There is reason for doubt. Psychoanalysis was born out of a collective retreat from politics on the part of the Viennese intelligentsia. In the 1880s, Austrian liberal hegemony, with its confident ideology of Enlightenment reason and social progress, was threatened by the emergence of new mass parties that channelled various anti-liberal currents – Christian, antisemitic, socialist and nationalist. In 1895, the electorate in Vienna voted for Karl Lueger, a populist antisemite and reactionary Catholic, as mayor. Emperor Franz Joseph, disliking Lueger’s antisemitism, refused to ratify his election; Freud, a liberal and a Jew, smoked a cigar in celebration. But just two years later, in 1897, the emperor bowed to the popular will, and Lueger became mayor, bringing the liberal era to a close. Describing the dying days of 19th-century Austria, the historian Carl Schorske writes: ‘Anxiety, impotence, a heightened awareness of the brutality of social existence ... these features assumed new centrality in a social climate where the creed of liberalism was being shattered by events.’
Psychoanalysis, then, was born of a moment not dissimilar to our own: a moment when the image of the human as a rational animal seemed fragile if not preposterous, and the progressive liberalism founded on that image was revealed to be dangerously naive. In turning inwards to the drama of the human psyche, Freud was part of an aestheticised culture of feeling and self-cultivation that resulted from political paralysis. In fin-de-siècle Vienna, what mattered was not objective reality but one’s affective response to it. Freud took this focus on inner feeling and instinct, synthesised it with the scientific rationalism of mid-century liberalism, and created in psychoanalysis a theory that at once offered a powerful reckoning with human irrationalism and a welcome refuge from its terrifying political manifestations.
As Schorske observes, Freud would put psychoanalysis to use in explaining away his own sense of political guilt. In his pivotal work of 1899, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud reports one of his own dreams – he calls it a ‘revolutionary phantasy’ – in which he confronts an aristocratic Austrian statesman only to frantically flee the scene. The dream Freud rediscovers the statesman at a train station, now transfigured into Freud’s blind and dying father, whom Freud must help to piss into a urinal. On display in the dream is Freud’s guilt at having abandoned his youthful ambition to enter politics – to confront and conquer the old, antisemitic world represented by the aristocrat with the secular, liberal values that his father venerated. But Freud reads the dream as merely the phantastic fulfilment of his wish to take revenge on an overbearing father; a father who had once suggested that the young Freud, as he immodestly urinated in front of his parents, would never amount to anything. On this reading, the dream loses its political specificity; it is simply an expression of the universal desire for patricide. The Oedipus complex, the centrepiece of Freud’s mature theory, thus promised to acquit an entire generation of politically disengaged sons from the accusations of their fathers.
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