Frank Tallis
Vienna Blood
Frank Tallis - Vienna Blood
- I just want to say very, very warm welcome to all our participants and to you, Frank. It’s an absolute unknown pleasure to have you on with us this afternoon. So before I hand over to Trudy and for the two of you to be in conversation, I just want to say, tell our participants a little about you. Dr. Frank Tallis is a writer and a fellow clinical psychologist. He has held lecturing posts at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London. He has published over 30 scientific papers in international journals. He has written five works of psychology for that lay reader. He’s currently working on a new book, titled “Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna, and the Discovery of the Modern Mind”. Frank Tallis’s novels include “Killing Time”, “Mortal Mischief”, “Vienna Blood”, “Fatal Lies”, and many more. In 1999, he received a writer’s award from the Arts Council of Great Britain, and in 2000 he won the new London Writers Award. “Fatal Lies” was long listed for the International Thriller Writers Best Paper Book Award in 2010. The Liebermann books have been translated into 14 languages and adapted for television as the internationally successful TV series, “Vienna Blood”. Congratulations. Credible. What an achievement. So, thank you, Frank. Thank you Trudy, and really, it’s great pleasure to have you on with us today.
Thank you. Lovely, lovely introduction and thank you for inviting me.
Thank you so much, Wendy. God bless. Right. Well, Frank. Again, thank you so much for coming and it’s very fortuitous to meet you, particularly in the middle of the series we’re giving on Vienna. So my first question, why Vienna?
Well, I decided to write a psychoanalytic detective thriller, and, which I wanted to turn into a series. And once you’ve made that decision to, to write, you know, psychoanalytic detective novels, then there really is only one place you can set it, which is Vienna. I had the idea of the character of Max Liebermann, who was a, acolyte of, of Freud and early disciple, and so…
Can I interrupt you a minute? Can we have the big picture please, or are we in a box still?
[Wendy] You are a big picture on everyone’s screen but your own.
Okay, fine. Thank you. Sorry, Frank.
So, so, yeah, I, so it was, it was the obvious place to, to, to choose. Also, I was quite interested in Viennese culture. You know, my general interests were medical history, music and cakes. So I’m a great fan of Viennese pastries.
Yeah.
And so it seemed like a fairly logical and reasonable thing for me to, to write about.
Right, and of course, at the centre is Freud and his ideas, and of course, your character Liebermann is a disciple of Freud. But what I found wonderful about the series is you’ve spent so much time in research. When you research for the book and for the, for the Liebermann books, how much time did you spend actually researching the background? I mean, for example, when you talked about antisemitism, all the areas that you’ve dwelled on, you know it, you’ve studied it.
Well, yes. I mean, I spent really about eight years, sort of, immersing myself in the literature of Vienna, you know, everything that I could get my hands on. Actually, when I first started to write the Liebermann series, which was about 2003, it was quite difficult to get ahold of the material. It wasn’t sort of freely, freely available. I mean, it would certainly be a lot easier to research now because of the, the internet has a lot more, you know, resources than, than it did back then. So it wasn’t actually quite difficult to, to research in depth, and I had to make contacts in Vienna who would find things out for me. I also found that Viennese as readers are very, very critical audience, so that if you’ve got something at all wrong, they would be deeply offended and, and right. So it, you know, very, very small things. I, you know, I learned to attend to the detail. So yeah, the research is very important to me. I would say that, actually, I did more research for the Liebermann books than I did for my PhD, which was in an aspect of cognitive psychology. So it was, yeah, it was certainly an immersive experience.
What made you switch from clinical psychology, a practise, as a practitioner to actually writing?
It’s an interesting question. I’d always wanted to write, and I found that as I, my career progressed, I was writing more and more about psychology and writing academically more. And I then became increasingly interested in the whole process of writing, and so I started to experiment with fiction, and it just kind of expanded from that. I don’t make a very, very sharp distinction between the psychology and the novel writing. I mean, people, you know, say to me, you know, “Why did you give up psychology to become a novelist?” And I always, sort of, say, “Well, I didn’t really give up psychology. I just do psychology, but in a different way.” And I feel that the training in psychology is, and the experience of seeing patients, is immensely useful if you are writing fiction. So, for example, I mean, you know, we have the term “Psychological Thriller”, and, you know, it’s almost that as soon as you say thriller, you want to attach psychological to it. It’s used so much. One of the things that I found frustrating about reading psychological thrillers was that there wasn’t much psychology in them and so it was like a challenge to try to import genuine psychology, genuine psychological concepts into the genre. So rather than just have something vaguely and nebulously psychological to actually base a plot around a Freudian idea or some sort of notion of how the mind might work in Freudian terms. And, and when I, when I was actually writing the Liebermann novels, if I had something like a serial killer, you know, in psychological thrillers, serial killers often are very, fairly florid characters, but they’re rather poorly explained psychologically. And so, what I wanted to do was to actually treat my characters of that kind as though almost as though they were case studies. So I would almost, like, work out the case study in my mind before I actually sat down and started writing the novel. So it’s almost like I would conjure the, the criminal as a, as a patient.
Yes. Yeah.
As a forensic patient. And then I would actually sort of start writing the, the novel with the person embedded in the plot.
It obviously, comes through like that because the characters are so well-crafted. But back to Vienna, it had, I know you had a great interest in Freud, but Vienna was the perfect place for this kind of… Turn-of-the-century Vienna was perfect for your kind of writing, wasn’t it? You put it all there.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And then the other thing is that I, I think that if you have a great context, it almost generates the plots for you. And Vienna, obviously the Vienna we know and love is a, a place that is in extraordinarily rich with respect to, you know, culture, science, music, everything, everything is there. But it was also a, an extraordinary setting because it, the Vienna of that time was composed of many worlds, and that’s a gift if you’re writing fiction, because you can literally just take a world off the shelf and, and use it to generate a plot. So the first novel in the Liebermann series, “Mortal Mischief”, I, what I did with that was I looked at the world of the late 19th century occult revival, which was, you know, in France, Vienna, most of the kind of capitals of Europe were touched by that. In the second one in the series, I became very interested in the, you know, rather dark pan-German cults. So the cults around people like Guido von List and Liebenfells. They were, effectively, proto Nazi cults that are rather dismissed, I think, by mainstream historians, but were extremely influential with respect to the thinking of Adolf Hitler when he was having his “Dictator’s Apprenticeship”. if you like.
Very much so.
As a, as an artist in…
Yeah, I mean, I believe you’ve got, if you want to understand Adolf Hitler, you’ve got to look at the world he came from.
Yes, yes.
And I think it’s very raw. But can we go back to the mystery and magic, because I think this was something you brought out so beautifully? What was it about turn-of-the-century that led to this absolute, it was almost fetishist, wasn’t it, the kind of obsession with the dark, with magic? But also, and Kabbalah was another.
Well, I mean, I, I think that, to some extent, there was a, a wave of interest in the irrational that was generated by German romantic philosophy. And those, sort of, German romantic philosophers had a, had a sense of the dark and the strange, which actually is picked up by, by Freud and you see it more explicitly in his non-clinical writing. So things like his essay on “The Uncanny”. In many respects, you know, Freud could be seen as, as someone who is a, is a late incarnation of that German romantic tradition, because, you know, they, they believed in, you know, something luminous, something mystical behind the, the world of appearances. I mean, they, they, the, the great German romantics, why they were so enamoured with, sort of, walking in the mountains and being in nature, was because they felt that, that this, this communion with nature was getting them closer to the world’s soul. They thought there was this, this mystical power behind appearances. And in a sense, that kind of idea permeated the whole of, I suppose, Germanic culture. So in Vienna, when Freud was studying, the medical school was very influenced by the work of Rokitansky. Rokitansky was, his work was based on doing autopsies to understand illness, and get to look, you know, doing lots and lots of autopsies to find out what’s behind the surface. And of course, Klimt used to go to see bodies being dissected. He used to attend autopsies to see, you know, what was, you know, behind the superficial appearance. And that is, essentially, the key idea of psychoanalysis, that, you know, you are presented with the person. But what is important is perhaps, you know, what they don’t tell you it’s important, what they don’t want to tell you, you know, what they don’t say and you have to interpret, and you have to find what is behind the appearance. And as I say, I feel that a lot of those ideas stem from this semi-mystical, late 19th century German romanticism, which has these very, kind of, interesting ideas about appearance and what is behind appearance.
And what was so brilliant, I think in, in some of the episodes, the way a Liebermann character goes against the medical, the medical establishment, because you’ve also got the conservatism of Vienna, Catholic Vienna, very bureaucratic Vienna, so there’s this incredible clash of culture, isn’t it?
Yes, yes. And what was good medicine.
Yes.
I mean, what was good practise?
Yes.
And I think we do always have to put, I mean, you know, not only my character, but the, the world of psychoanalysis in its context. I mean, of course, psychoanalysis is subject to lots of criticism, but in reality it was a very humane approach. I mean, if we think about the kinds of psychological, medical treatments that were available, I mean, electrotherapy…
Which you brought out in, in a couple of the episodes.
And just, sort of, effectively, just, you know, running currents through the body, sometimes that would be become considerably more aggressive than just sort of weak currents.
But that went on to the seventies in this country.
Well, I mean, it didn’t quite go on… I mean, there’s always been an electrical element in, in, in medicine.
Yeah.
But I suppose it, it metamorphose into other kind of, you know, treatments that, that will be now considered to be barbaric. But in Freud’s day, you know, the, there were, there were… Medicine could sometimes resemble forms of mediaeval torture. So the idea of just simply understanding people’s suffering, dignifying it with meaning, so that a symptom wasn’t merely just, you know, a, a medical phenomenon. And a lot of the doctors in Freud’s time weren’t even that interested in treatment. So it was said in the 19th century at the Vienna General Hospital, the only treatment that was available was cherry brandy, because they simply were not interested in treatment. They were interested in understanding. Again, it comes back to this romantic idea of what’s behind the surface. They were understanding the causes of illness through processes like autopsy. So in other words, you know, the, what was called at the time, there was a name for it, therapeutic nihilism. They weren’t, they weren’t that bothered about treating patients. They were more interested in the patient once the patient died, because then they could actually, sort of, open them up, see what was actually, what was going on. So Freud brings something which is actually incredibly compassionate to, to medicine. And of course, he’s been subject to enormous criticism today. And indeed that, you know, psychoanalysis has many, many flaws. But I think you have to, you have to contextualise it. You have to see what he was doing, and he was dignifying distress with, with meaning. And people, their suffering could be understood and that process of understanding could, in a way, alleviate suffering. And I think that’s, that’s something that’s often overlooked by the more robust critics of Freud.
But in his time, he was such an outsider, wasn’t he?
He, he, he was, he, I think he exaggerated it, to some extent, because he, I mean, he also, of course, loved his own myth, and he loved, he was an outsider, but he loved playing up to that, you know, it was something that he really liked to push as the narrative of his life. And, and Freud, Freud is a, is a great writer and Freud is someone who loved fiction, loved storytelling, and he didn’t hesitate to tell his own story in an interesting semi-fictive way. So he, he was, he fell in love with his own legend, in a way. So he would tell the story of his birth. He was born with a caul, which was supposed to signify greatness.
Yes, yes.
And he would always, sort of, share that with his disciples, saying, you know, “I don’t believe it. It’s all nonsense.” But it did happen. And you know, I think there was a, you know, an entertainer in a restaurant once approached his parents and, sort of, said that basically had a presentment of his greatness. And again, you know, Freud said, “Yes, it’s kind of nonsense, but you know, it’s something worth, you know, chatting about.” And, and so he was… I think if you look at his life as well, it conforms, almost, the story of a classic legend or myth, you know, born in humble circumstances, you know, he fights adversity, he fights prejudices, you know, there are enemies who try to bring him down, but it’s a rags to riches story and he triumphs, and he triumphs several times over, you know, in a sense, initially antisemitism, resistance to his ideas. And then in a way he, you know, he, he defeats the Nazis, you know, he, he escapes and, you know, they burn his books, but they don’t get him.
That’s what he said. That was… I think when they burnt his books in, in Germany, he said, “At least we progressed, because in mediaeval times, they would’ve burnt me.” That is such an absolute tragic…
It’s, it’s a very, it’s a very, you know, it’s a very moving, moving thing. My actually, I, I’m very lucky and I own a couple of Freud’s books, and one of the things that I always find deeply, deeply moving is the fact that the book is there, that, you know, it’s on my desk.
How did that happen?
It was just, it was just a, a wonderful piece of generosity by somebody who’d escaped the Nazis. Freud had a cardiologist, Benno Samit. Benno Samit escaped around the same time, with Freud’s help, with his son, Paul Samit. Paul, so Paul’s a very small child. Paul as an old man, read my books and he said, and he contacted me, said, “I really like your books, and I’ve got a couple of, from Freud’s library that were given to my father by Freud’s widow in gratitude. I would like you to have them.” And I said, “No, that’s a gift I can’t accept, because it’s, you know, it’s too much, and surely you must have relatives.” And of course, sadly, given the circumstances, he didn’t have relatives. And he said, “No, I love your books. I love, I think you’ve got a feeling for this. It will make me really happy if you took them off my hand.”
Oh, that was wonderful.
I was, I was just so deeply, deeply moved by that act of generosity. And they, and he actually, that there were two in the end. And I treasure them. I, you know, I keep them on my desk and the very fact of their existence, the fact that they didn’t end up in a fire, then they’re inspiring me and I can write a, you know, a series of, you know, albeit, you know, just, you know, novels, the theme of which is sort of, you know, anti, you know, antisemitism, the theme that runs through them. The very fact that I’m there, able to do that with those books on the table, I find, you know, very moving, because it’s an emotional link, you know? It makes it real, you know, so that even when you’re writing fiction about these subjects or things that touch upon these subjects, when you have something like that on your desk…
You know, in a way it’s, but what I think is so, what it makes it so good for me is it’s beautifully researched fiction. I mean, when you write about antisemitism, for example, it, you can feel the real, it’s real, and the way you handle it is absolutely extraordinary. When you, when you talked about the amicus, the Black Hand, the research is phenomenal. And I think that’s what makes the books and the series so very special.
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, it was, it was very important to me to get that right. And I suppose the immigrant experience…
Because you, yourself are…
Yeah, I mean, I come from an Italian background and was raised in a family, a Catholic family, who were confused and stressed by the whole business of what it meant to be English, but not English, and the whole business of whether you are accepted or not accepted. And so, my mother was very, very concerned that, you know, I would blend in, that, like, I would be an invisible Italian, so.
It’s like being a Jew.
Yeah, absolutely. And so there were those commonalities.
Yeah.
There were things that, when I was actually reading about antisemitism, it was that there, there was a kind of a broad humane commonality that, that I could feel it resonated with my experience. So in, in other words, and I think that, that is something that all people who experience a level of displacement share. And it is confusing. And there are some things that, I suppose, that if you, if you are within that kind of experience, you have more familiarity with. So, I mean, you know, for me, there were kind of curious things, like the way my parents were, you know, were one in the same time very keen to be, sort of, English, but could never quite actually, fully identify with being English. But at the same time, they would, sort of, look down at the relatives back home because they hadn’t made the transition, they hadn’t, they hadn’t, sort of, and at the time, I guess when, you know, we’re talking, coming over to England a lot earlier in the century. I guess they, I guess they perceived the people back home as being more, kind of, rural, more uneducated, more, you know, lacking in, sort of, aspiration. And so these, kind of, petty snobberies, the detail of the immigrant experience I found quite interesting.
And, you know, back to Freud, after he died, his wife started lighting the Friday night candles.
Yes. Well, he, he… I mean, one of the things about his curious relationship with her, of course, was that he forbade her to, to be observant at home. And that was almost like a condition of, of marriage. And, you know, he didn’t like having to, because I think, obviously, he was obliged by law to have a religious marriage, and I think, his wife’s uncle had to teach him Hebrew lines, which he objected to strongly, and…
He’s a bit of a mystery that, you know, because all the evidence is he knew a lot more than he wanted to know, with the Bible, and his father gave him, et cetera, et cetera. So that in itself is… Who did he want to be?
Well, I mean, I think, I mean, there’s two ways of looking at Freud’s relationship with Judaism. There’s the… I mean, it is quite complicated, and you can unpack it in many ways, and you can find all kinds of inconsistencies. And, you know, you can look at sometimes when he, he says, you know, antisemitic remarks. I mean, you know, you can look at that ambivalence. But on the other hand, I think it, you know, it is a kind of a simple relationship. I mean, he did reject religion. He reject all, rejected all religion. And he saw, you know, Jewish observances in the same way that he would look at Catholic observances.
Yes.
And saw it as all, you know, religion as a failure to face up to the realities, the harsh realities of existence. He saw, you know, the individual’s responsibility to face up to reality, to connect with reality, and he saw religion as a defence. He saw it as a, as a myth, a fairy story to make life bearable. And so he you know, he didn’t really believe it, but he did have many, many Jewish attachments. And I think one has to make a distinction between the, you know, the religion, the religious aspect of it, and his Jewishness as a set of what he thought of as necessary attachments in the end, because without those attachments, without that comradery, without that sense of belonging in a community, he just had to face hostility and antisemitism.
Yeah, I think what was interesting, most of his circle were Jews. They were Jews like him.
Completely, at the beginning.
They didn’t cut themselves away from it, but he did have this, this sort of circle of non-Jewish Jews. And his son joined the Zionist Organisation at the university, which is fascinating. And I know one of his last visits was from Roheim Bitesman. We don’t know what was said, but his son talked about his father looking happy. So, who knows what happened in Europe and done to him?
And the business of whether, whether he owned books of Kabbalah or not.
Yes.
And you know, and, obviously, there are these tremendous correspondences that you defined with psychoanalysis and Kabbalistic writings. So, construing sex as a kind of energy, dream interpretation, you know, the use of, of symbols, the fact that you can interpret a person like you might interpret a book. All of these, you know, close, close examination of text, which is just like psychoanalysis, the close examination of language and the detail of a patient’s, you know, hand gestures or intonation, all of these things, there’s a tremendous set of connections you can make in terms of joining the dots between Kabbalah and psychoanalysis. David Bacon has written about and it’s, it’s fascinating, you know, it’s not known for certain whether he had these books. I mean, there was, you know, allegedly, a witness who said, yes, he did have a French translation of the Zohar, and he did possess, you know, mystical literature. It wouldn’t surprise me if he did. I mean, I don’t find that necessarily strange, because…
He was the zeitgeist, wasn’t he?
Yeah, and as we’ve already discussed it, he had his roots in German romantic philosophy. And he, even though he was antireligious, he had an extraordinary mystical, sinister streak in the sense. By sinister, I mean sinistral, in the sense of leaning to the left, leaning to looking at the strange.
Fascinated with the dark.
Fascinated with the dark, the uncanny. So, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman”, which is a very early horror story. He was very interested in that. He was interested in doubles, you know, the doppelganger.
Yes.
He actually did, in Ernest Jones biography, he mentioned that he had a conversation with Freud and Freud, apparently, met a doppelganger and wondered whether he would actually die. He met someone who looked very much like him, thought, “Oh, well, maybe I’m going to die as a result of this.” He had these kind of superstitions. He had some obsessions about certain numbers, which again, is a bit like kind of, you know, within, within Kabbalah, the significance of certain numbers. He thought that he would die, I believe it was either 62 or 63. He made weird connections between his telephone number and these numbers. He, but at the same time, so all, so you have all of this, kind of, mysticism dance, interest in telepathy, he did, with Forensy, he did experiments with, with, his daughter Anna. And actually his, some of his followers like Jones, tried to dissuade him from writing about it because they thought, “Well, this is going to ruin our scientific reputation.” So there’s all this, but, but he’s doing all of this mystical stuff, but somehow finds within it a beautiful idea, which is of great cultural significance. So he explains all of these supernatural phenomena as “The Return of the Repressed”, and he actually says that, “No, we can explain it all within, you know, modern psychology.” And in a way, he sanitises all this stuff for the, for the modern audience. I mean, he’s a great modernist. So he takes all of this, kind of, weirdness and strangeness, he, sort of, like steps out of the twilight zone and says, “No, I can explain it all psychologically”, and he gives it a modern meaning. And in a way, you know, we, you know, the idea of haunting, you know, we are haunted by the past, which he explores in psychoanalysis where, you know, we are haunted by ourselves. And he tries to, you know, he, he takes this idea of haunting and incorporates it within psychoanalysis. And he also gives us a tool for understanding and analysing literature. So we can look at something like James’s “Turn of the Screw”, you know, one of the great, sort of, you know, classic, early psychological ghost stories and we can understand it as a psychoanalytic tale that the ghosts in that are really the return of the governess’s repressed sexuality. So he gives us tools with which to, kind of, analyse literature and understand the strange, but within psychological and scientific parameters, which I find interesting about him. This kind of duality that he, he has this strangeness, this foreignness, this alienness about him, but he also is able to convert that into something that is imminently scientific and practical and speaks to the modern age. But perhaps, perhaps it’s more that he shapes the modern age.
Yeah, I think that’s the point, isn’t it? He is the arbiter of modernity, the words we use today. I remember somebody once said to me, “It doesn’t matter whether he’s right or wrong, you know, because it’s his terminology we’re using now.
Absolutely. And it’s extraordinary. I mean, I’m old enough to remember that when I was a, an undergraduate, I was interested in the idea of the unconscious. And, you know, then, I mean, you know, ‘cause Freud, of course, comes in and goes out of fashion, the idea of the unconscious was sought by many, many, you know, established academics to be a ludicrous idea. It was, you know, an old-fashioned, you know, Freudian psychoanalytic idea. Of course, it was insane to start thinking about the unconscious. It was, you know, it was, it was something that, that had no basis in science. And today, there isn’t, you know, a single major neuroscientist in the world who would reject the idea of pre-conscious processing. The idea that there is, you know, every conscious mind has a massive hinterland of pre-conscious processes that never actually are, you know, or not, but some of them actually go into consciousness, but a lot of what we are remains, you know, perpetually unconscious. And that is, that is the modern model of the mind. It isn’t, you know, quite a psychodynamic Freudian model of the mind, but it’s an example of how an idea that is at the centre of Freudianism was, you know, reduced to being, you know, in certain academic circles, you know, a visible idea, a laughable idea, making a massive comeback, and being actually central to contemporary neuroscience. As I say, no serious neuroscience would reject the idea that there is an unconscious part of the mind.
I now know why you’re working so hard on your book.
Well, I’d like to…
Tell me a little bit about it.
Well, I’m writing book the moment called, "Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna and the Discovery of the Modern Mind”, and what I want to do in the book is try to write a balanced appraisal of Freud. I find the arguments about Freud, the polar arguments about Freud quite tedious. So, you know, the people who called him a saint, the people who bash him all the time, have made whole careers out of just criticising Freud, which seems to be a rather sterile way to make a career. But, so you have the… And, of course, Freud was human. He had massive flaws. The case studies are vulnerable to all kinds of criticism, but he was also a massive intellect whose cultural and intellectual contribution to the 20th century, in 21st century is huge.
It’s beyond imagination.
Yeah, and I want to, actually, put this into, what I would like to think, is a measured perspective. I would like to put Freud in his context. He’s often seen as a freakish, sort of, sort of intrusion into history, but he’s not, he has a context. And there’s a massive amount of overlap between Freud, psychoanalysis and Vienna. And you see that the preoccupa, Freud’s preoccupations are in Vienna’s preoccupations. You see it in the arts of Klimt, you see it in Schiele, you know, the Viennese preoccupations of sex and death are deriving Freudian theories, Eros and Thanatos, the kind of, the life instinct, the death instinct. There’s a, there’s a constant dialogue between Freud psychoanalysis and his cultural context. It’s a conversation. And I would like to stress that, and I think that’s often, sort of, underestimated. We, you know, we are often, we interpret art sometimes now from a Freudian perspective and say, “Ah, look at the Freudian influence in Viennese writing. Look at the Freudian influence in, you know, Viennese writing, Viennese art.” But all, there was also a Viennese influence from Freud. And finally, in the book, I want to join the dots with Freud and modernity and the way we live now, and to show that he is relevant now, and that when we go to art galleries, the things that he was talking about and the things that created the, the climate of his time are relevant now. So if you look at something like the, the culture of nervousness, almost the glamour of nerves. So his patients were wealthy, but also neurotic. And this creeps into Klimt in his society portraits. You know, he’s write, he’s painting beautiful women and part of their beauty is, in a sense, their neuroticism. And so, you know…
Neuroticism of neuroticism.
Yeah, and if you have all of this innate, it may make innate… Really weird thing that happened with, with Vienna at the time. It’s almost, there’s like nerves, neuroticism becomes sexy. And this is most explicitly in the art of Egon Schiele, where it is explicitly in-your-face sexual and a little crazy too. And so you, you know, you, you get this. But that, all of that, you know, you, I can see that. You know, if you look at, you know, if you, a famous piece of modern art like, Tracey Emin’s “Unmade Bed”, which is really an autobiographical piece about sex and depression. So you can see that these things that are being, that are Freudian, that are being explored in Freud’s Vienna, artists are still doing it, but we don’t necessarily connect it. If you think of Tracey Emin, you don’t think of her necessarily as a Freudian artist, but, but she’s, you know, incredibly Freud and that, you know, everybody was talking about “The Unmade Bed”, was it art? But it’s actually, you know, I see it, in a way, as being a modern exploration of these themes that are the wellhead about contemporary modernity explored by Freud and his manure and the arts around him.
I’m going to ask one more question, 'cause I know there’s going to be loads online. The Liebermann, books, where’s he going from here?
Well, it very much depends on whether I get the time to write.
You should actually explain, how many hours a day are you working on your novel, well upon your, on, not your novel, on this big work?.
The non-fiction book, I write for about five hours a day. A light at the end of the tunnel. I’m almost finished. I mean, I did actually, I wanted it as a COVID project. You know, when lockdown started, I thought, well, I’m not going to be able to go away on holiday, I’m not going to be able to do things. A book that I’d really like to write would take me a very long time, would be this book on Freud. Usually it might take me, I don’t know, four years, but if I don’t go on holiday and I’m just stuck in a room, this is a very constructive use of my time. And so I, I, that’s what I decided to do. Now that it’s coming to an end, I hope I’ll finish it this year. Yes, I’m thinking a little bit about fiction again, but also, I mean, I, I’ve really enjoyed getting back to my roots, as it were, and writing psychology, psychology, rather than the fiction. I would like, at some point, to get back to Liebermann. I would like, if I got back to him, to reboot him just before the First World War. I’ve got some ideas I’d like to maybe explore. The whole atmosphere of impending doom before the First World War. I could also have fun in the war. I’d quite like him to join the Navy and go off to sea in a U-boat, and his captain would be Goerg von Trapp, who we know from “The Sound of Music”, who was a real U-boat captain. And so I could get quite a few “Sound of Music” gags in and that would be fun. And so, yeah, I’d quite like to bring Liebermann back, maybe 10 years later and…
And then another 10 years.
And then maybe, yeah. Maybe have him, you know, escape to England.
Or America.
Or America. But so he, he could…
He must escape.
Oh, oh, I, I’m not, he’s going to escape.
Because he’s a wonderful outsider who watches.
Yes, yes. I mean, he would have to. He would… I couldn’t, I mean, I couldn’t do to a commando, I couldn’t, I couldn’t kill off Max. It just, that would just be too much.
You wouldn’t. Anyway, Frank, I can talk to you all night, but I think we better see we’ve got near 1 000 people. The machine’s listening. Okay. The first one from Harold, “Has the philosophy of the Vienna’s Circle of logical positivism influenced your "Vienna Blood” books in any way?“
I’m afraid there is a simple answer to that, which is going to be very unsatisfying, which is, no. It hasn’t. That isn’t honestly something that’s influenced my, my fiction at all.
Okay. Arlene wants to know, "Which of Freud’s books do you own?”
Oh, I own his case studies, so his own copy of his own case studies. There was a book published of a selection. So it wasn’t the total, it’s a collection of his case studies, you know, his own personal copy. And I also own his essay on Moses, his own copy of that.
Fantastic. Sheila is asking, “How did the series end up being produced in Austria? And please speak to the filming the series in Vienna with Austrian German actors.”
Oh, well, I suppose it was, it ended up being filmed in Austria simply because the producers were interested, who were interested were both English and Austrian, and so it was logical to make it a joint, sort of, Anglo-Austrian production. And yeah, it just made sense and it was, and it’s also, of course, excellent to be able to film something in the location.
And you were, were you there for the film?
No, no. And my involvement is very, very small in the… I mean, what they they do is obviously, you know, what happens is your, the rights of your books are bought and they send me the scripts and they say, you know, “Do you, you know, do you like them?” Or, you know, “Do you have anything to say?” I try to not meddle too much because, in a sense, what they’re doing is different to what I do in the books. So my books are aimed at a different kind of audience, so I can, I can indulge myself. So in the books, you know, Max plays the piano and the inspector Rheinhardt sings. So, because of my passion for music, I can, I can really write lots about Schubert’s songs and Marlow at the Opera House and things like that. Now their business is making a commercial television programme, so they take my plots and they, I suppose, they slim them down and take out my excesses because they know that, you know, they’re, they’re more in the entertainment business. I mean, I guess what I’m doing is, I guess, more of a labour of love, so, so, you know, I get to write about Marlow at the Opera House and I get to write about Schubert songs and I get to write about the things that I’m interested in. So I get to write about, you know, Kabbalah and the golem and all kinds of things that, that I don’t think necessarily would translate very well onto television. So it’s great that it’s in, it’s filmed in Vienna. It’s great. There are kind of, you know, plenty of Austrians and Viennese on board, but they are changing the books for a commercial market, which I respect. As I said, if it was left to me, I would probably write something that would alienate the commercial audience.
I love that answer. “Are Freud’s descendants, for the most part, Jewish?” No.
I honestly don’t know. I don’t know.
I can answer that one if you really want me to. I mean, Clement Freud, there was an article about him in the Jewish Chronicle, and he said, “Please don’t refer to me as a Jew.”
Oh, really, really?
Yeah, I, so I think very, as far as I know, I think not, religiously anyway. “Is 'The Return of the Repressed’ an essay? I haven’t been able to find it, if, as it is.”
Oh, “The Return of the Repressed” is, is, perhaps, most explicitly expressed in Freud’s essay on “The Uncanny”. So if you look in “The Uncanny”, you’ll find the idea of “The Return of the Repressed”. And, you know, with his analysis of E.T.A Hoffman’s, “The Sandman”, “Doubles” and all things that are strange and weird, and on the periphery of conventional psychology.
Jean is asking, “Would it be more accurate to say that Freud was opposed to organised religion rather than anti-religion?”
Oh, that is difficult. He was anti-religious. He was intolerant of religion, but he did have this strange, kind of, semi mystical aspect of his personality. I mean, the, the, I suppose, you know, we associate Jung with more spiritual thinking and Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious, this idea that we inherit the experiences of our ancestors, we have access to some repository of human experience that is inherited. It’s almost like a collective soul. But actually, Freud believed that, and actually, Freud got there before Jung, and he was referring to what he called, “Endopsychic Myths” in his correspondence with Wilhelm Fleiss before Jung starts to write about ideas of the collective unconscious. And it’s one of those ideas that’s, that’s curiously always overlooked. So I’ve, obviously, writing the book that I’m writing, I’ve been reading the original works and quite a lot of them. And the idea of a collective unconscious, the idea of inherited memories occurs again and again and again in Freud’s writing, and yet it’s very rarely referred to. You know, people concentrate on sex, sexual theory, dream interpretation, psychotherapy. But he does have this, as I say this, this idea, which is almost a kind of a, a religious, spiritual idea that we associate with Jung is in, is in Freud’s psychology and his works. And he, there is no doubt about it, he’s always attracted to the mystical and the strange. So he was anti-religious, and if anybody talked to him about religion, he would say, “No, it’s childish, it’s a superstition, it’s foolish, it’s regressive, it doesn’t help us because we need to grow up and engage with reality.” That would be his position. So he would, he would put organised religion and all religion into that, that box and approach. But, but at the same time, he was so complex and you can tease out mystical, semi-spiritual ideas in his work.
And presumably, you’ll be, in your book, you’ll be dealing a lot with him and Jung.
Yes, yes. And their, you know, their big fallout. And I think that one of the most interesting aspects of the Freud-Jung debark is, of course, they are always presented as opposites, as, you know, Freud, you know, being Jewish and Jung Teuton, and Freud being, you know, completely, you know, obsessed with sex and Jung being broader. Freud being the strict atheist, Jung being the, kind of, the spiritual person. And all of these differences are emphasised, but when you get down to it, the split was because they were so similar. They both wanted the prize. They both wanted to be the principal depth psychologist, you know, in the world. They both had very, very similar ways of approaching psychology, the mind. They both had very similar worldviews. And I think the differences in terms of character are, and in terms of philosophy, are stressed because it makes a much, much better story than they were actually both very similar, and I think that was part of the problem.
“Which is the book which links psychology to the Kabbalah?”
In my book of…
Yeah.
Oh, in my book. In terms of my fiction, there is a book called, “Darkness Rising”, which is a detective story set in Freud’s Vienna, in which there is a Kabbalist layer, which is discovered and is the, the golem legend is central to the, the plot. And in my nonfiction, I’ve written a little bit about Freud and Freud and his relationship with the Kabbalah, and a detective fiction and the nonfiction book is called, “The Act of Living”, which is about psychology, a book about all psychotherapies as a, as actually the… We would benefit if we see all psychotherapy as a unitary, philosophical album, rather than see it as a bunch of competing schools.
“Is there going to be a…” Oh no. “Who will Liebermann marry?”
Oh, he will marry Amelia Lydgate in the books. In the series, they’re going to take him off in different directions.
“Is there going to be a third TV series of "Vienna Blood”? You can’t leave it on a cliff hanger.“
Oh, oh, yes, there will be a third series. I can’t say yet whether there will be a fourth or, or a fifth, because, you know, it depends, and the whole thing is, kind of, flexible and it depends on audience ratings and, you know, the way that these production things work is everybody’s got to talk to each other and get on, and it’s all got to work for a lot of people. So yeah, I think, I think we can safely say there will be three, there will possibly be a four and five. I can’t say that yet, but I’m, I’m pretty confident there will be a three.
Okay. "I was in a group discussion this week comparing and contrasting the TV versions of "Vienna Blood” and “Paris Police 1900”, with superficially very overlapping themes. If you have seen the Paris series, do you have any comments, Freudian or otherwise?“ It’s from Brenda.
No, I haven’t actually seen the, the Paris series. I mean, curiously, and people find this a bit odd, I’m, I’m, you know, crime writing and crime fiction isn’t my favourite genre. I mean, I love genre fiction, but I’m very keen on science fiction. I’m very keen on horror and, you know, although I really enjoy writing crime, it’s something that I enjoy writing more than, perhaps, sort of, I do in terms of reading and when I’m reading. I quite like things like, you know, genres like horror or science fiction because they, I find them, I find science fiction, well, you know, good science fiction, very interesting because it’s often not about the future, it’s actually about the present and often deals with the, you know, complex issues that we deal with, like, today, like artificial intelligence, things like that. And I like horror because, I suppose, it does deal with issues of life and death in a very interesting way. It’s quite, quite deep, philosophically. Ask questions, "What is alive, what is dead, what are these?” You know, so those kind of questions are there at the heart of horror.
“What do you think of the TV adaptation of your novels?” That’s from Shirley.
Well, it’s, and as I was saying, it’s something that I can sit back and enjoy as in the same way that anybody else would because I, you know, I try to, I try not to interfere, I’m not, I try not to see it as an adaptation of the books, in a way, because they are, they are for a different market, and so I can, I can sit back like, you know, anybody and say, “Oh, I’ll watch an episode of "Vienna Blood”, and I have my favourites and ones that I like and ones that I don’t like. I enjoy it, but I do see it as something that… You know, they take plots and they slim them down and they do different things with them for a different market. So it seems, it seems to me that, that they are, they are almost like a, an abstraction of the books rather than an adaptation of the books.
Okay. Now, oh, my friend Susan, “Absolutely fascinating talk, thank you. Can you tell us a little bit about how you developed the character of Liebermann?”
Oh, well, I mean, the detail comes from my own practise as a clinical psychologist, so, very, very small details. So he always, kind of, listens to his patients like that. And that’s actually, I find myself to him at a lot in sessions towards the end of the day. Small things, the details were just observed from my own clinical practise. I developed the character. Obviously, the character grows out of the history and the time. And I suppose, being party myself, in a slightly different way, to the immigrant experience, there were plenty of resonances and I found that writing about a Jew in, you know, anti-Semitic Vienna wasn’t that difficult if you were someone from an Italian family growing up in London in the ‘60s and '70s where, you know, perhaps foreigners were regarded with suspicion. So there were, there were not, you know, it wasn’t, you know, developing the character wasn’t a million miles away from my own experience.
Okay. “Do you know if the… What do the people of Vienna think of it?”
As far as I know, they really like it, but I think they like it because Viennese are so fiercely proud of Vienna that they just love the, you know, seeing it shot, and it’s, and the series is a great, I mean, it’s great for the tourist industry. I mean…
Well, “Vienna Blood” tourists.
Oh yeah. I mean, because I mean, I mean, they show it in a glorious light. I mean, the thing that, things like, you know, the shots of the Am Steinhof Lunatic Asylum. I mean, I mean, it looks glorious. I mean, you know, it is, you know, it’s wonderful. I mean it, the most extraordinary thing that, you know, they should have built this kind of, you know, temple to insanity, in a way.
It’s turn-of-the-century Vienna.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, we’ve got beautiful, kind of, Otto Wagner church at the top. I mean, it’s, it’s like a golden, sort of like, Taj Mahal, and it’s a modernist Taj Mahal. It’s wonderful.
We’re going to have one more question, I think, because… “Do you personally practise a religion?”
No I don’t, but I’m extremely interested in religion. I don’t, I don’t have any strong beliefs, but I’m fascinated by religious belief. I take a, like Freud, a great interest in things that occur on the periphery of science. So I love talking Buddhism with my Buddhist friends. I love looking at findings from parapsychology. I love the big philosophical questions about life, universe and everything. I enjoy studying religions. I mean, it’s, it’s an odd thing. I mean, I never find it quite enough to persuade me to, to have faith. Perhaps, I think, there’s a small part of me that would just love it to be true. But being, you know, a Freudian in a sense, I can’t make that leap, in the final instance, to be able to take on a spiritual belief. I certainly don’t criticise people who have spiritual beliefs, and I find new atheists who are very hostile to anybody who practises religion. I find them as ghastly as I find certain fundamentalists. I mean, I don’t believe in any kind of fundamentalism. I just find it ghastly in all of its manifestations. So I, yes, I’m open to be persuaded. I always keep an open mind. I might, one day perhaps, some, some, I will have an experience that converts me to something or other, but until that day, I suppose, technically, I’m an atheist.
I think Martin’s question is probably too big. “Which parts of Freud are accepted as part of medicine today?”
Well, that is an interesting question.
Yeah.
In terms of his… Although psychoanalysis is probably a minority interest within the practise of psychotherapy, it is un, one cannot question the influence of Freud on the practise of all psychotherapies, really, at a philosophical level and a fundamental level. He actually influenced the practise of psychiatry at so many levels, so that he seeded psychotherapy and psychiatry with many, many ideas, and so he’s inextricably there. Even among the practise of people who say they abhor Freud, I think if I looked at them practise, I could join the dots. I could say, “That’s Freudian, that’s Freudian and that’s Freudian.” And in a broader sense, if we look at neuroscience, one of the most fascinating things for me to happen over the past, I think 10 years, there are some very, very interesting new developments in neuroscience, new models of mind. I won’t bore you with the detail, but they come out of, kind of, hardcore neuroscience, mathematical modelling work on machine intelligence. There’s lots of, kind of, frontier, hard science, which is coming together with new models of how the mind might work and how the brain works. And it’s extraordinarily interesting that the people at the frontier of this research, people who you would expect, maybe, to be hostile to Freud’s model of the mind, are actually very interested in seeing how their ideas connect with Freud’s structural model of the mind, the idea of the, you know, the ego, id, superego. And in fact the world’s leading neuroscientist, the most cited neuroscientist is a British neuroscientist called, Karl Friston. And he’s done, you know, he did extraordinary work, pioneering brain imaging, and his cutting edge neuro-scientific ideas about how the brain works and how biological systems work, he has actually connected, he’s actually written papers, jointly with another neuroscientist, connecting these cutting edge ideas with Freudian psychology, which I just found extraordinary because, you know, when I was training, Freud was often sort of laughed at, and now you have cutting edge neuro, cutting edge neuroscientist saying, “Well, you know, maybe we, maybe, maybe some of those ideas weren’t so silly, after all.”
I think that’s about a place to stop. Lauren.
Well, thank you very, very much, Frank. Thank you, Trudy, for a really awesome presentation. Very thought provoking and fascinating. I trained, you know, my training, was psychoanalytic and the genius of Freud.
Yes.
One cannot question the genius of Freud. You know, it was, it doesn’t mean I said that to you, Trudy. Actually, whether you agree or you don’t, you know, whether you agree or disagree, it’s, it’s, he’s, you know, he’s, undoubtedly, one of the great men of, of the century.
And also the much maligned. I mean, that’s part of the… Part of the interest of Freud for me, is that if you look… It’s difficult to find, say, a contemporary figure who has lasted into the 21st century with such presence as Freud. So, you can go into any High Street bookshop and you can buy a copy of the, you know, “The Interpretation of Dreams”. Now, how many figures, you know, around in the 1900 have their books on the shelves in the High Street? And yet, and yet, you know, he is probably the most criticised of, of all of the major figures, you know, in the 20th century, and his influence have stretched to the present. And I find that extraordinary that, that he’s so, so, you know…
Maligned.
And you know, he was right and he was wrong, you know. So what? We, we’d, you know, Einstein was right and wrong, you know. Lots of people got things right and wrong. You know, lots of people did good things and bad things. But with Freud, I don’t know why it is, why people just become obsessed with, with knocking him down and all the time.
Yeah, that’s interesting. Look, he’s, for me, you know, he created a whole new vocabulary. He actually permeates and, you know, his, his theories, philosophy, permeates every, every part of my life, and certainly, part of my thought process and the way that I look at the world, the way I think about things, the way that I look at relationships, analyse relationships and have my own relationships. And I, you know, I, I have a very strong interest in numerology. That is my hobby. And, and as above, so below. As you say, sometimes you’re right, sometimes you’re wrong. Your greatest strength is your greatest weakness.
It’s interesting because, of course, with numerology, you can see connections between that and the ideas of Wilhelm Fleiss.
[Wendy] Right.
You know, they were, they were… So Freud was corresponding with Fleiss and they, they, you know, they talk numbers.
Yeah. I guess you’re…
And Forensy and Johnny von Neumann all come from there.
Yeah. Yeah.
Frank, I guess ruling six. I’m get, I get you a ruling six. Do you know your, your core number?
Ruling six. Six, I mean in numerology, I, and if we link it to astrology, that’s Venus, isn’t it? Six?
It’s relationship. You come into this lifetime to negotiate relationships, work on relationships, see relationships. You get that by adding, well you get that by adding up your birthdate. No, no, no. I’m putting myself on the line now. I don’t know how many people are on board. I’d rather do this with you offline.
I think you two better meet offline. This is great.
We can have fun.
One other thing, 'cause it is actually really interesting, how the mystical overlaps with psychoanalysis. So I could see, I could see how for a psychoanalyst, like with Freud, numbers have that slightly uncanny quality that are attractive. And it’s the most amazing thing, that if you look at the histories of psychoanalysis, Wilhelm Fleiss is always criticised, he’s always, sort of, you know, he’s always seen as being, you know, just a lunatic who thought, you know, that, that there were these numbers and, and cycles and you know, these, these numerical cycles were all kind of nonsense. But if you actually think about it for a moment, biorhythms, we recognise bio rhythms. What are, what are biorhythms? Well, they’re just cycles, which you can quantify numerically. So when Fleiss was talking about the, the power of numbers applied to biology and everybody said, “Oh look, you know, look, he’s a lunatic”, he was actually really talking about biorhythms, but in a different language. And I find that fascinating.
Right. Oh, we’ve got tonnes to talk about.
Thank you. I think we better invite this man back.
I love that. Well, thank you very, very much to both of you. Frank, I look forward to meeting you in person soon.
Yes, I hope so.
Definitely.
And may, yeah, we’d love to have you back. And as I said before, welcome to Lockdown University family. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
Bye darling. God bless, Wendy.
Thanks. Bye-bye.