Sigmund Freud by Kathleen Krull
Author:Kathleen Krull [Krull, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cookie429, Retail, Ages 8+
ISBN: 9781440678332
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2006-10-19T07:00:00+00:00
Even if he didn’t cure them, patients were usually grateful. For many, it was the first time in their lives that someone had listened to them with full attention. They gained new insights and felt better after treatment—and they told others about it. Some patients were so devoted to their analyst that they went on to become psychoanalysts themselves.
As his reputation spread, Freud was able to charge more, especially once he was promoted from lecturer to full professorship at the University of Vienna. This promotion took several years longer than it should have, partly because anti-Semitism was on the rise once again, partly because he lacked the confidence to go after the promotion aggressively. But he was finally appointed Professor Extraordinarius in 1902. At one point he was supporting his family comfortably with only eight patients.
He saw patients between eight and noon, then wrote up his notes. Martha—besides running a household that included six children, nannies, servants, and her sister Minna—made sure her husband’s day ran like clockwork.
Lunch, the main meal of the day, was served precisely at one o’clock. A maid would enter the dining room with a giant soup tureen. Soup was followed by meat, vegetables, and dessert. The doctor liked roast beef with onions, and preferred artichokes to cauliflower. Martha would come to the table with a pitcher of hot water and a napkin so she could immediately blot any spills. Freud usually ate in silence. Sometimes he brought one of his newest artifacts, perhaps a Greek urn with red figures, to the table and contemplated it while munching.
Then he took a walk along the boulevard lined with trees, the fabled Ringstrasse. He’d stop at the barber (he had his mustache and beard trimmed every day), the cigar store, a bookshop, or antique dealers.
He saw more patients between three and nine, ate supper, then played cards with Minna, or walked with Martha or his daughters to a café for ice cream or pastry. Not overtly affectionate, never kissing or cuddling, he was a doting father in his way to his children (all named for friends of his, not his wife’s). His letters told about when a baby’s first tooth came in, poems they’d written, their accomplishments in school, special talents they had, news about their health. He nursed them when they were ill, which without benefit of modern medicines, was often.
Every Saturday he lectured at the University of Vienna, then played cards with old friends. Every Sunday he had dinner with his adored mother, who still called him “My golden Sigi,” and five sisters. In the summers, the Freuds vacationed in the German Alps, and he would take the children on hunts for strawberries or edible mushrooms.
Martha later claimed that during their fifty-three years of marriage, “not one angry word fell between us.” She kept a low profile, believing in the popular saying that “The best Hausfrau [housewife] is the one about whom the least is said.” She did everything for Sigi, laying out his clothes (he always dressed meticulously), even putting the toothpaste on his toothbrush.
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