Since I have been studying the unconscious I have become so interesting to myself. A pity that one keeps one’s mouth shut about the most intimate things.

– Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 3 December 1897

It completely follows the dictates of the unconscious on the well-known principle of Itzig, the Sunday horseman: ‘Itzig, where are you going?’ ‘Do I know? Ask the horse’. I did not start a single paragraph knowing where I should end up.

– Freud to Wilhelm Fliess on writing The Interpretation of Dreams, 7 July 1898

Flectere si nequeo Superos, acheronta movebo. If I cannot bend the higher powers, I will move the infernal regions. Aeneid 7:312

– Motto on the title page of The Interpretation of Dreams, 1899

Sigmund Freud’s name will be forever connected to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. He himself coined the term in 1896. In 1908 he changed his modestly named Wednesday Psychological Society – a society that was little more than an intimate group, meeting weekly in Freud’s apartment at 19 Berggasse in the centre of Vienna – to the more precise and prestigious, Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. The aims of the society and, later, the even more encompassing International Psychoanalytic Congress were two- fold: to chart the elusive dynamics of the psyche, especially in relationship to the unconscious, and to fashion a new therapeutic method: what Freud, adopting the words of Anna O, an early patient, called the talking cure. Freudwas passionately committed to creating a new movement in psychological understanding, a development he pitted against academic medicine and which he came to guard, in his later years, with the fanaticism of a zealot.

Unquestionably, psychoanalysis had a momentous effect on our ways of understanding and narrating the self. The magnitude of that influence is impossible to circumscribe. It involved an inexorable movement from theology to therapy, from sin to symptom, from salvation to self- realisation. It would not be hyperbole to say that psychoanalysis forged the modern language of identity. But though Freud’s ideas, at first, shocked and then shaped much of the thinking of the twentieth century, he was not the first to grasp the place of the unconscious, nor the first to perceive the need for therapy, or the crucial role of psychology in the interpretation of human life.

From the Renaissance one can trace a growing belief in the cognitive powers of introspection and the crowning value of the individual. These passions permeate the writing of Montaigne (to whom Freud paid no attention) and Shakespeare (whom Freud revered and sought, at times, to interpret). The unique character of Hamlet alone suggests a seismic shift in consciousness, a sudden yawning gap between self and world, between inner and outer. From the Reformation onwards, developments in the English language register a growing preoccupation with self- conscious identity. In the seventeenth century, a multitude of compounds enter the language in which ‘self’ is hyphenated to a variety of activities: ‘self-pity’ (1621), ‘self-reflection’ (1639), ‘self-consciousness’ (1675), ‘self- study’ (1683) and ‘self-regulation’ (1693). Under the influence of the early Romantics, further psychological words, such as ‘sensibility’, ‘sentiment’ and ‘personality’, took on their modern resonances. It was the Romantic poet, Coleridge – not Sigmund Freud – who coined the concepts of ‘psychosomatology’ and ‘neuropathology’.

In the nineteenth century – often depicted as the age of the ‘self-made’ man – more and more words hyphenated with ‘self’ made their appearance: ‘self-culture’ (1829), ‘self-observation’ (1832), ‘self-reliance’ (1833), ‘self- criticism’ (1857), ‘self-realisation’ (1874) and ‘self-orientation’ (1896). In 1849 four of these illuminating compounds appear in one line of Matthew Arnold’s sonnet, ‘Shakespeare’. The poem celebrated the Elizabethan dramatist as the paragon of creative introspection: self-school’d, self- scann’d, self-honour’d, self-secure. At the climax of the sonnet, Arnold extols Shakespeare for creating a language to embody the plethora of misfortunes, maladies and melancholias that human beings are heir to. All weakness that impairs and all griefs that bow, he declares, found their sole voice in him. The bard is hailed as therapist: one who sees the pathologies of life and dives into the obscure depths to return with the healing power of speech. Shakespeare as psychoanalyst…

The psychological importance Arnold confers on the dramatist is typical of his time. As Christianity began imperceptibly to loosen its grip on critical self-consciousness, so the nineteenth century became the psychological age. It was the period in which autobiography – the word first coined by Charles Lamb in 1807 – burgeoned. Augustine’s autobiographical quest for religious salvation had, finally, modulated into the quest for psychological individuation. After Rousseau’s Confessions the desire for personal revelation and investigation became a cultural compulsion, part of the zeitgeist, manifesting itself not only through a plethora of autobiographies but in the widespread habit of writing intimate letters and of keeping diaries and journals to capture moments of heightened awareness: those formative moments of being.

It is further witnessed in the birth of the Bildungsroman, the novel of personal growth, charting the author’s odyssey beyond social edicts and tribal expectations, the journey into inwardness. Even many of the more conventional novels of the nineteenth century can be regarded as in-depth studies of individuals who, undergoing a series of traumas and tests, either find or lose themselves. Not infrequently the protagonist provided the title of the work: Jane Eyre, Nicholas Nickleby, Daniel Deronda, Jude the Obscure, Billy Budd, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina. Viewed through the lens of psychoanalysis, the novels can be seen as the first monumental, if fictional, case studies: the first psychobiographies – in-depth narratives of individuation or, in some cases, breakdown. Freud was drawn to narratives of the self mobilised by inner conflicts. The tragic figure of Oedipus stands at the centre of his thinking.

Characteristically, Oscar Wilde, author of the autobiographical novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, defended himself in the trial against his work with the language of authentic selfhood: I think that the realisation of oneself is the prime aim of life, and to realise oneself through pleasure is finer than to do so through pain. The sentence might have been taken from one of Freud’s letters to his friend and colleague, Wilhelm Fliess, written at the very time of Wilde’s prosecution and imprisonment. Not a coincidence, rather a convergence of thinking across the whole of Europe – a morphic resonance in the field of consciousness.

At the same time the concept of an unconscious mind, first coined by the German philosopher, Schelling, in the eighteenth century, was gathering momentum. If the unconscious was topical with the early Romantics, by 1870 it had become de rigeur, part of the intellectual chatter and orientation of the age. In his Journal Intime, written between 1847 and 1881, the Swiss thinker, Amiel, wrote: Our greatest illusion is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be. He saw individual lives being directed by invisible forces which could be charted like the astronomical laws of Ptolemy, mapped according to cycle, epicycle and metamorphosis. Greatly influenced by the work of Darwin and Schopenhauer, Nietzsche claimed: All our conscious motives are superficial phenomena: behind them stand the conflicts of our instincts and conditions. The French historian, Taine, proposed with a fine eloquence: Outside a little luminous circle lies a large ring of twilight, and beyond this an indefinite night; but the events of this twilight and this night are as real as those within the luminous circle.

The idea of an unconscious psyche, dark and unknown, dangerous and alluring, was ubiquitous, as was the recognition of the weird power it exerted through dream and phantasy. Romanticism could not have happened without the notion of mysterious powers of the mind, of disconcerting nightmares and uncanny phantasmagoria, of those magical caverns ‘measureless to man’, as Coleridge put it. But no one had attempted to define systematically the baffling ways in which the unconscious worked or to map cogently the profound effects it exerted on everyday life. This was the promethean undertaking that Sigmund Freud set himself in the last decade of the century.

Freud’s life was outwardly uneventful, as it was introspectively rich. He was born in 1856 into a Jewish family. Having studied medicine at the University of Vienna in 1885, he worked in Paris for a short time under the

(A Clinical Lesson at Salpêtrière, by André Brouillet, 1887)

distinguished neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot. In the same year he was made lecturer in neuropathology at the University of Vienna. Soon after, he began to take private patients and his interest gradually moved from neurology to psychopathology, to psychoanalysis. In 1895 he published, with Joseph Breuer, Studies in Hysteria; but, as Freud developed his own theories of infantile sexuality, the collaboration came to an uneasy end. His first seminal work exploring the patterns of the unconscious mind was The Interpretation of Dreams. It came out just before 1900 to accost the new century. With his magisterial book on dreams, psychoanalysis was publicly launched.

Freud’s fascination with the unconscious comes out powerfully in his correspondence with the quixotic Berlin physician, Wilhelm Fliess. Only Freud’s side of the correspondence survives. All Fliess’s letters were burnt and Freud himself wanted his own letters destroyed. I do not want any of them to become known by so-called posterity, he declared. However, two hundred and eighty-four of his letters were bought by Marie Bonaparte in 1928 and she refused to execute the instructions of her aging and, by then, famous mentor. She was surely right. Reading his letters, one encounters the procession of concepts and metaphors which climaxed in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis: one of the first explicit developmental theories of human identity. The letters, with their many attached papers – first drafts of essays, medical reports, diagrams, schemas of work – are a dazzling and indispensable document in the story of the self. While lacking the eloquence of great literature, they belong with Augustine’s Confessions, Montaigne’s Essays and Rousseau’s Confessions for their probing investigation of identity, their existential courage and depth of self-analysis.

Freud wrote his first letter to Fliess on 24 November 1887. It was somewhat rhetorical, if utterly professional, in tone. But, after nearly five years, the salutation became warmer and more vulnerable. The formal Sie turned into the intimate Du. The content of the letters began to open up, ranging from exacting theorising to family intimacies, to gossip. At the height of the correspondence, in a state of intellectual and emotional intoxication, Freud even addressed his friend as Daemon.

The letters unselfconsciously reveal the man. One becomes aware of Freud’s bourgeois respectability, his driving ambition, his blushing hubris. One notices his habits: his addiction to cigars (never broken, on average twenty a day), his love of unremitting mental work, his patriarchal attachment to his family. And one observes the qualities of his mind: the logical acuity, the commitment to rational and scientific explanation, the ability to sweep across the whole of Western culture, drawing now on Goethe, now on Shakespeare, now on Greek drama and myth. Intellectual passion races like molten lava through the whole of the correspondence. I send you a few pages of philosophical stammering, he writes in one letter dated 16 October 1895. In another, dated 11 October 1899, he talks of wild things surmised during stormy epochs of productivity and goes on to quote Goethe’s Faust: Again ye come, ye hovering forms.

At one point, he informs Fliess that he needs to talk for forty-eight hours so that he can crystallise his inchoate ideas, but concludes that, in the absence of his dearest friend, he has no choice but to lurch forward alone, stumbling towards the ever elusive quarry. He dramatises his position by quoting the German poet, Ruckert: what we cannot reach flying/we must reach limping. On occasion the staggering explorer sighs with pleasure: A beautiful piece of objective truth. The formulation is indicative. Freud is a child of the Enlightenment. He is mesmerised by rational symmetry, the formal articulation of a necessary pattern, the abiding structure of things.

In contact with Fliess, Freud’s speculative genius caught fire. Early on he proclaimed: We cannot do without people who have the courage to think something new before they can demonstrate it. Although two years younger and conspicuously less talented, the Berlin physician represented a father figure, or a lover. Somewhat absurdly, Freud hailed the eccentric Fliess as the new Kepler. He is consciously admired, and unconsciously emulated. Fliess became the creative Other, the intellectual midwife to some of Freud’s most original thinking in the most creative decade of his long and productive life. At the end of one letter outlining a vast thesis, which was soon to be discarded, Freud wrote: Of course it is absolutely not developed enough for publication. Suggestions, amplifications, indeed refutations and explanations will be received most gratefully. In their charged relationship, doubt and questioning became essential thoroughfares to a greater synthesis of understanding. Something like the Socratic elenchus was at work.

Accompanying the pursuit there were, at times, states of exalted possession and uneasy reverie. In a letter dated 8 October 1895, Freud writes: I am alone with a head in which so much is germinating and, for the time being, thrashing around. I am experiencing the most interesting things which I cannot talk about … I do not want to read anything, because it plunges me into too many thoughts and stunts my gratification in discovery. In short, I am a wretched hermit. Two years later he became more and more engaged with the symbolic meaning of dreams; he writes in a similar mood of trance: On such quiet days as yesterday and today, however, everything in me is quiet, terribly lonely. I cannot talk about it to anyone, nor can I force myself to work … I must wait until something starts in me and I become aware of it. And so I often dream whole days away. He describes himself as being in a cocoon and wonders what sort of creature will emerge. The euphoria is palpable, as is the attendant loneliness. In the half-intellectual, half-erotic matrix of the relationship a revolution is taking place. A larger picture of the self, however problematic, however incomplete, however doctrinaire, is in formation.

The years 1893 to 1900 were the great period of discovery. During these years Freud abandoned the idea of a scientific psychology based on physiology and gravitated towards the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. The dramatic shift of paradigm was achieved through work with his patients, through extensive research and reading, but, most critically, through his own self-analysis. In a letter to his fiancée, written in 1882, Freud had declared: I always find it uncanny when I can’t understand someone in terms of myself.

In the summer of 1897 he took the most obvious next move – the existential step. He made himself his own patient; he descended into the dark labyrinth of his psyche. In the tradition of Augustine, Montaigne and Rousseau, he turned to his own existence in order to understand life at large. He informed Fliess that the self-analysis was more difficult than any other. His orientation, however, was somewhat different from that of his predecessors. For Freud sought to understand himself in terms of the earliest conflicts within his family, in terms of infantile libido and an unconscious mind that expressed itself, most dramatically, in puzzling dreams. This was, for the most part, new. Coming out of both the Enlightenment and Romanticism, it was yet another radical response to the Delphic Oracle’s injunction Know thyself, that demanding imperative set up at the gates of Western culture.

Freud’s self-analysis began in earnest in the summer of 1897 but had its origin in the death of his father some nine months earlier. In the preface to the second edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud claimed that the whole book was part of his own self-analysis precipitated by his father’s death: the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man’s life. In fact, a week after it Freud had written to Fliess saying that his childhood had been suddenly re-activated and that he felt uprooted. Late to his father’s funeral, he had a dream the following night. At his usual barber’s shop he found himself reading the sign: You are requested to close the eyes. Freud interpreted the dream as one of self-reproach, disclosing a failure to honour his father. Much might be conjectured about this brief dream in relationship to Freud’s preoccupation with sexuality and death, as well as his relationship to his new father figure, Fliess. It may well carry a multiplicity of meanings that Freud could not consciously face at the time. But what the letter marks, unambiguously, in the context of Freud’s life and work, is the first shift towards his own self-analysis and with it a growing belief in the significance of dreams. This modest letter is the autobiographical prelude to psychoanalysis.

It was the task of the physician now to heal himself. The sustained self-analysis began the following year. Freud struggled to break into the intricate web of associations and repressions below the surface of everyday rational and pragmatic consciousness. To theorise about his hysterical female patients was one thing; to enter the shadowy maze of his own mind was quite another. Freud turned back to childhood to summon up the turbulent emotions which continued to subvert his adult life. In that momentous summer he identified a number of unsettling desires and impulses: an incestuous love for his mother, jealousy and hatred towards his father, murderous wishes towards his younger brother, sadistic feelings towards his niece, a strident competitiveness with one of his nephews and a complex set of ambivalent erotic emotions (including shame and fear of punishment) towards his nurse. The raging infant was father to the man. Soberly, he reclaimed the dark material which had been banished into the depths of his psyche. A century after psychoanalysis it is difficult to appreciate the originality of this lonely inner work or the courage it demanded. In the story of the self it was nothing less than another quantum leap.

In one of the more remarkable letters to Fliess, dated 15 October 1897, Freud quietly formulated the notion of the Oedipus complex: A single idea of general value dawned on me. I have found, in my own case too, being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood. Having made a huge speculative leap from his own personal experience to all humanity, Freud then makes a further leap back into classical culture. He refers to the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles and begins to interpret the mesmerising power of the play in the light of his introspective discovery: Everyone in the audience was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy, and each recoils in horror from the dream-fulfilment here transplanted into reality, with the full quantity of repression which separates his infantile state from his present one. Not content with this, Freud then makes a further jump to Hamlet, suggesting that the same complex informs the play. The hysterical protagonist cannot act because he too has desired the same pleasure secured by Claudius. According to Freud, this was not Shakespeare’s conscious intention but, rather, the author’s unconscious working with the unconscious of his neurotic hero. Freud reads the play like a dream disclosing subterranean meanings.

During this period of self-scrutiny Freud suffered from a variety of symptoms. They alarmed and perplexed him. These were quickly relayed to his unofficial therapist, Fliess. He described his fear of cardiac arrest and his dread of death, his anxiety before travel, an extreme oscillation of mood and a pervading sense of depression accompanied by a desire to withdraw from others. He acknowledged his addiction to cigars and saw it as masturbatory. He complained of severe migraines and obscure digestive problems. That he was undergoing a psychological crisis, almost a crack- up, can hardly be doubted. Yet the breakdown was also a breakthrough.

Out of the bleak suffering came brighter understanding. What was unconscious was being made conscious, reclaimed like the ground of the Zuyder Zee for abundant life. Having discovered the art of self-scrutiny, Freud never lost it. Nearly every day of his long life he allowed himself at least half an hour for introspective reflection. In this, although he may not have known it, he followed the same habit as the stoic Seneca, as also the daily examination of conscience of the good Christian. If there had been a revolution, there still remained conspicuous continuities.

It is a great loss that Freud never formally traced his self-analysis. Paradoxically, the man loathed self-revelation. He could never have written about himself in the naked confessional style of Rousseau or even Montaigne. The letters he scribbled to Fliess provide unique but partial insights into this interior journey. Because of Freud’s characteristic reticence, however, a full narrative will never be possible. His cultivated urbane style, diplomatic and often cunning in method, outlawed the quick of intimacy. His autobiography is cool intellectual memoir, not burning revelation. Rousseau would have been contemptuous. Regarding Freud’s self-analysis, all that remains is a number of fragments throwing a diffuse light on what must have been a much larger pattern of disconcerting exploration.

Nevertheless, by 1900 the entire conceptual language of psychoanalysis was in place. In Freud’s letters to Fliess one encounters the vocabulary of the new movement in swashbuckling action. The rapidly expanding lexicon included such words as ‘sublimate’, ‘resistance’, ‘cathexis’, ‘libido’, ‘transference’, ‘wish-fulfilment’, ‘repression’, ‘defence’, ‘infantile sexuality’, ‘Oedipus complex’, ‘hysteria’, ‘neurosis’, ‘psychosis’, ‘paranoia’, ‘bi-sexuality’. Whatever the problems with the theory and the language – and there are many – it was a startling intellectual achievement. In less than a decade a semiotic for reading experience had been created and with it a practical therapy for immediate application.

What was the larger picture of self painted by Freud?

His project was primarily concerned with therapy and the charting of the unconscious. Charcot and Breuer had demonstrated that below the visible symptoms of hysteria lay long forgotten traumatic experiences. Working in Vienna, Breuer employed a method which relied first on hypnosis and, then, on a process of ‘abreaction’ – an ugly term that was later to be incorporated into the language of psychoanalysis. Under hypnosis, the patient relived the forgotten trauma and was encouraged to express all the pent-up feelings that accompanied it. Out of this medical matrix psychoanalysis was to emerge.

At the same time as starting his self-analysis Freud began to refine and extend Breuer’s rudimentary therapy. Regarding it as unreliable and haphazard, he discarded the practice of hypnosis. In its place he introduced the talking cure, inviting patients to say whatever came into their minds without inhibition. He added to this the method of free association and the analysis of dreams. Around the same time the famous couch was introduced. Reclining on a low bed the patient could regress more easily to childhood and unconsciously transfer key parental figures onto the

 

 

 

 

unseen analyst. Listening to himself in his self-analysis and listening to his patients on the couch, Freud detected a marked tendency to repress traumatic events and to resist any attempt to identify them. ‘Repression’ and ‘resistance’: two further key terms. Understanding and overcoming these defences became a further crucial part of the talking cure.

The emerging picture of the self was complex and multi-layered. Primary unconscious processes were envisaged as poetic and associative in nature, not rational or empirical. They were seen as invariably in conflict with the higher secondary processes of reason and civilisation. The image was one of depth and tension, of inner division and dissociation. The primitive psyche was made up of feuding impulses, each seeking release and gratification. At one point Freud compared the psyche to the modern state in which the mob, avid for pleasure and destruction, had to be held down by a superior class of people. Later, in 1923, he introduced the tripartite concept of the self, dividing the psyche into three antagonistic parts: id, ego and super ego. The threefold structure was remarkably close to Plato’s anatomy of the soul, but shorn of the metaphysics, the idealism and the transcendental hope.

Freud saw his work as delivering the third wounding blow to humanity’s narcissism and conceit. At the beginning of the Renaissance Copernicus had destroyed the illusion that man was at the centre of the universe; in the nineteenth century Darwin had destroyed the illusion that human life had been created in a single moment by divine fiat; at the beginning of the twentieth century Freud had destroyed the illusion that the human mind could ever know or be in complete control of itself. The rational self was a recent and ever precarious achievement. The psyche was inherently ambivalent and prone to being seduced by its own rationalisations. The story of the self was, in large measure, the story of man’s metaphysical and cosmic dispossession. The interpretation was all but Nietzschean in character but without the tragic sublimity and without the Dionysiac dithyrambs. For Freud, any kind of life-wisdom had to begin with the sober confrontation of a difficult ‘reality’, with an ethical stoicism.

For all its speculative reach, however, Freud’s thinking tends towards a certain reduction. He is, at root, a determinist. There is little room for freedom, or transcendence. We hardly ever encounter the subject as a living being, invisible in a world of mute empirical objects: the self as creative subjectivity. It is no accident that in his letters to Fliess the words ‘formula’ and ‘solution’ appear so frequently. He thinks he is defining the laws of the mind, but it is far from clear that the mind has any defining set of laws. The legal metaphor does not match the wild and unwieldy terrain.

In a similar manner, in Freud’s interpretation of dreams, certain objects nearly always signify the same things. Women’s hats, overcoats and ties represent genital organs, while steps, staircases and ladders symbolise sexual intercourse. Likewise, all dreams are viewed as manifestations of one ‘mechanism’: wish-fulfilment. A kind of depleting scientism is in operation. The interpretation is often downwards to a dreary ‘nothing but’ explanation. Early on in the history of psychoanalysis Breuer pinpointed this doctrinal tendency when he wrote to a friend: Freud is a man given to absolute and exclusive formulations. It was the same Freud who could later denounce followers, who came to disagree with him, as ‘heretics’: Adler, Jung, Stekel, Rank and many others.

Freud loved riddles which he could solve. Yet he could not conceive of riddles which were multivalent in character, where there might be a plurality of ‘answers’ dependent on the individual who seeks and asks. Ironically, Freud, who was quick to catch verbal slips and had a genius for interpreting at an angle, often missed the subjective oddities and possibilities, the quirks and quarks, the contingencies and multiplicities.

It could be said that Freud was developing his theory within the wrong paradigm. He was not strictly a scientist, like Galileo or Darwin. For all his concise taxonomies and definitive deductions and inductions, he is best seen as a poetic interpreter of the irreducible human condition, a man working in the long tradition of hermeneutics, offering original readings of symbols, texts and biographies (like those of Goethe and Leonardo da Vinci), speculating on stages of human development, on various life crises, on the meaning of what we say and do not say or slip up saying. Many of Freud’s patients were not cured in the way he claimed; the cases of Anna O and Wolf Man are spectacular examples of misrepresentation. In 1979, decades after his therapy with Freud, Pankojeff (Wolf Man) lamented: The whole thing looks like a catastrophe. I am in the same state as when I came to Freud. He had spent the whole of his life, after Freud’s

therapy, seeking further remedies for his depression. Moreover, the actual number of patients for any empirical comparison (if that was ever possible) was risible. Characteristically, the binding conclusions in Freud’s essay, The Aetiology of Hysteria, were based on only eighteen cases. It is telling that, today, Freud’s work is honoured more in English and philosophy departments than in medical schools or science faculties.

While Freud may have been right to insist on the sexual aetiology of many neuroses and to point to the erotic nature of much infant experience, it was reductive to make sexuality the single cause, the sine qua non of all development. As so often in Western history, the liberating insight was in danger of becoming a petrifying dogma. At the very beginning of psychoanalysis Breuer maintained that Freud – like Charcot before him – was categorically wrong in his ‘overvaluation of sexuality’. Charcot had shouted at his young students: C’est toujours la chose g̷enitale, toujours, toujours, toujours – it is always the genital thing, always, always, always. Freud, for most of his life under the deceptive spell of scientific laws and causes, kept declaiming his mentor’s ‘toujours’. A nimble reader of the ambiguous symbolic traffic of the mind, he was yet unable to detect the resistance to the spiritual and aesthetic that lurked below the mechanism and grand narrative Materialism of the age.

Paradoxically, the view Freud gave of himself to his friend Fliess got nearer to the existential truth. In one of his letters he jettisoned the scientist’s objective persona to reveal the inner drive. He claimed he was not really a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am nothing but by temperament a conquistador – an adventurer, if you want to translate the word – with the curiosity, the boldness and the tenacity that belong to that type of being. If only he had remained true to that daring self-revelation, the spirit of psychoanalysis would have remained free of scientism and those ‘nothing but’ formulations: the downward reduction of human consciousness. His theory might have been composed more in the higher key set by the two great conquistadors with whom he passionately identified: Leonardo da Vinci and Goethe. It would have been an even richer and more Socratic creation, and not subject to the subsequent doctrinal feuds and wrenching schisms.

For all the complications and ambiguities, Freud’s psychoanalysis belonged to the long tradition of Western culture. Though seldom seen in this light, psychoanalysis revived the central aspiration of the Greek philosophers to live well. At its best, and in spite of a certain arrogant reductionism, it sought to establish a form of therapeia which would secure a state of eudaimonia: a tempered human flourishing, a Stoic healing of the splintered self, a reflexive life based on the art of love and the discipline of work. In a new historic context, and with a different terminology, something of the same classical humanist aspiration was still in play. Psychoanalysis was a revolution, yes, but it was, at the same time, rooted in the old rhizome. The plant was soon to break into an even richer efflorescence of the self.

In his next essay Peter Abbs will examine Carl Jung’s notion of individuation. For further details of the story of the self see www.peterabbs.org