Nobel committees gave Freud the cold shoulder
His name was put forward 12 times for a Medicine Prize
Sigmund Freud, a man of letters or the mind? Neither, according to the Nobel committees, which not only gave the father of psychoanalysis the cold shoulder but even criticised his work.
Nominated for the Nobel Medicine Prize for the first time in 1915 by US neurologist William Alanson White, Freud went on to be nominated for a Nobel a total of 13 times until 1938, one year before his death in London.
Freud’s name was put forward 12 times for a Medicine Prize and once for a Literature Prize.
In 1937, no fewer than 14 prominent scientists, including several Nobel laureates, backed the nomination of the Austrian doctor. But their support was in vain. Very early on, Freud “understood that he could never win a Nobel science prize. Psychoanalysis was already under attack as not being a science. He was hurt,” Elisabeth Roudinesco, the author of the biography Freud, In his Time and Ours, told AFP.
In 1929, professor Henry Marcus of the Karolinska Institute, home to the Nobel medicine committee, cruelly summed up the scientific community’s mistrust of Freud’s doctrine:
“Freud’s entire psychoanalytic theory, as it appears to us today, is largely based on a hypothesis”, with no scientific proof that a neurosis can be traced back to the existence of a childhood sexual trauma — if a trauma even existed, he wrote in a document unearthed by Swedish academic Nils Wiklund in 2006.
Faced with the Nobel science committees’ lack of interest in him, Freud’s close friend and translator Princess Marie Bonaparte of France tried to round up support for a Nobel Literature Prize instead.
On January 20, 1936, Romain Rolland, the French novelist, wrote to the Swedish Academy to propose Freud’s name.
Per Hallstrom, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy at the time, did not mince his words about Freud’s nomination:
“When it comes to the presentation of his theories, it is easy to note the acuity, the fluidity and the clarity of his dialectic. He unquestionably also has a very good and natural literary style,” he wrote.
Freud, he concluded, “should not be awarded any poet laurels, no matter how poetic he has been as a scientist”.
Eighty years later, Odd Zsiedrich, the Academy’s administrative director, is a bit more diplomatic: “The competition was very stiff” in 1936, he said of a year in which American playwright Eugene O’Neill got the nod.