Sight by Jessie Greengrass

Author:Jessie Greengrass
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hogarth
Published: 2018-08-21T00:00:00+00:00

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During the summer of 1897 Freud conducted what he described, in a series of intensely felt letters to his friend and confidant Wilhelm Fliess, as a self-analysis. “I believe,” he wrote, “I am in a cocoon, and heaven knows what sort of creature will emerge from it.” Since 1891 the Freud family had been living in an apartment in Vienna, at Berggasse 19, which would remain their home until 4 June 1938 when, forced to leave at last in the wake of Austria’s annexation, Freud, along with Anna and his wife, Martha, would take the Orient Express to Paris and, from there, to London, first to stay in a house at the bottom of Primrose Hill and then, at last, to 20 Maresfield Gardens, where, after the passing of a fine summer and the difficult completion of some remaining work, he would die at the age of eighty-three. By then his followers would regard him as a kind of secular prophet and his pronouncements, handed down through Anna, as absolute; but in 1897 he had few patients and little money, five children already and a sixth, Anna, on the way. Despite an unshakeable belief in the importance of his work he had so far failed to successfully complete a psychoanalytic treatment, and nor could he articulate any sound theory of psychoanalysis. Initially, under the influence of the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, with whom he had studied in Paris, he had believed that the solution to those problems of mental topology which interested him might be found in hypnosis, but he had since ceased to trust it; now he sought some alternative but seemed to get nowhere. He had been, for a while, a close collaborator with Josef Breuer but Breuer lacked Freud’s faith in the idea that it was suppressed sexuality that was at the root of their patients’ neurotic symptoms and, in the face of this doctrinal difference, their relationship had crumbled—a pattern which was soon to be repeated with Fliess and then, some years later, with Jung. This pattern of intense collaborative friendship followed by a difference of opinion which Freud felt as a betrayal—finding resolution at last in his relationship with Anna, whose faith in his work was absolute, a form of love, tying him to her as much as her to him—was something which Freud appeared unable either to notice or to anticipate; and I find in this a particular sadness, that a man so concerned with the possibility of understanding might remain in this case so blind. This impending separation, although still some way distant, presents itself in the letters that Freud wrote to Fliess during the summer of 1897 as a kind of weight: the oppressive, headachy closeness of the air before thunder. Freud writes with a noisy fondness, as though the volume of his friendship will keep his doubts at bay, drowning them in the performance of affection, and he allows little space for discussion of Fliess’ own theories, commenting rarely on the other man’s work.

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