On the reality principle - Patrick Blanchfield in TNR:

‘Freud is dead, as more than a few have quipped, because Freud is everywhere. Or as W.H. Auden put it, in an obituary poem, “to us he is no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion.” As a stand-in for a body of work (the English Standard Edition of his writings—which doesn’t include his letters—runs 24 volumes), as the Father of Psychoanalysis, and as a metonymy for a suite of still-disquieting claims about aggression, sexuality, and the unconscious dimensions of human behavior in general, “Freud” endures, overdetermined, signifying far more than just a name.’

(…)

‘Why had he failed to leave Vienna earlier when it would have been relatively easy for him to do so?” Nagorski’s excellent new book, Saving Freud: The Rescuers Who Brought Him to Freedom, tackles precisely this question, offering partly a narrative of Freud’s last years; partly a group biography of the patients, colleagues, and collaborators who served as his “rescue squad” in 1938; and partly a portrait of a city and a world on the brink of disaster.’

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‘Sigismund Shlomo Freud was born in the town of Freiberg, now Příbor, Czechia, in 1856, to a petit bourgeois family. His first years were spent in Moravia, a province of an empire that no longer exists. That polity, the Austrian Empire, was atypical for its era, and can seem stranger still to us today. First an absolutist monarchy, and then, after 1867, a constitutional dual monarchy in union with Hungary, the empire was the second-largest state in continental Europe, its second-biggest in population, and an economic powerhouse, boasting a national health insurance system, mandatory accident insurance, and, by the close of the century, a massive, state-funded postal, telegraph, railway, and electricity infrastructure. Overwhelmingly Roman Catholic but multireligious, with large populations of Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, Muslims, and Jews, it was multiethnic and multilingual, too, with nine official languages and an official version of its national anthem for each. As Nagorski observes: “It was a recipe that also depended on a built-in willingness, by rulers and subjects alike, to tolerate the ambiguities, contradictions, and tensions inherent in such a relatively enlightened multinational, multicultural arrangement. This was particularly true for that somewhat amorphous group of people who identified as Austrians—and not simply as Germans who happened to live in Vienna or elsewhere.”’

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‘Unlike those who would prefer to view Freud as a solitary genius, Nagorski understands Freud in large part through the personal and professional relationships that sustained and ultimately saved him. First among these was with Ernest Jones (1879–1958), a dapper Welsh physician who stumbled across Freud’s work in medical school and “came away with a deep impression of there being a man in Vienna who actually listened with attention to every word his patients said to him.” Jones promptly taught himself German and in 1908 traveled to Austria in order both to hear the Master lecture in person and to pursue the first systematic translations of his writing into English.
Jones rubbed shoulders with H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and D.H. Lawrence. He was also the object of accusations of sexual misconduct by several young female patients—accusations that he insisted were products of transference, and for which he was regularly exonerated, but which nonetheless saw his career shift from the U.K. to Canada and the United States and back again. Jones would thus become a co-founder of the American Psychoanalytic Association, founder of the British Psychoanalytical Society, the longest-serving president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and the first editor of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis; he is also credited as the first to use the term “rationalization” in the sense of a defense mechanism.’

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‘The members of the Freud household were themselves not above various forms of nationalist chauvinism. “All my libido is given to Austro-Hungary,” wrote Freud to Jones, whose confidence in an Allied victory led Freud to chide him as a “real Anglo.” The Freud children cheered the Austrian nobility as they passed in their carriages, and Martha remained a strident supporter of the German imperial family, too. Their eldest son, Martin, enlisted, joining thousands of other Jews in continuing a long and illustrious history of service in the Austrian army, and served gallantly in Russia and Italy. But Freud also condemned the war as “at least as cruel, as embittered and implacable, as any that preceded it.” For him, the conflict was bestial nihilism: “It tramples in blind fury on all that comes in its way, as though there was no future and no peace among men after it is over.” The most Freud let himself hope was that the enormous conflict would yield a “mourning” that would run its course and, just possibly, be followed by a restoration of civilization “perhaps on firmer ground and more lastingly than before.”’

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‘As Nagorski documents, Freud figuratively “worked through” pain and mourning by working through it, literally. “I cannot face with comfort the idea of a life without work,” proclaimed Freud, “In the words of King Macbeth, let us die in harness.” He wrote more than ever, completely overhauling his prior theories of mind and memory in light of the suffering of “shell-shocked” war veterans (1920’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle); penning classic “anthropological” texts like The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) (on the origins of religion and the role of guilt, shame, and aggression in social bonds, respectively); and engaging in a public correspondence with Albert Einstein (Why War? [1932]).’

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‘When Nazis first come to the Freud apartment in 1938 to confiscate any “improperly acquired” funds, Martha asks them to stow their rifles in an umbrella stand and have a seat at the table, and she takes cash out of the family safe for them. Martin manages to hide compromising documents even as brownshirts manhandle and threaten to shoot him; he bribes another to let him leave with one particularly incriminating cache. Marie Bonaparte rushes to Vienna, to sit in her finery blocking the stairs up to Freud’s apartment and to smuggle Freud’s papers and cherished antiquities to the Greek Embassy in her skirts. Bullitt appeals directly to President Roosevelt and has an embassy car with its flag parked in front of Freud’s door. Schur provides Martin and Anna with suicide pills, just in case, and refuses to leave with his family until the Freuds themselves get out of Austria, too.’

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‘Later, he insisted Nazism would never find traction in Austria, reassuring Bonaparte, “Our people are not quite so brutal.” Freud had few illusions about the character of Austria’s own right wing, but believed that its distinctly Catholic character meant that godless National Socialism was unthinkable. “It is only this Catholicism that protects us from the Nazis,” he insisted to Andreas-Salomé. If not that, then at least Austria would be held in check by international law. “We too will get our fascism, party dictatorship, elimination of opposition, applied anti-Semitism,” he assured Jones. “But we should retain our independence, and the peace treaty makes it legally impossible to strip minorities of their rights.” Yet each and every one of these hopes, grim or otherwise, ran aground on the bleak shores of what Freud elsewhere called “the reality principle.”’

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‘When Freud did finally decide to leave, it was almost too late. Only the pleading of Ernest Jones, who flew to Vienna in a chartered monoplane, could move him intellectually; only a direct threat to his beloved daughter and successor could move him viscerally. When Anna was summoned to Gestapo headquarters and barely managed to avoid being sent to a camp, Freud at last roused.
What ensued was a flurry of last-minute scrambles to hide books and export assets while securing the funds and paperwork to pay a Kafkaesque “Reichsfluchtsteuer”—a tax levied on Jews seeking to leave the ¬Reich. Even with ready money from Bonaparte and Bullitt, complications multiplied. In a Europe far from friendly toward Jewish refugees, the Freud party required no less than 20 foreign visas—for the Freud family, their domestic staff, the Schurs, and sundry in-laws. Securing them from the British authorities taxed even Jones’s formidable networking skills. And finally there was the ambivalent Nazi.
In their drive to expropriate Jewish assets, the Nazis seized the Vienna publishing house, a Freud family holding, and came down hard on the Freuds to reveal any foreign assets. Anton Sauerwald was the “trustee” assigned by the party to oversee this plunder. Sauerwald was a young chemist who, as a grad student, had formed a deep affection for an older Jewish professor who subsequently died. He also was an ardent National Socialist who berated Gentiles at the publishing house for working with “Jewish pigs” and told Schur that he viewed Jews as not a “reliable element of the population,” and that they “had to be eliminated” in a situation that “might be deplorable, but [where] the end justifies the means.” Such were the contradictions of a man who would apologize for the rudeness of Gestapo by telling Anna, “What can you expect? These Prussians don’t know who Freud is,” and who—in Anna’s own testimony—became essential to the family’s escape, and more.’

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‘Freud still met VIPs like Isaiah Berlin and Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and he sat for a portrait by Salvador Dalí. He recorded an audio message for the BBC and was filmed handing a baby some flowers. Finally, when the cancer grew too agonizing, he asked Schur to keep his promise, and the good doctor did. Back in Vienna, a despondent Anna Freud had asked her father, “Wouldn’t it be better if we all killed ourselves?” Freud’s response was simple: “Why? Because they would like us to?” But now, the man who had finally told his family that his only realistic hope was to “die in freedom” met death on his own terms.
Perhaps this is part of the answer to Nagorski’s question as to why Freud spent so long “in denial”: His denial of reality was also a refusal to alter the conditions of his inevitable death on terms that were not his. Put simply: He wanted to die at home, and held to this wish, until it came to the point that either the home was no longer his or he would be dragged to die outside it. “The center of Freud’s universe was Berggasse 19, where he and Martha had raised six children,” writes Nagorski. “It was also where he saw his patients, wrote his essays and books, and met on Wednesday evenings with the members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association. He was wedded to rituals like his evening walks on the Ringstrasse and visits to the city’s famed cafes, where he would smoke his cigars and read newspapers.” In other words, Freud was attached to a way of life, and to living in a particular place. He was also attached to identifying himself in certain terms. “My language is German,” he told a journalist in 1926. “My culture, my attainments are German. I considered myself German intellectually, until I noticed the growth of anti-Semitic prejudice in Germany and German Austria. Since that time, I prefer to call myself a Jew.”’

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‘Freud more or less “forgot that Hitler was Austrian.” But then again, as Anna Freud observed many years later, “It is always easy in retrospect to know what was right, to know what should have been done, and when it should have been done.”’

Read the article here.

The idea that you can work yourself through pain is immensely appealing, at least to me. But the limits of it are obvious, and can be found also in this idea.

Without any fiction life becomes unbearable, even for the master of suspicion.