Sigmund Freud, Adirondack High Peaks and American Colitis

The modern era has produced a number of great speeches that have withstood the test of time. Amongst them are Winston Churchill’s “Fight on the Beaches” (June 1940), John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner”(June 1963) and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” (August 1963), but the speech that may have had the biggest impact in the history of political thought was Abe Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” (November 1860).

Brief but powerful, Lincoln’s oration reminds us not only of the inspirational impact of a well-crafted address, but also highlights the sad decline of public speaking in our day and age. Parliamentary democracy offers limited space to the “theatre of oratory” and even the most pressing issues do not erupt into a spectacle of debating duels. Eloquence has become a “suspicious” quality in modern politics. Performance management and technological means have turned the orator into a messenger of blank phrases and catch lines.

Battle of Gettysburg

After victory over the United States forces at Chancellorsville, General Robert E. Lee marched his powerful Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania in late June 1863. On July 1, the advancing Confederates clashed with the United States Army of the Potomac, commanded by General George G. Meade, at the crossroads town of Gettysburg.

The three-day battle marked a turning point in the conflict. The Confederacy’s campaign to invade the United States had been halted and pushed back. Robert Lee’s reputation for invincibility in battle was dispelled as he was forced to withdraw his battered army. With more than 50,000 estimated casualties, it was the bloodiest encounter of the Civil War

The carnage weighed heavily on the hearts and minds of the American public where a movement towards peace was gathering support. Reluctance to continue fighting also crept into the minds of soldiers and officers. The battle and its aftermath inspired President Abraham Lincoln’s most famous speech.

The Address was delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, four and a half months after the decisive clash between the United States armies and those of the Confederate States had been fought out.

In his “few appropriate remarks” at the solemn occasion (the speech lasted scarcely two minutes), Lincoln elevated the battle narrative into rallying call for a weary United States to press on with the campaign. He equated the Civil War with a struggle for the preservation of the union that had been torn apart by the secession of the southern states. It remains the most concise statement of national purpose on record.

The speech established Lincoln’s reputation and would be hailed as a visionary outline for the nation’s future. A year-and-a-half after speaking at Gettysburg, the President was assassinated by a Confederate States supporter.

Freud & Lincoln’s Legacy

During and immediately after the Second World War, Lincoln’s Address took on global prominence. The American government began to broadcast the speech abroad as a rallying cry for democracy and European revitalization. But its significance had been recognized much earlier than that.

In his Annual Message to Congress of December 1, 1873, President Ulysses S. Grant – who had served under Lincoln during the Civil War – reported on the success of American participation in the International Exhibition of the Products of Agriculture, Manufactures and the Fine Arts (the fifth World Fair). Held at Vienna in May that year, the occasion also served to celebrate Franz Joseph I’s twenty-fifth year as Emperor of the Austria-Hungarian Empire.

The world took note of America’s rapid rise as a commercial powerhouse. More importantly, the nation intended to manifest itself as a functioning democracy by displaying a copy of the Gettysburg Address at the Exhibition. One of the visitors to the U.S. exhibit took a particular interest in the document.

In 1873, seventeen-year old Sigmund Freud had completed his studies at the Sperl Gymnasium in Leopoldstadt and enrolled at Vienna University with the intention to read law. At the last moment he changed his mind and decided to attend the Medical Faculty instead.

Freud’s education in the city’s vibrant cultural atmosphere had a strong liberal orientation. In his younger days, he admired Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and translated three essays by John Stuart Mill. Like philosophers of the Enlightenment, he identified civilization with human reason and regarded science as man’s path to knowledge.

On his visit to the Exhibition, Sigmund Freud was so taken with Lincoln’s eloquent expressions of liberty and equality that he memorized the text, then recited the speech to his sisters. A few years later, he even considered relocating to America, particularly as anti-Semitism began to spread in his native Austria. Having decided against the move, he hung a copy of the Declaration of Independence above his bed.

In the years that followed, Freud’s admiration for America was tempered and he shared the prejudices held by numerous cultured Europeans who feared for the “Americanization” of their continent. These critics warned that Europe might be invaded and overrun by Yankee business practices, work ethic, mass culture and populist values.

There was an undertone of cultural superiority in this particular anxiety. Developments in industrial Europe may have been worrying to many observers, but the American example was too abhorrent for them to contemplate. Initially, social critics had pointed to London as an image of horrific urban expansion. By the end of the nineteenth century, the cities of New York and Chicago were seen as a threat to European culture.

Belle Époque

The period between roughly 1870 and 1914 became known on the Continent as the “Belle Époque.” It was named so in nostalgic retrospect as an age in which peace and prosperity prevailed. A “cloudless summer” and a “long garden party” are dominant metaphors in reference to the era, even if extreme poverty and social misery remained rampant in most major cities. The spirit of technological and artistic innovation permeated European society as a whole.

It was during this period that Freud started work as a medical doctor. In bourgeois Vienna, as in Paris or elsewhere, hysteria was the burning health issue of the time. In a male dominated society where most talented women were blocked from professional careers, the display of female suffering was a means of expressing their aspiration to cut the shackles.

Freud specialized in the treatment of neuroses. He concluded that disarranged thinking was the result of fears experienced in childhood. To treat neurotic behavior, he argued that techniques had to be developed to bring these early experiences to the surface. He was not aware of the fact that scientists in the United States were also grappling with an epidemic of nerve disorders. 

Freud’s interest in the United States was reawakened in December 1908 when he received a letter from G. Stanley Hall, President of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the first President of the American Psychological Association (APA – founded in 1892 at the University of Pennsylvania).

Hall invited Freud to deliver a series of lectures in September 1909 to mark Clark University’s twentieth anniversary. After some discussion over financial issues, the latter accepted the request. Freud was joined on the long journey by Carl Jung and his Hungarian colleague Sandor Ferenczi. The three boarded the German liner SS George Washington and sailed from Bremen to New York City.

New York City & Worcester

The ship approached New York City on the evening of August 27. On shore they were met by Austrian-born Abraham Arden Brill, America’s first full-time psychoanalyst (and later Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at New York University), who had been the first to start translating Freud’s works. He acted as their tour guide in the city.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art Sigmund took a keen interest in the Greek antiquities; at Tiffany’s he bought a Chinese jade bowl for his collection. The group made a trip to Coney Island, dined at Hammerstein’s Roof Garden, and visited Columbia University. Freud and Ferenczi saw their first ever moving pictures in a Manhattan cinema.

Freud’s stay in New York was not without problems. He experienced the pace of life in the city as unbearable as was its money worship and consumerism. An “old school” academic, “Herr Doctor” Freud resented the informality of relationships he encountered and the disrespect for intellectual hierarchy. There were private issues as well. Suffering from prostate trouble, he bitterly complained about the city’s lack of public bathrooms.

On September 4, Brill put his guests on the overnight steamer to Fall River, the next leg of their journey to Worcester. Freud was pleasantly surprised to find that staff and students at Clark University were familiar with his thinking. Not fluent in English, he delivered five lectures in German on “The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis.” He was relieved to observe that his radical views were openly discussed by “prudish” Americans. Both Freud and Jung received an honorary doctorate at Clark.

As all the lectures had been public, Freud attracted a diverse audience. Among unexpected listeners was Emma Goldman, the “notorious” anarchist, who had attended Freud’s lectures in Vienna a decade earlier. Another participant was the Boston neurologist and psychologist James Jackson Putnam who would later play a prominent role in disseminating Freud’s ideas in American academic circles.

Putnam Camp

The visitors were not due to sail for Europe until the twenty-first which, at Freud’s insistence, allowed them time to visit Niagara Falls. From there they moved on to the Adirondacks at Putnam’s invitation.

Located in the bucolic Keene Valley and set against the majestic backdrop of the High Peaks, Putnam Camp was a woodland summer sanctuary established in the mid-1870s by a group of Boston School intellectuals with the intent of restoring contact with the natural world as an antidote to the stresses of urbanized society.

Putnam Camp aimed at inspiring a culture of plain living and high thinking. Freud, Jung and Ferenczi stayed in a simple log cabin nicknamed the Chatterbox on a rocky slope stippled with other cabins bearing sobriquets such as the Coop, the Pig Pen and the Ark.

Freud marveled at the wilderness of the Adirondack landscape. During these days of close companionship, Putnam and Freud cemented a strong bond. Coming from opposite worlds and backgrounds, the Boston Unitarian and the Viennese Jew struck up a fruitful collaboration which would eventually strengthen the psychoanalytic movement in the United States.

Ever since his arrival in New York City, Freud had complained about the unpalatable richness of American food. At the Camp he succumbed to a chronic gastrointestinal malady caused by a steak prepared – in his word – by culinary “savages” at a campfire. For the rest of his life, he would remember this Adirondack experience as the start of his “American colitis.”

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The party then returned to New York for the start of the eight-day voyage back to Bremen on board SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. In a letter to his daughter Mathilde written during the passage Freud labelled the trip a success, but also expressed relief that he did not have to live in America.

The First World War disturbed him personally (his three sons were drafted in the Habsburg Army) and professionally. As early as 1915 he condemned the war for its inhumanity and brutality. Witnessing the self-inflicted devastation of European cultural values shocked him to the core and shifted the focus of his psychoanalytic thinking from the individual to the community in order to come to terms with the tragedy.

The outcome of the 1919 Peace Conference intensified his anti-American feelings. Freud blamed President Woodrow Wilson for the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He never returned to the United States, in spite of his spiraling reputation there.

Illustrations, from above: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (Library of Congress); Soldiers National Monument in the National Cemetery at Gettysburg; a detail of a photo of Sigmund Freud with his mother Amalie, circa 1872; (Seated, from left) Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall and Carl Jung in 1909 (The New York Times); Sigmund Freud sculpture on Clark University’s campus; Putnam Camp in the Adirondacks; and Ernst and Martin Freud in uniform with their father Sigmund, 1916.