Freud, the Pandemic, and Our Emotional Well-Being

 One hundred and one years ago this weekend, on January 25^th 1920,  Martha and Sigmund, a bourgeois Viennese couple, received some devastating news. The phone call came at noon. Their pregnant daughter Sophie, mother of two young boys, a six-year old and a thirteen month old toddler, had died: Spanish flu (so-called) with pneumonia complications. She was the second youngest of the family’s six children, and her father’s favourite daughter.

The flu pandemic had swept through Europe in 1918 and 1919 - brought to Europe, ironically, by American troops who’d come over to fight, when America entered the fray, late in the war. The flu ended up killing more Europeans than the war itself. And 27 year-old Sophie Halberstadt, as she then was, would probably be just another statistic if it wasn’t for the fact that her father was then, and has remained, a rather significant figure in the history of ideas:  for Sigmund is of course - Sigmund Freud.

Because of Freud’s renown, all the correspondence to and from Freud, and between other family members, has been preserved and from it we can gain an intimate picture of the sadness, the grief, in one family, a century ago – but it could be yesterday, and will, for some, sadly, be tomorrow.

This Shabbat in the UK Jewish community was designated as ‘Mental Health Awareness Shabbat’. Freud spent a lifetime thinking about how the human mind works, and he was passionately – we might even say obsessionally - devoted to what wasn’t then called ‘mental health’.  One way or another we are all the inheritors, willingly or not, of the mapping of the human psyche that he pioneered. Many aspects of what later became a multi-faceted, psychotherapeutic and self-awareness and  psychological industry - much of which would be unrecognisable to Freud, and the self-indulgence of which he might well hate – nevertheless have their roots in that long-left-behind central European milieu.  

Having heard the painful news, the first person Freud wrote to was his mother. And he came straight to the point: 

Dear Mother, I have some sad news for you today. Yesterday morning our dear lovely Sophie died from galloping influenza and pneumonia… She is the first of our children we have to outlive. What Max [Sophie’s husband] will do, what will happen to the children, we of course don’t know as yet…I hope you will take it calmly; tragedy after all has to be accepted. But to mourn this splendid, vital girl who was so happy with her husband and children is of course permissible.

I greet you fondly. Your Sigmund.

There is a lot one could say about this letter: its tender yet austere tone, both compassionate and dispassionate, both empathetic and fatalistic: ‘tragedy after all has to be accepted’. And its concluding sentiment - that although the reality of the loss has to be accepted,  to mourn this splendid, vital girl …is of course permissible - what of that?

That word ‘permissible’ might sound strange to our ears now, a century later, maybe even slightly chilling. What do you mean it’s ‘permissible’ to mourn!? Who could ever doubt that? Who needs to be given ‘permission’ to mourn? And yet what Freud intimates here is worth reflecting on, because what he’d discovered after 25 years of working with patients with all kinds of mental and emotional distress, was the vital importance of mourning, of being given permission – and giving oneself permission – to grieve fully and deeply and truly, to feel and express the pain of loss. 

One has to remember that 19^th century emotional repression – active suppression of tears, the ethos of the ‘stiff upper lip’ - was not only a Victorian, British phenomenon, but a bourgeois belief throughout Europe. Particularly for men, but not only for men. Freud was one of the first to systematically explore the detrimental consequences of keeping a whole range of innate human feelings at bay, out of sight, suppressed: feelings that might be judged by oneself, or one’s society, or one’s religion,  or one’s parents, to be wrong; or to make you into a ‘bad’ person.

In that little word ‘permissible’ Freud is signalling to his mother something that he made the cornerstone of his revolution: it was permissible, indeed vital, to accept one’s deepest human feelings. Because every day of his professional life he was working with people who were blocked from doing that and were suffering from everything from depression to hysteria, neurotic anxiety to medically-undiagnosable bodily symptoms, psychosis to melancholia. And  a thousand other ‘mental health’ issues in between. Freud gave permission, gave space, for people to own up to, to own, their own feeling life. If this all seems simple and obvious now, it was a revolution then. But the journey that we have travelled in the last one hundred years so that this insight does now seem obvious is testimony to Freud’s contribution to our everyday lives.

The day after he wrote to his mother, on January 27th 1920, Freud wrote to a close friend, the Swiss pastor, Oscar Pfister, that our sweet Sophie in Hamburg had been… snatched away in the midst of glowing health, from a full and active life…all in four or five days, as though she had never existed. Although we had been worried about her for a couple of days, we had nevertheless been hopeful; it is so difficult to judge from a distance. And this distance must remain distance, we were not able to travel at once, as we had intended…there was no train, not even for an emergency. [This was post-War central Europe where transport links were still infrequent]. The undisguised brutality of our time is weighing heavily upon us. Tomorrow she is being cremated, our poor Sunday child!

So Sigmund and Martha aren’t able to be at the funeral of their daughter. We recognize distant echoes in our own times of how circumstances have forced us to lose out on so much - whether it is funerals and shivas, or hospital visits, or care home visits – there are so many losses we are suffering. I know that many people are feeling their own version of Freud’s sentiment: “The undisguised brutality of our time is weighing heavily upon us.”

A final few words from Freud before I switch from January 1920 to January 2021. From a letter a few days later to a Hungarian colleague, Sandor Ferenczi :

Dear Friend, Please don’t worry about me. Apart from feeling rather more tired I am the same. The death, painful as it is, does not affect my attitude toward life. For years I was prepared for the loss of our sons [During the War, Freud’s sons were away fighting and one of them, Martin, went missing in 1918 - it was a month until the family heard he’d been taken as a prisoner-of-war and he wasn’t released until mid-1919]; now it is our daughter; as a confirmed atheist I have no one to accuse and realize that there is no place where I could lodge a complaint….Deep down I sense a bitter, irreparable narcissistic injury.”

Actually I think Freud was in denial when he wrote that this loss hadn’t affected his attitude to life. You can’t suffer an “irreparable injury” and think it won’t impact your “attitude toward life”. The devastating loss of Sophie was in fact only compounded when Sophie’s younger boy, the toddler Heinele, whom Freud doted on, himself died - of tuberculosis - three years later. Freud mourned for them both for the rest of his life.

So where does all this history  leave us?

It’s clear that in these lockdown and pandemic times – and we are fast approaching a year now since our world was turned upside down – the question of how we are managing our day to day life is a major preoccupation. The newspapers, radio, TV and social media are full of advice on how to manage our emotional well-being: tips for survival, guides to lockdown living, how best to look after our mental health.  

And yet, when it comes down to it, and you dig into how each of us is bearing up, you don’t have to dig very far to touch into just how distressing we are finding this, how disturbed we are feeling, how frightened we might be, how insecure and uncertain we are about the future – and that is regardless of whether we have had the vaccine injection or not. We might not have emerged from a World War – but nobody I know is manging well, sailing through this, however brave a face we are putting on it.

Our mental health, our emotional well-being is being challenged, perhaps as never before in our lifetimes. And that is separate from those of us who might have actually lost someone to Covid over this last year. When somebody dies, however painful that is, we can mourn the loss. The loss is real, the grief is real, yet we sort of know what we are dealing with. But with the pandemic, what we are struggling with is a different kind of loss - and because we have never gone through this kind of loss before we don’t know what we are dealing with.

We just know that there are a variety of symptoms: be it an edginess, an unsettledness, an irritability, maybe sleeplessness, feelings of hopelessness or despair,  a low level anxiety, maybe we find we are being forgetful or tearful or finding it difficult to concentrate.

If there is one thing I would highlight here, it is something we may never have realised was so vital for our mental health, our emotional well-being: the real tactile contact we are used to having with other people. Live connection, sharing physical space with others, touching other people, being touched by other people, bodies in space together. How much we are missing this: the living, embodied  presence of other people, people we know and love, or people we see only once in a while, but also strangers, people in the street and in shops and on the tube and at football. Real people whom we mix with and interact with and keep us ‘in touch’ – what a powerful phrase this turns out to be! - keep us in touch with our own being alive, in our bodies, in our selves.

Zoom and the phone does not touch some deeper human need for embodied, kinaesthetic presence, a need we have never been deprived of before, and so never realised – and we are only just realising now – helps us feel alive. Breathing, sweating, smiling, grimacing, glowing humanity. We go out and interact and other people mirror our aliveness. And a lot of was happening at a subconscious level. And we have largely lost it.

Our sense of being fully alive – heart, mind, body, soul – becomes atrophied, slowly, if we have no physical connection with others. Why is solitary confinement the ultimate punishment in prison? In certain regimes it’s used to drive prisoners into despair or madness.

So we need to acknowledge that if we are abiding with the guidelines we are experiencing a collective bereavement. And maybe at some fundamental level that is why, psychologically, people might not be complying – it’s not just being anti-social, or bloody-minded, or perverse, or dressed up as libertarian ideology - it’s because unconsciously we all know that connecting to others makes us feel more alive. And aren’t we all determined, in our own ways, to try and feel and stay alive?

As Freud’s family tragedy illustrates in a small way, we are of course not the first to experience traumatic loss: the disorientation, dislocation, bereavement, anxieties about separation and loss that have to be endured month after month, sometimes year after year. It is part of the human condition.

In our situations there is much that we can do to help ourselves – as I mentioned, everywhere you look there are suggestions about how to survive lockdown. I imagine some of the things you do will help, some won’t. Sometimes you will just feel low, sad, morose, upset, disconnected from others, disconnected from your deeper more alive self. But for our own mental health it can be important, I would say vital, just to be able to accept those feelings. This is easier said than done. But - using Freud’s word - it’s ‘permissible’ to feel low: that’s congruent with what we are having to live through. Those feelings won’t last forever, they don’t last forever, even though when we are in them we sometimes feel as it they will.

We have resilience fused to our souls. In these weeks in our annual cycle of readings from the Torah we have arrived at that archetypal event, the liberation of the Israelite slaves from Egypt. It’s a universal story, and one for every era:  we will see this pandemic through, we will be coming out of Egypt. We may not have a Moses - but we will be coming out of Egypt, in God’s good time.

[based on a sermon given on Zoom for Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, January 23^rd 2021]