Grand Austrian Perverts 3: Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) [1]

Photo by Max Halberstadt (c. 1921)

 

A sexual act is perverse if it has abandoned the aim of reproduction 

and pursues the attainment of pleasure as an aim independent of it.

 

 

I. 

 

So far in this series on großen Perversen Österreichs, we have discussed the cases of Arthur Schnitzler and Egon Schiele [2]. 

 

But I could have very easily have selected another writer - Sacher-Masoch, for example - just as I might have chosen another painter as the subject of my study, such as Gustav Klimt. For there are plenty of grand perverts [3] in the world - particularly in the arts - and Austria has its fair share of 'em.

 

This dilemma of choice is just as real within the world of psychoanalysis: Otto Gross and Wilhelm Reich certainly have strong claims to be considered within this series, for example. 

 

However, I've already written a post in memory of the former [click here] and although the latter - with his orgone accumulators and sex-pol clinics, etc. - is certainly an interesting figure, ultimately, one can't help thinking back to the man who initially inspired them both, Sigmund Freud ...

 

 

II.

 

Freud has a good claim on being perhaps the grandest of all grand perverts; one who understood how the inherently perverse nature of human sexuality - and the manner in which the perversions are either repressed or sublimated - is central to the reproduction of heteronormative civilisation.           

 

Although, as a reader of Lawrence and Deleuze, I am obviously not a Freudian, I will always be grateful for his insight that one does not become a pervert; that one is, rather, born such. And that even after healthy adult individuals renounce the polymorphously perverse pleasures of childhood in favour of undeviating genital intercourse, these kinks don't just disappear, but return in a multiplicity of strange forms.   

 

Indeed, for Freud, no matter how necessary it is to repress the perverse aspects of our nature - and no matter how well we sublimate such pleasures (even to the point of neurosis) -  "some perverse trait or other is seldom absent from the sexual life of normal people" [4] - even if this is just the desire to explore the mouth of one's lover with one's tongue in a passionate kiss. 

 

As Freud says, far from being that which transcends perversion, love is that which liberates it: "Being in love [...] has the power to remove repressions and reinstate perversions" [5] - that's what makes it so intensely exciting and feel so dangerous. 

 

It's unfortunate, therefore, that as psychoanalysis developed it became increasingly hostile to perversions and paraphilias. Whether Freud himself was responsible for this, or whether certain reactionary followers appropriated and contained his more radical ideas within a more traditional metaphysical schema, is debatable.     

 

Commentators who wish to stress the revolutionary nature of Freud's project will perhaps give him the benefit of the doubt, arguing that his work subverts traditional theories of sexuality, even if, ultimately, he remains an idealist. Jonathan Dollimore, for example, suggests that Freud's theory of the perversions retains and develops the paradoxes and displacements that give it its dynamic nature [6]. 

 

I think that's true. And I also agree with Dollimore when he writes that Freud is unrelenting in finding perversion "in those places where it is conventionally thought to be most absent" [7] - such as childhood. 

 

For children are not just sexual beings, but their sexuality is quintessentially perverse. Like that of many artists and intellectuals, who retain a certain quality of childlike innocence about them even when exploring illicit desires and forbidden pleasures.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm not - for obvious reasons - going to try and provide full details of Freud's life and work here in this short post; rather, I just wish to discuss his theory of perversion, the aspect of his psychoanalytic project that interests me most. However, for those who would like the very barest of biographical facts ... 

      Born to Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in May 1865, Freud qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna, the city where he lived and worked for most of his life, having set up his clinical practice there in 1886. 

      In 1938, Freud fled Austria to escape Nazi persecution (his books were prominent amongst those burnt in 1933) and he died in London in 1939. 

      As the founder of psychoanalysis, his influence upon Western thought and culture in the 20th-century has been immense and he is often named alongside Marx and Nietzsche as one of the three great masters of suspicion (a term coined by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur). And even if, today, psychoanalysis as a diagnostic and clinical practice is in decline and many of his ideas contested, Freud's writings as a form of fiction-theory, remain of great interest to many scholars across the humanities. 

      As D. H. Lawrence wrote in his Introduction to Fantasia of the Unconscious (1923), we should be grateful that Freud insisted on the importance of the sexual element in our lives: "We are thankful that Freud pulled us somewhat to earth, out of all our clouds of superfineness."   

    

[2] For the post on Schnitzler, click here. For the post on Schiele, click here. 

[3] I am borrowing this phrase from D. H. Lawrence, who, in a letter to Aldous Huxley, once described St. Francis, Michelangelo, Goethe, Kant, Rousseau, Byron, Baudelaire, Wilde and Marcel Proust as grand perverts. Click here for my post on this subject.

[4] Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Vol. 1 in the Pelican Freud Library (Penguin Books, 1973), p. 364. 

 

[5] Sigmund Freud,  On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 11 in the Pelican Freud Library (Penguin Books, 1984), p. 95.

 

[6] Jonathan Dollimore, 'The Cultural Politics of Perversion: Augustine, Shakespeare, Freud, Foucault', originally published in Genders No. 8: (University of Texas Press, Summer 1990), pp. 1-16, but which can now be read in the open access online version of Genders on the University of Colorado website: click here.    

      In this brilliant essay - which has informed my thinking here and elsewhere - Dollimore attempts (amongst other things) to sketch out the far-reaching implications of Freud's theory of the perverse; to show how, at the very least, "a range of central binary oppositions (spiritual/carnal, pure/degenerate, normal/abnormal), oppositions upon which the social order depends, are either inverted, removed, or collapsed into a relational interdependence".

 

[7] Ibid. 

 

Grand Austrian Perverts 2: Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele (1890-1918)

Photo by Anton Josef Trčka (1914)

 

Ich bestreite nicht, Bilder erotischer Natur gemacht zu haben. 

Aber sie sind immer Kunstwerke und den Künstler einzuschränken ist ein Verbrechen.[1] 

 

 

I. 

 

Whilst I have previously expressed my dislike of Egon Schiele's treatment of his devoted muse and lover Wally Neuzil - click here - it would be amiss to write a series of posts on the grand perverts [2] of Austria and not include this brilliant young artist. 

For he may have been a bit of a shit and his concern with marrying advantageously so he could climb the social ladder may make me despise him, but there's no denying that this protégé of Gustav Klimt - another grand pervert in his own right [3] - was a hugely talented figurative painter, whose work is noted (and notorious) for its twisted body shapes and explicit sexual nature.

 

 

II.

 

Egon Leo Adolf Ludwig Schiele was born in Tulln, Lower Austria, in 1890. 

 

As a child, he was fascinated by trains and would obsessively spend his time drawing them. I imagine that this was due more to the fact that his father was in charge of the local railway station, rather than an immature form of siderodromophila, but, who knows, maybe these early sketches did have a fetishistic or erotic component to them, which might help explain why his father one day became so enraged that he destroyed them. 

 

It might also explain why even his schoolfriends found him queer - that and the fact that this shy, reserved young man also had an incestuous desire for his younger sister, Gerti; something else that met with paternal disapproval [4]. 

 

By the time he turned sixteen, it was obvious that Egon had a tremendous talent for drawing and so he was enrolled first at the School of Arts and Crafts in Vienna (where Klimt had once studied) and then at the more traditional Academy of Fine Arts (also in Vienna). 

 

Although he stayed at the latter institution for three years, Schiele despised the ultra-conservative style of painting being taught [5] and so, in 1907, he decided to contact Klimt, who was known to mentor talented young artists. Klimt was so impressed by Schiele, that he not only helped find models and potential clients, but bought some of the young artist's drawings himself.  

 

Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, Schiele's earliest work shows the strong influence of Klimt, although there are also similarities with his slightly older contemporary - and rival - Oskar Kokoschka. However, he soon developed his own distinctive style and, free from the conventions that had been imposed upon him at the Academy, he began to explore (and distort) the human form, particularly in its sexual aspect. 

 

This included some shockingly honest nude self-portraits, including one from 1910 in which  he is seen grimacing, and another, from 1911, in which he is masturbating. Other nude portraits were equally provocative; not least those which featured very young (and very thin) models in sexualised poses, such as Girl with Black Hair (1910), or Nude with Red Garters (1911): see figures 1 and 2 below.

 

Many critics thought the works grotesque and pornographic and soon the authorities would be coming for Schiele, who, perhaps sensing that trouble was brewing, decided to leave Vienna and start afresh elsewhere ...

 

 

III.

 

Schiele and his mistress Wally first moved to the small town of Český Krumlov (German: Krumau), in southern Bohemia. Unfortunately, they quickly upset the locals with their lifestyle and the fact that Schiele tried to employ their young daughters as models. 

 

Obliged to move on, they travelled to Neulengbach, about 25 miles west of Vienna. However, as in Krumau, Schiele's studio became a meeting place for delinquent adolescents and unsavoury artist-types and soon the town's residents were up in arms, the Bürgermeister agreeing that something had to be done. 

 

And so, in April 1912, Schiele's studio was raided by the police who seized more than a hundred works they considered degenerate [6] and arrested him on a charge of seducing a girl below the age of consent (which was then - as now - fourteen in Austria) [7]. Schiele was imprisoned for three weeks while awaiting his trial, during which time he produced a series of twelve paintings depicting life behind bars. 

 

When his case was finally heard, the charge of seduction was dropped. But he was found guilty of exhibiting obscene drawings in a place accessible to children and the judge seemed to take a strange delight in burning one of these offending works over a candle flame in the courtroom itself.   

 

Deciding he really needed to settle down - and tone down the pervy-paedo content of his work - Schiele married in 1915 into a solidly middle-class family, breaking Wally's heart in the process. Despite being conscripted during the War, he continued to work and to exhibit. By 1917, he was back in Vienna and able to focus more fully on his artistic career. 

 

This was, in fact, his most productive period and at the Secession's 1918 exhibition, Schiele had fifty works on display in the main hall. He also designed a poster for the event; a version of the Last Supper, with himself in the role of Christ. The show was a huge success and not only did he receive many new portrait commissions, but prices for his older works dramatically increased.

 

Unfortunately, in the autumn of that same year, the Spanish flu [8] arrived in Vienna: it first killed his wife (who was six months pregnant at the time) and, three days later, on Halloween, it claimed Schiele's life too. Allegedly, his last words were: Der Krieg ist aus, und ich muss gehen ... 

 

Which is a nice line with which to close either a life or a post. 

 

 

Fig. 1: Schwarzhaariger Mädchenakt (1910)

Fig. 2: Akt mit roten Strumpfbändern  (1911)

 

 

Notes

 

[1] For those who don't read German and can't be bothered to have it translated, the lines in English read:  'I do not deny that I have made pictures of an erotic nature. But they are always works of art and to restrict the artist is a crime.'

 

[2] I am borrowing this phrase from D. H. Lawrence, who, in a letter to Aldous Huxley, once described St. Francis, Michelangelo, Goethe, Kant, Rousseau, Byron, Baudelaire, Wilde and Marcel Proust as grand perverts. Click here for my post on this subject.

 

[3] Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), was an Austrian symbolist and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. His primary subject was the female body and his works are marked by what is often rather coyly phrased as a frank eroticism. As he began to develop a more pervy style, his work was increasingly the subject of controversy; this culminated when the paintings he completed around 1900 for the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna were criticized as pornographic.

 

[4] When Egon was sixteen he took his twelve-year-old sister Gerti - by train - to Trieste and spent the night in a hotel room with her. By this time his father had died, of syphilis, and he was technically in the care of his maternal uncle (another railway official).   

 

[5] Schiele's main teacher at the Academy was the German painter Christian Griepenkerl, who specilised in allegorical works based on themes drawn from classical mythology. As well as frustrating Schiele, Griepenkerl was also the man who twice rejected Adolf Hitler's application to study at the Academy in 1907-08. 

 

[6] As Cody Delistraty reminds us in his essay 'Rethinking Schiele' in The Paris Review (3 Dec 2018):

      

"Working at precisely the time that fin-de-siècle decadence and excess was giving way to prewar conservatism, Schiele found that degeneracy would become a key term in his damnation. Degeneracy, of course, was also the term that the Nazis would use to describe so much of modern art, from works by Vincent van Gogh to Paul Klee to Edvard Munch." 

 

This interesting essay, which discusses Schiele's art in relation to questions of pornography and sexual exploitation, can be read online by clicking here. 

[7] Thirteen-year-old Tatjana Georgette Anna von Mossig. Frl. Mossig, from Neulengbach, was the daughter of an esteemed naval officer. I am grateful once more to Cody Delistraty for this information. 

 

[8] Unlike the coronavirus pandemic which caused global hysteria, the Spanish flu pandemic (1918-20) was exceptionally deadly and no one really knows how many people it killed, although estimates vary from 17 million to 50 million (and possibly as high as 100 million). Unusually, whereas the flu usually kills the very young and very old, this strain also had a high mortality rate amongst young adults, such as 28-year-old Schiele. 

 

 

To read the first post in this series on grand Austrian perverts - on Arthur Schnitzler - click here.   

 

To read the third post in this series on grand Austrian perverts - on Freud - click here. 

 

 

Grand Austrian Perverts 1: Arthur Schnitzler

Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) 

Photo by Ferdinand Schmutzer (c. 1912)

 

Ich schreibe über Liebe und Tod. Welche anderen Fächer gibt es?

 

 

I. 

 

If the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler is known at all today in the English-speaking world, it's as the author of the 1926 work Traumnovelle, which was adapted for the screen by Stanley Kubrick as Eyes Wide Shut (1999), starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman [1].  

 

But he deserves, as a grand pervert [2] and pessimist, to be better remembered in my view ...

 

 

II.   

 

Schnitzler was born into a wealthy Jewish family in 1862. His father was a famous laryngologist - not something many people can say - originally from Hungary. And his mother was the daughter of a prominent Viennese doctor. 

 

So, no surprises then, that in 1879 young Arthur Schnitzler should begin studying medicine, qualifying as a doctor in 1885. Although he took up a job in Vienna's General Hospital, his heart wasn't in it: he wanted, rather, to become a writer and would eventually abandon the medical profession and opt for the life of a man of letters. 

 

In 1903, he married Olga Gussmann, an aspiring young actress and singer half his age, who also came from a Jewish middle-class background. The marriage lasted for eighteen years - and the couple had two children - before separating in 1921, ten years before Schnitzler's death.      

 

 

III.

 

As a member of the Austrian avant-garde, Schnitzler happily played with literary and social convention [3] and his works were regarded as controversial; both for their sexually explicit descriptions - much appreciated by Freud - and for their rebuttal of antisemitism.

 

Following the first public performance, in 1920, of his play Reigen (1909) [4], Schnitzler was not only condemned as a pornographer, but attacked in the vilest manner possible for his Jewishness. When asked by an interviewer why all his works betrayed the same perverse obsessions, he replied: 'I write of love and death. What other subjects are there?

 

Perhaps not surprisingly, Hitler was not a fan; describing Schnitzler's work as Jüdischer Dreck and his books were first banned by the Nazis, then burned by the Nazis. 

 

Fortunately, Schnitzler's papers - including manuscripts, letters, and an almost 8,000 page diary in which he recorded full details of his many sexual encounters and experiences - were saved from the flames and eventually ended up in Cambridge University Library.       

IV.

In closing, I'd like to mention Schniztler's philosophical pessimism. 

 

As Byung-Chul Han reminds us, in one famous aphorism, Schnitzler "proposes a relationship between bacilli and the human race" [5] and presents a vision "of an ontological or even a cosmic necessity for the general demise of life" [6]. 

 

It is a vision in which "the secret fate of every individual is to destroy the other" [7], not because of any evil intention to cause harm, but simply because: "Existence as such is already violence." [8]  

 

Notes

 

[1] Kubrick's version of Schnitzler's psycho-sexual fantasy makes significant changes to the original story and its setting; for example, the film takes place in New York in the late 1990s, not in Vienna in the early 1900s. Kubrick also removed all references to the Jewishness of the characters.      

[2] I am borrowing this phrase from D. H. Lawrence, who, in a letter to Aldous Huxley, once described St. Francis, Michelangelo, Goethe, Kant, Rousseau, Byron, Baudelaire, Wilde and Marcel Proust as grand perverts. Click here for my post on this subject.

[3] Schnitzler was a member of Jung-Wien, a society of fin de siècle writers who experimented with the more radical aspects of Modernism, challenging 19th-century realism and moralism, and promoting a politics of desire. Schnitzler was the first writer of German fiction to use stream of consciousness as a narrative mode. He was also a great practitioner of what is now known as microfiction.    

 

[4] Reigen - better known by its French title, La Ronde - was written by Schnitzler in 1897 and privately printed in 1900. It provocatively examines issues to do with class and sexual morality.  

 

[5]  Byung Chul-Han, Topology of Violence, trans. Amanda DeMarco, (Polity Press, 2018), p. 97. 

      The aphorism in question can be found in Arthur Schnitzler, Aphorismen und Betrachtungen, (S. Fischer Verlag, 1967), pp. 177-78. It is quoted in full (and translated into English) in Han's text, p. 97.

 

[6-8] Ibid., Note 41, p. 146.

 

 

To read the second post in this series on grand Austrian perverts - on Egon Schiele - click here.  

 

To read the third post in this series on grand Austrian perverts - on Freud - click here.

On D. H. Lawrence and Oscar Wilde

 

 

I.

 

One hundred years ago today - 26 April 1921 - D. H. Lawrence arrived in the German spa town of Baden-Baden, situated on the edge of the Black Forest, close to the border with France. He was on a visit to his mother-in-law, Frau Baronin von Richthofen. 

 

It had been, he tells one correspondent, a devil of a journey from Italy; one that left him feeling not quite right inside his own skin [1]. Perhaps the curious stillness and emptiness of the place intensified this feeling. And one can't imagine the cold northern air helped matters. 

 

Not surprising then that, although his wife hoped they would be staying for the entire summer, Lawrence is already thinking of leaving in a few weeks; "doubt I shall stand it more than a month" [2]. 

 

Interesting as all this is, what really caught my attention, however, was a remark made in another letter written on the 28th of April, this time to his London publisher: "Alfred Douglas is a louse." [3]  

 

 

II.  

 

Why this remark caught my attention is because, as a matter of fact, Lawrence makes very few references to Oscar Wilde and his circle, only one of whom, Reggie Turner, does he ever meet in person [4]. 

 

Why this is so, we can only guess ...

 

For one thing, of course, it's generational; the world has moved on and, despite being born in 1885, Lawrence belongs very much to the unfolding twentieth-century, rather than the fag end of the nineteenth. Like many others, he finds Wilde's work dated and describes the 1890s as a ridiculous decade - a mix of decadence and pietism [5]. 

 

But it's also a question of temperament. For one suspects that Lawrence - an English puritan at heart - would have found Wilde a little too Irish, a little too queer, a little too affected ... In brief, just a little too much all round. We find traces of this in his characterisation of Wilde as a grand pervert, i.e., someone full of ineffable conceit who tried to "intellectualise and so utterly falsify the phallic consciousness" [6].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Lawrence's letter to John Ellingham Brooks (28 April 1921), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 706.

 

[2] See Lawrence's letter to Robert Mountsier (28 April 1921), ibid., p. 707. In the event, Lawrence and Frieda stayed in Baden-Baden until mid-July.  

[3] See Lawrence's letter to Martin Secker (28 April 1921), ibid., p. 708. 

      Despite the harshness of his description, Lawrence had, when younger, admired some of Douglas's poetry in The City of the Soul (1899): "Alfred Douglas has some lovely verses; he is affected so deeply by the new French poets, and has caught their beautiful touch." 

      See his letter to Blanche Jennings (20 Jan 1909), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 107. 

      Lawrence being Lawrence, however, he can't resist also taking a bit of a pop at Douglas in the same letter immediately afterwards: "the fat-head [...] feels himself heavy with nothing and thinks it's death when it's only the burden of his own unused self". 

 

[4] Lawrence is introduced to Reginald Turner by Norman Douglas in 1919 and he partly bases the character of Algy Constable on Wilde's most loyal of friends in Aaron's Rod (1922).

      References to Wilde in Lawrence's work include, for example, 'The Proper Study', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 170, and 'Introduction [version I] to The Memoirs of the Duc de Lauzun', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 89.

 

 [5] See Lawrence's 'Review of Hadrian the Seventh, by Fr. Rolfe (Baron Corvo)', Introductions and Reviews, p. 239. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Aldous Huxley (27 March 1928), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 342. 

      Wilde finds himself in good company, as Lawrence also brands Goethe, Byron, Baudelaire, and Proust (among others) as grand perverts. 

 

 

For further refections on Lawrence and Wilde, click here.  

D. H. Lawrence and the Grand Perverts

Drawing of D. H. Lawrence by David Levine (1968)

According to D. H. Lawrence, in a letter written to Aldous Huxley, behind all of those whom he identifies as grand perverts, lies "ineffable conceit" and boundless ego.

Figures including St. Francis, Michelangelo, Goethe, Kant, Rousseau, Byron, Baudelaire, Wilde and Marcel Proust, are all guilty of the same thing; namely, "attempting to intellectualise and so utterly falsify the phallic consciousness", says Lawrence.

By this, he seems to mean they get their sex in their heads and barter away the sheer intensity of lived experience for mere representation. In other words, they fall into idealism, into narcissism and into solipsism; "the utter incapacity for any development of contact with any other human being".

But, in as much as phallic consciousness is also "the basic consciousness, and the thing we mean, in the best sense, by common sense", I suppose he's also taking a dig at all those who dare to think differently from those who subscribe to the morality of custom and popular prejudice, or what Lawrence mistakes for an instinctive-intuitive form of folk wisdom. 

 
And this, when you think about it, is not only surprising, but bitterly disappointing. That Lawrence - of all people - should end up defending doxa (that form of truth and goodness which goes without saying and from which we should never deviate) and condemning a host of other writers, artists, and thinkers as perverts (a term used in an admittedly idiosyncratic manner, but still in an essentially negative and pejorative sense), is, if nothing else, an outrageous example of the pot calling the kettle - and every other kitchen utensil - black.   


See: D. H. Lawrence, Letter 4358, to Aldous Huxley, 27 March 1928, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James. T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 342.