The Art of Resistance: Defending Academic Freedom since 1933 | Page 34

saving freud Jane McAdam Freud
My great-grandfather, Sigmund Freud, saw the bigger picture
as he tussled with his theories as though they were moulds for
sculpture. He applied his inside out interrogation to the wider
society with his work on the psychology of ‘the mass’. He saw a lack
of self-awareness in places, like politics, where one assumes a sane
disposition is a prerequisite, saving us from raving nonsense.
Freud ironically was himself saved from the ‘inside out’ which
paradoxically ties in with his way of thinking about concepts.
Freud looked at the world from a different direction. In The
Interpretation of Dreams, 1899, his innermost drives became the
director of his theories. From his forgotten and buried memories
he retrieved and deciphered the condensed language of his dreams
and offered it up to his rationalising ego. It was from the inside out
he functioned to find and form his theory of the unconscious and
it was in the end, when life looked like a death sentence, from the
inside out that he was saved. It was Anton Sauerwald, working from
within the Nazi party who ultimately saved Freud.
Sauerwald was a well-educated man who had studied medicine
and law and had a doctorate in Chemistry from the University of
Vienna, where he studied under professor Josef Herzig, who he
both liked and respected. It so happened that Herzig was a friend
of Freud. They played cards together.
It was Sauerwald’s job to find Freud guilty of something so as
to initially extract his money in fines. However Sauerwald was
nothing if not an academic. His admired Professor Herzig may well
have read Freud and in all probability the meticulous Sauerwald
also read Freud. Instead of finding more evidence against Freud
it seems that through reading Freud’s theories, which help one
to understand the ego system with its drives and motivations,
Sauerwald’s imagination was captured and this could have
contributed to Sauerwald’s decision to allow Freud to leave Vienna.
Freud didn’t want to leave. Everyone was warning him of the
dangers with the Nazi threat to the Jews, yet all he could say was,
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The Art of Resistance? Defending Academic Freedom

“the Austrians are far too disorganized to carry it out”.
As David Cohen tells us, when the Gestapo marched into the
house, Freud had to cope with the Anschluss in terrible physical
pain. Following his operation for throat cancer three weeks earlier
he wrote, “I lay with pain and hot-water bottles on the couch that is
meant for others”. However Freud’s acerbic humour and antennae
for irony still had not deserted him. “Help yourselves, gentlemen,”
Martha said as she handed over 6,000 schillings. To which Freud
declared: “Dear me, I have never taken so much for a single visit.”
Freud ‘the scientist’ survived on two levels, physically escaping
the Nazis and also culturally through his works; this in spite of,
or as a result of, his theories evoking such extreme reactions.
He is never ignored or forgotten. It is as though we cannot quite
put him down and one explanation might be that he was so far
ahead of his time that we haven’t got there yet. Ironically, in death
he is more recognizable and widely known as a figure than he was in
life, which of course is the case with many artists of the past who
were not understood in their lifetimes.
Freud was ahead of his time and a provocateur. Strangely
also my father, Lucian, had his way of inspiring great loyalty and
exciting a following. Perhaps one might explain this by evoking one
of Sigmund’s theories, ‘archaic inheritance’ - being in the blood as
Nietzsche said.
He also believed in the positive effect of psychoanalysis on the
‘normal neurotic’, all of us. He thought that its application could
avert a crisis indeed save us from the Second World War. Freud
said, if Woodrow Wilson had understood his own obvious neurosis
he would not have let himself be bullied into agreeing to the unfair
treaty of Versailles, which led to social unrest in Germany after
the First World War. The fairer treaty Woodrow wanted would
have left rabble-rousers like Hitler at the fringes. He said, “if only
Woodrow Wilson had a good therapist world history would have
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