Freud repressed his personality's artistic side

From Lesley Chamberlain's speech given as part of centenary celebrations marking the publication of Freud's 'The Interpretation of Dreams'

By calling Freud the "secret" artist, I mean that he has a kind of talent which is hidden from himself. Freud has artistic gifts, but he represses the artistic aspect of his personality. It is because repression is an unconscious process that Freud can't know about it, any more than his patients can know what they are repressing.

Yet repression always leaves a trail of clues. This is the chief law of Freud's - that what we deny at this deep level will express itself in other ways. Repressed material comes out in neurotic disguise and is signalled by intensity and exaggeration. I believe Freud's drive to express himself is in this indirect way.

Freud is often said to be a good writer, and although a good writer is not necessarily an artistic talent, two features stand out in his Case Studies. He weaves an intriguing, engaging, fantastic story out of multiple points of view, and uses symbols that recur like a Wagnerian leitmotif. Also, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in his sketches of "faulty" human behaviour (shades of John Cleese's Basil Fawlty here), Freud is often ironic and funny, because of how he sees the unconscious working.

Freud wrote best of all, however, when interpreting dreams. He invented a form which I call the double reservoir, with the manifest dream, the one we remember, on the one hand - vivid, brief and passionless - and on the other, the manifest meaning, the real story as Freud creates it. Freud approaches the dream as if it were a poem, and writes something akin to a much longer poem in response. He has an artist's sense of what he can do with words to expand their power.

To judge the artist to be a manipulative egoist seems crass, but, by reading it psychoanalytically, I focus on a form of compensation for what he is denying himself.

I also stress those occasions on which Freud contrasts science and art. He points out that art has already gone where psychoanalysis is heading, that science can never quite do what art does, but ends up hiding his real ambition behind the noble limitation of science.

I note also some circumstantial evidence from his life, as when he was driven wild by suspecting that two artists were his rivals for his later wife's hand. In Freud's view, artists have charm and are sexually successful. This view is expressed in the authoritative The Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.

On another telling occasion, Freud speaks of the artist as a psychological type who has no need to keep his personality under control. No biographer would deny that Freud by contrast was intent on self-control.

But the artist also supplies Freud with a model for self-disguise, which is deeply interesting to him. In The Artist and Creative Imagination he tells us that the artist can disguise nasty thoughts from his own innards by adding the component of pleasure. Science, he reminds us on another occasion, does offer work as a parallel to art - but it is purged of pleasure.

I suggest that it is the pleasure of releasing his deepest, socially unacceptable wishes through artistic expression that Freud is repressing, and that his "scientific" system is already a neurotic substitute for a potential artistic vision.

Freud was the owner of several homoerotic and incestuous fantasies he ascribed to others, and self-analysis made him yearn to express them. Had he had the talent, they might have been embodied in a novel, but instead they became the foundation of a "scientific" system.

That Freud in his official view of art should then reduce the artist's transformative power to socially advantageous self-disguise, and reduce the rest of us - yearning for the artist's kind of sexual and social success - to victims of pen-envy, suggests to me that Freud was always disturbed by the path to glory that he didn't choose.