Freud, the Listener

“…a man with immense powers of intellect and observation, an intriguing personality, and a complex family history,” is how Patrick Mahony, author of Freud as a Writer, describes Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud is without a doubt a major cultural hero, especially for the city and people of Vienna and even Europe, but he is also my personal hero. Particularly, his incredible ability to observe, to listen, and to shed light on the mysteries of the mind are the attributes that make him my role model. The skill of listening for me has always been a shortcoming, but I have only recently realized it. When I thought I was listening, I was only hearing objectively and only seldom had I actually been able to subjectively listen. Freud, excuse the pun, had subjective listening down like a science, as it was essentially the backbone of possibly his greatest contribution to the field of psychology: psychoanalysis.

Sigmund Freud was born in Freiberg, Monrovia on May 6, 1856. His mother Amalie was twenty years younger than his father, a Jewish wool merchant, and his third wife. Freud was his mother’s favorite child and she continually expressed this, calling him her ‘golden Sigi’. He later attributes all of his inner confidence to his mother and this term of endearment.
Freud's mother was especially fond of her "Golden Sigi".
When Freud was 3 years old, his family moved to Vienna, where Sigmund would continue to live and work for the next 80 years, despite the fact that throughout his life he expressed a strong dislike for the city. Jonathan Miller, writer of Freud: The man, his world, his influence, describes Freud as “…a Viennese Jew who was constantly fighting a heroic battle for his identity and self-awareness in a hostile milieu, in Vienna—a city he both loved and hated.” This is just one of many apparent contradictions in Freud’s strange but intriguing life.
Although Freud was born a Jew and his family practiced minimal Jewish customs, Freud was never religious and later professed himself as an atheist. However, throughout his life, Freud always had a deep sense of pride for his Jewish-ness and identified with the Jewish cultural ideals and values, despite the rampant anti-Semitism in Vienna at the time. He later felt that this very lack of acceptance by the community fostered the intellectual autonomy and independence that allowed him to be so innovative in the field of psychology. Paul Roazen, biographer of Sigmund Freud, describes Freud in his anti-Semite surroundings as “…a Jew trying to escape from what he experienced as a constricting cultural background.” Freud’s need to escape from his surroundings was only one of the many forces that seemed to drive him to success.

Even as a boy, Freud was an extremely hard worker and intellectually precocious—always the top in his class at school. At a young age he spoke German, French, English, and Spanish fluently, and had read and comprehended the classics such a Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Goethe, with the latter two being his favorites. Freud had a passion for knowledge and particularly philosophical knowledge. Here arises another apparent contradiction in Freud’s personality. “As a young man,” Freud reminisces, “I knew no longing other than for philosophical knowledge…. I became a therapist against my will.” And on a number of occasions he admitted that he had no particular inclination toward the subject of medicine.

With so many dualisms of Freud’s personality: distaste for Vienna, yet a reluctance to leave; Jewish pride, yet atheism; love of philosophy, yet pursuit of science; it is only natural that from such a conflicting personality should come a psychology that centers on conflict. Similarly, most of these apparent contradictions begin to make sense when considering Freud’s character and what forces drive him in his specific approach to science.
Portrait of Goethe, Freud's favorite writer.

According to Freud, it was an essay by one of his favorite writers, On Nature by Goethe, which made him decide to enroll in the School of Medicine. Billa Zanuso, writer of The Young Freud: The Origins of Psychoanalysis in Late Nineteenth-Century Viennese Culture observes, “So a great poet was responsible for directing Freud’s steps toward science, albeit a peculiar science, probing beyond the boundaries of observed reality into areas which are more usually the preserve of poets and novelists.” This I will consider Freud’s philosophical drive, however, there is a deeper drive in Freud that connects his love for philosophy and his practice of science. Freud himself reveals his true character and ambition.

“For I am not really a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, and 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.”

Freud’s study of philosophy and career in medicine were just a manifestation of his true passion, “realizing his intense curiosity in nature and human relations (Looking and Listening: The Construction of Clinical Knowledge in Charcot and Freud by Daphne de Marneffe). Freud’s ‘intense curiosity’ provided an obvious contribution to his success as an individual, a scientist, and a philosopher. “In my youth I felt an overpowering need to understand something of the riddles of the world in which we live and perhaps even contribute something to their solution.”(Freud) In this statement we not only see his conquistadorial desire to fearlessly explore the unknown, but also a need to shed a light on “that abyss in the human mind” and then to lead those still stuck in the dark (Miller). Paul Roazen elaborates, “It was the adventurer in Freud, the seeker after new knowledge, that, despite the conventionality of his everyday life, led him eventually to challenge not only the psychiatry of his day, but ordinary commonsensical assumptions about human behavior.” This statement alludes to the rebel, the leader, the deliverer side of Freud. It is no surprise that Freud’s boyhood heroes included the likes of Hannibal, Alexander the Great and Moses.
Moses, a boyhood hero of Sigi's

Freud considered himself a “saver of souls” and through psychotherapy he found a way to do that. He soon discovered that in this endeavor, listening was paramount. Scientists before Freud, such as Charcot, one of Freud’s friends and mentors, had mastered the art of observation. “To gaze, to look, to keep looking, always: thus only one comes to see.”(Marneffe) From a young age, Charcot developed an artistic eye and later in life he used it to observe his patients and record their symptoms of hysteria. These observations, though they led to many relative breakthroughs on the subjects of hysteria, were purely objective however—as if taking a picture. Charcot himself admits, “But in truth I am nothing more but a photographer.” Freud admired Charcot's observational skills but he thought this kind of observation alone was “simply inadequate” and instead he “realizes the importance of thoroughly listening” to his patients (Marneffe). Freud not only employed his skill of detailed listening when dealing with his patients in the process of psychoanalysis, but he was constantly in a state of awareness to his surroundings. He paid painstakingly close attention to detail with regards to the people around him, especially of his friends and himself—behaviors, conversations, thoughts, dreams—that he was able to formulate many of his theories on his everyday experiences alone. Not only did he formulate his theories by listening, but he was also able to recall specific “neurotic symptoms, dreams, everyday errors and slips of the tongue, and even works of art” that led to these conclusions and then use them as examples in his scientific writings, thus substantiating his highly controversial theories (Miller).
A painting by Dali that Freud might have analyzed

Miller explains, “By choosing to present his revolutionary innovations as standard pieces of scientific theory…he made the largest possible claim for their objective truth.” Probably his most detailed and impressive example of listening is his Interpretation of Dreams in which he analyzes his own dreams, which he religiously recorded over an extended period of time. In this unique form of autobiographical writing, Freud “presented the most personal thoughts and dream material with total candor” (Marneffe). This incredible example of listening, introspection and dedication, to actually record his own dreams—the deepest, most enigmatic, most private thoughts of his troubled mind—and then publish them for the purpose of elucidating mankind is truly heroic and inspiring.

Sigmund Freud is a cultural hero in his timeless contributions to science, to philosophy, and to mankind. And although he was nearly 50 before he made his greatest discoveries, his influence on society is incalculable. Jonathan Miller compares Freud to a quarry and a volcano: “a quarry form which builders fetch stones to construct their own relatively modest homes…a volcano, in that his ideas and energies erupt unexpectedly like molten lava just when they are thought to be extinct.” He is also a personal hero for me, in his awe-inspiring ability to listen to his patients, to his friends, to his environment and especially to himself. Patrick Mahony makes another intriguing piscatorial analogy: “Many of us, gazing over the water, have had the thrill of glimpsing a fish arching into the air; so Freud, we imagine, sunk in introspection, watched for ideas to break through the unconscious, ready to seize and hold them in their transitory flight.”