Young Dr. Freud (2002) - full transcript

He grappled with
the enemy within

on the battlefield of the mind.

Freud.

He has things to say which
are extremely subversive.

He was a bourgeois who
made bombs in his living room.

But Freud had demons of his own.

He suffered from
episodic depressions.

He was very worried about dying.

He was in a troubled state.

His ideas revolutionized

the way we think and
feel about ourselves.



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On October 23, 1896, 80-year-old
Jacob Freud died in Vienna.

His son, Sigmund,
was deeply shaken.

I find it difficult
to write just now.

The old man's death has
affected me profoundly.

With his peculiar mixture

of deep wisdom and
fantastic lightheartedness,

he had a significant
effect on my life.

I now feel quite uprooted.

My father's death
revolutionized my soul.

By the time he died, his
life had long been over,

but in my inner self, the whole
past has been reawakened.



Freud's childhood
came rushing back,

flooding him with
disturbing dreams

and half-forgotten memories...

And out of the tumult,

he would fashion a theory
that would change forever

the way we think and
feel about ourselves.

All the key concepts of human
psychology have been with us

since the ancient world,

but nobody before Freud
took this kind of wisdom,

systematized it

and offered alleviation
of human suffering

on the basis of it.

Uh, that was totally, uh, new.

Freud believed that the human
being is an animal in conflict.

We are not masters
of our own house.

Much of our life is determined

by unconscious forces
that we don't know about.

It's a frightening, uh, notion.

It flies in the face
of all our wishes

to have our free will affirmed,
our rationality affirmed.

Unconscious wishes,
slips of the tongue,

repressed impulses...

He gave us a language
for our fears and dreams,

our deeply held secrets, our
darkly imagined nightmares.

We're blasé about it now,
because Freud's thinking

has become part of the
very language we use:

"You're being defensive,"
"You're rationalizing,"

uh... or "You're
conflicted about that."

His insights into the ways in
which our minds are divided,

the ways in which we
are at war with ourselves,

change our very
conception of human nature

and of the nature of mind.

Freud spent his
life, as he once put it,

"struggling with the demon,"
the demon of irrationality,

but everything he believed

grew from the discoveries
he made as a young man

before the turn of
the 20th century,

when he learned that to grapple
with the demons inside others,

he would have to
wrestle with his own.

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Vienna, the glittering capital

of the empire of
Austria-Hungary.

With a booming population

and a dazzling array
of new public buildings,

as the 19th century
drew to a close,

the ancient city was bursting
with pride and confidence.

Sigmund Freud grew up in
Vienna, the eldest of seven children.

He knew its splendid palaces
and modern boulevards,

its markets and parks...

but he ignored its festive
air and effervescent gaiety.

While others dreamed of
champagne and waltzes,

young Freud dreamed of fame.

In 1877, Sigmund Freud
was an ambitious 21-year-old

who planned to devote
his life to science.

The man who would
one day explore

the tumultuous
world of the mind...

Desires, dreams,
anxieties, wishes...

Began by studying the
anatomy of the brain.

As a student at the
University of Vienna,

he published well-argued
scientific papers

with cautious conclusions,

illustrated by his own
painstaking drawings.

His professor was one

of the most famous
scientists of his day,

Ernst Wilhelm von Bruecke.

With his piercing blue eyes
and penetrating intellect,

Bruecke was a
formidable figure...

"the greatest authority,"
Freud wrote, "I ever met."

40 years Freud's senior, Bruecke
was the first of a series of men

whom Freud would
revere and emulate

before striking out
in his own direction.

Bruecke was very tough
on the medical students

who worked with
him, very demanding.

Freud felt a sense of admiration
as well as a good deal of fear...

The way you might feel

about a very intelligent,
very demanding father.

Bruecke insisted on
careful observation,

experimentation and physical
or chemical explanations

of biological phenomena.

For Bruecke,

the intangible feelings
and thoughts of the mind

were hidden within the
brain's gelatinous tissue.

Even the mind could be
reduced to physical laws.

The main thing that
the young Freud learned

in Bruecke's laboratory

is that nothing is valid

which cannot be put into strict
laws of physics and chemistry.

That is the whole wish...

To reduce the human
being to the laws of science.

Freud would struggle for years

to go beyond what he
learned in Bruecke's laboratory,

to develop a theory of the mind

that was not based on
the biology of the brain.

There would always
be a battle within him...

The scientist in him
and the visionary.

He always wanted to be
regarded as a scientist,

but his conclusions very
often go beyond science.

When Freud was 26,

his commitment to laboratory
science came to an end.

21-year-old Martha
Bernays was peeling an apple

when Freud first saw her.

Soon he was sending
her red roses every day

and calling her "Princess."

Within two months,
they were engaged.

My precious, most beloved girl.

I knew it was only
after you had gone

that I would recognize the
full extent of my happiness.

I still cannot grasp it.

And if that sweet little picture
were not lying in front of me,

I would think it was
all a beguiling dream.

BERNAYS: Sigi, my Sigi.

Today for the first time
I call you by your name.

My darling, I am
happy, yes, happy

as I have never
been in my long life.

But Freud was too
poor to marry Martha.

A penniless student
still living at home,

he could hardly support
a wife and family.

My sweet girl, it
only pains me to think

I should be so powerless
to prove my love for you.

In front of me sizzle the gas
bubbles which I have to filter.

The whole thing spells
resignation, waiting.

With no real prospect

of ever earning a livelihood
from his scientific work,

desperate to marry Martha,
Freud made a painful decision.

Just six months
after he met her,

he sacrificed his
scientific ambitions

for the woman he loved.

He decided to become a doctor.

Bruecke takes him aside and
says to him, "Look here, young man,

you can't make
a living this way."

If Bruecke had been
able to pay his wages,

you and I would have
never heard of him.

Freud would spend
three lonely years

at Vienna General Hospital,

trying his hand at surgery,
internal medicine, psychiatry,

not knowing which might
become his specialty.

He rarely saw Martha now.

She had moved with
her family to Hamburg

in northern Germany,
far from Vienna.

Restless, he read
late into the night...

Cervantes, Goethe,
Shakespeare...

And every day wrote Martha
long, passionate letters.

My beloved Marti,

these difficult times
will not discourage me.

I know how sweet you are,

how you can turn a
house into a paradise.

My beloved, sweet Sigi,
why can't we be together?

I could not sleep
half the night.

Your dear and noble
image was before me

and my longing for
you was so intense.

She was his first love

and he was extremely ardent.

Fair mistress, sweet
love, do you realize

that it is two whole days
since I heard from you?

It is such a sweet feeling
to make something for you.

And that I am
beginning to worry.

The night before last, I
dreamt continuously of you.

Could you be ill
or angry with me?

I only fear

that you are too passionately
involved in your work.

I have to fight the sensation
of being a monk in a cell.

When a letter from
you arrives, life enters.

I am so much in the
mood to hear you talk

and to close your mouth
every now and again

with a kiss to make you stop.

He's jealous, demanding.

He wants her not to go
skating with so and so

and she's not supposed
to see somebody else.

Who was boss was very
obvious from the very beginning.

Maybe one of the
things that attracted him

and kept him attracted

was that she was
willing to go along.

I want to be the way
you want me to be.

Just love me a little,
a little passionately.

You kiss so wonderfully.

Cover me with love.

While Freud studied medicine,
he continued his own research,

hoping for some
important discovery.

When he began experimenting
with a poorly understood drug,

he was convinced he
would soon win fame, fortune

and make Martha his wife.

We need no more
than one stroke of luck

to consider setting up house.

I have been reading
about cocaine.

Cocaine was a
powerful painkiller,

but Freud learned that it
also acted on depression.

He complains of depression
and of low energy level.

Freud did not anticipate

cocaine's very, very
strong addictive qualities.

He finds this magical substance

which elevates his mood, which
gives him enormous energy,

and he feels like he has
discovered the elixir of life.

In my last severe
depression I took coca again

and a small dose
lifted me to the heights.

Freud published
a paper on cocaine

and prescribed it for himself,
his patients, his friends.

He even sent some to Martha,

to make her
strong, he wrote her,

and give her cheeks a red color.

When other scientists discovered
cocaine's addictive powers,

Freud's hopes for success
and fortune quickly vanished.

Although he would turn
to cocaine occasionally

over the next years, he
never became addicted

and eventually stopped
using the drug altogether.

In the fall of 1885,

impatient with what he
could learn in Vienna,

Freud traveled to Paris.

He had won a
scholarship to study

with one of the greatest
neurologists of his day.

At the height of his fame,

Jean Charcot was called
"the Napoleon of Neuroses."

"Charcot," Freud wrote Martha,

"is a man whose common
sense borders on genius."

Charcot was a compelling,
charismatic man,

and Freud was always attracted
to compelling, charismatic men.

The turning point for Freud
really was his year in Paris

and the work with Charcot.

Charcot would introduce
the young medical student

to a mystery he would spend
the rest of his life trying to fathom:

the power of mental
forces hidden away

from conscious awareness.

Many of Charcot's patients

suffered from a bizarre array of
physical and emotional problems,

symptoms of a
puzzling affliction

doctors called "hysteria."

There are medical texts
that describe hysteria,

from stuttering and facial
tics to major motor symptoms...

Arching backwards in a bed,

total rigidity of the body,

swooning away and
losing consciousness,

inability to swallow, numbness.

So they would do
a battery of tests

and they would come
up with the conclusion

that there was no organic cause.

Somebody would
be paralyzed one day

and the next day they would
get up out of bed and be fine

and then several days
later, the paralysis returns.

That is not an
organic paralysis.

The cause of
hysteria was unknown.

Unable to find a
physical explanation,

medical doctors were frustrated,

often curtly accusing
their patients of faking.

An hysterical woman

is almost as certain to
be treated as a malingerer,

as in earlier centuries she
would have been certain

to be judged and
condemned as a witch

or as possessed of the devil.

Charcot placed the whole
weight of his authority

on the side of the
genuineness and objectivity

of hysterical phenomena.

The common wisdom was

that hysteria was a disease
for which there was no cure.

They would put them in a
psychiatric hospital in a ward,

and that was the end of them.

It was a death
sentence, this diagnosis,

and to think in terms of
being able to cure hysterics

was really radical.

Hysterics used to be the
despair of the physician.

Freud at one point said,

"When a patient is a hysteric

"and the doctor
finishes examining him,

"there is no change
in the patient,

but there is a marked
change in the doctor."

The riddle of hysteria
excited Freud's curiosity.

If he could reveal
its unknown cause,

he might gain the recognition
he had long hoped would be his.

Charcot treated
hysteria with hypnosis.

Under his hypnotic spell,

his patients would
follow his suggestions

and a paralysis would
disappear, a tic subside,

only to reappear later
when the trance faded.

Here is this great, you
know, French physician,

with a great reputation
indeed, who uses hypnotism.

Hypnotism was the kind
of thing that you did at fairs,

games that you
played with the gullible.

This was a very
unrespectable thing to do.

Freud was struck by
Charcot's forceful demonstration

of the mind's power,
even over the body itself.

It was the recognition
that there's a depth to mind

and layers of consciousness
and unconsciousness at play.

This was an enormous
insight for Freud,

because it was the first inkling

that the mind was
not transparent.

Freud had arrived in Paris

fascinated by
problems of the brain.

Five months later
he returned to Vienna,

intrigued by
problems of the mind.

That spring, in a small
office in the heart of the city,

he began to practice medicine,
specializing in neurology,

treating patients with both
physical and nervous disorders.

At last, he was able to
scrape together enough money

to make Martha his wife.

On September 14, 1886,
after four years of waiting,

30-year-old Sigmund Freud

married the only woman
he would ever love.

I am finding it
all most strange,

my utter effrontery
in getting married

and setting myself up as a man
who can do anything he likes.

But the Bodensee is frozen over,

and my happy heart is
leaping gaily across it.

Martha quickly became the
kind of wife Freud had hoped for,

busy with home and family.

Martha produced six children
in a little over nine years.

She was constantly pregnant.

She was a very good hausfrau.

She was very thrifty.

My father would say

that his mother would rather
poison the whole household

than throw food away.

Freud became a
man of regular habits.

He had his moustache and
beard trimmed daily by his barber,

strolled the boulevard each day

and played cards with
the same group of friends

every Saturday night.

Five foot seven,
faultlessly dressed,

he loved a good cigar... He
smoked more than 20 a day.

As Freud began his
work as a neurologist,

he continued to be puzzled
by the riddle of hysteria.

Like other doctors of his
day, he treated hysteria

with discreetly delivered
jolts of electricity.

My therapeutic arsenal
contained only two weapons:

hypnotism and electrotherapy.

Unluckily, I was
soon driven to see

that electrotherapy
was of no help whatever.

Bewildered, searching for
a more effective treatment,

Freud turned for
advice to a new mentor,

a brilliant physician

who had also been
experimenting with hypnotism.

Josef Breuer was a
highly regarded doctor

with a thriving practice.

Nearly 15 years older,

Breuer had befriended Freud
when Freud was still a student,

lent him money,
shared his ideas.

The two men grew so close

that Freud named his oldest
daughter after Breuer's wife.

Breuer had once
shared with Freud

the story of one
of his patients,

a young woman
he would later call,

to guard her identity, "Anna O."

Anna O. was very beautiful.

She was unusually
clever... and as a patient,

she was enough to
keep anybody busy.

Her real name was Bertha
Pappenheim, a 21-year-old

with what Breuer described as
a "highly poetic temperament."

Freud never met her,

but Breuer's account of her
treatment helped convince him

that hysteria was connected
to the slumbering imagination.

The patient had been

a young girl of unusual
education and gifts,

who had fallen ill while
she was nursing her father,

to whom she was fondly devoted.

As her father grew weaker,

Bertha rarely left her room,
except to sit by his bedside.

In her distress, she developed
increasingly bizarre symptoms:

a nervous cough,
headaches, blurred vision,

paralysis in an arm or leg...

hallucinations.

Terrified by the thought
of her father's death,

she conjured up images
of fear and mortality.

Overwhelmed, she
turned to Breuer for help.

Breuer put her into
a hypnotic trance.

Breuer arrived at a
new method of treatment.

He made her tell him what it
was that was oppressing her mind

and the symptom disappeared.

The thought of
her father's death

and her passionate love for him

had been too much
for Bertha to bear.

Hypnosis, Breuer discovered,

seemed to free her to
explore her suffering.

Bertha described talking to
Breuer as "chimney sweeping."

When she talked freely
and he encouraged her,

the symptoms would disappear.

They might come back,

and then you did it again
and they would go away.

It's something that
was unheard of...

That you might get
rid of certain symptoms

by talking them out.

There is a thought that
is so unacceptable to her

that she has to banish
it from consciousness.

But even though it's banished,

it does its dirty work anyway
in producing symptoms.

Hysterical symptoms are
linked to specific traumatic events

that have been not accessible to
normal states of consciousness.

Therefore you
hypnotize the person,

put them in a state

where they can gain access
to these traumatic memories

and they disappear.

That was the rationale
for Breuer's treatment.

From the case of
Anna O., Freud learned

that recapturing the past
promised hope for the future.

Bertha was the first
person to experience

what she herself
called the "talking cure."

After further struggle,
Bertha's symptoms subsided.

One day she would
become an ardent feminist

and a pioneer social worker.

In 1891, on Freud's
35th birthday,

his father gave
him the family Bible

to remind his son of
his Jewish heritage.

"My dear son," Jacob
wrote in Hebrew, "go, read.

"There will be open to you

"the sources of wisdom,
knowledge and understanding.

From your father, who
loves you with unending love."

But Jewish rites and rituals
had no appeal to Freud.

He had not been raised
as an observant Jew.

He celebrated
Christmas every year,

complete with candlelit trees
and presents for the children.

Freud didn't accept
Judaism as a religion.

He was a nonbelieving Jew,

but there's no doubt

that he fully identified,
had the identity of a Jew.

For centuries, central
European Jews had lived

in fear of murder and massacre,

oppressed by cruel social
and economic injustices.

By the time Freud was 11,

they had been given
the rights of other citizens,

but anti-Semitism persisted,
and Freud was never unaware of it.

Freud's marginality
as a Jew played a role

in his developing his ideas,

because it's standing back,
and rather than being absorbed

and taking for
granted cultural norms

and cultural
assumptions and beliefs,

he's critiquing them,
he's questioning them,

he's challenging them.

He knew that he was very bright.

He knew that about himself,

and he was going
to prove to the world

that he... that a Jew
could become a great man.

By the fall of 1891, Freud
was earning just enough money

to move to a new apartment
in the heart of Vienna.

For nearly five decades
this would be his home.

Here in the small office
adjoining his apartment,

he would receive his patients

and do the work that
would at last bring him

the fame he always
believed would be his.

As a young researcher,
Freud had dissected the brain

and studied its anatomy
under a microscope.

Now he would study the mind

and attempt to
penetrate its mysteries

with the scalpel
of his own intellect.

At first, like Breuer, Freud
hypnotized his patients,

encouraging them
to tell him their stories

while under a hypnotic trance...

but hypnosis
wasn't helping them.

In a hypnotic trance

people would talk about things
that they couldn't talk about,

wouldn't talk about
under other circumstances,

and that could help,
but it wasn't lasting.

People would have
momentary cures under hypnosis

and then lapse right back
into their illness again.

Gradually Freud abandoned
hypnosis altogether.

Instead, he urged his
patients to shut their eyes.

He applied the pressure of
his hands to their foreheads...

Anything to get them to tell
him what they remembered.

Nothing worked.

Then he hit upon a technique

that became the
cornerstone of his treatment.

He simply asked
his patients to talk.

He would listen,
encouraging them

to let their thoughts
drift, to free-associate.

That's how free
association was born.

All he asked for is

that the patient pledge
himself to say everything.

It may be boring, it
may be repetitious,

it may make you feel silly

and you may be ashamed
to believe something or other.

It may be very dirty, it may
be criminal... doesn't matter.

Freud transformed the
passive hypnotic patient...

To whom people were
giving suggestion...

Into a source of information.

Charcot actually commanded
his patients to get well;

Freud inquired.

That was a huge revolution.

If a patient is...
suffers from hysteria,

and you want to
know why, you asked.

Freud saw himself as
a kind of archaeologist,

digging deeper and
deeper into the buried past,

and prided himself on
the antiquities he collected

throughout his life, displaying
them in his consulting room.

I like to compare my procedure

with the technique of
excavating a buried city,

clearing away the
pathogenic psychical material

layer by layer.

From fragments of the past,

he struggled to
interpret the present.

His statues stood as emblems
of the instinctual life itself.

Freud learns that
people seem to be guided

by forces over which they don't
have really complete control,

and he begins to develop
this idea that maybe

this unconscious
is worth studying

in a more systematic
way than it's ever been.

What his patients said mattered.

Everything was important,
even their dreams.

Men and women had
always wondered at dreams,

imagined them as
hidden messages,

feared them as mysterious omens,

invested them with
prophetic powers.

Doctors in Freud's
day dismissed dreams

as irrelevant nonsense,
but Freud was curious.

Somebody else could
have passed dreams by.

This was one of
those genius ideas.

Everybody dreams, so
this was the huge step

from a medical specialty

to a discovery that
matters to everyone.

If you take the
simple hypothesis

that dreaming is a
continuation of thinking

in the sleeping state,

then looking at your
dreams may well be a way

of understanding your
preoccupations, your concerns,

what you're most upset by,
what you're most preoccupied by,

that may not be
that easily accessible

when you're talking to me awake.

Every summer, Freud
fled the heat of Vienna

to vacation with his
family in the Alps.

He loved hiking the mountain
trails with his children,

gathering the wild flowers

and identifying the mushrooms
dotting the alpine meadows.

There was one
place he liked best,

his son Martin later wrote, a
lake high in the Koenigssee.

Freud and his children
enjoyed riding the ferry,

especially when the steersman
fired an ancient pistol...

sending reverberations echoing

from mountain wall
to mountain wall.

But even on vacation,

he never stopped trying to
unravel the mystery of hysteria,

which had by now
become an obsession.

I was sitting deep
in contemplation

of the charm of the distant
prospect, so lost in thought

that at first I did not
connect it with myself

when these words
reached my ears:

"Are you a doctor, sir?

"You wrote your name in
the visitors' book in the inn.

The truth is, sir,
my nerves are bad."

Freud looked up and saw

an 18-year-old
girl asking for help.

When he wrote about her
later, he called her "Katerina."

When she recounted
her ailments...

Shortness of breath, dizziness,

a crushing feeling in her
chest, a choking in her throat...

Freud was convinced that
she suffered from hysteria.

Her symptoms first
appeared, she told Freud,

when she discovered her
father having sex with her sister.

She was frightened, she said,

because her father had
attempted to force her

to have sex with
him two years before,

when she was just 14.

She obviously
developed trust in Freud

or she had the need to talk,

but she talked
relatively easily.

At the end of these
memories, she came to a stop.

She was like
someone transformed.

The sulky, unhappy
face had grown lively.

Her eyes were bright.

She was lightened and exalted.

You'd be amazed
how helpful it can be

to somebody who's undergone
any kind of rape experience

or molestation experience

and never been able
to tell the tale, to tell it.

But we know now that
more needs to be done.

She told him this
story, so he thought

that now that she
confessed it to him, that's it.

Freud considered her cured,
but this is not an analysis.

Freud's idea at that time

was that you are hysteric
because you repress something.

The mere act of making
it conscious is the cure.

The transformation from
one realm... the unconscious...

Into another realm... The
conscious... is curative.

That was Freud's original idea.

Later on he learned better.

Freud was still groping.

He had helped Katerina, but
he only vaguely understood how.

Later he would learn

that to help someone
takes more than insight,

that there was much more to
healing than solving a puzzle.

It's the beginning
of a whole journey

that will take on
increasing complexity.

At that time he was
operating on a simple idea:

You make something conscious.

I hope this girl derives some
benefit from our conversation.

I have not seen her since.

If someone were to assert
that the present case history

is not so much an
analyzed case of hysteria

as a case solved by guessing,

I should have nothing
to say against him.

Freud and Breuer
elaborated their ideas

in professional journals

and finally in a book,
Studies in Hysteria.

But their collaboration
and their friendship

was coming to an end
over a highly charged issue.

Whatever case and
whatever symptom we take

as our starting point, in
the end, we infallibly come

to the realm of
sexual experience.

Freud kept noting
the sexual material

peeping out from behind
the symptoms of his patients.

In an era when sexuality
was a forbidden subject,

Freud grew convinced
that the cause of hysteria lay

not just with any early
traumatic experience,

but with early traumatic
sexual experience.

Respectable people in the 19th
century were very squeamish

about the matter of sexuality.

They didn't talk about it.

If they talked about it at
all, they used euphemisms.

They went into
marriage uninformed.

This was a kind of unacceptable
subject, and Freud argues

that what's unacceptable
will then be repressed...

It will be put

into that invisible
compartment in your mind...

And this is something

that Freud thought
Breuer had failed to see.

"The plunging into sexuality,
in theory and practice,"

Breuer wrote, "is
not to my taste."

He did not accept
Freud's theory,

and, I suspect,
with good reason.

He's more careful.

He's, uh... needs more data.

He's, uh, more cautious.

Breuer objected

that Freud had collapsed the
complex lives of his patients

into one sweeping
theme... Sexuality.

Freud's scientific training
was to look for the single cause

behind a multiplicity
of phenomena,

which could produce
reductive explanations.

The single-minded
attention to sexual desire

did obscure other desires,

but you have to be single-minded

when you are going against
great forces of opposition and...

and centuries of
different understanding

and you are trying to lever
your way into something novel.

Freud's theory is a
very frightening one.

It's very frightening to think
that people are as moved around

by their sexual desire
as Freud held them to be.

The collaboration between
Freud and Breuer was over,

the bond between the two
men broken, never to be mended.

The development
of psychoanalysis

cost me his friendship.

It was not easy for
me to pay such a price,

but I could not escape it.

This is the beginning
of a long pattern

of getting very close to
and even worshiping a man

and then having
to break from him.

Freud wants a strong
male figure to worship.

He needs the great man

to idealize and identify
with, and then he...

goes way beyond them.

By the middle of the 1890s,

Freud was increasingly
isolated from his colleagues,

pursuing his research on his
own, certain he was on the way

to a discovery that
would make him famous.

I am pretty well alone
here in tackling the neurosis,

regarded rather as a monomaniac,

while I have the distinct
feeling that I have touched

on one of the great
secrets of nature.

Settled comfortably in
the routines of daily life,

he was consumed by his work.

But the ardor had
disappeared from his marriage.

It was a very ordinary life...

of a professional and
his wife and family.

Martha was very
tolerant of the idea

that he worked
late into the night.

She took care of the kids and
he did the work and that was it.

Her role was to keep
the household going

and make that all possible.

We have wonderful courting
letters before marriage,

but after marriage, we
only get laundry letters...

It's all practical.

We don't have a single
love letter after marriage.

With no one to talk to
about his radical ideas,

Freud saved his passionate
outpourings for a new friend.

Wilhelm Fliess was an ear,
nose and throat specialist

from Berlin, a reputable
doctor with a large practice.

Of all the men Freud looked to

for understanding,
sympathy and support,

Fliess appears
the oddest choice.

Fliess had theories of his own...
very strange kind of connection

between the nose
and sexual feelings.

If you were to read Freud
and Fliess at that time,

you wouldn't know which of them

or whether both
of them were crazy.

Freud was desperately
alone, and what Freud did was

to write down and send to Fliess
everything that occurred to him.

Freud always regarded
Fliess as superior to him.

How much I owe you...

Solace, understanding,
stimulation in my loneliness,

meaning to my life.

It is primarily
through your example

that intellectually I gained the
strength to trust my judgment.

For all that, accept
my humble thanks.

I know that you do not need
me as much as I need you.

If you read some of
the letters to Fliess,

they sound almost as
romantic as his letters to Martha.

He clearly was a
sounding board for Freud.

The need to have a
figure to confide in,

admire, even idealize,

is probably especially
poignant and intense

when you're charting
uncharted territory

and think that you
have broken through,

made important discoveries
but are not quite sure.

So you find someone
who you respect and admire

and you share some
of these ideas with them.

I think only about the neurosis,

but I have to rely
solely upon myself,

which is why progress is slow.

I have spent the
hours of the night

from 11:00 to 2:00
with such fantasizing...

Overworked,
irritated, confused...

Stopped only when I came
up against an absurdity...

I have a whole series

of the most peculiar
things I could tell you...

Hysteria is a consequence
of presexual sexual shock...

The need for you
increases greatly...

I keep collecting material...

Your praise is nectar
and ambrosia for me...

I am overflowing
with new ideas...

It will still be a long time

before you can ask
me about results.

Freud was investigating his
own memories and dreams now,

his moods swinging wildly
between elation and despair.

I thought I had
the secret already...

The origin of neurosis
pursues me everywhere...

Now I know I don't have it
yet; I am still all mixed up.

He suffered from
episodic depressions.

Everything fine except
for the three-day migraine.

He had all kinds of
heart arrhythmias.

Shooting pains
down the left arm,

burning in the heart region,
constant tension, pressure...

He was very worried about dying.

I would like so much
to hold out until 51.

He had all kinds of expectations
of the date for his own death.

But I had one day that
made me feel it was unlikely.

He was in a troubled state.

I feel aged,
sluggish, not healthy.

I shall go on suffering for
another four to eight years

and then between 40
and 50 perish very abruptly

from a rupture of the heart.

For years Freud worked alone,

sharing his theories
with no one but Fliess.

Then, two weeks
before his 40th birthday,

he felt confident enough to
risk revealing his radical ideas.

Gentlemen, imagine
that an explorer arrives

in a little-known region

where his interest is aroused
by an expanse of ruins.

He may content himself
with what lies exposed to view,

but he may have brought
picks, shovels and spades

to uncover what is buried.

We try in a similar way to
make the symptoms of hysteria

bear witness to the history
of the origin of the illness.

In a lecture

at the Viennese Society
for Psychiatry and Neurology,

Freud presented his theory
of the origin of hysteria

to his skeptical colleagues.

I put forward the thesis

that at the bottom of
every case of hysteria

there are one or
more occurrences

of premature sexual experience,

occurrences which belong to
the earliest years of childhood.

The infantile traumas must
be described without exception

as grave sexual injures, some
of them absolutely appalling.

Hysteria, Freud argued,

was caused by the sexual
assault on an innocent child.

He's on novel territory

and very, very difficult
territory to think about...

The seduction of
children by adults.

It's not like there's a huge
literature sitting out there

about this.

No one talked about this.

So to... to piece
his way through it

and try to... to understand

what might be fantasy,
what might be fact,

what might be distorted
memory, repressed memory,

these very, very
complicated issues,

hard to understand even after
a hundred years of work on it.

I have now come to the end
of what I have to say today,

prepared to meet with
contradiction and disbelief.

What is even more
important to me

than the value you
put on my results

is the attention you give to the
procedure I have employed...

A new method which gives wide
access to processes of thought

which have remained unconscious.

I cannot believe that
psychiatry will long hold back

from making use of this
new pathway to knowledge.

Freud's colleagues
rejected his theory.

One of them called it
a scientific fairy tale.

His theory is
totally unacceptable.

The people who listened to it

are indifferent,
amused, horrified.

Convinced that he had
solved the mystery of hysteria,

Freud was profoundly
disappointed.

He celebrated his 40th birthday

still suffering from
migraine headaches,

fears of an early death
and spells of depression.

At that time I had reached
the peak of loneliness.

No one paid any attention to me,

and the only thing that kept
me going was a bit of defiance.

That summer, Freud's
father, Jacob, fell ill.

Four months later, Jacob died.

On the day of the funeral

I was kept waiting
at the barbershop

and therefore arrived at
the house of mourning late.

The family was
displeased with me,

somewhat offended
by my lateness.

That night, Freud had a dream.

I was in a place
where there was a sign:

"You are requested
to close the eyes."

I recognized the place as the
barbershop I visit every day.

Freud was by now
convinced that dreams held

a key to unlocking
the secrets of the mind.

His dream on the night
of his father's funeral

concealed a clue to
his own troubled state.

The dream obviously refers

to something that he
didn't want to look at.

If Freud were my patient and
he would present me the dream,

I would say to him, "Is there
something about your father

that you would
rather not look at?"

Freud was deeply disturbed
by his father's death,

gripped by an intellectual
and spiritual crisis.

I am unable to take
any pleasure in living.

Once more I experienced

a temporary intensification
of cardiac pains.

The death of his
father filled him

with feelings that
he didn't understand.

Before his father died, one
gets the impression of a man

who's on a kind of
headlong path of achievement

and family
founding and all of...

and then he's... stopped.

He knew he was in trouble,

and he set out to find
out what he suffered from.

You are requested
to close the eyes.

Freud's dream the night
of his father's funeral

had warned him
to close his eyes.

But to understand his
troubled patients and himself,

he would have to open them.

In the months following
his father's death,

Freud's confusion deepened.

Six days a week he
analyzed his patients,

many of them
suffering from hysteria.

Increasingly, their problems
resonated with his own.

Freud began to suspect
that he, too, was neurotic,

suffering from what he described
as "a little case of hysteria."

In the spring of 1897,

he wrote his friend
Fliess about a new patient,

a young woman with
hysterical symptoms.

It turned out

that her supposedly otherwise
noble and respectable father

regularly took her to bed when
she was eight to 12 years old

and misused her.

It was, Freud wrote,

fresh confirmation that
the prime cause of hysteria

was the sexual abuse of
an innocent child by an adult,

most often a father.

But his theory had
alarming implications.

If he himself suffered
from a form of hysteria,

and if hysteria was
caused by an abusive father,

then Freud was forced to
draw a distressing conclusion:

He began to imagine that his
own father might have abused him.

Three months after Jacob's
death, he wrote Fliess.

Unfortunately, my own father
was one of these perverts

and is responsible for
the hysteria of my brother

and those of several
younger sisters.

Freud thinks, "Oh, my God,

"if hysteria is due to
a seduction by father,

then my father's a
pervert or a seducer."

It's like spitting on
his father's grave.

If his theory worked, his
father would suddenly become

some sort of a, you
know, sexual monster.

As his anguish grew
more and more intense,

Freud turned to the therapy
he had invented to help others

to ease his own suffering.

He subjected his tumultuous
thoughts and feelings

to examination

by the only doctor alive
who could analyze them...

Dr. Freud.

My recovery can only come about
through work in the unconscious;

I cannot manage with
conscious efforts alone.

During the very period
where he's so creative,

he also was very conflicted.

He's studying the human
mind, and it's hard to imagine

that it doesn't stir up
some of his own concerns.

That's one motive for
the period of self-analysis

that he engages in:
He's trying to cure himself.

You have to be able to be
the patient to be the analyst,

and Freud, in his own way,
was making that discovery.

He was in those
years the patient.

He realized that he cannot get
further in understanding others,

unless he analyzes himself.

That was another one
of those great ideas.

Things are bubbling in me.

I have felt impelled to
start working on dreams,

where I feel most certain.

Freud was inventing a
new theory of mental life

bit by bit, layer upon layer.

As he analyzed
himself in solitude,

searching for ways to explore
the hidden recesses of his mind,

he turned to dreams to help him.

"Dreams," he would one day say,

"are the royal road
to the unconscious."

Freud began recording dreams,
without exactly knowing why,

by 1892.

He happens to be a good dreamer.

He dreams a lot and he remembers
a lot and he writes them down.

And as he reads
them and reads them,

he begins to,
well, interpret them.

Freud believed that
he had discovered

the secret force
common to every dream.

Dreams, he said, were
wishes longing to be gratified.

There is a dream

of wandering about
among strangers undressed,

undressed and with
feelings of shame and anxiety.

Oddly enough, the
bystanders don't seem to notice,

for which we have to
thank wish fulfillment.

Freud had a theory

that dreams are wishes
which have been repressed.

The mind is very intent

on not letting itself know
certain disgusting, mean,

unpleasant, self-centered
things... whatever...

Which are in all of our minds,
and which we hold back.

The dream is a way of
revealing some of this

if you know how to do it.

Freud states that the
motive force for every dream,

even when it appears
to be not the case,

is always an
unacceptable infantile wish.

In sleep,

all those forbidden wishes,
ideas, fantasies, desires,

are much more likely to
emerge into consciousness...

Not waking consciousness
but sleeping consciousness.

But even there, they
don't emerge freely,

and even there
they're disguised,

and that's why the dreams
have to be interpreted.

Suppressed and forbidden
wishes from childhood

breakthrough in the dream.

It is only in our childhood

that we feel no shame
at our nakedness.

Undressing has
almost intoxicating effect

on many children... They
laugh and jump about.

When we look back at this
unashamed period of childhood,

it seems to us a paradise;

mankind was naked in
paradise and was without shame.

But we can regain this paradise
every night in our dreams.

Thus, dreams of being
naked are dreams of exhibiting.

The dreams that he analyzed

are not really
particularly well analyzed.

They were just the beginning.

At that time, it's so simple.

"All dreams are
wish fulfillment"

is a simplification, but you
need the courage to start,

and a simplification
enables you to start.

If the dreams are complex,
and some of them contain wishes

and some of them
contain anxieties or fears,

then the whole task is
difficult so you don't start it.

You needed the
oversimplification

in order to start the process.

As Freud analyzed himself,
he was often perplexed.

With his imagination on fire,

he had a dream that
seemed to confirm his theory

that abusive fathers
caused hysteria.

I saw "Hella" before
me, printed in heavy type.

He had dreamed, he wrote Fliess,

of having "overly
affectionate feelings"

for a young girl named Hella.

Freud believed that
dreams could be interpreted

by free associating... letting
the mind wander randomly,

settling on events
from the present

or dredging up long-forgotten
images from the past.

You really can't
interpret a dream

unless you have the
dreamer's personal associations

to the dream.

You can't just take a
handbook and read the dream

and say, "Ah, this means
that, and that means that,"

because the same content,

given different associations
by different patients,

could have different meanings.

As his mind wandered,

Freud connected "Hella,"
the word for ancient Greece,

to his oldest
daughter, Mathilda.

Mathilda may have
been called Hella

because she is enthralled by
the mythology of ancient Hellas

and regards all
Hellenes as heroes.

Freud turned to his theory
that dreams were secret wishes

and came up with
an interpretation.

His "overly affectionate
feelings" for Mathilda

were so intense

that he was capable
of abusing his own child,

just as he assumed the
fathers of some of his patients

had abused their children.

The dream shows a
fulfillment of my wish

to pin down the father as
the originator of neurosis

and put an end to
my persistent doubts.

This is really not a
very good interpretation

and only shows

that he was desperately
hanging on to this theory,

which was really
quite implausible.

This is a good example
of an unanalyzed dream.

He doesn't say what he
means by "over affectionate."

Does he mean "sexual"?

See, an analyst
would have said to him,

"Nu? So? So, what
do you make of it?"

That June, Freud took his family
to the mountains outside Vienna.

They picked flowers and hunted
mushrooms, as was their custom,

but he remained haunted
by the problem of hysteria.

He was having, he wrote,
"grave doubts" about his theory,

leaving him in a state

of "fathomless and
bottomless laziness,

intellectual stagnation."

I have never before
even imagined

anything like this period
of intellectual paralysis.

I have been through some
kind of neurotic experience,

curious states, twilight
thoughts, veiled doubts.

The chief patient I am
preoccupied with is myself,

my little hysteria.

The analysis is more
difficult than any other.

Something from the deepest
depths of my own neurosis

sets itself against any advance
in understanding neurosis.

I am dull with it.

I believe I am in a cocoon,

and God knows what
sort of beast will crawl out.

Then, on September 21, 1897,

Freud wrote Fliess
an astonishing letter.

The theory he had been
evolving over the last five years

he now believed was wrong.

I will confide in you at
once the great secret

that has been slowly dawning
on me in the last few months:

I no longer believe in
my theory of the neurosis.

He had a very simple theory...
that every hysteric had suffered

from some kind of
early sexual trauma.

But as he worked further
with this, he began to question

whether there were
other causes to hysteria,

particularly as he discovered

he wasn't able to
cure his hysterics.

It wasn't working out
according to theory.

Freud concluded

that most of his neurotic
patients had not been abused,

and that his suspicions
about his father were wrong,

that Jacob never abused
him, his brother or sisters.

Now I have no
idea where I stand.

His theory shattered,
Freud drifted.

The expectation of eternal
fame was so beautiful...

certain wealth, travels,
and lifting the children

above the severe worries
that robbed me of my youth.

Everything depended

upon whether or not
hysteria would come out right.

Then, after agonizing
days of self-analysis,

Freud reached a conclusion that
would transform the very nature

of the theory of mental
life he was still inventing.

His patients,
Freud now believed,

had been reporting fantasies.

In most cases there
had been no abuse,

only conflicted
wishes and desires.

When I pulled myself together,

I was able to draw
the right conclusions,

namely that neurotic
symptoms are not related directly

to actual events but to
fantasies embodying wishes.

Freud takes the emphasis

off the experiences that
a person has in the world

and puts them on
the intrapsychic life,

what happens in a
person's inner world.

We've moved from the
notion of an external trauma

to an inner wish and desire

that's unacceptable to the
person... that's now the trauma.

That's a major shift.

This liberated
Freud, as is were,

to appreciate the
power of fantasy,

the extraordinary complexity
of the meaning of dreams,

the richness of
intrapsychic life.

By switching from
actual seduction

to seduction fantasies,

Freud has now entered
the world of the mind

and the world of imagination.

It becomes
extraordinary material

for the humanities,
literature, the arts.

We're now into the area
of self-deception, truth,

confronting oneself, conflict,

and that's the birth
of psychoanalysis.

My self-analysis is the
most essential thing I have.

I am gripped and
pulled through old times

in quick association
of thoughts.

As the great poet puts it,

"And the shades of
loved ones appear."

As Freud struggled to learn

the most secret
things about himself,

his childhood was coming
back in a rush of discovery...

disconnected
memories, and dreams.

He recalled a nightmare
about his mother

from which he had
awakened in tears, screaming.

It was very vivid and showed
me my beloved mother

with a peculiarly calm
sleeping facial expression,

being carried into the room
by people with bird beaks.

Freud carried the
dream all his life.

Not only was it a
nightmare at the time,

but Freud could never forget it.

For Freud, dreams were riddles
sometimes hiding their secrets

by playing with words.

Freud concentrated
on the birds...

In German, the word is Vogel.

The plural is Voegel,

which is an obscene German
word for sex, having sex.

I awoke in anxiety,

which did not end until
I woke my parents up.

The anxiety can be traced back

to an obscure
and sexual craving.

Freud found the explanation
of his sexual craving in a wish:

He lusted for his mother,

in violation of a
taboo against incest

common to every
religion and culture.

I have found in my own
case the phenomena

of being in love with my
mother and jealous of my father,

and I now consider it

a universal event
in early childhood.

If this is so, we can
understand the gripping power

of the Greek legend Oedipus Rex.

Freud was putting
together the rudiments

of what would one day be
called the Oedipus complex.

The Oedipus complex would become

another cornerstone
of his thinking,

critical, he believed,

to the formation of character
and personality in everyone.

Freud is saying
that all children have

these incestuous
and rivalrous feelings.

It is an inevitable
and universal aspect

of a boy's development

across all people
within a culture

and across all cultures.

I mean, that's a... quite
an extraordinary claim.

This is a good example

of something that is
characteristic of Freud...

Namely, universalizing his
own personal experiences...

Which would make a
careful scientist go crazy,

but it also paradoxically
reflects Freud's desire

to develop a universal
theory of human nature.

That is, there is a
scientific impulse behind it.

He's not interested

in accounting for
an individual case;

he's interested in
a theory of the mind

and the nature of human nature.

So this universalizing
is paradoxically

both scientifically reckless
and scientifically inspired.

Freud discovers the
Oedipal in himself.

He expresses the Oedipal
conflict on the personal level.

It seems clear that this comes
out of his own experience

of being adored and
worshiped by his mother.

I have found that
people who know

that they are preferred
or favored by their mothers

give evidence in their lives

of a peculiar self-reliance
and an unshakable optimism,

which often bring actual
success to their possessors.

All his adult life,

Freud went to see his
mother, Amalie, every Sunday,

always bringing flowers,
delighting in her praise,

making much of her devotion.

He always emphasized that
she was a very beautiful woman,

very vivacious
and... and attractive.

He was close to her, she
was certainly close to him.

She was very strong.

We know from comments
by other relatives

that she was domineering
and dictatorial.

I think he was a
little afraid of her.

I only remember

that she didn't like to
be called Urgrossmutter,

which means "great-grandmother,"

because she was... she
didn't want to appear so old.

If a man has been his
mother's undisputed darling,

he retains throughout
life triumphant feelings.

This is altogether
the most perfect,

the most free from ambivalence
of all human relationships.

Anxious to preserve
the gratifying thought

of the purity of
his mother's love,

Freud never looked too
deeply into their relationship.

We all prefer legend to fact,
and he was no exception.

Freud said that he was
her golden-haired Sigi.

It was a wishful fantasy.

He saw his mother
weekly for Sunday lunch,

but he had
stomachaches every time.

We also know that he didn't
go to his mother's funeral.

Now, he was an
old man by that time.

But so all of that
makes me suspect

that the relationship was not
as wonderful as Freud described.

And if you create an
image of your mother

which doesn't correspond
to reality, if you idealize her,

then you don't want
to know who she is.

And if you don't want
to know who she is,

then the likelihood is that
you will not look very carefully

at any other woman.

Freud would later say that women
were largely "a dark continent."

"What does woman
want?" he asked.

He never found a
satisfactory answer.

Freud's views of
women are totally mired

in a culture in which there
were enormous prejudices

about the capacities of women.

He saw women as ultimately
restricted by their biology.

It led him to focus on
inherent limitations in women.

He saw their role
in childbearing,

which demanded so
much time and attention.

He saw women's
sexual development

as an aborted development

based on discovering that
they didn't have penises,

and therefore they were thrown
off course for the rest of life.

His understanding of women
was notoriously inadequate,

but he did make great steps

beyond what was understood about
women when he came on the scene.

It was very unusual
in Freud's time

even to acknowledge that
women had sexual desire,

much less to say

that the repression
of their sexual desire

could make them hysterical.

While Freud idealized his
relationship with his mother,

a disturbing memory revealed

his tangled feelings
toward his father.

When Freud was ten,
Jacob had told him a story.

"When I was a young
man," my father said,

"I went for a walk one Saturday.

I was well dressed and had
a new fur cap on my head."

"A Christian came up to
me and with a single blow

knocked off my cap into
the mud and shouted, 'Jew!'"

"And what did you do?" I asked.

"I picked up my cap"
was his quiet reply.

This was a major
disappointment for Freud.

He was hoping

that his father would have done
something dramatic and grand.

He wanted a father
who was defiant,

not someone who was submissive.

It was a perfectly
good adjustment

on Freud's father's part,
but it was not calculated

to make the son feel that
his father is a heroic figure.

He lost his respect
for his father.

He grows beyond the father.

He's a little boy who was,
in his own understanding,

the apple of his mother's
eye, and his father was his rival.

And he won.

That can be as
difficult as losing.

To triumph over your father
can induce a great feeling of guilt,

particularly when they die,

if you, for example,
wanted them to.

All his life,

Freud had masked his
disappointment in his father,

especially from himself.

He never questioned
Jacob's authority

or blamed him for the
unexpected calamity

that cast a shadow
over his childhood.

Freud traced to his first years

his sense of
confidence and destiny.

His earliest memories were
of a simple provincial town

150 miles north of Vienna,

where he was born in a rented
room over a blacksmith shop.

I was born on May 6,
1856, at Freiberg in Moravia,

a small town in what
is now Czechoslovakia.

I recall an anecdote I often
heard repeated in my childhood.

At the time of my birth,

an old peasant woman had
prophesied to my proud mother

that with her firstborn child

she brought a great
man into the world.

Jacob was 40 when
Freud was born...

20 years older than
Freud's mother, Amalie.

The patriarch of a
large extended family,

he had already
been married twice,

with children from his first
marriage older than Amalie.

One of those sons from the
first marriage was, Freud felt,

flirtatious with
Freud's own mother.

So there was a lot

of intergenerational
complexity there.

There's a boy who grew up
with his relationship curiosity

at high pitch.

Most of Freiberg's 5,000
citizens were Roman Catholic.

The town itself was dominated

by the steeple of
St. Mary's Church,

boasting the best
chimes in the district.

I once asked my mother whether
she remembered my nurse.

"Of course," she said.

"She was always
taking you to church.

"When you came
home you used to preach

and tell us all about how
God conducted his affairs."

Playing happily in the
fields beyond his village,

surrounded by an adoring family,

Freud fondly recollected
his early years.

Of one thing I am certain:

Deep within me, covered over,

there still lives that
happy child from Freiberg,

the firstborn son of
a youthful mother,

who had received the
first indelible impressions

from this air, from this soil.

But when Freud was
three, everything changed.

In 1859, Freud left
Freiberg forever.

Jacob's business had failed.

Fractured memories
were all that remained

of that traumatic leave-taking:

the gas lamps at
the train station,

which reminded him
of souls burning in hell...

And a furtive glimpse
of his mother, nude.

He was leaving behind
everything he knew and loved.

His aunts, uncles, nephews,
playmates... all gone.

For the rest of his life,

Freud was haunted by the sense
of something irretrievably lost.

I have never got over
the longing for my home.

Bankrupt, Freud's father
took his family to Vienna,

where they lived in what had
once been the Jewish ghetto,

moving from one miserable
apartment to the next,

six times in 15 years.

Jacob never found
a full-time job again.

Until the day he died

he would depend upon
handouts from relatives.

Freud's father was a
very dubious person.

Nobody knows exactly
how he made a living.

He was a kind of a dreamer.

He had no particular talents
or particular connections

or anything to allow him

to be anything more
than a ne'er-do-well.

My grandfather grew
up in extreme poverty.

The family was all the
time worried about money.

That pervaded the atmosphere.

When wild horses on the
pampas have once been lassoed,

they retain a certain
nervousness for life.

In the same way, I once
knew helpless poverty

and have a constant fear of it.

Freud became the focus of his
parents' most extravagant hopes.

A brilliant student, he finished

at the top of his gymnasium
class six out of eight years.

Five sisters and a brother
were born by the time he was ten,

but in the growing
family constellation,

the firstborn son
remained the brightest star.

When he complained that
his sister's piano playing

interfered with
his concentration,

his mother stopped
the piano lessons.

As Freud grew to manhood,

he rarely indulged in the
pleasures of Viennese society.

Studying as if he were
on some kind of mission,

he seldom frequented the
cafés and never dallied with girls.

Vienna was changing
all around him.

By the time Freud was 41,
married and a father of six,

the Austrian capital was filled

with an intoxicating
air of cultural ferment.

Like Freud himself,

Viennese artists at the
dawn of the 20th century

were turning inward...

penetrating beneath the
surface of consciousness

to reveal buried layers
of tumultuous feelings.

Their efforts to comprehend the
irrational mirrored Freud's own.

But Freud never
showed any interest.

He was not really at home
with the artists of his generation.

I think he felt that they
were a little strange.

There was in him the bourgeois.

Freud was a man of
old-fashioned tastes.

His home was crowded
with embroidered tablecloths,

Oriental rugs, plush chairs
and family photographs.

He disliked
telephones and bicycles

and never used a typewriter.

He thrived in an atmosphere
of solidity and order,

as if he needed a firm
foundation to explore

the shifting, timeless
world of the unconscious.

He was very
conventional in his lifestyle.

It was a very organized home.

The meals were
exactly on the hour.

He had his mealtime

and the household was
built around his schedule.

There was nothing
casual in that family.

Nothing was ever casual.

It was all quite formal.

It was a formal society.

Every Sunday, the
family assembled

in the Freud household,
including myself.

He would come out at 12:00,

and his physical contact
was... you did like this.

You put your two fingers and
you squeezed the child's cheeks,

which was a sign of affection.

You did not hug
or anything like that.

You did this.

After 11 years,

Freud's marriage had become
largely a matter of habit.

Freud and Martha
were drifting apart,

their sexual life, Freud
admitted to a friend,

sadly waning.

They shared a
devotion to the children,

but Martha, burdened
by domestic duties,

had little interest in
her husband's work.

"As far as psychoanalysis was
concerned," his daughter wrote,

"my mother never cooperated.

"My mother believed in my
father, not psychoanalysis.

She thought psychoanalysis
was rather a dirty occupation,

dealing with all
kinds of awful things.

He wrote these strange books.

I don't even think
she ever read them.

She was a very bright
woman, a very engaged one,

but not interested in
progressive child rearing,

not interested in the
liberation of women,

uh, really very conservative.

Out of this orderly,
bourgeois life

would come a break with the past

that would create an
intellectual revolution.

Freud would pour
everything he had learned

into a book that
would signal a shift

in the way men and women
imagined their inner lives.

He would call his book
The Interpretation of Dreams.

November 5, 1897.

My self-analysis is
once more at a standstill,

or rather, it slowly trickles on

without my understanding
anything of the course it takes.

November 10.

I shall force myself to
write the dream book...

To come out of it.

February 9, 1898.

I am deep in the dream book.

I'm writing it fluently

and enjoy the thoughts
of the head shaking

that will come of the
book's indiscretions.

Several chapters of the dream
book already are complete.

It is turning out nicely...

The Philistines will
rejoice at being able to say

that with this I have put
myself beyond the pale...

I have finished a whole
section of the dream book...

Comments of Oedipus
Rex and possibly Hamlet

will find their place...

I'm curious about what
else will occur to me...

I must read up on
the Oedipus legend...

Do not know where yet...

How can I make this
credible to anyone?

The book consumed him.

He suffered from excruciating
migraines and back pains,

fretted about money,

feared his psychoanalytic
practice was failing,

even considered
changing his profession

and moving to a new city.

He was being devoured,
he wrote, "like a cancer."

How can I ever hope
to gain an insight

into the whole of
mental activity?

As Freud explored the unknown,

he grew more and more dependent
on his friend, Wilhelm Fliess,

the only person whom he
dared entrust with the manuscript.

You shall not refuse me

the duties of the first audience
and the supreme judge.

I shall change whatever you want

and gratefully
accept contributions.

I cannot write entirely
without an audience,

but do not at all mind
writing only for you.

Even on vacation, Freud
brought his manuscript with him

and drew inspiration from
hiking the high alpine trails.

The whole book is planned on
the model of an imaginary walk.

At the beginning, the
dark forest of authors,

hopelessly lost on wrong tracks.

Then a concealed pass
through which I'll lead the reader.

And then suddenly,
the high ground.

He had a classical conception

that his book would be like
Dante's journey into the inferno

and then back out.

Slowly, The Interpretation
of Dreams grew in size

until it reached 250,000 words,

the longest book
he would ever write.

August 1, 1899.

I am working on the
completion of the dream book

in a large, quiet
ground-floor room

with a view of the mountains.

There are some
mushrooms here as well.

The children naturally
join in the hunt for them.

All this work has been very
good for my emotional life.

I am apparently much more normal

than I was four
or five years ago.

At the end of August
1899, after three years,

Freud finished his book in a
farmhouse in Berchtesgaden

high in the German Alps,

looking out on what
would one day be

the site of the vacation
home of Adolf Hitler.

The book's first words rang out

with a triumphant
note of confidence.

In the pages that follow,
I shall bring forward proof

that there is a
psychological technique

which makes it possible
to interpret dreams,

and that, if that
procedure is employed,

every dream reveals itself
as a psychical structure

which has a meaning

and which can be inserted
at an assignable point

in the mental
activities of waking life.

It's his first general
philosophical,

psychological statement
about how the mind works.

And even though he...
he revised that statement

many times after that, it still
was the touchstone statement

for the whole psychoanalytical
inquiry into mental processes.

The book is not just a
theory about dreams.

He uses dreams and dreaming

to develop and weave an entire
theory of mental functioning:

perception, memory, wishes.

That, I believe, is the reason

and the foundation for why
it's viewed as a landmark.

In the dream book the
Oedipus complex is stated there.

The role of infantile
sexuality is recognized.

That dreams have
meaning is recognized.

The patient is asked
to free-associate.

Once you have the dream book,

you can start business
as a psychoanalyst

because you know at least
you have a hunch of how to do it.

The Interpretation of Dreams
contains the most valuable

of all the discoveries it has
been my good fortune to make.

Insight such as
this falls to one's lot

but once in a lifetime.

It was only later
that Freud revealed

the impetus behind the most
important book he ever wrote.

It was a portion of
my own self-analysis:

my reaction to
my father's death.

That is to say, to the
most important event,

the most poignant
loss of a man's life.

The Interpretation of Dreams
was published in November 1899,

with the title page dated 1900.

During the next six years, the
book would sell only 351 copies.

It would take two decades

before Freud achieved the
fame he had always imagined.

In the years that followed,

while he elaborated
and refined his theories,

Freud created a movement,

beginning with a
small cadre of men

who helped spread his
ideas around the world.

He put the
unconscious on the map.

He put it on the
cultural folksy map.

Everyone loved it,

because things that were
puzzling to people before that

suddenly made sense,

and we all want to make
sense out of our crazy behavior.

As his fame grew, his name
became a household word,

his theories the chat
of cocktail parties

and the popular press.

Confusion and even apprehension

surrounded the
bearded Dr. Freud,

who supposedly found
in sex the meaning of life.

"I'm not famous," Freud
said, "I'm notorious."

He has things to say which
are extremely subversive.

He was a bourgeois who
made bombs in his living room.

From analyzing his patients,

Freud took to
analyzing the world itself,

elaborating a troubling
view of the human condition.

He once said, "I
bring them the plague."

Now, that may be
an exaggeration,

but he certainly did not
make life easier for people.

He says, "When you think
of me, think of Rembrandt...

A little light and a
great deal of darkness."

In 1933, the Nazis came to
power and burned his books

alongside those of
Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht

and Albert Einstein.

"What progress we're
making," Freud told a friend.

"In the Middle Ages they
would have burned me.

Nowadays they're content
with burning my books."

Five years later,
Freud fled to England.

Even in his last years, he
never offered easy consolation.

For Freud, there
was no salvation,

not even psychoanalysis.

He offered instead

a way to probe the darkness
with the light of reason

and two principles to
live by: work and love.

What Freud insists
on is cure through truth.

In a world of quick fixes,
drugs and neuroscience,

Freud teaches us about the
role of meaning and conflict

and desire and wish
in shaping our lives,

our happiness and our suffering.

"Know thyself" is not simply...

no longer only a
Socratic imperative,

but it's a clinical necessity.

"The truth shall set ye free."

By the time of his death
from mouth cancer in 1939,

Freud's ideas had become part
of the fabric of 20th-century life.

But all of them lay implicit

in the discoveries
he made before 1900.

It was then, during long years

of false starts
and erratic detours,

he had looked into the
darkness of his own heart,

and in turmoil and confusion

rallied himself the
only way he knew how:

He trusted to his
own unconscious.

Something is at work on
the lowest floor, wild things.

Again, come, you hovering forms.

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