disappointed but not deterred. Though the official channels were closed, the secrecy of the Nobel Prize selection process was not impenetrable. With time and the energy of youth, I was able to glean references to Freud and the Nobel Prize from a large number of unofficial sources. These included the personal diaries of his nominators as well as the private and public correspondence of those who lobbied on Freud’s behalf. By my count, Freud had been proposed for the Nobel Prize in Medicine thirty-three separate times between the years 1915 and 1938, once achieving fourteen nominations in the year 1937. It was outrageous that Freud had been overlooked for a Nobel Prize on so many occasions. Yet, despite assertively contacting the Nobel Foundation again and again, I could elicit no explanation for this shameful state of affairs.
In 1974, however, the Swedish government’s introduction of new freedom of information legislation had an unintended consequence, one that would dramatically affect the outcome, and direction, of my enquiries. Recipients of the Nobel Prizes in Literature, Physics, Chemistry and the Economic Sciences were then, as now, decided by the Swedish Academy and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, both private institutions.fn1 In contrast, it was a publicly funded medical university – Sweden’s Karolinska Institute (Institutet, in Swedish) – that determined who received the Nobel Prize in Medicine. As the new legislation afforded access to documents retained in public institutions, the secrecy of the Karolinska Institute’s prize deliberations was now in jeopardy. The Karolinska Institute manoeuvred quickly. A new private body was created and tasked by the faculty of the Karolinska Institute to bestow its prize, thereby preserving the secrecy of its selection.
These crude shenanigans to circumvent freedom of information did not go unnoticed. The Swedish government immediately demanded that the secrecy surrounding the awarding of all the Nobel Prizes be lifted. After contentious negotiations, a key conciliatory revision within the statutes of the Nobel Foundation emerged as follows:
A prize-awarding body may, however, after due consideration in each individual case, permit access to material which formed the basis for the evaluation and decision concerning a prize, for purposes of research in intellectual history. Such permission may not, however, be granted until at least fifty years have elapsed after the date on which the decision in question was made.
I was delighted. With access to the Nobel Archives now available, I was determined to learn the real truth, sordid or otherwise, behind Freud’s lengthy series of disappointments.
After years of inadvertent delay for both professional and personal reasons,fn2 I at last arrived in Stockholm in the spring of 2013 to conduct my research. The twenty-nine-letter Swedish alphabet was an immediate and unexpected challenge; fortunately, undergraduate students from Stockholm University were available to translate documents at a reasonable ten Swedish kronor per page. The greater obstacle, however, lay with the quality of available records, which fell into four groupings: letters of nomination, reports on candidates, minutes of the working committees and minutes of the larger voting assemblies. It was the nature of the material in the latter two categories that was most limiting. Instead of unearthing detailed and candid discussions of the relative merits of Freud’s work as I had envisioned, only tallies of votes and final decisions were recorded.
I abandoned the effort altogether when an obliging student, aware of my interest, drew my attention to an obscure article by a Swedish psychiatrist, Dr Carl-Magnus Stolt, titled ‘Why Did Freud Never Receive the Nobel Prize?’ Stolt had already reviewed the relevant archival material, leaving no doubt as to either the priority or the thoroughness of his findings. In brief, Freud’s candidacy was based on those accomplishments one would expect to be cited: his courageous new insights concerning the unconscious, the significance of dreams, and the stages of infantile sexuality; his development of such novel concepts as the id, the ego, and the superego; and perhaps, most importantly, his introduction of psychoanalysis. As a number of his nominators stressed, Freud’s so-called ‘talking cure’ was the first effective treatment for a range of psychological disorders, including hysteria and the sexual perversions.
Yet Freud’s repeated rejections were not for the reasons I had suspected. Stolt found no indication that either anti-Semitism or the personal animosity of members on the Nobel Committee had undermined Freud’s chances. There was also no evidence that political considerations had constituted a factor, such as the fear that Freud’s selection in the 1930s might incite Nazi Germany. Instead, Freud’s work – at least as judged in the official documents – was viewed as too subjective for traditional scientific evaluation. In a cruel twist, one of the most damaging observations used against Freud was that he was also aggressively promoted for the Nobel Prize in Literature, once earning an official nomination from the French author and Nobel Laureate Romain Rolland. The flattering appraisal that Freud’s case studies lent themselves well to the conventions of fiction undermined any perception of Freud as an objective physician–scientist.
Figure 1. Sigmund Freud.
Disheartened, I considered other lines of investigation. As Freud had never encountered or written about Alfred Nobel (the man whose fortune was used after his death to finance the Nobel Prizes), I first distracted myself by reconstructing Nobel’s emotional life by way of Freud’s psychological principles. Once this small exercise was completed (see Appendix I), I then sought to clarify whether any psychiatrist had ever been awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. There were two: the first was Julius Wagner-Jauregg who, in 1927, earned the prize for his discovery that malaria inoculation could be effective in the treatment of neurosyphilis, at that time an incurable disease.fn3 The second psychiatrist-laureate was Eric R. Kandel, a co-winner in 2000 for delineating the physiological basis of neuronal memory. Neither of these individuals nor their respective areas of research were of particular interest. Nor were the brutal surgeries of António Egas Moniz, a Portuguese neurologist often incorrectly assumed to be a psychiatrist. Moniz won a 1949 Nobel Prize in Medicine for developing the now-discredited leucotomy (or ‘lobotomy’), a barbaric surgical procedure that he recklessly inflicted upon psychotic patients. Ironically, Moniz would have made a far more legitimate Nobel Laureate for his pioneering radiological investigations of the carotid arteries and other vasculature, work for which he also received Nobel nominations.fn4
For a period of time, I attempted to compile a list of Nobel Laureates who had been analysed by Freud. Although I failed to uncover any such individuals within Freud’s relatively small circle of patients, I had more success identifying those Nobelists treated within the wider psychoanalytic community. Saul Bellow, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976, was especially indebted to Freud’s disciples. Analysed by at least four well-known therapists, Bellow once shared his apartment with an Orgone Accumulator, a large zinc-lined rectangular crate roughly the size of a small outhouse. The contraption, invented by the controversial psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, ostensibly ‘accumulated’ orgone, an allegedly ubiquitous life force supposed essential for sexual vitality. Bellow was reported to have retreated into his Orgone Accumulator for hours, most often to read, but periodically to gag himself with a handkerchief and then unabashedly scream out for sexual release.
I was also aware, of course, of the profoundly disturbed nightmares of Wolfgang Pauli, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945. These so interested the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung that he published interpretations of four hundred of Pauli’s dreams and visions in what became the twelfth volume of Jung’s Collected Works.fn5 Jung and an apparently healthier Pauli subsequently collaborated on the subject of ‘synchronicity’: unrelated events that occurred together as ‘meaningful coincidences’. The resulting work was a completely mad fusion of quantum mechanics and parapsychology.
I was soon able to accumulate the names of more than forty other laureates who, like Bellow and Pauli, had benefited substantially from psychoanalysis. Again, however, I discontinued my enquiries, this time on re-examining my motives and recognising my real agenda: a childish means of highlighting Freud’s disgraceful oversight by the various Nobel Prize selection committees. In truth, it was more personal than that.