Author George Makari must have very little time on his hands. He is an associate professor of psychiatry at Weill Medical College, an adjunct associate professor at Rockefeller University, and he is on the faculty of Columbia University’s Psychoanalytic Center. Yet, he has also managed to write a terrific new history of psychoanalysis from the late 19th century to the post-World War II years. It’s enough to hurt your ego.
Makari has taken the birth, maturity and embittered middle age of psychoanalysis and made it into a compelling, rich narrative filled with fascinating characters and colorful settings: Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Vienna, London. What more could a reader want? Sex? C’mon – it’s a book about psychoanalysis. Conflict? You’re kidding, right?
Makari acknowledges that there have been many books written about the founders of psychoanalysis. His brilliant innovation is to synthesize this story of ideas and theories, and locate giants like Freud, his acolytes and his critics in their cultural and political context.
The book opens with, of course, Freud. But not the Freud we would necessarily recognize. “When the twenty-nine-year-old doctor stepped off the train in the fall of 1885, he was a failure,” Makari writes of Freud’s arrival in Paris. But not for long. Soon, he started a revolution in humankind’s exploration of the mind.
Makari shows us how psychoanalysis and Freudian theory took hold in the coffee houses, salons and clinics of Europe at the end of the Victorian era, how it inspired a movement and resistance, and how the world which gave birth to this revolution disappeared in the fire of World War II.
Makari argues that we need to revisit the roots of psychoanalysis because the “field is now in turmoil. Its future is said to be in doubt,” he writes. But as Makari shows, the field has always been in turmoil. Differences between Jung and Freud were beginning to emerge in the first years of the 20th century. Jung and his fellow Swiss were very different from Freud and his Austrian acolytes. “One group was Jewish,” Makari writes, “the other Protestant. One group resided in sexually open Vienna, the other in buttoned-down Zurich.”
Turmoil was present at the creation of this revolution, partly because the world in which these revolutionaries lived was in turmoil.
Psychoanalysis “emerged at a time when Europeans were dramatically changing the ways they envisioned themselves,” he points out. The characters in Makari’s tale are products of their time and environment, quite like the people they sought to understand. So it is important to remember that the movement was centered in Vienna, capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the final days of the Hapsburg dynasty.
Makari shows that by 1902, Freud’s “medical theories and his positions on degeneration, repression and sexuality had begun to filter into broader debates on Austrian political and social life. Many concluded the Austro-Hungarian Empire was sickly, and that radical measures needed to be imposed before this illness proved fatal.”
Freud’s theories, then, seemed to explain not only the mysteries of the unconscious, but the malaise of the empire. Austrian reformers flocked to Freud not only because he challenged conventional ideas about sexual morality, but because they thought he provided a context for political and cultural reform as well.
Terry Golway teaches U.S. history at Kean University in Union, N.J.