In 1886, a young physician
established a small medical practice in Vienna.
Patients would come to lie on this very couch.
And as he listened, they'd share their innermost fears and anxieties.
Their intimate, very personal stories
would nourish a radical and controversial
new way of understanding our pasts,
our desires, what drives our every action.
Ideas that would take the world by storm.
Because this couch belonged to Dr Sigmund Freud.
The 19th century witnessed unprecedented change.
Transformed by revolutions in industry, science and society.
It was an age that questioned traditional authority
and produced three game-changing thinkers.
Karl Marx attacked the social and economic order.
Friedrich Nietzsche took on Christian morality.
And Freud questioned the very essence of who we are.
Their penetrating, often contentious ways of seeing the world
still shape how we make sense of our lives today.
Sigmund Freud's ideas not only spearheaded a massive leap forward
in how we treat illnesses of the mind,
they also had a pivotal cultural impact.
The freedom we take for granted today to talk openly
about our deepest feelings, from sexual difference to inner demons,
the slogans that power our consumer society,
stem in part from his ideas.
From Freud, we get the notion of the unconscious mind
as a reservoir of irrational, conflicting impulses.
His ideas have become part of our vocabulary.
Penis envy, the pleasure principle, wish fulfilments
and, of course, the Freudian slip.
But Freud's always been controversial.
For some, he's not a genius,
but a charlatan obsessed with sex
whose speculative theories are impossible to prove
and whose methods are positively dangerous.
Freud's ideas still provoke intense debate today.
But what's not in doubt is that his innovative
mapping of the human mind challenged taboos and conventions
in ways that fundamentally changed our conception of self.
To understand how Freud's ideas evolved and how they add up,
it seems appropriate to adopt an approach Freud himself pioneered.
Something that we now take for granted.
To look for the keys for his motivation and character
by exploring his childhood experiences.
When Sigmund Freud was born here in 1856,
the town was called Freiberg, in Moravia.
Part of the Habsburg empire.
Freud was born with a caul.
That's when part of the foetal membrane is still attached to the baby's head.
And in those superstitious times, this was considered a good omen.
Freud's mother certainly interpreted it as a sign that her newborn son
was destined for happiness and fame.
Freud's Jewish parents could only afford to rent a single room in this building.
And family life was complex.
His mother was 20 years younger than his father,
who'd been married before and had two adult sons.
And so one of Sigmund's half-brothers
was even older than his mum.
Sigmund's closest playmate was, in fact, his own nephew.
But they were to be wrenched apart.
Because when Sigmund was three,
his father's small business selling wool collapsed.
Scattering the entire family in search of work.
Life may have been imperfect, but where Freud's family ended up
would prove to be a critical factor
in the future success of the young boy.
Vienna in the 1860s,
imperial capital of the Habsburg empire,
was a city at the forefront of social change.
The Europe-wide revolutions of 1848 had undermined
aristocratic conservative rule here.
Allowing a kind of edgy liberalism to flourish on the streets.
There were also an unusual number of immigrants in the city.
So Freud would have grown up surrounded by a cosmopolitan mix
of voices and cultures.
This is the Jewish district where Freud's family first lived.
It was poor and overcrowded.
But many capitalised on the opportunities that the city offered
and quickly rose from the margins.
They became newspaper magnates and bankers, academics,
doctors and lawyers.
Freud's parents passionately wanted the same
for their clever eldest son.
Of his six siblings, he was the only one given his own room to work in.
And he topped his class for seven years.
The young Freud's intense studies seem to have fed into
his self-image as someone destined for greatness.
He found inspiration in ancient civilisations.
In the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.
And he came to identify with powerful, heroic figures
from history and literature, like Moses
and Hannibal and Alexander the Great.
In 1873, at the age of 17,
Sigmund sought his own glory at Vienna University.
Initially dabbling in philosophy and law, he was soon drawn to
the university's celebrated natural scientists,
and their guiding light, the Englishman Charles Darwin.
Darwin's remarkable, epoch-defining Theory of Evolution
chimed with Freud's desire for kudos and celebrity.
But to match up to his hero meant hours of meticulous,
painstaking, not obviously-glamorous laboratory work.
Trying to unravel the mysteries of the nervous system of fish.
Freud himself said that his studies in anatomy, zoology, chemistry
and botany made him a godless medical man and an empiricist.
And certainly his time here nurtured a scientific worldview
that never left him.
If you look at this picture of him from the time, you can just imagine
the precise, clinical fish-dissector.
A man who seems to be both neat and orderly
in appearance and character.
But aged 25, Freud fell wildly in love with a young woman -
Martha Bernays.
Their early correspondence reveals
an altogether different side to Freud.
There's probably 1,600 letters in all.
Huh! They were writing more or less every day.
Sometimes two or even three letters a day.
Bits have been released of his letters alone,
but this is the first time now that we're seeing her letters.
How brilliant! So we've got Martha's voice, what is she saying?
What does she write about here?
Well, anything and everything.
I mean, in this case, she had just sent Freud a lock of her hair
to put in a little brooch, as lovers do.
And Freud had written back, "I hope you didn't tear it out,
"or did it come out when you were combing?"
So here, in this letter here,
she is taking him to task for his ignorance.
She says, "You're a doctor, you have no idea of the code of love.
"One does not send one's lover ripped-out or combed-out hair."
I suppose this is the first time he's had a full-blown love affair.
It's his first and his only.
And this is one of the things about these letters,
you get an insight into Freud you'll get nowhere else.
And he's losing his control sometimes.
He really is almost on the edge of a nervous breakdown
when he feels they can't go on,
when he feels there's an impossible disagreement between her.
She is for sweeping it under the carpet.
She says, "Why do you wallow around
"in this stuff that makes us miserable?"
And he says, "You have to face it, you have to talk through it."
That's fascinating.
So it's almost like we've got Freud, the proto-psychoanalyst here. Yes.
I mean, the psychoanalytic dictum is, say everything that's on your mind.
Don't censor, don't repress. It's there already.
Martha had opened Freud's eyes to a world of demanding human emotion.
And the financial pressures of their engagement saw him
casting around for opportunities beyond the lab.
Eventually, he abandoned his research career to study medicine.
And one day, when he was reading a medical journal,
he came across something that he was convinced would make his name.
In 1884, he wrote to Martha about a magical drug
little known at the time, cocaine.
In this pretty sober analysis, he says,
"I take very small doses of it regularly
"against depression and against indigestion.
"And with the most brilliant success."
But, then, just listen to this, when he's also writing to Martha,
where he sounds suspiciously like he's under the influence.
"Woe to you, my princess, when I come.
"You shall see who is the stronger.
"A gentle little girl who does not eat enough,
"or a big, wild man who has cocaine in his body."
At first, Freud denied that cocaine was harmful.
But his rash endorsement would damage his reputation.
When he gave it to a friend suffering from morphine addiction
in the hope that cocaine would cure him,
the consequences were disastrous.
His friend became as addicted to the new drug as he had been to the old.
Freud did manage to give up cocaine,
but his appetite for experimentation would not be stilled.
He had a new interest - neurology, the study of nervous diseases.
And he made a very canny move,
travelling to the centre of this burgeoning science,
an intellectual hotspot.
This is Salpetriere.
In Freud's day, a kind of medical poorhouse.
A bleak dumping ground for some 5,000 women.
Many of whom were diagnosed as hysterical.
Hysteria, from the Greek word for womb, was a mysterious condition
that was thought to afflict women from the ancient world onwards.
Really, it was just a catchall diagnosis
for all kinds of nervous symptoms.
From fits and paralysis to anxiety and headaches.
And for centuries,
it was a dangerous tool in the hands of male doctors
who were trigger-happy in diagnosing women as hysterical,
to the point where they incarcerated perfectly sane individuals
in hospitals and asylums.
Freud came here to Salpetriere to study with
the pre-eminent pioneer of neurology, Jean-Martin Charcot.
Having discovered that some nervous conditions, like multiple sclerosis,
were the result of lesions on the brain,
Charcot turned his attention to the mysteries of hysteria.
Charcot approaches hysteria more scientifically and more seriously
and doesn't think of it as simply a woman's ailment.
And he sees distinct phases.
He talks about the epileptoid phase, atonic phase, a fit.
And the fit was epileptic rigidity.
He then talks about clonic phase, or the clown phase,
where these huge thrashing movements take place.
So, he's identified these different phases, what kinds of methods
is he using to further his scientific inquiry?
Well, Charcot uses hypnosis to diagnose hysteria. He thinks that if
women are susceptible, men are susceptible to hypnosis,
that's probably a sign that they do have hysteria.
But he also uses hypnosis in his great public lectures, to
which, you know, all of Paris comes. Getting a ticket to go to one
of Charcot's public lectures is like going to the best play in London.
So, the patients were on display in these public lectures?
The patients were on display, and, under hypnosis, they will
begin to walk and they will talk, and they will effectively do
what the medic asks of them.
So, we know that Freud's there, he's in the audience, he's one of
Charcot's pupils. Do we know what kind of an impact this had on Freud?
Well, I think it has an immense impact. He begins to see that
there are different forms of thinking and activity going
on in the human mind simultaneously.
And that there are whole areas of the human mind that are there,
ready to be plumbed.
Freud returned to Vienna, aged 29, full of new ideas and career plans.
But things certainly weren't easy for Freud. When he first
opened his practice in this apartment block in 1886,
business was depressingly slow.
Sometimes he couldn't even afford a cab to make house calls, and
he could only marry Martha in the same year thanks to gifts and
loans from friends.
One of Freud's principal benefactors was the eminent physician
Joseph Breuer.
Like Freud, Breuer was curious
about the scientific mysteries of hysteria.
One of his old patients stood out.
Breuer had treated a highly intelligent young woman from
an affluent Jewish family, called Bertha Pappenheim, giving her
the pseudonym "Anna O".
She experienced hallucinations and suffered from partial paralysis.
At times, she could only speak English. She appeared to have
a split personality.
Now, Anna's case really fascinated Freud, partly because of her
extreme symptoms, but also because of the innovative way that
Breuer treated her.
During Breuer's consultations, Anna fell into a state of
hypnosis, and revealed melancholic details of her personal history.
The talking revived significant or painful memories of past events
that had been forgotten or somehow blocked up and suppressed.
Breuer found that he could trace Anna's numerous symptoms back to
original traumas.
When Anna showed an aversion to drinking water,
Breuer linked it back to her seeing a dog being allowed to
drink out of the glass of its owner, but once she expressed her
submerged disgust, her hydrophobia vanished.
Freud realised that Breuer might have stumbled upon, not just
an explanation, but a cure for hysteria.
Working from new larger premises at number 19 Berggasse, he began to
apply Breuer's cathartic treatment to his own neurotic patients.
But Freud had a problem - he just couldn't hypnotise all of his
patients, so he smartly turned a failing into a virtue and
developed his own version of a talking therapy.
Freud asked his patients to lie on this couch while he sat here
behind them, out of sight. He encouraged them to say whatever
came into their minds, almost as if they were talking to themselves.
He proved to be an alert listener, systematically sifting
through and probing his patients' memories.
Interpreting their confessions rapidly, intuitively, he
attempted to unlock what was being suppressed.
Freud gave his new free-association method a new name. He took
the ancient Greek word for mind or life-breath, psyche, and
added to it a robust scientific term - analyse.
Psychoanalysis was born.
In 1895, Breuer and Freud published their findings
in a landmark book - Studies On Hysteria.
Freud was keen to find a single unifying reason for hysteria
and neurosis, to offer their theory a kind of breakthrough moment,
and he started to see sex as a central issue.
The more cautious Breuer disagreed.
But another friend proved far more receptive -
the physician Wilhelm Fliess.
Sexual morality had long been framed by religion, and by and large
had been unremittingly repressive for centuries.
But Fliess was one of a growing number of medical researchers
who embarked on a scientific study of sexual identity and
behaviour, unconstrained by orthodox moral judgments and what was
generally considered to be perversion.
Encouraged by the open-minded Fliess, Freud began to hone
his ideas about hysteria and sexual issues.
In April 1896, he went to read a paper to the
Viennese Society For Psychiatry and Neurology.
He described the job of treating patients with hysteria in
epic terms, as if he were an explorer archaeologist
sifting through the remains of an ancient ruined city, trying
to find clues and evidence.
"Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region
"where his interest is aroused by an expansive ruins, with remains
"of walls, fragments of columns..."
'Freud claimed to have found a singular cause in all his
'neurotic cases, something he likened to discovering
'the source of the Nile.'
His daring theory - the seduction theory - was that all
neuroses were the result of some kind of sexual abuse in childhood,
typically by the father.
But, rather than the glory that he was expecting, the paper was
met with bewilderment and scepticism.
One eminent neurologist in the audience dismissed it
as "a scientific fairy tale".
This frosty reception just enhanced Freud's view that he was an
embattled pioneer, tackling taboo subjects.
However, in little more than a year, even he would concede that
his seduction theory was fatally flawed.
Hysteria was so widespread that to imagine so many men were
paedophilic abusers was highly implausible. With hysteria
afflicting Freud's own family, the idea that his father Jacob
could also be guilty was the final straw.
Other speculations, however, would prove far more enduring.
At the heart of Freud's thinking was how and why discomforting
past thoughts could become repressed, only to be woven into the
symptoms and psychic knots of everyday life.
Freud believed that the unconscious mind held the key.
The unconscious mind had been imagined and debated right
across the human experience for many centuries, but Freud was one
of the first to take a really systematic approach, to try
to add precision to the perceptions of the unconscious mind.
A painful personal tragedy would trigger his big breakthrough.
In 1896, Freud was devastated by the death of his father.
Freud wrote to Fliess, "My inner self, my whole past has been
"re-awakened by this death. I now feel completely uprooted."
But, in fact, these complex, intense thoughts would have
a catalysing effect on him.
Freud had been experimenting with self-analysis, scrutinising
his fragmentary childhood memories and deep-seated terrors.
The loss of his father intensified that exploration. And the
secret of his self-analysis?
He started to analyse his own dreams.
Few saw dreams as having any scientific substance.
But Freud chose to think differently.
He looks at dreams as something
that is multi-layered.
There is the story that people
remember when they wake up,
but, for Freud, that story is only the surface of our dream.
What lies underneath is what he calls the "latent dream thoughts".
But those latent thoughts become distorted, they become censored.
Why does this censorship need to happen?
Well, you see, these dream thoughts, they contain all the
repressed wishes and thoughts and fantasies that consciousness
considers to be disturbing and troubling.
Were they not to be censored, then they would manifest
themselves in all their disruptive force.
For Freud, a dream is essentially a fulfilment of an unconscious wish.
How are Freud's ideas about the unconscious evolving at this time?
For Freud, the unconscious is no longer just a set of traumatic
memories, it's a container of wishes and thoughts and fantasies
that have been self-generated by the mental life of every human being.
What's the value of these for Freud?
What's he doing with this raw material?
Within his clinical practice, he would piece together the
various associations that people bring to the story that they
remember, and, with those bits and pieces, he would try to
arrive at a certain understanding of those unconscious repressed
wishes that sit underneath.
With Freud's theory, we as human beings can look and think about our
dreams as productions of our minds that actually reveal
something about who we are, and that is extraordinarily valuable.
Freud's book, The Interpretation Of Dreams, offered a radical new
understanding of human nature, with the unconscious, a reservoir
of repressed inner desires and irrational impulses,
the hidden source of what motivates and makes us.
There's an interesting detail in the story of the publication of
The Interpretation Of Dreams.
Although this book was actually published 1n 1899, it was
branded with the date 1900.
Freud was telling the world that the theories in here would define
the 20th century, and that they'd herald the birth of a daring,
brave new world.
But this brave new world was riddled with anxiety.
It was said that to be Viennese was to be a question mark.
Liberalism had failed to deliver real power to the middle classes,
who felt threatened by a rising urban population.
In this climate, an appetite grew for new experimental art that
explored beneath the rational surface of human existence.
Freud's theories perfectly matched the zeitgeist.
In his next book, The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life,
he continued to dig deep.
In this, he argued that our repressed desires emerged not
just in our dreams, but infiltrate our waking lives, too.
One interesting case he cites was when a high-ranking Austrian
politician opened an important debate in Parliament
with these words,
"I announce the presence of so many honoured gentlemen, and
"therefore declare the session as closed."
This very public slip revealed his repressed frustration that the
session would be a complete waste of time. And, of course, we still use
the phrase "Freudian slip" in everyday life today,
usually to refer to a revealing or embarrassing verbal faux pas.
Although Freud believed that our unconscious desires broke
through due to triggers in our current lives, it was how
those mysterious impulses were shaped by our past experiences
that really preoccupied him,
something that finds echo in his consulting room.
When Freud enthusiastically gathered together all these fabulous
ancient artefacts, he didn't think of them as dead objects.
For him, the past wasn't a kind of museum that you could choose
whether or not to visit.
It was a live dynamic present in our day-to-day lives. He thought that
past experiences had something vital to tell us. In fact, it was a
story from classical Greece that would inspire his next big idea.
HE SPEAKS GERMAN
Freud attended a performance of a Greek tragedy by Sophocles.
Oedipus Rex tells the story of a young man who inadvertently
kills his father and then marries and has children with his mother.
When he first discovers the terrible truth, he stabs out his own eyes.
HE SCREAMS
Freud saw this story as a paradigm to explain his own repressed
sexual feelings.
This is what he wrote to Fliess,
"A single idea dawned on me. I found in my own case, too, 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."
Freud named this psychosexual drama the Oedipus complex.
He came to believe that little boys had to work through hidden
fears of castration by their fathers, punishment for
desiring and seeking possession of their mothers,
and that little girls were infatuated by their fathers
but had to deal with complex feelings of inferiority
because they themselves didn't have a penis -
what Freud calls "penis envy".
Freud believed that if these
complicated feelings weren't resolved,
internal conflicts would be stored up, only to cause adult
neuroses later in life.
Freud was keen to test out his theories about repressed
sexual issues.
And in October 1900, the opportunity arose to do just that.
A new patient walked into his office, a 17-year-old girl
who he'd give the pseudonym Dora.
She was his first and his most famous case study.
Dora was exhibiting hysterical symptoms, a nervous cough and
suicidal thoughts.
One of the most shocking things in the story is that,
when she was 13 or 14,
her father's best friend, Herr K,
manipulated the situation to
get her alone in his office
and kissed her. And Freud says, well, this was thoroughly hysterical
that she was disgusted by the kiss.
And then he goes on to say that she must have felt his erect penis
against her body, and that this must have sexually aroused her.
And he makes it his business, really, to show her that she
really does sexually desire Herr K, and that she's repressed that
desire from consciousness.
I have to say, when you look at Dora's case, there does seem
to be a trope developing here, that you have these young women
who are very troubled, and men like Freud kind of pounce on them,
to use them for medical material.
Yes. It has the sort of arrogance of the man of science, and that
he uses Dora and other patients as simply guinea pigs for his
confident scientific position.
How does it end? I mean, how does Dora take all of this?
Not well, not well. Dora walks out on Freud.
And what he learns from that, though, is that he should
have paid attention to the way in which she had transferred on
to him all her feelings of hostility to Herr K, and in fact, after
this case, he introduced the theory that psychoanalysis must pay
attention to the ways in which patients transfer their
unconscious and conscious feelings about significant people
in their lives on to the psychoanalyst or the therapist.
Freud learnt valuable lessons from the Dora case.
Yet his seemingly scientific method relied on subjective,
some would argue, self-fulfilling judgments.
It was a fundamental problem, articulated by his once loyal
confidant, Fliess, during a heated argument.
"The reader of thoughts is merely reading his own thoughts into
"other people," was Fliess's damning assessment.
In 1902, Freud sent out a written invitation to four Jewish
doctors, inviting them to come and meet here in his apartments.
What would come to be known as the Wednesday Psychological Society
gathered every week in his waiting room, and their first topic
was a subject very close to Freud's own heart - the psychological
function of smoking.
A good cigar after a meal was part of bourgeois Viennese
culture, but Freud took cigar indulgence to a whole new
level. He smoked 20 cigars a day and considered the pleasures of
the cigar a substitute for what he called
"the single greatest habit" -
masturbation.
The Wednesday Group discussions helped Freud to advance his
ideas on sexuality,
resulting in a ground-breaking publication -
Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality.
So, what he does in this book,
he introduces a concept of
enlarged sexuality.
Because, at the time,
sexuality was very much
restricted to people having sex,
whereas, for Freud, it's about eroticism, it's about
attraction, it's about excitement, and everything in between.
He also sees it being at work in children.
I mean, that's very controversial, isn't it?
So, how does he see this sex drive, this libido, developing in children?
Shortly after a child is born, it goes through an oral phase.
Freud observes that when a child is being fed, that it can
derive some satisfaction or gratification from that
which allows us to look at that experience as something that
can be deservedly called erotic.
So, he thinks he's identified this sex drive in children,
in what way does he see this playing out in adult life?
It plays out insofar as it informs our sexual identity,
our sexual fantasies, our sexual orientation.
It informs who we are as human beings.
But it's not a formula. Each and every individual has to find
his or her way through this process.
As result of which, in a sense, one could say that we are all
equally abnormal.
There is a possibility, though, isn't there, that that he's
got this all wrong, that it's not all about sex? Yes.
People have said Freud's got it all wrong, but I think if we use
an enlarged concept of sexuality, we actually do come to the
conclusion that a lot of our mental world is conditioned by this drive.
Freud's progressive theories of sexuality spoke to a generation
of young Viennese, cynical about the Church and repressive morality.
But his growing popularity had its dangers.
Freud feared, not without reason, that, because his circle was
mainly Jewish, anti-Semitism would mean that his ideas would
never be fully accepted.
He was anxious that psychoanalysis would be labelled
a "Jewish science".
A solution came in the form of a Swiss gentile from Zurich who
visited him in 1907.
Carl Jung was one of the brightest young psychiatrists of the day.
Freud bestowed rapturous praise on him and, in return,
Jung came to revere Freud.
Given Freud's antipathy to religion, it's rather ironic
that his movement was beginning to look a bit like a religious
cult with psychosexuality its key doctrine, Freud its high priest
and Jung the evangelist who'd promote Freud's message.
But the evangelist soon became a heretic.
Jung reinterpreted one of Freud's key terms, libido, which
Freud understood as sexual drive, to mean all mental energy.
He also took issue with what he saw as Freud's obsessive focus on
the Oedipus complex.
JUNG: When he had thoughts on a thing, then it was settled.
While I was doubting all along the line.
Their friendship ended acrimoniously, with Freud
calling Jung "crazy" and "out of his wits", while Jung's parting shot
was no less provocative.
"Your technique of treating your pupils like patients is a
"blunder. In that way, you produce either slavish sons or impudent
"puppies. I am objective enough to see through your little trick."
But whilst Freud faced dissent and a splintering of his movement,
his name and his ideas were to reach global prominence due to a
pivotal event.
In 1914, the heir to the Habsburg throne was assassinated,
triggering a war with Serbia.
Freud's sons left for the front line of a conflict that would
become World War I.
The war threw up new challenges for physicians - the mysterious
breakdowns suffered by soldiers.
Their disconnected speech and nightmares were diagnosed as
symptoms of physical shocks to the brain - shellshock.
But it quickly became apparent that soldiers who weren't
operating on the front line, who weren't exposed to exploding
shells, were also suffering.
So, the physiological explanations just didn't stand up.
Often written off as cowardly or weak, many of these soldiers
were forced back into action within a few days.
But Freud started a debate which would lead to today's
widely accepted condition of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Freud believed that war neurosis was a psychological rather than a
physical problem.
He thought that shellshock must be an emotional trauma triggered
by the horrors of conflict.
And by the end of the war, others were starting to believe him.
World War I was a breakthrough moment
for the psychoanalytical movement.
But, for Freud personally, it cast a long shadow.
Post-war inflation wiped out most of his savings, undermining his
comfortable life in Vienna.
Spanish flu swept through the city, killing his beloved daughter Sophie.
And even though all his sons returned,
they were scarred by the experience.
Freud began to question some of his core theories.
For him, sexuality had been singularly responsible for neuroses,
but, in 1920, he published Beyond The Pleasure Principle,
and posited a second basic force in the mind -
a death drive.
Before, he'd seen aggression as a sadistic aspect of the sexual
instinct - the urge for mastery, the drive to dominate the sexual object.
But now, with the raw experience of humanity's dreadful capacity
for self-destruction, he started to focus instead on the fatal
psychological impulses within us.
Freud wanted us to face up to inward as well as outward
aggression. He suggested that the death drive was part of the human
condition, a powerful deep-seated wish to undo the bonds of life.
But Freud's revisions didn't end here.
Freud proposed that the mind was made up of three elements.
There was the id - an entirely unconscious part, the
cauldron of our passions, where our death drive and our urge for sex
could be found.
Then there was what he called the superego - an internal conscience
which could impose impossible ideals and inflict merciless criticism.
The superego was a kind of strict moral guardian, in conflict
with the pleasure and death-seeking urges of the id.
Navigating between the warring mind and external reality was what
Freud called the ego.
Freud thought that psychoanalysis could help to strengthen the ego.
Although he never imagined that we'd be free of these
internal conflicts, the best we can do is simply to live with them.
1920S JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS
Freud's ideas were eagerly taken up by a post-war generation
in revolt against traditional values.
In Europe and the US, a new egocentric permissiveness
embodied in the glamour-driven world of dance music
and moving pictures was taking hold.
In 1925, the head of MGM, Samuel Goldwyn, called Freud
"the greatest love specialist in the world", and reportedly
offered him 100,000 to advise on the making of Antony and Cleopatra.
Freud curtly declined.
Yet, as Freud's cultural influence soared,
other more insidious forces were gathering,
forces which would threaten his very existence.
In neighbouring Germany, Adolf Hitler rose to power.
Jews were immediately targeted,
and Freud's books were burned in the streets.
In 1938, troops marched into Vienna.
It's me.
There is a crowd cheering Hitler.
Look at the crowd.
That's our house with those swastikas on it.
Just days later, the Gestapo knocked at his door.
Martha, ever the good host, asked them to leave their rifles in
the umbrella stand.
They behaved appallingly, throwing their weight around and
breaking into the safe.
But a line was crossed when they ransacked Martha's kitchen
and tossed her table linen onto the floor.
She gave them a thorough tongue-lashing
and they left.
Freud now realised that he had to escape.
But it's here we can start to get a measure of the broad appeal
that Freud was starting to enjoy.
Wildly disparate players collaborated
to secure his safe passage,
from the American President to a descendant of Napoleon, and
even a Nazi bureaucrat who'd been blown away by his work
when he was a student.
For the second time in his life, Freud would be displaced.
After 78 years in Vienna, his belongings were hastily packed up.
This trunk, in the Freud Museum in Vienna, has revealed poignant
new evidence of Freud's traumatic break with the past.
We kind of rediscovered it after it had
been sitting right in this
corner for, like, two decades.
Yeah.
And when we moved it,
we discovered this.
A label, "Wien Westbahnhof to London."
Ah! So, we know that this is physically one of the bits of
luggage that Freud would have taken with his family
on the day that he left.
And you can still open it, can you?
Yes, we can open it and see what's inside now.
Because one thing that we discovered was very exciting to us,
a squashed little box bearing Freud's handwriting, stating,
"Martha, for your 21st birthday, from a poor happy man."
Wow!
It's a tiny little thing, isn't it? But that is freighted with
history and memory. Yes. Absolutely. Even without the jewellery inside,
but still keeping the box with this personal little message. Yeah.
What Freud encouraged us to do was to face up to our own pasts
so that we could live better lives, and here is Freud and
Martha's past incarnate.
That's very moving.
VOICE OF FREUD:
VOICE OF ANNA FREUD: This is when three men of the Royal Society
came to present the book of the Royal Society for signature to my
father, and I think on the same picture is a signature of Darwin.
That was a very nice moment.
But Freud was frail and severely ill.
We had this couch put up for my father to rest.
It's in his last year already.
For around 15 years, his jawbone was riddled with cancer.
Despite over 30 operations that affected his hearing and his heart,
he refused to surrender the oral pleasure
that was almost certainly killing him.
When his mouth was too painful to open, he'd wedge it with a
clothes peg, just wide enough so he could smoke a cigar.
He set up his study, just as it had been arranged in Vienna,
and continued to see patients.
When Freud sensed that death was near, he asked for his bed to
be brought down here, so he could be close to his desk,
his books and his beloved collection of ancient artefacts.
In September 1939, Freud arranged to be given a fatal dose of morphine.
But even after death, Freud's ideas continued to gain momentum.
One of the impetuses that Freud gave to the 20th century was
giving people permission
to be different from other people, to recognise that there is
very little that is abnormal, because the abnormal is so normal.
And perhaps most important of all, really making it possible to
talk about sex. That really, I think, helped hugely.
In the century after Freud's time, homosexuality, sexual
variety, much more sympathetic understandings about things
that just used to be thought of as perverse... That was a big, big
change in our sensibility, certainly in the western world, anyway,
and something for which we should thank him.
There is an issue, though, isn't there? Because some of his
ideas, they're... It's not just pop science,
it's positively bad science.
It may even not be science at all, really, because the empirical
basis for Freud's work is incredibly slender. I mean, he self-analysed,
he analysed his wife and daughter, and a few neurotic Viennese ladies,
and this is a very poor starting point for any well of theory.
He looked a lot at the unconscious, how far does that stand up against
what we now know from science, from neuroscience, for example?
Well, of course, neuroscience is making enormous strides now
that there are instruments, like the MRI scanner,
the Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanner,
and we've learned quite a lot.
One thing we've learned is that most mental computation takes
place in a non-conscious way, below the level of consciousness,
and so memory is stored, physically stored, in the brain, and
this must mean that many of the layers of, as it were,
psychic deposits of all our lives are in there and could be recovered,
and so it's not a million miles away from what Freud was groping for.
He had the kind of strength to imagine what we're now
understanding to be true.
That's exactly, exactly right. He was an imaginative genius, a
wonderful storyteller, and, you know, even if you do a
destructive job, which is you tear down a conventional fabric of
ideas, that gives us an opportunity to see things differently,
and I think he had enough wonderful insight to have struck the
bell, just very occasionally, in ways that make us think,
"This is an interesting aspect,
"an interesting perspective on human experience."
While theories like the Oedipus complex and death drive have
been widely questioned, there's no doubting Freud's huge
cultural influence.
His ideas have become so embedded, they're buried so deep within
our day-to-day experiences that we take them for granted.
So, when advertisers scrutinise consumers to create brands
that appeal to our irrational desires, they are drawing on
Freud's psychoanalytical techniques.
It's one of the reasons that products are packaged in ways that
promise youthful freedom, prestige, and, of course, sex appeal.
And Freud's influence is also there in how we make sense of who we are,
the importance that we place on childhood experiences,
our openness to talk about the emotional complexity of our lives.
Some people even see his focus on looking inwards as promoting
our narcissistic, individualistic culture, making us
self-absorbed, self-obsessed.
What really mattered to Freud, I'd argue, is right here.
His ashes are still in this ancient urn, one of his favourites, which
celebrates the Greek god Dionysius,
the god of wild, irrational impulses.
So, here in his final resting place, you have sex and lust and
death and mania and the power of the past, all mixed up together.
For a man who told the world he was a scientist, this is a madly,
wonderfully romantic last gesture.
And a reminder too, perhaps, that Freud believed, no matter how
deeply we interrogate ourselves, there is an irrational part
of our mind destined to stay in the dark.
It's true that many of Freud's theories have been dismissed
as wildly speculative, criticised for being unscientific.
But the questions that he left us with are as cogent now as
they were back then.
Are we hostages to our pasts and to our hidden anxieties,
or can we ever learn to understand our psyches, to be truly
masters of our own minds?
VOICE OF FREUD:
If the mind of Freud has made you think, then why not explore
further with the Open University to discover how other great
minds have shaped our world today?
Go to the address on the bottom of the screen and follow the
links to the Open University.