Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [107]
Intellectually committed to physiological psychology, he hoped to become a physiologist and do pure research. But Brücke advised against this. Freud had no money—he still lived at home and was supported by his father—and at that time a career in pure science was impossible for a person without an independent income unless he could count on achieving a high academic position, which a Jew could not. Freud gave up the dream, reluctantly completed his medical studies, and received his M.D. in 1881.
He hung on briefly at the institute but the next year met and fell in love with a friend of one of his sisters, an attractive young woman named Martha Bernays, and soon proposed marriage. She was entranced by the darkly handsome young doctor and accepted the offer, though they would not be able to marry until he could support a wife and family. The most feasible way for him to do so was to enter private practice, but he needed clinical experience and training in a specialty he could tolerate. Neurology being the specialty closest to neuroscience, he left Brücke’s institute and joined the Vienna General Hospital, where he studied under Theodor Meynert, then the world’s leading brain anatomist, and over the next three years became expert at diagnosing different kinds of brain damage and disease.
(During this time, as nearly everyone knows, Freud briefly experimented with cocaine. He used it himself and touted it in medical circles as a valuable analgesic and antidepressant until, seeing its destructive effects on a friend who became addicted to it, he abandoned it. By then, however, he had made himself suspect in the Viennese medical community.)
His years of hard work at the General Hospital were lonely and dispiriting; Martha Bernays lived with her mother in Hamburg, and Freud saw his fiancée only at long intervals and then for brief periods. He wrote to her and she to him almost daily; in his chatty, loving letters, he envisioned himself as Dr. Sigmund Freud, Neurologist in Private Practice, earning a good living, happily married to his beloved Martha, and raising a family. Only rarely did he write of some inner turmoil (for instance: “I have been so caught up in myself, and then I have days on end—they invariably follow one another, it is like a recurring sickness— when my spirits decline for no apparent reason”8), but there is no hint in the letters that he would someday search his psyche in an effort to understand his distress, no premonition that deep-probing psychology would drive neurology out of his mind and life.
The Hypnotherapist
Freud’s move toward his unique career was initiated by his friendship and collaboration with Josef Breuer, a successful physician and physiologist fourteen years his senior whom he had met through Brücke. Despite the gap in age and status, Breuer and Freud became close friends, and Freud was a frequent visitor in the Breuer home. The friendship grew particularly close as Freud gained medical experience at the General Hospital and was able to discuss cases with Breuer.
In November 1882, Breuer told Freud about one of his patients, a young woman suffering from hysteria whom he had treated for a year and a half. Known to history by the case-study pseudonym Anna O., she was Bertha Pappenheim, a pampered, overprotected daughter of wealthy Jewish parents and a friend of Martha Bernays’s. Freud was fascinated by the case, got Breuer to go over it with him in great detail, and a dozen years later co-authored with Breuer a report that is often called the first case of psychoanalysis, although in actuality it was only the seed from which psychoanalysis sprouted and grew.9
Bertha Pappenheim, an attractive, intellectual woman of twenty-one, was deeply attached to her father and had nursed him during his