to do for the physical workings of the inner universe what Newton had done for the outer.
But, in another sense, what Freud had learned through the experience of writing that manuscript was just how subde the subtleties of mind were. Nothing in his neurological training had prepared him for—or, as he had now learned the hard way, could account for—that. Under intensive scrutiny, the mind had turned out to be even more complicated—far more circuitous, far more contradictory, and, finally, far more elusive—than he or, as far as he knew, anyone else had begun to imagine. Brain might be simply brain, but mind wasn’t just mind.
As he reclined in a chair in his modest study in Vienna, listening to the complaints of patients week after week, year after year, Freud had learned to encourage them to try to see whether they could remember the trauma that had caused their hysterical symptoms. If they did so, as he tried to reassure them, their symptoms would disappear. Freud had first heard about this method many years earlier, back in 1882, from a friend and colleague in Vienna, the eminent physician and medical researcher Josef Breuer. At that time, Breuer had told Freud about how he’d treated a young woman’s hysteria through hypnosis. Freud, in fact, had seen a demonstration of hypnosis once. It was, he thought, impressive, especially for a student with a physiological turn of mind. But instructive? Curative?
It might be so, said Breuer. Rather than simply issuing a command or a prohibition while she was under hypnosis, he said, he had asked this patient—Anna O., Freud named her later, when recalling this period in his professional development—what the source of the trauma was. In her waking state she “could describe only very imperfectly or not at all” the memories relating to her trauma, as Freud later wrote; in a hypnotic state, however, she seemed oddly able to remember everything. Even more improbably, by recalling the source of the trauma, as well as by experiencing the emotional outpouring that invariably accompanied this memory, she seemed somehow to slip free of the grip of the memory—seemed to achieve, in Breuer’s term, a “catharsis.”
In order for this construct of a cure to hold, it might seem, the mind must work like a Newtonian machine: an initial cause leading to an effect, which in turn becomes a cause for another effect, which in turn becomes another cause for a further effect, and so on, insinuating itself throughout the subject’s life until one day, in an unrecognizable guise, it surfaces as hysteric behavior, those worrisome symptoms that prompt the victim to seek medical attention. But if this description of the process were true, then the removal of any link along the way would be sufficient to interrupt the chain of causality and lead to the removal of the ultimate effect—the hysterical symptom. In that case, using hypnosis in a purely suggestive way, by simply commanding the symptom to disappear, would be sufficient in effecting a cure.
Freud, however, believed that he’d seen otherwise. When he attempted to apply this kind of therapy in his own medical practice, he found that leading the patient back to some step between the current state of hysteria and the original inciting incident didn’t have a cathartic result. Only by revisiting the scene of the crime, so to speak, could a victim permanently break free of its memory, its insidious influence. Only by tracing it to its source would doctor and patient see the hysterical symptom disappear—but only by tracing it all the way to its source. As Freud told a meeting of the Vienna Medical Club in January 1893, “The moment at which the physician finds out the occasion when the symptom first appeared and the reason for its appearance is also the moment at which the symptom vanishes.”
Anna O., for instance, complained of a paralysis on her right side, persistent hallucinations of snakes in her hair, and a sudden inability to speak her native German. These symptoms Breuer eventually traced back to an evening when she was nursing her sick father and imagined a snake approaching his sleeping figure. She tried to move to save him, but her right arm had gone to sleep over the back of a chair; and so she resorted to prayer, but in her fear all she could recall were some children’s verses in English. Or, from Freud’s own case files, Frau Cäcilie M., who suffered from a pain between her eyes until she remembered the time her grandmother had fixed her with a “piercing” look. “Cessante causa cessat effectus,” as Freud said in that same lecture before the Vienna Medical Club: “When the cause ceases, the effect ceases.”
Freud, however, wasn’t content with a vision of the mind that began with a cause and then, no matter what, ended with a certain effect. How to account for the inability of a process so powerful—so active, after all—to reveal itself?
With his background in a physiology that was ultimately nothing more than matter and motion, Freud knew exactly how to account for it: by postulating the existence within the unconscious of an opposing force at least equally powerful—a “defense” or, as Freud soon came to call it, a “repression,” a change in terminology that itself reflected a change in Freud’s thinking. This opposing force wasn’t merely defending the mind against itself; it was repressing the unpleasant memory or association. It wasn’t reactive. It, too, was active, even while seemingly absent.
On October 26, 1896, Freud’s father died. The heroic figure of Sigmund’s childhood imagination may have disappeared forever during that long-ago walk when the father confided in the son how he’d submitted to the indignities of an anti-Semite, and now the corporeal figure was gone, too. Yet they lingered—both the heroic figure and the tragic shade. Like a traumatic event that remains present in the symptoms of a hysterical patient, the older man remained alive in the grown son. That night, in fact, Freud had a dream about him. On his way to the funeral, Freud stops at a barbershop. There he sees a sign: “You are requested to close the eyes.” Whose eyes? he had to wonder. The dead father’s? The son’s? And “close” them as in lay to rest? Or “close” them as in “wink at” or “overlook”?
The dead-but-not-gone father wasn’t the only thing that lingered. The dream did, too, taunting Freud with its myriad possible interpretations, haunting him like the earlier memory of the about-to-be-unheroic man on the street, inhabiting him, continuing to exert its influence over him, as an adult, decades after the event. In years to come, Freud more formally commemorated his father’s death as “the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man’s life.” But now, when his impressions were raw, he confided in a letter to his friend Fliess, “By one of those dark pathways behind the official consciousness the old man’s death has affected me deeply.”
Could Freud navigate those dark pathways? When he tried to map the pathways of nerves within the brain, he had failed—and now he suspected it was because he’d set himself the wrong challenge. Now a new and radically different challenge presented itself to him: How to map the pathways of the mind alone? Even if he could, would anyone believe that such a description bears any resemblance to reality? He would, of course—but then, sitting in his office, listening to his patients, Sigmund Freud had heard the evidence for himself, if only in his mind’s ear.
Now here was something nobody had ever seen before. The photograph that began appearing on the front pages of newspapers around the world in the first weeks of 1896 showed an image of a hand, more or less. Less, because this hand seemed to lack skin—or at least its outer layers of flesh and blood and tendons had been reduced to a presence sufficiently shadowy so as to allow a look beneath them. And more, because of what that look within revealed: the intricate webwork of bones that previously had been solely the province of the anatomist.
The hand belonged to the wife of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, a professor at the University of Würzburg in Germany. On November 8, 1895, while working alone in his darkened laboratory, Professor Röntgen had noticed a seemingly inexplicable glow. On closer inspection, this glow revealed mysterious properties. For the next several weeks Röntgen worked in secrecy, strictly adhering to the method
