Freud and the future

Thomas Mann, 1929

Freud and the Future is the title of a celebratory speech given by Thomas Mann on May 8, 1936 in Vienna at the celebration of Sigmund Freud's eightieth birthday .

After the essay Freud's position in modern intellectual history from 1929, Thomas Mann again dealt with Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis , but also went into CG Jung . In addition to Friedrich Nietzsche , in the lecture he concentrated on the importance of Arthur Schopenhauer's metaphysics for the development of drive theory .

Going beyond the psychological and philosophical level, he circled religious and mythological questions and mentioned many of his own works. With his novel - tetralogy Joseph and his brothers , he wanted to give a psychology of God's covenant that was shaped by Freud.

Since the anniversary boy was ill and could not appear, he only heard the speech at a private lecture on June 14, 1936.

content

Sigmund Freud 1926 on a portrait photo of Ferdinand Schmutzer

Thomas Mann opens his lecture with the question of why a poet and not a scientist is giving the keynote address. For him, this suggests the special relationship that the birthday child has with literature, just as that of the poet with research. Quoting his speech from 1929, he describes the path to Freud's knowledge, which he walked in productive solitude without philosophical accompaniment, and names Novalis , Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who anticipated Freud. Thomas Mann makes the relationship between the poetic and literary spheres clear on two points: One of the “love of truth” stemming from “Nietzsche's school” and a “sense of illness”.

Thomas Mann's youthful melancholy, which was shaped by Nietzsche's “pride in truth”, entered his own works, such as his novella Tonio Kröger , and gradually gave way to calm serenity. He has not lost the “tendency to understand truth and knowledge psychologically”.

Thomas Mann also attributes the sense of illness to Nietzsche, who probably suspected “what he owed to his illness”. The person suffering from the middle position between nature and spirit allows himself to be researched into the depths of his being through precisely this suffering, so that the neurosis has proven to be an " anthropological means of knowledge of the first order".

With the Buddenbrooks he set a monument to Schopenhauer and got to know his pessimism , the moral core of psychoanalysis, even before he could study it more deeply. Freud's psychoanalysis grows out of the soil of Schopenhauer's metaphysics, whose id , a “cauldron of seething excitement”, corresponds to Schopenhauer's “dark realm of will”, while the ego is only a “small ... enlightened and watchful part of the id” and in it Order to regulate the relationship with the environment. Although the ego can fall back on experience to measure the pleasure principle against the reality principle , it is extremely weak , narrowed between id and superego - it likes to see itself as a rider, but is often ridden by the unconscious.

He pays tribute to the stylist Freud and, with his “vivid prose”, puts him on a par with Schopenhauer as an artist of thought, who was also a writer of European rank.

The mystical unity of self and the world constitutes the very core of psychoanalysis for man. In this context he quotes CG Jung from an introduction to the Tibetan Book of the Dead and describes him as an “ungrateful offspring” of Freud's teaching. Philosophy precedes natural science . The lack of presuppositions in science is presumably an illusion in Freud's sense. He praises the renegade Jung, who, like no other, used the insights of psychoanalysis to combine Western thinking with Eastern esotericism . The western spirit is subject to the subject-object split and defends itself against the insight to see the world and the gods as the creation of the soul, a mystical conception that contradicts western religiosity. Here he comes to speak of the "mythical" Joseph novel, with which he dared to attempt a psychology of the covenant of God.

Abraham is "in a sense God's Father", created him spiritually and ascribed to him properties that were God's original property. His power is that seen by Abraham, and the "power of his own soul" is sometimes indistinguishable from these qualities, which is the very origin of the covenant, "the express confirmation of an inner fact." The idea of ​​the novel for the author is the "Lived myth", which marks the "step from the bourgeois-individual to the mythical-typical".

For Thomas Mann, this myth can also be seen in other figures in history. It refers to Cleopatra , who dies with the serpent on her breast and with this symbol, which was significant in ancient times, indicates an attribute of the goddesses Ištar , Astarte , Isis and reveals her mythical consciousness. If Alexander the Great followed in the footsteps of Miltiades , it was Caesar who orientated himself to Alexander in order to identify with him, an attitude that can be traced back to Napoleon Bonaparte and can be described with the formula “It's me”. Even Jesus' life is characterized by the fulfillment of what is written and his cry is not only “an expression of messianic self-esteem”, but the beginning of Psalm 22 ( Psalm 22 : 2  EU ).

Freud himself is a pioneer of the future, to which one can attach the hope of overcoming hatred through his healing method. He stands for a "humanism that will have a bolder [...] relationship to the powers of the underworld than is granted to today's humanity struggling in neurotic fear."

development

Thomas Mann had already written about Freud in his mishaplet, My Relationship to Psychoanalysis, probably written in the early summer of 1925 , pointing out the importance of his teaching and describing it as a "strange growth of scientific and civilizing spirit". He addressed his contemporary novel The Magic Mountain as well as the novella Death in Venice .

In 1929 the much more extensive essay Freud's position in modern intellectual history appeared as the introduction to the first issue of the journal Die Psychoanalytische Movement and was given as a lecture on May 16, 1929 at the invitation of the “Club of Democratic Students” in the Auditorium Maximum of the University of Munich . Thomas Mann immersed himself in Freud's totem and taboo , praised his literary qualities and called the author an outstanding essayist who stands in the tradition of great writers of the 19th century who, against the rationalist current of the times, emphasizes the "night side of nature" as the essential would have. In Freud and the Future , he went back to parts of this essay. The later speech has a clear confessional character and, with references to works such as Buddenbrooks , Tonio Kröger , Death in Venice and the Joseph tetralogy, tends to interpret his own oeuvre.

background

Thomas Mann was not a Freudian, but like other writers he recognized the importance of psychoanalysis and was able to use it for his work in a variety of ways. His works themselves were interpreted psychoanalytically. Here, the ( sublimated ) homoeroticism is not the only, but an extremely important and dynamically grateful motif.

His early psychological work came about during the development of psychoanalysis. The novella Der kleine Herr Friedemann and the studies on hysteria written by Freud and Josef Breuer in 1895 tell in a sense the same story for Manfred Dierks - that of repressed sexuality and the threatening return of the repressed . If the patient Miss Lucy suppresses the love for her employer, which then returns as a physical symptom , the misshapen Mr. Friedemann suppresses his need for love by withdrawing into his art and book world until it returns in the form of the voluptuous Frau von Rinnlingen with deadly violence : He rejects his aesthetic existence and drowns himself in narcissistic aggression against himself. Despite these parallels, a direct confrontation with Freud can only be proven more than ten years later: In connection with his death in Venice , he read Freud's texts in 1911 that deal with the Dealing with displacement problems. According to Manfred Dierks, the reading helped him to clarify his own agonizing question and could even have led to a self-analysis . Thomas Mann went so far as to attribute the novella, which was initially supposed to refer to Goethe's degrading experience with Ulrike von Levetzow , to Freud's “direct influence” in an interview (1925): “Without Freud, I would never have thought of this erotic To treat motif or at least would have designed it completely differently ”, a representation that was largely doubted.

reception

Carl Gustav Jung

The socialist Kurt Hiller , who has been a sharp critic of Thomas Mann since the First World War , praised the speech. Many years earlier he had come across Mann's thoughts on Joseph von Eichendorff's good-for-nothing in the considerations of an apolitical person , spoke of a “pogrom against the spirit” and later criticized the “preceptoral arrogance” of the “disgusting rummage”.

Gisela E. Hoffmann points out that Thomas Mann did not mention the influence of Buddhism on Schopenhauer and Jung. This Eastern religion led both authors to comparable considerations about the essence of the soul, which appears as the starting point of the world, a point of view that determines Adrian Leverkühn's emotional state in the novel Doctor Faustus .

For Manfred Dierks, under Jung's impression, Mann moves away from the enlightenment nature of psychoanalysis and leads it into the metaphysical realms of Schopenhauer, seeing its “innermost core” in the mystical “secret of the unity of self and world”. This is the experience of the dreaming Hans Castorp , which he lives through in the central chapter snow .

Although he rates Freud and the future as one of Thomas Mann's “most impressive lectures”, he holds the speaker up to a faux pas: of all things, trying to try the renegade Jung to assess the supposedly mystical core of a doctrine and to present this to the father of psychoanalysis, testify of a "round (n) failure". The mistake is all the more serious since Jung had previously expressed himself against “Jewish psychoanalysis ” in his essay on the current situation in psychotherapy and differentiated an “ Aryan ” from a “Jewish unconscious”. These statements were known to a man who showed a profound ambivalence here. He now vacillates between Freud and Jung, between Enlightenment and Romanticism , seeing in the neurosis on the one hand an obstacle to development and on the other hand a path to deeper knowledge.

literature

Text output

• Thomas Mann: Freud and the future. In: Collected works in thirteen volumes. Volume 9: Speeches and essays. Part 1, Fischer, Frankfurt 1974, pp. 478-501.

Secondary literature

• Eckhard Heftrich : Joseph and his brothers. In: Helmut Koopmann (Ed.): Thomas-Mann-Handbuch (= Fischer TB . Volume 16610). Unabridged edition of the 3rd, updated edition. Fischer, Frankfurt 2005, ISBN 3-596-16610-1 , pp. 460-461.
• Manfred Dierks: Thomas Mann and the “Jewish” psychoanalysis. In: Ruprecht Wimmer (Ed.): Thomas Mann and Judaism. The lectures of the Berlin Colloquium of the German Thomas Mann Society (= Thomas Mann Studies . Volume 30). Klostermann, Frankfurt 2004, ISBN 3-465-03302-7 , p. 114.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Thomas Mann : Freud and the future. In: ders .: Collected works in thirteen volumes. Volume 9: Speeches and essays. Part 1, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1974, pp. 480-481.
2. ↑ Thomas Mann: Freud and the future. In: ders .: Collected works in thirteen volumes. Volume 9: Speeches and essays. Part 1, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. 481.
3. ↑ Thomas Mann: Freud and the future. In: ders .: Collected works in thirteen volumes. Volume 9: Speeches and essays. Part 1, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. 481.
4. ↑ Thomas Mann: Freud and the future. In: ders .: Collected works in thirteen volumes. Volume 9: Speeches and essays. Part 1, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. 482.
5. ↑ Thomas Mann: Freud and the future. In: ders .: Collected works in thirteen volumes. Volume 9: Speeches and essays. Part 1, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. 484.
6. ↑ Thomas Mann: Freud and the future. In: ders .: Collected works in thirteen volumes. Volume 9: Speeches and essays. Part 1, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. 486.
7. ↑ Thomas Mann: Freud and the future. In: ders .: Collected works in thirteen volumes. Volume 9: Speeches and essays. Part 1, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. 486.
8. ↑ Thomas Mann: Freud and the future. In: ders .: Collected works in thirteen volumes. Volume 9: Speeches and essays. Part 1, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. 490.
9. ↑ Thomas Mann: Freud and the future. In: ders .: Collected works in thirteen volumes. Volume 9: Speeches and essays. Part 1, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. 491.
10. ↑ Thomas Mann: Freud and the future. In: ders .: Collected works in thirteen volumes. Volume 9: Speeches and essays. Part 1, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. 493.
11. ↑ Thomas Mann: Freud and the future. In: ders .: Collected works in thirteen volumes. Volume 9: Speeches and essays. Part 1, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. 496.
12. ↑ Thomas Mann: Freud and the future. In: ders .: Collected works in thirteen volumes. Volume 9: Speeches and essays. Part 1, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. 500.
13. ↑ Thomas Mann: The position of Freud in modern intellectual history. In: ders .: Collected works in thirteen volumes . Volume 10: Speeches and essays. Part 2, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. 260.
14. ↑ Rolf G. Renner: Literary-, cultural criticism and autobiographical essays . In: Thomas Mann Handbook . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 643.
15. ↑ Thomas Klugkist: 49 questions and answers about Thomas Mann . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 193.
16. ↑ So Manfred Dierks: Thomas Mann and the "Jewish" psychoanalysis. In: Thomas Mann and Judaism (= Thomas Mann Studies . Volume 30). Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt 2004, p. 97.
17. ↑ Manfred Dierks: Thomas Mann and the depth psychology . In: Thomas Mann Handbook . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 284.
18. ↑ Quoted from: Manfred Dierks: Thomas Mann und die Tiefenpsychologie . In: Thomas Mann Handbook . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 284.
19. ^ Herbert Lehnert: German literature. In: Helmut Koopmann (Ed.): Thomas Mann Handbook. Unabridged edition of the 3rd, updated edition. Fischer, Frankfurt 2005, p. 156
20. ↑ Klaus Harpprecht : Thomas Mann, Eine Biographie , Rowohlt, Reinbek 1995, p. 440
21. ↑ Gisela E. Hoffmann: The motif of the chosen one in Thomas Mann , Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, Bonn 1974, p. 9
22. ^ Gisela E. Hoffmann: The motif of the chosen one in Thomas Mann , Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, Bonn 1974, p. 143
23. ↑ Manfred Dierks: Thomas Mann and the "Jewish" psychoanalysis. In: Thomas Mann and Judaism (= Thomas Mann Studies . Volume 30). Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt 2004, p. 114
24. ↑ So Manfred Dierks: Thomas Mann and the "Jewish" psychoanalysis. In: Thomas Mann and Judaism (= Thomas Mann Studies . Volume 30). Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt 2004, p. 110
25. ↑ Manfred Dierks: Thomas Mann and the "Jewish" psychoanalysis. In: Thomas Mann and Judaism (= Thomas Mann Studies . Volume 30). Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt 2004, pp. 113–114