SOURCE: "C. F. Meyer and the Origins of Psychoanalysis," in Monatshefte für Deutschen Unterricht, Deutsche Sprache und Literatur, Vol. XLVII, No. 3, March, 1955, pp. 140-48.

[In the essay that follows, Beharriell examines Freud's interest in Meyer's writing as it anticipates major elements of psychoanalytic theory, such as wish-fulfillment, the fantasy Freud names 'the family romance, ' and the psychological significance of art.]

In "Freud and Literature," an eminently sane and balanced essay, Lionel Trilling commented on the lack of evidence concerning the literary influences on the founder of psychoanalysis.¹ That there were such influences has of course always appeared certain. The importance of Hamlet and Oedipus in Freud's early thinking is well known. The similarity between his theory of dream meaning and the process of literary symbolism was apparent from the first. Innumerable allusions to literature in his writings reveal a wide acquaintance with literature and a striking respect for the insight of the writer. And if, as Trilling says, Freud "ultimately did more for our understanding of art than any other writer since Aristotle,"… it is no secret that Freud approached the other arts through literature. On the other hand, specific information was lacking. Not much light on the subject could be found in Freud's various autobiographical sketches. It must be remembered that all his life he had to suffer allegations that he was a theorist only, a philosopher whose claims had no firm basis in verifiable fact; his claim to be a scientist was ever nearest his heart. Thus it is not surprising that he did not emphasize the debt he owed to literature. His "discoveries," he repeatedly asserts, were forced upon him by his clinical experience.

Another circumstance contributed to the obscurity surrounding his early work. Like not a few of his contemporaries—one thinks of Henry James and Stefan George—Freud felt a curious animosity toward unknown future biographers. Ernest Jones, the official biographer, says that on more than one occasion Freud carefully destroyed, as far as he had the power, all his correspondence, notes, diaries, and manuscripts. And like James he gloated at the thought of the future biographers' discomfiture.²

These facts lent interest to the appearance in 1950 of Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse, a collection of previously unknown letters and documents penned by Freud in the years 1887 to 1902.³ Most of the material dates from precisely the years 1895 to 1900 when his most important ideas were born. Freud's work on the Traumdeutung, the famous self-analysis that went hand in hand with it, and the birth of the Oedipus concept all date from this period. These new documents, preserved in spite of Freud's efforts to destroy them, reveal among other things the hitherto unsuspected part played by the works of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in the origins of psychoanalysis. An intensive systematic study of Meyer's works is now seen to have been Freud's basic reading, outside of technical material, throughout the most crucial period. It is also not without interest that psychoanalytical criticism by Freud of one of Meyer's stories must now be regarded as the earliest application of psychoanalytic methods to a work of literature, anticipating by almost ten years the essay, "Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens 'Gradiva.' "

Freud's attention was drawn to Meyer by Wilhelm Fliess, the Berlin physician to whom the letters of Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse are addressed. Fliess, although a nose and throat specialist, had developed a consuming interest in certain aspects of neurosis, and here, of course, his research coincided with Freud's. From 1887 to 1902 Freud enjoyed with Fliess a friendship so close that his biographer has called it "the only really extraordinary experience in Freud's life" (Jones, 287). During these years the two men maintained a regular correspondence, reporting their findings and theories to one another and exchanging criticism and encouragement. Fliess was Freud's only confidant.

Freud's first recorded reference to Meyer dates from March 15, 1898, when Freud was at work on the manuscript of the Traumdeutung. His letters to Fliess of that date begins abruptly, "Teurer Wilhelm! Habe ich Conrad Ferdinand je unterschätzt, so bin ich seit dem Himmelstor durch Dich längst bekehrt." The reference is of course to Meyer's poem, "Am Himmelstor." As Freud destroyed all the letters Fliess wrote to him, we can only surmise what may have preceded this enthusiastic comment. It seems clear that Fliess had recommended the poem to Freud, and that the latter had found in it some decisive merit. The poem itself offers some assistance. Its purely poetic qualities are not such as to explain Freud's interest. On the other hand it does purport to describe a dream. Freud was struggling every evening with the manuscript of his dream theory, and the letters show how completely this work monopolized his time. His part of the correspondence, moreover, deals predominantly with his progress on the Traumdeutung. Everything suggests that Fliess had recommended Meyer's works, and particularly this dream poem, as illustration or corroboration of Freud's dream theory.

"Am Himmelstor" is of course the short poem in which the poet dreams he finds his beloved weeping outside the gate of heaven, incessantly washing her feet; he does not understand why, and the poem ends with her cryptic explanation, "Weil ich im Staub mit dir, / So tief im Staub gegangen." In view of the sharply conflicting interpretations that have been given to the poem,⁴ it is regrettable that we do not have Freud's opinion on its meaning. Nor would it be wise to indulge in speculation, for his dream theory itself was undergoing daily revision as he simultaneously developed and recorded it. The letter preceding this one, for example, communicates a basic idea, just evolved, which was very soon to be discarded. Thus it is not possible to determine precisely what the theory was on this date. All that can be said with certainty is that Freud saw in Meyer's dream-poem a gratifying confirmation, firstly, of the basic idea of wish-fulfilment, and secondly, of that process of symbolic distortion in which Freud also believed from the very outset.

The precise point Freud had reached in his speculations on the Oedipus theme is revealed in an interesting passage in this same letter (March 15, 1898). Freud says he is transmitting a portion of the Traumdeutung manuscript for Fliess to read. Two of the dreams there described, he writes, will be explained later: "Bemerkungen über König Ödipus, das Talismanmärchen, vielleicht den Hamlet werden ihre Stelle finden. Vorher muß ich über die Ödipussage nachlesen, weiß noch nicht, wo." It is a time of seminal thinking for Freud, and his steady reading of Meyer proceeds, it will be seen, through the time of the working out of the Oedipus idea. Moreover, Freud can have found time for little else in the way of imaginative literature at this period. His typical work day in early 1898 began with nine to twelve hours of work with patients, finishing around nine in the evening. "Then," reports Ernest Jones, "came writing The Interpretation of Dreams, correspondence, and the self-analysis" (Jones, 338; cf. Anfänge, 264). That Freud read Meyer under such pressure of work suggests he was seeking more than entertainment. There was little time for reading for pleasure.

Freud wrote about Meyer again only three weeks later, on June 9, 1898. He had meanwhile had a brief vacation in Istrea, but is back at work and once again lamenting his difficulties with the dream manuscript. He reports he is still finding great enjoyment in Meyer, and has now finished Gustav Adolfs Page. Fliess had recommended this story too, drawing Freud's attention particularly to an example of the phenomenon or theory which Freud had labeled "deferred action" (Nachträglichkeit). In the story, it will be recalled, the colonel upbraids the heroine for her irrational adoration of the king, with the words, "Nun sag' ich: man soll die Kinder nicht küssen! So'n Kuß schläft und lodert wieder auf, wann die Lippen wachsen und schwellen. Und wahr ist's und bleibt's, der König hat dich mir einmal von den Armen genommen, Patchen, und hat dich geherzt und abgeküßt, daß es nur so klatschte. Denn du warest ein keckes und hübsches Kind."⁴ The "deferred action" that Freud and Fliess both saw in this remark is of course the idea of the previously unrecognized psychological importance of childhood experiences. This was still a very new idea with Freud, one he had just "discovered" in his self-analysis and was still working out in the Traumdeutung manuscript. The letter of March 10, for example, contains lengthy speculations on the supreme importance of the years from one to three, "the source of the unconscious." Freud is thus using Meyer's story as he might use a patient, as "raw material" for the working out of still-developing theories.

A second example of "Nachträglichkeit" in Gustav Adolfs Page was discovered by Freud himself in the anecdote concerning Gustav Adolfs daughter Christina. Meyer relates that a scheming Jesuit fanatic, posing as a Lutheran in order to obtain a post as the child's tutor, had taken advantage of his position to influence her religious attitude. When the child's governess discovered her secretly praying with a rosary, the fraudulent tutor was banished. This incident occurred in 1632, when Christina was six, and Freud interpreted it as a foreshadowing by Meyer of her later abdication and conversion to Catholicism at the age of twenty-nine.

It may be pertinent to observe that of these two examples of Nachträglichkeit, the first is a rather striking confirmation of what was in 1898 a new theory, while the second is much less impressive. The first, the reference to the king's kissing the infant, is in fact a gratuitous intrusion on the narrative, an intrusion in which we must see with Freud a kind of "psychologizing" by Meyer. If it means anything, it must mean what Freud claims. The incident of the fraudulent tutor, on the other hand, can be amply explained as an example of Meyer's fondness for repeated variations on a theme, in this case the central theme of disguise and deception. This previous victimization of the king renders the "page's" deception of him more dangerous. And of course it is most significant that the story makes no reference to Christina's later actions. If Meyer really intended Nachträglichkeit, the historical consequences of the act would surely have been incorporated in the story. With regard to this same incident, further, it is not ascertainable whether Freud meant that Meyer consciously proposed this explanation of Christina's later conversion, or that Meyer unconsciously selected this anecdote because of Christina's later acts, or simply that Freud himself took the incident as a plausible explanation of the conversion. It is interesting to observe in this earliest Freudian criticism a lack of clear distinction between analysis of the artist and analysis of his art. This lack, inevitable in the Freudian system, has of course continued to this day to alienate non-Freudian critics.

Freud's remarks on Gustav Adolfs Page close with a much less controversial criticism: "Sonst aber stehe ich ratlos vor der Willkürlichkeit der Annahme, auf der die Verknotung beruht. Die Ähnlichkeit des Pagen mit dem Lauenburger in Hand und Stimme, an sich so unwahrscheinlich und gar nicht weiter begründet." Most critics will agree that this complaint is a just one.

In the letter in which he discussed Gustav Adolfs Page Freud had included a promise that he would soon forward a short essay on Meyer's Die Richterin. This essay is now recognized as Freud's first formal application of analysis to a work of literature (see Anfänge, 273, note 1). Indeed it seems to be the first such application to any work of art, and shares with the dream theory the distinction of inaugurating that ever-widening application of Freudian analysis which was eventually to bring under scrutiny so many aspects of behavior and culture. The essay was apparently written between June 9 and June 20, 1898, and was sent to Fliess on the latter date when Freud returned to Vienna from a visit in Aussee.

Again Freud uses Meyer's work to test the theories which are taking form in his mind. Die Richterin is the story in which Meyer incorporated a somewhat imperfect union of two main themes: the (female) judge who herself stands in need of judgment; and the forbidden love of a brother and sister. Needless to say it was the latter theme which seemed to Freud to hold the essence of the story. His essay begins on a typically confident note: "Kein Zweifel, daß es sich um die poetische Abwehr der Erinnerung an ein Verhältnis mit der Schwester handelt. Merkwürdig nur, daß diese genau so geschieht wie in der Neurose. Alle Neurotiker bilden den sogenannten Familienroman …, der einerseits dem Größenbedürfnis dient, andererseits der Abwehr des Inzestes. Wenn die Schwester nicht das Kind der Mutter ist, so ist man ja des Vorwurfes ledig." It is relevant here that at this time Freud probably was acquainted with the most superficial facts of Meyer's life—Meyer was by then a public figure—but no more. His speculations are based on the stories. Some six months later (December 5, 1898), he laments his ignorance of Meyer's "Lebensgeschichte" particularly the order in which the works were written, "was ich zur Deutung nicht entbehren könnte."⁵ And in January, 1900, he procures and reads a copy of Adolf Frey's biography of Meyer as soon as it is published.

The "Familienroman" or family romance with which Freud identifies Die Richterin is the name he gave to a recurring pattern of phantasy reported by neurotic patients. Although Freud later came to regard it as a function of the normal personality, he at first believed it to be a regular symptom of paranoia. His neurotic patients, he said, frequently claimed that as children they had come to believe themselves stepchildren or adopted children. Freud later asserted that many normal adults can recall the same childhood phantasy. A second phase of this phantasy is a feature common to neurosis and to every higher gift, such as the poetic temperament. In this stage the child's phantasy busied itself with the task of doing away with the "despised" parents and replacing them with phantasy parents who are usually higher in the social scale. (Certain well-known writers come instantly to mind.) In a third and final stage, having learned, as Freud puts it, that pater semper incertus est while the mother certissima est, the child was content to imagine an unknown aristocratic father. At this stage also, the original motive of revenge on insufficiently doting parents is strengthened by a developing Oedipus desire to imagine the mother as untrue to the father.⁶

Freud did not publish his concept of the family romance until 1909 (see Anfänge, 219, note 2). All the main features of the theory, however, are stated in his analysis of Die Richterin. On the available evidence it appears that it was on this story that Freud based his first seriously worked-out identification of the poetic temperament with the neurotic, an identification which has had the most sweeping consequences although Freud himself at last virtually abandoned it. It is true that a year before the Richterin essay he had jotted down, "Der Mechanismus der Dichtung ist derselbe wie der hysterischen Phantasien…. So behält Shakespeares Zusammensetzung von Dichtung und Wahn recht (fine frenzy)." (Anfänge, 222). When he wrote this, however, his attention was fully engaged by the still unsolved problem of the hysterical phantasies, and not at all by the mechanism of creative writing. The Oedipus idea had not then occurred to him. The quoted remark about Shakespeare seems no more than a fleeting aperçu. Then in a letter of October 15, 1897, come the first tentative speculations on the Oedipus complex, suggesting: "Jeder der Hörer war einmal im Keime und in der Phantasie ein solcher Ödipus," and that Hamlet was a "typical hysteric." The crucial labeling of the creative process itself as identical with a neurotic defense mechanism, however, together with a formal working out of the thesis, does not appear until the analysis of Die Richterin. Thus while it is most unlikely that any one author provided the whole pattern for Freud's original concept of the artist, the available evidence does suggest that that concept drew from Meyer, Sophocles, and Shakespeare, in that order of importance.

In Die Richterin Freud was impressed by the double occurrence of the motif of the faithless mother, once in the figure of the heroine, and again in that of her servant Faustine. This weakness in composition, he said, was reminiscent of his patients, who always insisted on telling him the same story twice. In both the family romance and the story, further, there is discernible a desire for revenge against the sternly punishing mother: this bitterness against her makes her a stepmother in the story. The aloof father, towering majestically above the child, is symbolized in the story by Charlemagne. The dispatching of Wulfrin's father by means of poison satisfies the family romance dream of encompassing the death of the father. Freud's attention to "significant detail" in this essay foreshadows the future nature of most psychoanalytic criticism: the incident of the taking away of the hero's horn, its recovery, the sister's anorexia, the hurling of the sister on the rocks, the schoolmaster motif, all are, according to Freud, characteristic of the phantasies of neurotics: "Also in jedem einzelnen Zug identisch mit einem der Rache- und Entlastungsromane, den meine Hysteriker gegen ihre Mutter dichten, wenn sie Knaben sind."⁷

The study of Meyer continued. Less than three weeks after the historic essay on Die Richterin, on July 7, 1898, a letter from Freud contains a paragraph of analysis on Die Hochzeit des Mönchs. Here for the first time Freud uses the concept of latent and manifest themes. This concept has of course had a decisive impact on twentieth-century criticism; in Lionel Trilling's view it has been Freud's most valuable contribution to understanding of the literary work (op. cit., page 48). In Die Hochzeit des Mönchs, Freud thought, the latent or secret theme, rooted in Meyer's childhood, is unsatisfied revenge and inevitable punishment; Dante's presence suggests that this revenge and punishment are to be eternal. The manifest or apparent theme, on the other hand, is the loss of equilibrium (Haltlosigkeit) that follows when a man abandons his firm support in life, and this theme has in common with the latent theme, and with Die Richterin, that "blow follows on blow." Thus, just as Die Richterin was found to conceal the reaction to infantile misdeeds that were discovered by the avenging mother, Die Hochzeit des Mönchs is a reaction to infantile misdeeds (Freud might later have written "thoughts" for "deeds") which were not detected. "Der Mönch ist der Bruder, 'Frate,'" Freud concluded. "Als ob es vor seiner eigenen Ehe phantasiert wäre, und besagen wollte, so ein Frater wie ich soll nicht heiraten, sonst rächt sich die Kinderliebe an der späteren Ehefrau."

On November 28, 1898, Meyer died. Freud "marked the occasion" by purchasing the volumes he still lacked—Hutten, Pescara, Der Heilige—and wrote to Fliess, "Ich glaube, jetzt tue ich es Dir an Begeisterung für ihn gleich. Vom Pescara konnte ich mich kaum losreißen" (Anfänge, 288). He finally obtained a biography of Meyer when Adolf Frey's book became available late in 1899. His comment on Frey was, "Er weiß das Interne nicht oder darf es aus Diskretion nicht sagen. Es ist auch gerade nicht viel zwischen den Zeilen zu lesen" (Anfänge, 330).

Freud retained his interest in Meyer's works and his easy familiarity with them for the rest of his life. "Ich bin kein ausgeklügelt Buch, / Ich bin ein Mensch mit seinem Widerspruch," the lines from Hutten so suggestive of Freud's own view, are quoted at the end of a case history written in 1899 (Anfänge, 297), and cited again ten years later in another work (GW VII, 347). In his book, Freud, Master and Friend (Cambridge, Mass., 1944), page 52, Hanns Sachs recalls that Freud's lectures at the Psychiatric Clinic were marked by quotations and other hints of his partiality to Meyer, and that at the first personal interview between Freud and himself, the two "joined in praise of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer."

There is one last testimonial to the unique importance of Meyer for Freud's early thinking. After Freud had become famous he was asked on one occasion to recommend a list of ten good books, the request apparently not defining the word "good" more closely. On the list which he returned Freud included Meyer's Huttens letzte Tage, and the comment he appended is of peculiar relevance here. Emphasizing that his list does not represent the ten "greatest" works, nor the "most significant," nor even his favorites, Freud interprets "good" as meaning "Bücher, mit denen man etwa so steht wie mit 'guten' Freunden, denen man ein Stück seiner Lebenskenntnis und Weltanschauung verdankt, die man selbst genossen hat und anderen gerne anpreist, ohne daß aber in dieser Beziehung das Moment der scheuen Ehrfurcht, die Empfmding der eigenen Kleinheit vor deren Größe, besonders hervorträte." He stresses the importance of the relationship between the author and his works, and concludes significantly, "bei C. F. Meyers Hutten muß ich die 'Güte' weit über die Schönheit, die 'Erbauung' über den ästhetischen Genuß stellen."⁸ An admission, it would appear in view of all the evidence, that from Meyer as from few other authors he had deduced basic ideas about the connection between the artistic personality and its imaginative creations.

There was more than one reason for Freud's interest in Meyer. In view of Meyer's emotional instability, it is relevant that Freud himself suffered for ten years from "a very considerable psychoneurosis," and that for those ten years, which included the years of original work discussed in this paper, he experienced "only occasional intervals when life seemed much worth living" (Jones, 304-305). Meyer was preoccupied with the idea of death;⁹ Freud suffered attacks of Todesangst, and once, as he was regaining consciousness after a fainting spell, his first words were, "How sweet it must be to die!"—one of many indications, his biographer observes, that "the idea of dying had some esoteric meaning for him" (Jones, 317). And recalling that curious and decisive period of Meyer's youth which Meyer called his "dumpfe Zeit," it is significant to find the following concerning Freud: "In the depressed moods he could neither write nor concentrate his thoughts…. He would spend leisure hours of extreme boredom, turning from one thing to another … (in) a state of restless paralysis. Sometimes there were spells where consciousness would be greatly narrowed: states, difficult to describe, with a veil that produced almost a twilight condition of the mind" (Jones, 306; italics mine). It was precisely during the period of these "spells" that Freud discovered and studied Meyer.

Last and most important is the striking correspondence between the new symbolism of Meyer's creative process and the very similar symbolism on which Freud was building his theory of dreams. Indeed Meyer's peculiar creative process affords a striking example of the precise theory of poetry toward which Freud was moving. In essence Freud's theory was that the present experience which occasions the poem awakens in the poet a forgotten earlier (frequently childhood) experience; the poem, then, will contain elements of the old experience as well as of the fresh stimulus. Of the two, the childhood experience, dating from the formative period, is of course the fundamental and determining one (GW VII, 221). This is very similar to the dichotomy which Professor Henel has demonstrated in Meyer between past and present, motif and theme, subconscious and conscious content.¹⁰

For some or all of these reasons Meyer was intensively read and studied by Freud during the most critical period of the birth of psychoanalysis. Meyer's work was an important source, or at the least a first "proving ground" for the key concepts of Nachträglichkeit, the family romance, the Oedipus complex, art as neurosis, and the roots of art in childhood experience. The essay on Die Richterin is Freud's first formal application of analysis to a literary work, and thus the first step toward the application of analytical ideas far beyond the consultation room. Freud may have been thinking of Meyer when in 1928, as he frequently did, he paid envious tribute to the insight of poets, to whom it is granted, "aus dem Wirbel der eigenen Gefühle die tiefsten Einsichten doch eigentlich mühelos heraufzuholen, zu denen wir Anderen uns durch qualvolle Unsicherheiten und rastloses Tasten den Weg zu bahnen haben."¹¹

Notes

¹ Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York, 1953), p. 44.

² Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. I (New York, 1953), pp. xii-xiii, hereafter referred to as "Jones."

³ Sigmund Freud, Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse (London, 1950); hereafter referred to as "Anfänge"; letters identified in the text by date are in this volume.

⁴ See Heinrich Henel, The Poetry of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (Madison, 1954), p. 145.

⁵ If Freud contemplated any "Deutung" beyond his essays for Fliess he apparently abandoned it; he probably was thinking of his own understanding of the works as a whole.

⁶ Paraphrased from Freud, Gesammelt Werke, 18 vols. (London, 1940-52), Vol. VII, 227-231; hereafter cited as "GW."

⁷ The same interpretation of Die Richterin reappears in a much more elaborate form in Otto Rank, Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage (Leipzig and Vienna, 1926), pp. 499ff.

⁸ Hugo von Hofmannsthal, "Vom Lesen und von guten Büchern," Jahrbuch deutscher Bibliophilen und Literaturfreunde, 1931, pp. 108-127.

⁹ See Henel, The Poetry of C. F. M., Chapters IV and V.

¹⁰ Ibid., particularly Chapter I.

¹¹ Quoted from Anfänge, p. 20.