The Analysis of Josef Breuer in When Nietzsche Wept

The Freudian Perspective

The provinces of the mind comprise of the ego, the superego, and id according to Freud. The psyche of Josef Bruner presents the id as the component that selfishly seeks pleasure. This manifestation took place in his obsession with his delusional patient called patient Bertha Pappenheim. In the novel, Breuer claims that he is in love with Bertha and is attracted to her sexually, but with the constant aid of Nietzsche, he realizes that he had actually come to make her his getaway from a life with his family and responsibilities unconsciously. Further, Bertha comes along as a dangerous option that gave him the thrills in his overall dull life and an obsession towards sex that aided him in coping with the inevitabilities that come with advanced age. To support this, in one of their sessions, Breuer confessed to Nietzsche: “Before her, I lived within the rules. Today I flirt with the limits of those rules... I think about exploding my life, sacrificing my career, committing adultery, losing my family, emigrating, beginning life again with Bertha… Is Bertha my freedom wish—my escape from the trap of time?” (Yalom, 1992).

This way, Breuer’s id lost contact with the realities of his successful life and marriage; as an alternative, the id kept demanding an escape through rebelliousness and adultery. Moreover, Bertha, an unbalanced patient of Breuer, did not make any sense for Breuer to be involved. However, his mind was engrossed on primeval urges that surfaced in his ego through the discontent he had for his career, wife, and family. In stark dissimilarity to his ego, Breuer’s superego petitioned that he should live up to a moral standard that was higher. Just like the id, the superego remains unrealistic in the demands it places. On the contrary, the superego refuses the id’s urges and consequently sets its own standards. The superego of Breuer preferred that he lived with his wife, Mathilde, in fidelity as in love although their marriage had tremendous issues and an all-purpose dysphoria. The whole novel manifests Breuer’s superego through two pertinent ways. First is the ego-ideal and then followed by the conscious. On the one hand, the conscious mind, which prohibited him from doing acts that bordered on immorality, mandated the non-abandonment of his wife in pursuit of Bertha and a life that was new. Moreover, this same consciousness fought to stop Breuer from having thoughts of infidelity. This is reflected when Breuer says, “In fact, part of the problem is I have so many sexual thoughts about another woman that I feel guilty touching Mathilde,” (Yalom, 1992); indicative of his experience of guilt, as a function of the superego when the moral standards are not met in full (Feist, Feist & Roberts, 2012).

Contrariwise, the ego-ideal, which acted in support and command of his idealistic and moral acts, propelled him to remain loving and highly considerate to his wife. The support for this posit occurs in the novel, whereby, Breuer states, “My loving but concerned wife will be waiting at the window, and I have a duty to be sensitive to her feelings,” while he heads back to the hotel to check on his significant other. Therefore, inasmuch as most of the conflicts came from the id and superego of Breuer, they became understood, processed and implemented through his ego since it was the one that was with reality. Within the provinces of the mind, the encounter between the superego and id took place, which also represented the amoral and moral, the selfishness and selflessness. The ego of Breuer settled for an affair that was inherently emotional and a total secret. Moreover, his ego also accepted the fact that he had a manageable but unhappy life with his medical practice and his wife. With the added pressures of having to satisfy all three of the superego, id, and reality, the ego of Breuer resulted in anxiety, leading him to feel miserable and weighted down by anxiety. Overall, larger parts of the novel displayed Breuer’s dominating id, and his relatively weak superego, making him susceptible to the influences of his id, with little to no considerations for what is proper or possible

Jungian Perspective

The Jungian perspective commenced with Carl Gustav Jung. He singled out eight psychological categories that diverge on two pertinent attributes, which are function and attitude. Jung proposed and described four main consciousness functions, which are the perceiving ones; intuition and sensation; and the judging functions of thinking and feeling (McLeod, 2017). He also proposes that two inherent attitudes govern these functions, which are extroversion and introversion. In Breuer, a basic fundamental attitude surfaces which is that of being an introverted individual. This is exhibited in the novel by the fact that he appears instantaneously responsive to most of the influences made by his inner perceptions, fantasies, and dreams. On various occasions, we see that he fantasized about a world that is characteristically dissimilar from the one he is presently living in; this resulted in his depression and anxiety. In some way, Breuer and Jung experienced comparable midlife crisis experiences that are inherently characterized by an attitude of introversion. In the novel and Jung’s life, both men undergo inner battles with non-realistic perceptions that resulted in increasing tensions within their family and marriage lives. Comparable to Jung, Breuer is seen as an emotional suppressor through his ability to redress his confusion prior to eventually abandoning his medicinal practice. Ultimately, Breuer balances the attitudes of extroversion and introversion within his psyche.

Attitude has the potential of influencing the four innate functions; represented as stated above in the form of thinking, sensing, feeling and intuition. Initially, Breuer comes across as an introverted thinking person since although he reacts to external pressures; he gives major attention to his understandings and outlook on life other than actually processing the fundamental connotations of various external stimuli. A good example is a claim Breuer makes in the novel that he has lived a life that is mundane and for the most part colorless, while he is, in essence, a respectable and successful doctor who has five vigorous children and a wife who loves him and is caring. This shows his introverted thinking, which has a heavy influence on the negative perceptions of life instigated by the midlife crisis and further fueled by the midlife crisis. Breuer also exhibits his introverted feeling attitude through the fact that in his idea of evaluation, he neglects an objective perception but relies on a more subjective understanding. This is explicitly shown in the novel through the fact that he had repeated fantasies of planning to run away with his patient, Bertha. On this instance, Breuer evaluates this idea from a subjective point of view, in that, the beautiful young woman Bertha’s use was to release him, ultimately freeing him from old age, and bring youthfulness to his life.

Thirdly, Breuer showed his introverted sensing nature since his influence on the perception of sound and light comes from subjective outlooks rather than actual realities of sensory stimuli. Here, a good example forms in through the fact that at one point in the novel, he appears to be in a hypnotic trance and looks at his reflection. Seeing wrinkles and an old face, Breuer concentrates on his aging while in the real sense he is still young. This shows that Breuer’s influence originates from a growing and persistent awareness of his unavoidable aging instead of focusing on his present: a subjective perspective that underscores an introverted attitude. Lastly, Breuer shows an introverted intuitive persona. People who are introverted intuitive possess unconscious motives that are sturdy enough to forge decisions that have great corollaries (Beebe, 2012). In Breuer’s personality, this is evident when he was close to giving up his family and life to elope with Bertha for motives that were unclear to him in the first place. Fortunately, in the end, Breuer was able to overcome his fixations and perceptions that were faulty prior to taking irreversible actions that would have been disadvantageous to his whole life.

The Horneyian Perspective

The Horneyan perspective dictates that the fact people move towards people represents three neurotic trends that are pertinent to people who require dealing with their basic anxieties. Breuer’s anxiety is traced back to his childhood when his mother died while young (Horney, 1991). This had detrimental effects on him when he had feelings of loss and intense grief, which in turn caused Breuer to develop anxiety and this was fed by his basic hostility. The neurotic trends displayed by individuals moving towards people is indicative of helplessness. As a small child, Breuer experienced the feelings of helplessness the moment he lost his mother and could not do something to bring her back. In his adolescence, Breuer further felt unconsciously helpless when his father demanded that he should follow designated plans, which made him have a disposition of obliging as opposed to making his own strategies. Therefore, as an adult, Breuer felt inherently helpless while he faced his obsessions, responsibilities, inner conflicts and boring life.

On the other hand, while Breuer exhibited the neurotic trend of moving toward people, it aided him in combating helplessness and anxiety. This particular neurotic trend as interpreted by Horney has its manifestation in the novel from Breuer’s obsession with Bertha. Theoretically, people with this kind of neurotic trend normally like to seek powerful partners (Symonds & Symonds, 1986). Inasmuch as Bertha may not seem a powerful woman, she represented a familiar feeling that Breuer was seeking in her. Breuer liked the freedom he would experience in her; therefore, she was a choice that would have been easier for him to seepage all that he abhorred in his life. Thus, in this particular sense, Breuer moved towards Bertha, trying to persuade himself that he essentially loved her as an excuse to neglect his accountabilities. In addition, Breuer depended on Bertha in fulfilling his world of fantasies and of imagining a new life instead of focusing on the present and making better choices for his future. Since he was an intelligent and successful doctor, Breuer settled on his obsession and made it even more absurd.

This kind of neurotic imbalance is exhibited by the fact that individuals possessing the neurotic trend of moving towards people often subordinate themselves with lesser attractive people or individuals who are less intelligent to make them feel more secure. Moreover, Breuer also sought the approval and respect of others, an inbuilt characteristic among people attempting to move towards others. This kind of manifestation of seeking the approval of others is a strategy that establishes itself due to the seeking of opinions based on self-image and self-esteem. Ultimately, Breuer scores highly on conscientiousness since he was a hardworking and organized doctor who spent his days in the clinic conducting research and treating individuals.

References

Beebe, J. (2012). Psychological Types in Freud and Jung.  Jung Journal ,  6 (3), 58-71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jung.2012.6.3.58

Feist, J., Feist, G., & Roberts, T. (2012).  Theories of Personality  (8th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

Horney, K. (1991).  Neurosis and human growth: The struggle toward self-realization . WW Norton & Company.

McLeod, S. (2017).  Carl Jung | Simply Psychology .  Simplypsychology.org . Retrieved 16 October 2017, from https://www.simplypsychology.org/carl-jung.html

Symonds, A., & Symonds, M. (1985). Karen Horney.  Comprehensive textbook of psychiatry,   1 , 419-424

Yalom, I. (1992).  When Nietzsche Wept . New York: Harper Collins.