The German Genius

philosophers anticipated Freudian concepts. In The World as Will and Representation , Schopenhauer conceived the will as a “blind, driving force.” Man, he said, was an irrational being guided by internal forces, “which are unknown to him and of which he is scarcely aware.” Eduard von Hartmann argued there were three layers of the unconscious: (1) the absolute unconscious, “which constitutes the substance of the universe and is the source of the other forms” (2) the physiological unconscious, which is part of man’s evolutionary development; and (3) the psychological unconscious, which governs our conscious mental life.
    Many of Freud’s thoughts about the unconscious were anticipated by Nietzsche, who had a concept of the unconscious as a “cunning, covert, instinctual” entity, often scarred by trauma, camouflaged in a surreal way but leading to pathology. Ernest Jones, Freud’s first (and official) biographer, drew attention to a Polish psychologist, Luise von Karpinska, who originally spotted the resemblance between some of Freud’s fundamental ideas and those of Johann Friedrich Herbart (who wrote seventy years earlier). Herbart pictured the mind as dualistic, in constant conflict between conscious and unconscious processes. An idea is described as being verdrängt [repressed] “when it is unable to reach consciousness because of some opposing idea.” Gustav Fechner (1801–87), an experimental psychologist (and yet another son of a pastor) built on Herbart, specifically likening the mind to an iceberg “nine-tenths under water.”
    Pierre Janet, a doctor in La Havre, France, claimed to have refined a technique of hypnosis, under which patients sometimes developed a dual personality. One side was created to please the physician while the second, which would occur spontaneously, was best explained as a “return to childhood.” (Patients would refer to themselves by their childhood nicknames.) When Janet moved to Paris, he developed his technique known as “Psychological Analysis,” a repeated use of hypnosis and automatic writing, during the course of which, he noticed, the crises that were induced were followed by the patient’s mind becoming clearer. However, the crises became progressively more severe, and the ideas that emerged showed that they were reaching back in time, earlier and earlier in the patient’s life.
    The nineteenth century was also facing up to the issue of child sexuality. Physicians had traditionally considered it a rare abnormality but, in 1846, Father P. J. C. Debreyne, a moral theologian who was also a physician, published a tract in which he insisted on the high frequency of infantile masturbation, of sexual play between young children, and of the seduction of very young children by wet nurses and servants. Most famously, Jules Michelet, in Our Sons (1869), warned parents about the reality of child sexuality and in particular what today would be called the Oedipus complex.
    The idea of “two minds” fascinated the nineteenth century, and there emerged the concept of the “double ego” or “dipsychism.” The dipsychism theory was developed by the University of Berlin philosopher of aesthetics, Max Dessoir (1867–1947) in Das Doppel-Ich ( The Double Ego ), published to great acclaim in 1890, in which he divided the mind into the Oberbewusstsein and the Unterbewusstsein , “upper consciousness” and “under consciousness,” the latter, he said, being revealed occasionally in dreams.
    Freud’s own views were first set out in Studien über Hysterie ( Studies in Hysteria ), published in 1895 with Josef Breuer, and then more fully in his work titled Die Traumdeutung ( The Interpretation of Dreams ) , published in the last weeks of 1899. * Freud, a Jewish doctor from Freiberg in Moravia, was already forty-four.
    It is in The Interpretation of Dreams that the four fundamental building blocks of Freud’s theory about human nature first come together: the unconscious, repression, infantile sexuality (leading to the Oedipus complex), and the tripartite division of the mind into ego, the sense of self; superego, broadly speaking the conscience; and id, the primal biological expression of the unconscious. Freud saw himself in the biological tradition initiated by Darwin. After qualifying as a doctor, Freud obtained a scholarship to study under Jean-Martin Charcot, who ran an asylum in Paris for women afflicted with incurable nervous disorders. In his research,