Sigmund Freud, born 6 May 1856

A friend of mine has been doing some work for the Austrian Cultural Foundation in New York. She wrote a concert programme note yesterday, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sigmund Freud, which is worth reproducing:

This concert celebrates the 150^th anniversary of the birth of the great Viennese psychoanalyst, SIGMUND FREUD, and his groundbreaking study, The Inter-pretation of Dreams.

The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung) was published on January 1, 1900 – a publication date he chose for its significance, heralding a new century and a new world-view. He called The Interpretation of Dreams “my most valuable work” but noted that poets had known about the importance of dreams long before he did. Freud realized that dreams reveal suppressed desires and fears.

Paradoxically but in a very real sense, all the German Romantic poetry of the 19^th century paved the way for Freud’s “new science of the soul” – his psychoanalytic theory and practice. Freud, rooted in the science of his time – his early medical specialty was neurology – was nevertheless keenly aware of the nonmaterial basis of human behavior. Although Freud insisted that “Psycho-analysis is a medical procedure which aims at the cure of certain forms of nervous disease.” His technique was based not on therapy for the body but understanding of the soul.

The Viennese world into which The Interpretation of Dreams was launched was
a world which was both dying and being reborn: a time of extraordinary artistic and intellectual ferment. Poets were the canaries in the coal mine of this world: the poems which form the basis of this evening’s songs describe aspects of love and loss, of death and decay. Rilke’s poem Schneeglöckchen (in a setting by Erich Wolfgang Korngold) speaks of the first flowers of spring – the tiny Schnee-glöckchen (literally snow-bells; they are called snow-drops in English) whose “ringing” announces the coming of spring. But this is no joyous poem of spring-time; instead, the little flowers must die before the warm weather comes – just
as the poets, weary from their efforts, lie in their own graves. Other poems describe dream-states, some in which Love leads the poet out of his personal terror; others in which Love is the cause of sorrow or death.

Freud was part of this world in turmoil. Born this week – May 6, 1856 – and raised as a secular Jew in the liberal Vienna of the 1860s, his boyhood was filled with expectations of an important career, perhaps as a cabinet minister in government. He had just entered university in 1873 at the time when the stock market crashed, and anti-Semitism began to be felt again; suddenly the world became a less welcoming one. He lived almost his entire life in Vienna, emigrating to London only after the Anschluss in 1938; he died there, in September 1939. It is interesting to note that, at the time of the Anschluss,
Freud wrote in his diary: “Finis Austriae” – the end of Austria.

The composers of the songs on this evening’s program span the late Romantic period to the beginnings of modernism: from Brahms to Berg.