Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [120]
From that year on, however, Freud’s life began to improve. In 1902 he was at last promoted to Professor Extraordinarius at the University of Vienna and for the rest of his life was generally known as Professor Freud. The honor came late, but was both symbolically and practically of great value to him.
That same year, Wilhelm Stekel, a Viennese physician whom Freud had successfully treated for impotence, suggested that Freud hold weekly evening meetings with a handful of colleagues who were interested in his work. Freud liked the idea and sent invitations to three other physicians. In the fall of 1902 the five, calling themselves the Wednesday Psychological Society, began regular meetings in Freud’s office. One member would present a paper, after which, over coffee and cake, the group would discuss it and relevant aspects of psychoanalytic theory and therapy. In the group’s first years, according to one member, “there was an atmosphere of the foundation of a religion in that room. Freud himself was its new prophet who made the heretofore prevailing methods of psychological investigation appear superficial.”57
The group grew gradually; its early members included Otto Rank, Alfred Adler, Sandor Ferenczi, and Ernest Jones, all destined to become important in the psychoanalytic movement. By 1906 there were seventeen, and two years later the expanding group, now factional and acrimonious, became the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Many such societies sprang up in other cities in Europe and America, and by 1910, at a congress in Nuremberg, the International Psychoanalytic Association was founded.
Freud’s professorship and the formation of the Wednesday Psychological Society brought an increase in his practice and income. In his office suite, completely separate from the family’s spacious living quarters, he began collecting the Roman and Greek statuettes and other antiquities that he loved, arranging them on a table in his line of vision where he sat behind the head of the patients’ couch. He also could now afford more luxurious vacations to more remote areas. It was his custom to work extremely hard for nine months of the year and then take a three-month summer break. He would spend the first part of the vacation in the mountains with his large family—Martha, their six children, and Martha’s unmarried sister, Minna. Although in photographs he always looks stern, even severe—he is said to have had a piercing gaze and a commanding air—in private life he could be warm, relaxed, and informal, and on vacation would put on a backpack, hiking clothes, and boots and take his older children walking in the forest, climbing, hunting mushrooms, and fishing.
After some weeks of this, he would leave the family and go to Italy, where, as a result of his self-analysis, he was now able to visit Rome. Martha did not accompany him; Freud was very much a conservative, middle-class Viennese paterfamilias whose wife was the chatelaine of the household, her only purpose in life being, she said, to serve “our dear chief.” She maintained peace and order, relieving Freud of all mundane concerns, laid out his clothes for him each day, and even put toothpaste on his toothbrush.58 With such support, it is not surprising that Freud, a compulsive worker, could accomplish so much. Although he saw patients eight or nine hours a day, he wrote prolifically in the evening and on weekends, and his lifetime output of psychological writings fills twenty-three good-sized volumes.
Among the many works, both short and long, that Freud completed in the early years of the new century were two that are particularly important, one because it added greatly to his renown, the other because it added greatly to his notoriety.
The first, published in 1901, was The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. It dealt with such topics as forgetfulness, slips of the tongue, and bungled actions, which Freud viewed not as mere accidents but as having significant unconscious causes. Although the purpose