Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision: Darkness in the Midst of Vision: Darkness in the Midst of Vision - Softcover

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LOUIS BREGER is Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies, Emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology and founding President of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He has been a practicing psychotherapist/psychoanalyst for over thirty-five years and has published numerous scholarly articles and books dealing with dreams, personality development, literary interpretation, and psychoanalytic theory.

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"Finally, the Freud biography we have long been waiting for." Sophie Freud, Freud s granddaughter and Professor Emeritus of Social Work, Simmons College

More Praise for Freud: Darkness in the midst of Vision

"Rich and readable . . . a thoughtfully complex account of a great but flawed man. . . absolutely fascinating." Judith Viorst, author, Necessary Losses and Imperfect Control

"A foray into the past that matters a great deal." The New York Times Book Review

"Masterly . . . this landmark work conveys a new sense of one of the great flawed men and movements of the last century." Library Journal (starred review)

"Groundbreaking . . . Freudian analysis (literally) at its best." Booklist

"Perceptive . . . Breger s sane and lucid study must henceforth count among the indispensable books on Freud." Times Literary Supplement

"Highly readable . . . Breger maintains a judiciously skeptical distance from Freud and Freud s own self-mythologizing, yet never loses sympathy for the man himself." J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Booker Prize

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"Finally, the Freud biography we have long been waiting for."–Sophie Freud, Freud’s granddaughter and Professor Emeritus of Social Work, Simmons College

More Praise for Freud: Darkness in the midst of Vision

"Rich and readable . . . a thoughtfully complex account of a great but flawed man. . . absolutely fascinating."–Judith Viorst, author, Necessary Losses and Imperfect Control

"A foray into the past that matters a great deal."–The New York Times Book Review

"Masterly . . . this landmark work conveys a new sense of one of the great flawed men and movements of the last century."–Library Journal (starred review)

"Groundbreaking . . . Freudian analysis (literally) at its best."–Booklist

"Perceptive . . . Breger’s sane and lucid study must henceforth count among the indispensable books on Freud."–Times Literary Supplement

"Highly readable . . . Breger maintains a judiciously skeptical distance from Freud and Freud’s own self-mythologizing, yet never loses sympathy for the man himself."–J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Booker Prize

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Excerpt

Freud's Life: The First Thirty Years

A Traumatic Infancy

Freud has emerged as a person stranger and less explicable by his own theoriesthan he himself realized.

?Charles Rycroft

SIGMUND FREUD was born in 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia (today Príbor, in theCzech Republic), a small market town one hundred fifty miles north of Vienna,the first child of the newly married Jacob and Amalia Nathanson Freud. Freibergwas then part of the Austro-Hungarian or Hapsburg Empire, a vast region thatincluded parts of what later became Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania,the Ukraine, Yugoslavia, and present-day Austria. Of the 4,500 inhabitants ofFreiberg at that time, only 130?about 3 percent?were Jews like the Freuds;there were an equally small number of Protestants. The rest of thetownsfolk?over 4,000?were Czech Catholics. The new baby was named SigismundSchlomo. Sigismund was a German name from the word Sieg, or victory.Schlomo?Solomon in English?was a Hebrew name bestowed in honor of Jacob'srecently deceased father. The two names reflected the historical and culturalmilieu of Jacob and his family, positioned between traditional Jewish life andthe new path of emancipation and assimilation that was just opening to them inthe middle of the nineteenth century.

Jews had been a persecuted minority in Europe for centuries, their fortuneswaxing and waning at different times and in different countries. Under someprogressive regimes, they prospered as merchants, traders, and advisers tokings, while at other times they were subject to oppression, legalrestrictions, banishment, and pogroms in which they were slaughtered by thethousands. Such persecution forced families to move from one country toanother, and the father of Kallamon Jacob Freud?to give him his full name?hadsettled in what was then the Austro-Hungarian region of Galicia (now part ofthe Ukraine), in the village of Tysmenitz. During Jacob's youth, half thepopulation of Tysmenitz was Jewish; many were traders and merchants, and thetown was also a center of Jewish learning and scholarship. Jews in the village,or shtetl, of Tysmenitz followed centuries-old Orthodox traditions:they celebrated their own holidays, studied the Talmud, adhered to dietarylaws, and spoke Yiddish among themselves, all of which isolated them from theirgentile neighbors. Forbidden from owning land, they served as merchants,shopkeepers, and traders. As in many of the shtetls of eastern Europe, the Jewsinteracted with their gentile neighbors, yet constituted a world untothemselves with their separate religious practices, customs, and language.

Jacob's maternal grandfather, Siskind Hofmann, traveled between Galicia andMoravia, trading in wool, linen, honey, and tallow; Jacob became his juniorpartner and would work as a merchant and salesman for the rest of his life. Histravels took Jacob away from the narrow confines of the shtetl and introducedhim to a somewhat wider world. These journeys took him to Freiberg, where hebecame a permanent resident in 1852. Sally Kanner, whom he had married as avery young man, did not join him on his travels; she died in Tysmenitz beforehe moved to Freiberg. His two sons from this first marriage?Emanuel andPhilipp?joined their father in Freiberg to work in his business there.

As the nineteenth century progressed, discrimination toward Jews graduallylessened. The rise of the Enlightenment?particularly in Germany?brought aboutincreased religious tolerance. The Austrian emperor Joseph II issued aTolerance Ordinance in 1781 that did away with many restrictions on the Jews inhis realm, and Prussia officially emancipated its Jewish population in 1812.The revolution that shook western Europe in 1848 had, as one benefit, greaterreligious freedom. Franz Joseph, emperor of Austria-Hungary throughout much ofFreud's lifetime, granted full rights to Austrian Jews in 1849. When Jacob setup in Freiberg as a trader in wool, he was the beneficiary of these newfreedoms. The old prejudices did not disappear, of course; Jacob was still a"tolerated Jew" who had to apply to the authorities every year for permissionto pursue his business. Nevertheless, full political and civic rights and theabolition of many restrictions meant that Jews were in a far better positionthen they had been for centuries.

The new freedoms, along with contact with the world outside the shtetl,encouraged Jacob to shed many of the traditions of Jewish life. He was part ofa generation in transition, people who were beginning to think of themselves asAustrians or Germans as much as Jews, who moved away from Orthodox religiouspractices and adopted the customs, mores, and languages of their new countries.Where his ancestors spoke Yiddish and wrote in Hebrew, Jacob?who knew theselanguages?conducted his business in German. By the time he married Amalia, hisnew family was set on this assimilated path: they continued to celebrate thetraditional Jewish holidays of Purim and Passover, but more as festive events;the Orthodox practices of their forebears were gone and the new family wasraised as culturally but not religiously Jewish. Still, with all the newfreedom and assimilation, memories of persecution hovered in the air: therewere many reminders in daily life of their position as Jews; the effect ofcenturies of mistreatment, and the possibility of new violence, could not beerased from their minds. They were, after all, a tiny minority in Freiberg,surrounded by people who did not share their history or religion.

Following the death of his first wife, Jacob may have married a woman namedRebecca, who apparently also died. It is not known for certain whether thiswoman even existed but, if she did, Freud as an adult showed no awareness ofher, though she would have been known to his older half brothers and, no doubt,his mother. Jacob and Amalia Nathanson were married in 1855, when he was fortyand she twenty. Jacob has been described as fair and, in the later words of hisgrandson Martin, tall and broad-shouldered. Photographs of him around the ageof fifty reveal a handsome and distinguished-looking man. He was a person ofpleasant manners, easygoing, with a sense of humor?he was, after all, asalesman?and, at the time of his marriage to Amalia, somewhat successful inbusiness.

Little is known about Amalia Nathanson's background. She was born in the townof Brody in eastern Galicia and lived for a time in Odessa, where her olderbrothers settled. With her parents, and her younger brother Julius, she movedto Vienna when she was a child, and it was here that she and Jacob met. Herfather was a merchant and the family, at least in later years, was not poor.She was an attractive young woman, slender and dark, and possessed of greatvitality and a powerful personality. Jacob and Amalia were married by a rabbiaffiliated with the Reform movement, a further sign of their move away from theOrthodox traditions of their ancestors.

Sigismund Schlomo Freud was the firstborn son of the new marriage between Jacoband Amalia. He was known as "Sigi" throughout his childhood and his motherstill called him this when he was in his seventies, though he used the nameSigismund throughout adolescence, shortening it to Sigmund around the time heentered the university. Jacob, Amalia, and their infant son were soon joined bytwo additional babies. While Jacob's business seemed sufficient to support hisfamily, they could afford no more than a single rented room above the locksmithshop of a Czech family named Zajic in a building that still stands in Príbor.The family's living conditions were cramped, and which continued for a numberof years after they moved to Vienna, a situation that exposed little Sigi tomany intimate details of his parents' lives; at this time, babies were born athome and nursed in the conjugal bed. And they died at home as well.

The young Freud was part of an extended family...