Acton's
floor - and then remembered that I had to go back to my own first, to get paper
and pens. The bizarre biblical passage in his manuscript had affected Brill
deeply. He seemed actually frightened. He said he was going straight back to
Jelliffe, his publisher, for an explanation; I felt there might be something he
wasn't telling us.
I had expected Freud to be present at
my initial sessions with Miss Acton. Instead, he instructed me to report to him
afterward. His presence, he felt, would disrupt the transference.
The transference is a psychoanalytic
phenomenon. Freud discovered it by accident, and much to his surprise. Patient
after patient reacted to analysis by worshiping him - or occasionally by hating
him. At first he tried to ignore these feelings, viewing them as unwelcome and
unruly intrusions into the therapeutic relationship. Over time, however, he
discovered how crucial they were, to both the patient's illness and the cure.
The patient was reenacting, inside the analyst's office, the very same
unconscious conflicts that caused the symptoms, transferring to the
doctor the suppressed desires that lay at the heart of the illness. This was
not fortuitous: the entire disease of hysteria, Freud had found, consisted of
an individual's transferring to new persons, or sometimes even to objects, a
set of buried wishes and emotions formed in childhood but never discharged. By
dissecting this phenomenon with the patient - by bringing the transference to
light and working it through - analysis makes, the unconscious conscious and
removes the cause of the illness.
Thus the transference turned out to
be one of Freud's most important discoveries. Would I ever have an idea of
comparable importance? Ten years ago, I thought I already had. On December 31,
1899, I excitedly announced it to my father, actually interrupting him in his
study a few hours before the guests would arrive for the New Year's Eve dinner
party my mother always threw. He was quite surprised and, I suppose, irritated
that I would bother him at his work, although of course he didn't say so. I
told him I had made a discovery of potentially great moment and asked
permission to inform him. He tilted his head. 'Proceed,' he said.
Since the dawn of the modern age, I
argued, a peculiar fact held true of all man's supreme revolutionary bursts of
genius, whether in art or in science. Every one of them had occurred at the
turn of a century and - more specifically still - in the first decade of the
new century.
In painting, poetry, sculpture,
natural science, drama, literature, music, physics - in each one of these
fields - which man and which work, above all others, has the best claim to
world-altering genius, the kind of genius that changes the course of history?
In painting, the cognoscenti uniformly point to the Scrovegni Chapel, where
Giotto reintroduced three-dimensional figuration to the modern world. He
painted those frescoes between 1303 and 1305. In verse, surely the crown
belongs to Dante's Inferno, the first great work written in the
vernacular, begun soon after the poet's banishment from Florence in 1302. In
sculpture, there is only one possibility, Michelangelo's David, carved
from a single block of marble in 1501. That same year marked the fundamental
revolution of modern science, for it was then that a certain Nicolaus of Torún
traveled to Padua, ostensibly to study medicine but secretly to continue the
astronomical observations from which he had glimpsed a forbidden truth; we know
him today as Copernicus. In literature, the choice has to be the grandsire of
all novels, Don Quixote, who first tilted at windmills in 1604. In
music, none will dispute Beethoven's pathbreaking symphonic genius: he composed
his First in 1800, the defiant Eroica in 1803, the Fifth by 1807.
This was the case I made to my
father. It was juvenile, I know, but I was seventeen. I supposed it a great thing
to be alive at the turn
floor - and then remembered that I had to go back to my own first, to get paper
and pens. The bizarre biblical passage in his manuscript had affected Brill
deeply. He seemed actually frightened. He said he was going straight back to
Jelliffe, his publisher, for an explanation; I felt there might be something he
wasn't telling us.
I had expected Freud to be present at
my initial sessions with Miss Acton. Instead, he instructed me to report to him
afterward. His presence, he felt, would disrupt the transference.
The transference is a psychoanalytic
phenomenon. Freud discovered it by accident, and much to his surprise. Patient
after patient reacted to analysis by worshiping him - or occasionally by hating
him. At first he tried to ignore these feelings, viewing them as unwelcome and
unruly intrusions into the therapeutic relationship. Over time, however, he
discovered how crucial they were, to both the patient's illness and the cure.
The patient was reenacting, inside the analyst's office, the very same
unconscious conflicts that caused the symptoms, transferring to the
doctor the suppressed desires that lay at the heart of the illness. This was
not fortuitous: the entire disease of hysteria, Freud had found, consisted of
an individual's transferring to new persons, or sometimes even to objects, a
set of buried wishes and emotions formed in childhood but never discharged. By
dissecting this phenomenon with the patient - by bringing the transference to
light and working it through - analysis makes, the unconscious conscious and
removes the cause of the illness.
Thus the transference turned out to
be one of Freud's most important discoveries. Would I ever have an idea of
comparable importance? Ten years ago, I thought I already had. On December 31,
1899, I excitedly announced it to my father, actually interrupting him in his
study a few hours before the guests would arrive for the New Year's Eve dinner
party my mother always threw. He was quite surprised and, I suppose, irritated
that I would bother him at his work, although of course he didn't say so. I
told him I had made a discovery of potentially great moment and asked
permission to inform him. He tilted his head. 'Proceed,' he said.
Since the dawn of the modern age, I
argued, a peculiar fact held true of all man's supreme revolutionary bursts of
genius, whether in art or in science. Every one of them had occurred at the
turn of a century and - more specifically still - in the first decade of the
new century.
In painting, poetry, sculpture,
natural science, drama, literature, music, physics - in each one of these
fields - which man and which work, above all others, has the best claim to
world-altering genius, the kind of genius that changes the course of history?
In painting, the cognoscenti uniformly point to the Scrovegni Chapel, where
Giotto reintroduced three-dimensional figuration to the modern world. He
painted those frescoes between 1303 and 1305. In verse, surely the crown
belongs to Dante's Inferno, the first great work written in the
vernacular, begun soon after the poet's banishment from Florence in 1302. In
sculpture, there is only one possibility, Michelangelo's David, carved
from a single block of marble in 1501. That same year marked the fundamental
revolution of modern science, for it was then that a certain Nicolaus of Torún
traveled to Padua, ostensibly to study medicine but secretly to continue the
astronomical observations from which he had glimpsed a forbidden truth; we know
him today as Copernicus. In literature, the choice has to be the grandsire of
all novels, Don Quixote, who first tilted at windmills in 1604. In
music, none will dispute Beethoven's pathbreaking symphonic genius: he composed
his First in 1800, the defiant Eroica in 1803, the Fifth by 1807.
This was the case I made to my
father. It was juvenile, I know, but I was seventeen. I supposed it a great thing
to be alive at the turn
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