Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [123]
Yet perhaps the speed of social change, the disintegration of traditions, and the emergence of a bewildering array of social options made Freud’s psychology particularly appealing, especially in America (except in academic, behaviorist circles). In a time of rapid change, it spoke of unchanging aspects of human nature; in a time of tremendous emphasis on material goods and the physical sciences, it stressed humanistic phenomena—desires, frustrations, conscience, moral values; to a culture of individualism and optimism, it spoke of the personal determinants of behavior, and offered theory and therapy supportive of the hope that people can change themselves for the better. In 2004, the neuropsychologist Mark Solms wrote, “For the first half of the 1900s, the ideas of Sigmund Freud dominated explanations of how the human mind works,” and the historian Eli Zaretsky credits Freud with having created the “first great theory and practice of ‘ personal life’ … the experience of having an identity distinct from one’s place in the family, in society, and in the social division of labor.”66
Explorer of the Depths: Sigmund Freud 215
Whatever the reasons for the success of psychoanalysis as a therapy and a psychology, Freud’s fame grew from 1909 on and reached a peak between the two world wars. His name indeed became a household word. Though relatively few people had read any of his works, every reasonably well-read person knew who he was. He was likened to Einstein in his influence on modern thought, and many noted intellectuals wrote to him or sought him out and lionized him. Media bigwigs attempted to capitalize on his name and fame. In 1924, at the time of the Leopold and Loeb murder trial, Colonel Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, offered Freud $25,000 to come to Chicago and analyze the two young killers; Freud declined. Samuel Goldwyn offered Freud $100,000 to assist in making a film portraying famous love stories of history; Freud’s reply earned him a New York Times headline: “FREUD REBUFFS GOLDWYN. Viennese Psychoanalyst Is Not Interested in Motion Picture Offer.”67
Freud was unimpressed by these indications of his fame, but when he was awarded the Goethe Prize in 1930, he called it “the climax of my life as a citizen.”68
In 1923, at sixty-seven, Freud developed cancer of the upper jaw from his lifelong heavy cigar smoking and underwent the first of what would be thirty operations over the next sixteen years to remove recurrent pre-cancerous or cancerous tissue. He had to wear a prosthesis—a kind of large denture—to separate his mouth from his nasal cavity; it made talking and eating difficult, and had to be removed regularly, a painful procedure, so that the affected area could be cleaned.
His final years were darkened by the rise of the Nazis in Germany, who began burning his books in 1933. As the danger grew that the movement would overwhelm Austria, friends and family tried to get him to leave, but he adamantly refused. Only when Germany took over Austria in March 1938 and the Nazis confiscated his passport did the fragile, aged Freud, nearing eighty-two, recognize his peril and agree to leave if he could. Partly through the intervention of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his ambassador to France, William C. Bullitt, the Nazis were induced to let him go, and late that year he and the faithful Martha moved to London. Although his cancer had become inoperable, he was still of perfect mind and continued to write and to see a few patients. At last, in intolerable pain, he asked his physician to end his suffering by an overdose of morphine; he died on September 23, 1939, three weeks after the outbreak of World War