Copyright Todd C. Riniolo, 2012. Cover by Todd C. Riniolo.  Dr. Riniolo is a Professor of Social Sciences at Medaille College (Buffalo, NY, USA).

This book is dedicated

(in no particular order) to the following:

To Katie Bear,

to Tommy Tunes,

to Angela Hogwarts,

and to Dobby.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1:  BELIEVE IT OR NOT: HISTORY DOES NOT HAVE TO BE BORING

Chapter 2:  RECONSTRUCTING THE PAST: AN INTRODUCTION TO HISTORICAL RESEARCH

Chapter 3:  HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION: PITFALLS THAT CAN MISLEAD

Chapter 4:  SEPARATING HISTORICAL FACTS FROM HISTORICAL FICTION (PART 1): THE CASE OF ANNA O.

Chapter 5:  SEPARATING HISTORICAL FACTS FROM HISTORICAL FICTION (PART 2): FREUD’S “MAGICAL SUBSTANCE”

Chapter 6:  FREUD COMES TO AMERICA!

Chapter 7:  THE POPULARIZATION OF FREUD IN AMERICA: HOW POPULAR WAS HE?

Chapter 8:  BECOMING A HOUSEHOLD NAME IN EARLY 20TH CENTURY AMERICA: SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT FREUD

Chapter 9:  THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY: THE SENSELESS MURDER OF ROBERT FRANKS

Chapter 10:  THE LEOPOLD AND LOEB TRIAL

Chapter 11:  THE IMPORTANCE OF THE LEOPOLD AND LOEB TRIAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY

Conclusions

Appendix A

Appendix B

References

Acknowledgements

Footnotes

Introduction

For those of us living in the 21st century, Sigmund Freud has always been a cultural icon.  And his fame shows no signs of diminishing anytime soon, as Freudian allusions have appeared in a variety of popular television programs (e.g., Frasier, Gilligan’s Island), movies (e.g., Analyze This, Psycho), and books (e.g., Lord of the Flies, The Prince of Tides).  The Freudian couch even appears in an episode of the popular children’s cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants.  This has not always been the case though, and in the early 20th century the American public did not recognize Freud’s name and was not especially interested in psychoanalysis.  The interesting question of exactly how Freud achieved his iconic status is rarely, if ever, asked today.  Like others who first achieved widespread fame early in the 20th century (e.g., Babe Ruth, Harry Houdini, Al Capone, the Titanic), Freud’s presence in our cultural experience is taken for granted, perhaps because it now seems that Freud has always been with us.  In this book, I will bring the issue to the forefront, asking the intriguing but often overlooked question: exactly how did Freud first become a household name in America?

Unfortunately, giving the precise date when most Americans first began to recognize Freud’s name is not possible.  Other writers have provided evidence indicating that Freud initially achieved widespread fame in America sometime around his first appearance on the cover of Time magazine, which was October 27, 1924.  I believe this assessment is accurate, and I know of no compelling evidence demonstrating that Freud was widely known prior to this time frame.  In the first half of 1924, interest in psychoanalysis and Freud was largely limited to specialized groups.  Some academics and other intellectuals knew of Freud, for example.  So did individuals undergoing their own personal analysis.  There were even some popular magazines, including Good Housekeeping, Harpers, Everybody’s Magazine, McClure’s, and Ladies’ Home Journal, that published articles about psychoanalysis for their readers.  But again, even given this limited exposure, we cannot say that Freud’s work was widely known at this time.

So how did interest in psychoanalysis spread from specialized groups to the general public, and how did Freud become truly famous?  The answer to this question may surprise some readers.  It is my conclusion that Freud’s rise to fame with the American public began with events that occurred during the summer of 1924.  Specifically, two very bright young men from extremely wealthy Chicago families committed a premeditated murder, apparently just for fun.  Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, 18 and 19 years old respectively, brutally attacked and murdered 14-year-old Robert Franks in America’s first thrill killing, which has been labeled “the Crime of the Century.”  During the murder trial, testimony from Freudian psychoanalysts became front-page news across the country, as the expert witnesses attempted to explain why the senseless murder occurred.  Just as the more recent O. J. Simpson murder trial provoked massive media coverage and widespread public interest, the Leopold and Loeb trial dominated American news coverage during the summer of 1924.  And just as the Simpson trial introduced the science of DNA evidence to a wider audience, the Leopold and Loeb trial introduced Freud’s ideas to the general public.

Ultimately, the Crime of the Century changed the context for remembering Freud’s name.  The American public quickly became immersed in the importance of early childhood events, abnormally developed egos, unconscious motivations and fantasies, and so forth.  Now it was not just academics and intellectuals who were interested in the concepts and principles of psychoanalysis, but the nurse from Seattle, the housewife from Kansas City, and the mechanic from Buffalo.  Everyone became engrossed in this New Psychology of Freud during the summer of 1924.  And once psychoanalysis captured the universal attention of Americans, it would not be long before the father of psychoanalysis would earn his iconic status.

For Whom Was This Book Written, and Why Was it Written?

I have just provided a brief historical interpretation that the Leopold and Loeb case played a central role in first capturing widespread public interest in psychoanalysis; as a consequence, Freud became a household name in America.  At the time of this writing, this interpretation cannot be found in any textbook or academic journal related to the history of psychology.  Thus, this book was written in part for scholars, because it provides additional historical information about the popularization of psychoanalysis in America and a new interpretation of how Freud first became universally famous.

Because of the subject areas covered, this book was also written for readers who are passionate about history, psychology, psychoanalysis, and true crime.  And yet there is still one more audience I hope to reach.  Specifically, this book was also written for the reader who needs to learn more about critically evaluating my (or any other) interpretation of historical events.  As a college professor, I have found that many students passively accept historical interpretations without demanding supporting evidence and without critically evaluating the quality of the evidence before them.  Many of my students seem stunned to learn that history books sometimes contain interpretations that are not fully accurate, or even just plain false.  This may be because most historical accounts are solely focused on providing historical information (i.e., facts and interpretations).  This focus assumes that readers already understand both the process of recreating the past and the need to critically evaluate such historical recreations.

My book does not make this assumption, but instead tries to teach readers about the critical evaluation of historical interpretation.  Thus, another primary focus of this book is to teach the process of history and provide the reader with the tools to critically evaluate historical interpretations.  Students should leave a history course with a clear understanding that historical interpretations should not be confused with historical facts, and I have provided many examples that reinforce this important lesson.  Since Freud and his followers actively attempted in some instances to distort history and put the father of psychoanalysis in a better light, Freud’s past provides many wonderful examples that demonstrate why critical evaluation is so important.  Finally, because a stereotype that “history is boring” currently exists for some students, I actively attempt to counteract this misconception because we all are more likely to practice and retain skills when we are interested in the material.  My hope is that this approach will benefit college students and anyone else interested in the process of historical research.

Structure and Content of the Book

The structure of the book is as follows.  Chapter 1 focuses on a fascinating scandal that is particularly useful for students who have a negative view of history, but who may be assigned portions of this book to read for class.  Thus, Chapter 1 emphasizes that learning about history does not have to be boring. To achieve this goal, I introduce the sexual scandal that rocked the academic world in 1920 and resulted in the firing of the most prominent experimental psychologist of the time, Dr. John B. Watson.  Watson’s case also provides context because experimental psychology and psychoanalysis were then involved in an intense battle to be the true science of the mind.  Watson also had strong opinions about Freud and his theories, and these ideas will be briefly presented in Chapter 1 as well.

Chapter 2 discusses the process of reconstructing the past.  I have already stated that the Leopold and Loeb trial furthered American public interest in psychoanalysis, which was in turn necessary for Freud to become a household name.  Yet, what type of evidence is used to make such a claim, or any claim, for something that happened many years ago?  And how confident should the reader be in accepting this or any other historical interpretation?  Chapter 3 will focus on how historical interpretations can go wrong, as the individual who attempts to interpret history faces many obstacles that can ultimately interfere with a correct conclusion (e.g., preconceived views, misleading data, lost or destroyed data).

Chapter 4 shifts to the celebrated case of Anna O., the founding case of psychoanalysis, while Chapter 5 reviews Freud’s advocacy of cocaine.  Both chapters were included because they provide important background information about Freud and reinforce the material covered in the first three chapters.  Both chapters also expose the reader to a theme that will reoccur in this book: sometimes there is a difference between Freudian legend and what the historical evidence actually indicates.  Freud has sometimes been presented in a better light than he should have been, and he was conscious of maintaining a certain image at the expense of historical accuracy.

Chapter 6 will discuss two major topics.  First, I review some of Freud’s important works that were published after the Anna O. case.  The “Seduction Theory” controversy will receive special attention here and provide another example of the importance of critically evaluating historical interpretations.  I will also review Freud’s first and only trip to the United States, when Freud was invited to give a series of lectures at Clark University’s 20th Anniversary celebration in 1909.  This trip is a significant factor in explaining Freud’s early popularity with American academics and intellectuals.

Chapter 7 discusses the popularity of Freud’s ideas in America between his 1909 Clark lectures and the Leopold and Loeb trial of 1924.  Additionally, I review Freud’s desperate need for money that led to a failed public relations scheme and the tragic breakup of two marriages.

In Chapter 8, I discuss some of the ways in which widespread popularity generally occurred in America during the early part of the 20th century.  And because Freud personally did not receive massive media attention, I also discuss here how memory works, since I ultimately argue that Freud could not have become a household name until his theories were presented to the general public in a context that was personally relevant to them (as during the Leopold and Loeb trial).  Also, I evaluate a common interpretation that Freud’s becoming famous was inevitable because of the “power of his ideas.”   This interpretation ignores the impact of important historical events.

Chapter 9 introduces and summarizes the main points of the Leopold and Loeb case prior to the formal beginning of the trial.  I focused not only on the important details of the case, but on the intense media coverage generated by this trial.  Likewise, I point out some of the many useful resources for readers who want additional information about the Crime of the Century.

Chapter 10 focuses on the actual trial and how the media portrayed what occurred inside the courtroom.  Especially important for this portion of the book is the testimony and media coverage of the Freudian psychoanalysts (i.e., alienists), who would first introduce the general public to Freudian terminology and the “New Psychology” of Freud that ultimately captivated the nation.

In Chapter 11, I restate my historical interpretation of how Freud became a household name in America, which is consistent with the version provided in this introduction.  I will remind the reader (see Chapters 2 & 3) that historical interpretations on such issues should not be confused with historical facts, and that interpretations can be wrong.  Here the reader is encouraged to critically evaluate my interpretation, and to find the weaknesses in my supporting evidence.  In addition, I also discuss other interpretations of Freud’s American fame, noting that just a handful of authors have commented on the importance of the Leopold and Loeb trial as it relates to the history of psychology.  Finally, I provide a few final thoughts in my Conclusions chapter, and point out rumors of another sexual scandal for readers who wish to critically evaluate this fascinating historical claim.

With respect to content, I reference my statements throughout for readers who want to find out more information about a specific issue or to double-check my interpretation.  For example, when I argue that Freud’s book sales could not have made him famous because his books sold only a very limited number of copies prior to the summer of 1924 (see Chapter 11), I provide the reference to support the statement.  Also, when possible, I reference additional resources to help interested readers learn more about specific topic areas.  For example, some of the psychiatric testimony given by Leopold and Loeb to the defense alienists (the generic term used in 1924 to describe an expert witness testifying about the mental state of a criminal defendant) is available to download on the internet.

How Should the Book be Read?

While I suspect that some readers may want to pick and choose from among the various chapters here, I would recommend reading the book in order from start to finish.  This advice is especially useful for the reader with a limited background in history because some lessons will carry over from one chapter to the next, and some important points are reemphasized later in the book.  The one exception would be for the reader who wishes to learn more about the Leopold and Loeb Case immediately.  In this instance, I would recommend starting with Chapters 9 and 10, then returning to Chapter 1 and reading the rest of the book in order.

One Final Issue

Why is this book focused solely on Freud’s popularity in America?  Surely Freud has become famous across the globe, so why not extend our discussion to other countries as well?  First, the decision to limit the scope of this book to the United States was a practical one.  If the discussion were extended to other countries, the book quickly would have become unmanageable.  However, given the massive amount of publicity generated around the world by the Leopold and Loeb trial, its importance in popularizing Freud is likely to generalize to other countries as well (particularly Canada and the United Kingdom).  I will leave the investigation of these issues to others.  The second reason for limiting our discussion to the U.S. is that no other country in the early portion of the 20th century embraced Freud and his theories more enthusiastically than America.  For those reasons, then, this book limits itself to Freud’s popularization in America.

Chapter 1:  BELIEVE IT OR NOT: HISTORY DOES NOT HAVE TO BE BORING

Many students’ first exposure teaches them that history is a boring subject area in which nothing more is learned than the memorization of facts (e.g., Thomas Jefferson was the third President of the United States).  Even in the Harry Potter books, the one magical subject that is always portrayed as dull is the history course.  Unfortunately, too often, this initial experience perpetuates into adulthood.  The purpose of this chapter is to counteract this negative view of history, while also providing some necessary background information that will be useful later in the book.

Related Information: The Battle Between Psychology and Psychoanalysis

Prior to presenting a case to counteract the history is boring stereotype; I will provide needed background information on the relation between psychology and psychoanalysis in the early 20th century.  This material will be helpful not only for this chapter, but later in the book when the popularization of psychoanalysis in the early portion of the 20th century is discussed in greater detail (see Chapter 7).  In the period from Freud’s American visit in 1909 leading up to the Leopold and Loeb murder trial during the summer of 1924, psychology as an experimental discipline and psychoanalysis were unmistakably distinctive as they shared little in common.  Yet, both psychologists and psychoanalysts viewed themselves as the legitimate scientists of the mind.  An intense and sometimes nasty battle for dominance ensued that extended well past 1924.  As Hornstein (1992, p. 254) writes, “There is no easy way to talk about psychology’s relations with psychoanalysis.  It is a story dense with disillusionment and the shapeless anger of rejection.  Each side behaved badly, and then compounded its insensitivity with disdain.  Their fates bound together like Romulus and Remus, psychology and psychoanalysis struggled to find their separate spheres, only to end up pitted against one another at every turn.”  For a more detailed discussion than presented below, I refer the reader to Gail Hornstein’s (1992) article, “The Return of the Repressed: Psychology’s Problematic Relations With Psychoanalysis, 1909-1960.”

Let’s start with the beginnings of psychology in America, not to be confused with psychoanalysis.  In the late 19th and early 20th century, psychology in America attempted to break from its philosophical roots and establish itself as an experimental science.  American universities hired faculty to teach what was called in the popular press (e.g., newspapers, magazines) the “New Psychology” and establish experimental laboratories.  Unfortunately, psychology’s image with the general public from the very beginning in the United States gave the wrong impression.  Psychology was viewed as just another pseudoscience, not as an experimentally oriented discipline that used the scientific method for inquiry.  As Benjamin (1986, p. 941) notes, “The public’s equation of psychology with clairvoyance, mind reading, and spiritualism was understandably disturbing to this early generation of experimental psychologists.”  Those outside of the discipline had little understanding of exactly what psychologists did, which persists to some degree today.

Leading up to the summer of 1924, the new experimental psychology developed inside of American universities and progressed through several schools of thought (structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism).  The most popular movement among the academic experimental psychologists by the 1920s was behaviorism, which focused on objective quantification of observable behavior and a repudiation of subjective interpretation.  Behaviorists did not believe that it was possible to understand underlying causes, but instead focused upon what they could objectively view.  Experimental psychology over the years had also transitioned from solely a pure science in the early days of structuralism into a more applied science.  Psychologists were now attempting to take results from laboratory experiments and apply them to real-world situations and problems in order to improve quality of life (e.g., education, child rearing, business).

By the early 1920s, psychology became popular with many Americans because of its potential to solve everyday problems and a belief that “the science of psychology held the keys to prosperity and happiness” (Benjamin, 1986, p. 943).  This enthusiasm did not last long as the Stock Market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression arrived, and experimental psychologists provided no answers for the important problems that ensued.  Psychologist John B. Watson, who will be the focus of the example that history does not have to be boring below, was the most prominent individual of the behaviorist movement.  Perhaps more than any other psychologist, Watson helped to popularize interest in the “New Psychology” with portions of the general public.

While many individuals enthusiastically embraced the application of psychology to the lives of everyday citizens, not everyone was enamored with this trend.  Humorist Stephen Leacock noted in an article published in Harpers in March, 1924, “that America was suffering from an unfortunate “outbreak of psychology”” (cited in Benjamin & Dixon, 1996, p. 461).    In the same Harpers article, Leacock wrote (cited in Benjamin, 1986, pp. 943-944):

In the earlier days this science was kept strictly confined to the colleges. . . . It had no particular connection with anything at all, and did no visible harm to those who studied it. . . .  All this changed.  As part of the new researches, it was found that psychology can be used . . . for almost everything in life.  There is now not only psychology in the academic or college sense, but also a Psychology of Business, Psychology of Education, a Psychology of Salesmanship, a Psychology of Religion . . . and a Psychology of Playing the Banjo. . . .  For almost every juncture of life we now call in the services of an expert psychologist as naturally as we send for an emergency plumber.  In all our great cities there are already, or soon will be, signs that read “Psychologist—Open Day and Night.”

In summary, the “New Psychology” was experimentally oriented and had its roots in academia.  It developed a certain amount of visibility with the general public during the early 1920s that appeared to be at its peak just before the Leopold and Loeb trial during the summer of 1924.  Exactly how many, how much, or how accurately Americans knew about psychology at this time in history is difficult to pinpoint.  Surveys about what the public knew about psychology would not begin until the 1940s (Benjamin, 1986).  It seems probable that those in academia, the well-educated, and readers of popular magazines that included coverage of psychology were the most likely to have familiarity at this point, as opposed to the public at-large.

What about psychoanalysis? Where does it fit in the early portion of the 20th century in relation to the academic experimental psychologists such as John Watson?  When psychoanalysis arrived in America (largely propelled by Freud’s American visit discussed in Chapter 6), its proponents attempted from the very beginning to supplant experimental psychology as the true science of the mind.  The academic experimental psychologists were not initially worried.  As Hornstein (1992, p. 255) points out, “psychologists initially saw psychoanalysis as just another of the “mind cures” that flashed across the American landscape… .”  Psychoanalysis at this point in time was confined almost exclusively to practitioners in clinical and medical settings, as academic posts at American universities were held by experimental psychologists.  The psychoanalysts, as far as academic positions were concerned, were on the outside looking in, and psychologists wanted to keep it that way.

Over the years, there was some quarrelling that took place between psychologists and psychoanalysts in academic journals and the popular press as both groups believed they possessed the true avenue to understanding the human condition.  The experimental psychologists argued that there was nothing at all scientific about psychoanalysis as it was solely based on personal experience, which was highly subjective, making it nothing more than “nonsense” or a “fairytale.”  In contrast, psychoanalysts claimed “that being psychoanalyzed was what made someone a credible scientist” (Hornstein, 1992, p. 256).  From the very beginning, there has been tension between experimental psychologists and psychoanalysts, as both groups viewed the world through a different perspective.  There still exists today a similar tension between research psychologists, who believe in the power of experimental methods to approximate truth, and mental health professionals, who are more likely to rely upon their clinical judgment and personal experience.

Psychoanalysis, like experimental psychology, also received some coverage in the popular press (see Chapter 7).  Just like with psychology, exactly how many everyday citizens knew about psychoanalysis and how accurate was their knowledge is difficult to estimate.  Here it is worthwhile to point out that both psychoanalysis and psychology were also battling over gaining recognition with some segments of the general public (e.g., the well-educated, readers of popular magazines).  Interestingly, psychoanalysis was also referred to in the media as the “New Psychology,” just as experimental psychology was called the “New Psychology.”  It is likely that the use of the same title in popular media reports was at least partially responsible for creating and furthering the confusion among the general public about what exactly a psychologist was in the 1920s as opposed to a psychoanalyst.  Much to the dismay of the psychologists, most of the general public would eventually come to view psychology and psychoanalysis as the same thing.

More importantly, after the Leopold and Loeb trial, the New Psychology of Psychoanalysis had so captured the attention of the American public that it clearly won the long term war for public recognition.  Specifically, the public image of psychology today is not the experimental researcher, but the clinician.  Although beyond the scope of this book, it would not be long before psychoanalysts would not only capture the imagination of the public and psychoanalysis became dinner conversation in American homes across the country, but the public would begin to request universities start teaching this version of the New Psychology (i.e., psychoanalysis).  For better or worse, psychoanalysis would receive its representation in colleges and universities across the country which persists into modern times.

The focus of my example that history does not have to be boring will center on the above mentioned psychologist John B. Watson.  Watson, the leader of the behaviorist movement and a leading academic experimental psychologist, had a long interest in Freud and psychoanalysis.  Rilling (2000) makes an insightful point that while both men were two of the most influential individuals in the history of psychology, they are almost never discussed together.  This omission is peculiar because Watson and Freud were the “leaders” of psychology and psychoanalysis respectively, which were ultimately engaged in a battle for supremacy both scientifically as well as obtaining public recognition in the early 20th century.  While Watson was initially intrigued by Freud’s theories, he ultimately “emerged as an arch anti-Freudian” (Rilling, 2000, p. 302).  A few examples of Watson’s anti-Freudian views will be provided below as the scandalous story of Dr. Watson unfolds.

The Interesting and Scandalous Psychologist, John B. Watson

Here is the important information to begin the example with.  “In 1974, a story was published about clandestine research done by John B. Watson that was judged to be so reprehensible that it was offered as the real reason he was fired from his faculty position at Johns Hopkins University in 1920, at perhaps the peak of his academic career” (Benjamin et al., 2007, p. 131).  Not only was Watson fired, he was blackballed from obtaining another University position and never again entered academia.

Professor Watson was unlike the stereotype that we have of the unattractive old professor.  The best concrete example I can provide is that John Watson was in many ways like the famous movie character Indiana Jones, played by Harrison Ford.  Both were not only college professors, but young, charismatic, handsome, and even had their students fall in love with them.  For example, early in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, there is a classroom scene where Dr. Jones is lecturing to his students.  Many of the female students were gazing lovingly at him during the lecture, and one even wrote the words “love” and “you” on her eyelids, which became quite apparent when she closed her eyes.  Similarly, when Watson was 25, one of his students wrote “a long love poem to Watson on one of her examination papers.  It is not known what grade she got, but she did get Watson” (Schultz & Schultz, 2008, p. 298).  The student was Mary Ickes who would subsequently become Watson’s first wife.  Mary was from a prominent and politically connected family, and her brother would later become President Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior.

Moreover, the handsome Dr. Watson had the well-deserved reputation as a real life Don Juan, and he had no inhibitions about sharing his sexual escapades with others.  The historian John Burnham (1994), who had interviewed Watson when Watson was 76 years old, provides a fascinating account.  Specifically, Burnham notes that he interviewed many individuals who knew Watson personally.  When trying to gather information about Watson’s work relevant to the history of psychology, Burnham reports that the conversation typically turned into a recounting of Watson’s romantic adventures.  Based upon his interviews with family, friends, and those who worked with Watson, Burnham surmised that Watson may have been one of the greatest lovers the world had ever seen.

Also, Watson was so popular with his students, that the first year he was a professor at Johns Hopkins University; the students dedicated their yearbook to him (see Riniolo, 2008, for further details).  Schultz and Schultz (2008, p. 299) have also reported that the students at Hopkins “voted him the handsomest professor, surely a unique accolade in the history of psychology.”  Interestingly, the year after Watson arrived at Hopkins, the chair of the psychology department, James Baldwin, was forced to resign because a police raid found him at a Baltimore brothel.  The story was initially suppressed by the media, but ultimately came to light when Baldwin was attempting to gain a position on the local school board.

John Watson was not only a handsome and charismatic professor, a legendary playboy, but he was without question one of the most influential individuals in the history of American psychology.  His paper published in 1913 in the journal Psychological Review, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” was the article that initially defined and ultimately propelled the behaviorist movement that would come to dominate American psychology for the next 50 or so years.  Watson’s behaviorism viewed psychology as an objective science that should only quantify behavior, and should not attempt to describe mental processes.  The goal of behaviorism was the prediction and control of behavior.  Many readers have heard of Watson because of his famous “Little Albert” study, in which he and his young graduate assistant Rosalie Rayner used Pavlovian classical conditioning to produce fear responses (i.e., phobic responses) in a well-adjusted and good tempered 11-month old infant (Watson & Rayner, 1920).  Albert’s mother, however, removed her child from the study prior to the researchers attempting to remove the conditioned responses.  Whatever happened to little Albert remains one of the great mysteries in the history of psychology (see Beck, Levinson, & Irons, 2009, for an extensive attempt to identify the boy).

As mentioned earlier, Watson had a long interest in Freudian theory (see Rilling, 2000).  Perhaps Watson’s most sarcastic criticism of Freud occurs on the last page of the little Albert article when the authors theorize how Albert would be diagnosed by Freudian therapists (Watson & Rayner, 1920, p. 14):

The Freudians twenty years from now, unless their hypotheses change, when they come to analyze Albert’s fear of a seal skin coat—assuming that he comes to analysis at that age—will probably tease from him the recital of a dream which upon their analysis will show that Albert at three years of age attempted to play with the pubic hair of the mother and was scolded violently for it.  (We are by no means denying that this might in some other case condition it).  If the analyst has sufficiently prepared Albert to accept such a dream when found as an explanation of his avoiding tendencies, and if the analyst has the authority and personality to put it over, Albert may be fully convinced that the dream was a true revealer of the factors which brought about the fear.

In summary, the historical evidence indicates that Watson was not just an average run of the mill professor, but a very influential academic who was at the peak of his career when a monumental scandal would erupt.  In fact, Johns Hopkins University, in an attempt to keep Watson from moving to a different institution, had recently substantially increased his salary (Buckley, 1989).  By 1920, John Watson was a superstar within the academic world at the peak of his career.

As previously described, Watson had the well-deserved reputation as a playboy.  Even early in his marriage to Mary Ickes, Watson had an affair that would embitter his wife towards him.  Just prior to John and Mary’s courtship, Watson had been pursuing Miss Vida Sutton, who moved away from Chicago.  Watson was teaching at the University of Chicago where he received his Ph.D before landing a position at Johns Hopkins.  When Miss Sutton returned to Chicago a few years later, she and Watson were regularly seeing each other, and this was discovered by Mary’s brother, Harold Ickes, who had hired a private investigator to follow Watson when he became suspicious of his brother-in-law.  Watson would later write to a colleague in 1910, early after his arrival at Johns Hopkins University, that his wife Mary, because of his conduct, “no longer cared for [him]” (cited in Buckley, 1989, p. 123) and she “instinctively loathes my touch” (cited in Buckley, 1989, p. 124).  The Watsons’ marriage during their time at Hopkins was not happy, and Watson suspected his wife was having an affair.  I know of no conclusive evidence to validate that Mary was unfaithful to her husband, but Watson believed, true or not, that this was a possibility.

Back to the graduate student, Rosalie Rayner, who had worked with Watson on the “little Albert” experiment.  The Rayner family was a very prominent one in Maryland, as Rosalie’s grandfather had built a fortune as a successful business man and her Uncle had served in the United States Senate.  The Watsons’ had become social friends with the Rayner family and were frequent guests at the Rayner home.  This likely occurred as a cover, as the 42-year-old Watson and his 21-year-old student were having a torrid love affair.  Watson’s wife ultimately became suspicious, and one evening she snuck into Rosalie’s bedroom and took  “a number of her husband’s letters that Rosalie had concealed in a bureau drawer” (Buckely, 1989, p. 125)  Mary took the letters to her brother (John Ickes), who received legal advice that this evidence could be used as leverage in divorce proceedings.  In addition, Watson notes that the letters were also being used in an attempt “to extort a considerable sum from the Rayner family” (Buckely, 1989, p. 125).

Thus, Johns Hopkins University had another scandal on its hands from the chair of the psychology department as the previous chair was forced to resign when it became public knowledge that he had visited a brothel.  The university administrators were initially considering an alternative to termination of Watson, as he was an elite professor with an impressive academic record who certainly added to the prestige of the University.  Perhaps because Watson believed there was no way that Hopkins would fire one of their most respected, popular, and influential professors, Watson not only continued to see Rosalie, he made no attempt to conceal the relationship.  Add into the equation that Rosalie’s grandfather had given the University a ten thousand dollar gift, a substantial amount of money at the time, and he was not pleased with the scandalous and public conduct of Dr. Watson that involved his granddaughter.  Watson’s wife, who had been publicly embarrassed by her husband’s conduct had no intention of going away quietly, also came from a prominent family with political connections.  All of these factors must have influenced the ultimate decision of the president of Johns Hopkins University about what should happen to Watson.

In October, 1920, John Watson, one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century, was fired.  When his divorce trial occurred in November, 1920, it received newspaper coverage, which emphasized the “juicy” details of the divorce.  Mary’s brother had photographs taken of the letters she had taken from Rosalie’s bedroom which subsequently became evidence at the divorce proceedings.  Portions of the love letters were published in the Baltimore Sun, and the Watsons’ divorce became national news.  Here is a sample of the love letters that John Watson had written to Rosalie.  These quotes appeared in the Sunday morning edition of the Baltimore Sun (November 28, 1920, p. 10):

I just think I’ll die if I don’t hear from you.  If I thought you were in I’d call you, dangerous as it is.  Every time the phone rings I know I’ll jump from my chair.  My heart will be in my throat, but I can listen, anyway.

Darling, every one wants you to stay, but do write me that no matter how long you stay away your heart and body will still be mine.  They can’t break it now, can they?  Only a change in one of us can do that, and I know every cell I have is yours, individually and collectively.  My total reactions are positive and toward you. So likewise each and every heart reaction.  I can’t be more yours than I am, even if a surgical operation made us one.

Well, I’ve made enough love in one day to a girl so young.  You might grow weary in reading so much.  I am so mad whenever I get to the end of your letters—are you that way? Could you kiss me for two hours right now without ever growing weary? I want you all 24 of the hours, and then I’d quarrel with the universe because the days are not longer.  Let’s go to the North Pole where the days and nights are six months each.

This unwanted publicity effectively ended any hopes Watson may have had of securing a new position in academia as a psychology professor.  Watson’s divorce became official on Christmas Eve, 1920, and John Watson and Rosalie Rayner were married just a few days later on New Year’s Eve.  By all accounts, John and Rosalie had a happy marriage.  Unfortunately, Rosalie died suddenly in 1935 of pneumonia, and Watson was crushed and became somewhat of a recluse in his later years.  Although Watson would never enter the academic world again, he had a very successful career in advertising.  For example, he helped to increase sales of toothpaste by linking it with sexual attraction; he used demographic techniques to identify target populations, and he used expert medical testimony in his advertisements.  All of these techniques are still used today (see Buckley, 1989, for further details).

Watson would go on to write psychology articles for newspapers and popular magazines (e.g., Harper’s, The New Republic, McCall’s, Cosmopolitan) advocating behaviorism and in some cases attacking psychoanalysis even though he was no longer part of the academic world.  As one example, in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, Watson wrote an article titled, “The Myth of the Unconscious: A Behavioristic Explanation,” he asks his readers, “Just why Freud should have resorted to voodooism instead of falling back upon his early scientific training is not clear” (1927, p. 502).  Although speculation, one reason Watson may have attacked Freud at this point was because psychoanalysis clearly had captured the public’s attention.

Watson also made numerous appearances on radio talk shows, and published an influential and popular book on childrearing, Psychological Care of Infant and Child (1928).  This book was written for “mothers who have leisure to devote to the study of their children” (p. 7).  Fortunately, most mothers did not have leisure time to read and implement what Watson instructed in the book.  The most controversial chapter of the book (Chapter 3, “The Dangers of too Much Mother Love”) instructs mothers to never hug or kiss their children, and never let children sit in their lap.  John Watson used some behaviorist principles in the raising of his own children.  In his first marriage to Mary, he made his two children wake themselves up in the morning, get ready for school, and make their parents breakfast in bed before leaving the house (Burnham, 1994).  Watson (1928, pp. 5-6) even goes so far as to ponder “whether there should be individual homes for children—or even whether children should know their own parents.”

Finally, I had previously mentioned that historian John Burnham (1994), who was a graduate student at the time, had interviewed Watson in 1955.  While having limited historical value (Watson provides some factually inaccurate information), the interview is fascinating.  Watson did not grant interviews, and had at the end of his life burned his materials such as personal correspondence that would have been of great interest to historians (Schultz & Schultz, 2008).  At least in this regard, destroying personal documents to frustrate historians, Watson and Freud are the same (see Chapter 3).  In describing his interview, Burnham notes that Watson often used foul language and was eager to shock him.  He offered a strong opinion about Freud which indicates that his views towards psychoanalysis, or at least toward the man who conceived it, had not softened as the years passed.  Specifically, Watson said: “… Freud, being ugly and Jewish, must have felt inferior and used psychoanalysis as a way to point out other people’s shortcomings” (Burnham, 1994, p. 68).

I hope this chapter was successful in counteracting the negative stereotype that history is boring.  If the reader was uninterested by the Watson account, it was likely my lack of skill as a writer, not a lack of intriguing material.  I certainly did not cover all of the interesting details of Watson’s life, and would refer the reader to Buckley’s (1989) Mechanical Man for additional information.

Moreover, history has even more intrigue to share about the firing of Johns Hopkins’ most famous and popular professor.  For many years, it was simply assumed that Watson was fired because he was (a) having an affair with a student, (b) once the affair became exposed, Watson made no attempt to conceal or break-off the relationship, (c) Rosalie’s grandfather was a large donor to Johns Hopkins University and was not pleased with this situation, (d) the Ickes family, which was politically connected, was furious with Watson’s actions, and (e) the President of Johns Hopkins had previously fired the chair of the psychology department for scandalous behavior.  Thus, the reasons for Watson’s termination appear relatively straightforward.

Yet, as mentioned above, in 1974, a report surfaced that the affair was not the real reason for the firing, but a reprehensible research project that was being carried out in secret by Watson, and ultimately was discovered by University officials.  At this point, I would like to delay until the next chapter exactly what the 1974 report said, in order to provide some background information about how historical interpretations are reconstructed by using data fragments from the past.

Chapter 2:  RECONSTRUCTING THE PAST: AN INTRODUCTION TO HISTORICAL RESEARCH

One of the goals of this book is to attempt to answer the question of exactly how Sigmund Freud first became a household name in America.  This is not a simple question that can be easily answered by picking up a book and finding the definitive answer, as it requires an evaluation based upon incomplete information.  This book should be viewed as an attempt to reconstruct history, but the process is often not an exact one that leads to a definitive answer like a chemistry experiment.  This chapter introduces the process of recreating the past.

Historical Interpretation using Data Fragments

For historical questions that require interpretation, such as how exactly did Freud become a household name in America or exactly why was John Watson fired from Johns Hopkins University, history has to be reconstructed using data fragments from the past.  Data fragments include such things as official documents (e.g., birth certificates, court records), newspaper articles, documented eyewitness accounts, magazine articles, diaries, letters, and photographs, to name just a few of the potential sources.  Unfortunately, I do not have access to a time machine where I can go back in history and find the unequivocal correct answer.  Individuals attempting to reconstruct the past have to interpret incomplete information, and can come to differing conclusions especially when the available data fragments do not provide a definitive picture of what happened.

It is useful to think of history as containing both facts and interpretations.  Historical facts are definitive answers supported by data fragments which are typically very specific (i.e., Freud was on the cover of Time magazine, October 27, 1924; Watson had a yearbook at Johns Hopkins University dedicated to him in 1909).  Historical facts are some of the data fragments that support larger historical interpretations.  In contrast, historical interpretations are an opinion about what occurred in the past (i.e., when did Freud become a household name in America?  Why was Watson fired?), and should ideally be an unbiased opinion based upon and supported by historical evidence.   The notion that books about history contain solely factual knowledge that is not open to different interpretations is simply not true.  Since history is part fact and part interpretation, then this raises the question of exactly how do individuals attempt to recreate the past, especially when the questions of interest occurred a long time ago?

Recreating the Past: The Dinosaur Analogy

The following analogy is useful to illustrate how individuals attempt to recreate the past.  What were dinosaurs like millions of years ago (i.e., what did they look like, how did they live)?  What is presented in current books is interpretations by individuals, such as paleontologists, attempting to recreate the past based upon discovered data fragments.  In this example of recreating dinosaurs, data fragments are the fossil remains.  With some dinosaurs, the discovered fossil remains provide an almost complete skeleton, but with others the recreations that are provided are based upon just a limited skeleton.  The more complete the data fragments discovered, the greater confidence we can have in the recreation.  For example, The Field Museum in Chicago has on display the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex discovered to date, named Sue (see fieldmuseum.org).  Because of the number of data fragments discovered, we can have better confidence in what T. rex looked like compared with other dinosaurs which have much more incomplete fossil remains, such as the Spinosaurus.  It works much the same way when interpreting history, the more data fragments that are uncovered the more complete the picture that can be reconstructed, and the easier it becomes to come to the correct historical interpretation.

Yet, even when attempting to recreate the past with an almost complete skeleton, just like when individuals attempt to recreate the past with a substantial number of data fragments, there still typically exist subjective decisions that have to be made.  When subjective decision making comes into play, the possibility exists that the interpretations can result in the wrong conclusion.  For example, when I was growing up in the 1970s, the T. rex that I read about in books and the ones that I saw on television on Saturday mornings in such shows as Land of the Lost, was not the T. rex that was shown in the Jurassic Park movies or contemporary books.  While I learned that the T. rex was a fearsome carnivore, which is consistent with today’s interpretation, I also learned that T. rex stood upright with its tail dragging on the ground and moved very slowly.  Past interpretations of T. rex presented the dinosaur as a “living tripod,” and this interpretation dominated what the American public believed for most of the 20th century.

The first scientific paper that interpreted the T. rex as a tripod was a paper written in 1905 by Henry Fairfield Osborn (“Tyrannosaurus and Other Cretaceous Carnivorous Dinosaurs”; see http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/dspace/bitstream/handle/2246/1464/B021a14.pdf?sequence=1).  A picture of the living tripod interpretation was published in Osborn’s article by William D. Matthew (p. 262), and greatly influenced the historical interpretation of T. rex (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tyrannosaurus_skeleton.jpg).  When the first T. rex skeleton was put on display as a tripod for the public in New York City at the American Museum of Natural History in 1915, this further influenced how T. rex was viewed by both scientists and the general public.  Subsequent evidence has resulted in the data fragments being interpreted differently.  Specifically, a scientific paper about how this upright posture was not physically possible for a creature that size resulted in a new interpretation (Newman, 1970).

Just like our understanding of the T. rex has changed over time, so does our understanding of history when new findings appear or a new interpretation of the same data fragments that leads to a more likely explanation occurs.  History should be viewed as dynamic, ongoing, and ever changing, not simply boring old facts that need to be memorized and should be uncritically accepted as the unwavering truth.  Perhaps in another 50 years the pictures of what scientists believe T. rex looked like will change again.  The posture of T. rex also illustrates that once a more likely interpretation occurs, it can be a slow process in the information filtering down to everyone else.  Despite the new evidence in the early 1970s that T. rex almost certainly did not exist as a living tripod, this information did not become widely known for many years.

Let’s continue with the dinosaur analogy.  Currently in books, documentaries, internet sites, etc., you will find color pictures of the T. rex, descriptions about hunting habits, and a wide variety of explanations about their behaviors.  This type of knowledge about the larger questions should be viewed as tentative, and may or may not be correct.  Once again, without a time machine, there is simply no way to verify certain interpretations.  I always like to ask my students was the T. rex pink?  While this question appears to have an obvious “no” answer, it does force the individual to distinguish between a historical fact, and historical interpretation based upon the available data fragments.  Consistent with contemporary living creatures, the color of the skin would likely provide some camouflage that would provide a hunting advantage, so pink seems unlikely based upon what scientists believe the landscape was like when T. rex roamed the earth.  When interpretations are being made, both paleontologists and historians are giving their informed opinion about what they believe is most likely to have occurred in the past based upon the quality of the evidence uncovered.

While facts are true, even informed opinions based upon evidence can be wrong.  Thus, it is always important to distinguish if the information provided is a historical fact or is a historical interpretation (i.e., an opinion).  Facts do not change, while opinions about what occurred can certainly change, especially when new information is presented that contradicts the prevailing viewpoint.  This distinction between facts and opinions is especially important for books pertaining to historical interpretations of events, which includes this book.

When evaluating the accuracy of historical claims (or claims about the dinosaurs), I have found it useful to use the following scale (see Figure 1), which is on a reciprocal continuum:  historical fact (factual information does not change) => strongly supported by the available data fragments <=> ambiguous based upon the available data fragments <=> not likely based upon the available data fragments <= historical fiction (fiction has been demonstrated to be false based upon factually discrediting the claim and will not change).  Historical facts and historical fiction are not open to interpretation (represented by the arrows in Figure 1), but the middle portion of the range (strongly supported, ambiguous, not likely) represented by overlapping circles requires interpretation by both the paleontologist as well as the historian.

Figure 1

Using the above scale, what are we to make of T. rex?  It was a dinosaur with serrated teeth is a historical fact, and no forthcoming information will change that (just like no forthcoming information will change the fact that Freud appeared on the cover of Time magazine for the second time, June 26, 1939).  The belief that T. rex was the smallest dinosaur is historical fiction.  That the color of T. rex’s skin was not pink is strongly supported.  Whether the T. rex hunted primarily as a predator or as a scavenger is somewhere in the middle range (strongly supported, ambiguous, not likely), and varies depending upon which individual is interpreting the data fragments.  Because data fragments provide an incomplete picture, there can be disagreement when interpreting the same information.  The belief that T. rex was primarily a vegetarian is not likely.  Yet, any interpretation in the middle of the scale can theoretically change because it has not been factually verified or factually discredited.  Finally, newly discovered factual evidence can move something from the middle range which is open to interpretation to either historical fact or historical fiction.

The Firing of John Watson: Historical Interpretation

What about John Watson?  First, that he was fired by Johns Hopkins University is a historical fact.  However, exactly why he was fired at this point in time is open to historical interpretation unless a conclusive data fragment that is yet to be discovered is found in the future.  It is the job of the individual interpreting history to evaluate all of the discovered data fragments and search for any undiscovered “dinosaur bones” when making an interpretation.  What exactly was the 1974 evidence of reprehensible research that came forth which questions the interpretation that Watson was fired for his public affair with his student Rosalie Rayner?

Psychologist James McConnell wondered why John Watson, one of the leading professors in the country, would be terminated for having an affair, especially since affairs with students were likely not uncommon in the 1920s (Benjamin et al., 2007).  McConnell, in searching for evidence, found a former colleague of Watson’s, Deke Coleman, when Watson worked in advertising.  The real reason, according to Mr. Coleman, was that “Watson had been conducting studies of actual sexual intercourse, measuring physiological responses during the sexual act.  Coleman claimed that Watson conducted these studies using himself and his graduate assistant, Rayner, as the participants. Coleman also stated that Watson had been fired for these studies, not just for having an affair with his graduate student” (Benjamin et al., 2007, p. 132).

McConnell would ultimately publish this account of Watson’s firing in an Introductory Psychology textbook that he authored in 1974, and the account spread to other textbooks.  Textbooks play a very important role in transmitting information, as most professors do not have the time to double check every interpretation and ultimately rely on most information in textbooks at face-value.  In fact, I first heard this account of Watson’s firing in a History of Psychology course that I had taken as an undergraduate psychology student at Buffalo State College.  I would subsequently repeat the story when lecturing myself years later.  The professor teaching the course when I was a student likely repeated McConnell’s account from the textbook used, which was an early version of Schultz and Schultz’s A History of Psychology (I use the current version of the textbook when teaching).

Whether or not the account (i.e., the historical interpretation) provided by McConnell based upon his interviewing Mr. Coleman was true or not, at this point in time, has no definitive answer.  Thus, it is not a historical fact and cannot be classified as historical fiction.  The question then becomes, what interpretation do the existing data fragments point towards?  I would encourage the reader with a real interest in why Watson was fired to read the article published by Dr. Ludy T. Benjamin Jr. and colleagues (2007; “John B. Watson’s Alleged Sex Research: An Appraisal of the Evidence”) in the American Psychologist.  The article provides the most recent and available data fragments.  My own interpretation is consistent with the authors that “the story of Watson’s sexual research was just that—a story, so much gossip” (p. 138).  Textbooks, which had previously included McConnell’s interpretation (e.g., Schultz & Schultz’s textbook), have in more recent editions dropped the story.

Despite believing that it is unlikely that Watson conducted sexual research described by Coleman, I’ve wondered whether or not Watson did tell the story to co-workers.  Watson was not beyond being boastful and embellishing his sexual escapades.  As mentioned in Chapter 2, Watson certainly did like to talk about sex, but no conclusive evidence exists at this point in time.

Incomplete Knowledge: Undiscovered Data Fragments

Finally, two last uses of the dinosaur analogy.  First, even with dinosaurs that have the majority of the fossilized bones discovered (often from multiple finds), new discoveries can always add to the picture to gain a better understanding.  As an example relevant to history, Charles Darwin is one of the most researched individuals in the history of science, and there currently exist a large number of books devoted to Darwin.

Yet, even recently, new evidence about Darwin came to light which adds to the understanding about Darwin the family man, and how his personal experience may have influenced his thinking about evolution.  Specifically, Randal Keynes, the great-great-grandson of Darwin (also the great-nephew of John Maynard Keynes, the economist), found in a box of family “odds and ends” the writing case of Annie Darwin, who became ill and died when she was only 10 years old.  The case contained notebooks and letters written by Darwin about his daughter as the family cared for her over the course of her illness.  Keynes’s book (2002), Darwin, his Daughter, & Human Evolution, added “bones” to our understanding of Darwin.  There may yet be undiscovered materials that will be forthcoming as one never knows if all of the relevant data fragments have been uncovered.

Second, I suspect that currently all of the dinosaur fossil remains in the ground have not been discovered, which means that new findings (i.e., new dinosaurs) are always a possibility.   Likewise, new findings occur in history as well.  My favorite example of a new finding relevant to the history of psychology occurred quite by accident.  Professor Ludy T. Benjamin Jr. was one day visiting the University of Akron and reading the letters of a psychologist he was researching.  The University of Akron is where the Archives of the History of American Psychology are located.  It is the largest central source of “data fragments” for researchers interested in the history of psychology in the United States (see www.uakron.edu/ahap).  When looking through relevant folders for his research, one labeled “P.R.T” was noticed.  Since Dr. Benjamin wondered what “PRT” stood for, he opened the folder, which contained only four one page letters.  What became apparent to him from reading the letters, which included the names of some well-known psychologists, was that “PRT” appeared to be the initials of a secret psychological society.  In digging for more information, Dr. Benjamin would eventually discover that a secret organization began in 1936 by 6 psychologists and called itself the Psychological Round Table (PRT).  The group met once a year, was by invitation only from the “secret six,” and limited to young male psychologists.  Those who attended the early meetings were “a select group containing many individuals who were to become the prominent figures of American psychology in the 1950s” (Benjamin, 1977, p. 542).

Dr. Benjamin was ultimately invited to attend the 40th anniversary of the PRT, when the “secret six” became aware that he was researching the group.  The only major difference he noticed in comparison to the early descriptions was that women were now included at the gatherings.  To complete the analogy, Dr. Benjamin discovered a before unknown dinosaur, which contributes to our overall knowledge about the history of psychology.[1]

Chapter 3:  HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION: PITFALLS THAT CAN MISLEAD

The previous chapter emphasized that history is a combination of both facts and interpretations.  History is not “fixed,” but dynamic in response to new evidence.  In this chapter I discuss how (a) historical researchers may mislead themselves when interpreting discovered data fragments, and (b) how data fragments of history can inhibit, or mislead when formulating an interpretation.  Please do not misinterpret that I am implying that all individuals will ultimately come to the wrong conclusions when interpreting historical data fragments, but it is important to emphasize that the possibility of a faulty conclusion does exist.  Because of the subjective nature of the decision making process—at some inevitable point, the researcher must fill in the gaps between fragments to complete the picture.

The Importance of Objectivity

Individuals who are reconstructing history are supposed to be objective in their interpretation of evidence.  In essence, it is the evidence or data fragments that should help point to the most likely historical interpretation.  Yet, historians bring “to their research a bundle of prejudices, preconceptions, penchants, premises, predilections, predispositions, and philosophical orientations.  Such personal baggage does not mean that they abandon all hope for objectivity, nor does it mean that their histories are hopelessly flawed” (Benjamin, 2006, p. 9).  Good historians attempt to take their own biases into account when interpreting evidence, but this can be a difficult task, especially since individuals often chose subject areas that are personally relevant in some way.  For example, a historian may choose to investigate Freud because they admire his theory.  The opposite is also true, as Freud may be chosen because the individual believes his theory is nonsense.  Interpreting and writing history objectively should be thought of as a struggle, as opposed to an easy task.

Personal Biases

The historian, or any individual attempting to interpret history, often begins with an idea about what they believed happened, which can influence the interpretation of the data fragments.  Research has demonstrated that current beliefs directly influence our ability to objectively analyze evidence, even in individuals who have been trained to think in an objective manner (Riniolo, 2008).  We may latch on to “positive evidence” that supports what we already suspect (i.e., an inherent bias toward supporting evidence), while discounting or ignoring evidence that is not consistent with what we believed happened.  Once an idea about what occurred has been formed, we all have a tendency to look for evidence that is already consistent with what we believe.  Focusing on finding positive evidence further reinforces our opinion, but we do not with equal vigor seek out evidence that would contradict our belief.  Psychologists call this a confirmation bias, and the confirmation bias has been demonstrated in a wide variety of situations and influences even those who are aware of this biased form of data collection.  Once we develop a strong opinion, it can be difficult to give up our belief even in response to overwhelming new evidence (Riniolo, 2008; Riniolo & Nisbet, 2007).  Thus, personal biases can ultimately influence historical interpretations.

Let me provide an example of how beginning with an idea of what happened appears to have influenced historical interpretation.  One question I had become previously interested in was the accuracy of eyewitness testimony from survivors of the Titanic who witnessed the ship’s final plunge (see Riniolo, Koledin, Drakulic, & Payne, 2003).  Specifically, how did the eyewitnesses recall the ship’s state during its final plunge, as intact or breaking apart?  Until the wreck of the Titanic was discovered in 1985 and it was demonstrated that the bow of the ship had settled on the ocean floor about 1970 feet from the stern (Ballard, 1987), and subsequent forensic analysis indicated that there was “no doubt” (Garzke, Brown, Sandiford, Woodward, & Hsu, 1996, p. 250) that the Titanic’s main hull was breaking apart while the ship was still on the surface of the water, the eyewitness testimony were the only data fragments available to historians to interpret what happened.

Specifically, a combined total of 91 Titanic survivors testified at hearings by the United States Senate (April 19-May 25, 1912) and the British Board of Trade (May 2-July 3, 1912).  The transcripts of both sets of hearings are available on the internet (www.titanicinquiry.org/).  The survivors responded to a wide range of questions (e.g., loading of the lifeboats, the actions of Captain Smith).  Our investigation was limited to those who directly commented on viewing the condition of the ship during the final plunge (i.e., intact or breaking apart) as not all witnesses were asked about this topic.  This resulted in total of 20 eyewitnesses, some of whom testified at both hearings.  I will return to what the eyewitnesses recalled momentarily.

As noted above, it can be a difficult task to objectively interpret information when a preexisting belief exists.  It was a widely held belief at the time and by subsequent historians that the Titanic was “the most perfect work of naval architecture the world has ever produced” (Wood, 1912, p. 160).  The Titanic was really viewed as the “unsinkable” ship.  It is likely that those interpreting the tragedy were biased towards interpreting the final plunge in the best possible light.  Sinking intact is closer to the preexisting belief that the Titanic was unsinkable than the ship breaking apart as it was about to plunge to its final destination on the ocean’s floor.

So, what did the eyewitnesses recall, which at the time were the only data fragments available to evaluators and historians prior to the Titanic’s discovery in 1985?  Of the 20 survivors who testified to having witnessed the Titanic’s final plunge, 15 (75%) accurately recalled that the ship was breaking.  It appears that the data fragments should have led subsequent historians to the correct conclusion.

Despite the majority of testimony at both the United States and British hearings recalling that the Titanic was breaking while on the ocean’s surface, both hearings concluded in their final reports that the Titanic sank intact.  In addition, I am unaware of any historian who believed that the Titanic was breaking prior to its discovery.  Virtually every author writing about the Titanic, except Mowbray (1912) who summarized eyewitness accounts, concluded the Titanic sank intact.  With one exception, every evaluator came to a conclusion that was in direct contrast to the only available evidence at the time (i.e., the survivors’ testimony).

Eva Hart, who was only 7 years old when the ship sank and who lost her father in the tragedy, provides an interesting case history of this specific issue.  She did not testify at the hearings because of her age, but had repeatedly stated over the years in interviews prior to the discovery of the ship that the Titanic was breaking (Denney & Hart, 1995).  Historians told her repeatedly over the years that her memory was mistaken because the evidence showed the ship sank intact.  She never wavered from her belief and was ultimately demonstrated to be correct.  Perhaps the most famous example depicting the Titanic sinking intact was in Walter Lord’s (1956) A Night to Remember, which was also made into a movie.  For those who are old enough to remember, prior to the Titanic being discovered there was talk of “raising” the ship as a whole if it was ever located, because everyone assumed that it was lying intact on the ocean floor.

This example of the Titanic should alert us all to the influence that preexisting beliefs can have on historical interpretation.  If historians had objectively interpreted the data fragments of history, they should have come to the correct conclusion that the ship was breaking apart initially, which is what 75% of the eyewitnesses reported.  Finally, the Titanic example given above is useful in another way.  The conclusions made by the United States and British hearings were sources that had great influence over historians who would make subsequent interpretations.  If the initial conclusion is wrong, it can be repeated or easily accepted without proper scrutiny by subsequent individuals.

What are the Relevant Biases of the Author?

This discussion of individual biases influencing how we interpret historical information leads to a very pertinent question.  What are the author’s own views towards Freud and psychoanalysis?  I think this is a legitimate question to ask, and one which I try and ascertain about other authors when reading about Freud as so many who have written about him have had extremely strong opinions (both pro and con), which can ultimately influence what is presented, and how history is interpreted.   For example, like so many others who have written about Freud, this book will rely in some instances upon Freud’s official biographer Ernest Jones.  Jones was an exceptional writer, and I encourage you to read his three Volume biography of Freud, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (Volume 1 is available at the Internet Archive; http://www.archive.org/).

One almost has to rely upon Jones’ work in some instances because Jones had access to materials that most historians have not been allowed to view, and perhaps will never be allowed to scrutinize.  Yet, Jones was not only a personal friend of Freud, but he can accurately be described as an ardent supporter of Freud and psychoanalysis as he was one of the people who attempted to popularize psychoanalysis in America.  It is important to keep that in mind when evaluating his work, as others may have different interpretations of the same events based upon their views of Freud.  This is not unique to Freud’s biographers, as many examples could be given where what a biographer chooses to present and how they interpret specific data fragments is strongly influenced by their own personal beliefs towards the subject material.

How do I describe my own views towards Freud and psychoanalysis, keeping in mind that self-reports are limited themselves?  First, I think it is important to separate the man from the movement.  In regards to Freud the man, I view him like the rest of us, as a person with both pros and cons.  Some of his pros were his work ethic, his loyalty to certain people, he possessed some admirable qualities as a husband and father, and his diligence about answering letters that were sent to him.  Some of his negatives were his willingness to falsely report clinical outcomes in journal articles (examples will be coming in forthcoming chapters), and his vindictiveness to those who disagreed with him.  Also, some of Freud’s close friendships ended badly over disagreements about his theories.  Thus, I have mixed views towards Freud the person.

My opinions about psychoanalysis as a theory are more straightforward.  If I am feeling diplomatic at the time, I would give a response very similar to F.A. Hayek’s.  Hayek, who won a Nobel prize in 1974 for his work in economics, also made a very important contribution to psychology with the publication of The Sensory Order: An Inquiry Into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology first written in 1952 (for more details about Hayek’s contributions to psychology, see Mahoney & Weimer, 1994).  This book, written during the height of behaviorism (see Chapter 1), focuses on the mental mechanisms that influence perceptions.  Hayek’s book is a forerunner to modern cognitive psychology.  In the preface of The Sensory Order, Hayek describes the influential individuals (e.g., Wundt, James, Lashley) and schools of thought (e.g., Gestalt) which influenced him and with which he was familiar (he was an economist by training, but had a long-time interest in psychology).  Hayek had this to say about psychoanalysis, “I have to admit that I have never been able to derive much profit from that school” (Hayek, 1952/1976, p. vi).

If I am feeling less diplomatic, I would likely say something like the psychologist Raymond Cattell who offered the following opinion when psychology and psychoanalysis were battling to be the true science of the mind (see Chapter 1), “As to psychoanalysis, it is not so much a question of science as a matter of taste, as Doctor Freud is an artist, rather than scientist, who lives in a fairy-land of dreams among the ogres of perverted sex” (Wiggam, 1928, p. 341).  Ultimately, I believe that Freud’s theories moved us further away from a true understanding of the human condition and the underlying causes of mental illness.  Without Freud’s influence, perhaps today we would have a better understanding of mental illness because so many would not have gone down the wrong path.  Many others will disagree with my assessment, as it is an opinion.

Could my own views towards psychoanalysis and Freud influence what is presented in this book?  The answer is yes.  I will attempt to limit the influence of my own personal biases, but the research literature clearly demonstrates that all of us are vulnerable (e.g., confirmation bias), and even a self-awareness that biases exist is often times not sufficient to completely control their influence (Riniolo, 2008).  All authors who have written about Freud have their own biases to deal with, as Freud the man and Freudian theory are topic areas in which most who have written have strong preexisting views.

Biased Data Fragments

Bias can not only come from personal views, but in other ways as well.  One such way is when the available data fragments that historians or biographers have to review can themselves be a biased source of information.  As one example, if the data fragments have been selectively omitted, potentially important information is skewed or lost.  As Sulloway (1979, p. 7) points out, “Freud took steps to deny history well before he had assured himself a place of lasting fame in its graces.  Twice in his life, in 1885 and again in 1907, he completely destroyed all his manuscripts, private diaries, notes, and correspondence.”  Freud wrote to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, about the 1885 destruction when he was only 28 years old (cited in Sulloway, 1979, p. 7):

I have destroyed all my notes of the past fourteen years, as well as letters, scientific excerpts, and the manuscripts of my papers.  As for letters, only those from the family have been spared.  Yours, my darling, were never in danger. … I couldn’t have matured or died without worrying about who would get hold of those old papers. … As for the biographers, let them worry, we have no desire to make it too easy for them.  Each one of them will be right in his opinion of “The Development of the Hero,” and I am already looking forward to seeing them go astray.

Since historians only have access to selected materials about Freud and psychoanalysis, what is accessed remains a biased sample which can ultimately mislead when trying to accurately recreate the past.  In some instances, the lack of historical record makes approximating the truth virtually impossible.  One of the unfortunate consequences of a biased sample of materials is that it can become difficult to differentiate what actually happened, from what is simply a legendary retelling.  Fortunately, Freud was not able to destroy all relevant materials, and one of the things that I attempt to do in subsequent chapters is compare Freud’s later interpretations with historical data fragments that survived.  One of the consistent findings is that Freud attempted to present himself in an idealized light, whereas the surviving historical documents often point to a different interpretation (see Sulloway, 1979, for many examples).

A limited access to historical materials is another way in which historical interpretations can be biased.  Unfortunately, Freud’s estate has continued the tradition of biasing the historical materials that researchers have access to by restricting what materials are made available to scholars.  As Schultz and Schultz (2008, p. 9) point out, “one letter to Freud from his eldest son is sealed until the year 2013, another until 2032.  A letter from one of Freud’s mentors will not be released until 2102, some 177 years after the man’s death, leaving us to wonder what could be so remarkable about that letter as to require such secrecy for such a long period of time.”  Until all of the available data fragments relevant to Freud are made available for study, there is no way to tell if current interpretations are accurate or need modification because researchers have been restricted to form opinions based upon a biased set of materials.

In summary, the purpose of this chapter was to emphasize that there exist many potential pitfalls (e.g., personal biases, preconceived views, biased data fragments) that can interfere with an objective interpretation of the past.  Thus, there always exists the possibility that a specific historical interpretation is flawed.

Chapter 4:  SEPARATING HISTORICAL FACTS FROM HISTORICAL FICTION (PART 1): THE CASE OF ANNA O.

The case of Anna O. is important for this book in a variety of ways.  First, the case continues to this day to be the founding myth of the effectiveness of psychoanalysis in the treatment of mental illness.  The case provides for us a prime example of the significance of evaluating the accuracy of historical claims, and the importance of digging for additional data fragments.  Because we have to rely upon incomplete data fragments, the case of Anna O. is still open to different interpretations of some of the specific details (the book, Anna O: Fourteen Contemporary Reinterpretations, helps to emphasize this point).  As a reminder from Chapter 2, the notion that history is solely made up from rock solid fact is not true.  The case will also be part of a recurrent theme in this book: sometimes there exists a difference between the “legend” of Freud, and what the historical record shows.  For those readers who are familiar with just the version of Anna O. that was perpetuated by Freud, you may be surprised at what the historical record shows.  For readers unfamiliar with the case, I believe you will find this also to be another example that counteracts the history is boring stereotype.

Background Information

Here is the important background information.  The physician Joseph Breuer had developed an impressive reputation as both a medical doctor and researcher (he was the personal physician of several medical school professors).  As a researcher, Breuer discovered, along with Ewald Hering, the self-regulation mechanism involved in respiration by the vagus nerve, the Hering-Breuer reflex.  Later, Breuer would discover the importance of the semicircular canals in the ears for maintaining balance.

Breuer and Freud developed a very close friendship shortly before Freud obtained his medical degree.  Breuer offered his friend who was 14 years younger advice.  The two men frequently discussed patients, Breuer lent him money, and the Breuer and Freud families frequently socialized.  As Freud would later recount in An Autobiographical Study (1925, p. 34), Breuer “became my friend and helper in my difficult circumstances.  We grew accustomed to share all our scientific interests with each other.  In this relationship the gain was naturally mine.  The development of psychoanalysis afterwards cost me his friendship.  It was not easy for me to pay such a price, but I could not escape it.”  Breuer would not be the last close friend that Freud would lose because of disagreements related to Freud’s theories.

It was Breuer’s treatment of one specific patient who was suffering from a severe case of hysteria, Anna O., which was the bedrock case that had been used to provide evidence of the effectiveness of psychoanalysis.  The patient’s real name was revealed as an unauthorized disclosure by Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones in 1953 as Bertha Pappenheim (see Jones, 1953, p. 223).  As Kimball writes (2000, p. 20), “As a mature adult she became a leading social worker, writer, and feminist activist in the German Jewish community.”  Because of Bertha’s many outstanding accomplishments, the West German government issued a postage stamp of her in 1954, an impressive achievement (Images of this stamp are widely available on the internet).  With such an accomplished life, it surely does seem as though Bertha must have had a successful outcome as the result of Breuer’s treatment, but historical data fragments point to a very different interpretation.

Let’s continue with more relevant background information before the treatment of Bertha’s hysteria is discussed.  Bertha was born in Vienna on February 27, 1859, into a very wealthy orthodox Jewish home.  She was the third of four children.  Unfortunately, her oldest sister died before Bertha was born, and her other sister died when she was just 7 years old.  The deaths of her sisters likely contributed to her parents being extremely overprotective of their only remaining daughter.  By all accounts Bertha was both exceptionally attractive and very bright, as she received a good education up to a point.  Women did not have the same educational opportunities as men in the 1800s.  Her life as it existed did not permit her to pursue an independent or professional career, in contrast to her younger brother who would study law.

While on a family vacation in July 1880, her father became ill (he would die in April, 1881).  Both Bertha and her mother became responsible for his care as was typical of the times.  While helping to care for her father, Bertha stayed up during the night and rested during the day, but ultimately became exhausted as she had difficulty sleeping.  During this time, she developed a variety of symptoms associated with hysteria, but her family did not seek help until she developed a severe dry cough that persisted.  Breuer would describe this period as the first of several clearly identifiable phases of her illness (latent incubation; see description of all of the phases below).

Martha Bernays, Freud’s fiancée and eventual wife (they had a long engagement and eventually married in 1886), was not only friends with Bertha, but had family connections to the Pappenheim family.  When Martha’s father died in 1880, her mother appointed Bertha’s father as the legal guardian of her own children (Appignanesi & Forrester, 1992).  This information is important because Martha was able to keep informed about Bertha’s condition from a friend who also lived in Vienna, who was the wife of Bertha’s first cousin.  Martha would ultimately share what she learned of her friend’s condition with Freud after Bertha’s treatment with Breuer had ended (this will be important later in this chapter).  I mentioned in a previous chapter that Freud destroyed much of his personal correspondence.  However, a large amount of his correspondence with Martha during their courtship remains, and is worth reading for a personal side of Freud that is not typically shown.

Important Historical Documents

Initially, there were two important documents which detailed the case of Anna O. (Bertha will be referred to as Anna for this portion of the discussion for consistency with the documents).  First, Breuer and Freud’s Studies on Hysteria, published in 1895.  Studies on Hysteria (http://www.archive.org/details/studiesonhysteri037649mbp) is available online at the Internet Archive homepage (http://www.archive.org/).  The first section of Studies on Hysteria included a “Preliminary Communication” (On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena), which was published two years earlier in 1893 and marks the first time the concept of “catharsis” is used.  Section two consisted of 5 case histories.  The first one was Anna O. (written by Breuer), while the additional four were credited to Freud (Emmy von N., Lucy R., Katharina, Elisabeth von R.).  The second document was “The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis” which was based upon Freud’s lectures given at the 20th Anniversary of Clark University’s opening and subsequently published in the highly prestigious and widely read The American Journal of Psychology (1910; more details will be provided about Freud’s only trip to America in Chapter 6).  I will rely upon these two documents to tell the initial version of Anna’s treatment because those documents have been largely responsible for creating the “legend” of the miracle cure eventually known as psychoanalysis.  Be forewarned, evidence has been discovered that is inconsistent with the version presented by Breuer and Freud.

The Case of Anna O.

Freud (1910, p. 182), when first presenting this case to an American audience, describes Anna in the following manner:

Dr. Breuer’s patient was a girl of twenty-one, of a high degree of intelligence. She had developed in the course of her two years’ illness a series of physical and mental disturbances which well deserved to be taken seriously.  She had a severe paralysis of both right extremities, with anesthesia, and at times the same affection of the members of the left side of the body; disturbance of eye-movements, and much impairment of vision; difficulty in maintaining the position of the head, an intense Tussis nervosa, nausea when she attempted to take nourishment, and at one time for several weeks a loss of the power to drink, in spite of tormenting thirst.  Her power of speech was also diminished, and this progressed so far that she could neither speak nor understand her mother tongue; and, finally, she was subject to states of “absence,” of confusion, delirium, alteration of her whole personality.

As Breuer (1895, p. 22) notes in Studies on Hysteria, Anna’s conditions were characterized by several clearly separable phases, the first of which was mentioned above:

(A) Latent incubation. From the middle of July, 1880, till about December 10.  This phase of an illness is usually hidden from us; but in this case, owing to its peculiar character, it was completely accessible; and this in itself lends no small pathological interest to the history.  I shall describe this phase presently.

(B)  The manifest illness. A psychosis of a peculiar kind, paraphasia, a convergent squint, severe disturbances of vision, paralyses (in the form of contractures), complete in the right upper and both lower extremities, partial in the left upper extremity, paresis of the neck muscles. A gradual reduction of the contracture to the right-hand extremities. Some improvement, interrupted by a severe psychical trauma (the death of the patient’s father) in April, after which there followed

(C)  A period of persisting somnambulism, subsequently alternating with more normal states.  A number of chronic symptoms persisted till December, 1881.

(D) Gradual cessation of the pathological states and symptoms up to June, 1882.

During the period from December 1880 to April 1, 1880 (“B”: manifest illness), Anna was seen by Breuer and bedridden.  During this time Anna’s symptoms included visual hallucinations, she became unable to speak for several weeks, suffered memory loss, and she lost the ability to speak in German (i.e., her native language) and communicated only in English.  Anna also suffered from altered states of consciousness which alternated without warning and on a frequent basis.  As Breuer reports (1895, p. 24), “In one of these states she recognized her surroundings; she was melancholy and anxious, but relatively normal.  In the other state she hallucinated and was ‘naughty’—that is to say, she was abusive, used to throw the cushions at people, so far as the contractures at various times allowed, tore buttons off her bedclothes and linen with those of her fingers which she could move, and so on.”  While in the ‘naughty’ state, Anna would report losing time and would not remember the state.  Anna did ultimately improve and was able to get out of her bedridden state on April 1, 1880, which marks the end of the manifest illness phase.

On April 5 Anna’s father died (beginning of “C”: persisting somnambulism).  Her condition deteriorated further at this point, as she was unable to recognize people except Breuer.  Anna generally refused to eat, although she would allow Breuer to feed her, and she could not understand German, and would only speak in English.  Furthermore, as Breuer notes in Studies on Hysteria, she had other problems with her vision as well.  For example, “in a bunch of flowers which gave her much pleasure she could only see one flower at a time” (Breuer, 1895, p. 26).  Breuer had to leave Vienna for a few days during this time and was unable to visit Anna.  Upon his return, she had not eaten at all when he was away, and she was now prone to terrifying hallucinations (death’s heads, skeletons), which occurred during the day.  At night, Anna would now go into a deep state of hypnosis.  If she could narrate her hallucinations, it brought her some relief.

Anna’s condition deteriorated further, as she was having suicidal impulses, and on June 7, 1881, Anna was taken—against her will—to a country house near a Sanatorium where Breuer would visit every few days.  Eventually, Anna grew calmer and her symptoms now appeared on a regular cycle, frightening hallucinations during the day and a calmer mind at night.  Breuer would arrive in the evening, when he knew he would find her in a state of hypnosis.  If Anna was able to narrate her terrifying hallucinations, she would “wake up clear in mind, calm and cheerful” (Breuer, 1895, p. 27).  Because Breuer was unable to visit her on a daily basis at this point, on the second day, she would become more moody and unpleasant, and this would become more pronounced on the third day. As Breuer (1895, p. 30) notes, Anna “aptly described this procedure, speaking seriously, as a ‘talking cure’, while she referred to it jokingly as ‘chimney-sweeping’.”

On those nights in which Breuer (1895, p. 30) was unable to visit Anna and calm her by the talking cure, it became “necessary to fall back upon chloral. … I was obliged to give her 5 grammes… .  I had been able to avoid the use of narcotics, since the verbal utterance of her hallucinations calmed her even though it might not induce sleep; but when she was in the country the nights on which she had not obtained hypnotic relief were so unbearable that in spite of everything it was necessary to have recourse to chloral.”  Chloral is a nonbarbituate sedative.  I will return to the statement that Breuer claimed to have avoided the use of narcotics in his treatment of Anna later, when discovered data fragments will be used to evaluate specific claims made by Breuer and Freud.

After Breuer returned from a family vacation that lasted several weeks (no talking cure was performed at this time, as Anna would not let anyone but Breuer perform the method), he “found her in a wretched moral state, inert, unamenable, ill-tempered, even malicious” (Breuer, 1895, p. 31).  He brought her back to Vienna for treatment and “the former rhythm was re-established: on the day after her giving verbal utterance to her phantasies she was amiable and cheerful, on the second day she was more irritable and less agreeable and on the third positively ‘nasty’” (p. 32).  In December (end of persisting somnambulism phase and beginning of “D”: gradual cessation), Anna deteriorated further, and her states of consciousness altered in a very strange manner.  In the normal state, she lived in the current time, but in the second state she lived exactly one year before (Breuer reported that a diary kept by Anna’s mother confirmed the dates).

During this time period, Breuer recorded the first time a verbal utterance made symptoms disappear:

There was in the summer a time of intense heat, and the patient had suffered very much from thirst; for, without any apparent reason, she had suddenly become unable to drink.  She would take a glass of water in her hand, but as soon as it touched her lips she would push it away as though suffering from hydrophobia.  Obviously for these few seconds she was in her absent state.  She ate only fruit, melons and the like, in order to relieve this tormenting thirst.  When this had been going on about six weeks, she was talking one day in hypnosis about her English governess, whom she disliked, and finally told, with every sign of disgust, how she had come into the room of the governess, and how that lady’s little dog, that she abhorred, had drunk out of a glass.  Out of respect for the conventions the patient had remained silent.  Now, after she had given energetic expression to her restrained anger, she asked for a drink, drank a large quantity of water without trouble, and woke from hypnosis with the glass at her lips.  The symptom thereupon vanished permanently (Freud, 1910, pp. 184-185).

This initiated a newer type of time consuming procedure for treatment.  Anna would describe, in great detail, in reverse order leading to the initial event.  In using this procedure, she was able to talk away permanently her other symptoms as well.  What Breuer found was that if he could trace a symptom, through hypnosis or putting Anna in a relaxed state, to its initial experience, usually a traumatic event, the symptom would disappear. The beginnings of psychoanalysis were occurring during Breuer’s treatment of Anna, as Freud would modify this basic procedure (he would later abandon the use of hypnosis for the method of free association).

Eventually, Anna was determined to bring her treatment to an end by June 7, 1882, which was the one year anniversary of her being taken—against her will—to the country house.  On the final day of the illness, Anna’s room was made to resemble her father’s room during his illness.  At this point, Anna recalled a terrifying hallucination which Breuer believed “constituted the root of her whole illness” (1895, p. 40).  Specifically, while Anna was helping to care for her seriously ill father, the following had occurred:

Once she was watching at night in the greatest anxiety for the patient, who was in a high fever, and in suspense, for a surgeon was expected from Vienna, to operate on the patient.  Her mother had gone out for a little while, and Anna sat by the sick-bed, her right arm hanging over the back of her chair.  She fell into a revery [waking dream] and saw a black snake emerge, as it were, from the wall and approach the sick man as though to bite him. … She tried to drive off the creature, but was as though paralyzed.  Her right arm, which was hanging over the back of the chair, had “gone to sleep,” become anesthetic and paretic, and as she was looking at it, the fingers changed into little snakes with deaths-heads.  (The nails.)  Probably she attempted to drive away the snake with her paralyzed right hand, and so the anesthesia and paralysis of this member formed associations with the snake hallucination.  When this had vanished, she tried in her anguish to speak, but could not.  She could not express herself in any language, until finally she thought of the words of an English nursery song, and thereafter she could think and speak only in this language (Freud, 1910, p. 186).

As Breuer notes (1895, pp. 40-1), “During the original scene she had only been able to think and pray in English; but immediately after its reproduction she was able to speak German. She was moreover free from the innumerable disturbances which she had previously exhibited.  After this she left Vienna and travelled for a while; but it was a considerable time before she regained her mental balance entirely.  Since then she has enjoyed complete health.”  As Freud would later comment to his American audience in 1909 at Clark University, “When, a number of years later, I began to use Breuer’s researches and treatment on my own patients, my experiences completely coincided with his” (1910, p. 186).  Both men reported a successful outcome for Anna, who had suffered from a severe case of hysteria.  Freud has a different version of how the treatment ended, which will be discussed below.

The cathartic method and the cure of the severely hysterical patient Anna O., which is the founding case of psychoanalysis, has been told and retold in various forms like I just presented above.  It truly does seem like a successful outcome for the patient.  Yet, keep in mind the importance of historical research, as sometimes the historical record does not match what is subsequently reported years later.

Historical Research: Comparing Data Fragments with Individual Claims

At least three separate claims made by Breuer and Freud deserve further scrutiny: (a) Breuer’s treatment cured Anna, (b) Anna was not given narcotics while in Breuer’s care, and (c) how exactly did Breuer’s treatment with Anna end?  Prior to addressing each of the claims, let’s discuss the work of Henri Ellenberger and Albrecht Hirschmüller.  Both discovered some data fragments that shed new light on the case.  Moreover, the historical documents that they uncovered directly contradict some of the account provided by Breuer and Freud.

a.       Did Breuer’s Treatment Cure Anna?

Henri Ellenberger (1972) was looking through a biography of Bertha Pappenheim (i.e., Anna O.) written by Dora Edinger, and noticed a picture of her, dated 1882, looking healthy and wearing riding clothes.  This photograph contradicted Breuer’s version of a home-bound individual at the time.  Ellenberger secured permission to examine the original picture, and had it examined under special light by the Montreal City Police.  The name of a German town appeared:  Konstanz.  Specifically, Ellenberger wondered what Bertha was doing there because according to Breuer’s account she was supposed to be very ill in a sanitarium near Vienna.  As Ellenberger (1972, p. 274) states, “Mrs. Edinger suggested that she could have been treated in one of the sanitariums which existed in that part of Europe.  Actually, there was one famous sanitarium, in the little Swiss town of Kreuzlingen, quite close to Konstanz:  the Sanatorium Bellevue.  I asked the present director, Dr. Wolfgang Binswanger, if the medical archives contained a case history of Bertha Pappenheim.  I learned from him that Bertha Pappenheim had actually sojourned there as a patient from July 12 to October 29, 1882.  The patient’s file contained two documents:  a copy of the case history written by Breuer himself in 1882, and a follow-up written by one of the doctors of the Sanatorium Bellevue.”

Two important documents were discovered that need to be considered.  One of the documents, which is a 21 ½ page report (translation of the document into English is available by Hirschmüller, 1978), does not contain Breuer’s name, but portions of the document are virtually identical to what Breuer would later write in Studies on Hysteria 13 years later.  The document also contains some information left out of the later publication.  For example, her family had lied to Anna about the seriousness of her father’s illness and she was not allowed to see him for the final two months of his life, which helps to explain why his death was such a shock to her.  Along with Breuer’s 21 ½ page report, Ellenberger also discovered a 2 ½ page follow-up report written by Dr. Laupus at Bellevue titled, “Evolution of the Illness During the Sojourn in Bellevue from July 12, 1882, to October 29, 1882.”

Albrecht Hirschmüller would subsequently visit Bellevue, and discovered additional documents that had eluded Ellenberger.  Specifically, he found letters about the case written to Robert Binswanger, the director of Bellevue at the time, from Breuer, Anna’s mother, Anna’s cousin (Fritz Homburger), and Anna herself after she had been discharged.  A self-report from Anna about her own condition was also found as well as a preliminary report from Breuer about Anna’s condition that preceded Breuer’s 21 ½ page report.   In Hirschmüller’s (1978) book, “The Life and Work of Josef Breuer,” all of the reports (including the two found by Ellenberger) and letters about Anna’s stay in Bellevue are translated into English and provided for the reader in the Appendices.  The 21 ½ page report had a request that the original be returned; as the text was transcribed (Breuer likely wanted the report for his records, as this was prior to the days of photocopying machines).  Hirschmüller (1978) also found documents in the Vienna City Psychiatric Hospital archives of a sanatorium in Inzersdorf (near Vienna) that recorded that Anna was admitted an additional 3 times for hysteria (July 30, 1883 to January 17, 1884; March 4, 1885 to July 2, 1885; June 30, 1887 to July 18, 1887).

What is most important is that just a few weeks after Anna’s “cure,” she was back in a psychiatric hospital, and would have to return to a psychiatric hospital at least three more times from 1883 to 1887.  Evidence indicates that both Breuer and Freud were well aware that Anna was not “cured” by the cathartic method.  For example, in August 1883, Breuer told Freud that Bertha was deranged (Appignanesi & Forrester, 1992).  Likewise, Breuer had told Freud that a year after his treatment with Bertha had ended, that she was “quite unhinged and that he wished she would die and so be released from her suffering” (Jones, 1953, p. 225).  Breuer had been kept informed about Bertha from medical reports, a personal visit in 1884, and likely from her brother whom Breuer corresponded with for many years (Hirschmüller, 1978).

Freud shared this information with Carl Jung, who revealed that Anna had not been cured in a 1925 seminar in Zurich.  As Jung stated, ““so much spoken about as an example of brilliant therapeutic success, was in reality nothing of the kind … There was no cure at all in the sense of which it was originally presented.” And yet, Jung added, “the case was so interesting that there was no need to claim for it something that did not happen”” (cited in Ellenberger 1972, p. 270).  Finally, Martha Freud was friends with Bertha, and had visited her at least twice in 1887.  She had written to her mother that Bertha was still suffering from hallucinations in the evenings, but was doing alright during the day which is a pattern consistent when she was under Breuer’s care (Appignanesi & Forrester, 1992; Jones, 1953).  Yet, if you read Freud’s An Autobiographical Study (1925, p. 37), Freud notes that Breuer’s “patient had recovered and had remained well and, in fact, had become capable of doing serious work.”  Apparently, Freud did not find it necessary to point out that this patient did not remain well, but for years after treatment ended continued to suffer from hysterical symptoms.

As previously mentioned, along with Breuer’s 21 ½ page report, Ellenberger also discovered a 2 ½ page follow-up report written by Dr. Laupus at Bellevue.  This document is also consistent with a patient who has not been cured, as Anna would lose her ability to use the German language just like in the care of Breuer.  The case report by Dr. Laupus and the self-report written by Bertha herself (middle of 1882) about her illness flatly contradict the claim the Breuer had cured her of her loss of the ability to use German.  As Laupus would write, Anna would lose her ability to use German in the evening and this “phenomenon occurred regularly each evening in such a way that as soon as the patient’s head was laid on the pillow she could no longer either understand or speak the German language.  If she was speaking German at the time, the sentence was finished in English” (cited in Hirschmüller, 1978, p. 292).  As Anna would write, “I, a native German girl, am now totally deprived of the faculty to speak, to understand or to read German.  This symptom lasted during the time of a heavy nervous illness, I had to go through, in permanence longer than a year; since about 4 months it only returns regularly every evening” (cited in Hirschmüller, 1978, p. 296).

So, what are we to make of all this new evidence?  From my perspective (which admittedly has its own biases that need to be controlled to maintain objectivity; see Chapter 3), it is clear that Bertha Pappenheim was not cured by Breuer’s treatment.  She continued to suffer from hysteria as late as 1887.  More disturbing, however, is that both Breuer and Freud knew that Anna was not cured, yet both perpetuated what most people would describe as a severe distortion in their professional papers by omitting the fact that when Bertha left Breuer’s care she would require being admitted to a mental institution at least 3 more times for hysteria over the years. As Hirschmüller (1978, p. 107) nicely summarizes, the idea that Anna O. “was completely cured does not square with the facts.”

b.       The Use of Narcotics During Anna’s Treatment

Was Anna given narcotics while under Breuer’s care?  While this may at first appear like a “picky” or trivial question to focus on, it does have large implications for the story of Anna O. because narcotics can cause symptoms that mimic those of hysteria.  Breuer did say that Anna was given chloral hydrate, a nonbarbiturate sedative, at night to help her sleep, but wrote that he did not need to give her narcotics.  As Ramos (2003) has pointed out, the dosage of chloral hydrate that Breuer himself reports giving to Anna is 10 times greater than the normal usage, and consistent with a person who has built up a high tolerance.  Anna’s dosage was potentially lethal for a first-time user.

Also, the subsequently discovered 2 ½ page follow-up report written by Dr. Laupus indicates that Anna’s drug use for her first day of the clinic was 5 grams of chloral hydrate given at night (consistent with the high dosage given by Breuer), and morphine 80 mg/day.  Morphine is a narcotic.  This initial dosage needed to be increased because Anna was showing the signs of withdrawal.  Ramos (2003) explains that the increased dosage was consistent with someone who had developed a high tolerance for morphine over a long period of time.  When Anna was admitted to Bellevue, she showed the physical signs of a patient not only addicted to chloral hydrate, but one who was a morphine addict.  Yet, Breuer had made it a point in Studies on Hysteria to note that she was not given any narcotics.

As even more compelling evidence, in mid-1882, Breuer wrote to the doctor in charge of the Bellevue Sanatorium (Dr. Binswanger), where Anna would eventually become a patient.  These documents shed further light on the issue of whether or not Breuer gave Anna narcotics while in his care.  Specifically in Breuer’s letter to Binswanger (mid-June 1882), he writes, “She is receiving daily 0.08-0.1 morphine by injection.  My case history will justify me in this matter.  I am not engaged in breaking her of this addiction since, despite her good will, when I am with her I am powerless to cope with her agitated state” (cited in Hirschmüller, 1978, p. 293).   Likewise, the preliminary report by Breuer (late June) noted, “In recent months the patient has been receiving injections of morphine … morphine dosages became rather high (0.15-0.20 pro die), but are now reduced to 0.05-0.70 each day, and withdrawal from morphine will probably cause little difficulty as the patient desires it” (cited in Hirschmüller, 1978, p. 295).

The evidence is inconsistent with what Breuer reported in Studies on Hysteria, as Anna was given narcotics according to letters that he himself had written, and she also possessed the symptoms of a morphine addict.  As the case report written by Dr. Laupus notes, the first task of her treatment under his care was to break her morphine addiction (Hirschmüller, 1978).  Unfortunately, while there was some initial success, Anna developed severe facial pains and when other treatments for the pain were unsuccessful (e.g., leeches, electrical treatments, arsenic), morphine injections were once again started and continued through her discharge.  It is interesting that both Anna’s mother and cousin comment on the lack of progress in Anna breaking her addiction in their letters to the director of the sanatorium.  For example, Anna’s mother writes (October 7, 1882), that while initially there was “a ray of hope that it will be possible to suspend morphine injections, I learn most unhappily from the other that the patient cannot remain for as much as a single day without the drug, and B[ertha] is just as dependent on it now as she ever was” (cited in Hirschmüller, 1978, p. 303).

The data fragments of history clearly indicate that under Breuer’s care, Bertha was given morphine, and had developed a strong dependence.  Ramos (2003) makes a compelling argument that Anna’s later and more severe hysterical symptoms are largely the result of a patient who is addicted to chloral hydrate and morphine.  Although it is unclear exactly how Anna ultimately became better (to my knowledge, no one has uncovered any historical documentation that settles this important question), it likely did not occur until after she broke her drug addictions.  One interpretation of how Bertha finally recovered has little if anything to do with the effectiveness of psychoanalysis, but of a drug addict being able to successfully overcome her addiction.

c.        How did Anna’s Treatment with Breuer End?

Exactly how did Breuer’s treatment with Anna end?  Breuer’s account of how his treatment with Anna ended was later contradicted by Freud and Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones in several ways.  Jones (1953) reported that Freud told him that Breuer had developed a strong countertransference and his wife became jealous when her husband would talk repeatedly about this particular attractive patient.  According to Freud, in a letter to Martha, this was not the only time that Anna had elicited feelings in her doctor, “a colleague [at the sanatorium] is completely enchanted by the girl [Bertha], by her provocative appearance…” (cited in Appignanesi & Forrester, 1992, p. 81).  Martha responded with:  “It is curious that no man other than her physician of the moment got close to poor Bertha, that is when she was healthy she already [had the power] to turn the head of the most sensible of men – what a misfortune for the girl.  You will laugh at me, dearest, I so vividly put myself in the place of the silent Frau Mathilde [Breuer] that I could scarcely sleep last night” (p. 82).  This account has Breuer developing feelings for his attractive young patient, and at this point he decided to end his treatment of Anna.

The account of how Breuer ended his treatment does not stop there.  Freud, in a letter written almost exactly 50 years after the event to Stefan Zweig (June 2, 1932) gives additional information (which is also commented upon by his biographer Ernest Jones) as to what happened on the final day of Anna’s treatment.  Freud recounts suddenly remembering Breuer telling him in a different context that on the evening of the day in which Anna’s symptoms had finally disappeared, Breuer was called back to his patient and “found her confused and writhing in abdominal cramps.  Asked what was wrong with her, she replied: “Now Dr. B.’s child is coming!” …  Seized by conventional horror he took flight and abandoned the patient to a colleague.  For months afterwards she struggled to regain her health in a sanatorium.” (Freud, 1960, p. 413).  Jones (1953) notes that the next day, Breuer and his wife left for a second honeymoon in Venice, which resulted in the birth of a daughter (Dora Breuer), and Freud (1960, p. 413) noted in his letter that this was “not without significance for the deeper connections!”

What are we to make of this new version?  First, let’s start with the story that this event resulted in Dora Breuer’s conception as the result of a second honeymoon.  This version is contradicted by the historical record, and provides a great example of historical fiction (i.e., something that can be demonstrated as factually false; see Chapter 2).  Ellenberger found in the public records in Vienna that Dora was born on March 11, 1882 (Anna’s treatment ended on June 7, 1882).  The time of conception (approximately June 1881) was during the time Anna was transferred to the country house.  Thus, this aspect of the story is factually untrue, and can be classified as historical fiction (see Chapter 2).

Appignanesi and Forrester (1992) offer an interesting hypothesis as to what may have happened, if Freud’s version is correct (there is no independent verification of this version from anyone other than Freud, so take it with a grain of salt).  Specifically, they speculate that during this time Anna was reliving the previous year (June of 1881 as opposed to 1882) in her altered state.  June 1881 was nine months before Dora’s birth.  Thus, the “baby episode” may have been a reliving of events in Breuer’s personal life, and he found this to be “an unacceptable intertwining of his personal with his professional life” (p. 84).  According to this interpretation, Breuer was frightened at this point when Anna now seemed to be marching into his marriage and family life.

To me, the best explanation of the story offered by Freud is that it was a metaphor for the beginning of psychoanalysis, and is consistent with Freud putting himself in the best possible light.  Thus, I believe it likely did not occur, but be aware that this is simply speculation on my part and cannot be factually proven.  Specifically, the story can be interpreted to symbolize the “birth” of psychoanalysis.  However, Breuer let the birth of psychoanalysis “drop,” and was too frightened to continue as he abandoned his patient. Thus, it took someone with greater courage to recognize what had occurred, to become the father of the birth.  That individual was Sigmund Freud.

Without additional historical documents, exactly what occurred during that final day with Anna will never be known.  Since others have offered their speculations, I’ll offer mine as well.  Breuer’s letters to Binswanger provides further evidence that needs to be considered to make a judgment on Breuer’s final day of treatment with Anna, June 7, 1882.  In a letter dated November 4, 1881 (this letter was preceded by previous correspondence which has not been found), which is 7 months before Breuer’s treatment with Anna would officially end; Breuer is attempting to make arrangements for her treatment to be taken over by Bellevue (Hirschmüller, 1978).  Further correspondence from mid-June 1882, just after Breuer had stopped treatment, indicated that Anna’s mother was unsure if she should be brought to Bellevue or not, and a letter dated June 19, 1882, shows that Anna’s mother ultimately decided to take Anna to visit with relatives in Karlsruhe (Hirschmüller, 1978).  She was seeking the advice of another physician besides Breuer, and was hoping that new surroundings would help Anna’s condition.  However, Anna would ultimately be admitted to Bellevue on July 12, 1882.

I would speculate that the sheer amount of time that Breuer was spending with Anna was both negatively impacting his marriage and his other professional obligations.  Thus, Breuer was ultimately looking for a way out, especially since there was no end in sight for the termination of treatment.  Anna had developed a pattern of getting better for a short period of time, but would always relapse.  Breuer also realized at this point she was addicted to chloral and morphine, and needed to be treated for her drug addiction, which would require more intensive treatment than he was willing or able to give.  If Anna did announce that she wanted treatment to end on her one year anniversary of being moved to the country house (June 7, 1882), Breuer may well have used that as the opportunity to terminate his involvement in the case.  Anna checked into a sanatorium shortly after, and I would speculate that Breuer could anticipate this occurring once the symptoms of drug withdrawal began.  While I believe it is unlikely that the “Dr. B.’s baby” episode occurred, but some final dramatic scene with Anna would not shock me because she was not cured of her psychological problems, was addicted to drugs, and was prone to the dramatic.  Unfortunately, unless new data fragments are uncovered, we will never know the answer to the question of what exactly occurred on the final day of Anna’s treatment as the 21 ½ page report written by Breuer for the sanatorium does not address the final day of her treatment.

Why Would Breuer Agree to Publish Anna’s Case History?

Finally, one last issue deserves comment.  Freud told James Strachey (who edited The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud) that when treatment had concluded, Anna “made manifest to Breuer the presence of a strong unanalyzed positive transference of an unmistakable sexual nature” (see Breuer, 1895/1957, p. 41, footnotes).  Freud believed that this was the reason Breuer held back the publication of the case of Anna O. for so many years as well as Breuer’s ending his collaboration with Freud’s subsequent research.  This notion that Breuer delayed publication because of the sexual feelings that Anna may have possessed for him, or sexual feelings he may have had for her, has also become part of the legendary interpretation surrounding this case, and is told by Jones (1953). Yet, here we find a discrepancy between what Breuer has written, and what Freud would subsequently write.  For example, as Breuer reports about Anna, “The sexual element is astonishingly undeveloped; I have never once found it represented even amongst her numerous hallucinations” (cited in Hirschmüller, 1978, p. 277).  Moreover, she had “no element of sexuality throughout the entire illness” (cited in Hirschmüller, 1978, p. 295).

Thus, why did Breuer agree to publish her case history with Freud in Studies on Hysteria?  Especially the version that he put forth (i.e., a successful outcome) which is inconsistent with the patient he wished would end her own life to stop her suffering, and inconsistent with the patient he had left addicted to choral and morphine?  I would speculate that Breuer likely agreed to publish this case history to help out his friend.  Breuer was the much more highly respected researcher and clinician at the time compared with Freud.  Likewise, Freud’s reputation had recently suffered because of his publication about the benefits of cocaine (see Chapter 5).  Breuer’s name appearing on the manuscript would give it much more credibility than if Freud had published the other case histories on his own.  This practice still occurs today, as having a senior and well established researcher, such as Elizabeth Loftus, as a co-author on a journal article can give it much more prestige than would otherwise occur.

Second, Breuer likely only agreed because Freud had told him of his own successes in treating patients using the methods Breuer had developed with Anna.  Thus, Breuer may have rationalized that even if the “chimney sweeping” did not completely cure Anna, perhaps it did work with others so the case history had some benefit.  Finally, Breuer and Freud did not publish Studies on Hysteria until a full 13 years after the Anna case ended.  Perhaps the simplest explanation for the long delay in publishing the case is that Breuer wanted to ensure that Anna did not have another severe episode and wind up back in a psychiatric hospital.  This would have been extremely embarrassing given that a successful outcome was reported, and potentially harmful to Breuer’s professional reputation.  Yet, these are speculations on my part and should not be confused with historical fact.  Anna’s productive life really began when she moved to Frankfurt in 1888.  For the reader interested in learning more about Bertha Pappenheim (there are many available resources), I would recommend starting with Kimball’s (2000) article, “From “Anna O.” to Bertha Pappenheim: Transforming Private Pain Into Public Action.”  What seems clear is that Bertha leading such a productive life appears to have little if anything to do with Breuer’s treatment, which occurred years before and did not effectively cure her hysteria.

Chapter 5:  SEPARATING HISTORICAL FACTS FROM HISTORICAL FICTION (PART 2): FREUD’S “MAGICAL SUBSTANCE”

In 1884, Freud, like many young physicians in Vienna at the time, was searching to discover something which would bring him instant name recognition within the local medical circles.  Recognition would not only bring professional accolades, but allow him to be able to increase his economic standing and marry his fiancée Martha Bernays and ultimately support a family.  Unlike today, when marriage occurs at a variety of stages, the custom at that time was that marriage should be delayed until economic prospects were stable.

Freud came across a paper written by a German army surgeon, Theodor Aschenbrandt, which he believed showed promise and could be exactly what he was searching for to make the important discovery that would gain him the much needed professional accolades.  Aschenbrandt, prior to becoming a military officer, had worked at the Pharmacological Institute at Würzburg as an assistant where experiments using cocaine to revive exhausted animals had been performed.  Subsequently, Aschenbrandt searched for an opportunity to test if cocaine had the same revival properties in humans.  He ultimately administered the drug to 6 soldiers in 1883, when they became exhausted while marching in unseasonably hot weather.  The results were spectacular, as cocaine had the desired effect.  As described by Aschenbrandt (cited in Thornton, 1983, p. 38):

Case L.T., volunteer of one year, collapsed of exhaustion directly upon leaving W. on the second day of a march; the weather was extremely hot, I gave him approximately one tablespoon of water with twenty drops of a cocaine solution (0.5/10).  A few minutes later (approximately five), he stood up of his own accord and travelled the distance to H., several kilometers, easily and cheerfully and with a pack on his back.

Freud subsequently found a paper in a relatively obscure American journal (The Therapeutic Gazette of Detroit), which provided some preliminary evidence that cocaine was also successful in weaning morphine and alcoholics from their addictions.  Freud subsequently ordered cocaine for himself and began taking it on a regular basis for depression and indigestion, and had dramatic results.  He was so impressed with the positive benefits that he sent some cocaine to his fiancée Martha, and “he pressed it on his friends and colleagues, both for themselves and their patients, he gave it to his sisters.  In short, looked at from the vantage point of our present knowledge, he was rapidly becoming a public menace” (Jones, 1953, p. 81).  Freud and his biographer Ernest Jones indicate that Freud’s use of cocaine ended in 1887, and he never became addicted to the drug himself.  Yet, Jones (a devoted supporter of Freud), who was allowed to see many of Freud’s letters not made available to others, wrote in a letter, “I’m afraid that Freud took more cocaine than he should though I’m not mentioning that [in my biography]” (cited in Isbister, 1985, p. 35).  Letters written from Freud to Wilhelm Fliess provide evidence that Freud continued to take cocaine into middle age (Masson, 1985), and Thornton (1983; Freud and Cocaine) makes a compelling case that Freud’s use of cocaine directly influenced his theory of personality, especially the emphasis on sexual drives.

In a letter to Martha in 1884, Freud told her he was “now busy collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magical substance” (quoted in Isbister, 1985, p. 34).  Freud’s tribute to his “magical substance,” which he now believed had many uses (e.g., stimulant, aphrodisiac) and the potential to cure many ills (e.g., stomach disorders, cachexia, asthma) was published in the July 1884 edition of Centralblatt für die Gesammte Therapie, titled “Über Coca.”  This paper was subsequently translated into English, and appears to have played a role in the subsequent cocaine epidemic that began in the 1890s in the United States, which started with medical professionals that experimented with cocaine, but were unaware of the addictive properties of the drug.

Freud’s Third Scourge of Humanity

In addition to the other “magical” properties described in the paper, Freud discusses a successful use of cocaine as a safe and non-addictive substitute for morphine.  This case was almost certainly Freud’s friend and colleague Ernst Fleischl von Marxow.  Fleischl started taking morphine to control pain in his right hand, which had to have the thumb amputated and had several operations performed on it.  Unfortunately, Fleischl became a morphine addict.  Freud, based upon what he had read in the Therapeutic Gazette, as well as his own positive experience, had given his friend cocaine as a substitute for morphine.  In his “Über Coca” paper, Freud wrote that “after ten days he was able to dispense with the coca treatment altogether” (cited in Thornton, 1983, p. 40).  While the cocaine had successfully broken Fleischl’s morphine addiction momentarily (he would subsequently need morphine again for the pain in his hand), by early 1885 Fleischl was taking huge amounts of cocaine.  He was a cocaine addict.

Freud in March, despite knowing that Fleischl was now an addict and did not stop taking the drug, read a paper to the Vienna Psychiatric Association in which he claimed that cocaine was able to break morphine addictions without threat of subsequent addiction to cocaine.  This paper was subsequently published on August 7, 1885.  Keep this date in mind, as it will be important shortly, and will provide another concrete example that Freud was not above being less than fully honest in his professional publications to make his clinical cases appear more successful than they actually were.

Fleischl’s case came to a crisis on June 4, 1885.  When Freud found his friend, Fleischl was in such a bad state he went to fetch other doctors (his friend Joseph Breuer among them).  Fleischl was exhibiting classic symptoms of cocaine intoxication.  For example, he was hallucinating that white snakes were crawling all over his body.  Freud would recall that this was the most frightening night of his life (Jones, 1953).  Freud wrote to Martha (June 8), and warned her against acquiring a habit, although he continued to send her the drug (Thornton, 1983).  Sadly, Fleischl would live in a miserable state another 6 years, both in agonizing pain and addicted to cocaine.  Thornton (1983, p. 45) notes that “having been witness to these terrible scenes, knowing that Fleischl was still taking morphine as well as cocaine and having warned his fiancée of acquiring the habit, Freud allowed the 1885 paper to go forward for publication in August.”  In all fairness to Freud, he gave his friend cocaine before it became widely known about the addictive properties of the drug and was trying to break his friend’s morphine addiction.  On the other hand, Freud’s failure to mention what he had witnessed firsthand to the Vienna Psychiatric Association is extremely disturbing.  Perhaps these types of actions by Freud help to explain why he destroyed so much of his personal papers and correspondence.  They are fragments of historical evidence that will never be recovered.

Ironically, it was not long afterward that Freud would wish he had never published his 1885 paper, which claimed that cocaine could safely wean morphine addicts from their addiction without fear of subsequent addiction to cocaine.  Earlier that same year, Albrecht Erlenmeyer had published an article cautioning about the addictive properties of cocaine, and subsequently reports started to come in from around the world about the highly addictive properties of the drug.  Erlenmeyer, in a second paper about the addictive properties of cocaine in 1886 named Freud personally (Ellenberger, 1970), and it was Erlenmeyer that would accuse Freud of unleashing “the third scourge of humanity” (i.e., cocaine) on the world (the first two were alcohol and morphine).

Freud would attempt to defend himself in a July 1887 paper against Erlenmeyer’s charges.  In this paper, Freud blamed others for first suggesting that cocaine could be used as a treatment for morphine addicts.  Freud also stated that the hypodermic needle was the real source of the danger when taking cocaine, and he had recommended taking the drug orally.  Yet, in the 1885 paper, Freud supported injections as a method to administer cocaine (Jones, 1953).  In Freud’s 1897 list of publications he prepared when applying for the title of Professor, the 1885 paper was not included.  Likewise, Freud did not keep a copy of the paper in his personal collection of reprints.  As Jones (1953) points out, Freud seems to have totally suppressed his paper about the benefits of his magical substance.[2]

Chapter 6:  FREUD COMES TO AMERICA!

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss Freud’s first and only trip to the United States in 1909, in which he was invited to give a series of lectures at Clark University (Worchester, Massachusetts).  Freud himself described the trip as the first formal acknowledgment of his work (Jones, 1955).  The trip was extremely important because it ultimately introduced Freud to a much larger academic audience than would have otherwise occurred.

While some American psychologists were familiar with Freud’s work prior to his trip to the United States, many were not.  There is no guarantee that this would have changed without Freud lecturing at Clark University, especially given that most American psychologists in the early 1900s were experimentalists performing research, not clinicians treating mental illness (see Chapter 1).  Because of financial concerns Freud almost never made the trip to America, which likely would have altered the history of psychology in many ways.  As pointed out by Schultz and Schultz (2008, p. 421), on this trip, “Freud met prominent American psychologists such as James, Titchener, and Cattell.  Freud’s lectures were published in the American Journal of Psychology and translated into several languages… .  The APA discussed his work at the annual convention. The American Psychoanalytic Association was founded in 1911, followed by psychoanalytic societies in New York, Boston, Chicago, and Washington, DC.”  Freud’s trip to America was the initial impetus to introduce his work to a much larger academic audience both in America and Europe than he previously had or could have imagined.

Filling in the Blanks: Freud’s Work during 1895-1909

Prior to discussing Freud’s American visit, I will fill in some pertinent missing information not yet covered.  Specifically, what occurred in between the publication of Studies on Hysteria in 1895, which only sold 626 copies in 13 years (R.I. Watson, 1978), to 1909.  Likewise, relevant issues will be examined.  First, in 1895, Freud completed a Project for a Scientific Psychology, which attempted to create a neurophysical model of the mind.  He ultimately discarded the biological model and turned towards a psychological approach.  Publication of this work did not occur until the 1950s, in which it was initially published in German and then in English.

The Seduction Theory

On April 21, 1896, Freud presented a paper (The Aetiology of Hysteria) to the Viennese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology.  The meeting was chaired by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who was the department head of psychiatry at the University of Vienna.  Freud by this time believed that sex was the causal factor in the development of hysteria.  In this paper, Freud stated that all of his hysteric patients, which consisted of 12 women and 6 men, had told him about an incident in childhood in which they had been seduced by an older adult (“the seduction theory”).  Freud concluded that childhood sexual traumas, which were repressed until psychoanalysis was able to uncover the memories, were the cause of hysterical symptoms.  This lecture received a cool response from the Society’s members.  As Freud would write to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, his lecture was “met with an icy reception from the asses, and from Krafft-Ebing the strange comment: It sounds like a scientific fairy tale. …  They can all go to hell” (cited in Masson, 1984, p. 9).

About a year and a half later, for reasons that are still uncertain, Freud changed his mind about his seduction theory.  Freud now claimed that in the majority of patients, the childhood sexual trauma described had not actually taken place, but the patients instead had been reporting fantasies that they believed to be true.  The events were real to the patients, and just as traumatic as if the sexual trauma had actually occurred.  This new interpretation allowed Freud to keep the core of his original theory, that hysteria was the result of the repression of a sexual event, but now the sexual trauma was imagined as opposed to real.  Freud would subsequently develop the Oedipus complex from this new interpretation of what his patients told him.

Prior to continuing this timeline leading up to Freud’s American visit, I thought it would be useful to present a controversial historical interpretation about why Freud abandoned his initial belief that the sexual incidents described by his patients were real.  This will allow me to again emphasize the importance of historical research in helping us to differentiate on the historical fact/historical fiction continuum (see Chapter 2).  Specifically, Jeffrey Masson (1984) in The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory claimed that Freud’s seduction theory so outraged his colleagues that Freud was subsequently ostracized from the medical community.  According to Masson, Freud changed his interpretation not because he changed his mind, but because of social pressure.  Yet, as Esterson (2002, p. 130) notes, “there is abundant documentary evidence that demonstrates that Masson’s account of Freud’s being shunned by his colleagues is contradicted by the historical facts.”  For example, Freud was able to publish a paper in 1896 on his seduction theory, and shortly after was promoted to the rank of full professor.  It does not follow that an ostracized individual would be allowed to publish a paper on the topic responsible for his being shunned, and receive the necessary votes from colleagues to obtain the high honor of receiving the rank of full professor.

Freud’s seduction lecture did receive a cool response from his colleagues at the Viennese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology (Esterson, 2002).  Yet, “it was not outrage at Freud’s raising the issue of childhood sexual abuse that was the source of their skepticism.  Contemporary documents indicate that opposition to the seduction theory claims was based either on a belief in the predominantly constitutional basis of nervous disorders or, more often, on the grounds that findings obtained by means of Freud’s clinical procedures were unreliable” (Esterson, 2002, pp. 117-118).  It was the method being attacked—which meant there was little substance to support the theory.  Even Freud’s own writings show “that he had often used highly suggestive procedures to elicit the memories of childhood “seductions” from his patients” (Powell & Boer, 1994, p. 1283).

As previously discussed, the historical record not matching later interpretations surrounding Freud and the history of psychoanalysis have occurred.  Freud’s seduction theory provides several more examples worth exploring.  Specifically, Freud would write the following in his An Autobiographical Study first published in 1925:

If the reader feels inclined to shake his head at my credulity, I cannot altogether blame him; though I may plead that this was at a time when I was intentionally keeping my critical faculty in abeyance so as to preserve an unprejudiced and receptive attitude towards the many novelties which were coming to my notice every day.  When, however, I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only phantasies which my patients had made up or which I myself had perhaps forced upon them, I was for some time completely at a loss. (cited in Israëls & Schatzman, 1993, p. 26)

Futhermore, Freud would write that:

I do not believe even now that I forced the seduction phantasies on my patients, that I ‘suggested’ them.  I had in fact stumbled for the first time upon the Oedipus complex, which was later to assume such an overwhelming importance, but which I did not recognize as yet in its disguise of phantasy (cited in Esterson, 2001, p. 341).

Here Freud presents himself as an innocent bystander who initially was deceived by his patients, but was ultimately wise enough to uncover the truth.  This version “attained the status of historical fact for much of the twentieth century” (Esterson, 2001, pp. 329-330).  However, what Freud published in 1896 (i.e., the historical data fragments) flatly contradicts his later recreation in his autobiography.  For example, Freud tells a much different version than patients freely providing him fantastic stories, and vigorously defended his seduction theory against charges that his patients were simply telling him phantasies.  As Freud would write in 1896, “Before they come for analysis the patients know nothing about these scenes. They are indignant as a rule if we warn them that such scenes are going to emerge.  Only the strongest compulsion of the treatment can induce them to embark on a reproduction of them” (cited in Israël & Schatzman, 1993, p. 24).  Freud in defending his seduction theory would also write in 1896, “Whatever you may think about the conclusions I have come to, I must ask you not to regard them as the fruit of idle speculation.  They are based on a laborious individual examination of patients which has in most cases taken up a hundred or more hours of work” (cited in Israël & Schatzman, 1993, p. 38).  Freud’s own writings are not consistent with the later version of the innocent bystander who was initially “duped” by his patients, but ultimately wise enough to ascertain the truth.

Also of interest, Freud had written a series of letters, which he believed would remain confidential, between 1887 through 1904 to his friend Wilhelm Fliess.  When Freud discovered that the letters had not been destroyed in the 1930s he wrote apprehensively, “I do not want any of them to become known to so-called posterity” (cited in Israël & Schatzman, 1993, p. 47).  In a letter dated September 21, 1897, Freud had written to Fliess that he no longer believed in his seduction theory, but would not make his reversal public.  Freud provides 4 motives for his reversal.  Let’s concentrate on the first.  As Freud wrote, “The continual disappointment in my efforts to bring my analysis to a real conclusion; the running away of people who for a period of time had been most gripped; the absence of the complete successes on which I had counted; the possibility of explaining to myself the partial successes in other ways, in the usual fashion…” (cited in Israël & Schatzman, 1993, p. 48).  Freud, who believed that he was writing in confidence to a close friend at the time, notes that he was not having therapeutic success using his psychoanalytic techniques based upon his seduction theory.

In an additional letter on February 9, 1898, he wrote to Fliess, “The cases of hysteria are proceeding especially poorly.  I shall not finish a single one this year either” (cited in Esterson, 2001, p. 334).  Freud was not above presenting therapeutic success in published articles despite privately knowing the ineffectiveness of the treatment (e.g., Freud’s disastrous use of cocaine to treat his friend’s morphine addiction which was presented in Chapter 5).  Unfortunately, the same pattern of behavior occurred here.  In 1898, 13 years after publishing his mistaken writings about cocaine’s treatment benefits, Freud would again in a published paper claim great successes, this time with his new procedure to treat the most severe cases of hysteria (Esterson, 2001).

Likewise, in both Freud’s An Autobiographical Study and later in his New Introductory Letters on Psychoanalysis, Freud states that the seducer of his female patients was almost always the patient’s father.  This later reinterpretation directly contradicts what Freud had previously written.  Specifically, the seducers when the seduction theory was first published in 1896 were older children, adults who did not know the child, and adults who knew the child (e.g., teachers, servants), but were not related.  As Esterson (2001) points out, Freud in preparing for the 1924 reprinting had reread the 1896 papers.  Thus, the inconsistency cannot have been a simple issue of unreliable memories with the passage of time.  Likewise, it is not the case (as some have interpreted) that Freud was hiding the truth that fathers were typically the wrongdoer.  What appears most likely is that Freud “could not resist the temptation to bring the 1896 clinical claims into line with his Oedipal explanation of girls’ supposed phantasies of seduction in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916-1917), namely, that they are ‘retrospectively phantasying a desired object’ into their early childhood to spare themselves shame about infantile masturbation” (Esterson, 2001, p. 342).

In summary, the purpose of examining the seduction theory controversy was to provide another example of the importance of historical research.  If we were to simply rely upon Freud’s recreated version that he provided later in his life or Masson’s controversial version at face value without examining the relevant historical data fragments, we would be at a substantial disadvantage if our ultimate goal is to have an accurate assessment of what happened a long time ago.

Freud’s Other Important Publications

Let’s return back to our timeline filling in some of the important events leading up to Freud’s American trip.  In 1896, Freud’s father passed away, and he experienced severe depression.  During this period, Freud attempted to analyze himself.  Since he could not use free association or any form of talking cure, as he would have to be both patient and doctor, he instead attempted to interpret his own dreams.  This effort resulted in perhaps Freud’s most well-known work, The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung), published in 1900, which initially took 6 years to sell 600 copies (Hergenhahn, 1997).  Thus, Dreams did not receive instant attention, but would ultimately go through 8 editions during Freud’s lifetime.  Without the American trip in 1909, this increased type of interest in his work would have been unlikely.  Dreams contains such well-known concepts such as the difference between manifest content (the literal dream itself) and latent content (the underlying meaning encoded in symbols).  Likewise, the concept of wish fulfillment, as well as Freud first outlining the Oedipus complex occurs in Dreams.  Such topics as Freud’s sexual longings for his mother and a sexual desire towards his daughter were discussed.  While I personally find Freud’s interpretations problematic, I would encourage you to read the book.  It provides an example of what an exceptional writer Freud was.  Dreams is available at the Internet Archive website (http://www.archive.org/).

One individual who did read The Interpretation of Dreams soon after its publication was Carl Jung, who would subsequently become a convert to psychoanalysis.  Jung and Freud began corresponding regularly in April 1906, and became very close friends (the friendship would become permanently severed by 1913).  Jung’s passion for Freud’s views seemed limitless, and Freud decided that Jung would be his heir and continue his work.  For example, Freud in a letter to Jung said that “if I am Moses, then you are Joshua and will take possession of the promised land of psychiatry, which I shall only be able to glimpse from afar” (cited in Benjamin, 2006, p. 143).  For those interested in the correspondence between Freud and Jung, see The Freud/Jung letters (McGuire, 1974), which also includes the letters that end the friendship.  Sandor Ferenczi of Budapest (Hungary) also became a close friend with Freud after reading Dreams.  The two men would vacation together and exchanged over a thousand letters between 1908 and 1933 (Jones, 1955).  Both Jung and Ferenczi would accompany Freud to America in 1909.

In 1901, just a year after The Interpretation of Dreams was published, Freud would publish Psychopathology of Everyday Life.  This book discussed parapraxes, which are small errors in everyday life that were described as unconsciously motivated (e.g., forgetting things, small accidents).  The “Freudian slip,” or slip of the tongue (saying “sex” instead of “six”), is a concept from this book.  Likewise in 1905, Freud would publish Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, which emphasized childhood sexuality.  Leading up to Freud’s American trip, Freud was publishing at a prolific rate, but none of Freud’s works sold many copies, and few American psychologists read the German writings.

However, interest in Freud’s theories had begun to receive some attention, and he did begin to attract followers.  For example, the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society was formed in 1908.  Likewise, a “Freud Group” had been started in Zurich and was led by Jung.  The first journal on psychoanalysis, The Yearbook for Psychoanalysis and Research in Psychopathology, was started in 1908 with Jung as the editor.  The First Congress of Freudian Psychology occurred on April 26, 1908, at the Hotel Bristol in Salzburg, Austria.  The event included 42 participants from several countries, and nine papers were read during the one day conference.

In America, James Jackson Putnam (1906), a distinguished Harvard University neurologist, published the first article (“Recent experiences in the study and treatment of hysteria at the Massachusetts General Hospital, with remarks on Freud’s method of treatment by “psycho-analysis””) on psychoanalytic therapy in an American journal, the Journal of Abnormal Psychology.  Putnam would become over the years a loyal and devoted follower of Freud, and was influential in ultimately establishing psychoanalysis in the United States.  Putnam became the first president of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1911.  Also, the Journal of Abnormal Psychology reviewed Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which was the first review of one of his books in an American journal.  Despite the above recognition, psychoanalysis remained a minor movement (i.e., it was not widespread nor a widely accepted method of treatment), but Freud’s influence was increasing and his private practice at this time was flourishing.

G. Stanley Hall: The Great Organizer

Prior to discussing Freud’s trip below, I will provide some necessary background information about G. (Granville) Stanley Hall, who extended the invitation to Freud.  Hall is well-known for his large list of “first” achievements.  Hall received the first doctorate in American psychology, at Harvard University, and would subsequently become the first American to study under Wilhelm Wundt, the father of modern experimental psychology, at Leipzig University in Germany.  After returning to the United States and giving a successful series of lectures at Harvard, Hall would land a position at Johns Hopkins University where he established the first American psychology laboratory.  Hall also established the first psychology journal in the United States in 1887, The American Journal of Psychology (Hall would also establish Pedagogical Seminary in 1891, now called the Journal of Genetic Psychology; the Journal of Religious Psychology in 1904; and the Journal of Applied Psychology in 1917).

In 1888, Hall would leave Hopkins to become the first President of Clark University, but was simultaneously a professor of psychology and was influential in making Clark University one of the leading graduate programs in America for psychology at that time.  Clark University not only had an outstanding reputation in North America, but was well known by Europeans as well.  Most importantly, Hall was one of the first (perhaps the first) American psychologists to become interested in Freud’s theories.  As Evans and Koelsch state (1985, p. 943), “Hall had been long attracted to Freud’s ideas.  He even owned one of the 257 copies sold of Freud’s book on aphasia.  As early as 1901, Hall was mentioning Freud’s work in his lectures at Clark.”

Perhaps more important for Freud, Hall was a great organizer and promoter of psychology.  For example, in 1892, Hall had invited the most influential psychologists from around the country to meet in Worchester to form an association.  His efforts resulted in the founding of the American Psychological Association (APA), and Hall was elected the APAs first president.  The APA remains one of the most influential organizations for psychologists in the world.  Hall would subsequently use his skills to promote psychoanalysis as well.  For example, Hall ensured that Freud’s lectures at the Clark University celebration received positive coverage by the local newspapers.  Hall even gained Freud some greater press coverage by ghostwriting a glowing article for the national publication, the Nation (Evans & Koelsch, 1985).

Freud’s initial invitation to America occurred when G. Stanley Hall was planning the 20th Anniversary celebration of Clark University by inviting distinguished lecturers to give talks at a variety of conferences (Hall previously organized a smaller 10th anniversary celebration).  A total of 29 lecturers participated from a variety of disciplines including psychology, physics, math, chemistry, biology, astronomy, anthropology, education and history.  This esteemed group included two Nobel Prize winners.  Of the 29 speakers, 8 came from the behavioral sciences.  The most well-known American psychologist to participate was Edward Bradford Titchener, who had established structuralism in the United States, after studying under Wundt at Leipzig University.  Wundt also received an invitation, but declined.  “Wundt would not travel even a few miles for an official international congress and most certainly would not travel thousands of miles for a convocation; he gave his advanced age as an excuse” (Evans & Koelsch, 1985, p. 942).  When Wundt declined, Hall offered the spot to Herman Ebbinghaus, whose work on memory is still referenced in psychology textbooks today.  Although Ebbinghaus accepted, he unfortunately died prior to the anniversary celebration.

A legitimate question to ask at this point is why would G. Stanley Hall invite Freud as a speaker?  Certainly compared to the other invited speakers, Freud was not as well known at the time, and did not have as distinguished an academic record and reputation as the others.  The answer as to why Freud was invited seems to be that Freud’s emphasis on sexuality was of particular interest to Hall.  Prior to Freud’s visit in 1909, Hall had collected a large number of books on sexuality for his personal library.  Hall had even offered a controversial course at Clark University called “The Psychology of Sex” (Rosenzweig, 1992), which was unheard of at the time.  Since he was not only a psychologist, but the President of the university, he had leeway to teach the controversial course without fear of interference from the administration.

Hall’s most important work was a two-volume book published in 1904/1905, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education.  It certainly is evident that Hall was very familiar with Freud’s work, as he is referenced several times throughout the book.  For example, Hall (1904, p. 285) references a paper Freud published in 1892 when he notes that “Freud was the first to insist that all forms of morbid anxiety were closely associated with the vita sexualis, and always arose in cases of retention of the libido.”   While Adolescence covered a variety of topics (e.g., language development, growth norms, crime, friendship, diseases) and was responsible for popularizing the term “adolescence,” the book became controversial because of a focus on sexuality, especially in the “Adolescent Love” chapter in Volume II.  As Hall (1905, p. 109) would write, “Sex is the most potent and magic open sesame to the deepest mysteries of life, death, religion, and love.  It is, therefore, one of the cardinal sins against youth to repress healthy thoughts of sex at the proper age, because thus the mind itself is darkened and its wings clipped for many of the higher intuitions, which the supreme muse of common sense at this its psychologic moment ought to give. … Neither the psychology nor the pedagogy of adolescence can be treated without careful consideration of the whole problem of sex.”

Hall (1905) references (see p. 121) Breuer and Freud’s Studies on Hysteria and from another 1896 paper by Freud emphasizing the importance of sexuality as it relates to hysteria in Adolescence.  Thus, “Hall found in Freud someone with a similar emphasis on the importance of sexuality in early childhood.  By 1907, Hall clearly believed that Freud’s work was fundamental to psychology” (Evans & Koelsch, 1985, p. 943).  Fortunately for Freud and psychoanalysis, Hall would do his best to promote Freud’s work to a much larger audience than Freud himself could have imagined.

Freud’s American Invitation

On December 15, 1908, Hall had written to Freud to ask if he would be willing to give a series of lectures during the first week of July as part of the 20th Anniversary celebration of the founding of Clark University.  Hall wrote, “Although I have not the honor of your personal acquaintance, I have for many years been profoundly interested in your work which I have studied with diligence…” (cited in Benjamin, 2006, p. 141).  Hall was able to offer Freud a 400 dollar honorarium.  Freud initially declined the invitation, because it would have required him to miss too much work and the financial loss of income would be substantial.  He was a practicing physician, and it was customary at the time to take time off from July 15 through the end of September.  Freud would write to Jung to tell him about the invitation, and would say this about the Americans, “I also think that once they discover the sexual core of our psychological theories they will drop us.  Their prudery and their material dependence on the public are too great” (cited in Benjamin, 2006, p. 143).  Freud could not have been more wrong, as Freudian theory would be more readily accepted in America in the first half of the 20th century than any other country on earth.

Hall would subsequently write to Freud again, explaining that the celebration events had been changed to September.  Also, he would be able to increase the honorarium to 750 dollars, and he would give Freud an honorary degree.  Freud accepted this second offer, and when a German psychologist had declined Hall’s offer to lecture at the celebration, Hall subsequently invited Freud’s close friend, at the time, Carl Jung.

One interpretation about the changing of the dates from July to September that has been sometimes repeated and is worth evaluating is that Hall did this to specifically accommodate Freud.  This interpretation appears unlikely, as the simpler explanation is that at the same time Clark University had initially planned its 20th Anniversary celebration, the University of Leipzig (Germany) would be celebrating its 500th Anniversary and the University of Geneva (Switzerland) its 350th Anniversary.  Many individuals that Hall wanted to attend Clark’s celebration would be attending those much older and more prominent anniversary celebrations in July.  In addition, European universities typically did not finish their semester until the end of July.  This would make travel to America difficult for the European professors that Hall had sent out invitations to attend.  The September date was likely chosen because of the many scheduling conflicts, not solely because of Freud’s conflict (Evans & Koelsch, 1985).

Freud’s American Trip

Freud would subsequently invite his friend Ferenczi to accompany him on the trip.  Thus, Freud, Jung, and Ferenczi would sail to America on August 21, 1909, on the ship the George Washington. After the men arrived in New York City (NYC), the following day A.A. Brill, who had first met Freud at the First Congress of Freudian Psychology the previous year, took the men on a tour of NYC, and they saw such sights as Central Park, the Chinese quarter, the Jewish section of the Lower East Side, and Coney Island.  The following day they visited the Metropolitan Museum, where Freud wanted to view the ancient Grecian remains as well as Columbia University.  Ernest Jones (Freud’s biographer) would join the group and notes that they went to a cinema to see a film “with plenty of wild chasing.  Ferenczi in his boyish way was very excited at it, but Freud was only quietly amused; it was the first film they had seen” (Jones, 1955, p. 56).  Unfortunately, all three men were having dietary issues from the foreign food (diarrhea and stomachaches).

When Freud, Jung, and Ferenczi arrived by train in Worchester, they initially checked into a hotel and rested for several hours before having dinner with G. Stanley Hall at his home that evening (Rosenzweig, 1992).  After spending the night at the hotel, the three men would stay with Hall for the remainder of the conference.  Carl Jung, in a letter to his wife (September 6, 1909) would write, “He [Hall] is a refined, distinguished old gentleman close on seventy who received us with the kindest hospitality.  He has a plump, jolly, good-natured, and extremely ugly wife who, however, serves wonderful food.  She promptly took over Freud and me as her “boys” and plied us with delicious nourishment and noble wine, so that we began visibly to recover” (cited in Benjamin, 2006, pp. 146-7).

This was Hall’s second wife whom he met through his work on child development as she was a kindergarten teacher.  His first wife and young daughter tragically died from asphyxiation in 1890 (Hall was not in the home at the time, recovering from an illness).  Unfortunately, “Shortly after the Clark Conference of 1909, Hall and his wife separated.  An escalating series of bizarre public incidents by his wife had produced many embarrassing moments for Hall.  Eventually she was institutionalized with severe dementia” (Benjamin, 2006, p. 147).  Hall ultimately lost both wives, and a daughter, in terrible circumstances.

Freud would give his 5 lectures at the conference on consecutive days starting Tuesday, September 7, and concluding on Saturday, September 11.  Each lecture was at 11:00 am in the morning, which was considered “prime time.”  Initially Freud was only scheduled to give 4 lectures, but Freud had arrived earlier than Hall had anticipated, and the conference was quickly rearranged so that Freud could start a day earlier.  As pointed out by Evans and Koelsch (1985, p. 944), “Were this not the case, Freud’s well-known book would have been titled Four Lectures on Psychoanalysis rather than the title we know.  Freud’s talks were not titled in the advance program.  In fact, Freud had not prepared formal talks at all and improvised his talks during morning walks with Ferenczi.”  Whether or not the last statement is historically accurate (although it is widely repeated) is open to debate, as the information comes from what Freud stated in his obituary of his longtime and loyal friend Ferenczi.  Rosenzweig (1992, p. 128) wonders whether “Freud may have somewhat exaggerated out of gratitude to a friend and disciple who had met an untimely death.”  Freud was extremely loyal to those who were loyal to him.  Moreover, this issue provides an excellent example of historical information that at this point in time cannot be classified as either historical fact or historical fiction because no definitive answer exists (see Chapter 2).

Freud, who was at that time an accomplished speaker, delivered the lectures in German with no notes.  The subsequent written publication of “The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis” published in The American Journal of Psychology in 1910 was reconstructed from memory.  As Evans and Koelsch (1985, p. 945) have commented, Freud’s lectures “still represent perhaps the most accessible and lively discourse on psychoanalysis every written.”  I agree with their interpretation.  This article was the initial exposure for most American psychologists to Freud’s work, and also gave his work much greater exposure in Europe because a large number of European psychologists also read The American Journal of Psychology.

Freud would subsequently write to Hall to ask his permission to make some changes in the published version, which Hall granted as customary (Rosenzweig, 1992).  Some of the topics covered in the final published form were as follows: First lecture:  Anna O.; Second lecture: the development of psychoanalysis, a discussion of such concepts as repression (using Hall as an example) and sublimation; Third lecture: free association, slips of the tongue; Forth lecture: infant sexuality and the Oedipus complex; Fifth lecture: social aspects of sexuality, transference, wish-fulfillment.  Rosenzweig’s (1992) research from the local newspaper coverage indicates that Freud did make some changes.  Specifically, “Freud shifted essential aspects of the third and fourth lectures from delivery to publication: he moved the topics of dream interpretation and free association from the fourth to the third lecture, and that of sexual development, including infantile sexuality, from the fifth to the fourth.  Some topics covered in the fifth delivered lecture were not included in the published version and others were added” (p. 129).

Overall, the impression that Freud made on those who attended the conference can best be described as mixed.  For example, Edward Titchener was not impressed with Freud’s theories, but appears to have developed a personal respect for him (Evans & Koelsch, 1985).  In contrast, William James appears to have developed a positive view towards Freud’s ideas, but had reservations about him personally.  As James would write, “I hope that Freud and his pupils will push their ideas to their utmost limits, so that we may learn what they are.  They can’t fail to throw light on human nature” (cited in Evans & Koelsch, 1985, p. 947).  On a personal note, James wrote the following about Freud, “I confess that he made on me personally the impression of a man obsessed with fixed ideas” and “I strongly suspect Freud, with his dream theory, of being a regular halluciné” (cited in Evans & Koelsch, 1985, p. 947).

As the conference was winding down, both Freud and Jung received honorary degrees of Doctor of Laws during a formal ceremony on Friday evening, September 10, 1909.  This would be Freud’s only academic accolade during his lifetime.  Freud would say in his small speech during the ceremony, “This is the first official recognition of our endeavors” (Jones, 1955, p. 57).  Carl Jung, in a letter written to his wife the day after the two men had received their honorary degrees, would write that “Freud is in seventh heaven, and I am glad with all my heart to see him so…” (cited in Benjamin, 2006, p. 148).

Rosenzweig (1992) points out a remarkable coincidence that occurred during Freud’s only American visit.  Specifically, “Bertha Pappenheim was in North America in 1909 just as Freud was.  She had come to attend the International Women’s Conference in Canada in August and stopped, by invitation, to lecture in Chicago and New York” (p. 109).  Thus, at just about the same time Bertha was in America, Freud was about to deliver his lecture about the case of Anna O.  One can only speculate what Bertha, who did not have positive views towards psychoanalysis after she finally recovered, would have thought of Freud’s lecture.

After the conference ended, Freud, Jung, Ferenczi, and Brill made their way by train to Buffalo, New York.  Freud had wanted to visit Niagara Falls while in America, and was not disappointed as it was a greater sight than he expected.  Jones recalls that the fifty-three year old Freud, who was sensitive about his age, had his feelings hurt in the Cave of the Winds.  A worker moved other tourists aside and called out, “Let the old fellow go first” (Jones, 1955, p. 58).  While on the American side of the falls, Freud sent his daughter Sophie a post card, and the four men sent Brill’s wife a card from the Canadian side of the Falls (Rosenzweig, 1992).

After Niagara Falls (Brill left the group at this point), the 3 remaining friends traveled to the Adirondack Mountains, near Lake Placid, where they had been invited by the Harvard Professor of Neurology, James Putnam, to stay a few days at his vacation home.  This brief trip was important for the spreading of psychoanalysis.  Putnam would ultimately become one of the most ardent and influential American supporters of psychoanalysis, and he helped to spread the word about psychoanalysis to the academic and medical communities.  For example, Putnam made a contribution at the APA’s 18th annual meeting in 1909 in a session devoted to abnormal psychology where he discussed Freud’s theory of the unconscious, and emphasized the importance of the sexual drive.  Also, in 1911, Putnam would become the first president of the American Psychoanalytic Association.  Putnam’s support, as a respected Harvard professor of neurology, gave psychoanalysis a credibility that may have not otherwise occurred initially without such a well-respected advocate.[3]

After their stay in the mountains, the three friends would make their way back to New York City and would sail for home on the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse on September 21.  On the trip home, the men discussed the possibility of founding an international psychoanalytic association, which was ultimately established the following year with Jung as its first president.  Thus, the trip “was the impetus given to the psychoanalytic movement as an organized professional endeavor” (Rosenzweig, 1992, p. 207).  Without the American trip, there is no guarantee that this type of organizational structure, which is vital when attempting to popularize a movement, would have ever occurred.

Some Additional Important Benefits of Freud’s Trip

In addition to the American Psychoanalytic Association mentioned above, other Psychoanalytic institutes were formed after Freud’s lectures in America.  For example, Brill established the New York Psychoanalytic Society, Putnam founded the Boston Psychoanalytic Society in 1914, and William A. White in Washington, D.C., “led an eager group of young analysts at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital” (Gifford, 1991, p. 130) and White “applied psychoanalysis enthusiastically to every kind of mental illness, including chronic schizophrenia” (Gifford, 1991, pp. 131-2).   White ultimately became the most well-known psychoanalyst in the country and he would testify for the defense in the Leopold and Loeb trial (see Chapter 10).

Also, after Freud’s trip there was a sharp increase in articles pertaining to psychoanalysis (most were favorable) in the medical literature (Hale, 1971).  If Freud had refused the second invitation by Hall, it is difficult to contemplate how he would have obtained an equivalent amount of professional notoriety.  Perhaps Evans and Koelsch (1985, pp. 947-948) have best summarized Freud’s American trip in the following way, “The seed of Freudian psychoanalysis, if it had not already been sown in America, was certainly sown now and nurtured through this meeting.  American psychology would not be quite the same again.”

Freud’s View of America

Psychoanalysis would ultimately become more widely accepted in America compared with any other country in the first half of the 20th century.  Freud and Jung were wrong in their prediction that Americans would quickly abandon psychoanalysis once they learned more about Freud’s focus on sex.  Yet, Freud would ultimately have a negative impression of Americans (in fairness, he had negative things to say about his hometown of Vienna as well).  For the reader who is unfamiliar with Freud’s view and some potential explanations, I would refer you to Volume 2 of Jones’ (1955) biography.  Jones believed Freud’s impression of America was unwarranted and without question unfair.   For example, Freud credited his enduring dislike of America to his constant intestinal issues, which he believed was triggered by American cooking.  Yet, as Jones recalled, this explanation does not take into account the fact that Freud had dietary issues long before he visited America.  Freud even attributed his deteriorating handwriting over the years to his American visit.  On a personal level, Jones believes that Freud’s negative feelings were caused by several factors starting with problems with fully comprehending a foreign language.  As Jones (1955, p. 60) wrote:

I recollect an occasion when one American asked another to repeat a remark he had not quite caught.  Freud turned to Jung with the acid comment: “These people cannot even understand each other.” He also found it hard to adapt himself to the free and easy manners of the New World…  He was a good European with a sense of dignity and a respect for learning which at that time was less prominent in America.  He said to me afterwards in his terse way: “America is a mistake; a gigantic mistake, it is true, but none the less a mistake.”

Summary

Freud’s American trip was an extremely important step for his theories to gain a larger professional audience in the United States.  Prior to his 1909 Clark University lectures, his name recognition was limited in this country to just a relatively small number of academic psychologists and medical professionals.  It is interesting to speculate what would have happened to Freud and psychoanalysis if the Clark University celebration had not been rescheduled.

Chapter 7:  THE POPULARIZATION OF FREUD IN AMERICA: HOW POPULAR WAS HE?

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the popularization of Freud and psychoanalysis leading up to the summer of 1924.  There is little doubt that Freud became famous with certain specialized groups of Americans, but that is different than obtaining widespread popularity with the general public.  It should be noted that Freud was worried about psychoanalysis becoming contaminated in America, and this concern was justified.[4]  Also, I will present two issues related to Freud and money that are not widely known.  Specifically, Freud’s failed public relations campaign and his role as a marriage counselor provides additional evidence that Freud had not yet obtained widespread name recognition with the American public leading up the Leopold and Loeb trial during the summer of 1924.

When Did Freud Become a Household Name in America?

Unfortunately, it is not possible to exactly pin down when Freud crossed over to becoming a true household name in America.  Surveys about what the public knew about psychoanalysis, psychology, and related topic areas had not yet occurred.  However, the available evidence indicates that Freud obtaining widespread fame occurred sometime shortly after the Leopold and Loeb trial.  Even those who may subsequently disagree with my interpretation about the importance of the Leopold and Loeb trial for Freud’s popularization with the American public, have all pointed to documentation shortly after the summer of 1924 as evidence of Freud’s extensive popularity.  For example, Freud made his first appearance on the cover of Time magazine (October 27, 1924), approximately 6 weeks after the sentencing of Leopold and Loeb.  Also, Freud was offered a large sum of money in 1925 (reported as much as $100,000) by one of Hollywood’s most powerful producers, Sam Goldwyn, to write or advise on the making of a love story for the big screen, which Freud ultimately declined (Gay, 1988).  As Burnham (1979, p. 129) points out, “By the late 1920s not only was H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury being read in the most respectable circles, but the mythical “everyone,” friendly or hostile to psychoanalysis, was supposed to know about repression and the Oedipus complex.  By 1925 Americans could be expected to understand such popular songs as the one suggesting a good subject to avoid: “Don’t tell me what you dream’d last night, For I’ve been reading Freud!””

As documented by the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends in 1933 in Recent Social Trends in the United States, magazine stories about psychoanalysis peaked during the years following the trial after interest in Freud had slightly declined and leveled off in the preceding years (Hart, 1933).  Most authors who have written about Freud’s popularity have pointed to these types of data fragments as evidence that Freud was now a household name.  As Gay (1988, p. 454) notes, it was not only Freud’s name that became widely know at this time, but “his photograph showing a stern, carefully dressed elderly gentleman with penetrating eyes and the inevitable cigar, became known to millions.”

Freud’s popularity with the general public continued even after media coverage about him substantially declined with the 1929 Stock Market Crash and the onset of the Great Depression in America (Hart, 1933).  For example, in an editorial published by the New York Times (February 22, 1931, p. 41, Maladies and Malingering), the Times would note that Freudian terms such as fixation and complex had become part of everyday language, and it was common for everyday people to provide Freudian explanations of others personality characteristics.  It was not just academics and intellectuals that were familiar with Freud at this point, but the general public as well.  Freud was truly famous.

Freud’s Increasing Popularity

There appears to be multiple factors that contributed to the increasing popularization of Freud in America, which initially occurred in specialized groups.  As pointed out by Hale (1971, p. 398), “The most important single reason for popularization was the growing interest of physicians.”  The medical community was interested in psychoanalysis as a method of treatment for patients showing a variety of psychological illnesses (i.e., Freud’s work was personally relevant to physicians as a method of treatment).  This increased interest appears to be a direct result of the exposure Freud received from his American trip in 1909 (see Chapter 6), and the subsequent organization of psychoanalytic institutes that arose in America to promote psychoanalysis.

Eric Caplan makes a compelling case that Freud’s acceptance in the United States owes a debt to the Emmanuel Movement, which was a “talking cure” type of treatment initially started as a joint undertaking between Episcopalian ministers and Boston physicians.  This movement occurred in the United States just prior to Freud’s American trip, and ultimately set the stage for the positive reception that psychoanalysis received.  As Caplan (1998a, pp. 306-7) has written:

More significant than the content of Freud’s ideas was the context in which they were received.  The fundamentally positive reception of psychoanalysis in the United States during the second decade of the twentieth century was largely attributable to a host of factors that had little to do with the substance of Freud’s theories.  The allure of psychoanalysis derived in large measure from the unprecedented combination of popular and professional enthusiasm for mental therapeutics that existed at the time of its introduction in the United States.  Had Freud delivered his lectures just 3 years earlier in, say, 1906, chances are great that they would have received little fanfare.

Caplan’s historical interpretation points out the importance of contextual variables that contributed to Freud’s gaining popularity (i.e., it was not inevitable).  For further information about the Emmanuel Movement, see Caplan’s (1998b) Mind Games: American Culture and the Birth of Psychotherapy.

A second major influence in Freud’s gaining popularization was “The analysts themselves, organized and militant, eager to spread the gospel, co-operated enthusiastically with journalists” (Hale, 1971, p. 398).  Some young intellectual patients also became “major publicists for psychoanalysis” (Hale, 1971, p. 399).  Both the analysts and patients have been described by a number of historians as being similar to a religious movement.  While there is much merit to this analogy, the early believers also shared characteristics of “true believers” of a political movement.  They not only presented their beliefs in an extremely idealistic light, but also set out to personally attack and/or discredit those who challenged the intrinsic worth of their views.

Yet, Freud’s work was peripheral to the vast majority of Americans until about 1915 (Burnham, 1991).  Freud’s work as presented in media reports, which consisted primarily of magazine articles, did not reach a large enough audience and was not sufficiently relevant enough to most Americans.  However, things began to change in 1915.  Freud’s work became popular with a specific and influential subgroup, American intellectuals. As Burnham (1991, p. 120) notes, “Clearly something was happening in 1915.  In the thinking of a critical number of Americans, psychoanalysis had reached such importance that they actively published on the subject and found receptive editors and readers, whether lauding psychoanalysis or attacking it.  Learning about psychoanalytic ideas became an urgent matter among leading thinkers.”

Burnham (1991) makes an important interpretation about 1915, which is consistent with the way human memory works (see Chapter 8).  Burnham (1991) persuasively argues that psychoanalysis became “personally relevant to American intellectuals…” (p. 121).  We are much more likely to pay attention and ultimately store information that is able to be retrieved when it has personal meaning.  Why was psychoanalysis now relevant for the intellectual community as a whole, as opposed to simply a method to treat hysterical patients or a way to interpret dreams?  As Hale (1995, pp. 57-8) writes, “psychoanalysis offered a sweeping criticism of traditional sexual mores and virtues.  It supplied theory and rhetoric for the attack: the overwhelming importance of the sexual instinct and the evils of “repression.”  Psychoanalysis also supplied therapy for the internal conflicts rebellion engendered.  Finally, it is not too much to see in the adoption of psychoanalysis an attempt to establish a new, universal, and iconoclastic image of man, one that became associated with varieties of “modern,” “liberal,” social, and cultural reform and that supplied a new faith for those who had repudiated traditional religious doctrines.”

Freud and psychoanalysis were now relevant to a larger segment of society than just academics and the medical community.  Intellectuals were attempting to spread the message to a wider audience.  Yet, popularization at this point included “little sensationalism, and it was written primarily by intellectuals for well-read people if not also intellectuals” (Burnham, 1991, p. 126).  The “vulgarization” for and by the public at-large would come later.

It is interesting to read through some of the early magazine articles that Burnham points out above.  For example, Max Eastman’s (1915a) initial article introducing Freud and psychoanalysis in Everybody’s Magazine.  The article is a glowing account, as Eastman, who was the type of intellectual to whom psychoanalysis was now relevant, describes “psycho-analysis” as “a kind of “magic” that is rapidly winning the attention of the most scientific minds in the world of medicine” (p. 743).  The article also exposes the reader not only to Freud, but to other important relevant figures who are given a description with a picture (Carl Jung, Smith Ely Jelliffe, G. Stanley Hall, A. A. Brill, and William A. White).  This article was written for an intellectual audience.[5]

An article in Good Housekeeping Magazine (“Diagnosis by Dreams”) by Peter C. Macfarlane (1915) was written for a much more general female audience, and is also a glowing endorsement of “psycho-analysis.”  The article starts as follows (p. 125):

Here is hope for every woman—and every man—who because of the pressure of unconscious forces is living less than a full, free life.  Few reach maturity without discords having been struck upon the delicate strings of the soul, and these discords later rise up to nag and vex.  By tracing present symptoms back of memory, back to their lodgment in the subconscious mind, the practitioner is able to effect a cure.  Women, who are perhaps the chief sufferers, are here for the first time offered a readable analysis of the new science.

A couple of important issues should be mentioned regarding the popularization of Freud and psychoanalysis that began in 1915.  First, as perhaps should be expected, the early popularizations that attempted to spread the message to a larger audience, while avoiding sensationalizing the sexual aspects of Freud’s theories, were typically glowing accounts about psychoanalysis.  These accounts tended to exaggerate claims about the effectiveness of psychoanalysis that “added a miraculous dimension drawn from the folklore of happiness and success that had pervaded pre-Freudian therapies and mind cures” (Hale, 1971, p. 400).  For example, in the Good Housekeeping Magazine article by Macfarlane (1915) mentioned above, the author tells the reader about a healthy 39 year-old mechanic, who had a wife and family, but one morning woke up blind.  Yet, through the process of dream interpretation while undergoing “psycho-analytic” treatment, the man’s blindness “totally disappeared, and he went back to his work a well man” (p. 130).  Eastman’s (1915a, pp. 742-3) initial article “Exploring the Soul and Healing the Body” in Everybody’s Magazine also provides a miraculous example (this type of example would be perpetuated by further authors):

Let me illustrate this with another story, that of a friend of mine who was cured of fainting spells in the psycho-analytic hospital at Zurich, Switzerland.  He is a young man of muscular body and vigorous health, and he never had any chronic trouble except these sudden attacks of nausea and swooning, which no doctor of medicine could explain.  At the hospital in Zurich he was asked to relate to the physician the whole story of his life, omitting nothing that he could remember, no matter how trivial.  And he was asked also every morning to relate the dreams he had dreamed the night before.  And by piecing together all the significant things he related in the course of a several months’ confessional, and by interpreting his dreams in a manner I shall explain later, the physician managed to bring my friend to realize for himself what it was in his mind that was unconsciously causing the trouble.

He had been in love with a girl and engaged to her.  She had broken the engagement.  In doing so she had told him that she hoped, if he were ever sick or in trouble, he would tell her, and she would come to him.  He had gone away and tried to forget her, and, so far as he consciously knew, he had succeeded.  But unconsciously he was thinking of her all the time, and he was recoiling from all other interests and activities, and longing to be with her.  And this unconscious longing found expression in fits of sickness—perhaps just because she had told him that she would come to him if he were ever sick or in trouble.

And the best part of the story is, that after the day my friend told his physician that he understood this unconscious cause of his fainting spells, the fainting spells absolutely never returned.

Finally, one last “miraculous” example in the “Mr.-er-er-Oh! What’s his name?” article (Eastman, 1915b, p. 98), as it will provide a transition for the next issue to be discussed.

Dr. Jung describes the case of two sisters who fell in love at the same time and under equally auspicious circumstances; but when it came to the question of marriage one of them took the plunge and lived a happy life with her lover, while the other, after a scene of tears and hysterical fright, provoking anger in him, was finally carried away to a health resort, irritable, depressed, jealous of her sister, and suffering from a nervous intestinal trouble.

In process of curing her of this trouble Dr. Jung learned that she had been an excessively sensitive child, the favorite of her parents, and that she had always had a peculiarly passionate attachment to her father.  It was this “father image” which, dwelling still in her unconscious mind, absorbed all her power of loving and made her recoil, in spite of herself, from the natural course of life which her sister pursued.

Some Limitations of Freud’s Popularity Spreading

The above articles contain some case examples with rather spectacular outcomes.  Yet, it is important to keep in mind several issues when evaluating whether or not this amount and type of media coverage was sufficient to make Freud a household name with the general public.  First, most Americans at that time did not read the magazines that had articles pertaining to Freud (magazines tend to have specialized readerships).  While the popular magazines that Freud was featured in certainly had large readerships, the mechanic from Scranton and the carpenter from Mobile did not regularly read Good Housekeeping Magazine.  Newspapers were at the time the primary way to reach the general public, but Freud received very limited coverage in them (see Chapter 8).

One thing that has struck me as odd when reading about the media coverage that Freud and psychoanalysis received is how some historians have interpreted the media coverage to be more widespread than it actually was with the general public.  For example, the media coverage of Freud’s American visit has been described as far-reaching despite the fact that it was limited to some local newspapers and one national magazine.  I would interpret this in the context of making Freud a household name as limited, especially when contrasted against media coverage that is truly widespread, like what the Titanic received in 1912 and in the subsequent years after the tragedy.  As a concrete example, from 1915 to 1918 (4 years in which Freud’s popularity started to increase substantially within the intellectual community), according to the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, there are only 8 articles about Freud, which averages out to two a year (there were 31 on psychoanalysis, which is less than 8 articles per year).  I do not mean to gloss over this coverage as unimportant, as it helped Freud obtain name recognition among certain segments of the American public.  However, this amount of media coverage should not be interpreted as blanketing the nation and automatically exposing everyone to Freud and psychoanalysis.

Second, Freud was not always the sole focus of the articles pertaining to psychoanalysis and miracle cures, as the above case involving Jung illustrates.  As Hale (1995, p. 27) notes, Freud was often presented as “merely the first among equals.”  Freud was often lumped in with Jung, Adler, and other analysts.  In fact, in Eastman’s article that first exposed Freud and psychoanalysis to the readers of Everybody’s Magazine, the reader is led to believe that Freud, Jung, Jelliffe, G. Stanley Hall, Brill, and White were equally important members of a single unified movement.  This would have the likely effect of further diluting the potential for widespread name recognition as a single name standing alone is more likely to make an impression that one of several names mentioned together.  By this time, Freud had already broken with Jung, and Hall (who was not a clinician) would eventually become more of an advocate of Alfred Adler, who also already had a bitter split with Freud.  Intellectuals who were attempting to spread the message about Freud and the effectiveness of psychoanalysis often did so in a way that Freud himself would not have approved of (e.g., being lumped in with Jung and Adler).

Third, it is difficult to know how personally relevant Freud would have been to the average American who was not interested in political upheaval or sexual liberation, but busy working long hours and raising a family.  The average work week back in the early portion of the 20th century included working on Saturdays for most people as time for leisure activities was more limited in comparison to today.  Likewise, not all Americans would be interested in the latest “mind cure” to be discussed.  Psychoanalysis was not the first “mind cure” with equally spectacular results written about in national magazines (Hornstein, 1992), and certainly would not be the last.

As one example of another mind cure receiving attention just a few years before Freud started to appear in national magazines, national publications (particularly Good Housekeeping) exposed certain segments of the public to the Emmanuel Movement, which combined talk therapy with religion.  Readers learned of “miracle” cures, just as they later did with Freudian treatments.  Furthermore, the Emmanuel Movement, unlike Freud, had a bestselling book, Religion and Medicine: The Moral Control of Nervous Disorders, which sold about 200,000 copies and was reviewed “in virtually every major newspaper, medical, and religious periodical, it soon became the single most important text of so-called “scientific psychotherapy” in the United States” (Caplan, 1998a, p. 297).  To the general public, most of whom did not have any particular interest in the subject; Freud would have simply been one in a relatively large marketplace of related movements that also included Christian Scientists, other mind-curists, New Thought, healing cults, faith healers, spiritualists, and so forth (Caplan, 1998a).  This crowded landscape also interfered with his gaining widespread name recognition among the general public.

While Freud was not a household name in America in the early 1920s, there certainly exists historical data fragments consistent with the notion that Freud and psychoanalysis gained popularization with certain segments of the American public beyond academics and the medical community (primarily intellectuals, well-read individuals, and the interested readers of popular magazines).  As one example, the number of letters written to Freud increased substantially[6] (Benjamin & Dixon, 1996).  However, by the early 1920s, interest in psychoanalysis was not increasing (it was not dramatically dropping either; Burnham, 1968).

When psychoanalysis initially became popular among intellectuals in America, it was presented as the “New Psychology,” in contrast to the experimentally based academic psychology (see Chapter 1 for further discussion).  Yet from 1915 through the end of the 1920s, there emerges three stages of “New Psychology,” and often times the three distinct versions were lumped together.  As Burnham (1968, p. 354) writes, “Psychoanalysis represented the first of three phases through which the new psychology went.  After psychoanalysis came an emphasis on endocrine glands, and after the glands, behaviorism.”  The gland psychology would link an individual’s personality with levels of body chemicals.  More importantly, the emphasis on glands started to take away some attention from psychoanalysis (Burnham, 1968).

Likewise, as shown in the table at the end of this paragraph (Hart, 1933, p. 395), magazine articles (per thousand indexed) on the topic of psychoanalysis were not as prevalent in the early 1920s as in the period from 1915-1918 indicating that interest in psychoanalysis was not increasing leading up to the summer of 1924.  They would reach their peak in the years immediately after the Leopold and Loeb trial.  Also of note, from 1905-1909, there does not exist a single article on psychoanalysis, which provides evidence of the importance of Freud’s American trip.  Likewise, notice the drop in articles in the 1930-31 time frame, which corresponds with the onset of the Great Depression.  Unfortunately, this breakdown did not occur year by year, which would have provided increased precision for the purposes of this book.

Freud and the Failed Public Relations Campaign

Freud was in desperate need of money as early as 1919 (perhaps before).  Inflation in his home country of Austria, as well as Germany, had substantially reduced the worth of his personal savings.   Freud’s need for money was not only for living expenses for himself and his family, but also so that he could effectively spread his psychoanalytic movement.  For example, the psychoanalytic press was having financial troubles and money was needed to ensure it did not go bankrupt.  Freud’s nephew, Edward L. Bernays, who was one of the first to effectively use public relations campaigns and had a long and distinguished career in the field he helped pioneer in America, came up with a plan to help his uncle financially.  The plan was to increase Uncle Sigmund’s popularity in America.  Specifically, he would publish an English version of Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, and his uncle would receive royalties in American dollars.  Bernays secured a contract with Horace Liveright from the publishing firm Boni and Liveright to achieve that goal.

Bernays believed that an introduction written by a famous American psychologist would help sales, and G. Stanley Hall who had invited Freud to America agreed to write it.  This marketing strategy of having a well-known individual in the field write an introduction to help increase book sales is still prevalent today.  The English translation of Freud’s book sold well for that type of book (i.e., an academic book; the book was nowhere near the bestseller list), and did provide Freud with much needed money.  Furthermore, the release of the book was supposed to be accompanied by a public relations campaign to increase Freud’s popularity, which would ultimately increase book sales.  However, as will be shown below, Freud was not very cooperative.   The likely reason is that Freud had been concerned since his American visit in 1909 “that the purity of psychoanalysis would be contaminated by its use in America; he therefore tried to protect it in its orthodox form” (Rieber, 1998, p. 386).  As an example, Freud was unhappy with the English translation that his nephew helped publish, and Freud was diligent about identifying the translation errors so that they could be changed in subsequent reprintings.

Freud was correct that psychoanalysis had already been “Americanized” at this point, and was likely concerned that a public relations campaign would further distort the original intent of his theories.  Likewise, Freud disliked the notion of popularity with the general public, especially with the American public which he did not have a favorable opinion (see Chapter 6), as he was much more interested in professional accolades than name recognition with the average person in the street.  However, Freud at least considered the popularization plan because of his need for money at the time.

The details of what ultimately unfolded between Freud and his nephew are too intricate to fully summarize here, so I will limit myself to some specifics.  A more detailed account is given by Bernays (1965, Chapter 18) in Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel Edward L. Bernays.  While this is from Bernays’ perspective, he does rely upon his personal correspondence with his uncle.  First, the letters between the two men leave little doubt that Freud was very interested in the money that American popularization could produce, as he “was deeply concerned about the sale of his book” (Bernays, 1965, p. 264).  In contrast, he was also a frustrating individual for his nephew to work with as he rejected most of the ideas designed to generate greater public exposure for Freud, and ultimately refused several lucrative offers that would have resulted in Freud gaining wider publicity in the United States.

Specifically, Bernays had come up with many other ways to increase his uncle’s popularity and bank account besides the English translation of books, but Freud in the end would refuse.  For example, Horace Liveright guaranteed Freud $10,000, a substantial amount of money at the time, for an American lecture series in English, which also certainly would have increased book sales by generating greater publicity for Freud.  His nephew urged him to accept the offer.  Freud would write back to his nephew that “I do not consider myself a person of public notoriety” (Bernays, 1965, p. 256) and declined the offer.

In October of 1920, Freud would write to his nephew with an idea for an English publication (Bernays, 1965, p. 261):

I could promise to write, let us say, four popular papers a year for a certain review chosen by you, and these articles, if successful, could be collected in the shape of a small book after some time.  The title might be Scraps of Popular Psychoanalysis or something like that.  They are to be easy yet original, the first I intend to write down I might name: “Don’t Use Psychoanalysis in Polemics.”

Bernays would discuss his uncle’s idea with one of his clients, Cosmopolitan magazine, whose readership would expand Freud’s popularity.  The editors of Cosmopolitan were interested in having Freud write several articles (about 3,000 words in length) for $800 to $1,000 U.S. dollars per article, also a substantial amount of money at the time.  Because the editors of the magazine did not know if Freud’s writings would appeal to their readers as he had no track record of writing for a general audience before, they would not pay in advance and even suggested some topics that were suitable for their readers (e.g., “The Wife’s Mental Place in the Home”; “The Husband’s Mental Place in the Home”; “What a Child Thinks About”).  Freud would respond that while the money was fair payment for the length of the article, he was outraged that the editors would not pay in advance and had even suggested ideas for him to write about.  As Freud would write to his nephew in refusing the offer (Bernays, 1965, pp. 263-4):

This absolute submission of your editors to the rotten taste of an uncultivated public is the cause of the low level of American literature and to be sure the anxiousness to make money is at the root of this submission.  A German publisher would not have dared to propose to me on what subjects I had to write.  In fact, the subjects brought forward in your letter are so commonplace, so far out of my field, that I could not give them my attention and my pen.  A European editor would have shown more respect to an author he appreciated.

Bernays was frustrated in his efforts to help his uncle and would describe Freud’s letter as “exasperating.”  Likewise, the publisher of Dial offered Freud $10,000 to lecture in the United States and $25 an hour to treat patients.  Freud would send his nephew a cable saying “NOT CONVENIENT. FREUD” (Bernays, 1965, p. 262), followed by a lengthy letter of reasons why he would ultimately refuse the offer.  All of the above offers were prior to Freud’s having been diagnosed with cancer of the jaw.  Thus, they were not refused because of health concerns.  Other examples of Freud refusing offers that could have increased his popularity exist (see Bernays, 1965).

Freud’s interactions with his nephew, while always cordial, indicate that he was not concerned, and to some degree hostile, to any idea that would have increased his popularity in America.  While Freud certainly did appreciate the money that his nephew had generated in book royalties, he refused any type of public relations idea that could have spread his name recognition beyond what it currently was, even if that meant simultaneously refusing substantial amounts of money which Freud was at the time in need of to effectively spread his movement.  Thus, while Freud was a great self-promoter for his movement to certain segments of society and was very concerned about his reputation among the professional communities (e.g., medical community), his peers, and notable individuals, this certainly did not extend to the public at-large.  Freud’s actions indicate that he disliked the notion of popularity with the American public because of concerns that his theories would become further distorted.  It is interesting to ponder what would have happened to Freud’s popularity in America if Freud had relied upon his nephew’s public relations expertise and followed his advice.  As it stands, through no fault of Edward Bernays, the public relations campaign to increase Freud’s popularity in the United States in the early 1920s can best be described as a failure (Rieber, 1998).

Freud and Money: The Sad Case of Horace Frink

Another example of Freud’s need for money at this time to help popularize his movement (e.g., promotion of psychoanalysis institutes; training of psychoanalysts) can be found in the sad case of Horace Frink.  “The Marriage Counselor” (Edmunds, 1998) provides a more detailed account.  Frink had been attracted to Freud’s ideas and would ultimately become one of America’s leading psychoanalysts.  In 1918, he published Morbid Fears and Compulsions, which was a readable introduction to Freud’s theories for the American intellectual.  Frink was also a founding member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society.  He was elected as the first president in 1923, but was shortly after removed because of his mental state which will be discussed below.

In February, 1921, Frink had gone to visit with Freud in Vienna to undergo a personal analysis, which was part of the training Freud provided for his students.  Frink, like many of the young analysts who visited Freud for training, worshipped “the master.”  During Frink’s analysis, Freud would encourage him to divorce his wife (they had two children together) and marry a New York heiress, Angelika Bijur.  Angelika was a former patient of Frink’s whom he had a sexual relationship with.  Angelika at the time was married to an older and very rich husband, Abraham Bijur.  This recommendation by Freud was followed by Frink having a series of severe depressive and manic episodes.  Frink was unsure about the prospect of divorce and giving up his children.  Freud would also advise Angelika to divorce her husband, and told her that if she did not follow his advice Frink would likely develop into a homosexual.

This whole mess of a leading American psychoanalyst potentially marrying a former patient by breaking up two marriages on the advice of Freud was scandalous.  Frink’s wife, however, was compliant in keeping a low profile about the whole matter (she would die shortly after in 1923 of pneumonia, and Frink would later recount that he wished he had never divorced her).  Angelika’s husband was furious at Freud’s interference in his marriage, and planned on running a letter written to Freud as an advertisement in the New York City newspapers.  However, Abraham Bijur died of cancer in May, 1922, before the letter was published, which made a divorce for Angelika unnecessary.  Here are portions of that unpublished letter (cited in Edmunds, 1998, pp. 267-8):

Dr. Freud:

Recently I am informed by the participants, two patients presented themselves to you, a man and a woman, and made it clear that on your judgment depended whether they had a right to marry one another or not.  The man is at present married to another woman, and the father of two children by her, and bound in honor by the ethics of his profession not to take advantage of his confidential position toward his patients and their immediate relatives.  The woman he now wants to marry was his patient.  He says you sanction his divorcing his wife and marrying his patient, but yet you have never seen the wife and learned to judge her feelings, interests and real wishes.

The woman, this man’s patient, is my wife. […] How can you know you are just to me: how can you give a judgment that ruins a man’s home and happiness, without at least knowing the victim so as to see if he is worthy of the punishment, or if through him a better solution cannot be found?

[…] Great Doctor, are you savant or charlatan?

Doktor, please write me the truth.  The woman is my wife whom I love. […]

Frink’s condition continued to worsen and Freud took him as a patient two more times.  Ultimately, Horace Frink and Angelika on the advice of Freud married on December 27, 1922.  However, the marriage quickly collapsed and was anything but happy as Frink’s mental state deteriorated.  In May, 1924, Frink placed himself under Adolph Meyer’s care, and he would ultimately have to be institutionalized for a period of time.  The couple divorced in 1925.

What does the whole mess of Horace Frink have to do with Freud and money?  As Hale (1995, p. 29) points out, Freud “suggested that Frink make a financial contribution to the psychoanalytic movement, presumably with his new wife’s money.”  Historical data fragments support this interpretation.  For example, in a letter written by Freud to Frink in November, 1921, Freud says: “Your complaint that you cannot grasp your homosexuality implies that you are not yet aware of your phantasy of making me a rich man.  If matters turn out all right let us change this imaginary gift into a real contribution to the Psychoanalytic Funds” (cited in Edmunds, 1998, p. 270).  When Angelika contacted Freud as her new marriage to Frink was falling apart, he sent the following telegraph: “Extremely sorry. The point where you failed was money” (cited in Edmunds, 1998, p. 270).

What the case of Horace Frink, and all of the effected people involved says about Sigmund Freud, I will leave up to the reader to interpret.  This case, however, provides additional evidence that Freud was in need of money to help popularize his movement in the years leading up to the summer of 1924, which is additional evidence that he had not yet become a household name in America (i.e., achieved widespread fame) prior to the Leopold and Loeb trial.

Summary

In summary, the popularization of Freud went through several stages, each of which was important.  First, his American trip sparked interest and gained him name recognition largely with academic psychologists and the medical community.  Once his theories became personally relevant to the intellectual community, Freud’s name recognition spread to this subgroup as well.  The intellectual community would further extend Freud’s popularity with regular readers of popular magazines, and interest in Freud and psychoanalysis would remain somewhat steady in a crowded landscape.  While Freud certainly was well known by specific subgroups of Americans, there is no evidence that he was a household name prior to the summer of 1924.  Thus, even for the reader that may ultimately disagree with some of the specifics of my subsequent interpretations (see Chapter 11), there is a consensus that Freud obtaining widespread fame with the general public occurred after the Leopold and Loeb trial.

Chapter 8:  BECOMING A HOUSEHOLD NAME IN EARLY 20TH CENTURY AMERICA: SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT FREUD

Taking the time to consider exactly how Freud first gained widespread popularity with the general public is important.  One reason is because it is not every day that an individual from a field related to psychology captures the American public’s imagination.  Other giants in the history of psychology from the early portion of the twentieth century, such as Wilhelm Wundt, Edward Titchener, William James and G. Stanley Hall, did not capture the public imagination.  Even John B. Watson (see Chapters 1 & 2), the most famous academic experimental psychologist of the early portion of the 20th century who did receive some attention in national publications, paled in comparison with Freud for instant name recognition with the American public by the mid-to-late 1920s.

Likewise, important clinicians in the 20th century such as Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Karen Horney also never achieved the widespread popularity of Freud.  Perhaps the only individual in the 20th century from a related field to even approach Freud for popularity with the general public for a time was the psychologist B.F. Skinner, who received coverage in the popular press and had a New York Times bestselling book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, which remained a bestseller for weeks (see Rutherford, 2000).

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss some of the issues that are necessary to consider when evaluating how an individual could obtain widespread name recognition with the American public in the early 20th century.  During this discussion, I provide examples of how memory works, as sporadic media exposure (i.e., every now and again) does not translate into widespread name recognition unless the public as a whole is personally interested in the subject matter.  Also, in this chapter I present the most prevalent version of how Freud ultimately breaks into the public consciousness (i.e., it was inevitable because of the power of Freud’s ideas), and point out some problems with this interpretation.

Obtaining Household Name Recognition in the Early 20th Century: Some Issues to Consider

Let’s consider some of the ways in which widespread popularity occurred in America during the early portion of the 20th century.  This examination is important because this type of analysis is typically not applied when evaluating how Freud became popular with the general public.  One mechanism to become household name was through massive media exposure.  However, unlike today in which television and the internet play such a vital role, the primary mechanism to achieve general fame was widespread newspaper coverage, which could provide exposure to the nation as a whole.  National stories in newspapers were often transmitted via the wire services, such as the Associated Press, so that readers across the country could be exposed on the front pages to a story with national interest.

Magazines and books could also provide some national media exposure, but had more specialized readerships as they were self-selected by people with more particular interests resulting in more limited exposure compared with what newspapers provided.  Radio was beginning by the mid-1920s to also play an increasing role for popularization, but was still considered by many a “new” technology.  In comparison to today, there existed fewer media outlets, but the media exposure was more concentrated as a greater percentage of people accessed fewer media choices.

How about Freud?  Prior to the events that occurred during the summer of 1924, did he receive massive media exposure which blanketed the nation so that everyone could not help but be exposed to him?  Were his treatments of hysterical patients or his dream interpretations splattered across the country on the front page of newspapers?  The answer is no, as Freud received limited newspaper coverage and when he was mentioned it was not on the front pages.  Newspapers were not the only mechanism to generate public interest.  Perhaps it was Freud’s books.  Did Freud’s books prior to the summer of 1924 sell millions of copies to a fascinated public, like J. K. Rowling’s books about Harry Potter?  The answer is again no.  Freud’s early books sold a very limited number of copies (Hale, 1971), and he would not make a bestseller list until 1939, which was well after Freud initially became a household name (Moses and Monotheism made the New York Times bestseller list; Justice, 1998).

Freud did receive media attention every now and again in some popular magazines and was mentioned in newspapers from major cities from time to time, but he was not frequently presented to the American public as a whole (see Chapter 7).  The historical evidence indicates that Freud did not obtain the type of massive media exposure that others received.  For example, Freud’s media exposure was miniscule compared with the legendary baseball great Babe Ruth or the ship the Titanic.  Freud’s media coverage prior to the summer of 1924 can best be described as sporadic.

The Importance of Personal Relevance

For an individual or event to reach the status of being instantly recognizable by such a large group as the American public when media coverage is sporadic, it typically has to be personally relevant to most individuals, unique, or sufficiently interesting so that it captures the public imagination at-large (not just certain specialized segments).  It is a myth that everything we have ever seen, heard, or have experienced somehow becomes part of our memories (this is not how our brain works).  Think about what you were doing 3 years ago today.  Unless this is a special day, such as a birthday or anniversary, we typically do not remember.  Most of what we read, hear, or see in the media is subsequently forgotten and does not become part of our permanent memories.  There is a difference between mere exposure to the American public and capturing the public imagination so that people will remember, especially when media coverage is sporadic.  Likewise, we do not seek out additional information about media stories that do not personally interest us, which also is important for remembering information long term.  Historical interpretations about Freud should not assume that media coverage about him and psychoanalysis made a lasting impression with the general public until the subject matter had personal relevance, which did not occur until the Leopold and Loeb trial during the summer of 1924.

Let me provide two concrete examples to illustrate how memory works, and the importance of personal relevance.  First, Sidney Crosby is not a household name with the American public (Canadian readers may find that hard to believe).  He does have name recognition with some specialized groups much like Freud was known by just certain segments of the public prior to the summer of 1924.  For those who are unfamiliar, Crosby is a hockey player for the Pittsburg Penguins, but most Americans have limited interest in hockey.  Thus, Crosby is best known in the United States by hockey fans, some sports fans, anyone who lives near Pittsburg, and has some name recognition among “hockey towns” in America.  While “Sid the Kid” has specialized name recognition, everybody does not know his name.

Most Americans, however, have been exposed to Crosby multiple times and/or have had the opportunity to learn who he is through the media.  For example, Crosby has been featured in television commercials as part of a national advertising campaign for Gatorade.   I saw one during an episode of the popular television show Desperate Housewives that aired on ABC on Sunday, May 4, 2008.  Crosby has also been part of an advertising campaign by NBC to promote their Sunday afternoon hockey coverage.  The National Hockey League has used Crosby in many advertising campaigns to promote their sport, and he is given substantial attention on sports channels such as ESPN.  Likewise, he has received widespread newspaper coverage in the sports pages across the nation (both local papers and USA Today).

Furthermore, Crosby was featured during a nationally televised outdoor game on NBC (NHL Winter Classic) against the Buffalo Sabres on New Year’s Day, 2008.  He also was featured and played in several prime time games on NBC during the 2008 and 2009 Stanley Cup finals, both against the Detroit Red Wings (Crosby’s Penguins won in 2009) as well as many NBC Sunday afternoon games.  In addition, Crosby was part of the nationally televised gold medal game on NBC during the 2010 Winter Olympics (United States versus Canada; February 28, 2010), which was viewed by a larger audience than typically watches hockey coverage.  Crosby scored the game winning goal in overtime to give team Canada the victory.  Most recently, Crosby was again featured during the 2011 NHL Winter Classic on NBC as well as being part of HBO’s reality series “24/7 Penguins-Capitals: Road to the NHL Winter Classic.”

In addition, Crosby has appeared numerous times on the cover of Sports Illustrated (see http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/cover/home/index.htm).  Specifically, he has been the feature cover four times: (a) March 8, 2010, “The Kid Comes Through for Canada,” (b) February 9, 2010, “Sidney’s Moment,” (Olympic Preview), (c) June 21, 2009, “Penguins Win: The Kid and The Cup”, and (d) June 18, 2009, “2009 Stanley Cup Champions” (Commemorative Issue).  Also, On June 8, 2009, Crosby appeared along with several Detroit Red Wings on the cover of Sports Illustrated when it appeared likely Detroit would win (“Motown Cool: The Wings Close in on Stanley Cup Number 12”).  Crosby has also appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated as the secondary story three times (October 3, 2005; January 22, 2007; June 22, 2009) as well as being the topic of many articles.  Crosby’s media coverage has even extended beyond the sports world, as evidenced by his picture in the October 2005 edition of Vanity Fair.

For many Americans who do not instantly recognize the name Sidney Crosby, it is not due to lack of media exposure, but due to a lack of interest in the subject material.  We either do not pay attention even when the material is directly presented to us, and/or do not access what we are uninterested in.  If there were an event that made hockey personally relevant to most Americans, it would not take long for Crosby to become a household name.

Second, a person that is sufficiently interesting and unique (i.e., has personal relevance) can capture the public’s imagination even with limited media coverage.  For example, Harry Houdini received media exposure, which like Freud, can be classified as sporadic (i.e., every now and again).  Yet, Houdini was able to make a lasting impression, as he was able to stand out from others in his profession and performed feats that were of interest to almost everyone early in the 20th century.  It was not every day that a naked man shackled in chains escapes from the local jail, as Houdini performed this feat around the country.  He even broke out of the Murderers’ Cell in Washington D.C., which at the time was considered one of the most difficult jails in the nation from which to escape.  It was not every day that a man, with his hands handcuffed behind his back and approximately 75 pounds of additional weight locked to his body, would jump into the San Francisco Bay and survive.  It was not every day that someone would escape from a glass box made by the Pittsburg Plate Glass Company, while not even scratching the glass.  It was not every day that someone would jump, heavily handcuffed in zero degree weather, into icy water in Detroit.  Other examples exist.

Even with intermittent media exposure, if the story has personal interest, people will remember.  They will want to learn more, and they will spread the word.   If Houdini had just been another escape artist who did not perform unique feats, he would not have become a household name in America (and the world for that matter).

This difference in public interest had a direct impact on Freud becoming a household name in America.  Prior to the summer of 1924, the American public was not particularly aware of or interested in psychoanalysis (see Chapter 7 for supporting evidence).  In this time frame, Freud was like Sidney Crosby, an individual with specialized name recognition.  However, after the summer of 1924, the American public was fascinated with the New Psychology of psychoanalysis (see Chapters 9 & 10).  In this instance, Freud obtains name recognition with the general public like Houdini because of the shift in personal relevance.  Ultimately, without Freud personally receiving massive media exposure like the Titanic, which never occurred, the shift in public interest was necessary to move from specialized name recognition to becoming truly famous.

The “Power of Freud’s Ideas” Theory

Before continuing on to the Leopold and Loeb case in the next chapter, let me introduce and discuss a prevalent view of how Freud became a household name with the general public.  After Freud’s trip to America, he gained widespread recognition from both academic psychologists, and the medical community.  This recognition spread to the larger intellectual community, who began to popularize Freud and psychoanalysis (see Chapter 7).  I agree with this interpretation up till this point.  Ultimately, the “power” of Freud’s ideas made the popularization of him and psychoanalysis with the general public inevitable as the ideas were so strong that they could not be ignored.  I disagree with this final portion of the interpretation, but it appears consistent with how Freud himself viewed his ideas as one of the three great shocks to the human ego (the two others were when Copernicus showed that the earth is not the center of the universe, and Darwin’s natural selection).  Exactly how Freud ultimately captivates the typical man or woman is not thoroughly evaluated, so we are left to infer that it must be the power of the ideas, as there appears no other explanation.  As previously covered, Freud’s ideas were not powerful enough to capture the intellectual community’s interest until the ideas were personally relevant to that specific subgroup (see Chapter 7).

In order for this interpretation to have merit (i.e., the power of the ideas filtering down to the public at-large), one would predict that interest in Freudian theory in popular outlets would be steadily increasing as more and more of the American public became aware of and interested in Freud.  Yet, the data fragments of history show that this was not occurring, and that interest in Freud and psychoanalysis was either remaining steady or even slightly declining leading up to the Leopold and Loeb trial (see Chapter 7).

Let me provide an example of how name recognition can move from a specialized group or groups to the larger public, in order to contrast with the case of Freud.  The majority of the American public and most other countries around the world has current name recognition for the Harry Potter books, but let’s focus on America for consistency.  Even people who have not read Joanne Rowling’s books or seen the movies are familiar with the name Harry Potter, as the “Boy Who Lived” is famous.

This name recognition initially started with children who read the books in record numbers (Anelli, 2008).  In this instance, children represent a specialized group.  Harry Potter’s name recognition spread to parents, teachers, and anyone who worked with children.  Quickly, the name recognition continued to widen to other groups (e.g., many adults began to read the books as well), and started to receive more and more media attention which was necessary to expose more people to Harry Potter.  Because of the increasing interest in the Harry Potter books, this garnered increased media attention from the internet, print media, as well as television.  Eventually the increasing interest, the increasing media attention surrounding the books and subsequent movies virtually ensured that all Americans were exposed to the fictional character Harry Potter in some way.  The fictional boy wizard Harry Potter has been featured twice on the cover of Time magazine (September 20, 1999; June 23, 2003).

Likewise, Harry Potter was personally relevant to enough people that it helped with remembering the name for subsequent recognition.  For example, many adults knew a child who was interested in the books.  For me, the fact that these books resulted in so many kids becoming interested in reading was relevant.  The author’s own “rags to riches” story was intriguing to many people as well.  As Melissa Anelli (2008, p. 18; author of “Harry, A History”) reports:

There are now 400 million books in print worldwide, in sixty-five languages and two hundred territories.  Five movies have been made and released, and by the end of 2007 made up a quarter of the top twenty grossing films worldwide, ever.  Harry Potter as a franchise had been estimated to be worth $15 billion, most of which has funded a worldwide enterprise that has been crammed into every crevice of popular culture—it has spawned video games, films, playing cards, toys, parodies, and even an entire music genre, and has become so absorbed in pop culture that it appears inside other pop culture references.

For Harry Potter, public interest continued to increase and expand, which promoted more media attention, which prompted more public interest, and so forth.  Here there was a widening of name recognition from specialized groups to the larger general public, which was supported by increasing media coverage on a topic area that had some personal relevance for many people.  In contrast, for Freud, there is no evidence that public interest was increasing prior to the Leopold and Loeb trial, and certainly there is no evidence of increasing media exposure.  Psychoanalysis was not widening to greater numbers of people, which helps to explain why there exists no evidence that the general public knew Freud’s name prior to the Leopold and Loeb trial (see Chapter 7).

Also problematic, this interpretation that Freud’s ideas filtered down from specialized groups to the general public makes important assumptions, which are not verified.  If the assumptions supporting the theory are not true, it substantially damages the likelihood that the theory is correct.  Most relevant, an assumption exists for the power of Freud’s ideas interpretation that there was not a major media event that exposed the general public to Freudian theory in a context that captured the public imagination.  If such an event did occur, this would provide a simpler and more likely explanation (see the next two chapters for such an event), especially since Freud’s popularity at the time was not increasing.

Let’s take the following instance as an example of why investigating this assumption is important when evaluating how something (or somebody) can achieve instant name recognition with the general public.  Today, everybody is familiar with DNA evidence.  In fact, it is tempting to make a power of the science argument for DNA evidence.  It certainly did start, much like name recognition of Sigmund Freud, in specialized groups (i.e., biologists, criminologists, academics).  Early on, there was some sporadic newspaper and magazine stories about DNA evidence, as well as television coverage that contributed to more people having instant name recognition of DNA evidence, but most of the public was not familiar with the term.  As late as 1994, most Americans did not know what DNA evidence was.  However, that all changed with one huge media event that made the topic area relevant, and therefore interesting to the nation as a whole.

Specifically, the O. J. Simpson murder trial first exposed the general public to DNA evidence on a massive scale (i.e., unprecedented media coverage) in a context of an interested general public.  Virtually everyone had a strong opinion about his guilt or innocence.  Likewise, the Leopold and Loeb case first exposed the general public to Freudian theory because of unprecedented media coverage in a context that also fascinated virtually everyone (see Chapter 9).  Yet, the power of Freud’s ideas theory ignores this O. J. Simpson type of media event that captivated the American public for weeks.  Thus, the assumption discussed above is false.  To exclude either murder trial when constructing a historical interpretation of exactly how did the popularization of DNA evidence or Sigmund Freud occur with the American public is problematic because it leaves out the most parsimonious explanation, which is typically the most likely.

In summary, there are some problems with the interpretation that the power of Freud’s ideas was the principal force that ultimately propelled him into public consciousness.  The evidence is inconsistent with an increasing expansion of people who were becoming interested in his ideas (see Chapter 7).  There was a massive media event of great public interest that occurred which introduced the American public to Freudian concepts and theories that immediately comes before when historians have identified as the time frame when Freud first achieved widespread popularity with the general public (see Chapters 9 & 10).  Although just speculation, perhaps the power of Freud’s ideas belief as the mechanism that made him a household name has perpetuated because many who have written about Freud’s popularization have interpreted his ideas as truly groundbreaking and assumed that nothing could stop Freud’s ideas from capturing the public imagination as well.  Thus, they did not look for potentially alternative explanations (see confirmation bias discussed in Chapter 3).

Finally, although not the focus of this book, exactly why Freud has endured as an icon is another interesting question to consider.  Most who achieve widespread popularity at one time fade or diminish from public consciousness.  As one example from Freud’s time, Jack Dempsey, world heavyweight boxing champion known as the “Manassas Mauler,” was arguably the most famous person not only in America but the world.  Today, Dempsey’s name recognition is largely confined to individuals with specialized interests such as boxing and sports fans.  This reduction of name recognition as the years pass by is typical, as most things that capture the public imagination do not endure.  I believe one could make a much stronger and valid argument that Freud continues to interest us today because his ideas are inherently fascinating, even to those who ultimately disagree with Freudian interpretations.  Yet, Freud needed his ideas presented to the American public via a large-scale media event in a context which was personally relevant to the general public in order to initially obtain icon status.  The following two chapters will introduce the Leopold and Loeb case, which introduced the vast majority of the American public for the first time to Freudian theory in a highly interesting context.

Chapter 9:  THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY: THE SENSELESS MURDER OF ROBERT FRANKS

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce and summarize the main points of the Leopold and Loeb case (i.e., the Crime of the Century).  I will not be providing an exhaustive review of all the interesting and pertinent details surrounding the crime and subsequent trial.  For those readers who are interested in learning more details let me suggest a few of the many resources that are available.  Hal Higdon’s (1999) Leopold and Loeb: The Crime of the Century reviews not only the trial, but the preceding events, and the years afterward (first published in 1975 as The Crime of the Century: The Leopold and Loeb Case).  John Theodore’s (2007) Evil Summer: Babe Leopold, Dickie Loeb, and the Kidnap-Murder of Bobby Franks also provides a nice overview of all aspects of the case.  Gilbert Geis and Leigh Bienen (1998) provide a concise summary in Crimes of the Century: From Leopold and Loeb to O. J. Simpson.  The most detailed account of the case was recently published by Simon Baatz (2008; For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder that Shocked Chicago).  Baatz’s book is meticulously referenced, and one area of emphasis is the psychiatric testimony.  Finally, for those who would like a visual presentation, the History Channel’s “Born Killers: Leopold and Loeb” (In Search of History, 1998) is worthwhile to view.

There were several books published shortly after the trial that are also important resources for the individual wanting to learn more about the case.  Maureen McKernan, who was a reporter for the Chicago Herald and Examiner, published The Amazing Crime and Trial of Leopold and Loeb in 1924, and her book has been republished several times.  McKernan’s book provides an excellent overview that relies heavily upon the official record.  Also, it contains the psychiatric reports of Leopold and Loeb either as a summary (the Bowman and Hulbert reports) or in full (by White, Healy, Glueck, and Hamill).  In addition, her book contains the lead attorneys’ closing arguments for both the prosecution and the defense.  Maurice Urstein (1924), Leopold and Loeb: A Psychiatric-Psychological Study, discusses the case from a mental health perspective.  Alvin Sellers (1926), The Loeb-Leopold Case, provides some quotations from the trial transcripts that are not available in other sources, and provides the other lawyers’ closing arguments in addition to the lead attorneys’.  His book is available on-line (http://www.archive.org/details/loebleopoldcasew00loeb) at the Internet Archive website (http://www.archive.org/).

Nathan Leopold’s autobiography published in 1958, Life Plus Ninety-Nine Years, was of enough interest to the American public 30+ years after the trial that it made the New York Times bestseller list (Justice, 1998).  Leopold’s autobiography was written in an attempt to gain parole (so I would suggest not taking the book at face-value), which he ultimately did achieve.  Despite the self-serving nature of the book, it is a must read for those who are truly interested in the case.  Loeb was killed in prison in 1936, and Time magazine would write a short story about it (“Last of Loeb”; February 10, 1936, p. 15).

There were several journal articles published after the trial that will interest those who are fascinated about the psychological aspects of murder.  First, the editors of the Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology (1924, Vol. 15, pp. 347-405) published “The Loeb-Leopold Murder of Franks in Chicago, May 21, 1924,”  because this probably was “the first instance of the offer of elaborate psychiatric analyses as the basis for remitting the law’s penalty for a calculated, cold-blooded murder, committed by persons not claimed to be insane or defective in any degree recognized by the law as making them not legally responsible” (p. 347).  Likewise, an editorial (“The Crime and Trial of Loeb and Leopold”) appeared in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology and Social Psychology in 1924 (Vol. 29, pp. 223-229) and Glueck’s (1925) “Some Implications of the Leopold and Loeb Hearing in Mitigation” published in Mental Hygiene should also be of interest.

Historian Paula Fass (1993) published “Making and Remaking an Event: The Leopold and Loeb Case in American Culture” in The Journal of American History.  Her article is a detailed summary of how the case not only initially captured the public’s imagination, but how the telling of the story in the media changed over time, and continued to fascinate the public years after the trial had ended.  Her article also sheds light on the question of how the trial becomes personally relevant for the general public.  While Dr. Fass relies primarily upon media coverage in the Chicago papers (e.g., Chicago Daily Tribune, Chicago Herald and Examiner), the coverage blanketed the nation.  Catherine L. Covert’s 1975 dissertation in American History (“Freud on the Front Page: Transmission of Freudian Ideas in the American Newspaper of the 1920’s”) provides some newspaper coverage outside of Chicago not available from other sources (largely East Coast newspapers).  To my knowledge, Dr. Covert did not turn her dissertation into a book or a peer-reviewed journal article, which is a shame.  Her dissertation would have been of interest to many, but typically dissertations are not the proper vehicle to transmit the information to a larger audience.

At the time of this writing, the internet also has a wide selection of information (e.g., details related to the crime) and resources (e.g., pictures, documents) that are worth exploring.  Specifically, the Northwestern University Library Archives (Digital Collections and Exhibits) has holdings on the webpage titled “Leopold and Loeb in the University Archives” (http://www.library.northwestern.edu/libraries-collections/evanston-campus/university-archives/digital-collections-and-exhibits/leopold).  Northwestern’s Archives include the entire psychiatric reports from Drs. Bowman and Hulbert (almost 300 pages total; available as downloads), which are described in Chapter 10.  In addition, posted are Leopold and Loeb’s confessions/statements to the prosecution which provide greater details about the crime than I will discuss below.

Leigh Bienen’s (School of Law at Northwestern University) “Homicide in Chicago 1870-1930” website (http://homicide.northwestern.edu/; click on “Crimes of the Century”) and the “Famous Trials” website by Douglas O. Linder (University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law; http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/ftrials.htm) are also excellent resources.

Finally, the Chicago History Museum (http://www.chicagohistory.org/; click on “Research” and then “Online Resources”) has the largest collection of photographs related to the trial that I am aware of.  While many internet sites have pictures of the people, places, and evidence related to the case, the Chicago History Museum has some materials that others do not possess.

For those readers that enjoy the mixing of fact and fiction, Meyer Levin’s (1956) New York Times bestselling novel Compulsion is recommended.  The book was made into a Hollywood film in 1959 starring Orson Wells.  Levin at the time of the trial was a University of Chicago student who worked for the Chicago Daily News as a campus correspondent and was assigned to the arraignment hearing.  Levin wrote an article about Leopold’s father, which impressed his editor.  It appeared that Levin would be assigned to cover the trial on a regular basis, which would be a great opportunity for a young reporter.  However, Levin had already made plans to travel to Europe with friends that summer, and was concerned that the trial would be delayed as the defense lawyers were already asking the court for more time to prepare their case.  As Higdon (1999, p. 166) notes from an interview, “Over in Paris, France, Meyer Levin would read that the court had decided to hear the case immediately and curse himself for not having remained at home.  He would spend the rest of the summer reading in European newspapers what was happening in a Chicago case he could have been covering himself.  Frustrated by this missed opportunity, he nevertheless would have an opportunity later to write about Leopold and Loeb.”

Media Coverage

Another reason for taking the time to discuss Meyer Levin above is to transition and provide an overview of the enormous media coverage that surrounded the case.  The Leopold and Loeb trial was not just an event that received local attention, and perhaps a small blurb in a national publication, like Freud’s American visit.  The case received media coverage that blanketed not only America, but the entire Western world.  During the trial, all of the major newspapers around the country had special correspondents that attended.  As the famous lead attorney for the defense, Clarence Darrow, would write in his autobiography, The Story of My Life (1932, p. 226), “Few cases, if any, ever attracted such wide discussion and publicity; not only in America, but anywhere in the world.”  In an article published shortly after the trial in The Living Age (“Murder as a Diversion: Europe Philosophizes on Chicago Criminals;” November, 1924, Vol. 323, pp. 277-283), Otto Kaus in a translation originally published in Arbeiter Zeitung (Viennese Socialist Daily), notes that the trial “raised a commotion throughout the whole world” (p. 281).

Judge Caverly, who ultimately ruled on the case, started his decision with the following statement, “In view of the profound and unusual interest that this case has aroused not only in this community but in the entire country and even beyond its boundaries, the court feels it his duty to state the reasons which have led him to the determination he has reached” (cited in McKernan, 1924, pp. 376-377).  Historian Paula Fass (1993, p. 919), who examined the influence of the Leopold and Loeb case on American culture, wrote, “From the instant it broke on public awareness in 1924, the Leopold and Loeb case was enveloped by the mass media.”  The media coverage the trial received throughout the summer of 1924 was front page news on a daily basis.

In the late 1990s I first became interested in the Leopold and Loeb case when working on an article about the Scopes Monkey trial (Clarence Darrow was the leading defense attorney in both cases).  I became curious about the newspaper coverage of the trial.  Everyone that I am aware of who had written about this case at this point in time had noted that it was front page news across the country.  Yet, I wanted to see for myself because most of what has been written about the media coverage of the trial has relied primarily upon the Chicago newspapers.  Was the trial front page news outside of Chicago, and if so, what was it like?

I enlisted the help of three undergraduate students (Myriah Koledin, Gregory Drakulic, & Robin Payne) during an honors seminar at my first full-time job as a college professor at Adams State College (Alamosa, CO) to try and track down a more varied sample of newspaper coverage (the internet is of much greater use today).  What we decided to do was to try and obtain microfilm and microfiche from newspapers in various parts of the country outside of the Midwest.  Thus, we were attempting to obtain, via interlibrary loan, newspapers from the Northeast, South, Northwest, and Western portions of the United States during the trial.  Our sample was limited because most libraries would not ship their archived newspapers, but some did.  What we found was that it did not matter if it was The New York Times, The Pittsburg-Post Gazette, The Pensacola Journal (Florida), The Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville, FL), The Los Angeles Daily Times, or The Seattle Times, this trial was front-page news.  We even found some coverage of the trial in much smaller newspapers such as the Rogue River Courier (Grants Pass, Josephine County, Oregon), and the San Luis Valley News (Colorado).  More recently, historical newspaper databases (see next paragraph) confirmed that this trial received extensive coverage throughout the United States in the major newspapers.

For the reader interested in regional coverage, your local public or University library may have microfilm or microfiche of your hometown newspaper dating back to the summer of 1924.  It’s interesting to browse through to see not only the coverage of the trial, but what other events were going on in the country and in your local community at the time.  Furthermore, ProQuest (www.proquest.com) has begun a Historical Newspapers program, which allows the user to quickly search for older newspaper articles in a variety of publications (The Atlanta Constitution, Detroit Free Press, San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, to name just a few).  What used to take months searching through microfilm and microfiche, can now take minutes if you have access to the databases.

Currently, the most widely available of the historic databases in the United States is the New York Times Historical, to which many public and most university libraries subscribe.  Since the front page stories about the trial were pretty consistent across the country (there are some variations discussed below), this database is an excellent resource to easily read through the newspaper coverage that the typical American would have read back in the summer of 1924.  Also, ProQuest’s Historical Newspapers program has extended to include newspapers from around the globe so that the reader who would like to examine the coverage of the trial from other countries can now do so.  For example, for the reader interested in how the trial was covered in Canada, The Globe and Mail (“Canada’s Heritage from 1884”) and the Toronto Star (“Pages of the Past”) are available.  Other international newspapers include The Guardian, The Observer, The Irish Times, and The Scotsman.

The front page newspaper coverage in America outside of Chicago was largely from the wire services, primarily from the Associated Press (AP), but newspapers picked up reports from other wire services as well (e.g., United Press, United News, World News Service).  The coverage typically not only reported on what was occurring inside the courtroom, but provided the reader with extensive courtroom testimony directly quoting the judge, the lawyers, and the witnesses that testified.  People across the country would be reading the highlights of what was spoken in the courtroom.  Also, much of the country would be reading the same coverage in the front page stories; although there were some differences in the AP stories on the East and West Coast.  The East Coast printed the AP stories the following day, while some of the West Coast stories were printed the same day as written in the late edition of newspapers.  The primary difference in coverage across the country was what was written in the editorial pages, opinion pieces relevant to the case, or the various wire stories that individual papers chose to include.

Also, every now and again a newspaper would print a report from an independent writer (e.g., “Special to the New York Times”).  The various newspapers differed in their front page headlines, while typically containing the same AP story.  For example, on August 2, 1924, The Florida Times-Union’s front page headline was “Loeb Considered Crime as to Franks Boy “Intellectual Feat” Declares Dr. White” while The Pittsburg Post-Gazette’s front page headline was “Dual Leopold and Loeb Mind ‘Devilish,’ is Alienist Plea” to accompany the same coverage, which in this instance was the testimony of the defense Freudian psychoanalyst Dr. William A. White.  Alienist was the term used back in 1924 to describe an individual who was testifying about the mental state of a defendant.  Independent of the specific newspaper, the testimony of Dr. White was a front page story across the country, and you can read the article using the New York Times Historic database.

The Perpetrators and the Victim

Let me introduce the two perpetrators of the crime, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, and the victim, Robert Franks.  Nathan Leopold was 19 at the time of the murder, and was given the nickname “Babe” from early childhood.  He would be called “Babe” by the defense lawyers during the trial in an attempt to humanize him.  Nathan “Babe” was from a German Jewish family who lived in the extremely affluent Hyde Park area in Chicago.  Leopold’s father was a millionaire box manufacturer and head of Large Lake shipping.  Nathan Leopold was by all accounts brilliant; with an IQ so high it could not be accurately recorded (his IQ was estimated between 210-220).  Nathan obtained his bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago at 18.  He was attending Law School at the University of Chicago and was going to transfer to Harvard Law School for the upcoming semester.  Nathan had a great interest in ornithology as he was an avid bird watcher, and even presented his study of the rare Kirtland Warbler at the American Ornithological Society and published his findings in a professional journal (video footage of Leopold hand-feeding the rare bird exists, and is shown in the History Channel’s “Born Killers”).  On a personal level, Leopold was socially awkward.  He was perceived by others as being aloof, had trouble making friends, and was viewed as relatively unattractive.  While Leopold possessed a superior intellect for his age, he was socially ill at ease.

Richard Loeb, who was 18 at the time of the murder, was called affectionately “Dickie” by family and friends and also by the defense lawyers during the trial.  Richard Loeb was from an even more affluent German Jewish family who also lived in the Hyde Park area in Chicago.  Loeb’s father was vice-president of Sears, Roebuck and Company.  Loeb, to a lesser degree than Leopold, was also intellectually very gifted (IQ of 160).  He had been the youngest to ever graduate from the University of Michigan at age 17.  He was in a special program for brilliant students at the University of Chicago in 1924.  On a personal level, Richard was extremely charming, had an easy time making friends, was very handsome, and was by all accounts loved by girls.  Strangely, after it was known that “Dickie” was one of the murderers, “giddy” schoolgirls flocked to the courthouse in an attempt to see him (McKernan, 1924).  (Equally strange, the handsome serial killer Ted Bundy did not meet and marry his wife until he was convicted of brutally murdering many young women; Bundy was ultimately executed.  Why these handsome killers are attractive to others is an interesting psychological question to which I will not even attempt to provide an answer, but other examples of this bizarre phenomenon exist.)

Robert (Bobby) Franks was a 14-year-old boy who also lived in the Hyde Park area and attended the exclusive Harvard School in Chicago.  The Franks, Leopold, and Loeb families all lived within walking distance of each other, and were on friendly social terms.  In fact, Bobby Franks was a distant cousin of Richard Loeb, and Bobby and Richard had even played tennis together on the Loeb family courts.  Bobby’s father, Jacob, created a fortune from his dealings in real-estate and money lending.  Jacob Franks, who loaned money to all (e.g., rich, poor, gamblers, beggers) for 95 cents on the dollar, earned the nickname “Honest Jake” for his business practices.  The social status of the perpetrators and the victim was important for initially capturing public attention.  If this crime had been committed by two individuals with a long history of criminal activity and the victim had been a boy from the poorer side of Chicago, this crime would more than likely have simply been another story that may at best have received a small blurb in the back pages of the local newspapers.

The Chronology of Events

On May 21, 1924, Robert Franks had not returned home for dinner, which was very unusual as he typically followed a regular schedule.  As it became later in the day, the Franks family became worried and went around the neighborhood to determine if they could locate their son.  Family members learned that Bobby had been at the playground of the Harvard School umpiring a baseball game earlier in the day.  He was last seen in front of the school walking in the direction of his house.  The Franks family was becoming increasingly worried and they even checked inside the Harvard School to ensure that Bobby had not been accidently locked inside (Theodore, 2007).  At about 10:30pm Bobby’s mother answered the telephone.  A man who identified himself as “George Johnson” told Mrs. Franks that her son had been kidnapped but was safe.  The family waited for further instructions, which arrived in a special delivery letter mailed from the Hyde Park post office the next morning.  This letter, which was subsequently published in many newspapers a few days later, was as follows (cited in Sellers, 1926, pp. 12-13):

Dear Sir:

As you no doubt know by this time your son has been kidnapped.  Allow us to assure you that he is at present well and safe.  You need not fear any physical harm for him providing you live up carefully to the following instructions and such others as you will receive by future communications.  Should you, however, disobey any of our instructions, even slightly, his death will be the penalty.

1.       For obvious reasons make absolutely no attempt to communicate with either the police authorities or any private agency.  Should you already have communicated with the police, allow them to continue their investigations, but do not mention this letter.

2.      Secure before noon today $10,000.  This money must be composed entirely of old bills of the following denominations: $2,000 in $20 bills, $8,000 in $50 bills.  The money must be old.  Any attempt to include new or marked bills will render the entire venture futile.  The money should be placed in a large cigar box or, if such is impossible, in a heavy cardboard box securely closed and wrapped in white paper.  The wrapping paper should be sealed and all openings with sealing wax.

3.      Have the money thus prepared as directed above and remain home after one o’clock P.M.  See that the telephone is not in use.  You will receive a future communication instructing you as to your future course.  As a final word of warning, this is a strictly commercial proposition, and we are prepared to put our threats into execution should we have reasonable ground to believe that you have committed an infraction of the above instructions.  However, should you carefully follow out our instructions to the letter, we can assure you that your son will be safely returned to you within six hours of our receipt of the money.

Yours Truly,

George Johnson.

Bobby’s father did as the letter instructed, as he feared for his son if he disobeyed the kidnapper’s instructions.  The call finally came that evening, as Jacob Franks was instructed that a taxi would arrive and take him to a drugstore on 63rd street.  A second phone call came, but this time it was the police informing the Franks family that a body of a boy had been found by some workmen just south of Chicago in a marshy area.  The body, which was found in the open end of a culvert, was naked and had hydrochloric acid poured over the face and body.  The coroner would conclude that death occurred from strangulation and blows to the head from some type of dull instrument.  Near the dead child was a pair of glasses, so the Franks family believed this was unlikely Bobby as he did not wear glasses.  To check just in case, an uncle went to identify the body.  Just before Bobby’s father was to leave to follow George Johnson’s instructions, the uncle called to inform the family of the horrible news.

If Bobby’s body had not been found, the kidnappers had planned to call Jacob Franks at the drugstore and instruct him to board a specific train.  Ultimately, he would have received additional instructions.  As Leopold would recall in his statement to authorities, Mr. Franks would have been instructed to go on the rear platform of a specific train.  Immediately after he passed a brick factory with a water tower with the word “Champion” on it, Jacob Franks was to count to three or four and throw the package eastward as far as he could.  Leopold and Loeb had planned on being nearby the location when the package was thrown from the train.  A picture of the George Johnson instructions is available at the at the Chicago History Museum’s website (http://chsmedia.org/media/dn/07/0772/DN-0077257.jpg).

Initial Public Fascination

From the very beginning of the case, the city of Chicago was enthralled with the mystery of who killed Robert Franks, which quickly spread to the rest of the country.  This story was not like previous kidnapping stories in which the paying of the ransom might result in the child being safely returned.  Here, the Franks child was murdered prior to the kidnapper(s) receiving the ransom, which made the murder a truly senseless crime.  The newspapers, which possessed a tabloid mentality at the time, vigorously and sensationally covered and reported every detail.  The crime “was a perfect fit for the tabloid mentality that was Roaring Twenties’ journalism” (Theodore, 2007, p. 52).  To keep the story alive, the media attention was not just about one murdered boy, but needed a larger theme to captivate public attention and ultimately sell more newspapers.  As historian Paula Fass (1993, p. 921) points out, as the story began to unfold, “the papers invested it with meaning and significance by linking it to widespread concerns about childhood and youth.”  The story of Bobby Franks initially had significance for the American public because if a child from such a prominent family living in an exclusive neighborhood could be taken off the street and murdered for no apparent reason, nobody’s child was safe.  During this time, virtually everyone “turned detective.”  Particularly noteworthy was that Richard Loeb was willing to talk with just about anyone who would listen and offer his insights on the murder of Robert Franks, especially newspaper reporters and the authorities.  In contrast, Leopold kept a low profile.

On Monday, May 26, 1924, the Chicago Herald and Examiner engaged its readership by offering a prize for the best theory about the murder.  The Chicago paper received entries from 40 states, and had announced that it received 3,000 entries in the first three days of the contest (Higdon, 1999).

During the early portion of the case, information led detectives to two teachers from the Harvard School where Robert Franks was a student and had last been seen.  The teachers were held and questioned by the authorities for almost a week.  The teachers were strongly pressured to confess.  The teachers were ultimately released from custody by a judge’s order when the police did not have enough hard evidence to formally charge them with the crime.  One of the teachers subsequently won a lawsuit against the city for the treatment he received while in custody.

Solving the Case

A break in the case occurred nine days after the murder of Bobby Franks due to some diligent detective work, and a remarkable bit of luck.  Remember that a pair of glasses had been found close to where Bobby’s body was found?  The horn rimmed glasses had a frame spring that was recently patented.  These frames were sold by just one optical store in Chicago, Almer and Coe.  Only 3 pair of glasses with those frames had been sold, and the other two pairs were accounted for.  The remaining pair belonged to Nathan Leopold, who had purchased the glasses 3 months previously but had stopped wearing them.  Leopold was asked to explain if the glasses were his, why they would be in the marsh where the Franks boy’s body was found.  Leopold was sure his glasses were at home, but a search of his house failed to locate them.  While the authorities would later learn that the glasses fell out of Leopold’s jacket pocket when disposing of the body in the culvert, he gave the State’s Attorney a plausible story that he likely lost the glasses when bird watching, as he had been to that area many times (a picture of the glasses is widely available on the internet).

When asked where he was during the day of the murder, Leopold gave the authorities a statement which he and Loeb had concocted to provide each other with an alibi just in case they were ever questioned.  McKernan (1924, p. 18) writes that Nathan Leopold said that he and Richard Loeb “had spent the afternoon, after luncheon in the loop, studying birds in Lincoln Park and drinking gin—drinking too much gin to go home for dinner.  They went to the Cocoanut Grove, on Sixty-third Street, for dinner, and after dinner driving in Nathan’s maroon Willys-Knight car up and down Sixty-third Street, looking for some girls with nothing to do.  They found the girls, Nathan said, and took them out to the wooded island in Jackson Park.  The girls, however, did not agree with the boys on methods of spending the evening, and so they were told to get out and walk home, so the boys drove home alone.  That was their story.  Later Richard told it, too. Not a flaw—both told the same plausible story—simply, willingly and smilingly.”

At this point, the authorities did not believe it likely that such nice young men, from such good families, were involved in such a heinous crime.  The treatment that Leopold and Loeb received during questioning, compared with the previously mentioned teachers who were being pressured to confess, was substantially different.  Little did the authorities know at the time that Leopold and Loeb had been committing smaller crimes, such as robbing Loeb’s fraternity, prior to the murder of Bobby Franks.  Yet the authorities kept digging for evidence, which subsequently resulted in the evidence pointing directly at the two “nice” young men.  The letter sent to the Franks family from Mr. Johnson was written on an Underwood typewriter.  James Mulroy, a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, learned that Leopold had been preparing for examinations with four other students during the previous winter, and outlines had been typed using Leopold’s typewriter.  After testing, there was no doubt that the same typewriter that had written the ransom note had also typed the outlines.  Leopold denied ever owning an Underwood typewriter.

Another crack in their alibi occurred when the Loeb family chauffer, Sven Englund, told the authorities that Nathan’s car had not been taken out the day of the murder.  He remembered because he had made repairs and cleaned the car that day.  As the evidence began to mount, Loeb subsequently crumpled and confessed that he and Leopold had murdered Bobby Franks.  Once Leopold heard Loeb was talking, he confessed as well.  Both told essentially the same story, with one major difference.  Both accused the other of ultimately committing the murder.  The confessions indicated that Leopold and Loeb had killed “because they wanted the excitement of committing a perfect, detection-defying crime” (McKernan, 1924, p. 22).  The pair had been meticulously planning the “perfect crime” for months.  For example, on the day of the murder, they had rented a car, but had previously rented a car as a dry run.  Every aspect of the murder was planned, from the George Johnson letter to the hydrochloric acid on the body, with the one exception of who would be the victim, which was a random selection on the day of the murder.

Prior to the identification of the murderers (the newspapers reported that Leopold and Loeb confessed on May 31, 1924), this case had sparked substantial public interest around the “no child was safe” storyline.  Public interest became even more intense because of the nature of the crime which was a random and senseless thrill killing (just for the fun of it), as well as the backgrounds of the killers (two bright, affluent young men from well-respected and prominent families).  As Geis and Bienen (1998, p. 16) nicely summarize, “The absence of a sensible motive for the killing of Bobby Franks, the stunning intellectual abilities of the killers, the great wealth and high social standing of their families, and their “different” (that is, Jewish) cultural heritage contributed to the most intense public attention ever to be focused on a murder in the United States.”  The presence of the most famous criminal defense lawyer in the history of the United States, Clarence Darrow, also added to the public attention of the case.

The Legal Figures

At this point, let me introduce the important legal figures in the case.  Let’s start with the defense lawyers, who would be commonly called “the million dollar defense” not only because of their high profiles, but because of the wealth of the defendants’ families.  The lead attorney defending Leopold and Loeb was the just mentioned Clarence Darrow.  Darrow, who was 67 at the time of the trial, had been connected with many famous trials in his long and distinguished career.  Darrow was, at the time of the trial, a “superstar” and is still today widely recognized as the most famous defense attorney of the 20th century.

Darrow had a mechanistic philosophy of life, which viewed man as having no free will, but that human actions are ultimately determined by genetics, biology, and the environment.  For Darrow, while Leopold and Loeb had committed the crime, the responsibility for the murder of Robert Franks was ultimately beyond their control (Riniolo, 2002).  While Darrow fought for many causes over the course of his career, he was a most outspoken critic of the death penalty.  As Darrow (1932, p. 232) would write in his autobiography, The Story of My Life, “No client of mine had ever been put to death, and I felt that it would almost, if not quite, kill me if it should ever happen.”  The summer after the Leopold and Loeb trial, Darrow would be the lead defense attorney for John Scopes in the famous Scopes Monkey Trials.  There is not a defense attorney with as high a public profile today that I could give the reader as a contemporary equivalent.

The other two important defense attorneys were the Bachrach brothers (Benjamin and Walter), who were cousins of Richard Loeb.  Benjamin had a distinguished career as a defense attorney prior to this case, as he had argued and won before the United States Supreme Court.  Benjamin Bachrach even defended world heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson in 1913.  Walter Bachrach was also part of the defense team, and he was one of the intellectuals who had become interested in Freud’s theories over the years.  As pointed out by McKernan (1924, p. 212), Walter had for more than ten years been making “an intensive study of modern psychology, including abnormal psychology and psychiatry, and therefore is familiar with the remarkable progress of modern psychiatry.  In 1921 Mr. Bachrach, with others, sponsored a visit to Chicago, of some two and a half months’ duration, by Dr. Wilhelm Stekel (the internationally distinguished Viennese psychiatrist and colleague of Dr. Freud), who, by his lectures and treatments in Chicago, endeavored to make known to Americans the extraordinary progress in therapeutic methods and results obtained by renowned German and Austrian psychiatrists.”  Walter was undergoing his own personal analysis, and his interest in Freudian psychoanalysis will become important as the story unfolds because he ultimately secures Freudians to testify as expert witnesses for the defense.

The State’s Attorney, who would be the lead prosecutor, was the 45-year-old Robert Crowe (“Fighting” or “Battling” Bob).  Crowe was a gifted speaker, but his office had a poor conviction rate, and an election was only months away.  Solving the case and securing a guilty verdict would certainly help his reelection status in the fall for the State’s Attorney who had initially run in 1920 on the slogan: “To make life, children, and property safe in Cook County, vote for Judge Robert E. Crowe” (Higdon, 1999, p. 78).  The judge who would hear the case was the honorable John R. Caverly, who was 64 years old at the time and had been a judge for 14 years.   Caverly was a self-made man, as he paid for his education by working in the steel mills carrying water.  Judge Caverly had previously been Chicago’s city attorney, and was rewarded with a judgeship when he prosecuted a group of personal-injury lawyers who had defrauded the taxpayers out of millions of dollars.

Public Interest: A New Storyline

Once the defendants’ identities became known, Leopold and Loeb seemed to be proud of the killing, as they filled in the authorities about their previous criminal activities and ultimately led investigators and reporters to the various important places in the transmission of the crime (e.g., the marsh where they left the body, the place where they rented the car).  Leopold said that the murder was as easy to commit as sticking “a pin through the back of a beetle” (cited in Fass, 1993, p. 925).  At this point, most people assumed that Nathan Leopold, because of his superior intellect must have been primarily responsible for the crime.  Leopold was portrayed in the media and viewed by the public as an evil scientist who was devoid of feelings and/or compassion for others.

In contrast, the public opinion was that the charming Richard Loeb must have been led astray by his intellectual superior.  This interpretation would change as subsequent information was released to the public.  The media coverage at this point shifted to the story line of Leopold as an evil mastermind.  As Fass (1993) points out, in order to keep the Robert Franks murder front page news, the storyline had to reflect modern life in some meaningful way.  The central theme to accompany the Leopold and Loeb coverage now continued with the theme of childhood, except now the coverage shifted to “understand the motiveless crime and its relation to the dangers of modern childhood…” (Fass, 1993, pp. 926-7).  The newspaper coverage now focused on the importance of proper parenting during childhood to keep children from growing up like Leopold and Loeb.

On July 17, 1924, just a few days before the beginning of the trial, the Chicago Daily Tribune asked its readers in a front page story if they wanted the trial to be broadcast on its new radio station—WGN (“World’s Greatest Newspaper”).  Readers were instructed to send in ballots.  As the Tribune would write (cited in Theodore, 2007, p. 120), “Millions of Americans, from New York to San Francisco, have read of the murder of the son of Millionaire Jacob Franks with more than a morbid fascination—with a curiosity that grows out of the fact that this murder touches closely more than one intimate phase of human experience.”  The 10,000 plus ballots over five days had a majority who voted no, largely because of concerns over whether the content of the trial would be appropriate for all who may listen (particularly women and children), as there were concerns over scandalous details coming out during the trial.

The Alienists

Prior to the authorities letting Leopold and Loeb meet with their defense attorneys for the first time, Crowe (the State’s Attorney who would be the lead prosecutor) had requested that 3 of the leading alienists in Chicago meet with him.  Alienist was the term used at the time to describe forensic experts that testified about mental status.  Dr. Hugh Patrick (professor emeritus of nervous and mental diseases at Northwestern University Medical School and past president of the American Neurological Association), Dr. Archibald Church (department head of nervous and mental diseases at Northwestern and author of a widely read textbook on mental illness), and Dr. William Krohn (in private practice and an author) all agreed to testify for the prosecution before the defense lawyers had a chance to meet with them.  The prosecution would later secure another prominent Chicago alienist, Dr. Harold Singer.  Clarence Darrow, in his closing speech, said that Dr. Patrick and Dr. Church were “the two ablest alienists in Chicago” and “if my friend Crowe had not got to them first, I would have tried to get them” (cited in Sellers, 1926, p. 158).  Darrow would instead ultimately wind up with Freudians to testify for the defense.

Clarence Darrow immediately hired two physicians to conduct a thorough examination of Leopold and Loeb.  Dr. H. S. Hulbert from Oak Park, Illinois, and Dr. Karl Bowman of Boston, who was a specialist in glands and mental disorders. The examinations occurred from June 13 to June 30, 1924, in the Cook County Jail in Chicago, and they would create a medical report for each defendant that would later be offered as evidence in the case.  Summary versions of the reports are widely available in McKernan (1924), but the originals they are well worth the read (see Bowman & Hulbert, 1924a, 1924b).  For both defendants, Doctors Hulbert and Bowman note that the examination included a comprehensive psychiatric evaluation as well as physical, neurological, endocrine, x-ray, and clinical laboratory examinations.  Also, the examination included abundant interviews from family members, friends, relatives, and acquaintances to attempt to gain an accurate history of the defendants.  Interestingly, McKernan (1924, p. 82) refers to an “unprintable matter concerning the sex life of the defendants” that she does not include in her summary of the Bowman and Hulbert reports.  Although this subject was largely kept out of the newspapers during the trial, the unprintable matter will be discussed in the next chapter.

Because Crowe had already hired the leading alienists from Chicago, Clarence Darrow believed the defense should obtain their alienists from out of town to obtain experts with a higher profile.  Darrow subsequently sent Walter Bachrach, one of the other defense attorneys, to the American Psychiatric Association’s 18th Annual Meeting.  Darrow had written a book where he stated his belief that criminal behavior is the direct result of the individual’s genetic makeup and endocrine system.  Darrow was initially inclined to obtain alienists that would focus upon this type of testimony.  However, Walter Bachrach, who had a keen interest in Freudian theory, ultimately convinced Darrow that Freudian psychoanalysts should testify for the defense.

Walter would subsequently secure three of the leading psychoanalysts in the country.  Dr. William A. White, who had appeared with Freud and others in the Everybody’s magazine article written by Max Eastman in 1915 (see Chapter 7), was the Superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Insane (Washington, D.C.), president of the American Psychiatric Association, and the author of many books on mental abnormalities.  At the time of the trial, Dr. White was the most well-known psychoanalyst in America.  William Healy was formerly Director of the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute (Chicago) and currently the Director of the Judge Baker Foundation (Boston), and had written extensively on mental disturbances in adolescence, juvenile delinquency and crime.  Bernard Glueck, a former Director of the Psychiatric Clinic, Sing Sing Prison, who had also worked as an alienist for New York State, was considered one of the leading alienists in the country.  Ralph C. Hamill, a Neuropsychiatrist from Chicago would also be hired for the defense, but would not testify in court.

Also, White, Healy, Glueck, and Hamill would author a joint medical report about Leopold and Loeb, which was not offered into evidence, but provides the position of the defense alienists.  The report was published by McKernan (1924, pp. 141-163) and the editors of the Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology (1924, Vol. 15).  As McKernan (1924, pp. 81-82) summarizes, “Probably never in the history of criminal trials has there ever been before such a painstaking, elaborate and detailed examination of any person charged with a crime, by such a distinguished corps of scientists as was made of Nathan F. Leopold, Jr., and Richard Loeb, in this case.”

Summary

In summary, because of the unique aspects of the murder of Robert Franks, the public quickly became fascinated in the case.  The media supplemented the coverage with personally relevant storylines that kept the story in the news.  Even before this case officially made it to trial, the psychological make-up of the defendants was already a topic of widespread interest to the general public.  During the trial itself, as will be discussed in the next chapter, Freudian psychoanalysts took take center stage and were accompanied by front page news stories.  You did not need to be a psychologist, a medical doctor, an intellectual, or interested in the latest mind cure to have an interest in the Freudian testimony that was about to take place in a Chicago courtroom during the summer of 1924.  This trial provided the general public in America, and perhaps the rest of the Western World, with a crash course in Freudian themes and terms.

Chapter 10:  THE LEOPOLD AND LOEB TRIAL

The trial of the People v. Richard A. Loeb and Nathan F. Leopold began on July 21, 1924, in Cook County, Illinois.  The local public interest around the trial was incredible as each day approximately 3000 people tried to get into the courthouse that would only hold 300.  The public fascination with the trial outside of Chicago was equally captivating, as people around the nation waited for newspaper reports of what would unfold in the courtroom.  The defendants were each charged with one count of murder and one count of kidnapping.  Both charges carried a minimum jail sentence of 14 years and a maximum punishment of death.

Guilty Plea: Evidence for Mitigation of the Crime

At the beginning of the trial, Clarence Darrow stunned the court.  Everyone was expecting an insanity defense, but Darrow instead said the following to Judge John R. Caverly (cited in Sellers, 1926, p. 11):

Your Honor, we have determined to withdraw our pleas of not guilty and enter pleas of guilty.  We dislike to throw this burden upon this court or any court.  We know its seriousness and its gravity.  And while we wish it could be otherwise we feel that it must be as we have chosen.

The statute provides, your Honor, that evidence may be offered in mitigation of the punishment, and we shall ask at such time as the court may direct that we be permitted to offer evidence as to the mental condition of these young men, to show the degree of responsibility they had, and also to offer evidence as to the youth of these defendants, and the fact of a plea of guilty as a further mitigation of the penalty in this case.  With that we throw ourselves upon the mercy of this court and this court alone.

Darrow’s guilty plea had a dual purpose.  First, it would allow him to avoid a jury trial, as the case could now be argued solely before the judge.  Public sentiment at the time the trial began was clear: Leopold and Loeb should hang.  Nothing short of a death sentence would do as proper punishment for the heinous crime.  Darrow believed the only chance he had to avoid the death penalty for his clients was to keep away from a jury.  Second, Darrow planned a new strategy of defense, testimony by alienists for mitigation of the crime.  He was going to attempt to reduce the sentence, specifically avoid the death penalty, by using what would in today’s terminology be described as a “diminished capacity” defense.  In other words, Leopold and Loeb were not wholly responsible for the crime, and it would be the Freudian psychoanalysts who would take center stage for the defense team to explain why there were mitigating circumstances that should be considered when determining punishment.

Using psychological testimony to reduce punishment was a new strategy.  Today, it is almost expected in cases in which the defendant is clearly not insane or is not attempting to use a defense of temporary insanity, the defense will call expert witnesses to testify that the defendant committed the crime because of some underlying psychological issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder, severe childhood neglect, sexual abuse in childhood, dissociative disorder, and so forth (likewise, the prosecution will have experts to rebut the defense experts’ testimony).

At the time of the Leopold and Loeb trial, alienist testimony about the psychological makeup of the defendant was limited to determine sanity.  If the court ruled the defendant was sane (i.e., capable of exercising fee will), they would stand trial.  In contrast, if the court found the defendant insane, they were not held responsible for their actions but sent to an insane asylum.  There was simply no middle ground.  The strategy that Clarence Darrow implemented was groundbreaking, and would thrust the psychological testimony about Leopold and Loeb center stage.  He would argue that there was a continuum between normal and abnormal mental conditions, not just a clear “sane” or “insane.”[7]

Despite the guilty plea, the law required the State to nonetheless prove the crime.  During this time, the State produced approximately eighty witnesses to document the details of the crime.  The testimony produced no controversy in the courtroom and there was very little cross-examination by the attorneys for the defendants.  The state rested its case on July 30, and the defense was now allowed the opportunity to begin its case.  Because there will be a variety of names and dates forthcoming, I have provided a timeline that includes the important names and dates relevant for the psychological testimony in Appendix A that can be referred to as needed.

Shifting Public Interest: The Bowman and Hulbert Medical Report

While the prosecution rested its case on Wednesday, July 30, an event occurred over the weekend that made the prosecution livid.  Lead defense attorney Clarence Darrow said that someone had stolen portions of the medical reports made by Dr. Bowman and Dr. Hulbert (see Chapter 9).  Darrow was well aware of the importance of public opinion and media reports in high profile cases.  Darrow likely leaked the report to the press to shift the focus of the media reporting away from the details of the crime to the mitigation portion of the trial.  Darrow subsequently sent the “stolen” report to other newspapers so that they would not get scooped by the other papers that already possessed the document.  This was the beginning of the next phase of public interest, the underlying causes as to why Leopold and Loeb had committed what appeared to be a senseless murder.  This phase of the trial would change America for the foreseeable future into becoming interested in Freudian theory.

The Bowman and Hulbert (1924a, 1924b) reports for both defendants included a thorough medical examination (physical, neurological, endocrine, X-ray) as well as the family and academic histories of the defendants.  The most interesting portions of the report for the public were the abnormal childhoods of Leopold and Loeb, and the subsequent development of their active phantasy lives (I am using the spelling of “fantasy” that occurred in 1924 for consistency with later quotations).  According to the medical reports (see Bowman & Hulbert, 1924a, 1924b), Loeb was said to have felt inferior from an early age as he believed he did not receive enough parental attention.  He also had a strict Governess, Miss Struthers, who was employed when he was 4 ½ years old, and she pushed him academically beyond what would be considered normal for a young boy.  Although they were attached to each other, Loeb quickly realized he could avoid punishment by lying to Miss Struthers (Bowman & Hulbert, 1924b).

The report also stated that Loeb was physically inferior during early childhood (until about the age of nine), so he was not allowed to play outdoors with other boys.  Loeb never developed normal feelings of guilt and remorse.  He had an inability to show normal emotional responses, and was suffering from depressive episodes.  Loeb, who read a large number of detective books as a child, is also said to have developed and spent a great deal of time in an active phantasy life by the age of 10 or 11, and these phantasies centered on being a “Master Criminal.”  As Bowman and Hulbert (1924b, p. 70) report, in all of Loeb’s “criminal phantasies the thing that gave him pleasure would be the prestige to himself as the “Master Mind” directing the criminal operations which no detective could solve.”

Nathan Leopold had a series of different governesses growing up, but Mathilda Wantz (Sweetie) had a tremendous influence over Leopold when he was a child.  Sweetie was “homely, suspicious, had a violent temper and was continually getting into scraps with other people” (Bowman & Hulbert, 1924a, p. 18).  She was also extremely jealous (i.e., she encouraged Leopold to love her more than his own mother) and did not teach Leopold what would be considered a normal view of right and wrong.  For example, when Leopold was just 7 years old he had borrowed a neighbor boy’s stamp collection which contained several duplicate stamps that he desired.  Sweetie would help Leopold steal the objects he wanted, but the stamps were ultimately returned when his parents eventually found out.  The report would note that the psychiatric importance of Sweetie, who was described as having a “very peculiar mentality” (p. 22), was that Leopold would come to take “her abnormal ideas as normal” (p.18).

Furthermore, Leopold was from an early age encouraged and permitted to inspect his governess “from head to foot in her undressing closet” (Bowman & Hulbert, 1924a, p. 19).  Moreover, his earliest sexual experiences would be with his bizarre governess.  As McKernan (1924, p. 136) summarizes, Leopold’s sex life had an “abnormal start due to the abnormal introduction to sex life that he had acquired from his insane governess when he was a boy of tender years.”  The Bowman and Hulbert (1924a, p. 151) report of Leopold would summarize the influence of his governess (i.e., “Sweetie”) in the following way:

She was a definitively abnormal individual, who, being closely associated with him in the tender and formative years of his development, produced a profound and unwholesome effect. …  This governess set herself up as being superior to the patient’s parents in every way, and the patient accepted this idea. … She gave the patient a very abnormal and unhealthy introduction to sex topics, and he has never been able to secure a normal viewpoint on this subject since.  Some of the things which she did to him have been forgotten or repressed, but the effects of such treatment still remain and still act as determinants for his behaving and thinking.

When Leopold first entered school, he went to an all girls’ school.  He subsequently attended a co-ed school, but did not adapt and returned to the girls’ school.  He was shielded from other boys and had very few close friendships growing up, becoming a solitary individual.  Leopold’s notebook drawings indicated his “subconscious mind had a much greater range than the average person’s and turned to subjects quite foreign to the thinking of normal people” (McKernan, 1924, p. 114).  Leopold would tell the doctors that he actively worked to contain all emotional feelings in an attempt to develop cold-blooded, purely intellectual interests (Bowman & Hulbert, 1924a).  Leopold ultimately came to believe that his mental superiority meant the normal societal rules did not apply to him, allowing him to indulge his active and abnormal phantasy life.  He had no feelings of remorse about the crime, as there was a marked discrepancy between his intellectual and emotional development.

Leopold, like Loeb, also developed an active phantasy life, which allowed him to escape from feelings of inferiority.  His most pronounced phantasy was that of a king and slave, where he preferred to play the role of the slave who would serve his superior king (i.e., Richard Loeb).  According to the medical report, the murder of Bobby Franks was an acting out of his phantasy life.  The leaked Bowman and Hulbert medical reports were front page news on July 28, 1924.  For example, the headline for The New York Times was “Loeb ‘Master Mind’ of Franks Slaying, Alienists Report” (as covered in Chapter 9, the full article is widely available in the New York Times Historical database), The Washington Post was “Loeb Master Mind, Leopold His Slave, Alienists Declare,” and The Atlanta Constitution was “Loeb is Branded as Master Mind in Franks Crime.”

The Bowman and Hulbert reports were important for public opinion in several ways.  First, it was generally assumed that Leopold was the driving force in the murder, and that Loeb had somehow been hoodwinked by his intellectual superior.  After the report became public, most people concluded that Loeb bore the greater responsibility for the crime, as Leopold was viewed as being Loeb’s “mental slave” and simply serving the wishes of his “King.”  Second, the focus of the newspaper reporting now shifted to a story line about the abnormal childhood experiences of the defendants, which is exactly what Clarence Darrow had hoped would happen.  The message was clear:  An abnormal childhood could result in serious consequences, making the story particularly relevant for parents across the nation.  The early childhood experiences of both Leopold and Loeb would ultimately make great theater when the Freudian experts would take the stand and give Freudian interpretations of the underlying causes for the senseless crime (you can see Freud’s influence in the medical reports as well with such terms as “repression”).  Whether or not individuals agreed with the Freudian explanations, there is little doubt that Freudian interpretation of the underlying causes for the senseless murder was fascinating to a wide spectrum of individuals (i.e., the general public).  It is no wonder that the Freudian testimony during the trial would generate substantial public debate lasting for years (Higdon, 1999).

The Dueling Alienists and Public Fascination

After the prosecution rested its case, the first expert to testify about the abnormal mental condition for the defense took the stand (pictures of the expert witnesses are available at the Chicago History Museum’s website; http://www.chicagohistory.org/).  Dr. William A. White, the most recognizable psychoanalyst in the country, would refer to Leopold as “Babe” and Loeb as “Dickie” throughout his testimony.  The other defense alienists would follow this strategy.  As soon as Dr. White began his testimony, prosecuting attorney Robert Crowe objected and the legal battle began over the question of whether or not mental abnormality short of insanity could be used to mitigate punishment.  The judge would use the next several days to hold hearings on this specific issue.  The prosecution’s position was as follows:  “Our interpretation of this is, your Honor, that they are attempting to show degrees of responsibility.  There is nothing in law known as degrees of responsibility.  You are either entirely responsible for all the consequences of your act, or you are not responsible at all” (cited in McKernan, 1924, p. 79).

The defense’s position was that they should be allowed to offer evidence of an abnormal mental condition to show that there are degrees of mental responsibility short of legal insanity.  Judge Caverly ultimately decided that Illinois law required him to hear evidence of mitigation.   This ruling not only allowed the alienists for the defense to testify, but allowed the Bowman and Hulbert medical reports to be offered into evidence.  An additional joint defense report was prepared by Drs. White, Healy, Glueck, and Hamill.  This report was never introduced into evidence, but is worthwhile to read because it concisely states the positions of the defense alienists as they would testify on the stand (see McKernan, 1924, p. 141-163).

The battle that was about to take place in the courtroom was between the defense and prosecution alienists.  The defense alienists would argue that Leopold and Loeb were mentally diseased while the prosecution would argue the opposite.  As McKernan notes (1924, p. 167), “The trial became a contest in psychology and for days the air was thick with terms—“split personalities,” “phantasies,” “subconscious influence,” “basal metabolism”—which the alienists and neurologists of the two sides of the case hurled back and forth before the judge.”  What would ultimately happen by the end of this process was that the “newspapers helped introduce Americans to the new psychology and to new concepts of the normal and the abnormal” (Fass, 1993, p. 929).  Here, the new psychology would be Freud’s psychology.  As Catherine Covert (1975, p. vi) would write in her dissertation, “Newspaper coverage of that case for the first time brought to American readers extended coverage of Freudian thought, presented by psychoanalysts on the witness stand testifying for the accused.”  I would recommend using the New York Times Historical database (see Chapter 9) as the quickest way to read firsthand what was reported in most newspapers across the country via the wire services, which not only reported about the trial, but typically provided substantial quotations from the courtroom.

At the time of the trial, most people were not pleased with Darrow’s strategy of using alienists to mitigate punishment in this murder case.  Editorials from around the globe had harsh words.  For example, The Daily Mail of London editorialized the following (August 1, 1924): “The monstrous depravity of Leopold and Loeb is causing their trial to be followed with horror-struck and unparalleled interest.  The Mail criticizes the “mobilization of a procession of psycho-analysts” endeavoring to save the accused from the proper penalty on the convenient plea of insanity.  The danger to the public in this dubious science here is clearly shown” (cited in Theodore, 2007, p. 145).  Likewise, letters to the editor in newspapers around the country, while certainly not a representative sample, were also typically harsh about the testimony from the defense alienists.

The American public would be fascinated during the alienist testimony reviewed below, as everyone was interested in the psychological explanations of why the killing of Bobby Franks occurred.  However, most Americans did not accept the Freudian explanations as the alienists for the defense were viewed as being on the side of cold-blooded and calculated murderers.  As Hale (1995, p. 93) writes, “In this trial, psychoanalysis became identified with a radical view of crime which seemed to suggest leniency for murder.”  Independent of whether the individual reading the newspaper coverage of the trial was sympathetic or outraged by the use of psychological testimony to mitigate punishment, “the newspapers, in edition after edition, brought this new psychology into people’s homes.  Dickie Loeb and Babe Leopold, two pampered sons of millionaires who lived upholstered lives, didn’t kill just for a thrill, the papers reported.  It was abnormal childhoods that led them to the crime.  The public now saw the boys as object lessons for raising children” (Theodore, 2007, p. 148).

If there was a single moment in time that introduced the New Psychology of Freud to the American public, it was during this portion of the trial, as the Leopold and Loeb case “familiarized Americans with a wide range of terms, concepts, and values drawn from psychiatry” (Fass, 1993, p. 939).  The newspaper coverage, while using the psychological testimony to further its storylines about the importance of early childhood events, also sought to “knock psychiatrists off their scientific perch as so much inflated (and overpaid) ego” (Fass, 1993, p. 937).  In the same edition of a newspaper you could have a detailed explanation of the underlying causes of murder in Freudian terms, while the editorial pages would simultaneously harshly criticize the use of Freudian testimony by the defense (Covert, 1975).

After Judge Caverly had ruled he would hear the defense testimony for mitigation purposes (see The Seattle Times, “State Loses Fight to Ban Alienists,” August 1, 1924, p. 1), the prominent psychoanalyst Dr. William A. White retook the witness stand to testify for the defense starting on Friday, August 1.  His testimony would conclude on Saturday, August 2.  Dr. White, like the other defense alienists to follow, wanted to show the court that Leopold and Loeb’s abnormal childhoods ultimately contributed to the murder of Robert Franks.  Dr. White was at the time of the trial a seasoned lecturer who was able to modify his speaking to his audience.  While on the witness stand, he would cut out the technical jargon and attempt to explain what he believed were the important issues in language accessible for the non-expert.  He was the perfect spokesman to introduce Freudian theory to the general public in understandable terms (Baatz, 2008).  For  more information about the defense alienists testimony than provided below, consult the previously mentioned Joint Medical Report by Drs. White, Healy, Glueck, and Hamill (who did not testify), which provided the basis of their testimony.

Dr. White would tell the court in a story-like manner about the active phantasy life that Loeb developed because of his abnormal childhood, and that his phantasy life ultimately centered on committing the perfect crime (see The Hartford Courant, “Dual Personality Plotted Murder, Alienist Testifies,” August 2, 1924, p. 1; The Washington Post, “Dual Personality Caused Kidnaping, Dr. White Asserts,” August 2, 1924, p. 1).  As Dr. White would testify, “He is the master criminal mind and wanted to do a great job, wanted to commit a crime that would be perfect, that would be thoroughly and completely planned in all details, that would baffle the police, that would be an object of great concern in the immediate community, that would leave no clues, that would be an intellectual feat to accomplish” (cited in Theodore, 2007, p. 140).  In further describing Loeb, Dr. White would say, “He was the host of an infantile emotional make-up which was a long way from the possibility of functioning harmoniously with his developed intelligence.  He was going in the direction of a split personality, because of this inner, unresolved conflict” (cited in Sellers, 1926, p. 16).

Dr. White’s testimony about Nathan Leopold (i.e., Babe) centered on his abnormal childhood (e.g., the role of his governess, his feelings of inferiority, his extraordinary intelligence) that resulted in his development of an active phantasy life, particularly the king-slave phantasy, in which Babe would play the role of the slave.  Dr. White also focused on the relationship of the two defendants together.  As he testified, “I do not believe that the Franks homicide can be explained without an understanding of this relation.  Babe would not have entered it alone, because he had no criminalistic tendencies, as Dickie did.  Dickie would never have gone as far as he did without Babe to give that final push” (cited in Sellers, 1926, p. 16).  Dr. White would also testify that Leopold had confided that both he and Loeb had considered killing each other (see The Pensacola Journal, “Dual Mind of Loeb and Leopold Worked With Devilish Ingenuity in Kidnaping of Young Franks, Says Expert Alienist,” August 2, 1924, p. 1).  Dr. White’s testimony concluded by “defining how new psychiatrists, the disciples of Freud, differed from the old ones” (Higdon, 1999, p. 212).

Perhaps the two most ill-advised statements made by Dr. White, which would be fodder for the press and for the prosecution, were as follows.  First, when the defense lawyer asked Dr. White if Loeb’s mental condition on the day of the murder was normal, he responded “Decidedly otherwise.  He is still a little child talking to his Teddy bear” (cited in Sellers, 1926, p. 16).  Clarence Darrow would note in his closing argument that the prosecution made fun of Dr. White for his teddy-bear comments (see McKernan, 1924).

Second, “Dr. White described pictures of Dickie as a child dressed in a cowboy costume holding a pistol, and again dressed as a policeman.  The earnestness of the boy’s expression convinced the psychiatrist that he took great interest in playing these roles” (Higdon, 1999, p. 208).  As one writer would later sarcastically comment about Dr. White’s testimony, “An idea strikes me—a great idea, and one that may eliminate murder forever.  If childhood pictures are indications of our future deeds, there need never be another murder.  A law should be passed at once compelling parents to have photographs taken of their children annually between the ages of three and nine—then if a child should pose in the costume of an Indian, or is snapped while aiming a pop gun at any object whatever, hang the child at once and thus prevent murder for all time” (cited in Higdon, 1999, p. 208).  One of these cowboy pictures of Loeb is widely available on the internet, and the Chicago History Museum (www.chicagohistory.org) has an additional photograph of Loeb in the cowboy costume.

Newspapers across the country would report that on August 2, the lead prosecution attorney, Robert Crowe, would mock Dr. White’s childish phantasy theory when given the opportunity to cross-examine the witness (see The Hartford Courant, “Childish Phantasy Defense of Franks Slayers Ridiculed,” August 3, 1924, p. 1).  The prosecution also made clear that they believed that Dr. White had been fooled by two highly intelligent individuals with a long history of telling lies (see The Atlanta Constitution, “Alienists Bilked by Fabric of Lies, is Stand of State,” August 3, 1924, p. 1; Los Angeles Daily Times, “Crowe’s Logic Explodes Boy Slayers’ Baby Plea,” August 3, 1924, p. 1).  As one example of the questioning, Crowe asked Dr. White if he was familiar with the literary characters Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.  He then asked Dr. White if he thought that the boyhood phantasies of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer and their unkind dealing with ‘Jim’ were signs of criminal inclinations (see The New York Times, “Prosecutor Assails Alienist Testimony for Franks Slayers,” August 3, 1924, p. 9 continued from p. 1).  The testimony on August 2 also highlighted that Dr. White was being paid a $250 a day fee for his testimony (see The Sunday [Florida] Times-Union, “Prosecution Makes Fun of Childish “Phantasy” Theory,” August 3, 1924, p. 1).  The public, whether they believed the defense position or thought Dr. White’s testimony was nothing more than a clever scheme to mitigate punishment, was fascinated with the alienist testimony.

In one of the more clever negative commentaries about Dr. White’s testimony, The New York Times (August 4, 1924, p. 12) wrote an editorial titled “Ex Post Facto.”  This editorial criticized the after the fact nature of the testimony by comparing the similarities of how a Freudian expert would write about Nathan Leopold and how a historian would write about a productive historical figure with a strong imagination.  While the descriptions in the commentary were of individuals with similar characteristics, the Freudian was referring to the defendant who participated in a murder and kidnapping (i.e., Nathan Leopold), while the historian was referring to Joan of Arc.  Dr. White, who had first taken the witness stand with such confidence, was made to look foolish upon cross-examination.  Perhaps this explains why, in Dr. White’s (1938) lengthy autobiography (“The Autobiography of a Purpose”) his participation in the Leopold and Loeb trial receives such scant attention.

On Monday, August 4, Dr. William Healy testified next for the defense.  Dr. Healy would reinforce much of Dr. White’s testimony about the abnormal childhoods of both defendants resulting in their current abnormal personalities, and of the resulting king-slave phantasy (see The Seattle Times, “Leopold is Unbalanced, Says Expert,” August 4, 1924, p. 1).  He would describe Leopold as having a “paranoiac personality” (cited in Sellers, 1926, p. 19) and that Babe “showed himself to be self-centered and egotistic beyond any normal limit” (cited in Sellers, 1926, p. 21).  Likewise, Babe wasted no time with emotional development, as he was solely focused on intellectual pursuits (see The Boston Daily Globe, “Boy's Slayers Mentally Diseased, Says Boston Alienist,” August 5, 1924, p. 1a).  Dr. Healy testified that Leopold was proud he had no conscience and that early in life he tried to stifle his emotional development and began to develop his “egotistic” persona (see The Pittsburg Post-Gazette, “Doing Murder Like Choosing Pie to Leopold, Alienist Says,” August 5, 1924, p. 1).  Dr. Healy’s testimony would also inform newspaper readers that Loeb had confided in him that they had contemplated murdering member of the Loeb family (see The Boston Daily Globe, “Loeb Willing to Kill a Relative,” August 5, 1924, p. 1).

Perhaps the most explosive testimony by an alienist during the trial occurred when Dr. Healy told the court of a bizarre compact that tied the defendants together from childhood and he believe had a strong influence over the criminal behavior of the defendants (see The Atlanta Constitution, “Sinister Compact of Boyhood Bound Slayers, is Claim,” August 5, 1924, p. 1).  When Dr. Healy was cross-examined by the prosecution, they wanted to know the details of this compact, but Dr. Healy said that it was only appropriate to tell the judge in chambers.  The compact, which had started years ago and was referred to as “For Robert’s Sake,” was part of the King-Slave fantasy.  When Loeb would direct Leopold to carry out a request “For Robert’s Sake,” which typically was a criminal venture, Leopold would be rewarded by the “King.”  The reward for Nathan Leopold was “the privilege of inserting his penis between Loeb’s legs at special dates” (Theodore, 2007, p. 142).

This testimony was deemed at the time too scandalous for public consumption, especially in the presence of women.  The testimony was given in whispers in the courtroom, and this material, as previously stated, was deemed “unprintable” by McKernan (1924, p. 82) and does not appear in her summaries of the medical reports.  Judge Caverly told the newspaper reporters that the testimony was not appropriate for publication (see The Florida Times-Union, “Alienist Strips From Boys any Vestige of Soul,” August 5, 1924, p. 1), and I have yet to find any evidence of the actual testimony in the newspaper coverage of the case.  As the retelling of the Leopold and Loeb case shifted over the years to highlight different aspects, the sexual relationship would receive much greater attention.  Today, this likely would have been the lead story about the case.

Yet, rumors circulated of “perversion,” which was the term used in 1924 for homosexual acts.  The only printed article that I am aware of that directly mentions the sexual relationship between Leopold and Loeb at the time of the trial was written by a practicing psychiatrist, Leonard Blumgart, in the September 10, 1924 edition of The Nation (“The New Psychology and the Franks Case”).  Dr. Blumgart believed that this evidence was the most important for the trial to come to a true understanding of why the crime was committed.  He would describe Leopold’s intellectual life as a constant and unsuccessful endeavor to guard himself against his “perverse” homosexual urges.  In addition, Dr. Blumgart believed that prior to psychoanalysis no scientific knowledge existed to shed light on people like Leopold and Loeb.  Freud’s beliefs about homosexuality, as well as the beliefs of most psychoanalysts in the 1920s, were very different than most contemporary viewpoints.

On August 6, the last of the psychoanalysts, Dr. Bernard Glueck took the stand.  Dr. Glueck would tell the court that Loeb considered his own younger brother as a possible victim, and showed a complete lack of normal feelings.  Dr. Glueck would say of Loeb, “My impression is very definite that Loeb is suffering from a disordered personality, that the nature of this disorder is primarily in a profound pathological discord between his intellectual and emotional life.  We might designate it as a split personality” (cited in Sellers, 1926, p. 23).  Perhaps more importantly, Dr. Glueck told the court that Loeb had told him that he had struck the blow with the chisel to the head of Robert Franks that killed the boy (see The New York Times, “Expert Says Loeb Admitted he was the Actual Slayer,” August 7, 1924, p. 1; The Washington Post, “Loeb Dealt Fatal Blow, Say Doctor; Leopold Paranoid,” August 7, 1924, p. 1).  Of Leopold, Dr. Glueck would say, “This boy has come to develop a definitely abnormal conception of himself, of his ego.  I am perfectly ready to place that conception of his ego within the category of what we know as paranoid” (cited in Sellers, 1926, pp. 23-4).  The defense alienist also commented upon the king-slave phantasy of Leopold, saying that Leopold had told him that “he was jealous of the food and drink that Loeb took, because he could not come as close to him as did the food and drink” (cited in Sellers, 1926, p. 24).

On August 7, friends, classmates, and a former girlfriend of Loeb took the stand to testify about the defendants’ abnormal views and to confirm what Leopold and Loeb had told the alienists (see The New York Times, “State Accuses Girl of Lying for Loeb; Four Chums Testify,” August 8, 1924, p. 1).  Also, the prosecution had attempted to say that the motive for the crime was simply money, but the defense witnesses testified that both defendants, from very wealthy families, had plenty of access to money.  On August 8, Dr. Hulbert was the last alienist to testify for the defense.  He was not a Freudian, although that would have not been clear to the average reader by the newspaper reporting as all of the experts were lumped together under the “alienist” term.  His testimony confirmed much of what had been said earlier about the king-slave compulsion of Leopold, and that the motivation for Richard Loeb was to commit the perfect crime (see The New York Times, “Strange Impulses of Franks Slayers Traced to Cradle,” August 9, 1924, p. 1).  Dr. Hulbert’s testimony, in contrast to the other defense alienists, focused more on the physical abnormalities and associated problems of the defendants’ endocrine systems.  For example, of Leopold he would say, “The pineal gland has involuted early, because of the X-ray showing that it has already calcified at the age of 19 … the thyroid gland has been definitely diseased … his large teeth and their poor condition… . He has a disorder of the adrenal glands, medullary insufficiency.  I have come to the conclusion that his sex glands are over functioning…” (cited in Sellers, 1926, pp. 31-2).

The prosecution was doing its best to refute the expert testimony (see The Seattle Times, “State Attacks Expert’s Theory,” August 11, 1924, p. 1).  The prosecution was able to obtain an admission from Dr. Hulbert that Leopold and Loeb may have been rehearsed by both their doctors and lawyers to help build a defense for their case, as well as an acknowledgement that the influence of the endocrine glands was not a scientifically settled question.  Readers across the country would also learn from Dr. Hulbert something contained in the Bowman and Hulbert report (1924a).  Specifically, that Leopold had favored selecting a girl because of a phantasy which involved French girls being attacked by German soldiers (see The Pensacola Journal, “Leopold Favored Girl Victim for Their Death Plan,” August 12, 1924, p. 1).

Clarence Darrow and the defense rested on August 12, and the alienist testimony, while not impressing everyone (particularly the editorial writers of major newspapers who were more often than not critical of the testimony), had served its purpose.  As Simon Baatz (2008, p. 312) nicely summarizes, “The defense had placed the murder within a psychoanalytic framework, using psychoanalytic concepts and theories… .”  Furthermore, “The new psychology transformed them from arrogant Nietzschean criminals (the early representation of Leopold) into vulnerable boys (Loeb and his teddy bear) and linked them to the ordinary boys of America” (Fass, 1993, p. 936).  The alienist testimony had not only introduced America to the New Psychology (often in riveting front page stories in newspapers across the country), but had done so in a context that was of great interest to virtually everyone.  Now, the New Psychology of Freud was of interest to the general public.  However, it is important to emphasize that Freud himself and the term psychoanalysis were not typically mentioned in the front page newspaper coverage.

On August 12, the prosecution alienists, none of which were Freudian psychoanalysts, began to take the stand starting with Dr. Hugh Patrick, who would testify that he found no evidence of mental disease in the defendants (see Chicago Daily Tribune, “‘Slayers Not Mentally Ill’,” August 13, 1924, p. 1; The Seattle Times, “Slayers of Boy Declared Sane by Two Experts,” August 13, 1924, p. 1).  When asked why, he responded with, “That unless we assume that every man who commits a deliberate, cold-blooded, planned murder, must, by that fact, be mentally diseased.  There was no evidence of any mental disease, in any of this communication or in any of the statements the boys made regarding it, or their earlier experiences; there was nothing in the examination; there were no mental obliquities or peculiarities shown, except their lack of appreciation of the enormity of the deed which they had committed” (cited in McKernan, 1924, pp. 171-172).  When Clarence Darrow had his chance to cross-examine the witness, he asked if the only reason that Dr. Patrick had met with the defendants was to gather evidence that would ensure the defendants would hang for their crime (see The Pensacola Journal, “Heated Clash in Trial of Two Slayers,” August 15, 1924, p. 1).

Dr. Archibald Church was the next prosecution alienist, who also found no evidence of mental disease (see The Pensacola Journal, “State Alienists Say Leopold and Loeb are Normal,” August 14, 1924, p. 1).  The prosecution attorney (John Sbarbaro) had an interesting line of questioning for Dr. Church, and for the subsequent prosecution alienists.  He asked the alienists to assume a hypothetical person that had all of the characteristics that the defense alienists had testified too, and give their opinion about whether mental disease existed.  For example, in describing the hypothetical person, with the characteristics of Loeb, assume that “in his inner mental life he is stated to have had phantasies in which he would lie and preface his lie by saying, ‘And now, Teddy,’ as if talking to a teddy-bear … that he phantasied himself as a cowboy or frontiersman, as a leader of a gang of criminals, committing a perfect crime… .  Assume, further, Doctor, that he has been in the habit of reading detective stories, and of acting out some of these stories” (cited in McKernan, 1924, p. 183).  In response, the prosecution alienists would answer, “No mental disease.”

One interesting exchange occurred between Clarence Darrow and Dr. Church upon cross-examination, which highlights the difference between the prosecution and defense alienists (cited in Sellers, 1926, p. 36).

Mr. Darrow: You know something about dreams?

Dr. Church: Yes. I regularly inquire into the character of dreams in nervous people.  According to Freud they are a very good index of character.  I do not follow Freud to that degree.

Mr. Darrow: Do you follow him to any extent?

Dr. Church: No.  The character of the dreams, whether pleasurable or unpleasurable, has for me a significance as a reflex of the physical condition; but the content of the dream to my mind is of very little significance.

The testimony of Dr. Patrick and Dr. Church directly contradicted the theories put forth by the defense alienists, as their examinations indicated no mental or physical abnormities that would explain the murder of Robert Franks.

Dr. Harold Singer, who was asked about paranoid personalities and split-personalities, also concluded that there was no evidence of mental disease in the defendants (see The Atlanta Constitution, “Vital Admissions Made as Darrow Grills Alienist,” August 17, 1924, p. 1; The Pittsburg Post-Gazette, “Boy Killers Defense Rips at Testimony of Alienist,” August 17, 1924, p. 1).  Dr. Rollin Woodyatt was the next witness for the prosecution, and he testified about the certainty of the endocrine gland testimony given by the defense witness.  He noted, “There are many definite facts known, but they are scattered, disordered, unrelated.  This field of endocrinology beyond the coastline of definite information is a field which has been exploited by romantic writers, charlatans, and others who are not to be classified as scientists” (cited in Sellers, 1926, p. 39).  Finally, Dr. William Krohn, who had previously worked at Clark University and knew G. Stanley Hall, also testified that there existed no evidence of mental disease by focusing on the defendants’ memories (i.e., details of the fake alibis), the planning of the crime, the logical judgment, and so forth.  Dr. Krohn was a particularly effective witness for the prosecution (see The Hartford Courant, “Declares Slayers Mentally Sound,” August 19, 1924, p. 2).  The prosecution would rest its case on August 19, and thus ended the battle of the alienists (see The Florida Times-Union, “With Evidence all in, Fight for Lives of Slayers Opens,” August 20, 1924, p. 1.)

An article written shortly after the trial in The Survey (October 15, 1924, pp. 74-5) by Dr. Thomas Salmon (“The Psychiatrist’s Day in Court”) provides insight into the media coverage that occurred while the defense and prosecution alienists testified.  Salmon noted that the newspaper coverage provided psychiatrists with clinical material that was not different from what was presented at a conference or as part of a clinical case history.  Dr. Salmon also noted that the trial provided a popular education of the New Psychology, and provided an impetus for discussions about the necessity of implementing anticipatory actions to counteract abnormal development and actions.  Also, the Chicago Daily Tribune (“British Amazed by Trial of Chicago Slayers; Insanity Defense Seldom Wins in England,” August 8, 1924, p. 2) would note that the legal community in Britain was following the trial with keen interest because of the alienist testimony.

Closing Arguments

Several other important events deserve mentioning to close the trial.  First, while closing statements were given by several defense and prosecution attorneys, the most important were those given by the lead defense attorney (Clarence Darrow) and the lead prosecuting attorney (Robert Crowe).  Darrow’s closing statement is widely regarded as a classic in the field of law, and started on Friday, August 22, and ended on Monday, August 25.  It is a mixture of philosophy, history, psychology, science, literature, and even poetry.  It was a passionate plea against the death penalty that was consistent with Darrow’s strict deterministic philosophy of life as he believed that the murder could have only been planned and carried out by a diseased mind. This closing statement was printed in whole or in part in newspapers across the country, and is available from a variety of sources (e.g., McKernan, 1924; Sellers, 1926).  I will not attempt to summarize Darrow’s closing statement, but reports indicate that the audience of approximately 350 people inside the courtroom was mesmerized and some within the courtroom openly wept (see The Florida Times-Union, “Near Riot at Beginning of Darrow’s Talk,” August 23, 1924, p. 1).[8]

The leading prosecuting attorney, Robert Crowe would begin his final argument for the people on August 19, 1924 (McKernan, 1924; Sellers, 1926).  His argument was a razor sharp and often sarcastic indictment of the evidence offered for mitigation of the crime.  He refers to the Freudian alienists throughout the statement as “The Three Wise Men from the East,” and Dr. White was a particular target.  As just one example (others exist), Crowe stated, “I did come up to your Honor’s court room five weeks ago, and after I was there a little while Old Doc Yak—is that his name?—the man from Washington—oh, Dr. White,—Dr. White took me by the hand and led me into the nursery of two poor, rich young boys, and he introduced me to a Teddy bear.  Then he told me some bedtime stories, and after I got through listening to them, he took me into the kindergarten and he presented to me little Dickie and Babe…” (cited in McKernan, 1924, p. 312).  The prosecuting attorney ridiculed the diseased mind theory of the defense (see The Pittsburg Post-Gazette, “Deserve Same Mercy Shown Coiled Snakes, Judge is Told,” August 27, 1924, p. 1).

Judge Caverly set aside September 10 as the day he would give his decision and sentence.  An interesting article about the trial appeared in the Sunday edition of The New York Times (September 7, 1924) just before the trial decision written by Dr. George Kirchwey.  Dr. Kirchwey taught courses in criminal psychology and was at the time the head of the Department of Criminology of the New York School for Social Work, and was previously Dean of the Columbia Law School and Warden of Sing Sing Prison.  The article starting on page 3, had a large headline of “LOEB CASE INTRODUCES NEW PSYCHOLOGY: Judge Caverly’s Rulings Mark Modern Era in Criminal Procedure.”  The article certainly was in favor of the use of alienist testimony to mitigate punishment in the courtroom.

Also, Dr. Kirchwey made a statement that is consistent with the interpretation that prior to the trial Freud and psychoanalysis were not widely known by the general public.  When writing about Judge Caverly, Dr. Kirchwey (p. 3) noted that few people, including the judge, knew much about the New Psychology offered as testimony at the trial.  As previously stated, I know of no evidence to suggest, or any historian that has concluded that the majority of the American public was familiar with Freudian terms and concepts prior to the massive media exposure that occurred as a direct result of the Leopold and Loeb case during the summer of 1924.

Sentencing and Aftermath

On September 10, 1924, Judge Caverly sentenced the defendants to life imprisonment for the murder charge, and 99 years each for the kidnapping of Bobby Franks (see The New York Times, “Franks Slayers Get Life Imprisonment, Youth Averts Noose,” September 11, 1924, p. 1).  Judge Caverly felt compelled to explain the rationale behind the sentence because of the enormous public interest in the case.  Most pertinent to this book, Judge Caverly stated that (cited in Sellers, 1926, pp. 319-320):

The court, however, feels impelled to dwell briefly on the mass of data produced as to the physical, mental and moral condition of the two defendants.  They have been shown in essential respects to be abnormal; had they been normal they would not have committed the crime.  It is beyond the province of this court, as it is beyond the capacity of human science in its present state of development, to predicate ultimate responsibility for human acts.

At the same time, the court is willing to recognize that the careful analysis made of the life history of the defendants and of their present mental, emotional and ethical condition has been of extreme interest and is a valuable contribution to criminology.  And yet the court feels strongly that similar analyses made of other persons accused of crime would probably reveal similar or different abnormalities.  The value of such tests seems to lie in their applicability to crime and criminals in general.  Since they concern the broad questions of human responsibility and legal punishment, and are in no wise peculiar to these individual defendants, they may be deserving of legislative but not of judicial consideration.  For this reason the court is satisfied that his judgment in the present case cannot be affected thereby.

Judge Caverly would ultimately decline to impose the death sentence because of the defendants ages, “In choosing imprisonment instead of death the court is moved chiefly by the consideration of the age of the defendants, boys of 18 and 19 years” (cited in Sellers, 1926, p. 321; see The Seattle Times, “Murders are Spared Because of their Youth,” September 10, 1924, p. 1).  For completeness, I should point out that while this was the first murder trial that put forth psychological testimony in an attempt to mitigate punishment, which is commonplace today, this trial did not set legal precedent.  Legal precedent is only established when an innovation to the law is attempted, fails, and an appellate court overrules the trial judge.  If Judge Caverly would have ruled that the alienist testimony was not admissible to mitigate punishment; legal precedent could have been established if the defense won an appeal to a higher court.

The trial spurred a variety of opinion pieces in both magazines and newspapers in the months and years following the case on a variety of issues.  Some used the trial to put forth their opinions about the death penalty (e.g., see The New Republic, “The Leopold-Loeb Decision,” September 24, 1924, pp. 88-89).  Opinion pieces were offered as to whether the New Psychology should be used regularly in criminal proceedings (for contrasting examples, see The New York Times, “Deterrent and Cure,” September 12, 1924, p. 20; George Kirchwey, The Survey, “Old Law and New Understanding: The Leopold-Loeb Case: a Fingerpost in Criminology,” October 1, 1924, pp. 7-8, 64).  More importantly, public interest in the case, and in the New Psychology, would continue well after Leopold and Loeb were sentenced for the murder of Robert Franks (Hidgon, 1999).

A New Context: An American Public Interested in Freudian Themes

Remember the “LOEB CASE INTRODUCES NEW PSYCHOLOGY” headline previously mentioned in the September 7, 1924, New York Times?  In the same Sunday issue of the Times there is an article titled “Freud’s Imagination Flooding Wide and Obscure Areas: In Two Small Volumes He Tracks Through a Maze of Biology and Psychology,” which includes the classic photograph of Freud holding the cigar (see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sigmund_Freud_LIFE.jpg).  The article, written by Mary Keyt Isham (pp. 14, 16), is a book review of the English translations of Beyond the Pleasure-Principle and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.  Of importance is how articles like this would differ when read by the average American before and after the Leopold and Loeb trial.  Before the trial, there is no evidence that the general public was widely interested in psychoanalysis because of a lack of personal relevance.  Thus, most readers would likely have either flipped the page, or if the story was read, quickly forgotten (see Chapter 8).  Now, during and after the Leopold and Loeb case, in which the public had been given a crash course in psychoanalysis in a fascinating context, there is a much different level of interest.  In this new context of an interested public, readers were more likely to pay attention to related media coverage and to ultimately remember Freud’s name.

What Would Freud Think?

A question worth examining is: What would Freud think of the use of psychoanalytic testimony in the Leopold and Loeb trial?  Prior to the trial beginning, the Chicago papers (Chicago Daily Tribune, Chicago Herald and Examiner), who were fiercely competitive, had both attempted to get Freud to come to Chicago to psychoanalyze the defendants.  The Hearst Press in particular (Chicago Herald and Examiner) offered to charter an ocean liner to bring Freud to the United States, and would pay him virtually any price he would name.  William Randolph Hearst was apparently willing to go as high as a half a million dollars (Fass, 1993), an astounding amount of money at the time.  Freud officially declined because of health reasons as he had been diagnosed with cancer at this point.  One also wonders about whether or not Freud also refused because of his views on the appropriateness of psychoanalytic testimony to explain criminal responsibility, and his views that popularization would ultimately distort the true intent of Freudian theory.

While there is limited evidence on this specific topic of what Freud thought of the use of psychoanalysis in the courtroom, overall Freud was skeptical about the use of psychoanalytic testimony to determine criminal responsibility (Diamond, 1994).  For example, in 1922, Freud became directly involved in a criminal case that involved the son of a previous servant of his.  Specifically, the son shot and wounded his father while the father was raping his half-sister.  Freud was asked to testify on the son’s behalf, but refused.  Instead, Freud hired and paid for one of Vienna’s leading forensic psychiatrists, Dr. Valentin Teirich, to help defend the son in court.  Freud wrote to Dr. Teirich giving his opinion that probing for deeper meaning (i.e., some sort of Oedipal interpretation) would confuse the facts of the case, and Dr. Teirich should limit his testimony to the issue of sanity.  The defendant was ultimately acquitted by reason of temporary insanity.

Later, Freud was asked to comment about the psychoanalytic testimony given in 1931 during the Halsmann murder trial.  Halsmann was a young man who killed his father, and the Innsbruck (Austria) medical faculty had provided expert psychoanalytic opinion about the case for the jury.  This expert opinion apparently had little or no impact as Halsmann was found guilty.  After the conviction, one of the Innsbruck faculty members started a campaign to have the case retried.  In order to increase the chances of a retrial, Freud was asked for his judgment about the expert psychoanalytic opinion given by the Innsbruck faculty at trial.  Freud viewed it in the following manner (cited in Diamond, 1994, p. 9):

Precisely because it is always present, the Oedipus complex is not suited to provide a decision on the question of guilt.  The situation envisaged in a well-known anecdote might easily be brought about.  There was a burglary.  A man who had a jemmy in his possession was found guilty of the crime.  After the verdict had been given and he had been asked if he had anything to say, he begged to be sentenced for adultery at the same time—since he was carrying the tools for that on him as well.

Although there is limited evidence to draw upon, what is available indicates that Freud was very cautious about the use of psychoanalytic testimony in the courtroom.  I can only speculate that he would not have looked fondly upon Dr. White and the others who testified as expert witnesses for the defense in this case.

Small World: An Interesting Side Note

As covered in Chapter 7, Freud’s nephew (Edward Bernays) had attempted to help generate some much needed money for his uncle by using his expertise in public relations.  Bernays decided that he would celebrate his uncle’s 75th birthday by holding a banquet at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and invited a notable group of individuals to attend on May 14, 1931.  The group would send Freud the following cable (Bernays, 1965, p. 276):

Men and women recruited from the ranks of psychoanalysis, medicine, and sociology are assembling in New York to honor themselves by honoring, on his 75th birthday, the intrepid explorer who discovered the submerged continents of the ego and gave a new orientation to science and life.

The two notable individuals who attended that are important for this book were Dr. William A. White, who gave the principle speech at the banquet.  Likewise, Clarence Darrow, lead defense attorney for Leopold and Loeb, was also in attendance to honor Sigmund Freud.

Chapter 11:  THE IMPORTANCE OF THE LEOPOLD AND LOEB TRIAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY

When you initially read my interpretation in the introduction of the importance of the Leopold and Loeb trial in making the American public interested in psychoanalysis (and Freud subsequently becoming a household name), it was without the supporting evidence that I have provided in this book.  If I have done my job adequately and relied upon the data fragments of history, my historical interpretation below should be supported by the available evidence.  As I stated in the introduction, I am providing a reminder that historical interpretations on such issues as this should not be confused with historical facts (see Chapter 2), and interpretations can be wrong (see Chapter 3).  Thus, I encourage an active evaluate my interpretations based upon the strength of the evidence I presented in this book.

Freud’s Fame: A Historical Interpretation

Freud becoming famous with the American public was not inevitable but strongly influenced by several important events.  Prior to 1909, Freud was virtually unheard of in America, and had limited name recognition among psychologists and the medical community.  As a result of Freud’s first and only trip to the United States in 1909, in which he was invited to speak at Clark University’s 20th Anniversary celebration (see Chapter 6), he and psychoanalysis gained name recognition with certain specialized segments of American society (e.g., academic psychologists, the medical community).  Freud’s recognition ultimately spread to the intellectual community starting somewhere around 1915, when American intellectuals became very interested in Freudian theory because it became personally relevant to them at the time (see Chapter 7).  People are more likely to pay attention, seek out additional information, and remember specifics when the subject material either is personally relevant or presented in a context that has personal relevance (see Chapter 8).

In America, into the early 1920s, Freud had achieved instant name recognition primarily among intellectuals, the medical community, academics, and some interested readers of popular magazines (see Chapter 7).  Thus, he was famous among specific groups.  However, Freud was not known among the majority of the general public because of a variety of factors (see Chapters 7 & 8).  To name a few, (a) Freud was not yet personally relevant to the typical man or woman living in America in the early 20th century, (b) psychoanalysis did not stand out to the general public because it was one of many “mind cures” on a crowded landscape, and (c) infrequent media exposure.  As pointed out in Chapter 7, the years leading up to the summer of 1924 saw a stagnation of interest in psychoanalysis (i.e., interest was not widening to more groups and individuals), and Freud’s attempt at a public relations campaign to increase his popularity failed.

How then, did Freud make the leap forward to instant name recognition with the majority of the American public, which occurred sometime around his first appearance on the cover of Time magazine (October 27, 1924)?  Freudian psychoanalysts testified for the defense in one of the most famous murder cases of the 20th century: the Leopold and Loeb trial.  The media attention surrounding the case was front page news on a daily bases across the United States (see Chapters 9 & 10).  The Crime of the Century introduced the nation to Freudian terms (e.g., ego, repression), and started a national discussion of Freudian theory (e.g., the importance of early childhood experiences, unconscious motivations).  Everyone had an opinion about the trial and the expert opinion of the alienists.  The general public became engrossed in psychoanalysis during the summer of 1924 because it was presented in a context in which everyone was interested (i.e., why did the murder of the Franks boy happen?).  Also of importance, this historical event immediately precedes the time frame that has been previously identified by historians as when Freud first became known by the general public.

Although Freud’s name was not typically part of the media coverage of the trial, it would not take long for Freud to become a household name in this new context of a general public that was interested in learning more about psychoanalysis, or the “New Psychology.”  Just as the intellectual community in America quickly came to know Freud once psychoanalysis became personally relevant to them (see Chapter 7), the same pattern now exists for the general public because the Leopold and Loeb case made psychoanalysis relevant.  It also helped that there existed those specific subgroups (e.g., intellectuals, readers of popular magazines) that were already familiar with Freud and psychoanalysis prior to the trial, as they could help spread the word to the now interested general public.

To summarize, without the unfortunate murder of an innocent victim, the general public would not have been exposed to Freudian theory on such a large scale in such a fascinating context.  Freud becoming a household name was not inevitable, but strongly influenced by the tragic events that unfolded during the summer of 1924.  Freud at one point in time not being instantly recognizable may be hard for us to fathom today because he is currently an iconic figure in American culture.  However, there is no guarantee that Freud would have ever crossed over from being famous among specialized groups (e.g., academics, intellectuals) to achieving truly widespread fame.  The Stock Market Crash in October, 1929, and the Great Depression were just around the corner, which drastically reduced media coverage on such topics like Freud and psychoanalysis (Hart, 1933).

Although just speculation, I believe that without an event like the Leopold and Loeb trial that provided widespread media coverage and presented psychoanalysis in an interesting context, Freud’s name recognition today would have largely been confined to specific subgroups (just like other giants within the history of psychology such as Wilhelm Wundt and William James).  What is not speculation is that during the summer of 1924, America became a psychoanalytic nation and shortly afterwards Freud became famous. This historical evidence cannot be ignored when attempting to make an interpretation related to answering the question of how Freud first obtained widespread popularity with the American public.

Additional Issues

The purpose of the remaining portion of this chapter is threefold.  First, I will discuss why I believe that the history of psychology has largely overlooked the importance of the Leopold and Loeb trial in popularizing Freud with the American public.  Second, I will discuss how the information presented in this book helps to fill in some of the missing information about Freud’s popularity with the general public.  Third, I will comment on the few previous individuals who have written about the Leopold and Loeb trial as it pertains to Freud’s popularity to contrast with my interpretation.

Why has the Leopold and Loeb Trial Been Overlooked by the History of Psychology?

Open any history of psychology textbook, and if the topic of Freud’s popularization in America is included, you will not find any mention of the Leopold and Loeb case.  It’s as though the Crime of the Century had never occurred.  An interesting question to speculate on is why has the trial been largely overlooked?  As I have documented in earlier chapters, it was not beyond Freud himself and some of Freud’s ardent supporters to rewrite history in a way that put Freud in a better light (e.g., minimizing Freud’s use of cocaine).  Certainly Freud obtaining iconic status largely because of the power of his ideas is a much more rose-colored interpretation than being helped by the massive publicity generated because of the public’s fascination surrounding the murder of a young boy.  Could this be another example of an attempt to distort history?

Although this may surprise the reader, I believe the answer to that question is no.  There currently exist both “pro-Freudian” historians as well as “anti-Freudian” historians.  Those who would be classified as anti-Freudians have been no more likely to point to the important role of the Leopold and Loeb trial in helping to popularize Freud than pro-Freudians.  I believe there are several less conspiratorial explanations that have contributed to the Leopold and Loeb case not receiving the proper attention that it deserves in helping to explain Freud’s popularity with the general public.

While the Leopold and Loeb case was known by virtually everyone in the 1920s, over time the case has moved from widespread recognition to being known today by mostly specialized groups, which typically occurs as time marches on.  Even among historians, who are often times very specialized in their research; there is no guarantee that they will have familiarity with the case.  For example, historian Simon Baatz in his recent book (2008) about the case notes that he was unaware of the Leopold and Loeb trial until just a few years ago when he had a few hours to kill in London.  He decided to catch a movie to pass some time, which just by chance happened to be Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, which is a fictional account of the case.  Today, the importance of the Leopold and Loeb trial has been largely compartmentalized for its importance in the history of criminology (people who study film also are likely to be aware of the case because of Rope).  Those who have specialization in criminology or related issues, which is the group most likely to be aware of the trial today, would have no reason to recognize or focus on the importance of the trial as it relates to the history of psychology and Freud’s popularization with the general public.

Also, many individuals who focus on Freud or the history of psychology in general are unaware of the trial itself, or the specific events of the case.  I personally was unaware of the Leopold and Loeb case until I stumbled into it by accident.  When working on a manuscript about the Scopes Monkey Trial (see Riniolo & Torrez, 2000), I had come across testimony in the trial transcripts referring to the Leopold and Loeb case, as Clarence Darrow was the lead defense attorney for John Scopes.  After digging up information, one thing led to another, and I quickly became engrossed in the case.  Yet, this was simply by accident.  Another potential reason why the Leopold and Loeb case has not received proper attention in regards to the popularization of psychoanalysis with the American public may be because those who specialize in the history of psychology would largely be unaware of the massive amount of media exposure that the Leopold and Loeb trial generated and ultimately exposed the American public to Freudian themes and terms during the summer of 1924.  Once again, I do not believe that a cover-up is the appropriate explanation.  However, this does not exclude the possibility that an individual historian ignored the trial because it provides evidence inconsistent with a preconceived view of how Freud became an iconic figure (see discussion of biases in Chapter 3).

Another potential contributing factor was that the newspaper coverage during the trial may have helped to inadvertently cover-up the historical evidence.  As previously discussed, the Freudian psychoanalysts who testified for the defense during the case were typically referred to as alienists on the front pages, as were all of the individuals who testified about the mental status of the defendants.  The historian with no expertise in criminology searching for newspaper coverage relevant to Freud’s popularization may have overlooked the trial because of the unfamiliar term that did not specifically say Freudian psychoanalyst (or something similar).

Finally, there may have been an active effort immediately after the case ended by psychoanalysts attempting to capitalize on the public’s new interest in Freudian themes to break the initial connection with the trial.  This is speculation, not to be confused with a historical fact.  Psychoanalysis at the time was involved in a battle for public attention with experimental psychology (see Chapter 1).  Evidence shows that immediately after the trial, magazine articles about psychoanalysis reached their peak (see Chapter 7), which indicates that those attempting to popularize psychoanalysis were taking advantage of public interest to explain their theories.  This is at the time in which experimental psychologists were horrified that the public was confusing psychology with psychoanalysis (Hornstein, 1992).

Yet, most of the general public during the trial associated the alienists for the defense, who were primarily psychoanalysts, as helping to save two cold-blooded killers from proper punishment (Hale, 1995).  The public believed that the death penalty was the appropriate punishment.  The best way to capitalize on this situation would be to publicize psychoanalysis to take advantage of the public’s newfound interest, while simultaneously not reminding the public where they first became interested in Freudian themes and concepts.  The media coverage about psychoanalysis and Freud in the years that followed the trial did not mention psychoanalysis together with Leopold and Loeb, which ultimately would make it difficult for the historian as the years went by.

Freud’s first appearance on the cover of Time magazine (October 27, 1924) and accompanying article provides a specific example of how psychoanalysis was immediately separated from the Leopold and Loeb trial.  I chose this specific article because many have pointed to this cover as evidence of Freud’s widespread popularity, but appear unaware of the fact that the murder trial of Robert Franks had just concluded several weeks earlier.  Specifically, the article about Freud called “Freud and Freudism” occurs on page 20 of the magazine, and alerts the reader to two recent translations of Freud’s works and descriptions of books now available in the United States (these new translations occurred with the help of his nephew, Edward Bernays; see Chapter 7).  Likewise, Freud’s career, his character, some of his pupils, the doctrine of psychoanalysis, and some of Freud’s other writings are all discussed.  What is left out is any mention of psychoanalysis as it related to the Leopold and Loeb case, which had just concluded the previous month.  Dr. White, the most famous psychoanalyst in the United States at the time who had been previously discussed in magazine articles about Freud and psychoanalysis, was not mentioned.

This pattern of separating psychoanalysis from the murder trial would continue, and was a useful strategy for capitalizing on the public’s newfound interest in Freudian issues.  Please note that I am not suggesting that those who were attempting to capitalize on the public’s interest in psychoanalysis were intentionally trying to distort history at the time.  Not mentioning psychoanalysis and the Leopold and Loeb case together was simply the smart thing to do from a public relations standpoint.  However, it likely had the effect of making the dinosaur bones (see Chapter 2) more difficult to find as the years passed on the topic of Freud’s popularization.  Imagine if Freud’s first appearance on the cover of Time magazine had been a picture of Freud in the middle, and Leopold on one couch and Loeb on the other?  Perhaps if this had occurred, the trial would not have lost its connection with the popularization of Freud and psychoanalysis.  For readers who are interested in viewing Freud’s initial appearance on the cover of Time magazine and the accompanying story, you can find it at Time’s website (http://www.time.com/time/coversearch/) which allows you to search by “Articles” or “Covers.”  Perhaps more enjoyable is to go and search the shelves at a library that has an archived copy of the magazine because you can also see the other articles of the time.

How the Leopold and Loeb Case Fills in Some Blanks

Most who have written about Freud’s popularization in scholarly journal articles and book chapters, books, and textbooks do not mention the Leopold and Loeb case.  Before I discuss the few who had written about the case below, let me provide a few examples of how the trial is typically left out of the discussion of Freud’s popularization, and how the Leopold and Loeb case helps in contributing to our understanding about how Freud gained such widespread popularity with the general public.  The intent here is not to single out specific authors for criticism or ridicule, but to provide concrete examples.  Let’s start with two articles that were published in the American Psychological Association’s flagship journal, American Psychologist.  I also chose these articles to highlight because the articles must go through peer-review prior to being published, and the process of having a manuscript independently reviewed in a prestigious journal prior to publication did not catch the omission.  These examples should help to illustrate just how widespread lack of knowledge is among psychologists about the trial.

Specifically, Raymond Fancher’s (2000) Snapshots of Freud in America, 1899-1999, is an excellent historical account of Freud with the one following exception.  He attributes Freud becoming a household name to the English translations of his major works (e.g., Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and so forth).  As the author describes, “The accessibility of these works helped make Freud’s name a veritable household word in the United States, and in October of 1924, he made his first appearance on the cover of Time magazine” (p. 1026).  This interpretation seems extremely unlikely.  As Hale (1971, p. 430) correctly notes, “books by Freud and by the American analysts were read by very few people.”  Exactly how books that sold such few copies leading up to October 1924 resulted in Freud gaining widespread name recognition is not explained by the author, yet is accepted without critical evaluation by most readers.  The simpler explanation for Freud ultimately becoming a household name and for his appearance on the cover of Time magazine is the public interest in psychoanalytic theory generated as a result of the Leopold and Loeb case.

Gail Hornstein’s (1992) article published in American Psychologist, which I reviewed in Chapter 1, provides the reader with a fascinating account of the struggle between psychology and psychoanalysis.  While the author notes that the popular reception of psychoanalysis by the American public is beyond the scope of the article, I believe that the Leopold and Loeb case helps fill in a very important gap.  Specifically, experimental psychologists were aghast that the public was confusing psychology with psychoanalysis during the mid-to-late 1920s.  One potential reason why this confusion occurred is that psychoanalysis was during the trial called the “New Psychology” by the newspapers.  For many people, this “New Psychology” of psychoanalysis was the first psychology that they either heard of or were interested in because of the Leopold and Loeb case.  This confusion that psychologists are all Freudian psychoanalysts continues today.

Finally, Paul Dennis (2002) published an interesting article in the Journal of History of the Behavioral Sciences, in which he calculated the frequency of editorials in the New York Times from 1904 to 1947 in four year intervals on four topics related to psychology (Hugo Münsterberg, Mental Tests, Child Rearing, Freud).  He also calculated the percentage of negative editorial commentary by topic.  Prior to the murder trial the editorial commentary about Freud and psychoanalysis was primarily positive, but after the trial it was largely negative.  While there may exist several explanations as to why this occurred, the Leopold and Loeb trial likely played a role, as the Times was largely critical of the Freudian interpretations during the trial (e.g., see “Ex Post Facto,” August 24, 1924, p. 12 mentioned in Chapter 10).

Historical Interpretations by Others

There are just a handful of individuals who have written about the Leopold and Loeb case as it relates to Freud’s popularization.  First, Nathan Hale (1995, pp. 91-93) accurately describes the case, and notes that the testimony by the Freudians during the case like Dr. White would inspire the next generation of forensic psychoanalysts (see Dr. Diamond as an example below).  My major difference of opinion with Dr. Hale’s interpretation is that he categorizes Crime of the Century, which was front page news across the country for weeks and generated public debate about psychoanalytic testimony, as just one of a “few conspicuous events” that “marked the course of popularization” (p. 77).  Dr. Hale lumps the Leopold and Loeb case in with the 1930 International Mental Hygiene Congress in Washington, D.C., and the 1931 banquet honoring Freud’s birthday held in New York City and was attended by many intellectuals (the party thrown by his nephew Edward Bernays mentioned at the end of Chapter 10).  While the other two events were of interest to the professional and intellectual communities, they simply do not compare to the publicity generated by the Leopold and Loeb case as it relates to the general public.  Thus, my major disagreement is that I believe that Dr. Hale’s interpretation underestimates the importance of the trial in popularizing Freud with the general public.  It was not one of a few conspicuous events, but the pivotal event for becoming famous with the general public.

One subsequent forensic psychoanalyst who was inspired by the trial was Bernard L. Diamond, who was a professor of Law at Berkeley.  As Dr. Diamond recalled (1994, p. 5), “I was a school boy in Fresno, California, in 1924, and I remember very clearly the summer this trial took place.  It was the first time I had ever heard of Sigmund Freud, and I was enormously fascinated with the daily reports of the trial.”   Diamond, who was 12 at the time of the trial, noted that his image of “the psychoanalyst was not of Freud, but of William Alanson White, the psychoanalyst in the courtroom” (p. 6).  According to Diamond (1994, p. 5), “the average man in the street had never heard of Freud and never heard the word psychoanalysis until it screamed from the newspaper headlines.”  The first part of that statement is correct, that the average person had not heard of Freud prior to the trial.  However, the second portion is correct only metaphorically.  Freud’s name and the specific term psychoanalysis were used sporadically in the newspapers and were not on the front pages during the trial.  Thus, the newspaper headlines did not directly expose most individuals to Freud himself and the term psychoanalysis.  The primary importance of the Leopold and Loeb trial was in generating personal interest in psychoanalytic terms and concepts, which would ultimately lead to name recognition for the father of psychoanalysis.  In contrast to Hale above, I believe that Diamond overstates the case, but is ultimately correct about the importance of the trial.

I found Catherine Covert’s (1975) dissertation at the end stages of my gathering resource materials for this book.  In fact, I was unfortunately unaware of her work until I was reviewing the references in Caplan’s (1998a) article about the importance of the Emmanuel Movement in setting the stage for psychoanalysis in America.  Perhaps her work has been largely unnoticed because it was published as a dissertation in American History, not the History of Psychology.  As Covert (1975, p. 12) notes, many readers of newspapers during the Leopold and Loeb case “for the first time were exposed to basic Freudian theory—including something of the influence of childish experience, thought and feeling on adult behavior, something of the way sexual deviance and criminal behavior may originate, and something of the distinction between insanity and lesser forms of mental disturbance.”  However, her focus was examining how Freudian ideas changed from his original intent when disseminated through the American newspapers to the American public.  She did not directly address the issue of exactly how did Freud become a household name in America.  Yet, as I previously mentioned in Chapter 9, it is a shame that she did not convert her dissertation into a book or a journal article because her work could have alerted others to the importance of the Leopold and Loeb trial for Freud’s popularization with the general public.  Instead, her work has been largely ignored.

Conclusions

Ultimately, this book was written with several aims in mind.  First, it was written for the individual with a limited background in history.  If I have been successful as an author, the reader should now possess a better understanding of the process of recreating the past, and the pitfalls that can interfere with an accurate representation of history.  Likewise, the reader should now be able to differentiate historical facts from historical interpretations.  For example, it is simply beyond dispute that Sigmund Freud was on the cover of Time magazine in October, 1924 (i.e., a historical fact).  In contrast, exactly why Freud was chosen for the cover is currently open to interpretation.  Was the timing a direct result of the Leopold and Loeb trial, or was the cover planned well before the murder of Bobby Franks?  While there is always more to learn about the process of history, I hope I have provided the reader with a solid foundation to build upon.

Likewise, the reader should now have an appreciation of (a) the need to critically evaluate historical claims, and (b) the value of historical research.  In this book, I provided a number of examples in which the data fragments of history did not match what was ultimately reported in later historical accounts.  It is important to note that applying critical thinking to historical interpretations is important not only for the examination of Freud and psychoanalysis, but for all people and events of the past.  Gregory Burton (2001, p. 228) makes an insightful observation, “One recurring and discouraging theme in the history of science is the widespread acceptance of false facts.  Some historical canards are promulgated not only by popular outlets but also are incorporated into sources that are generally expected, and assumed, to be more trustworthy.”  Remember the scandalous Dr. Watson from Chapter 1 and his famous “little Albert” experiment?  Unfortunately, there often exists a discrepancy between what Watson and Rayner (1920) reported and how subsequent authors have presented the case (see Burton, 2001; Gilovich, 1993, for further discussion).  It is historical research that can help to identify these discrepancies, and provide us with a better understanding of what happened in the past.

I also hope that I achieved a minor but nonetheless important goal of counteracting the history is “boring” stereotype.  While I will not recount the number of topic areas covered in this book that I consider fascinating and I hope you do as well, the history of psychology is full of more intriguing people and events that are beyond the scope of this book.  I hope that the interested reader will continue to learn more about history, especially the history of psychology.  In fact, I have saved one last issue that I believe should be of interest, but wanted to save this topic area until the reader had a better understanding of the process of history and the need to critically evaluate historical claims.  Specifically, did Sigmund Freud, the Father of Psychoanalysis, have a sexual affair with his wife’s younger sister, Minna Bernays?

Rumors of a potential affair between Freud and his sister-in-law have long been part of the history of psychoanalysis, but have once again surfaced relatively recently as new historical document has been uncovered (another dinosaur bone).  Specifically, Freud had checked into a Swiss hotel with Minna and registered as “Freud and wife.”   Here, I will not provide my opinion about what the evidence indicates as I believe it is a useful exercise for the reader to view the relevant existing scholarship and opinions on the topic area, critically evaluate the evidence and historical interpretations, and ultimately derive your own opinion of what you believe is most likely to have occurred as well as setting your own standard of evidence (do you need beyond a reasonable doubt, a preponderance of the evidence, and so forth).  I have provided a list a journal articles in Appendix B on this specific topic area in rough chronological order (some were published in the same time period in different journals).  Once again, for those that believe that history is just a bunch of boring facts and dates, nothing could be further from the truth!

Also, as some readers may like a suggestion for a fascinating topic area outside of psychology’s history, I would recommend learning more about England’s most famous king, Henry VIII.  To say that he lead an interesting life would be an understatement.  Specifically, comparing Alison Weir’s (1991) wonderful book, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, with Showtime’s television series, The Tudors, will make a captivating project for just about anyone.

Of course, another primary aim of this book was to alert the reader to the important role that the Leopold and Loeb trial played in making the general public in America first interested in psychoanalysis, which was a necessary precursor for Freud becoming a household name.  I have provided evidence that is consistent with that interpretation.  Freud’s widespread fame was not inevitable, but helped by several important historical events (e.g., the Emmanuel Movement, Freud’s only American trip, interest by American intellectuals), the most important of which was the massive publicity as a result of the Crime of the Century.

Without the events that occurred during the summer of 1924, it is difficult to fathom how Freud would have obtained the iconic status that he currently enjoys with the general public.  Yet, even if we assume Freud would have eventually become well-known to the general public without the murder of Robert Franks, the Leopold and Loeb case cannot be ignored or minimized when recounting how Freud first obtained widespread popularity in America because the events and media coverage did happen.  History is ultimately what happened.  For better or worse, the Leopold and Loeb trial made America a Psychoanalytic nation.   Once the general public first became exposed to Freudian theory in a context that was personally relevant; Freud’s ideas never left and continue to interest the American public today.  Even those of us who believe Freud’s ideas are ultimately wrong must admit they are inherently fascinating.

Finally, let me thank the reader who has made your way through this book from start to finish.  I hope the next time you see a Freudian reference while watching your favorite television show, or reading a bestselling novel, you now will think about the question of exactly how Dr. Freud first become a household name in America.  If my interpretation is correct, the reason why Freud and Freudian theory need no explanation with the general public today is the result of Leopold and Loeb brutally murdering an innocent boy.

Appendix A

Important Dates for the Psychological Testimony

May 31, 1924: State’s Attorney Robert Crowe calls Chicago’s leading alienists to work for the prosecution.

June 1-2: Prosecution alienists (Drs. Patrick, Church, Singer, Krohn) observed and evaluated Leopold and Loeb before the defendants were locked in the county jail and allowed to meet with the defense attorneys.

June 13-30: Examination of the defendants by Drs. Hulbert and Bowman, which resulted in a medical report entered into evidence during the trial.

July 1-27:  Examination of the defendants by Drs. White, Healy, Glueck, & Hamill that resulted in a joint medical report.  Although this report was not entered as evidence during the trial, it provided the basis for the first three author’s trial testimony (Hamill did not testify).

July 27:  Hulbert and Bowman medical report leaked to the press.

July 30-August 1: Hearing to determine if alienist testimony will be allowed in mitigation of the crime.

August 1-2:  Dr. William A. White testifies (alienist for the defense).

August 4-5:  Dr. William Healy testifies (alienist for the defense).

August 5-6:  Dr. Bernard Glueck testifies (alienist for the defense).

August 7:  Four college associates and a former girlfriend of Loeb testify to corroborate the testimony of the defense alienists.

August 8-9, 11: Dr. Harold S. Hulbert testifies (alienist for the defense).

August 12-13:  Dr. Hugh Patrick testifies (alienist for the prosecution).

August 13-14:  Dr. Archibald Church testifies (alienist for the prosecution).

August 15:  Dr. Rollin T. Woodyatt testifies (alienist for the prosecution).

August 15-16, 18: Dr. Harold D. Singer testifies (alienist for the prosecution).

August 18-19:  Dr. William O. Krohn testifies (alienist for the prosecution).

August 22-23, 25:  Lead defense attorney Clarence Darrow gives his closing argument.

August 26-28:  Lead prosecution attorney Robert E. Crowe gives his closing argument.

September 10:  Judge John R. Caverly gives his decision and rationale for the sentencing of the defendants.

Appendix B

Did Freud Have an Affair with His Sister-in-Law? Relevant Articles

1.  Maciejewski, F. (2006). Freud, His Wife, and His “Wife” (Jeremy Gaines, Trans., with P. J. Swales & J. Swales). American Imago, 63, 497-506.

2.  Hirschmüller, A. (2007). Evidence for a sexual relationship between Sigmund Freud and Minna Bernays? American Imago, 64, 125–129.

3. Lothane, Z. (2007). The Sigmund Freud/Minna Bernays romance: Fact or fiction? American Imago, 64, 129–133.

4. Silverstein, B. (2007). What happens in Maloja stays in Maloja: Inference and evidence in the “Minna wars.” American Imago, 64, 283-289.

5. Lothane, Z. (2007). Sigmund Freud and Minna Bernays: Primal curiosity, primal scenes, primal fantasies—and prevarication. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 24, 487-495.

6. Maciejewski, F. (2008). Minna Bernays as “Mrs. Freud”: What sort of relationship did Sigmund Freud have with his sister-in-law? American Imago, 65, 5-21.

7. Burston, D. (2008). A very Freudian affair: Erich Fromm, Peter Swales, and the future of psychoanalytic historiography. Psychoanalysis and History, 10, 115-130.

*Note: This list is not exhaustive, but should provide a good foundation for the controversy.

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Acknowledgements

Typically, once a project is started I continue to work on it until it has been completed.  This book is different in that I have started and stopped work on this topic area several times over the past decade.  Throughout this time period, so many individuals—too many to name each individually—contributed to this work in a variety of ways.  My sincere thanks to the many unnamed individuals who have graciously given me their time and input over the years.  Without your help, this book would not have been possible.

Special thanks are necessary to all of the library staff that have been remarkable in obtaining obscure documents and patiently answering what must have appeared to be silly questions by the author.  In particular, the library staff at Adams State College (Alamosa, CO) where this project began, Medaille College (Buffalo, NY) my current employer (especially Andrew Yeager), and those in the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library system have my deepest gratitude.   I also owe a special thanks to three former students (Myriah Koledin, Gregory Drakulic, & Robin Payne) who worked diligently obtaining vital historical documents at the very beginning of this project.

Also, thanks to Jerry Erion, Howard Reid, Anne Pfohl, and Natalie Fingerhut.  All were kind enough to provide constructive feedback which greatly benefitted the final version of this book.  Not to be forgotten, many thanks to both my sister and my mom for pitching in and obtaining important documents.  Neither complained when I asked for “small” favors that saved me a great deal of time and effort.  Likewise, thanks to Medaille College for granting me with a sabbatical leave which allowed me to focus on this book without any of the usual academic distractions.

Of course, thanks to both my wife Angela, and kids, Thomas and Kate, who provide the perfect environment for me when attempting to transform vague ideas into book form.  My closest friends have always provided a forum for me to bounce my ideas off of.  It should go without saying that the usual disclaimers apply to all of the above-mentioned individuals and organizations as none should be held responsible for the views that are ultimately the responsibility of the author.  Last but certainly not least, I sincerely want to thank the reader for taking the time to select and I hope ultimately read this book.  Without readers, this whole endeavor would have little purpose.

Footnotes

[1] For readers who would like a more complete description of Dr. Benjamin’s discovery, see his A History of Psychology in Letters (2006).  Likewise, for more details about the PRT, see Benjamin (1977) and Hardcastle (2000).

[2] For further reading, see Chapter 6, “The Cocaine Episode (1884-1887)” of Jones’ (1953) The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (Volume 1) available at the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/details/lifeandworkofsig007124mbp).

[3] Putnam’s family history is interesting, as an ancestor had made the trip from England to settle in the New World, and ultimately ended up in Salem, Massachusetts, home of the famous witchcraft trials in 1692.  As Rosenzweig (1992, p. 204) has written, “in those trials a child named Ann Putnam was an important witness who later retracted her accusations.  The writer has established that Dr. Putnam was a second cousin, several degrees removed, of Ann Putnam and her family.”

[4] Psychoanalysis would become “Americanized” by professionals and intellectuals.  Interestingly, when the general public subsequently misinterprets and modifies Freudian theory, it is referred to by some historians as “vulgarization,” which certainly is not as nice a term as “Americanized” (Rieber, 1998).

[5] Eastman incorrectly notes that Hall first introduced Freud’s ideas to America at Clark University in 1910, when the year was 1909.  This minor error was likely due to the fact that Freud’s lectures were published in 1910.

[6] See Benjamin and Dixon (1996) for further details and an interesting letter from a young lady who was seeking help from Dr. Freud to interpret her dream.  Freud was generous enough to respond to her letter.  This article makes a wonderful classroom exercise for professors as students can attempt to provide a Freudian interpretation before reading Freud’s personal response.

[7] I personally have mixed feelings about psychological testimony being used to mitigate punishment.  There appear to be legitimate instances in which individuals have diminished capacity.  Yet, too often this type of testimony appears to be a clever strategy to reduce the sentence of individuals who likely had control over their actions.  Unfortunately, there does not exist any definitive testing.  Instead, we are left with conflicting expert opinion.

[8] As an interesting side note, throughout the closing statement, Darrow repeatedly mentions the ages of the defendants correctly as 18 and 19 at the time of the murder.  Yet in his autobiography (Darrow, 1932, p.226, p.241), he takes a year off each to make Loeb 17 and Leopold 18.  I do not believe this was an accident, but an attempt to put the case in a better light (17-18 is closer to childhood than 18-19).