In memory of Michael Porder
I
September 29, 1939, 20 Maresfeld Gardens, Hampstead, London: on the first Friday after Sigmund Freud’s death, having accepted more than a half-century’s imposed impiety at her husband’s insistence, the seventy-eight year old Martha Freud started to light the Sabbath candles again. Licht-bentshn, as the ceremony is called. You light a pair of candles just as the sun goes down; circle your hands in a sweeping motion three times to gather the light and savor the candles’ warmth — the spirit of restfulness that they are meant to convey — and then you cover your eyes with your hands while reciting the blessing in which God is thanked for sanctifying us with the commandment to light these candles.
Enter Shabbat the Queen, as the Sabbath is known in Jewish tradition, a presiding feminine presence in a patriarchal environment where most of the active, time-specific commandments, such as the wearing of tefillin or phylacteries (a pair of small black leather cubes, containing pieces of parchment inscribed with Biblical verses, one of which is strapped around the left arm, hand, and fingers and the other is strapped above the forehead) for the morning prayers, fall on men, since women are presumed to be busy with other priorities, such as housekeeping and childcare. And now here was the widow of one of the most formidable enemies of religion fulfilling one of the few obligations incumbent upon women under Jewish law. It was, surely, a form of poetic justice — or perhaps a testament to the hold of the past, however abjured it may be.
She was born Martha Bernays on July 26, 1861 in the German port city of Hamburg, into a highly regarded and intellectually advanced Jewish family to whom such recurrent observances meant a great deal. With her performance of the act of lighting candles at a prescribed moment on the Jewish calendar, one might argue that Martha Freud was being more than assertive: she was being defiant. In doing so, she was re-establishing her autonomy by renouncing a pattern of submission to her husband’s wishes. She was taking a deliberate step backward, toward her family ethos and the traditionalism of her origins before she became the compliant, devoted caretaker that Freud desired her to be, the “adored sweetheart in youth” who became “the beloved wife in maturity.” And she was also taking a step forward, towards the post-spousal woman she would become after the death of her husband, and reclaiming a small part of the ancient ritual-laden religious tradition that had been instilled in her while growing up.
It was a tradition that her fiercely anti-clerical husband, whom she always referred to as “Professor,” as though she were his eternal student, ridiculed, forbidding her to light the Sabbath candles when they set up their own home. A cousin of Martha’s once recalled “how not being allowed to light the Sabbath lights on the first Friday night after her marriage was one of the most upsetting experiences of her life.” And Isaiah Berlin, who visited the couple at their house in exile in London, recalled that husband and wife were still arguing the issue of lighting candles, however playfully, as late as 1938: “Martha joked at Freud’s monstrous stubbornness which prevented her from performing the ritual, while he firmly maintained the practice was foolish and superstitious.”
The Freuds’ fifty-three years of marriage are reputed to have been exceptionally harmonious — one of their few disputes was said to have been about the correct way to cook mushrooms — but the couple’s divergent attitudes toward Judaism remained a source of underground conflict. On the face of it, they were wholly deracinated Jews in a golden age of Jewish deracination. They celebrated Christmas and Easter, and their son Martin, in his memoir Sigmund Freud: Man and Father, testified that none of the six children had ever entered a synagogue. Freud, a confirmed atheist whose work was dedicated in part to the debunking of the monotheistic worldview as a neurotic illusion, delighted in ribbing Martha about her religious attachment, pretending not to know the Hebrew name for “candelabrum,” for example, in a note he wrote her in 1907 after visiting the Roman catacombs: “In the Jewish [catacombs] the inscriptions are Greek, the candelabrum — I think it’s called Menorah — can be seen on many tablets.”
As if he didn’t know that it was called a menorah! He had learned the Bible as a child, after all, and it is doubtful that he lost his grasp of basic Hebrew or religious objects. Freud never denied his Jewishness, and went so far as to credit his religion for his own lack of prejudice and his uncowed single-mindedness. Yet he was always highly ambivalent about his Jewish identity. He demanded that Martha not fast on Yom Kippur, arguing that she was too thin to fast, and the only one of his books in which he referred overtly to his Jewish connection was Moses and Monotheism.
In this regard he maintained a firm distance between his public and private allegiance — insisting, for instance, that psychoanalysis was not in any way a “Jewish science,” or judische Wissenschaft, which is how the Nazis and earlier anti-Semites had disparaged it. In a letter to Ferenczi, Freud wrote that “there should not be such a thing as an Aryan or Jewish science. Results in science must be identical, though the presentation of them may vary.” His awareness of the danger in having a specifically Jewish quality attached to his work, which could lead to antisemitic resistance to the psychoanalytic movement and render it less universally applicable, led him to court the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, despite Jung’s very different ideas about psychoanalysis — and more curiously, despite Jung’s own anti-Semitism and racial theories. Freud put all his hopes into Jung, whom he called his “son and heir,” until they had a disagreement about the uses of mythology which led to a permanent estrangement.
Yet the story of Freud’s Jewishness, the myth of his complete alienation from his patrimony, which is based largely on his non-observance of even the most fundamental of Jewish rituals, is more complicated than has been implied in most of the writing about him. (This misapprehension about Freud’s complete ignorance of Judaism was recently invoked yet again in Adam Kirsch’s essay “Freud as Talmudist” in the Jewish Review of Books). In contrast to the general image of Freud as an am ha’aretz, an ignoramus, severed from his Jewish roots, we have a letter that he wrote to the chief rabbi of Vienna in 1931, for example, in which he passionately declared: “I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all the efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial.” And more fully a few years earlier, in 1926, accepting an award from the Bnai Brith on his seventieth birthday, he told his audience in a letter that he had joined Bnai Brith because
I myself was a Jew, and it always seemed to me to be not only shameful but downright senseless to deny it. That which bound me to Judaism—I am obliged to admit it—was not my faith, nor was it national pride; for I was always an unbeliever, raised without religion, although not without respect for the so-called “ethical” demands of human civilization. And I always tried to suppress nationalistic ardor, whenever I felt any inclination thereto, as something pernicious and unjust, frightened as I was by the warning example of the peoples among whom we Jews live. But there remained enough other things to make the attraction of Judaism and Jews irresistible—many dark emotional forces, all the more potent for being so hard to grasp in words, as well as the clear consciousness of an inner identity, the intimacy (die Heimlichkeit) that comes from the same psychic structure. And to that was soon added the insight that it was my Jewish nature alone that I had to thank for two characteristics that proved indispensable to me in my life’s difficult course. Because I was a Jew I found myself free from many prejudices that hampered others in the use of their intellects; and as a Jew I was prepared to take my place on the side of the opposition and renounce being on good terms with the “compact majority.”
“Raised without religion”? Hardly. A complicated case, clearly.
[INSIGNIA] To better understand the Freuds’ respective positions on Judaism, one need look no further than their individual backgrounds. “I was born on the 6th of May [18]56 in Freiberg/Moravia,” Freud wrote in a letter to his colleague Paul Federn in 1912. “My father and mother came from Galicia. My mother, née Nathansohn, from Brody, of very distinguished ancestry (the Nathansohn-Kallir family), my father of the merchant class. According to tradition, as he once reported to me, the Freud family is said to sometime have left their hometown of Köln [Cologne] during a period of persecution of Jews and then to have migrated eastward.”
Throughout his lifetime, Freud, who was born Sigismund Schlomo Freud, went to great lengths to portray himself as having grown up in a deeply assimilated Reform Jewish family, steeped in modernist values and Viennese culture. (His family moved to Vienna when he was four.) It was a family, or so he led his colleagues and relatives to believe, in which Jewish holidays were minimally observed, and his own religious education was scanty, leaving him with but the vaguest understanding of Hebrew or Yiddish. A large part of our idea of Freud as a “godless Jew” — the term coined by the historian Peter Gay, himself an assimilated Jew who translated his last name from “Froelich” to “Gay” after becoming an American citizen and wrote extensively about Freud — derives from Gay’s insistence that Enlightenment values had completely displaced religious and ethnic ones. (This was consistent with Gay’s simplistic view of the Enlightenment itself.) Gay’s description of Freud’s father Jakob’s position on Jewish matters shows how the notion of total secularization was absorbed unquestioningly by Freud scholars: “Jacob Freud had emancipated himself from the Hasidic practices of his ancestors; his marriage to Amalia Nathanson [his second wife and Freud’s mother] was consecrated in a Reform ceremony. In time, he discarded virtually all religious observances….”
It is worth pointing out that ritual observance is hardly the only measure of Jewishness. The truth about Jakob Freud’s relationship to his religious background is richer, as was his son’s. The father, too, was a complicated case. The Freud family consisted of transplanted Eastern European Orthodox Jews — Ostjuden, or Eastern Jews, looked upon with disdain as primitive and uneducated by German and Austrian Jews — who were only slightly assimilated, if at all. According to Emanuel Rice, a psychiatrist who closely examined this subject in his book Freud and Moses: The Long Journey Home, Jakob had studied for years in a yeshiva in Tysmenitz, Galicia and was referred to in his youth as a “yeshiva bocher,” a yeshiva student. Rice also cites a granddaughter of Jakob’s who lived with him toward the end of his life and remembered him “reading the Talmud (in the original) at home.” If that is so, then Jacob possessed a considerable degree of Jewish literacy and cultivation.
Then there is the famous and much debated issue of the Phillippson family Bible — a German translation of the Tanakh — that Jakob gave his son on his thirty-fifth birthday, with an inscription in Hebrew that included a skillful pastiche of ancient quotations composed in the traditional manner from various Jewish sources. The inscription — “To my dear son Shlomo” — is written in a hand that is clearly comfortable with writing Hebrew. Although this dedication has been parsed by hoch analysts who assumed that Freud could not read Hebrew (an impression fueled by Freud himself), scholars such as Rice and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, in his Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, have shown that Freud had a considerable Jewish education and would have understood the inscription. (And indeed, one might ask, why would his father have inscribed such an important gift in a language that his son could not read?) Similarly, Freud’s insistence that he could not understand Yiddish — the “jargon” of the Ostjuden — is dubious, because his mother Amalia regularly spoke Yiddish. In addition to which, Rice argues, based on the testimony of one of Freud’s grandsons, Sigmund’s mother remained religiously observant until her death in 1930. This would go some way to explaining why Freud arranged for his mother to have a strictly Orthodox funeral and burial — although it would not explain why he chose not to attend it, sending his daughter Anna in his stead.
Martha Bernays’ background, on the other hand, was indubitably Orthodox (“frum wie ein Stecken,” or “religious as a stick,” as my mother, an observant German Jew, used to say), one in which hidebound observances were scrupulously maintained. Her mother, Emmeline, wore a sheitl, or wig, which was required by the rabbinical tradition to preserve the modesty of married Jewish women, and kept a strictly kosher house. Hers was a tenacious and domineering personality, though outwardly she came across as mild and soft. These traits would antagonize her future son-law; he described her as “alien” and wrote his fiancée that “I seek for similarities with you, but find hardly any.” (At the same time he conceded that Emmeline was “a person of great mental and moral power standing in our midst, capable of high accomplishments, without a trace of the absurd weaknesses of old women.”)
Martha’s family was renowned in the Jewish community for their scholarship and their leadership. Isaac Bernays, her grandfather, was the chief rabbi of Hamburg in the 1830s and 1840s, and was respected for his combination of secular and religious knowledge, expressed in his sophisticated philosophical views, his linguistic skills, and his superior grasp of Torah, Midrash, and Talmud. He was a distant relative of Heinrich Heine; he appears often in Heine’s letters, and upon his death in 1849 he was acknowledged by Heine to have been an extraordinary personality. Bernays served in this important pulpit in the early years of the Reform movement and opposed it bitterly, formulating in response an approach in which it was possible to live, with certain limits, in both the religious and secular worlds. Bernays’s conception greatly influenced his student Samson Raphael Hirsch, the rabbi and theologian who provided Modern Orthodoxy with its guiding principle of Torah Im Derech Eretz, or Torah and the way of the world. (Hirsch was my great-great-grandfather.)
Despite Bernays’ strict commitment to Orthodoxy, he was also considered to be something of a religious modernizer, known for his innovative sermons given in German, and for bringing secular subjects — German, natural science, geography, and history — into the curriculum of the Talmud Torah charity school, which had formerly been limited to Hebrew and arithmetic. Hirsch and Bernays became acquainted when Bernays, after attending the University of Wurzberg and studying at the yeshiva of Rabbi Abraham Bing, the chief rabbi of Wurzburg and a well-known Talmudist, became a private tutor in the house of Hirsch’s father. Hirsch followed Bernays’ practice of fusing the Jewish and secular realms with the hope of keeping the tidal wave of Reform Judaism at bay. (Family lore has it that at the Hirsch school in Frankfurt boys did not wear yarmulkes during secular classes.)
Two of Bernays’ sons were university professors. The eldest, Jacob, was a prominent philologist and classicist, a man of prodigious learning who was one of the pioneers of Quellenforschungen, or source criticism, according to which the primary method of classical studies was the intense study of the surviving texts of the ancient world for the purpose of coaxing from them knowledge of all that did not survive. He was famous for a controversial interpretation of Aristotle’s concept of catharsis, which he read not in moral terms but in medical ones — thereby making himself a kind of precursor to Freud’s own approach to the subject. His adherence to Jewish religious convictions prevented him from becoming a full professor at the University of Bonn, and so in 1853 he helped to found the Breslau Jewish Theological Seminary, which became one of the great institutions of modern Jewish scholarship. There he taught classics, history, German literature, and Jewish philosophy. In 1866 Jacob was finally appointed an assistant professor and chief librarian at Bonn, but he remained involved with the seminary at Breslau. His younger son, Michael, was a Goethe and Shakespeare specialist who was professor of German literature at the University of Munich. He converted to Christianity (as did Isaac Bernays’ brother Adolphus) in 1856 and was baptized, which led his family to break with him at the same time as it furthered his career.
Isaac’s other son, Berman Bernays — Martha’s father — was a merchant, as were the parents of his wife; Berman later became secretary to the well-known economist and constitutional law expert Lorenz von Stein, a great liberal who may have been the earliest theorist of the welfare state. When Emmeline (née Philipp) married him in 1886, his profession was given as “journalist.” One of four children (three older ones died in quick succession), Martha was born in 1881 and grew up in Hamburg in fairly modest circumstances. When she was six years old, her father served a stint in prison for bankruptcy; she is said never to have spoken of this incident. Freud’s uncle, meanwhile, was imprisoned for trading in counterfeit rubles and rumor had it that his father was implicated in the scandal. The writer Jenny Diski suggested, in a review of a biography of Martha Freud by Katya Behling, that Martha and Sigmund were united by a shared legacy of public shame.
Martha’s family moved to Vienna when she was eight, but she, as well as her mother and sister Minna, never lost their attachment to Hamburg. “Neither she nor Minna ever made the slightest concession to the spirit and lifestyle of Vienna,” Behling observes in her biography, “and even after fifty years in Austria they still spoke perfect standard German.” To refuse the spirit of Vienna was to live the life of a stubborn traditionalist. One of Martha’s two elder brothers, Isaac, died at the age of sixteen, when she was eleven. (This was another loss that she shared with Freud, who also had a brother who died at a young age.) It is worth noting that these extraordinary lineages lasted more than one generation: Freud’s sister Anna married Martha’s brother Eli, and not long after they moved to the United States their son Edward Bernays was born, who, with his pioneering studies of public opinion and its manipulation, became the father of press relations, mass marketing, and psychological warfare — in other words, a formidable shaper of modern life.
II
Despite being portrayed in later years as intellectually indifferent (in particular to her husband’s theories), the young Martha developed an interest in art and literature during her years at school. She had a keen appreciation of music and was an avid reader who knew the German classics (Goethe, Schiller, and so on); she had a special fondness for Stephan Zweig and Thomas Mann. Although the time she could allocate to reading was severely cut back during the busy years of her marriage, running a large household according to her high standards, she would return to her love of books after her husband’s death. During their courtship, Martha frequently wrote Freud letters in verse, and he shared his thoughts on John Stuart Mill with her. His first present to her was a copy of David Copperfield — Dickens became of one Martha’s favorite writers — although he warned her off the rude parts in Don Quixote, stating that they were “no reading matter for girls.” By the time he met Martha in April 1882, her sharp mind, slim and attractive figure, and coquettish charms had attracted many suitors. She had already turned down one proposal of marriage.
The first time Sigmund Freud spotted the almost twenty-one-year-old Martha Bernays was at his family’s dining table; she was visiting his sisters together with her sister Minna. Martha was peeling an apple during their conversation: a decorous feminine activity, suggestive of industriousness and nurturing. The twenty-six-year-old Freud was an anxious, somewhat self-important medical student with next to no experience of women, despite being the favored brother of five sisters and his mother’s goldener Sigi, who was given a room of his own in his family’s small apartment. One wonders whether things might have gone differently if he had glimpsed Martha in a different guise, less the domestic woman in a genre painting and more like her sister Minna, eager to compete intellectually and inclined by nature to take up more air. “Since I learned that the first sight of a little girl sitting at a well-known long table talking so cleverly while peeling an apple with her delicate fingers, could disconcert me so lastingly,” Freud wrote to Martha in June, 1885, “I have actually become quite suspicious.”
In any case, the young Martha presented a winsome picture, with her hair worn in a center part and pulled back in a chignon, elegantly clad in a high-necked dress with a lace collar and lace-up ankle boots. Soon, although rather awkward and shy, Freud was sure of his feelings for Martha and began calling her “Princess” and sending her a red rose every day accompanied by a poem in Latin or another foreign language. By the middle of June in 1882, a mere two months after they met, the couple was secretly engaged despite Emmeline’s opposition to the match — she considered Freud’s financial prospects to be dim. Freud began writing his “darling girl” and “darling Marty” long rhapsodic letters over the next four-and-a-half years of their engagement — the famous brautbriefe, as their correspondence came to be called. It was only after Martha’s eldest brother Eli became engaged to Freud’s sister Anna on Christmas in 1882 that the couple felt comfortable in announcing their own engagement, although Freud never officially asked for Martha’s hand in marriage. In Freud’s first fervent letter to her, he wrote, “Dear Martha, how you have changed my life”; but he was also an incorrigibly jealous suitor, expressing absurdly patriarchal horror that his fiancée had travelled on holiday with only her younger sister for company: “Fancy, Lubeck! Should that be allowed? Two single girls travelling alone in North Germany! This is a revolt against the male prerogative!”
Sigmund would later tell Martha that theirs was an instance of leibe am ersten blick, love at first sight, although it is unclear whether this was wholly mutual; Martha appears to have warmed up a bit more gradually. He would go on to observe to her in one of the nine hundred and forty letters that he wrote to her during the four and-a half years of their courtship and engagement (they also collaborated on a secret journal, a Geheime Chronik) that she was not “in the strict painterly sense” a beauty, but that she had qualities he considered more important, such as generosity, wisdom, and tenderness. One wonders what his fiancée, a young woman just coming into a sense of her attractiveness to the opposite sex, made of this faint praise. (Freud’s own mother had been considered a great beauty in her day and the appeal of female comeliness was never lost on him.
During the period in which he experimented with cocaine, Freud, worried about her pallor, sent Martha a small dose to put color in her cheeks, and referred jauntily to the disinhibiting effect that cocaine had on him. “Woe to you, my princess, when I come,” he wrote to her on June 2, 1884. “I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.” On February 2, 1886, toward the end of another letter, he wrote: “Here I am, making silly confessions to you, my sweet darling, and really without any reason whatever unless it is the cocaine that makes me talk so much.”
“I was told,” writes Sophie Freud, Martha’s daughter-in-law, in her memoir Living in the Shadow of the Freud Family, “that her greatest attraction for the young Sigmund Freud had not been her slender grace or charming features but her inner peace and serenity. She radiated calmness; and he sensed instinctively how wonderful it would be to have her near him after a day of hard work.” As for the scrutinizing suitor himself, Freud had good features, a thick beard and a penetrating gaze, but it seems that Martha initially found him too short and a bit intimidating.
It is difficult to cobble together an image of the pre-Freud Martha Bernays because we have few accounts of her before he enters the picture (and not many more after). From the few impressions that have been documented, she seems to have been both self-contained and curious, a dutiful daughter who retained some independence of mind. She loved to read whenever she found the time, went to plays, and was a demon for needlework of all kinds. Most of all, Martha was marked by the North German sense of discipline, by a horror of shoddiness and leaving things half-done. Her daughter Anna would later observe to her own biographer, Elizabeth Young-Breuhl, that “my mother observed no rules, she made her own rules.”
Although there were those, such as his brilliant Hungarian disciple Sandor Ferenczi (whom Freud eventually broke with as he did with so many of his followers), who contended that Freud’s unresolved connection to his narcissistically controlling mother Amalia left him with a fear of intimacy and of sexually passionate women in particular, it seems that, at least at the beginning of their involvement, Freud couldn’t get enough of his “deeply beloved, most ardently worshipped Martha,” as he described her in 1882. As long, that is, as she lived up to the very particular image that he had of a desirable mate. During the course of their epic engagement, undoubtedly fed by Freud’s anxiety as to whether Martha loved him with the same ardor that he loved her (Martha was by nature more reticent) and by his fiercely suspicious nature, Freud bullied her into becoming more of the docile and governable woman he was seeking. Despite maintaining that he did not want her to be a malleable toy doll, he sneered at her efforts to put her foot down and openly disliked what he called her “tartness.”
Somewhere along the way it seems that Martha lost some of her moxie — her unfettered and even feisty spirit. One can see a glimpse of that spirit still peeking through late in their engagement, when she wrote Freud in irritation: “You now always only write once about each thing, and then nothing more however much I ask. I’m not used to this, my good man, it is certainly high time I brought you to heel, otherwise I’m quite sure to go completely thin and green for sheer annoyance and exasperation.” But by this time Martha could not have been left in any doubt as to precisely what it was that her husband-to-be expected in his partner: a certain docility, and clear and separate spheres of influence. “I will let you rule [the household] as much as you wish,” he decreed, “and you will reward me with your intimate love and by rising above all those weaknesses that make for a contemptuous judgment of women.” Perhaps in keeping with Martha’s understanding that her fiancée wanted to remake her into a more subservient personality, some of her letters show her posing as an intellectual innocent in need of Freud’s assistance: “I finally have read your postcard with Max’s help because it was difficult to read. Yes, that’s how stupid your dear girl is.”
The critic Frederick Crews, a disenchanted Freudian and ardent enemy of psychoanalysis all the same wrote perceptively about the Svengali-like attitude toward Martha that hovered right beneath Freud’s almost fulsome expressions of adoration. “When he wasn’t complaining about his present aliments and future neglect,” Crews observed in Freud: The Making of an Illusion,
the unhappy fiancé was instructing his beloved in how to become a properly deferential mate. He made it clear that she would have to change some of her ways, and the sooner the better. It was precisely Martha’s most admirable qualities — unself-conscious candor and spontaneity, a trusting nature, freedom from class prejudice, loyalty to her family and its values — that struck him as in need of revision. Thus he rebuked her for having pulled up a stocking in public; forbade her to go ice skating if another man were along; demanded that she sever relations with a good friend who had gotten pregnant before marriage; and vowed to crush every vestige of her Orthodox faith and to turn her into a fellow infidel.
Although Crews is focusing here exclusively on the dictatorial aspect of Freud’s attitude toward his future wife, it is nonetheless a fairly accurate and unattractive picture — conventionally masculine for its time, perhaps, but especially disappointing in one of the great free-thinking apostles of modernity.
III
How did the Freuds’ marriage negotiate the age-old problem of combining sexual passion with enduring love? Is there evidence in Freud’s writings of his view of the institution of marriage, and of the possibility of lasting erotic attraction? And how confidently can we infer from his “scientific” remarks on conjugal life to the character of his own marriage?
There is not much to go on. Curiously enough, the index of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, the Strachey edition, has no entry for “wife” and only a smattering of references under “marriage.” Still, he famously wrote about the disjunction between romantic affection and carnal desire in 1912, in a paper titled “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life,” a psychoanalytic exploration of what we call the Madonna-Whore Complex, in which he observed that “where such men love, they do not desire, and where they desire, they cannot love.”
Freud attempted to explain this phenomenon by looking to the restrictive cultural mores of his time and the inhibition on both men and women to delay sexual engagement well beyond the age of maturational readiness — “the long period of delay between sexual maturity and sexual activity which is demanded by education for social reasons,” which resulted in a “lack of union between tenderness and sensuality.” He went on:
In very few people are the two strains of tenderness and sensuality duly fused into one; the man almost always feels his sexual activity hampered by his respect for the woman and only develops full sexual potency when he finds himself in the presence of od a lower type of sexual object; and this again is partly conditioned by the circumstance that his sexual aims include those of perverse sexual components, which he does not like to gratify with a woman he respects. Full sexual satisfaction only comes when he can give himself up wholeheartedly to enjoyment, which with his well-brought-up wife, for instance, he does not venture to do. Hence comes his need for a less exalted sexual object, a woman ethically inferior, to whom he need ascribe no aesthetic misgivings, and who does not know the rest of his life and cannot criticize him.
Freud’s own marriage was conspicuously de-romanticized and then rather quickly desexualized after its emotionally impassioned beginning; the letters, which include overt references to erotic longings on both sides, seem to confirm the fatalistic analysis of conjugal love and desire in his paper. Although Ernest Jones, Freud’s British colleague and hagiographic biographer, deemed this vast collection of correspondence “a not unworthy contribution to the great love literature of the world,” the analyst Martin Bergmann once quipped: “We have wonderful courting letters before marriage. After marriage we only get laundry letters. It’s all practical. We don’t have a single love letter after marriage.”
In an earlier paper, from 1908, called “’Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness,” Freud provided a larger framework, a civilizational framework, for his dour view of marital life, in which he presented a somewhat disheartening view of the damage to intimate relations that is inflicted by the process of socialization that humans must go through in order to co-exist peacefully with others. “Experience teaches us,” he observed, “that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to be more noble-minded than their constitution allows fall victim to neurosis; they would have been more healthy if it could have been possible for them to be less good.” And so he asks “whether sexual intercourse in legal marriage can offer full compensation for the restrictions imposed before marriage.” And he answers:
There is such an abundance of material supporting a reply in the negative that we can give only the briefest summary of it. It must above all be borne in mind that our cultural sexual morality restricts sexual intercourse even in marriage itself, since it imposes on married couples the necessity of contenting themselves, as a rule, with a very few procreative acts. As a consequence of this consideration, satisfying sexual intercourse in marriage takes place only for a few years; and we must subtract from this, of course, the intervals of abstention necessitated by regard for the wife’s health. After three, four, or five years the marriage becomes a failure insofar as it has promised the satisfaction of sexual needs….The spiritual disillusionment and bodily deprivation to which most marriages are thus doomed puts both partners back in the state they were in before their marriage, except for being the poorer by the loss of an illusion, and they must once more have recourse to their fortitude in mastering and deflecting their sexual instinct….Women, when they are subjected to the disillusionments of marriage, fall ill of severe neuroses which permanently darken their lives….A girl must be very healthy to tolerate it, and we urgently advise our male patients not to marry any girl who has had nervous trouble before marriage.
Many critical points could be made about the dark conjectures that Freud offers in this paper, which seem to be based more on personal experience than on scientific findings or cultural observations. Why, for instance, must married couples content themselves “with a very few procreative acts,” unless one believes that the sole purpose of sexual intercourse is procreation? What about sexual pleasure, a subject about which Freud extensively theorized? And his hypotheses about women’s fragility when faced with “the disillusionments of marriage” seem both ill-conceived and misogynistic — a blinkered attempt to understand female sexuality, which he regarded as murky and mysterious, in keeping with his idea of women as the “dark continent.”
In any event, Martha and Sigmund were married on September 13, 1886 in Hamburg. Frau Bernays became Frau Freud; she was twenty-five and he was thirty. Since a civil wedding on its own was not officially recognized at that time in Austria, the couple had to marry a second time under a chuppah with full Jewish ritual, despite Freud’s annoyance. The ceremony included the groom giving the bride a ring as well as crushing a glass underfoot in remembrance of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem — a memory of sadness in the midst of happiness, which in other contexts was a dissonance that Freud often studied.
Freud seemed to have felt abandoned within minutes of casting in his lot with Martha. “Once one is married,” he opined, “one no longer — in most cases — lives for each other as one used to. One lives rather with each other for some third thing, and for the husband dangerous rivals soon appear: household and nursery.” He added that, “despite all love and unity, the help each person had found in the other ceases. The husband looks again for friends, frequents an inn, finds general outside interests.” Hardly a chipper forecast for what lay ahead, but then Freud, despite his inner reserves of strength, was often the one who expressed anxiety. The task of reassurance fell to the unflappable Martha, who learned how to soothe him.
The union produced six children in nine years, by which point Martha was thirty-four. After three children had been born, the family moved to Berggasse 19, near the university quarter in Vienna, where their apartment occupied an entire floor but was rather small and dark. Martha, who was in charge of their finances, set about looking after her new husband with the utmost attention and care for both his appearance and his comfort. She laid out and brushed his clothes for him — which were, as Martin, Freud’s eldest son, reported in his reminiscences, “cut from the best material and tailored to perfection.” It was said that such was the diligent nature of her caretaking that she put the toothpaste on his toothbrush.
While her husband worked up to sixteen and even eighteen hours a day, Martha, carried around an enormous bunch of keys, the better to oversee a household that included, despite the family’s relative lack of money, a cook, a governess, two nannies, and a chambermaid. She ran the large family’s schedule like a well-oiled machine. Lunch was served promptly at one o’clock every day, a formal meal often featuring tafelsptiz or Rindfleisch, boiled beef and vegetables, with a horseradish sauce, a favorite of Freud’s. Sophie Freud, Martin’s daughter, recalled in a memoir that Martha maintained impeccable standards: “At each meal Mrs. Freud has a pitcher of hot water and a special napkin at her place, so that if anybody made a spot on the tablecloth she could hurry to remove it. Only her husband was permitted to make as many spots as he wished.” Dinner was at seven, after which Freud usually worked until midnight.
The children, who were Martha’s domain when young although of keen interest to their father as they grew older, seem to have been suitably well-behaved, their parents having instilled in them the importance of their father’s work. As Martin recalled, “There was never any waiting for meals: at the stroke of one everybody in the household was seated at the long dining-room table and the same moment one door opened to let the maid enter with the soup while another door opened to allow my father to walk from his study to take his place at the head of the table at the other end.”
Jenny Diski, in her review of Behling’s biography, observed that the exemplary bourgeois surface that Martha helped to provide — “the rigid table manners, ordered nursery, and bustling regularity” — enabled her husband to organize his “deeper, hardly thinkable thoughts” into “something that looked like a scientific theory.” By polishing that surface and keeping the clocks ticking in unison, Diski grandly concluded, “Martha was as essential to the development of Freudian thought as Dora or the Rat Man.” This may have a grain of truth to it, in the logistical sense that an orderly environment allowed Freud to concentrate on his work, but it strikes me all the same as something of an exaggeration — as though Mrs. Einstein were to be credited with facilitating her husband’s ideas about energy and mass.
The simple truth is that Freud never had any plans for Martha to be an intellectual partner or to participate in his intellectual life in any way. He was happy for her to take care of his every need and to view him as the genius of his age, the equal of Newton or Darwin, just as she was happy to call herself Frau Professor after Freud was given his title in 1902. Although he seems to have initially been drawn to Martha’s cultural sophistication, Freud quickly felt the need to downplay her braininess, a demotion in which she willingly acquiesced. Early in their engagement he referred condescendingly to “the charming confusion in your dear sentences.” In his memoir Martin Freud recalls that when his parents had distinguished visitors over for dinner and a learned guest began to recite from The Iliad, Martha had already departed the premises. “My mother,” Martin writes, “who knew no Greek and, in consequence, was without any admiration for Homer’s immortal epic, had quietly withdrawn earlier.”
Then, too, there was the slight puzzlement that she expressed at her husband’s choice of profession, as though his high-flying speculations were beyond her ken. “I must admit,” she said, “that if I did not realize how seriously my husband takes his treatments, I should think that psychoanalysis is a form of pornography.” The Viennese analyst Theodor Reik reported that, based on conversations with Martha during walks that they took together, “I got the decided impression that she not only had no idea of the significance and importance of psychoanalysis, but had intensive emotional resistances against the character of analytic work. On such a walk she once said, ‘Women have always had such troubles, but they needed no psychoanalysis to conquer them. After the menopause they become quieter and resigned.’” That sentence, so dismissive of the real problems faced by herself and other members of her sex, is painful to read.
IV
After the birth of their sixth child, the Freuds — or more precisely, Freud — decided to practice abstinence as a means of contraception. While he believed that pregnancy “is a normal state in a young woman,” he also held that coitus interruptus led to neurosis, a view that was based on some misbegotten Darwinian notion about the right and wrong “discharge” of semen. In some ways, of course, Freud was very much a man of his time and place, fascinated by the notion of “perverse” desires but also cautious and somewhat sexually inhibited. Freud professed to dislike Vienna, the hothouse capital of the Hapsburg empire, writing to his colleague Wilhelm Fliess that “I hate Vienna with a positively personal hatred.” But Vienna was all the same the center of intellectual life in Europe — a bubbling cauldron of ideas about literature, music, art, architecture, science, and philosophy — and therefore a stimulant to his thinking. It was also a city whose culture was intensely preoccupied with sex. While modernist painters and writers dug deeply into erotic life, the bourgeoisie had a more prurient and censorious attitude toward sexuality, especially as it applied to women and children. Women were expected to be chaste before marriage, and the youthful exploration of sexuality through activities like masturbation was vehemently discouraged. (Freud’s fine sense of humor did not desert him on even on salacious subjects such as these. The problem with masturbating, he once observed, is knowing how to do it well.)
In his research and his theory, Freud indicted these Victorian mores as a source of neurotic conflict, and his views on infantile sexuality (“one of the sources of Freud’s enduring appeal, I believe,” observed Paul Roazen in his book Meeting Freud’s Family, “is that he so often took the side of the suffering child”), were remarkably forward-looking — and yet those same Victorian mores were reflected in some of his own constricted views on the subject of carnal pleasure. “I stand for an infinitely freer sexual life,” he wrote in a letter, “although I myself have made very little use of such freedom. Only so far as I considered myself entitled to.” Having proposed that the sexual drive was necessarily self-divided (as he believed all the drives were), he took the view that sex could never be completely gratifying.
His ability to sublimate erotic desire in his work was remarkable, and in a small book about Leonardo da Vinci he observed that Leonardo’s apparent asexuality set him “above the common animal need of mankind.” In a letter written to Fliess in 1897, when he was forty-one, Freud made a reference to ceasing connubial relations entirely. “Sexual excitation is of no more use to a person like me,” he wrote, although he attested to some incidents of sexual intercourse with Martha later on, recording in his diary at the age of sixty that he had “successful coitus Wednesday morning.” He also wrote to Fleiss that he often suffered from impotence. (Some scholars have argued that Freud’s decision to abstain from sex, although ostensibly to avoid having more children, may have stemmed in part from an unconscious desire to get back at Martha for her sexual reticence during their prolonged engagement.) According to Oliver Freud, who was born fourteen months after Martin, neither parent thought to talk their sons about the birds and the bees. A family doctor was enlisted to teach the boys about sex.
Freud’s own sexual behavior reminds us that he was not only the champion of psychological and sexual enlightenment in his work, but also the champion of the rewards — and demands — of sublimation and repression. In 1936 he characterized his married life with a startling degree of restraint in a conversation with Princess Marie Bonaparte, one in a bevy of his female friends that included Minna Bernays, Princess Bonaparte, Lou Andreas-Salome, Hilda Doolitle, and Helene Deutsch, with whom he shared his thoughts. “It was really not a bad solution of the marriage problem,” he said, “and she is still today tender, healthy, and active.” When one compares this wan statement to his impassioned declaration to Hilda Doolittle, the poet H.D., who spent several years in analysis with him, that “I am an old man and you don’t think it worth your while to love me,” they almost seem to come from two different men.
To his son-in-law Max Halberstadt, he conveyed his relief that his children had turned out well and that Martha “has neither been very abnormal nor often ill.” (Recall the patronizing passage in the paper of 1908 about “regard for the wife’s health.”) This was a far cry from the sentiments that he felt during their engagement, when he clashed with Martha’s mother about who had the greater claim to her daughter: “Marty, you cannot fight against it; no matter how much they love you I will not leave you to anyone, and no one deserves you; no one else’s love compares with mine.” Martha, by contrast, sounded more enthusiastic when describing her marriage to her granddaughter Sophie: “I wish for you to be as fortunate in your marriage as I have been in mine. For during the fifty-three years I was married to your grandfather, these was never an unfriendly look or a hard word between us.” With accommodation and compromise on her part came harmony in their conjugal relationship, whatever it may have lacked in the way of higher communion.
This brings us to the sensational theory, originated by Jung and fanned over the decades by Peter Swales (also known as “the guerilla historian of psychoanalysis”), that after ceasing to sleep with his wife Freud embarked on an affair with Minna Bernays, Martha’s smart, witty, and acerbic younger sister. The two had corresponded while Freud was pursuing Martha, and clearly they had a companionable relationship. Among other things, they were both avid card-players. They lived together in the same household for forty years — first on Berggasse 19 in Vienna, where Minna moved in in 1896, and then at 20 Maresfeld Gardens in London. Indeed, the sleeping arrangements in Vienna were weirdly intimate, as I saw for myself when I visited Berggasse 19. Minna’s small sleeping quarters were right next to Sigmund’s and Martha’s bedroom, and the only way Minna could get to her room was to go through the bedroom that the Freuds shared.
The two also took trips together, and the rumors of their illicit liaison were fueled in 2006 by a German sociologist who found a yellowing hotel ledger entry written in Freud’s distinctive scrawl at an inn in the Swiss alps where the psychoanalyst, then forty-two, and Minna, then thirty-three, stayed for two weeks in 1898. The couple had registered as “Dr Sigm Freud u frau” — as husband and wife. They took the largest room at the inn, which had the equivalent of a double bed. This last detail persuaded some Freud loyalists, such as Peter Gay, of the veracity of the rumors, although I myself remain dubious. For one thing, they might have checked into a single room because of Freud’s frugality; they were anyway used to being in close quarters and it is unlikely, given the Victorian ethos of the era, that they could have rented the room if their actual unmarried relationship had been made clear. For another, despite his heretical approach to religious strictures and his theoretical advocacy of greater sexual freedom, Freud strikes me as a man fairly haunted by guilt, and he would have been disinclined to cheat on his devoted wife. There was also the fact that Minna was not particularly attractive and female appearance was important to Freud. In one of his early courtship letters he told Martha that her nose and her mouth were shaped “more characteristically than beautifully, with an almost masculine expression, so unmaidenly in its decisiveness.” Such a microscopic analysis of his future bride’s less than ideal features suggests that he was a critical observer of female appearances. Then too, he himself had once noted to his future wife that “similar people like Minna and myself don’t suit each other specially.”
Who, then, was Martha Freud? Why is she so hard to find amid the obsessive interest and research that swirls around her husband? Was she really just a contented Hausfrau, an efficient manager of a busy household, a firm, undemonstrative, but affectionate mother, and a devoted wife who “tried as much as possible,” as she wrote in response to a condolence letter after her husband’s death “to remove the misère of everyday life from his path”? Assuming that Freud’s ideas about everything from female psychology to wayward sexuality to neurotic conflict were drawn even slightly from his own experience, what influence did Martha’s personality and her interactions with him have on psychoanalytic theory? It is hard to imagine her living with him for more than half a century and not having had some impact on him beyond making sure that his boiled beef was served on time. In addition to which, as Sophie Freud points out in her book, “some of Freud’s most fundamental discoveries were made by observing his own children. Mrs. Freud was his assistant in helping to transform the nursery into a psychological laboratory. But the children were not to know they were being used as guinea pigs. ‘Above all, the family must be normal,’ she said.”
It is all the more surprising, then, that Martha has been of so little interest or consequence to the many biographers of her husband. In recent years there has been Katya Behling’s biography of her in German, as well as a novel called Mrs. Freud by the French writer Nicolle Rosen. There is also a short memoir by the Freuds’ long-standing housekeeper, Paula Fichtl, but it does not add much to the overall picture except for the author’s own adulation for Herr Doktor and her unstinting admiration for Martha’s capabilities and resilience. As Behling recounts in her biography, Martha was astonishingly courageous. When, shortly after the Anschluss, a group of armed SA men showed up at Berggasse 19, sending Paula into a tizzy, Martha is said to have maintained her composure, suggesting that “the gentlemen” might wish to deposit their rifles in the umbrella stand for the duration of their visit. And when another phalanx of Nazis stormed into their apartment a few days later, Paula’s upset was met with an ironic comment: “Surely, Paula, you did not expect the Nazis to come with flowers.”
Is Martha’s featureless, sphinx-like presence an odd gap in the story, a glitch in the hermetic, all-consuming narrative of male genius? Or does it point to some deeper absence, some way in which Martha willingly went along with being sidelined from her husband’s larger concerns the better to ensure a peaceful home from which Freud could venture out with his unconventional, often alarming ideas? One might argue that in a certain fashion she was her husband’s muse — not a particularly glamorous or inflaming one, but a steadfast, earth-bound figure who helped him roam freely in his head. It was perhaps Martha’s very ordinariness — her “fully developed and well-integrated” personality, as Ernest Jones put it — that cast into relief the neuroses and the pathologies that Freud found everywhere he looked.
Freud’s attitude to Martha, which verged on the fondly dismissive, is not irrelevant to the sense that psychoanalysis missed out on some of the big questions, particularly about women, and fell short of its liberating aspirations. Yet it is too easy to dismiss her as a martyr, unless one adds that she was a willing and seemingly contented one. Indeed, who is to say that she wouldn’t have played the role of helpmeet to a lesser figure as well, to a man who was not a genius? Or that despite her intelligence and sensibility, that she, like many people, was simply not driven to live up to what might have been her potential? Not every wife, no matter how intelligent or talented, wishes to compete with her husband. The competitive impulse, which looks to us invariably like a strength, can also derive from weakness and an infirm sense of self. Martha clearly knew who she was. Her dignity is undeniable. Her power derived from being the ultimate caretaker and ur-wife, presiding over the circumstances that facilitated Freud’s work. One might even see Martha’s abnegation of self — if abnegation it was — as an adult example of “altruistic surrender,” which was the term that her daughter Anna Freud coined for the children she worked with at the Tavistock Clinic who sacrificed their own well-being in the service of another child.
In any case, Martha seems to have gone through something of a sea-change in the wake of her husband’s death at the age of eighty-three in September 1939, after years of excruciating jaw cancer. Aside from returning to lighting the Shabbos candles, she took to reading again, often sitting on the stairs or on a chair on the half-landing between the ground floor and the first floor at Maresfield Gardens, and even developed a curiosity about Anna’s patients, marveling at how expensive child analysis was. Although she remarked that life had “lost its sense and meaning” without her husband, she carried on in exile with her energetic and orderly existence, and appears to have relished being at the center of a crowd of doting and often celebrated visitors who came to see her. She might be said to have embodied the spirit of Goethe’s das Ewig-Weibliche, or Eternal Feminine, a concept that is profoundly alien to us but was a pillar of Martha’s culture. As a frail but vivid old woman who had been the lifelong companion of an undeniable visionary, she must have aroused curiosity of her own accord. Frau Freud died in London on November 2, 1951 at the age of ninety, and was cremated and her ashes joined with her husband’s ashes in an ancient Greek vase in something called the Freud corner in the Golder’s Green crematorium, taking her mystery — her hopes, her disappointments, and her regrets — with her.
