Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939, Austrian psychiatrist, in the office of his Vienna home looking at a manuscript
Source: BBC
By Jane Ciabattari: A a journalist and book critic based in New York and California who is the author of the short story collection Stealing the Fire.
Freudian slips. The Oedipus complex. The ego. The id. The superego. Sigmund Freud’s writings changed how we perceive human behaviour. The founder of psychoanalysis pioneered insights into perhaps the original unreliable narrator – the self – and opened the pathway toward increasingly complex literary characters with motives beyond the obvious.
“Every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance, and one which may be assigned to a specific place in the psychic activities of the waking state,” Freud wrote in his landmark book, The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899. From the beginning, his work was intertwined with the canonical literature of his time. He drew upon Sophocles, Goethe’s Faust and Shakespeare – especially Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth – to explicate his understanding of unconscious motivations and the complex metaphors and displacements of dreams. He used the language of poets and novelists to outline irrational behaviour, pioneering concepts we have come to think of as commonplace.
To begin to understand Freud’s enduring impact on literature today, it is illuminating to trace the parallels between his writings and the work of his literary contemporaries.
Peer pressure and praise
“When I read one of your beautiful works I keep finding, behind the fiction, the same propositions, interests and solutions that are familiar to me from my own thoughts,” Freud wrote to Arthur Schnitzler, whose sexually explicit work, including the 1897 play Reigen (best known as La Ronde) was banned in Austria for nearly a quarter century. Schnitzler was, like Freud, trained as a neurologist in Vienna. And he was familiar with The Interpretation of Dreams. Schnitzler’s fiction includes dreams, Freudian symbols (mountains, lakes) and stream-of-consciousness, modelled on the “free association” Freud describes in Studies on Hysteria (1895).
Freud also corresponded with Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, who noted in his 1931 biographical essay about the psychoanalyst, “Twenty years ago, Freud’s ideas were still thought of as blasphemous and heretical. Today they circulate freely and find expression in ordinary linguistic usage.”
Additional Reading
Curing Sigmund Freud’s Atheism
Categories: Europe and Australia, Medicine, Psychology, Religion & Science, Religion and Science