100 Volumes of Freud
It has been estimated that Freud wrote between 10,000 and 15,000 letters over the course of his life and that, were there to be a super-complete complete works of Freud, it would grow from its current 24 volume set in the SE to over 100 volumes.
What propelled this drive to write? While there are many answers—ambition, neurosis, castration, all of the above—it is probably best to conclude that such a compulsion is, as Freud himself might have said, overdetermined.
The fact that in matters of literature Freud is something of a dark horse only adds to his mystique and the startling breadth and reach of his literary vision. We think of him as a doctor, a neurologist, a psychoanalyst, rarely as a writer in his own right, failing, or neglecting to read him as we might read his modern contemporaries in literature, Henry James, Kafka, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolfe and so on, writers who are remembered, first and foremost, as Writers. That Freud exists in a kind of literary blind spot, even while, for my money, his early case histories are better than Henry James, and a theoretical text such as Beyond the Pleasure Principle has all of the literary power of its exact contemporary The Wasteland, and none of its religiosity.
We may attribute some of this blind-spot to Freud’s own modesty: raw ambition is revealed only in discrete moments. The manifest content of the work falls under the auspices of science, and not literature. These are papers published in scientific journals; they are books that would grow the limits of knowledge. Lesley Chaimberlain in her book The Secret Artist (2000), claims as much when she says that Freud “neurotically exaggerates doing science, and introjects the totem of its authority, so that instead of being in opposition to this authority, he can say: ‘I am the authority.’ ‘Being a scientist’ in turn helps him suppress the intensity and fluency and playfulness which come to the fore in his writing when he lets go.”
So Freud as scientist overshadows Freud as writer. The science even overshadows the intensity of his compulsion to write from himself. Freud, for his part, was aware of this from early on. In a letter to Fleiss, speaking of a work-in-progress chapter of the Interpretation of Dreams that he had shared, he says that it “completely follows the dictates of the unconscious, on the well-known principle of Itzig, the Sunday rider. ‘Itzig, where are you going?’ ‘Do I know? Ask the horse.’ I did not start a single paragraph knowing where I would end up. It is of course not written for the reader” That Freud did not write for the reader must strike us as odd, considering just how much Freud would be read, reread and closely read again in the coming century; but it is a sentiment that he will repeat elsewhere—Earnest Jones quotes Freud: "nevertheless we write in the first place for ourselves." He writes for his “selves” because in the last instance he is writing his own case study, his self-analysis.
As everyone knows Freud, as the first psychoanalyst, had to analyze himself. He claims this analysis came in the form of a book, namely The Interpretation of Dreams. This book was “a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father's death— that is to say, to the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man's life.” We can well imagine, given his superstitious fixation on his own imminent death, that for Freud the death of his father gave a certain urgency to the time horizon. Freud has been described as a late bloomer; he was 43 when he published the dreambook.
Later on in the book after recounting a dream in which Freud is coolly dissecting his own hips and legs, he says the dream stands for his own self-analysis, which is the dreambook itself; the dreambook is his own dissection. This creates a bewildering kind of chasm, a mise en abyme, by which self-analysis and self-dissection, dream and dreambook, are protracted inside one another endlessly. It makes me think of Freud’s early biological research in which he spent countless hours cutting up eels, looking for their sexual organs. Freud does not mention this, but the reader might interpret his own self-dissecting search for the source of his own neurosis, as a search for the source of psychosexuality itself; that all those hours cutting up eels lead him into a cul-de-sac of his own sexual obscurity.
No surprise that the dreambook begins with the latin inscription from Virgil’s Aenead: “If I can’t call on heaven, I will stir up the underworld.” Aeneas visited his dad in the underworld and so Freud, by his method of letting the horse lead, also travels down to commune with his own recently deceased dad, and in the meantime discovers the Oedipus complex. Whatever Freud’s early feelings may have been for his mother they are too deep to reckon by his method of free-writing. This will be the famous navel of the dream that Freud describes, “the spot where it reaches down into the unknown,” the point at which all interpretation and all writing fails. This point is symbolized by the navel, scar of our organic connection to mother, but also, strangely, by the network of mycelium, representing our ultimate origin, and end, in the cryptic earth.
Much has been written on Freud’s self-analysis and it is beyond the scope of this essay to address this literature here, but suffice to say the obvious, that this self-analysis is a written analysis; and less obviously, that it requires a reader, a “special interlocutor,” as Didier Anzieu says in his book on the topic, Freud’s Self-Analysis (1986). This reader is at once the interlocutor of the thousands of letters Freud wrote; it is Freud himself as reader and editor, as the many revisions of his work can attest, and it is the nameless reader, the future reader who cannot be imagined, but in this particular instantiation is me, myself.
Chamberlain asks the pertinent question that “was Freud not waiting for the reader to psychoanalyze him, given the trail he left? It was one of his most important points about repression that it always left signs.” The trail that the reader follows has been left by Itzig’s horse.
Freud’s voluminous written output, the hundred volumes of Freud, is like a shifting landscape of dunes, in which the hills of moving sand show in negative in their pattern and shape, the shape of the wind, which is the shape of the unconscious. It is Freud’s gift as a writer that this never comes across as TMI, and nor are his dreams ever boring. Freud himself will say that the artist is someone who can transmute their dreams, that would normally be a topic of revulsion in the reader, into a captivating art. The result of such literary mesmerism is that it is as if Freud is tacitly seducing the reader into analyzing him. The dream images in the dreambook are overladen with a kind of significatory fecundity, an associative surplus, like a Kafka story, so that we may analyze Freud to the end of time: interminable analysis indeed.
Taking this associative surplus into account, it stands to reason then that Freud’s self-analysis is not confined to the dreambook, nor even to the Fleiss correspondence, but may be found in his writing entire. His self-analysis amounts to the 100 volume set of collected works. Like the sand dunes, the compulsion to write shows in negative the constant pressures of the drive—or as Freud says of the drive, “the demand for work.”
Jones’s biography has stated that Freud was rarely happy with his written work. “Freud was seldom satisfied with any of his productions: they always fell so far short of what he really had to say, and the topics were so incredibly rich that only a part of them could be expounded in the very little time he had at his disposal for literary work.” To do something repeatedly even though dissatisfying is a pretty good description of compulsion. Freud could not not write. If writing at times is a hell, not to write is a worse hell. “I could only write to free my soul, to release my affect” Freud confesses in one of his 15,000 letters.
The description of the fort/da game played by his grandson makes a nice analogy for his own compulsive writing repetition. To follow the drive to the end of an essay, reeling it in, “Da!” only to find that it is dissatisfactory and throw it away, “Fort!” This helps us locate Freud’s writing compulsion in the domain of mastery, and explicitly the drive to mastery or drive to power (bemächtigungstrieb) that Freud cites in The Economic Problem of Masochism. Dominque Scarfone has said that this particular drive is allostatic, that is, it is an ever increasing passion for more and more, never mind if it is satisfying or not. The dissatisfaction leads to more demand.
Then we can think of Freud’s writing compulsion as a kind of enactment that Freud lets happen—just like his famous description of id and ego as horse and rider, (Itzig and his horse again). “Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id's will into action as if it were its own.” Freud lets his unconscious do the work, carrying him into all of the vicissitudes of the psychoanalytic terrain.
Patrick Mahoney, having written a number of essays on Freud’s writing, has concluded that “writing" was the only endeavor that Freud would give the dignity of the name work. Not reading, nor research, giving lectures nor even seeing patients. Only writing was the true work. So that when Freud claims (somewhere that I have not been able to locate after searching high and low) that the benefit of undergoing psychoanalysis is that one may “get back to work” it is not a career that he’s talking of, but rather the act of doing the work that is demanded by the drive, and expressed in writing; in other words: sublimation.
While Laplanche and Pontalis point out in their entry on sublimation that this concept is a bit underdeveloped in Freud, we may speculate that perhaps Freud did not give much attention to the topic because he was doing it all the time.
Freud’s Desk
