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Freud with his wife Martha and daughter Anna
(Freud Museum London)
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Freud thrived in an atmosphere of solidity and order in his home, as if he needed a firm foundation to explore the shifting, timeless world of the unconscious. As he delved deeper into the mysteries of sexuality in his research, the passion faded from his marriage.
SOPHIE FREUD: Every Sunday, the family assembled in the Freud household including myself. He would come out at 12 o'clock, and his physical contact was you did like this, you put your two fingers and you squeezed the child's cheeks, which was a sign of affection. You did not hug or anything like that, you did this.
After ten years of marriage, he found himself firmly established as the patriarch of his own large family. But his exhaustive work to find a cure for hysteria had not brought him the fame, success and happiness he longed for. Fears of poverty from his childhood resurfaced to haunt him.
FREUD: "Now I have no idea where I stand… The expectation of eternal fame was so beautiful… certain wealth, travels, and lifting the children above the severe worries that robbed me of my youth. Everything depended upon whether or not hysteria would come out right."
On Oct. 23, 1896, after an illness of four months, his father, eighty year-old Jacob Freud, died in Vienna. Freud was deeply shaken.
FREUD: "I find it difficult to write just now… The old man's death has affected me profoundly... With his peculiar mixture of deep wisdom and fantastic light-heartedness, he had a significant effect on my life… I now feel quite uprooted."
His feelings about his father's death were complex and confusing for Freud. He felt in some way he had supplanted his father in his mother's affections during his childhood. In an effort to understand the nature of hysteria, he imagined that his father had abused him and some of his siblings.
GAY: He [was] a little boy who was in his own understanding the apple of his mother's eye and his father was his rival - and he won. And that can be as difficult as losing, to triumph over your father can induce a great feeling of guilt, particularly when they die. If you, for example, wanted them to.
Through self-analysis, Freud was able to see the truth about his relationship with his parents. Freud came to realize that his father was innocent. He came to realize that, as a boy, he had wanted to marry his mother, and saw his father as a rival for her love. Freud understood his own wishes to be universal among all boys in all cultures. He called this newly discovered phenomenon the Oedipus Complex and it would become one of his most important ideas.
After his father's death, Freud began to work on a book based on the results of the self-analysis of his dreams. The Interpretation of Dreams would later make Freud one of the most revered minds of his time, and bring him more wealth and fame than his father could have ever imagined.
It was only later that Freud revealed the impetus behind the most important book he ever wrote:
FREUD: "It was a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father's death - that is to say, to the most important event, the most poignant loss of a man's life."
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