abra-
çam during World War l, "is powerlessembitterment, or embitterment at
my powerlessnessir'Regularly, his letters vete preoccupied with money and
with aging.:"I didn't answeryour last letter," he mendoned on another occa:
sion,because"I wastoo angryand too hungry."'POn his fiftieth birthday
his closest admirers presented him with a medallion inscribed with a quota
from OfaryPwf
Rm.-"He divined the famous riddle and was.amost mighty
man " They called him "Professor,"-though his real title, professor extraordi-
11 nary, méant only adjunct instructor. An unspoken penseofFreud as a weak,
aging, or wounded eather,a pensepropelled.by Freud s own self-perceptions
permeated his inner circle and set:in modon a -desireto protect him that
reinforcedthe circle'sdoomed search6orlegitimation.
If the circles centeredon Freud constituted one pele in the history of psy-
choanalysis, pro6essional acceptance and mass papularity constituted the
other. As it turned out, the iate of the second polo wauld be decided tive
thousand males from the origens of the discipline. Psychoanalysis remained
marginal to European psychiatry until after World War 11,when Americana
brought it back to Europe, but it becamecentral to American éulture
almost immediately. The reason was the weaknessof traditional authority
in the United Statesand the widespreadbelief in the power of the individ-
ual mind to overcomef'externas"diMculties. In that context, American psy-
choanalysisbecame intensely popular. As a result, it was caught up itl..a
processthat emphasizedpersonalempowerment,self-regulation,and indi-
vidual charisma.As we shall see,the actual practiceof analysiswasleis
Absorption andMargimLity ll
important than its cultural impact. Ultimately American analysiscometo
mean almost the opposite of the self-reflective explorarion ofinternal limi-
rations that characterizedits European counterpart.
An expansive,antinomian sensoofself had long beencentral to Ameri-
can culture.' Ralph caldo Emerson evoked its spirit when he described
himselfas "standing on the bare ground--my heacibarhed by the blithe air,
and uplifted unto infinite space--all mean egotism vanishes."s' The 6rontier
and mass democracy sustained tais sente of boundlessness, which coexisted
with seK.improvement, sexual prudery, and commercialism. By the middle
of the nineteenth century, American receptivity to the idea ofmental heal-
ing wasunparalleled in the world. In i86g the first purely psychologicalthe-
ory of a neurosis, neurasthenia, was put forth there.
While many factors converged in preparing the way 6or psychoanalysis,
the American Eaith in mental healing received its greatestboost from the
sécond Great Awakening, the great evangelical Protestant revivals of the
nineteenth century that sought to revitalize America'sCalvinist or Puritan
rootsl Although aimed at temperance and the strengthening of the work
ethic, the revivals were accompanied by the development of such secas
as mesmerism and Swedenborgism,and by the thought of influential
eccentricslike Phineas(2uimby, who preached the power of words to leal
regardlessof their content. The result was a widespreadAmerican belief in
the "subconscious," the impersonal or superpersonal mind, which, as wê
saw converged with pre-Freudian dynamic psychiatry. This beliefwas one-
sidedly optimistic. In the í8gos, asmaná Europeans turned inward toward
p'ssimism, subjectiviq, and the world ofthe dream, Americana, inspired by
pouring in of immigrants, the growth of massconsumption, and the
beginnings ofAmerica's global hegemony,reafhrmed theirZon+iction ofthe
powerof the transcendentalmind.
By the time Freud's writings appeared, the belief that the subconscious
could cure depression as well as somatic illnesses had swept Amerii;an soci-
ety in the form ofChristian Scienceand, more broadly, "mind cure." Con-
verging with American religiosiW, mind cure had:a, special appeal to
women. Indeed, the founder of Christian Sciencewas a woman: Mary
BakerEddy. EddX, likc Clara Barton (a Éounderofthe U.S. nursing profes-
sion), Dorothea Dix (a reâormer of psychiatriç asylums), and Jane Addams
(a 6ounderof the U.S. social work proÉession),had been sick when young
but then discovered her vocation and went on to lead a rich, healthy, and
produçtive lide. By the i8gos, then, the American landscapewas home to a
vasovariety of faith cures, 'mental sciencesiz'and "divide healings," which
preached the power of surrender through meditation on such slogans as "I
 78 SE(RETS 0F ' THEeiS 0UL
11
am not body." The goal was to become "perfectly passive" to facilitate "the
discovery and use of those inexhaustible subconscious powers which have
l:l their roots in the Infinite."s: What hem all thesecurrents together, wrote a
doutoral student at Clark University in i899, was the idea of suggestion,
"the law that any idempossessingthe mind tenda to materialize itself in the
bod
0 reasonto allow j'an arma of irregulars to carro away the bestpatients írom
The mind-cure attitude went far beyondhealing. The."New Thought"
movement, popular between1895and lgi5, taught that íinancial reward
dependsprimarily on "thç PersonalMagnetismof the seekerafter suc-
cess."s3
The someneedsthat drive the growth of mind cure drove the new
mass culture. Just as mind cure preaçhed the mind's ability to overcome
bodily ailments, se the new culture idealized the individual's ability to ride
abate circumstances
through positive thinking, fiequently abettedby a
conversion experience. Dome novels, amusement parks, movies, and sports
reflected immigrant and working-class traditions with important democra-
tizing elemento. But they algo reílected the stresson mental solutions that
accompanied the revolution in massproduction.s'
Again, it would be wrong to overstatethe contrast betweenthe United
Statesand Europe.American massculture, like American businessmeth-
ods, was already beginning to permeate European cities, for example, in the
l llil l form of imported American cowboy and detective stories, penny periodi-
cals, gymnastics, cycling, and department stores. Nonetheless, .in contrast
to the steelfume of paternalauthority that still haunted the European
imagination, the individual--generally in the form of a business success,
orts mero,or other celebrity--was at the center of the democratiç imagi-
11
nation. Mind cure, with its emphasison psychic power, was ideally suited
eor democracy.Whereas nineteenth-century psychiatry had fünctioned by
excluding and isolating those deemed "mad," mind cure stressedthe uni-
versalityof the "subconscious." in tais way, mind cure's language, codex,
and explanatory schematahelped crente a consumer market, an audience,
and intense interest in Freud.
The widespread belief in mind cure did not go unnoticed by doctors
and other professionals.Large-scaleimmigration and uprooting had cre-.
ated a need for new 6orms ofclassification, ordering, and the adaptation of
the individual to contexts beyond those of immediate, face-to-facerela-
tions. In the nineteenth century, individuais discussedtheir personal prob-
lems with doctors, lawyers, and clergymen aswçll as with family members
and friends. Psychiatristsmanaged mental hospitais. The growth of neurol-
ogy encouraged psychiatrists to reinvent themselves. Turning from asylum
management,.they emphasizedprevention, social adjustment, and the
Absorption andMargLmlit) .7q
treatment of alcohol- and drug-related diseaseswith new therapeutic tech-
niques. Warni.ng that nervousness was a way station on the road to insanity,
they claimed specialexpertise in regard to juvenile delinquenq in all these
spheres,they worked systematically to có-opt mental healing while attack-
ing its practitioners. As a New York phy$ician declared in i8g8, there was no
our business.?:ss
spreadofpsychiatry washrther abetted by the clergy in this period
in which church attendance was declining. Just as the social-gospelmove'
menusought to make religion relevant to poverty, crime, and alcoholism, se
minisrers learned the new medical terminology and combined it with reli-
gious advocacy. The two years preceding Freud;s Clark lectures were algo the
high point of the quase-religious, Boston-based Emmanuel movem.nt.
which brought together doctors;and ministers in common pursuit of the
new therapeutlcs.sóFamily doctors, too, began.advocating that "psychother-
apy,' asit would soon be called, be applied to the problems ofevêryday lide.
A small group of.Boston-based neurologists, psychiatrists, and psychol,
ogistshad taken up the study ofmental healing as early as the i88os. Partic-
ipante included important infiuences on American psychoanalysissuco as
JamesJackson Putnam and G. Stanley Hall,kleaders of noà-Freudian
psychiatry such as Morton Prince and Bons Sidis, and ature critica ofpsy-
choanalysissuch as the psychiatrist Adolf Meyed"DÇ'illiam James, also a
member, was in some ways the most important Êgure paving the way âor
the American reception..of Freud. games attacked the attempts ofdoctors to
monopoliza mental healinÉ, criticized the positivistic presuppositionsofhis
fellow proEusionals ("old.fogyism," he wrote, seemsto begin at the ageof
twenty-ave), and argued that the future of mental healing would depend on
popular movements, especially women's movements.szHis i89o / nrip&r af
/Vfóa/a&7 çhaUengedmind-body duàlism and thereby hrther legitimized
mental healing. As we have:seen,.;his::
igoi UanfüfJ afRf/ZWazlJAPTHr/2rr
describedmind. cure approvingly a$a break with Victorianism, arguing that
relaxation should supplant intentness.s8 .i,.} m!)t.kv .l} E,;snü.} ' "P'
With the support ofsuch luminaries, psychiatry quickly absorbed men-
tal healing. The first American advocates of "p!#chotherapy," Morton
Prince and Bons Sidis, were -followers of Pierre Janet, Charcos's most
important French disciple.s? in igo6 Prince Eounded ZBflo ma/ (ZfHÓ/zor-
md./Vcóoá7W.' that samc cear the word "psychotherapy" was first ]isted ]n
the /ndm .Aãedmi. Racha ' ' ;' "'"'''"'"'"'
.L..- - ..d Cabot, a Boston neurologist, wrote: "Psy-
Chotherapy is a most terri+ing word, but we are forced to use it because
thereis no other which servesto distinguish us fiom Christian Scientists,
8o SECRXIS 0F TnE 'SOUL
appeafed,'calling6nr "mund psychology,sound hedicine and sound reli'
gion."': in the game year Paul DuBoiS's /yrÓ/f 7 dD7Pzmf oy JVenlouíUls.
a/idas, containing an influential attack on hypnosis as degrading to the
patient's dignity, was translated unto.English, fiirther paving the way tor
the absorptton of Freud unto the psychotherapy movement. ', :!: , ;. .L
As Americâh prokssionals struggled to distinguish their wotk from the
pular forma of mental haling, they betrayed their undel:lying aMnity
with trem jugo Munsterberg's igo9 .book, .rycóa&gen4fpoüers an exam-
-MunsecrberB a professor of philosophy at Harvard, wrote the book to
combat mind-cure amateurism.Arguing that the .'fbig marketplaceof
.hilization" had weakenedcommunal tia he called 6or "a conscloussocial
program of symbol-building and communal reintegration led by profes'
sanais." By "a conscioussocial:program,"; Munsterberg meant the nen'
forma of social contrai aimed at the immigrant working class.At the same
time he deíined.psychotherapy'spurpose as the.inMbition of.pain; the sup-
prasion of emotion, and the.substitution of pleasant ideas "until the nor-
called the "iron cabe" ofinstrumental contrai coexisted easily with an incite-
ment to drcam. Tais was the context surrounding Freud's reçeption in the
United States.
Like the first skysçrapers,Charlie Chaplin's marjés? and Thomas Edison's
elecuic bulb, Freüd's igog lectures at Clark University deserve to be
remembcrcd among thà :signal momento announcing the advent of the
second industrial revolution. Like those developments'Frelid's lectures
marked an occasion that was qualitativelybnew and transformative.
Nonethcless, Freud had mixed feelings when he first received the invitation
from ClarklspresidentG. StanleyHall. Calling Hall "somethingofa king-
maker," hc complainéd thal the time away would cut inca hts practice,
adding: 'IAmeria should bring móney, nót cosa money."" Uhbeknownst
to Freud, Halos Êrst choice had been Wilhelm Wundt, the fo\inder of
experimental psychology;-Hall had turned to Freud at Jung's urging only
after Wundt had rehsed. Jung now counseled Freud to accept, pointing
AbsoQtim andMargímliD %\
out that prestigewauld repaysacrifica.Perhapshe would do as well as
Kraepelin:who had just received âf+ thousand marks Êora single consul-
tation in Cali$ornia.ós
Freud was simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the United
States.Reflecting on the invitation, he wrote to Jung: "When l started my
plactice [in i886] 1 was thinking on]y of a two-month trial period in
Vienna; ifit did not prove satisfacrory, l wasplanning to go to America and
Hound an existence that l would subsequently have asked my fiancee in
Hamburg to share..: . . [NJow, twenty-three years]ater, l am to go to Amer-
ica ater all, not, [o be fure, to make made)ç but in responde to an honorable
call!"óóAter the datemwere rearranged and he had accepted, however, Freud
wrote Jung: "There is a good deal to be raid about America [but] ondethey
discover the sexual core of our psychological theories they will drop us.
Their prudery and their material dependence on the public are too great."Õ7
With Ferenczi he was more direct. Once the Americana realize the sexual
basesofour ideal, he wrote, we'll be "up shotcreek."ói
The Clark lectureswere the decisivoHoment in the eruption of Freud's
charisma. Refiecting the dose connection between proGessionalismand
popular culture, the audience included a crosssection ofAmerica's medical
and academic elite: William James (philosophy), Edward Titchener (psy-
chology), Franz Boas (anthropoloW), AdolfMeyer (psychiatry), and James
Jackson Putnam(neurology).'P cones advised Freud "to aim first at the
recognisedpeople, and nat to popularise too soon. There is se much vul-
garisationand exploitation ofeverything here, that one hasa strong weapon
in insisting on the exactscientific sêde."But, Jonescontinued, anal»is fàçes
problems."peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon race.'' One must know their "cur-
reHts and prejudicas in order to combat them most successfiilly .a:i. a man
who writes alwayson the gamesubject is apt to be regarded]in America] as
a cranhf . .jif the subject is sexual he is simply tabooedi:;. . hence l shall
dilute my sexarticles with articles on other subjects."7'
On the boasto America,Freud discoveredhis cabin boy reading Z%f
P9rÓoPiÉaã)WofEurT&W .[e#?.]t occurred to him chen that he was about
to becomea world figure. He had addressedthe secondedition of ZZr in/rr-
pr?zaüaaí#Dreami to a "wider circle ofeducated and curious-minded read-
ers."'' Now- againstJones'scounsel, he aimed his lectur.s at a trufamass
audience:He stressed"the practicali% the optimism, the comparative sim-
plicity of psychoanalysis," ac times condensíng his theories almost to the
pointofcaricature.z'
The lectures not only constituted Freud's claim to scientific legitimacy;
they brought Freudian analysis and the world of mass consumption inca
SEéKEVSi:for. T H E se u L -4bsoQtion andMarginaLity p. SÀ

.fycó/a/W one of the most popular short texto in American psychiatric his-

H:E: ::::! :ll: :#:?y! ::: ; :l:

of the field ofconsciousÂess.In ign he denounced suggestion therapy and
introduced Freúd's theory alongsideJanet's.In igi5, when the.book was
replaced by White and JellifFe'sZ)üe eTafzÉf N?rz,auí SWfffm,White recom-
mended analysis as the treatment ofchoice at "higher psychological leveis."
It could not cure psychotic patienes,he conceded, but it could relieve cheir
symptoms."
Psychiatristsparticularly appreciated what they look to be Freud'senvi-
ronmental approach.':: }ikening analysis to eugenics, White and Jelliae
stressedthe ways in which .it could help preveni delinquency and addic-
eion." Largely rewrittenl in the languageof behaviorism doer the publica-
tion ofJ..B. Watson's BI'óau/a üm in igi4, the American version' óf Freud
was portrayed asa hard-boiled scientific psychology. As Watson explained,
when teachingFreudiad psychology he omitted achecrude vitalistic and
psychological terminoloéy" and stuck to biological factors; "Freud hihself
admits the possibilita oíl this."8+ Yet even as Freud's thought was inéorpo-
rated indo American ps?lchiatry, psychiatrists temained skeptical of every-
ng that uanscendedl
behaviorism:?:
"The main thing,"Adolf Meyer
remarked,"is that your point of reÉerence
should alwaysbe lideitself and
not the imagined cesspoolof the unconscious."is
Although American íjnalysis remained marginal to European analysis,it
w2s never Éu from the cq)nsciousness of Freud and his associates. By World
War 1, the United Stace$had the largest number of analystsin the world.
Freud sometimes tried tq ignore this;Jones never did. ló l9o8 the two men
metwith Brill to discuss
translatingFreud'sworksinto English.In igog
Brill translated pares of-S Zzexa/z-.r/7sfrr/a, in igi3 ZBf /ni?PTPial;b of
Z)rfzz/72i,
and in igi8 ZBrfe .Eha7K.8ú
Though cavalier about copyrights, Freud
supervised translations, suggested English terms such as "repression," and
vetredall important decisions.'7Understandingthat profasional approval
wasehekey to masspopularity, the translators fere guided by the idea that
English, like German, was a vernacular language that did' not promete
emotive distance. They therefare used a psychiatric terminology drawn
from Latin and Greek. While Freud's German was almost colloquial, they
encouraged neologisms and technical termo such as "anaclitic," "fixatión,"
epistemophilia," and "parapraxis.": The everyday German Zzzif bet:ame
'libida. ' . brzró (drive) became the hardwired "instinct. " ScÁazl/wír, pleasure
in looking, was translatêd "scopophilia. "88.,4ngsi,another everyday word,
became :«the clinical "a4xiety." Jlü (D: became "ego " .Bebe ' taken" or
Occupied," became "câthected." Ta underline the pro6usional legitimacy
. SECRETA' 0F THE'' SOUL AbsoQtion andMar$vlalit) \S

implications, but he was cautious abouc trying to spell them out. In igo7 he
tom the Vlenna Psychoanalytic Society that from' analytic casesrudies we
learn "what is really going on in the world.}E; t analysesare cultural histori-
cal documents of tremendous importance."9s A eew years bater he character-
ized the neurosesas "asocial" structures that attempt "to achieveby private
meanswhat is e#ectedin society by collective eKort."PÕThought-pravoking
assuco insights were, the problem of institutional Eorm remaine(i.
Reflecting the powerful thrusc toward social reorganization that accom-
panied the secandindustrial revolution, many of Freud's assaciates
sought a
closer relation between psychoanalysisand social demacracy.Alfred Adler
was the mbst prominent. In preparation for the Nuremberg con6erence,
Freud askedAdler, to speak to the Vienna Psychoanalytic:Society on the
question of whether psychoanalysisis compatible with everyworldview or
whether it entailed adherence to a particular politicas viewpoint.PZFerenczi
algourged.thât the conference discussthe "iac/aüKrcz/ significance of our
analyses.?'P: in the United States, James Jackson Putnam Éought to jom
analysiswith social and moral reForm. In Switzerland,Auguste-Henri Forel
tried to enlist Freud's support in a reform association devored to the eradi-
cation ofsyphilis, alcoholism, and other social problema.P9
Freud at first responded enthusiastically to Farei's propasal, writing [o
Jung that he was attracted by Porei'swillingness "to combat the authority of
Stateand Church directly where they commit palpable injustice.":" By thc
time of the congress,however; Freud had rejected this option. His ostensi-
ble motive was to protect analysis.In íact, Freudian thought was at odds
with the politica of the day. bota conservative and le6t-wing. Conservativc
parties were Eoundedon the de6enseof the patriarcha], monarchical, and
religious:traditions that analysis described in termo ofthc "Eather complex. "
Yet the most important populist alternatives to conservatism were xeno-
phobic and anti-Semitic. Freud's personal politica fere liberal in the Euro-
pean.sente,stressingsecularism and freedom ofspeech, but his experientes
in Vlenhaled him to be skepticalof this tradition..Meanwhilc.social
democracyvalorized communal principles and tended to reduce injustice
to the question of.economia organization.
Freud'soppositionto proposalsto join psychoanalysis
to a speciâcpoli-
tics reÍiected its role asa theory and practice ofpersonal lide. In his view Êor
an analyst to afHrm or challenge a patient's moral or political stance was not
only an unwarranted abuse of auchority but algo an obstacle to analyzing
the motives and meaning ofthe patient's stance. When.Freud tom the Vien-
nesesociety that analytic casestudies teach us what is really going on in the
world, he meant at the levei ofmotives and meanings, not ofpolitics. In his
S ECRETS ó:F :THE S O-UL
AbswPtion andMargimlity! t 87

Kandinsky's O/z /Ée Sp/ / a/ /# ,4rf had placed Russia at the forefront of
early-twentieth-centurymodernism. :Córrespondingly, Russian intellectu-
als turned passionatelytoward the West. Hungrily 'interrogating Hegel,
Schopenhauer,and Nietnche, they translated practically werything Freud
wrote becweenzgog and igz4, generally preceding any other foreign transla-
tions.''s Based on this interest, Molhe Mula' in Odessa(where Freud dis-
cerned a "local epidemic of psychoanalysis"),Tatania Rosenthalin St.
Petersburg,and Nikolai Osipov in Moscow founded analytic groups or
societies
cie

AJong with thesegroups, the symbolist poecsand philosopherswere the

main Russian advocates of psychoanalysis. Supposedly like psychoanalysis,
symbolism distinguished two planes of realiq the visible and the invisible.
In addition, therewere many other points ofapparent concact.Committed
tó the idemof Russia'sspecial mission, the symbolists sought the dissolution
of the ego,and especiallyof gender:distincEion,in what the Philosophcr
Vladimir Solovyov describedas a "íeminine" all-onenessand the symbolist
poet Vyacheslavlvanov called "the realm of bisexual, eeminine-masculine
Dionysius.": in the game vem, Nikolai Berdyaev describedsexuality as the
painel searchfor a lost androgyny,apparentin Adamand Christ. while
symbolists espousêdâ Dionysian transcendenceof the self through
sexual praccices;;Christianiqç the symbolist poet Sergei Solovyov tom
Alexander Blok, "at its very core is beyond gender" and can only be attained
through sexual reléasél= in Eact,theseideais were as incompatible with psy-
choanalysis as politicas revolution was, buc âor a while thc two movem;ents
occupied a common terrain.:'Õ

Eschewing sectarian reinterpretations of psychoanalysis, whether politi-

cal or aesthetic, Freud sought to reassurethose analystswho struggled Éor
pro6essionalacceptance.that they were doing their duty.to society: not onJy
were they helping their patients, but they were contributing their "share to
the enlightenment.of the community from which we expect to achieve the
most radical prophylaxis against neurotic disorders.":'l' Nonetheless,the
desire to align psychoanalysis with social reform persisted. As late as Febru-
aryigi3, Freudwould suggestto Ferenczithat the next round of analytic
discussions
at internationa]meetings
centeron "thesocialrole of neu-
roses.':;Q8
But when JamesJackson Pugnam argued that analysts:needed to
join with other social âorces,Freud responded: "tour complaint that we are
to compensate our neurotic patients 6or giving up their illness is
quite justified. But . .\; this is not the Éault of therapy but rather of social
tnstitutions .-. . the recognition of our therapeutic limitations 'rein6orces
our determination to change other social eactorsse that men and women
 Absoqtion 4ndMargitiaLityt \ t9
SECRETS 0F'' 'r 1{ B:.:SOUL
Dramatically throwing back his coar, he declared: "My enemieswould be

$:::
?K=::T==,:5l;l :111:':1
"1"T:: willing to seehe starve; they would tear my very coat oH'my back.""3
Caught between sectarian isolation with its attendant self-pity and mass
popularity with its threacenedloasof identit)ç the sectarian
character of the movement deepened.The year be6orethe Nurembérg con-
gress,whilc visiting America 6or the Clark lectures,Jung had developeda
theoryof an American "Negro complex." Now he presented it at Nurem-
berg. The Negro's example, he believed, posed a threat to the "laboriousiy
subjugatedinstinctsof the white rales.""' Problematicas this was,it was
soon adapted for another purpose. "The persecution ofblacks in.America,
Ferencziwrote Freud, occurs because"blacks representthe 'unconscious' of
the Americana. Teus the hate, the reaction formation against one's own
ces.Along with the circumcision/castration complex,lhas mechanism
collld algobe the basis6or ú f/-Srm/fira. The free,f'fresh'behaviorof the
Jew,his 'shameless'flaunting of his interestin money,evokeshatred as'ã
reaction âormation in Christians, who areethical not âorlogical reasonsbut
out of repression.It is only lince my analysisthat l haveunderscoodthe
widespread Hungarian saying: '/óa/f /m # êf mWi/m.l ""s Freud needed lit-
tle convincing. After the Nuremberg con6erena, he exploded:to Ferenczi
about a journal attack that cited his theory of anal eroticism asan example
of Viennese decadence: "Viennese sensuality can't be Hound elsewhere!"
Reading between the lhes, Freud continuei, "We Viennese &rc not only
pias but algoJews.But tharwasn't printed.""'d a {iü:.!9.Ê%a lbd !iü :. H
reEreât[o the predominantly Jewish character of the early analytic
group algoafEectedthe .442nnerózz/zd
Abraçam and Jung had alwaysdis-
liked eachother and, doer the Nutemberg conâerenêe,
beganan open
break."7 Freud wrote to the "consanguineous" Abraham: "Racial relation-
shipl!brings you closer to my intellectual constitution, whereas he, being a
Christian and the son ofa pastor, can only find his way to me against great
inner resistances. His adherence is there6ore all the more valuable';' in
another letter he urged Abraham to "develop a little masochism and be pre-
pared [o endure a certain amount of injustice. , . You may be fure that if
my game were Oberhiiber my new ideas would . i}..have met with Éarleis
resist:ance.""'

The formation of an internacional organization, the appointment of

Jung m its president, the appointment ofAdler as the head of the Vienna
branca: Freud experienced these primarily as hollow achievements. Return-
ing from the congress, he was depressed. "No doubt, it was an extraordinary
success," he wrote Ferenczi, but chefe was something wrong at its core. "We
.,,.. SE C RE TS OFkXTIH E S 0-U L

CbaPter tour

THE BIRTH OF.

THEÉEGO
it. To tell the truta, we should cave dome nothing at all.":" ; . 'ii .

With the congress, Freud lost his last chance for :integration.unto Euro-

:!iliiúix na n
tom Jung he would not join the society. It was too narrow, too exclusive,
one cannot "sit down .with everybody." in subsequent letters to Freud,-

kEIEilücnl :ç ll;T Charistnãtiçfervor is rooted in the attempt to come unto:çontact

with the veW essençeof being, td go to the verá roots ofexiscençe.
of çosmic, social and cultural arder, [o whar is seen as sacred and
fundamental.

.--.Shmuel Eisenstadt, Jáa lmPÓfro/z CZanfma ,znd

Institutian BuiUing
fathercomplex.""':...} :'À, xi ik i h>'i.' : ' c...i..l.
-ln faca, the International PsychoanalyticAssociation had barely been

the penod íollowing World War 11, its greatest pópularity set the stagefor
its most intense relectton.
SECRBTS0F THE SOUL Tbe BinboftbcEgo ''t 9'b

cheAnima, and the Shadow.Viewing modernity through the prism ofloss

and decline, he sought to hall its impoverishment of meaning'by restoring
çontact with the sacred.Accordingly, he aimed co assimilatepsychoanalysis
[o myth and religion, althaugh not to any organized religion ofhis time.
Freud rejected both approaches.,Like Adler, Freud look the aggressivi-
ties, hurts, and resentments of eheego seriously,but he did not equate what
he sometimes called the ego's "secondary revisions" or "rarionalizations
with the whole ofthe psyche. Like Jung, Freud believed that the egoresided
in the shadowsof a vasorealm available only to obscurointrospection, but
he called that realm the id, not the cosmos. WhereasAdler critically
aMrmed the ego'sstrivings, and Jung contemptuously dismissedits weak-
ness,Freud sympathetically graspedits vulnerability, which he tracedto the
infànt's dependente on a primamobject. In contrast to animais, which are
bom with predeterminedinstincts that lead them to the objectothey need,
humana depend for their survival on the Gareofather humana thrbughout
a pralonged period. Becauseof this lengthy period of biological helpless-
ness,according to Freud, "the value of the object which can alone protect
[the inÉant] is enormous]y enhanced." Un]ike both of his critica, then,
Freud placed an ihtensely personal need for "objecEs"at the center of his
conceptionoftheegoP
Forced to respond to Adler and Jung, Freud weBt back and rethought
the Houndations of psychoanalysis, turning the hypotheses of unconscious,
infàntile wishes,,sexuality, and primary-process thinking unto a systematic,
dynamic, developmental theory. Only in lgiz did he conclude that the
Oedipus complex was the "nucleus ofthe neuroses." in zgl3 he put forth his
first modal of pregenital(oral and anal) stagesof sexualdevelopment.In
igi4 he produced his first attempt at a theory of the "l": his esgaron narcis-
sism, a precursor to his theory ofthe ego, soon to supplancthe unconscious
asthe most important concept within psychoanalysis.Ultimately, as we
shali see, Freud's attempt to 6ormulate a theorylof the ego or "l" was inex-
tricable from the attempt to transform psychoanalysis:indo
a theory based
on the existenceof two mexes,an attempc that began to preoccupy analysts
duringWorldWarl. it;,bpnmn ,l UH;Ü.Tiqül:ãu ;i ,: .,I'':il DÉ;,
But the conHicts with Adler and Jung did more than spur theoretical
innovations.!They algo rrans6ormed the psychoanalytic movement. Until
the schisms,psychoanalysiswas efFectivelya MZ rró#nd. The object of
global projections and idealizations, Freud stood at the intersectioh af an
impossibledilemma: he embodied the authority he claimed to analyze.The
schismsbrought this dilemma. indo 6ocus,leading Freud to write Zo/rm anZ
Zaóaa,with its startling portrait of the primal Éatherand his murder. Obvi-
 Tbe Birtb ofthe Ego 95
SECRETA' O F' .THE S OUL

Alfied Adler: theorist of the

'masçuline protest" (ç. ign)

on whom the patient dependa. All neuroses"are derived and obtain their
power from the bartle between the feminine foundation and the masculino
protest. " Moreover, Adler added, "one muge assumethe presenceofa mascu-
line protest in all women, without exception," lince the devaluation of
woman is "the driving force in our civilization." in June ign Adler restaced
his view: "There is no principie more generally valid for all human relation-
shipsthan 'on top of' and 'underneath.' "s
Freudliked Adler's original theory of organ inferiority, especiallyits
emphasison compensatory strivings, and at first there was muco agreement
between trem. The breach occurred over Adler's insistence that the //zz,.zn-
úóü motive âor repression was the need to guard against [eelings ofinferior-
ity. At the most fundamental levei, Freud rejected the assumption that the
driving force in human lide was the wish to repudiate a passifé or subordi-
nate position. In a igí4 essas,he used a graphic image to develop a counter-
argument;,;He asked his readers [o consider onefof the fundamental
situationsin which desire is felt in inEancy: a young boy observing the sex-
ual act between his parenta. The boy will want to put himselfin the place of
what he takes to be the active man andin peaceof what he takesto be the
passivo
woman. "Between them, thesetwo impulses," Freud wrote, "exhaust
the pleasurable possibilities of the situation." However, Adler's "masculine
proEest"described only the íirst.' Yet the desire to submit, to be passivoor
'under," was at least aspowerfiil a source ofmotivatión asthe boy's desire to
be"on top," and, hrther, was more likely to be unconscious.
 Tt)e BinhoftbeEgo l $1
, SE C RE'rS' 0 F' ' TliE S O U L

dente Freud elaborated:one can see,he wrote Jung, how Adler "tries ta
force the wonderful diversiry of psychology into the narrow bed of a single
aggressive'masculine' ego-current," asifa child "had no other thought than
to be 'on top' and play the man."" Calling Adler's "a nice little caseofpara-
noia,'?:he added: "So Earit hasn't occurred to him that with such a theory
there can be no explanation íor the real suaerings ofneurotics, their feelings
ofunhappinessand conflict."''
Needlessto say,Freud's ad hominem comments, most of them private,
do not constitute an argument. However, they shed light on his and his cir-
cle's thinking. Adler, the Freudiana believed, could not accept his subordi-
nate relation to Freud. Even in public meetings, Freud complained, all we
cear from Adler is "wanting to be on top," "safeguarding," and "covering
one's rear."" Ferenczi elaborated on Freud's view: "Now 1. ; . understand
Adler's hate theories; he doesn't want to lote, and therefore he has to hate
and thinks he is being hated; in se doing he projects all this indo his theo-
ries.It is strange,and k:ertainlyno coincidente, that both Fliessand Adler
emphasize
ó/íex#a#Oin this way; thetunana]yzed]homosexualorigin of
their characceris expressedtherein. "'+ in such 6ormulations, the ambivaient
legacyof psychoanalysiswas Goreshadowed. As the Freudian circle ques-
tioned the sharp fender : dichotomies of nineteenth-century cultura,: it
unwittingly helped lay thelíbasis for a newi'heterosexual/homosexual
dichotomy.
After the break with Fre\id, Adler went on to world game.When he died
in 1938,Freudbrote SteEanZweig; "the world really rewardedhim richly for
his service in having concradicted psycho-analysis."" Buc Freud's spiteful
remark was too self-centered to do justice to the world's motivem.Adler's
conception of an ego that strives aggressivelyfor status and recognition,
regarding all forma of dependency and expressionsof weaknessas signoof
inferiority, arciculateddeep currents then taking chapein the new mass
democracias: one-sided desires for empowerment and contrai. Accordingly,
when the historian Warren Susman tried to describethe dominant cone of
Fordism and mass cultura in the United States in the igzos and '3os, he
could find no better rubric than :'The Age ofAdler.":ó Meanwhile, psycho-
analysisitself would incorporate many ofAdler's ideal, especiallyhis âocus
on aggression, which led to the discovery ofwhat was called "the deÉensive
hnctions of the ego.:

A . cl''-; c: la-!Ü3

leal
+l"l' =',Jii: )hiil.?a!

Ri Hl;=lElu.:i medicaland
n correspon-
rls the cotiHict with Adler was ending, the conHict with Jung erupted.
From the start of their essentially epistolary relationship, Freud had
 TbeBirtb oftbc Eg0 3 aa
. SECRETA OF TH:E ''S OUL

own view, which he coqmunicated to Freud as early as igo6, was Ehat "in
nature ..ç.:.we seeonly a continuous lide-urge, a will to live."3
Innzgiz Jung published a long two-par.t essas,"TransÉormationsand
Symbols of the Líbido," in the JaAróziró, in which he combined his ideal
concerning a unitary, nopsexual lideforce and the symbol-making character
of human psychology with a new stresson the importance of the mother.
Drawing upon the anthiopology ofAryan solar myths, he posited an early
matriarchal age reproduced developmentally in the inÉant'searly aetach.
menu to the mother. Incest, he inGormed Freud, characterized "the early,
culturelessperiod of matriarchy" when the eather'srole was,I'purely fortu-
itous."'4 Behind incestüous wishes are "higher't motivemÉocusedon the
mother. Among these uf the wish to become a ch.ild again, as expressedin
the Imyth of being reborn. The Freudian emphasison sexuality diverte
attention from the symbol world in which humans actually tive.'J
Like Adler, Jung drew on sharp fender distinctions in planeof Freud's
emphasis on the dynamic or personal unconscious. In contrast to Adler,
however,Jung wâs appalled by modem cendenciestoward women's rights.
AfEer the Clark let:jures, he inâormed Freud that 'IAmerican culture really is
a bottomless abyis; the Len have become a rock ofÉheep and the women
pl:y the ravening wolvef. within the;family circle of caurse. 1:ask myÉelf
whether such.conditions have ever existed in the world beÉore.l really don't
chink they have.""
In spiteofsuch views,Jung found much support in the United Status.A
i9zz Visit there precipitafed his break with Freud. Smith Ely JellifFeinvited
him to give a seriesof leftures at Fordham Universiy. "Jung'ssummons to
Americashouldn't be lnything good," Freud.wrote Ferenczi.'IA little,
unknown CaiÉo/zruni+ersity run by Jesuits, which Jones had turned
down."7 in his lectures .Íung expanded.on his essas..
"Obtaining pleasureis
by no meansidentical dith sexuality," he asserted.'8The vagueof the con-
cept oflibido lay "not in its sexual definition but in its energic view."9
Just as Adler felt that psychologyshould be linked to the cultur. of
social democracy and fe$inism, se Jung felt it had to be roored in the deep
ethical currents that coqstitute a Uo/».When Auguste Forel sought Jung's
help ip gaining analytic fupport Éoran "Internacional Fraternity 6or Ethics
and Culture':--a multi-!ssue reform organization---:Jung in6ormed Freud
that he consideredsocial reform "artificial. " For a coalition to have "ethical
significance," he continúed, it ;'must be nourished by the deep instincts of'
theracelti,[i}An echicalfraternity, with its mythical'Nothing, not inhsed
by any archaic-infantile driving force, is a pure vacuum. . . . l imagine a
Earfiner and more comprehensive talk ÉorWA than alliance with an ethical
 TbeBirtb oftbeEgo = \'f \al
SECRBTS' 0F THÉ SOUL
intermittently ever lince writing ZBe /alem?rriaf/on- afZ)rrúmí.[)urina the
conflicts with Jung and Adler,: however, suco preoccupations moved to the
center of Freud's thought.: in igo8 he wrote Jung that he suspectedthat
myth and neurosis cave a common core."31Soon after he described himself
as "obsessedby the ideaof a nuclear complex,"34Finally, in Zazrmá Z Zaóaa
he announced "a most surprising discovery": that social psychology, no leis
than individual, "should prove soluble on the basesof one single concrete
point--man's relation to his Eather."'s A Hewyears bater he set aside the idem
ofa single father in favor ofthe idea that there had been a historical epoch,
somewhere around the time of the lce Age, in which "tyrannical primam
Eathers"ruled. These fathers, he wrote, actually did rob their sons of their
"genital$ if the latter becamc troublesome to]them] as a rival with a
woman."" lü responde,the sons banded together and murdered their
fathers. Remorse over the murders, Freud hem, led to the establishment of
thc incest taboo and the patricentric family.
Freud's6ocuson paternal authority wasnot original. The carly evolu-
tion of bourgeois socieW was premised on the the critique of patriarchal
society and the attempt to establish (mate) equality in the realms ofpolitics
and contract. Perhapsthe most íamous assertionof tais idea was John
Locke'sseventeenth-century riposte to Sir Robert Filmei. Filmei, who sup-
ported the divide right of kings, argued that paternal power was absolute
and alwaysexplicitly included the power to castrate.Locke, in contrast,
de6ended the "natural authority" of mothers and Eathers within the eamily
but rejected Filmer's notion of "Fatherly power," calling it "this strangc
kind of domineeringPhantom. . . this Mrw JVoÍÉ;nX."37
Locke'sclaim to
the contrary, however, the shadow of paternal authority stil1 6ell everywhere
in Freud'stime. It wasimplicit in the equation of autonomywith mas-
culinity; it haunted the intimate relations of men and women, in which
6emininity was confused with submissiveness;and it buttressed "modem"
economia and political authority, se üat employers intimidated subordi-
nates,whites bullied freedmen,and iúperials overwhelmedcoloniais,just
as if the Éatherhad neves been slain by market liberalism and the demo-
cratic revolutions.
Nevertheless, Freud's conception of authority diKered from both Fil-
mei's and Locke's. ló the tradicional conception, authority derived from
Gounding moments, social contracts, or divine revelations. By contrast,
Freud traced the roots of authority to traumatic events: momentous occur-
rencesthat overfiowed the capacity ofmen and women to remember trem
and that were repeatedlyworked over by unconsciousprocessem
in the
courseof time. The myth of the primal morder wassuchan event;Freud
 TheBirtb ofthe Ego :>.\ z la\
SECRETA OF T.HE:=:SOUL
líbido.'"8 Understandably, then, Freud viewed Zoí?m.znZ Zaóoaas a rebuke
to Jung, writing Abraçamthat "the totem job f':i; will serveto cut us oH'
cleanly from all Aryan religiousness."3s
More was at stake than ethnoreligious sensibiliy. Ferenczi caught the
signiíicanceof the confiict while writing a review ofJung's /aóró#ró articles.
Jung'shain concern in the articles, he tom Freud, wasthe restoration ofthe
individual [o a place in the community. Jung, Ferenczi continued, "identi-
fies coneessionwith psychoanalysisand evidently doesn'tknow that the
con6essionof sins is the lessertask of VA cherapy: the greater one is the
demolition of the father âmago,which is completely absent in conâession.
Ferenczi alfa believed that Jung's conception of the analyst differed from
Freud's.Jung doesn'twant to allow himself to be analymd,he wrote, but
rather wants to remam to his patients "the sau/orwho sins himself in his
Godlike naturel" Being analyzedwould entail exposing "his hidden homo.
sexualit»'l Ferenzci explained, which appears in Jung's writings as the
"Christian community" or "brotherhood." Rather than make his own
homosexuality clear to himself. Ferenczi continued, Jung preGersto
despise'sexuality" and praise "the 'progressivehnction of the [uncon-
scious].' "4' A 6ew montês bater, Ferenczi reiterated::ç"The #aión: plays
almost no role . 4U the CBrís/ia rammzó jg afó olófrK takes up all the more
room.:' ' "

Freud responded by reminding Ferenczi of the significance of Enlight-

enment universalism and secularism: "On the manter ofsemitism: there are
certainly great difFerences from the Aryan spirit. We can become convinced
of that every day. Hence there will surely be difFereót world views and art
hereand there. But there should not be a particular Aryan or Jewish science.
The resultamusabe identical, and only their presentationmayvafy . . . If
these differences occur in conceptualizing objective relations in sêience,
then soúething is wrong." But Freud:thensuggestedthat Christianity's
thrust was integrative, whereasJudaism'swas analytic. "lt was ourEJewish]
desire,"he wrote, "not to interfere with their more distant [Christian]
world view and religion, but we considered ouro to be quite favorable for
conducting science.You had heard that Jung declared in America that WA
wasnot a sciencebut a religion. That would certainly illuminare the whole
difEerence.But there eheJewish spirit regretted not being abre tó join in."''
In other words, Freud maintained that scientific conclusions were culturally
neutral, but the cultures üat produce sciencq and that interpret its mean-
ing, varied. Psychological science involved self-consciousness.It was harder
[or the Christian, who starts from a position (universal brotherhood and
"community peeling")rhat repressesand acts out the infantile relation to
 TbeBinb oftbe Ego \o5
SECKBTâ orhínE soul. .,
morives." Explaining his willingness to let himselfbe advisedby the tour or
âve people closestto him, Freud remarked: "Since being taken in by Jung
my confidence in my politicas judgement has greatly declined.'47 When
Jung did resign from the Jaóró#rÁ in October, Freud suspected a play and
considered having the societies under his own contrai resign from the Inter-
nacional.Jonesdissuadedhim, pointing out that the Americanawould not
understandhis action. Finally, in April igi4 Jung, aiong with most other
Swiss analysts, unexpectedly withdrew Eram the Internacional.+8 .Although
Freuddid not know it, Jung had broken down mentallyas the split
unfolded. ,Only with the onset of World War l did he begin to recover,
terpreting his breakdown as a vision ofthe impending world catastrophe.
As 6or Freud, he exulted to Abraçam : "So we are rid ofthem at last, the bru-
tal, holy Jung and his pious parrocs."'P
The Committee, in its variousmaniÉestations,
servedas the icon of
charismatic authority within the analytic movement until the late twenties.
It was then succeeded by a series of institutions and informal groups cen-
tered on Freud. The post important ofthese was the Eraining analysis, the
File de pmsageof every analyst. Reverentially, all analytic literatÜre listed
(and still lista) Freud's igog walks with Max Eitingon as the ârst eraining
analysis." Thraugh subsequent training analyses each succeeding genera-
tion relived the 6ounding generation's transierence [o Freud. In the course
of a11its changes, analysis remained divided between a proâusional Eaçade
and a secret, fantasied, and ambivalent love aimed at Freud.

Ironically, at the very moment (lg12) in which Freud articulated the idea of
the Oedipus complex, paternal authoriy was giving way to a new system of
socialorganization refiected in law economic relations, and government. It
was raid at the dme that the administration of men was giving way to the
administration ofthings, but it is more accurate to say that the locus ofcon-
trol was shifting tg science, technoloW- and bureaucracy.Even the settings
of ehecasestudies that followed "Dará" suggestthe importance of the new
administrative and managerial context. The .ÇRatMan" wasan army oMcer.
Schreber was trying to get out of a mental hospital. If Dou wm in fiight
Eram the Víctorian family, Lanzer and Schreber were fleeing mass, bureau-
cratic organizations, organizations that relied not .on externascoercion but
on internalized self-control.
The shiÊ explains both the power and the limita of Freud'sprewar writ-
ings. His spectral image of a castrating Eatherplayed a role 6or early-
twentieth'century mass democracias analogous to that played by Placa's

' .