The Freudian Calling: Early Viennese Psychoanalysis and the Pursuit of Cultural Science (review)

This unusual little book approaches the well-worn field of early psychoanalysis from a different point of view. By omitting the familiar steps in Sigmund Freud’s development of clinical theory and practice, Rose reminds us how intensely Freud was concerned with “applied analysis” from the very beginnings of his “Wednesday Group,” and how many of his early followers were literary critics and intellectuals, as well as doctors. They were drawn to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (Vienna, 1900) for the same reasons that they were attracted to other avant-garde “causes,” alienated by middle-class Viennese hypocrisy and seeking a radical change in “the science of psychoanalysis.” Rose is not concerned with purely political radicals like Victor Adler and Theodor Herzl, or with artistic innovators like Arnold Schoenberg and Gustav Klimt, narrowing his field to consider aesthetic and social critics. The reader soon learns that his quaint title, the Freudian Calling, means enlisting in a “cause,” or joining a protest movement, as members of a bourgeoisie enragé.

The main focus of this book is on the period from 1900 to 1914, and on Freud’s essays on artistic creativity and the origins of society—chiefly his studies of Johannes Vilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva, Leonardo da Vinci and the Moses of Michelangelo, and his book Totem and Taboo (Vienna, 1912/13). That the Moses was the last of Freud’s studies of visual representations, Rose points out, was in part testimony to Freud’s disillusionment with the war—its failure to establish a peaceful Bruderband and overcome the fraternal strife that Moses had subdued by his Laws and by restraining his anger at his faithless followers. Rose quotes Paul Federn’s long-forgotten essay on “the fatherless society” (1919), which interpreted in Oedipal terms the overthrow of the Hapsburg empire and the socialist brotherhood of the First Austrian Republic. In this postwar period, Freud turned to the study of crowd behavior, and the regressive behavior of groups, in which the individual surrenders his identity and moral restraints to a charismatic leader. Rose discusses Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Vienna, 1921), and concludes his book with Civilization and Its Discontents (Vienna, 1929), in which Freud sums up his views on social behavior, morality, and the preservation of culture. Oddly, Rose ignores Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Vienna, 1920) and Why War? (Vienna, 1933), both of which deal with the cultural issues that concern him.

In the first part of this book, Rose brings to light some unexpected details about the lives and writings of Freud’s early followers, most of whom are mere names to the modern reader. They included Max Graf, Fritz Wittels, Wilhelm Stekel, Theodor Reik, and Isidor Sadger, whom Freud described as “that congenital fanatic of orthodoxy.” But Sadger wrote the earliest analytical studies of writers, beginning with Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist, and was attacked by Karl Kraus, who was still sympathetic to Freud at this time. Freud himself was critical of literary studies “wrong[ly] using psychology when they transform their works into case-histories.” Freud believed the analyst should study the work, not the life, of the artist. Of Stekel’s essay on Franz Grillparzer he wrote, “everything he finds in Grillparzer can be found in every neurotic, as well as in normal persons.”

Rose suggests that Freud’s A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci (Vienna, 1910) was written to illustrate how the analyst should deal with creativity, and that Freud became identified with both Leonardo and the Moses of Michelangelo, about which he wrote in a 1914 issue of the journal Imago. The high point of the pursuit of cultural science (Rose’s translation of Geisteswissenschaft, usually rendered as the humanities, in contrast to the natural sciences) is the founding of the Imago, by Otto Rank and Hanns Sachs, a “Journal for the Application of Psychoanalysis to the Cultural Sciences,” which followed the defections of...