The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud and the Search for Hidden Universes. Richard Panek
however, believed that he’d seen otherwise. When he attempted to apply this kind of therapy in his own medical practice, he found that leading the patient back to some step between the current state of hysteria and the original inciting incident didn’t have a cathartic result. Only by revisiting the scene of the crime, so to speak, could a victim permanently break free of its memory, its insidious influence. Only by tracing it to its source would doctor and patient see the hysterical symptom disappear—but only by tracing it all the way to its source. As Freud told a meeting of the Vienna Medical Club in January 1893, “The moment at which the physician finds out the occasion when the symptom first appeared and the reason for its appearance is also the moment at which the symptom vanishes.”
Anna O., for instance, complained of a paralysis on her right side, persistent hallucinations of snakes in her hair, and a sudden inability to speak her native German. These symptoms Breuer eventually traced back to an evening when she was nursing her sick father and imagined a snake approaching his sleeping figure. She tried to move to save him, but her right arm had gone to sleep over the back of a chair; and so she resorted to prayer, but in her fear all she could recall were some children’s verses in English. Or, from Freud’s own case files, Frau Cäcilie M., who suffered from a pain between her eyes until she remembered the time her grandmother had fixed her with a “piercing” look. “Cessante causa cessat effectus,” as Freud said in that same lecture before the Vienna Medical Club: “When the cause ceases, the effect ceases.”
Freud, however, wasn’t content with a vision of the mind that began with a cause and then, no matter what, ended with a certain effect. How to account for the inability of a process so powerful—so active, after all—to reveal itself?
With his background in a physiology that was ultimately nothing more than matter and motion, Freud knew exactly how to account for it: by postulating the existence within the unconscious of an opposing force at least equally powerful—a “defense” or, as Freud soon came to call it, a “repression,” a change in terminology that itself reflected a change in Freud’s thinking. This opposing force wasn’t merely defending the mind against itself; it was repressing the unpleasant memory or association. It wasn’t reactive. It, too, was active, even while seemingly absent.
On October 26, 1896, Freud’s father died. The heroic figure of Sigmund’s childhood imagination may have disappeared forever during that long-ago walk when the father confided in the son how he’d submitted to the indignities of an anti-Semite, and now the corporeal figure was gone, too. Yet they lingered—both the heroic figure and the tragic shade. Like a traumatic event that remains present in the symptoms of a hysterical patient, the older man remained alive in the grown son. That night, in fact, Freud had a dream about him. On his way to the funeral, Freud stops at a barbershop. There he sees a sign: “You are requested to close the eyes.” Whose eyes? he had to wonder. The dead father’s? The son’s? And “close” them as in lay to rest? Or “close” them as in “wink at” or “overlook”?
The dead-but-not-gone father wasn’t the only thing that lingered. The dream did, too, taunting Freud with its myriad possible interpretations, haunting him like the earlier memory of the about-to-be-unheroic man on the street, inhabiting him, continuing to exert its influence over him, as an adult, decades after the event. In years to come, Freud more formally commemorated his father’s death as “the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man’s life.” But now, when his impressions were raw, he confided in a letter to his friend Fliess, “By one of those dark pathways behind the official consciousness the old man’s death has affected me deeply.”
Could Freud navigate those dark pathways? When he tried to map the pathways of nerves within the brain, he had failed—and now he suspected it was because he’d set himself the wrong challenge. Now a new and radically different challenge presented itself to him: How to map the pathways of the mind alone? Even if he could, would anyone believe that such a description bears any resemblance to reality? He would, of course—but then, sitting in his office, listening to his patients, Sigmund Freud had heard the evidence for himself, if only in his mind’s ear.
Now here was something nobody had ever seen before. The photograph that began appearing on the front pages of newspapers around the world in the first weeks of 1896 showed an image of a hand, more or less. Less, because this hand seemed to lack skin—or at least its outer layers of flesh and blood and tendons had been reduced to a presence sufficiently shadowy so as to allow a look beneath them. And more, because of what that look within revealed: the intricate webwork of bones that previously had been solely the province of the anatomist.
The hand belonged to the wife of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, a professor at the University of Würzburg in Germany. On November 8, 1895, while working alone in his darkened laboratory, Professor Röntgen had noticed a seemingly inexplicable glow. On closer inspection, this glow revealed mysterious properties. For the next several weeks Röntgen worked in secrecy, strictly adhering to the method that had initiated the Scientific Revolution more than two centuries earlier and had sustained it ever since: He made sure that anyone else could use a Hittorf-Crookes tube and a Ruhmkorff coil to produce and reproduce the effect he’d detected. Sometimes his wife, Bertha, would ask why he was spending so much time in his laboratory, and he would answer that he was working on something that, if word got out, would have people saying, “Der Röntgen ist wohl verruckt geworden” (“Röntgen has probably gone crazy”).
At last Röntgen satisfied himself that his discovery was legitimate—that he hadn’t somehow misinterpreted the data. On December 22, he invited Bertha to join him in the laboratory, where he asked her to insert her hand, for fifteen minutes, between the tube and a photographic plate. As she did so, something happened—something he’d witnessed for himself numerous times now, something he still couldn’t explain. A substance passed between the tube and the plate—must have passed, because even though the substance itself was invisible, the effect was undeniable. An image of his wife’s hand, to her horror, was slowly burning itself into existence. On New Year’s Day, Röntgen went for a walk with Bertha, during which he mailed to colleagues copies of this photograph as well as his preliminary report, “Eine neue Art von Strahlen” (“A New Kind of Ray“)—what Röntgen, in a footnote, christened “X rays,” because of their mysterious nature. On the way to the mailbox, Röntgen turned to Bertha, whose hand—more or less, and complete (so to speak) with wedding ring—would soon be immortalized, and said, “Now the devil will have to be paid.”
The first public news account appeared on January 5, after a professor of physics at the University of Vienna received a copy of the paper and photograph and passed them along to colleagues, who in turn contacted the editor of the Wiener Presse. From there the news spread rapidly: the London Daily Chronicle on January 6, the Frankfurter Zeitung on January 7. “Men of science in this city,” began an article in The New York Times a few days later, “are awaiting with the utmost impatience the arrival of European technical journals”; when an English translation of Röntgen’s report arrived, the Times printed it on the front page almost in its entirety. By January 13 Röntgen had been summoned to Berlin, where he gave a demonstration of X-rays before Kaiser Wilhelm II. Röntgen granted only one substantive interview, to a particularly enterprising journalist from McClure’s Magazine, then withdrew from public scrutiny. “In a few days I was disgusted with the whole thing,” he later recalled. “I could not recognize my own work in the reports anymore.”
It was entirely coincidence that Röntgen had conducted what proved to be his decisive research at the same historical moment, and possibly even the same literal moment, that the sixteen-year-old Albert Einstein was pacing the grounds of a school in Aarau, trying to reconcile the properties of a beam of light with the concept of absolute space. It was similarly a coincidence that Röntgen made his discovery on the very day that the thirty-nine-year-old Sigmund Freud was writing to his friend Wilhelm Fliess that he was thinking of abandoning his