Paul Roazen wrote a truly important and highly underrated psychoanalytical story on the Tausk-Freud controversial relationship in the book "Brother Animal: The Story of Freud and Tausk", which explores Tausk - Freud's intellectual and personal interactions. For one, Tausk, the story ended in suicide, and for another, Freud, it seems unimportant. Also, the book illustrates the often unknown part of the beloved Father of Psychoanalysis. Part of his personality that was full of envy, destruction, self-consciousness, cruelty and ruthlessness.
Why Brother Animal?
Viktor Tausk was a struggling man in search of himself. He changed his profession thrice until he got to psychoanalysis and began his psychoanalytic training and medical studies.
For Tausk had courage; even after such a terrible collapse, he could pick himself up and decide to try something new. Out of this misery, he turned to Freud and psychoanalysis.[...] In Freud he sought to find all the guidance he had so sorely lacked. According to Tausk's youngest sister, he responded to an article of Freud's with a letter. Thinking Tausk was a medical doctor, Freud encouraged him to come to Vienna to study psychoanalysis. While Tausk's life improved vastly over the next few years, his past deep unhappiness explains how he could fear the collapse of the new existence he proceeded to build up. (p. 37)
Freud personally encouraged Tausk to join the psychoanalytical society. He sent him patients and even gave him money while Tausk was in a bad financial situation. A little did Tausk, and perhaps even Freud, know how this first hospital position would turn ten years later. Such an inviting attitude meant everything to Tausk, and for the moment, it seemed like he was, if not happy, then at least satisfied with his position in life.
Later, Lou Salmone entered his life, and their love affair began.
For she had actively set out to seduce Viktor Tausk, whom she ranked 'the most prominently outstanding' among Freus's students (p. 53).
She was the one who seemed to get Tausk's inner struggles, so that was her, who called him Brother Animal:
Yet from the very beginning I realized it was this very struggle in Tausk that most deeply moved me—the struggle of the human creature. Brother-animal. You. (p.65).
Lou Salome wrote about Viktor Tausk.
The Father-Son, and the buffer
During the Tausk-Lou affair in 1912-1913, the love triangle was established, which included the main player Sigmund Freud.
Tausk was certainly glad to play the role of the great man who was currently her lover. Just as Freud was jealous of Tausk's relation to Lou, so Tausk envied what Freud could mean to her. Lou could serve as a channel from Tausk to Freud, raising Tausk's importance in Freud's eyes. For both men she was a buffer. (p.55)
At that time, Freud and Tausk needed somebody like Lou to communicate. For one, she served as a reassuring friend who reported the harmless intentions of Tausk and with whom he shared his anxiety about the stubborn student:
Here lay the centre of Freud's difficulties with Tausk; and Freud's distress that Tausk might steal some of his ideas before he had quite finished with them also helps explain why Lou could be useful to Freud in keeping an eye on Tausk. Freud could be sure on whose side she would ultimately come down. He felt uncomfortable with someone like Tausk around, a man bright enough even to anticipate some of his own concepts. (p.62-63)
For another one, she listened, understood, accepted and cared. For Tausk, relationships with Freud were crucial, and he needed someone like Lou to explain them to Freud.
Freud could afford to brush Tausk aside completely. But for the Tausk, the whole conflict touched close to the centre of his being. Lou was sensitive enough to see it all from the perspective of Tausk's inner difficulties. (p.63)
The courage animal
After he completed his medical studies, he was forced to join the army as a psychiatrist. He often used his position and knowledge to defend deserters. I found this story very inspiring:
He intervened, for example, on behalf of a young boy who was to be court-martialled for failing to help shoot a whole group of enemy prisoners. Tausk saved his life by testifying that such a boy, raised with the highest standards of civilized life, could not be expected to assist in such an execution. (Years later, Tausk's younger son met this man, Fritz Weiss, in South America. He had Tausk's photograph on his wall and was full of gratitude.) Perhaps it was this sort of bravery that Freud referred to in Tausk's obituary: it was 'greatly to his honour that during the war he threw himself wholeheartedly, and with complete disregard of the consequences, into exposing the numerous abuses which so many doctors unfortunately tolerated in silence or for which they even shared the responsibility. (p.68)
Brother Animal in need of help
He came back to Vienna after War and was just another broken man. War intensified his pre-existing troubles and deepened the mental wound. He needed Freud at the time more than ever. Unfortunately, he didn't find much-needed support in this father figure. At the same time, Freud refused to take him into analysis or to refer to him patients who would be able to pay to give him some financial security. Instead, Freud referred Taus to Dr Helene Deutsch, an amateur in psychoanalysis. At the time, she was analyzed by Freud. Of course, it was Freud's statement of refusal and rejection, which could not be perceived otherwise.
Later, Freud took from Tausk even that minimum that he offered earlier by demanding from Dr Deutsch to stop analysis with Tausk only three months into it. And again, Freud and Tausk used Dr Helene Deutsch as the buffer to communicate with each other because she always talked about her new patient while on the Freud couch while Tausk talked to her entirely about Freud. In the end, that was the cause why Freud demanded she chooses between her therapy and her patient. Three months after his therapy stopped, he committed suicide.
Unprevented tragedy
There are some suicides which can not be interfered with, but one committed by Tausk was preventable. As Camu wrote in Myth of Sisyphus:
But one would have to know whether a friend of the desperate man had not that very day addressed him indifferently. He is the guilty one. For that is enough to precipitate all the rancors and all the boredom still in suspension.
I would argue against the strong word of 'guilt of the friend', but those close to the suffering Tausk should definitely acknowledge responsibility while he was asking for help and was so often rejected in the name of pride and envy. But in the end, it was his decision to take his life, and he wanted to be sure he would be gone the early morning of the 3rd of July, which could be seen in the manner he ended himself:
He wrote a will with a lengthy itemization of all his possessions, noting down even the smallest details. The huge inventory was all he had to establish his immortality.* In all that listing of his worldly goods, his decision stood. He also wrote and sealed two letters and left them on his desk, one to Hilde, the other to Freud. While completing this writing, he sipped Slivovitz, the Yugoslav national drink. Then he tied a curtain cord around his neck, put his army pistol to his right temple, and pulled the trigger. Here was a man utterly determined to put an end to his life. Besides blowing off part of his head, as he fell, he strangled himself. (p.122)
Tausk was a restless yet fully committed son to his father. To the father who could not stand even the potential superiority of another mind, especially one, he had raised himself. Tausk's suicide ended his potential, his potency. He could no longer fight Freud, his beloved teacher, and he needed his help to return to normal life, which Freud refused to help him with. Probably Freud felt relief after Tausk erased himself as the potential threat to the father of psychoanalysis. The latest seemed not to be upset about this tragedy, even the opposite:
I confess I do not really miss him; I had long taken him to be useless, indeed a threat to the future. I had a chance to cast a few glances into the substructure on which his proud sublimations rested, and would long since have dropped him had you not so boosted him in my esteem. (p.134-135)
Lou acknowledged seemingly emotionless letter Freud to her:
What you write - that basically, you do not miss him - seems to me not merely understandable; I too felt him to be a certain 'threat to the future' to you as also to the cause that consciously he championed with such enthusiasm and sincerity. (p.138)
To conclude
An excellent exercise everyone should practice occasionally is challenging the unchallengeable, like Sigmund Freund, whose contribution to psychology and culture should not be undermined. Paul Roazen was the courage to do so, and it's a great pleasure to read such work. Because at the end of the day, every idol is destructive, while realistic persons with their unperfectness are not. Thank you, Mr Paul Roazen.