Genius of the Modern World

In 1886, a young physician

established a small medical practice in Vienna.

Patients would come to lie on this very couch.

And as he listened, they'd share their innermost fears and anxieties.

Their intimate, very personal stories

would nourish a radical and controversial

new way of understanding our pasts,

our desires, what drives our every action.

Ideas that would take the world by storm.

Because this couch belonged to Dr Sigmund Freud.

The 19th century witnessed unprecedented change.

Transformed by revolutions in industry, science and society.

It was an age that questioned traditional authority

and produced three game-changing thinkers.

Karl Marx attacked the social and economic order.

Friedrich Nietzsche took on Christian morality.

And Freud questioned the very essence of who we are.

Their penetrating, often contentious ways of seeing the world

still shape how we make sense of our lives today.

Sigmund Freud's ideas not only spearheaded a massive leap forward

in how we treat illnesses of the mind,

they also had a pivotal cultural impact.

The freedom we take for granted today to talk openly

about our deepest feelings, from sexual difference to inner demons,

the slogans that power our consumer society,

stem in part from his ideas.

From Freud, we get the notion of the unconscious mind

as a reservoir of irrational, conflicting impulses.

His ideas have become part of our vocabulary.

Penis envy, the pleasure principle, wish fulfilments

and, of course, the Freudian slip.

But Freud's always been controversial.

For some, he's not a genius,

but a charlatan obsessed with sex

whose speculative theories are impossible to prove

and whose methods are positively dangerous.

Freud's ideas still provoke intense debate today.

But what's not in doubt is that his innovative

mapping of the human mind challenged taboos and conventions

in ways that fundamentally changed our conception of self.

To understand how Freud's ideas evolved and how they add up,

it seems appropriate to adopt an approach Freud himself pioneered.

Something that we now take for granted.

To look for the keys for his motivation and character

by exploring his childhood experiences.

When Sigmund Freud was born here in 1856,

the town was called Freiberg, in Moravia.

Part of the Habsburg empire.

Freud was born with a caul.

That's when part of the foetal membrane is still attached to the baby's head.

And in those superstitious times, this was considered a good omen.

Freud's mother certainly interpreted it as a sign that her newborn son

was destined for happiness and fame.

Freud's Jewish parents could only afford to rent a single room in this building.

And family life was complex.

His mother was 20 years younger than his father,

who'd been married before and had two adult sons.

And so one of Sigmund's half-brothers

was even older than his mum.

Sigmund's closest playmate was, in fact, his own nephew.

But they were to be wrenched apart.

Because when Sigmund was three,

his father's small business selling wool collapsed.

Scattering the entire family in search of work.

Life may have been imperfect, but where Freud's family ended up

would prove to be a critical factor

in the future success of the young boy.

Vienna in the 1860s,

imperial capital of the Habsburg empire,

was a city at the forefront of social change.

The Europe-wide revolutions of 1848 had undermined

aristocratic conservative rule here.

Allowing a kind of edgy liberalism to flourish on the streets.

There were also an unusual number of immigrants in the city.

So Freud would have grown up surrounded by a cosmopolitan mix

of voices and cultures.

This is the Jewish district where Freud's family first lived.

It was poor and overcrowded.

But many capitalised on the opportunities that the city offered

and quickly rose from the margins.

They became newspaper magnates and bankers, academics,

doctors and lawyers.

Freud's parents passionately wanted the same

for their clever eldest son.

Of his six siblings, he was the only one given his own room to work in.

And he topped his class for seven years.

The young Freud's intense studies seem to have fed into

his self-image as someone destined for greatness.

He found inspiration in ancient civilisations.

In the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.

And he came to identify with powerful, heroic figures

from history and literature, like Moses

and Hannibal and Alexander the Great.

In 1873, at the age of 17,

Sigmund sought his own glory at Vienna University.

Initially dabbling in philosophy and law, he was soon drawn to

the university's celebrated natural scientists,

and their guiding light, the Englishman Charles Darwin.

Darwin's remarkable, epoch-defining Theory of Evolution

chimed with Freud's desire for kudos and celebrity.

But to match up to his hero meant hours of meticulous,

painstaking, not obviously-glamorous laboratory work.

Trying to unravel the mysteries of the nervous system of fish.

Freud himself said that his studies in anatomy, zoology, chemistry

and botany made him a godless medical man and an empiricist.

And certainly his time here nurtured a scientific worldview

that never left him.

If you look at this picture of him from the time, you can just imagine

the precise, clinical fish-dissector.

A man who seems to be both neat and orderly

in appearance and character.

But aged 25, Freud fell wildly in love with a young woman -

Martha Bernays.

Their early correspondence reveals

an altogether different side to Freud.

There's probably 1,600 letters in all.

Huh! They were writing more or less every day.

Sometimes two or even three letters a day.

Bits have been released of his letters alone,

but this is the first time now that we're seeing her letters.

How brilliant! So we've got Martha's voice, what is she saying?

What does she write about here?

Well, anything and everything.

I mean, in this case, she had just sent Freud a lock of her hair

to put in a little brooch, as lovers do.

And Freud had written back, "I hope you didn't tear it out,

"or did it come out when you were combing?"

So here, in this letter here,

she is taking him to task for his ignorance.

She says, "You're a doctor, you have no idea of the code of love.

"One does not send one's lover ripped-out or combed-out hair."

I suppose this is the first time he's had a full-blown love affair.

It's his first and his only.

And this is one of the things about these letters,

you get an insight into Freud you'll get nowhere else.

And he's losing his control sometimes.

He really is almost on the edge of a nervous breakdown

when he feels they can't go on,

when he feels there's an impossible disagreement between her.

She is for sweeping it under the carpet.

She says, "Why do you wallow around

"in this stuff that makes us miserable?"

And he says, "You have to face it, you have to talk through it."

That's fascinating.

- So it's almost like we've got Freud, the proto-psychoanalyst here. - Yes.

I mean, the psychoanalytic dictum is, say everything that's on your mind.

Don't censor, don't repress. It's there already.

Martha had opened Freud's eyes to a world of demanding human emotion.

And the financial pressures of their engagement saw him

casting around for opportunities beyond the lab.

Eventually, he abandoned his research career to study medicine.

And one day, when he was reading a medical journal,

he came across something that he was convinced would make his name.

In 1884, he wrote to Martha about a magical drug

little known at the time, cocaine.

In this pretty sober analysis, he says,

"I take very small doses of it regularly

"against depression and against indigestion.

"And with the most brilliant success."

But, then, just listen to this, when he's also writing to Martha,

where he sounds suspiciously like he's under the influence.

"Woe to you, my princess, when I come.

"You shall see who is the stronger.

"A gentle little girl who does not eat enough,

"or a big, wild man who has cocaine in his body."

At first, Freud denied that cocaine was harmful.

But his rash endorsement would damage his reputation.

When he gave it to a friend suffering from morphine addiction

in the hope that cocaine would cure him,

the consequences were disastrous.

His friend became as addicted to the new drug as he had been to the old.

Freud did manage to give up cocaine,

but his appetite for experimentation would not be stilled.

He had a new interest - neurology, the study of nervous diseases.

And he made a very canny move,

travelling to the centre of this burgeoning science,

an intellectual hotspot.

This is Salpetriere.

In Freud's day, a kind of medical poorhouse.

A bleak dumping ground for some 5,000 women.

Many of whom were diagnosed as hysterical.

Hysteria, from the Greek word for womb, was a mysterious condition

that was thought to afflict women from the ancient world onwards.

Really, it was just a catchall diagnosis

for all kinds of nervous symptoms.

From fits and paralysis to anxiety and headaches.

And for centuries,

it was a dangerous tool in the hands of male doctors

who were trigger-happy in diagnosing women as hysterical,

to the point where they incarcerated perfectly sane individuals

in hospitals and asylums.

Freud came here to Salpetriere to study with

the pre-eminent pioneer of neurology, Jean-Martin Charcot.

Having discovered that some nervous conditions, like multiple sclerosis,

were the result of lesions on the brain,

Charcot turned his attention to the mysteries of hysteria.

Charcot approaches hysteria more scientifically and more seriously

and doesn't think of it as simply a woman's ailment.

And he sees distinct phases.

He talks about the epileptoid phase, atonic phase, a fit.