While the eagerly awaited series En Thérapie has just arrived on Arte, Stéphane Bern is interested, in Historically Vôtre, on Europe 1, in the destiny of a certain Viennese who became famous worldwide for his theories on therapies, precisely: the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.
We are in Paris, in 1885, in the amphitheater of the Salpêtrière hospital.
All good society meets every week to attend the Tuesday Lessons of the great neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot.
In front of him, patients placed under hypnosis show signs of paralysis and convulsion.
He makes them disappear, thus showing that hysteria is neither a simulation nor a neurological disease, but a functional disease.
It's a neurosis!
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Jean-Martin Charcot relates it to a genital cause, the word "hysteria" coming from the Greek "hyster" which means uterus.
Stunned, a 30-year-old Austrian doctor attends these demonstrations.
His name is Sigmund Freud.
Following this master, he will explain that hysteria results from a psychic conflict of sexual origin.
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Trained as a researcher in biology, Sigmund Freud began early to work on sexuality… but that of eels!
They are said to be hermaphrodites, is that true?
His research is unsuccessful.
Under the direction of Ernst Brücke, great patron of Viennese physiology, he then studied the nervous system of the petromyzon, a primitive form of fish.
He then took his first steps as a neurologist alongside his friend Josef Breuer, a specialist in nervous diseases.
Cocaine as medicine
In 1881, Freud obtained his doctorate and met Martha Bernays the following year.
Love is immediate, so are financial needs.
Forced to renounce the pleasures of laboratory research, Freud then sets up as a medical practitioner.
In a letter, he pays homage to Charcot: "one of the greatest doctors whose reason borders on genius, no one has ever had so much influence on me. I sometimes come out of his classes as if I came out of Notre-Dame, full of new ideas about perfection. "
If he is impressed, he is still at ease in the social evenings of the Faubourg Saint-Germain organized by Charcot.
Because to fight his neurasthenia and make him euphoric, Freud discovers cocaine!
Just before his departure for Paris, Freud wrote to Martha: "Take care, my Princess! When I come, I will kiss you to make you all red. And if you show yourself to be rebellious, you will see which of us is the one. louder: the sweet little girl who doesn't eat enough or the big, fiery man with cocaine in his body! "
The search for the causes of "hysteria"
Back in Vienna, Doctor Freud receives every day in his office, from 8 a.m. to noon and from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m.
He abandoned hypnosis for the cathartic method and also practiced electrotherapy.
Then, until late at night, he writes about hysteria.
Until 1897, Freud hypothesized that neuroses, and in particular hysteria, find their origin in the sexual abuse that all children would have suffered from adults within the family unit.
This is the theory of seduction.
But it is wrong!
His thinking evolves according to his encounters, such as the one with Wilhelm Fliess, this Berlin doctor whose extravagant theories on sexuality fascinate him.
And it was with Josef Breuer that he published in 1895 a book which would become famous,
Studies on hysteria,
in which several cases of hysterical women are related, including that of Bertha Pappenheim, Breuer's patient, nicknamed Anna O.
Legend has it that she invented the famous "talking cure" which will become "psycho-analysis".
A new discipline is born.
The psychoanalysis that Freud develops is a movement for the renovation of the medicines of the soul based clinically on the method of free associations. It consists in tracing the traumatic scenes of childhood, at the origin of neuroses. Freud conceptualizes and popularizes the notion of the unconscious, already used before him and in particular by philosophers of German romanticism.
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When his father died, Freud carried out a work of remembering his own past and built the Oedipus complex.
It brings a new definition to the notion of "stages": pregenital (oral and anal) and genital, according to the evolution of the subject and his relation to four erogenous zones which are distributed over four regions of the body to which the acts correspond. simple aspects of children's daily life: thumb sucking, mother's breast or even masturbation.
Birth of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
From this period of introspection results his work
The Interpretation of Dreams
, published in 1900. Freud expects to reach a large audience.
But at first it only obtained an audience among the scientific community before gradually becoming a classic for writers and poets, and especially for surrealists.
The father of psychoanalysis has his faithful followers: Sandor Ferenczi, Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Carl Gustav Jung and many others.
He finds them at his home, during the Wednesday meetings which will soon become the Psychoanalytic Society of Vienna.
In 1909, Freud, Ferenczi and Jung were invited to the United States.
Jung is already known across the Atlantic but Freud triumphs and conquers a huge audience.
The rivalry between the two men does not help their relationship: conflict is inevitable.
They separated in 1913 in pain and violence.
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There are many disagreements between Jung and Freud.
Among them, Freud's sexual theory, which Jung rejects.
Jung criticizes Freud for putting sexuality at the heart of his work on neuroses.
But that does not prevent him from being a fervent follower of carnal relationships with women, patients and disciples!
Freud, on the other hand, suffers from abstinence during his long engagement, women at that time having to remain virgins until marriage.
And at 40, after the birth of Anna, his sixth child, he ceases, in agreement with Martha, all carnal relationships.
Escape from Nazism
And in 1920 Freud went beyond the pleasure principle in a book in which he introduced new impulses: those of death (thanatos) and life (eros).
He also looks back on his time in a correspondence with Einstein, "Why the war?", In 1914. Clairvoyant on the human psyche, Freud is on the other hand blind in the face of the rise of Nazism in Austria.
In 1933, his books were burned in Berlin.
The Nazis nicknamed him "the false Jewish doctor of Vienna".
When they entered the Austrian capital in 1938, Freud was driven into exile by his friend Marie Bonaparte.
She then pays the "ransom" demanded by the Nazis for all those who want to leave Austria, and even more so the Jews who are also victims of Austrian anti-Semitism.
Freud leaves for London.
His four sisters will be exterminated by the Nazis.
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A big smoker despite the advice of those around him, Freud smokes nearly twenty cigars a day.
"When I give up this sweet habit," he explains, "my intellectual interests drop sharply."
Smoking inspires the father of psychoanalysis, but above all causes him cancer of the jaw for which he will undergo thirty-two operations.
It is clear, for those who heal the ailments of the mind, that those of the body can be incurable.
Pain is his daily lot, Freud has to wear a prosthesis which makes him suffer so much that he nicknames her "the monster".
On September 23, 1939, a few days after the outbreak of World War II, the pain was no longer bearable.
Freud asks his personal doctor and friend, Max Schur, to shorten his suffering with injections of morphine.
His daughter Anna agrees, and the father of psychoanalysis disappears.