Sigmund Freud

The father of psychoanalysis transformed how we think about the mind in general and sexuality in particular, but he was a real cigar-and-slippers guy around ...

While Freud’s use of a term like “perversion” sounds jarring to the modern reader, his message was that those were society’s labels; his own ideas were far more complex than that. Eastman offered what he later admitted was a “glib explanation” that the Bolsheviks’ dictatorial methods were only a transitional phase to be followed by “more real and universal liberty.” Freud was not impressed. The attempts to describe him as either a “conservative” or “revolutionary” creates misleading impressions. But that did not mean he was in favor of the government taking over private enterprises. Comfortably ensconced in imperial Vienna, Freud was slow to recognize the intensity of the accumulating tensions that finally produced World War I and the subsequent dismemberment of the empire, leaving only a rump Austria. He called her “a female of dangerous intelligence.” From then on, he valued her as a colleague and friend, “a muse,” with no amorous component of their relationship. During his engagement to Martha, he had already written to her about his “old ways,” especially when it came to the role of women. He was stuck by the fact that she had “no prudishness whatsoever,” freely discussing her string of lovers along with her sexual frustrations and fantasies. He was not self-repressed…” In other words, he was a dissolute man working in a dissolute city. “Since it is not permitted to dissect humans, I have in fact nothing to do with them,” he wrote, attempting to make light of his bashfulness. During his medical studies, one of his professors dispatched him to Trieste for a research project in the laboratory of the University of Vienna’s marine biology station there. In short, he had no problem developing his revolutionary theories while subscribing to the German saying “Ordnung muss sein,” which translates roughly as “There must be order.”