Interrogating the Analyst: D.M. Thomas talks to Sigmund Freud about Art, Literature, Women and his Jewishness

Do you take your coffee black, Professor?

 

Thank you. But what I really want is … Ah, blissful! Frankly, your promise of cigars is the only reason I came.

 

I wish I could have offered you a fee.

 

Money doesn't bring one happiness, because it's not a childhood wish.

 

Neither are cigars, nor my own weakness - cigarettes.

 

But masturbation is … Now, what do you want to ask me?

 

You wrote a case study of Leonardo da Vinci, didn't you?

 

Yes I did, that was a jeu d'esprit - partly a novella, if you like. He had difficulty finishing works. I wondered if I could find a psychological reason for that.

 

It's an ingenious, beautiful work. One is tempted to say, if it's not true, it ought to be! Can you, again, outline the novella's plot, so to speak.

 

Leonardo recorded in his notebook a childhood memory, or rather fantasy - he wrote 'It seemed to me …,' suggesting it was a fantasy. A vulture flew to his cradle, opened his mouth with its tail and struck his inner lips several times with it. I recalled that the vulture was the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for the vulture-headed goddess Mut, and also for 'mother'. The tail in his mouth surely represented the mother's breast - and also the phallus, at a time when he still thought his mother had a penis like he did. So, let's look at the great artist's mother … Well, he had two.

 

Just like you, in a sense. 'One can't have too many mothers,' you said. Is that because you can split the bad from the good?

 

That was a joke, my friend. Leonardo was illegitimate, and it's quite possible he was raised alone for a time by his actual mother, a peasant-girl. She would have lavished all her lonely love on him, aroused him erotically and turned him toward homosexuality.

 

If I can interrupt, you believed a male homosexual has had an over-tender mother. In later life he puts himself in his mother's place and seeks a male he can love as his mother loved him. Am I right?

 

It's one of the ways it can happen. Of course, it may be constitutional too. Anyway, Leonardo's father married a woman of good class, and they took the child into their house. Isn't this why, in his painting of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, in the Louvre, Mary and her traditional mother look the same age? And have the same enigmatic smile, since Leonardo had by then met the mysterious Mona Lisa, who awakened his unconscious memory of his peasant mother?

 

A fascination with enigmatic lips!

 

Yes, reserved yet seductive ... Such was my speculation. And after the work appeared, my colleagues started to find vulture-shapes all over the painting. Jung even found one in Mary's pubic region.

 

But in fact Leonardo wrote 'kite', not 'vulture'. You'd read a bad translation. Does that invalidate your theory?

 

Not altogether. I still think the bird's tail was the mother's breast. I'm even grateful for the mistake - otherwise I'd never have written the study. And I still believe it likely that his real mother's overtenderness paralyzed his will, froze him into a largely asexual life - and made it difficult for him to complete his paintings. His repressed sexuality turned into a lust for knowledge and invention. He sublimated.

 

We haven't mentioned sublimation. What is it?

 

When the impossible desires of childhood come up against brute reality, some people can use those instinctual energies in nobler ways, helping to create civilization and culture. So, if a musical youth had a perversion about women farting, he might learn to play the trumpet!

 

Ah, but if he simply repressed it in his unconscious, he'd become neurotic and maybe develop terrible haemorrhoids!

 

Oh, far worse. It's what I did - sublimate, I mean - becoming a scientist. Yet sometimes I wished I had had poetic talent. I admire artists and writers greatly, and envy them.

 

Why is that?

 

Because they seem to evade the normal rule that you have to give up the pleasure principle. The artist is like a child playing with his own fantasies, and in doing so he turns them into a new kind of reality. He seems to have a faulty censorship, giving him a ready opening into his unconscious. He doesn't have to deny Eros. He can indulge himself sexually because Eros is the source of his art, don't you think?

 

Renoir said he painted with his prick …

 

It must have been very busy!

 

There's a book called Blake & Freud in which the author Diana Hume George argues that you resemble the English Romantic poet William Blake in your call for a liberated Eros. She says you were essentially a poet, only you weren't aware of it. I agree with her.

 

That's flattering, but - if you'll forgive me - shit.

 

Let me try to persuade you. You both go into dream and myth - the unconscious. Symbolism and metaphor are vital to you. As in poetry a single word or phrase can carry several meanings; opposites can fuse in the same line or sentence. Think of Hamlet's lustful abuse of his mother, 'The rank sweat of an enseamèd bed …'

 

Ah yes, desire and revulsion …

 

Also I suspect you relied a lot on intuition. You wrote to Fliess that you found a way out of a block 'by renouncing all conscious mental activity so as to grope blindly among my riddles'. That's just like a poet working: he may get a little drunk, stop thinking logically, then go into a kind of dream-writing.

 

Ah, I never got drunk … I was a humble worker in Solomon's mines, I couldn't carve the stones for Sheba's jewels. Psychoanalysis is simply the science of the unconscious. I do agree that we can all touch poetry, at least of a surreal kind. For instance, that worthy gentleman who wrote inviting his estranged American wife to sail on the Lusitania to join him in Europe, so they could try again. A ship that had been sunk in the war! He meant Mauritania, but his ship - his slip - showed his true feelings. His unconscious took over for a split second, and transformed him briefly into a wit, a surrealist, an Oscar Wilde!

 

And into the wife-murderer Crippen! I remember it in your Psychopathology of Everyday Life … Shall we pause there? I've another dream I'd like to tell you.

 

Good. But first, bring on the cancan girls. If I'm really a poet as you say, I'd better start behaving like one.

...


Let' s talk about women, shall we? Your wife Martha put the toothpaste on your toothbrush every morning. You believed woman's place was in the home?

 

I trained accomplished female analysts, and treated them with equality. Find another profession where that happened! But in general I thought women were happiest looking after a home and children, and the best chance of their avoiding neurosis was sexual intercourse within marriage. But for many women, that wasn't possible. Their marriages amortized. I felt enormously sorry for them: their husbands could freely take mistresses or go with prostitutes.

 

So what should such women do?

 

Have an extramarital affair. Far better that than develop hysteria. As I told you before, I was in favour of a much freer sexual life.

 

How would you have felt if Martha had had an affair, when your own sexual life had cooled?

 

I would have been amazed she had the time or energy left over from bossing us all to keep the house clean!

 

She was like your 'Dora''s mother?

 

Not to that extent, thank God. I have to say, though, that I was often struck by a sort of psychic rigidity that overcomes women in their thirties - as if there's little scope for further development. I speak of women in my time, of course. Perhaps your women have become lifelong psychic dynamos! But not ours, on the whole - it was as if the effort to become women at all had exhausted them.

 

Why, is it harder to become a woman than a man?

 

Yes. A girl has additional changes to go through. Both sexes have the same love object at first: the mother. But a girl's changes. She realizes that she does not have a penis; neither does her mama, so it must be her fault. The infant girl resents her, even as she starts to want to make a baby for her papa. Her antagonism to her mother may continue for a long time, possibly all her life; though she will feel guilty and try to over-compensate. Often she will look for a husband who resembles her father. As often as not, she will later replace the husband with her first son! Another change which a boy is spared is the discovery of a new sexual organ, the vagina. So, becoming a woman can be exhausting. Some never succeed.

 

In your lecture 'On Femininity', you described women as narcissistic, more jealous and envious then men, less capable of sublimation and inventiveness - except for plaiting and weaving - and with little sense of justice. Did you always try to flatter women like that?

 

Ah, but I made it clear that male and female doesn't precisely equate with masculine and feminine: we're bisexual. The learned women in that audience were quite narcissistic enough to know I didn't mean them!

 

You would be lynched by feminists if you said that now.

 

Women may not like it, but I didn't create Nature! Through his different anatomy and development, the male's superego, his 'over-I', is stronger. His Oedipus complex comes crashing down when fear of castration assails him. Taking his father's place with his mama would mean punishment, the chop - so, no thank you! This shock leads to the creation of a severe superego. In contrast a girl has no Oedipus complex until she discovers her lack of a penis and starts to want a baby by her father. She doesn't fear castration, because it's already happened, so to speak. So she can linger in the complex, without the motivation to develop a strong superego. That means less sense of justice and cultural creation. And her penis envy leads to narcissism and jealousy. However, there are plenty of narcissistic, jealous men, and women who are without a trace of vanity or envy, and highly ethical.

 

What about a man's envy of the vagina? I would love to be a woman for, say, a month.

 

For a month would be interesting, I agree. But you didn't, in infancy, feel wounded by not having a vagina. The vagina doesn't exist in the unconscious, because neither sex is aware of it till puberty. A few women told me they were aware of it, but they were probably confusing it with the anus. My friend Lou Salomé believed that even in mature women the vagina is only on lease from the anus. A clever metaphor!

 

Don't males suffer breast envy? And the womb - I had a friend whose anus bled whenever his wife had her period.

 

There's a narcissistic wound when the breast is withdrawn. But most men don't envy women their breasts. Of course, unjustifiable legal and social restrictions do also affect women's natures. And if society tells women they mustn't think about sex, they can lose interest in any sort of thinking.

 

The women you knew had no sense of your belittling them?

The American poet H.D., a patient and friend of yours, wrote a loving tribute to you; and her partner Bryher said you were like an old-fashioned family doctor who would go out in all weathers and at night to help someone.

 

That was kind of them. Hilda - H.D. - was a splendid woman. When she was in analysis with Havelock Ellis, and found he was fixated on watching women urinate, Hilda obliged him. Now that's tenderness. Women can be very generous.

 

But you believed they could also be dangerous, I think?

 

I thought that they could hold a man back. For achievement, a platonic homosexual relationship may be best.

 

Is the libido, the sexual drive, the same in men and women?

 

It's the same. But I fancy it becomes more restrained in a female. Nature needs more libidinousness in the male for the propagation of the species. Frigidity can be a problem in women. Certainly not in Lou, who told me, on one of our late-night walks, she wanted orgasm constantly! So women can be more sexually voracious than men, being closer to Nature, more hostile to culture.

 

So, sometimes voracious, sometimes frigid … Would you say you had to struggle to understand women, just as a woman struggles to achieve her femininity?

 

That's true, I did. I called woman 'the dark continent'. I couldn't decide what they really want.

 

You don't write much about maternal nurturing - simple mother-love. Why is that?

 

It wasn't my focus. I left it to others.

 

Which is the true Freud: the one who seems to suggest a woman is a wounded, incomplete male; or the one who wrote of the overriding power of the three women - the mother who bears one, the beloved chosen in her image, and then Mother Earth? You said, 'It is in vain that an old man yearns for the love of woman as he had it first from his mother; the third of the Fates alone, the silent Goddess of Death, will take him into her arms.'

 

Woman is the guardian of eternal Eros. Perhaps I only fully realized this when man's stronger superego produced the cult of the Führer. I must also say it was the Jewish women who stood up to the Nazis most courageously in Vienna - my beloved Anna not least … Now please switch off again, I'd like to hear more about this man who menstruated.

 
…



When he was a young man, in Galicia, a Cossack pulled off your father's Sabbath cap and threw it in the gutter; and your father just meekly picked it up. When he told you about this, it upset you, am I right?

 

Very much. I lost a lot of respect for him.

 

Was your father ashamed of what he'd done?

 

Not enough! You have to understand the Jewish mentality in those primitive shtetls. Brain was valued over brawn. The most respected men were scholars, palefaced, short-sighted, with long beards and a stoop from poring over religious books. These were the men the girls sighed over! It was the wives who did the physical work. My father, in accepting abuse from a Cossack, would have been seen as behaving with admirable self-restraint. But that's not how I saw it.

 

You, as a brilliant boy, were growing up in German-Austrian culture, in an emancipated home. It must have been quite hard for your father and other Jews to adjust to a different concept of manhood?

 

It was hard for them. The Gentiles, with their athletic prowess and Prussian-style militarism, despised Jewish males for their effeminacy. Self-hating Jews felt the same: Otto Weininger, the philosopher, shot himself - in Beethoven's house! - because he felt Jewish men were no more than women.

 

What did being Jewish mean to you?

 

A shared, ancient ethical strength. Of course, there was also anxiety. We middle-class Jews had achieved almost complete emancipation. Yet then, as we filled up the law schools, medical schools and newspaper offices, because we're intelligent and ambitious, the anti-Semites grew more and more vociferous.

 

You spoke and wrote perfect German, and you knew Hebrew?

 

Yes, I was taught by a brilliant professor.

 

Yet in one letter you denied even knowing the Hebrew alphabet.

 

Did I? I must have had some good reason for pretending. But I had cast off all the religious stuff. And we all feared the Ostjuden, the caftaned hordes streaming in from the East, because we knew their arrival would increase hatred toward all Jews.

 

Did the Bible play a part in your life, as a boy?

 

My father owned a Philippson Bible, which was rather revolutionary in its time. It was in Hebrew with a German translation. It discussed archaeology and comparative religion. And, despite the injunction against graven images, it contained hundreds of woodcuts showing life in Egypt. Papa let me read it when I was little. That's how I became fascinated by Egypt and archaeology, and identified with Joseph, interpreter of dreams. Papa gave me a copy on my 35th birthday, inscribing in Hebrew a message saying the spirit of God had moved in me when I was seven.

 

So he was religious?

 

Only vaguely - he'd given it up really. In his later years, though, he would pore over the Talmud, the rabbinic discussions of our laws and ethics.

 

I'm told its sentences are very antithetical, so can be read either positively or negatively. Not unlike the id's ambivalence …

 

Or the Delphic oracle's … Only a Jew could have created psychoanalysis. As a racial outcast I could think unconventionally. An atheistic Jew at that - an outcast from the outcast.

 

Let's come back to sex - I'm never loath to do that. Jews, I believe, have a robust, unromantic view of sex. No troubadours, no Heloïse and Abelard.

 

'Be fruitful and multiply'. Just get married first, my son!

 

Has that influenced you? Your writings on sex seem more to do with tension relief than attaining ecstatic happiness.

 

I don't know that state! Where can I apply for an entry permit? Jews know it's important to have controlled sex, so that it can be got out of the way and one's main attention be given to intellect and the spirit.

 

Your mother … you hardly speak of her, the years of your nurturing are almost as silent as those of Jesus. You did say that the mother-son bond was 'the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships'. That's rather idealistic and ... well, unambivalent for you?

 

I don't think it's far from the truth. A Jewish woman's romantic marriage is with her son.

 

She would have been shut out of the male Jew's world of learning, and on top of that she suffered from penis envy … We know about the traditional smothering Jewish mama. Your father I assume, meek and mild, withdrew into the corner with his Talmud. Some have imagined your mother shouting and screaming, and torturing and frightening you with too much love - giving you some childhood trauma which made it impossible for you to ...

 

Enough already! She was a wonderful mother. I know some of my children have described her as coarse, shrill, aggressive and selfish. But the word matricide never occurs in my works. Doesn't that say it all?

 

It could hardly be clearer. You must have been relieved she died before Hitler took over Austria.

 

Very. At last! I'd thought she was immortal, and therefore I wouldn't feel able to die. At 95 she hated a new photograph, saying it made her look a hundred!

 

It must have been very painful for you to leave Vienna?

 

Yes, even though I'd always said I hated the city. Eighty years is a long time. Anna said to me, 'Papa, why don't we kill ourselves?' Hundreds of Jews were jumping out of windows - just as in your dream of young men crashing aeroplanes into skyscrapers …

 

That wasn't a dream: it really happened, in 2001. I said it seemed like a terrible dream.

 

It really happened? I must have been nodding off from the wine. My God, humanity is no better ... Anyway, I replied, 'Why make it easy for the Nazis?' And so we got out, and the English were very welcoming.

 

Your last work was Moses and Monotheism …

 

That's what you think! You know I wanted to write about the paranormal.

 

You mean ...?

 

No, I'm joking. Moses was my last. That was no joke for the Jews. I wasn't sure it should be published when Jews were being so persecuted.

 

They were offended that you believed Moses was an Egyptian.

 

And that the Jews killed him, after he'd led them through the desert. A ritual sacrifice. The murdered father. I was speculating. Originally I was going to call it 'a historical novel' - perhaps I should have done. It wasn't in any way meant to be offensive.

 

'Old men should be explorers,'  as the man you once described as S.T. Eliot wrote. You know, I do quite like your version of the name - probably because it's 'toilets' spelled backwards.

 

Ha! Another Freudian slip. Are you aware that he once heavily criticised my book, The Future of an Illusion?