If Freud is the father of psychoanalysis, Schopenhauer is the grandfather. Here’s why.

In 1809, the twenty-one-year-old Arthur Schopenhauer matriculated at the University of Göttingen, nominally to study medicine and satisfy his interest in the natural sciences. In Göttingen, the skeptic Gottlob Ernst Schulze introduced him to Plato and Kant. Arthur remarked to Schulze, “Life is a tricky business. I’ve decided to spend it trying to understand it.” With that, he left Göttingen to pursue his studies at the newly founded University of Berlin, which had fast risen into Germany’s premier centre of philosophy.

In Berlin, Schopenhauer attended lectures by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the head of the department, and found him to be abstruse and tedious. He thought of Fichte as a charlatan and second-rate Kant, and, in his notes, referred to his philosophy as a “world-comedy”. He held the dogmatic Friedrich Schleiermacher in equal contempt, and his notes on Schleiermacher’s lectures reveal a budding atheism. He never regretted his beginnings as a medical student. Even at Berlin, he attended more lectures in the sciences and medicine than in philosophy, since, he believed, a philosopher ought to have a strong grounding in the sciences.

The relationship between madness and genius

And not just the sciences, but life itself. In the winter of 1812, Arthur began visiting patients in the “melancholy ward” of Berlin’s Charité hospital to investigate the relationship between madness and genius. In his lectures, Fichte had characterised genius as “divine” and madness as “animal”, but Arthur, who was no stranger to mental illness, suspected the two to be intertwined. “Genius” he would write in The World as Will, “lives only one storey above madness.”

Many of the patients he spoke to were or had been highly accomplished people. They were perfectly capable of rational thought, even of wit, and rarely erred in their knowledge of the immediate present. Madness, he surmised, is not a disturbance of the rational faculty. Instead, it arises when the past is too painful to bear. When this happens, memories are repressed, and may be replaced by new “memories”. “If … certain events or circumstances are wholly suppressed for the intellect, because the will cannot bear the sight of them; and then, if the resultant gaps are arbitrarily filled up for the sake of the necessary connection, we then have madness.” “True mental health” in contrast, “consists in perfect recollection of the past.”

Schopenhauer conceived of genius as an ability to rise into timelessness, to see time merely, in that famous phrase of Plato, “as the moving image of eternity”. Thus, what genius and madness share in common is a disrupted relationship with time. Whereas the madman has lost the thread of the “where” and “when”, the genius can still pick it up, but disentangles himself to better concentrate on the “what”.

What Freud said about it

Freud, who was four years old when Schopenhauer died, denied having been at all influenced by him. But in 1914, he conceded: “What [Schopenhauer] says about the struggle against accepting a distressing piece of reality coincides with my concept of repression so completely that once again I owe the chance of making a discovery to my not being well read.”

Again, in 1925, Freud wrote: “I have carefully avoided any contact with philosophy proper. The large extent to which psychoanalysis coincides with the philosophy of Schopenhauer—not only did he assert the dominance of the emotions and the supreme importance of sexuality, but he was even aware of the mechanism of repression—is not to be traced to my acquaintance with his teaching. I read Schopenhauer very late in my life.”

If Freud is the father of psychoanalysis, Schopenhauer is the grandfather.