Emma Mendelson
Form VI
SIGMUND FREUD AND MODERNISM IN VIENNA
Historians often point to Darwin, Marx, and Freud as having a huge impact on the modern age's view of humanity. However, only one of these great thinkers has entered human consciousness so successfully that people quote him without knowing it. Only one has had such a profound effect on daily life that no one can feel depressed, forget something, or even stumble without wondering the cause. This man is Sigmund Freud; a man who has forever changed how we interpret the desires and idiosyncrasies of our personalities. Freud started to gain a following in some scientific circles by 1900, but it was not until the coming of the First World War and the 1920s that Freud became a household name. This upsurge of adherence to Freudian theory is what we now call the Freudian Revolution. This is the same period in which modernism in literature, painting, and other arts began to flourish. It is no accident that Freud's ideas became widespread while modernism in the arts was gaining strength, for there are affinities between Freud's theories and modernism. The three main affinities are the importance of the subjective experience, the focus on the non-rational, and a more open attitude towards sexuality.
It is only fitting that Freud came out of a place like fin-de-siecle Vienna; a place where chaos, anxiety and insecurity ruled the people. The government was completely under the control of the aristocracy, after a definitive defeat of the measly twenty year reign of the liberals. The Hapsburgs were in power, and with them came poor military defenses, a disregard for those not in the upper bracket and anti-Semitism. As the Turks attacked the city and the aristocracy's power increased, the collective attempt of the bourgeoisie to forget these problems came in a turn towards the arts. Used as a means of escaping reality and emulating the aristocracy, Vienna's devotion to the arts was unparalleled.
Vienna's repressed and weak bourgeoisie seemed to feel like outsiders looking in on the aristocracy- as did many middle class persons in Europe. What makes Vienna different is that the bourgeoisie were literally looking in on the aristocracy. Physically, the urban landscape was shaped by the Ringstrasse, a ring of buildings and a large circular boulevard separating the old city on the inside from the suburbs on the outside. The Ringstrasse was first constructed with the purpose of beautifying the city but soon became a symbol of oppression. The Ringstrasse served to physically separate the classes as a constant reminder of who was rich and who wasn't. Literally, who was "in" and who was "out". Ornate, Baroque buildings and planning dominated the inner city. The buildings in the Ringstrasse were also baroque in style, but had no planning at all. The area outside the Ringstrasse was a lower-class suburbia; housing was simple and dispersed. This physical separation of the classes greatly contributed to the intense insecurity of the bourgeoisie in Vienna as opposed to other cities.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) grew up in Vienna during the chaos of the late 1800s and early 1900s and experienced the isolation and anti-Semitism of being a middle class Jew in Austria. While many people looked to art as a means of escape from and an explanation of their despair, Freud's genius led him to look inside himself- at the place where artistic impulses originate. Freud published many books with dozens of revolutionary ideas. The most influential will be recounted here. Freud's first full length book was "The Interpretation of Dreams". The main idea of this study seems alarmingly simple and common today: "A dream is a disguised fulfillment of a suppressed wish" (1), or, as historian Carl Schorske simplified, "a dream is the fulfillment of a wish" (2). At the time, though, most people thought the theory was ridiculous because nothing like it had ever been considered before. In his dream theory, Freud pointed out two functions of the unconscious- the wish that the dream is fulfilling and the censorship the mind employs to disguise this wish. This brings us to another one of Freud's most revolutionary theories; repression. The expurgation of the latent wish present in dreams is what Freud called repression. An individual will prevent an idea or desire from entering consciousness (repression) because the realizations of the idea would cause the individual "pain". This pain would likely result because the idea is not socially acceptable, e.g. the Oedipal desire.
One of the most prevalent characteristics of modern literature and art is the concentration on the inner life of the individual, and the individual as a separate (and sometimes alienated) entity from society. The subjective reality of the person is the focus of much modern literature and art. Franz Kafka, an Austrian writer, explored unique ways of story telling so that the main character's individual experience came to the forefront of the novel. Kafka used symbolism and magical realism to describe the unique neuroses of a specific individual and how that individual handles alienation that can come with the nine to five work of the modern era. In Kafka's most famous work, "The Metamorphosis", the subjective experience is treated as external reality. The main character, Gregor Samsa, awakes one morning "from uneasy dreams" to find himself "transformed into a gigantic insect" (3). This is obviously not possible; it's not reality , thus Kafka must be describing Gregor's own subjective reality. The psychological aspect of this book is not at all latent; Gregor's magical reality is similar to the hallucinations of a schizophrenic. Visual art at the turn of the twentieth century also took a subjective turn, as artists began to paint in ways that focused less on an objective representation of external reality and more on the subjective experience of seeing light and color.
Freud's work also deals with the subjective experience, and revealed its hidden depths. He uncovered the unconscious, the sense of guilt and the layers of private feelings and thoughts that seem far-removed from the public world of work and politics, yet motivate individuals in all aspects of their existence. Freud describes neurosis, a broad, common and not terribly serious disorder as having "the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality" (4). This definition shows how individuals distort their own perceptions of their environment. The means of doing this is repression, and the end result is an experience unique to every individual; a subjective experience. Freud disclosed the manifold meanings of individual psychic life that had never been understood before, and his exploration of this terrain brings him close to the artists and writers who sought to explore it as well.
Another affinity is evident in the recognition of the role that sex plays in the life of the individual and society. Sex has evolved from something taboo and sinful in the nineteenth century to one of the most normal (and talked about) aspects of western life. In the late nineteenth century the sexual nature of literature and art became less and less subtle and hidden. The emergence of sexuality in visual art is no clearer than in the works of the famous Viennese artist Gustav Klimt. Klimt started out painting traditional murals inside buildings in the Ringstrasse, but his paintings soon became more abstract, symbolic, and, above all, sexual. Klimt's fascination with the liberated female body is evident in many of his most famous works. His drawing "Fish Blood" (1898) is composed of women with long, flowing hair undulating along with the waves. Off to the side is a fish as large as the women. His painting "Watersnakes" (1907) also explores this theme. In this painting there are no water snakes present- just nude women stretched out languidly with long red hair in the midst of a sea of colors and geometric shapes. Klimt's most famous work, "The Kiss" (1908) depicts the act of love which its title implies. The work is intimate- a man is leaning over and kissing a woman's check as she grasps him closer. The painting evokes feelings of sexual excitement, but also a closeness- maybe even love- between these two people.
Oskar Kokoschka, a brilliant and somewhat bizarre writer, artist and composer from fin-de-siecle Vienna described sexuality from the perspective of a young man in a repressive society. In his famous amalgam of visual art and poetry, "The Dreaming Boys", Kokoschka describes his sexual desire and subsequent shame that comes with it.
. . .you gentle ladies / what springs and stirs in your red cloaks. . . do you feel the excited warmth. . . my unbridled body / my body exalted with pigment and blood / crawls into your arbors / swarms through your hamlets / crawls into your souls / festers in your bodies. . .I devour you. . . a hesitant desire / the unfounded feeling of shame before what is growing / and the stripling state / the overflowing and solitude / I perceived myself and my body / and I fell down and dreamt love /
(5)
At the same time, Sigmund Freud was discovering the vast role that sexuality played in human behavior. Freud uncovered the role of sexuality in imagination, and the costs of sexual repression for individual health. One of Freud's most famous and daring discoveries was the sexual behavior children exhibit; proving that the sex drive is deeply embedded in humans.
However, Freud's work on the prevalence of sexuality mainly centers on his "libido" theory. Freud describes the libido as "a term used in the theory of the instincts for describing the dynamic manifestation of sexuality" (6). In fact, most of the disorders that occurred in Freud's patients were the result of a societal problem; the repression of the libido. Freud referred to his patients' problems in an essay called "The Libido Theory" from 1923. He says, "It was found their symptoms came about by the sexual instinctual impulses being rejected (repressed) by the subject's personality (his ego) and then finding expression by circuitous paths through the unconscious" (7). In addition to the similarities, Freud's sexual theories helped to legitimize the more sexual nature of newer works of art and literature.
Page Four/ Third Body Paragraph
The final affinity between Freud and the modernists is their common focus on the non-rational. In literature, Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse and Italo Calvino used dreams, hallucinations and pure fantasy to describe the human condition. Besides exploring sexual themes, Klimt experimented with the non-rational. Inspired by the impressionists, Klimt depicted scenes using small geometrical shapes. Sometimes these shapes were set in patterns to depict simple backgrounds. Other times Klimt used intricate, brightly colored swirls, eyes, flowers, scales and a multitude of other designs to describe a mood. In Klimt's "Pallas Athena" (1898), the goddess is depicted in two ways. The larger image shows her more traditionally- a strong warrior in her armor staring straight at the viewer. It is what she holds in her and that is interesting. In what seems more like the surrealism of the 1930s a small nude woman stands atop a sphere that rests in the palm of the larger Athena.
Freud, like these artists, did not reject the non-rational elements of the mind as "fancy". Freud was the first person to discover the importance of dreams. In his lecture, "Difficulties and Preliminary Approach to the Subject", Freud identifies dreams as "another of these ordinary, under-rated occurrences" (8). Freud believed that dreams held the key to understanding the human psyche because they expressed unconscious wishes.
Freud extended his theories to encompass jokes, slips of the tongue, daydreams. He analyzed myths and symbols in his search for keys to human psychology. And Freud showed how the neurotic was prevented from acting rationally by the sway of unresolved conflicts from his childhood. Both the modernists and Freud saw that the non-rational aspects of man's inner life might reveal hidden truths.
Page Five/ Conclusion
Psychoanalysis and modernism have had a huge influence on subsequent thought and artistic endeavor. They emerged at a time when the nineteenth century's beliefs in progress, science, and unlimited economic growth were being questioned. In many ways, Freud embodies all that is modern. He took a completely new and controversial approach to his studies, as did the artists and writers of the avant-garde.
ENDNOTES
1. Carle E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna , (New York, 1961), pg. 187.
2. Ibid number 1.
3. Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis , (New York, 1948), pg. 1.
4. Sigmund Freud, General Psychological Theory , (USA, 1963), pg. 21.
5. Ibid number 1, pg. 332.
6. Ibid number 4, pg. 180.
7. Ibid number 6.
8. Sigmund Freud, Psychoanalysis , (New York, 1920), pg. 87.