Authors: Eric Weiner
Freud was doubly marginalized. As a Jew, he existed on the fringes of Viennese society, belonging to “an alien race,” as he once put it. He also resided on the periphery of his chosen profession, psychology. That is often the case with geniuses, as Thomas Kuhn points out in his landmark work,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
He explains that newcomers to a discipline are less committed to traditional rules and “are particularly likely to see the rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.” Geniuses are always marginalized to one degree or another. Someone wholly invested in the status quo is unlikely to disrupt it.
A glance at some of history’s greatest discoveries and inventions demonstrates the power of the outsider. Michael Ventris was a professional architect who, in his spare time, deciphered Linear B, Europe’s earliest writing, a language that had stumped classicists for centuries. Ventris succeeded not despite his lack of expertise in the classics but because of it. He wasn’t burdened by bad knowledge. Nor was Luis Alvarez. A nuclear physicist by training, he, not a paleontologist, determined that a huge asteroid striking the earth led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. The paleontologists were fixated on terrestrial explanations: climate change or perhaps competition for food with early mammals. Alvarez looked skyward for answers, and that is where he found one.
So it was with Sigmund Freud. Medicine at the time could not explain why Freud’s patients—young, otherwise healthy women, for the most part—were suffering from “hysteria” or other neurological conditions. The discipline of psychology proved inadequate to the task, so Freud, in true genius fashion, invented an entirely new field and called it psychoanalysis. Freud was what Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner calls a “Maker,” or what I like to think of as a Master Builder, someone whose genius lies not in their contributions to an existing discipline but in constructing an entirely new one. This is, I think, the highest form of genius.
“Freud’s passions included traveling, smoking, and collecting,” the Voice tells me. One of these would kill him. The other two would inspire. Freud’s
passion for collecting was a very Viennese thing, though his was of a specific kind. An amateur archaeologist, he greedily scooped up ancient statues and other artifacts.
Evidence of this passion lies before my eyes now. I hardly know where to focus first. Over here is the wooden figure of a bird-headed deity from ancient Egypt that Freud kept next to his chair during analysis sessions. Over there, an Egyptian tombstone in bas-relief. Here a plaster cast of an antique relief,
Gradiva
, and there, a cabinet filled with ancient artifacts, and a picture of the Sphinx at Giza.
When Freud feared losing the entire collection to the Nazis, he arranged to have two pieces smuggled out: a nineteenth-century Chinese jade screen and a tiny statue of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. Scarred and pitted, the statue occupied pride of place on Freud’s desk. This is no coincidence. Athena represents not only wisdom but reason, and Freud aimed to understand, rationally, the deeply irrational psychic forces that drive us in peculiar, unhealthy directions. The statue, always within sight, served as a constant reminder of the primacy of reason, even in seemingly irrational times.
Freud had the good fortune of living during the heyday of archaeology. New sites were being discovered almost every week, it seemed, ancient wonders unearthed. Many of these ended up in Vienna’s numerous museums and the curio shops frequented by Freud. Nor was there a shortage of experts willing to talk about these miraculous findings. Freud’s heroes were almost all archaeologists; the one he admired most was Heinrich Schliemann, who, in 1871, discovered the ancient site of Troy. Freud also struck up a friendship with Emanuel Lowy, a professor of archaeology. “He keeps me up to three o’clock in the morning,” Freud wrote. “He tells me about Rome.”
Freud was no dilettante. He had a deep understanding of these ancient cultures and applied this to his psychological theories. He once likened himself to a sort of excavator of the human psyche since, as he told one patient, he “must uncover layer after layer of the patient’s psyche, before coming to the deepest, most valuable treasures.”
Freud placed his artifacts strategically so that no matter where he
looked as he sat in his upholstered consulting chair, his eyes fell on something old and significant. They were there when he treated patients, and they were there when he sat down in his study, often late at night, to write.
Creative people do this. They surround themselves with visual and auditory, and even olfactory, prompts. Why? So that even when they are not thinking about a problem, they are thinking about it. Incubating. Creative geniuses spend a lot less time with furrowed brows than the rest of us.
The artifacts that crowded Freud’s office affected not only him but also his patients, some of whom described the consulting room in almost religious terms. “There was always a feeling of sacred peace and quiet,” recalls Sergei Pankejeff, a wealthy Russian aristocrat whom Freud nicknamed the Wolf Man because he dreamed of trees filled with white wolves. “Here was all kinds of statuettes and other unusual objects, which even the layman recognized as archaeological finds of ancient Egypt,” he recalled.
Freud, not an outwardly demonstrative man, spoke effusively of his collection. “I must always have an object to love,” he once told his colleague, and later rival, Carl Jung. Freud collected until his last days, believing that “a collection to which there are no new additions is really dead.”
Freud’s interest in supposedly dead civilizations (I say
supposedly
because ancient Greek and Roman ideas live on inside all of us) underscores something I’ve encountered ever since I landed in Athens: the past matters. We can’t innovate without building on the past, and we can’t build on the past unless we know it. No one understood this better than Sigmund Freud.
Archaeology was Freud’s hobby, and here he joins hands with many geniuses. Darwin gobbled up novels. Einstein played the violin, and played it well. “Life without playing music for me is inconceivable,” he once said. A recent study found that Nobel laureates in the sciences are more involved in the arts than less eminent scientists.
These outside interests serve several purposes. First of all, they diffuse attention and allow problems to marinate. They exercise different mental
muscles. Einstein, for instance, took brief music breaks
while
working on particularly thorny physics problems. “Music helps him when he is thinking about his theories,” his wife, Elsa, said. “He goes to his study, comes back, strikes a few chords on the piano, jots something down, returns to his study.” Recalled Einstein’s eldest son, Hans Albert, “Whenever he felt he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work, he would take refuge in his music. That would usually resolve all his difficulties.”
Sometimes, these diversions have a more direct impact on the genius’s work. Galileo was able to discern the moons of Jupiter partly because of his training in the visual arts, specifically a technique known as chiaroscuro, used to depict light and shadow. Archaeology played a similar role for Freud. It directly informed his psychological theories, such as the Oedipus complex.
Vienna, a crossroads of cultures and ideas, encouraged this sort of intellectual synthesis. Yes, there were boxes, academic and professional constraints, as there are everywhere, but people moved more freely from one box to another. The novelist Robert Musil was trained as an engineer. His fellow writer Arthur Schnitzler was a physician. The physicist Ernst Mach was also a renowned philosopher.
Freud kept the city’s literati at arm’s length, but he couldn’t help but benefit from the billiards table that was Vienna. He ricocheted off some of the other creative geniuses of the day. The composer Gustav Mahler was briefly a patient of his, seeing Freud for help with impotency. An etching hanging on a wall here suggests another collision. It is of a bushy-haired Einstein. The two men met once, in 1927, in a suburb of Berlin. Over coffee and cake, they chatted for some two hours. Afterward, Freud described Einstein as “cheerful, agreeable, and sure of himself,” adding, “He understands about as much about psychoanalysis as I do about physics so we had a very pleasant talk.”
They had more in common, though, than that. Reading Einstein’s journals, I am struck by how, like Freud, he saw himself as an outcast, one man against the world: “I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate
family with my whole heart.” Those words could just as easily have been written by Freud or Michelangelo or any number of other geniuses.
Vienna afforded a young and curious physician such as Sigmund Freud all sorts of opportunities for experimentation—some fruitful and others not. A glass container on display here, the size and shape of a mayonnaise jar, tells the tale of one such ill-fated experiment. Purchased from the Merck Company, the jar contained packs of cocaine. At the time, in the late nineteenth century, cocaine was a new and little-understood drug. Some doctors, including Freud, believed it might be used to treat all sorts of ailments, from heart disease to nervous exhaustion.
Freud tested the drug on himself and, in 1887, reported, “I have taken the drug myself for several months without any desire for continued use of cocaine.” Clearly, he wasn’t using it properly, I think, before digging deeper into Freud’s cocaine habit. The drug led to an incident he would regret for the rest of his life and that would haunt his dreams. He prescribed cocaine to a sick friend, only worsening his suffering by adding addiction to his other maladies. Cocaine did have a therapeutic benefit, as an anesthetic for eye surgery, but Freud overlooked that breakthrough, and instead credit went to his friend Carl Koller (dubbed “Coca Koller” by Freud).
In other words, Freud failed. Here again we bump up against one of the most misunderstood aspects of genius: failure. Usually, when the topic comes up, so, too, does the old bromide about how successful people “embrace failure.” Which is true. They do. Except it is also true that failures embrace failure. If anything, they embrace it more tightly. So, what is the difference between failure that leads to innovation and failure that leads to . . . more failure?
The answer, researchers now believe, lies not in the failure itself but how we recall it or, more precisely, how we store it. Successful failures are those people who remember exactly where and how they failed, so when they encounter the same problem again, even if in a different guise, they are able to retrieve these “failure indices” quickly and efficiently. “When the critical information is found, the partial picture suddenly becomes complete and the solution is found,” explains one psychologist. In other words, “successful failures” reach an impasse like everyone else but are
better at remembering the exact “location” of that impasse. They are willing to backtrack.
The implications of this are tremendous. For starters, it suggests that knowledge by itself is less important than how we store that knowledge, and how readily we can access it. Also, the advice we were given as children when confronted with failure, “forget it and move on,” is dead wrong. “
Remember
it and move on” is the way of the genius.
I step into Freud’s private study gingerly, as if entering sacred ground. There is the gold-rimmed mirror that hung over his desk. How often, I wonder, did he gaze into it and see the effects of all those surgeries, attempts to stem the cancer that was eating away at his jaw, the result of all those cigars? Freud was in great pain but kept smoking right up until the end. If he couldn’t smoke, he said, he couldn’t write. He worked constantly, seeing patients from early in the morning, meeting with colleagues and friends in the evening, and then reading and writing until late at night. Just like Mozart.
One of Freud’s most loved objects, still here, was his desk chair. It was designed by a friend to accommodate Freud’s unusual sitting position. He sat diagonally, with one leg thrown over the chair’s arm, his head unsupported and a book held high in the air. Later, I’d try to replicate this position myself and couldn’t maintain it for more than a few seconds before various body parts began to cramp. Why in the world would Freud sit that way? Did he actually find it comfortable? Was it simple masochism? What did it
mean
?
Perhaps he was trying (unconsciously of course) to create a “schema violation.” A schema violation is when our world is turned upside down. Temporal or spatial cues are off. Something is wrong. Beethoven’s pigsty of an apartment or Einstein’s messy desk are a kind of schema violation. A few psychologists have tried to induce a schema violation in the laboratory. For instance, they would ask some participants to make breakfast in the “wrong” order, and others to make breakfast in the conventional way. Those in the first group—the ones engaged in a schema violation—subsequently demonstrated more “cognitive flexibility.” You don’t have to actually participate in a schema violation to benefit from it. Watching
others do it (provided you can relate to them) is enough to do the trick. For creativity, watching people do weird things is nearly the same as doing those weird things ourselves.
This explains a lot. It explains why in a creative place such as Vienna breakthroughs in one field led to breakthroughs in entirely different fields. As Howard Gardner puts it, “The very knowledge that there
could
be a new painting raised the likelihood of a new dance or poetry or politics.” Schema violations explain how Freud was influenced by the cultural scene of Vienna even though he didn’t engage in it directly. Novelty was in the air. Genius begets more genius.
What’s more, new ideas such as Freud’s had a better shot at recognition in a city such as Vienna because, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi puts it, “creativity is more likely in places where new ideas require less effort to be perceived.” Places accustomed to new ideas, new ways of thinking, are more attuned to their arrival, and genius and the recognition of genius are inseparable. You can’t have one without the other.