There are moments in cultural history when astonishing bursts of creativity (often coming with sudden political shifts) seem to explode throughout a city, producing a stream of scientific and artistic masterpieces that change the way humanity understands itself and the world. One such moment occurred in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century.
Celebrating this epoch in an “In Depth” panel during the December meeting were Peter Gay, Donald Kuspit, Peter Loewenberg, Julie Jaffee Nagel, and Louis Nagel.
Morris L. Peltz introduced the panel with a brief overview from Carl E. Schorske's seminal work Fin-de-Siécle Vienna. Schorske wrote of
… the near palpable tremors of Viennese social and political disintegration that led to one of the most fertile breeding grounds in the history of this century's culture. … [These] Austrians engaged in critical reformations or subversive transformations of their traditions that their own society perceived as radically new if not indeed revolutionary.
These thinkers, artists, and writers became preoccupied with the problem of the nature of the individual in a disintegrating society. Out of this preoccupation arose Austria's contribution to a new view of man: not only a rational animal but also a creature of feeling and instinct.
Political frustration spurred the discovery of this new view of a psychological man.
The Viennese middle class had begun by supporting the arts as a surrogate form of assimilation into the aristocracy. They ended by finding in it an escape, a refuge from the unpleasant world of increasingly threatening political reality. The life of art became a substitute for the life of action.
Peter Gay observed,
Fin-de-siècle Vienna was no city. … Rather this famous name is nothing more than a useful basket in which to throw a collection of populations that really had very little to do with one another. It has often been maintained by several important cultural historians that Freud was quintessentially Viennese [and] that he could have developed psychoanalysis only in Vienna and nowhere else.
Gay argued that Freud was a positivist and there is nothing specifically Viennese about positivism. According to Gay, “the only Austrian contribution to Freud's intellectual development was its university's medical school that had the brains and the funds to attract so many distinguished … colleagues to its staff.” Freud had mixed feelings about Vienna, an environment that was openly hostile to him and his work.
It is interesting how little connection Freud had to do with the rest of Viennese culture. He had no connection with the new art, the new music, or the new poets. His Vienna was medical Vienna.
[Freud's] world, in short, was his inner experience fed by correspondence with fellow psychoanalysts, visits from psychoanalysts, and congresses with other psychoanalysts. … And everyone, or everything, that made [the] fin de siècle so interesting to the rest of the world seems to have passed him by.
Disagreeing with Gay, Peter Loewenberg argued for a very different version of Freud. One only has to read Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious for convincing evidence of Freud's deep sense of himself as an Eastern European Jew living in Vienna. Loewenberg asserted that Freud's Jewish religious identification was far more pervasive than he recognized or acknowledged.
Other diverse cultural forces shaped Freud's psychology and, inevitably, his views of man's unconscious mind. These included latent Christian identifications with his Czech nanny. By virtue of his humanistic gymnasium education, Freud had been deeply immersed in classical languages, philosophy, and the art of Mediterranean antiquity. Loewenberg made the case that this education must surely have influenced Freud's enlightened plea for a tolerant, nonjudgmental sexual morality.
Yet Freud was also a marginal man, “a stranger,” straddling two different cultures. The stranger often has a unique status: Not only an outsider, but also a potential critic. Loewenberg proposed that the outsider/critic position of the stranger served Freud well as he developed his psychoanalytic technique.
Morris L. Peltz is a training and supervising analyst with the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. He manages the Program Committee's “In Depth: Art, Culture, and Politics” program.
Turning to the arts, Kuspit considered Gustav Klimt, the great muralist, portrayer of the erotic, and the founder of the Secession, a splinter group of young artists who broke away from traditional forms of painting.
Kuspit doubts that Freud ever saw any of Klimt's work, but it is likely that he read about him and the sensational paintings he was creating. Yet Freud and Klimt have been linked because of their “emphasis on the erotic.” Both were “decried and rejected by Viennese society” which, however superficially sophisticated, was provincial and conservative.
To illustrate, Kuspit focused on the new and daring in Klimt's nudes. Klimt turned upside down the longstanding convention of symbolizing some virtue in a female allegorical figure, said Kuspit: “His figures don't seem to give a damn about virtue. These figures are full of unutterable grief but also full of self-absorbed sensuality. Taken together, the nudes can be read as representing, however unsystematically, the varieties of sexual position, and orgasm.”
In later paintings, in image after image, the female figure becomes more and more naked, “her self-assertion being replaced by a kind of declaration of sexual freedom.”
Musicians Julie Jaffee Nagel and Louis Nagel concluded the panel, reviewing the history of dissonance in classical European music in order to better understand Arnold Schoenberg's radical deconstruction of chromatism to serial music (the twelve-tone row).
Schoenberg (1874–1951) was among the first composers, and was certainly the best-known, to completely break with European tonal principles, i.e. key center, diatonic scales, and conventional harmonies. He introduced the concept of the “Emancipation of the Dissonances”; his work became more and more atonal, culminating in the twelve-tone technique. Tonality is dissolved as a structural organizer and harmony loses its conventional function.
Schoenberg wrote, “Inside where the man of instinct begins, there, fortunately theory breaks down. … It is impossible for a person to feel only one thing at a time. People feel thousands of things. … It is this that I should like to have in my music.”
As with Klimt and his art, it is doubtful that Freud ever heard the modernist music of Schoenberg. In general, Freud had a distant and quizzical relationship with music. He did not seek out musicians and never went to concerts. It is known, however, that he enjoyed a few operas.