A giant with certain weaknesses
Frances Partridge
FREUD: A LIFE FOR OUR TIME by Peter Gay
J. M. Dent, £16.95, pp. 810
The hero of this impressive and ex- tremely interesting biography is not so much a man as a mind — an exceptional mind, fuelled with the desire to press ahead and follow wherever its findings took it, to draw conclusions and leap forward again to further discoveries. This gives the book an unusual fascination, and causes the reader to turn the pages with bated breath, as if following the hazardous adventures of an explorer, or perhaps a first-rate thriller. But Professor Gay has in no way skimped his portrait of the man to whom the mind belonged. Quite the re- verse — he has brought every aspect of Sigmund Freud to life for us: the brilliant boy, the jealous young lover, the devotee of Goethe, Shakespeare and Cervantes, the family man, the genial host and amus- ing companion. We even visualise his bourgeois surroundings in the solid com- fort of Berggasse 19, Vienna, with its plush armchairs and framed photographs, and the clutter of Egyptian or Greek objects which he loved to collect, and used to handle as he sat listening in his consulting- room.
Hitherto there has only been one reput- able life in English — that by Ernest Jones, published in the Fifties, a readable but uncritical account. Professor Gay is an American with a distinguished career as a cultural historian. He is obviously a Freud- ian but also a lucid and stylish writer with a balanced and detached viewpoint, who has researched his subject with enormous thor- oughness, and whose self-confessed aim is 'neither to flatter nor to denounce but to understand' — in other words he does not treat the body of Freud's theory as reli- gious dogma. He has tapped a good many new sources, but the ban on the letters to his fiancée still remains unbroken. The outline of Freud's life is fairly well-known, beginning with the brilliant student 'greedy for knowledge', who moved from physiolo- gy to nervous diseases, was dazzled by Charcot's use of hypnosis, and co-operated with Breuer in his work on hysteria. His rapid rise from frustrating poverty to a private practice at the age of 32 enabled him to marry Martha Bernays, a devoted wife much his intellectual inferior, who was later to declare that 'in the 53 years of marriage there was not a single angry word between us'. He was never personally obsessed by sex, as the ignorant sometimes suggest, nor was he the lover of clever, plain Minna, Martha's sister, any more than of Lou Andreas-Salornd. Lou was, however, one of the most important women in his life, the others being his daughter Anna and Princess Marie Bona- parte. Among his male friendships was one in which he himself detected a strain of crypto-homosexuality — with Dr Wilhelm Fliess, who is now regarded as a cranky and unworthy recipient of Freud's most fascinating revelations, particularly those describing his theory that hysteria was the result of seduction by a father-figure in early childhood, and his later amendment that many such 'remembered' scenes turned out to be fantasies. These repre- sented a crucial stage in the etiology of the neuroses: it would be interesting to know whether or not they influenced the doctors involved in the recent cases in Cleveland.
Now came the most productive period of Freud's mental development, including The Interpretation of Dreams and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (which Gay describes as 'a little book as tightly packed as a hand-grenade, and as explo- sive'.) Freud was now shooting out stimu- lating ideas like a Roman candle — 'wish- fulfilment', 'the day's residues', 'composite figures', `dream-symbols', 'the resistance', and all the while continuing to analyse patients, write detailed case histories and lecture to his pupils, who regarded him as 'a giant among men' — a giant with certain human weaknesses, no doubt, who was taken in by Fliess, who could not stop his addiction to cigars even when he equated it with masturbation, and who believed (with Mr Looney) that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare! But a giant nonetheless who was one of the most original thinkers of the last hundred years, who remained a stead- fast determinist and atheist all his life, and whom Gay describes as the 'heir to the 18th-century Enlightenment'. The profes- sor's summaries and elucidations of Freud's works, including the case histories, are dazzling, and only a little less enjoyable than the books themselves; for anyone who is not allergic to the whole subject must surely be enthralled by the stories of Little Hans (a five-year-old with a phobia of horses) or the obsessional Rat Man, while the Interpretation of Dreams and Psycho- pathology of Everyday Life show the ele- gance and wit of Freud's intellectual pro- cesses at their best.
I must here admit that having been alotted the job of indexing the 24 volumes of the Standard Edition (a gruelling task which I do not at all regret) I can at least boast of having read them all; with the result that I am amazed to find how un-shocking the ideas therein now seem, and how they have seeped in among the basic assumptions today accepted by most humane and liberal-minded people, and even got as far as The Nursery World. For instance, though a supporter of marriage, Freud advocated 'an incomparably freer sex-life' particularly for the young and single, and thought it 'showed great injus- tice and cruelty to persecute homosexuals'.
Followers from all countries flocked to his side, but it was one thing to be a lone thinker plotting his own course, quite another to be the leader of a movement. Again Peter Gay rises to the occasion with a mini-biography of every disciple, and vivid descriptions of the dramas and defec- tions that rocked the psychoanalytical boat. The quarrel with Jung has aroused much interest and partisanship. Freud's favourite pupil, loved as a son and chosen as 'Crown Prince' of the movement, Jung had a potent effect on Freud, including making him faint dead away on several occasions. The other members describe him as 'large and dominating', 'brimming over with vitality, laughter and torrential eloquence', and preoccupied by occult and esoteric subjects. According to Lou Andreas-Salomd, after the break his 'booming laughter' gave way to 'aggres- siveness, ambition and mental brutality', while Gay 'comments on 'the rage, the sheer ferocity' pervading Jung's last letters to Freud.
When he was 67, the first of many operations revealed that Freud had cancer of the jaw. He was forced to wear an uncomfortable prosthesis and suffered a lot of pain, but the urge to speculate never left him, and he preserved his clarity of mind by taking the minimum of pain-killers. In much of this later writing he applied his theories to art, prehistory and civilisa- tion. Forty-eight years ago the old prophet wrote: 'Will Civilisation be able to contain the human drive for aggression and des- truction? Modern technology has put man's very survival at risk.' It seems that he had reached the watershed of his powers, yet one of his last books, The Ego and the Id, is also the most difficult to understand. The family remained in Vien- na until 1938, when Sigmund expressed a desire to 'die in freedom'. Ernest Jones arranged for them to move to England, where Freud received a warm welcome which touched him greatly. The end makes moving reading. Weak and in constant pain, he still used his remarkable mind and showed flashes of sardonic humour, being unvaryingly courteous to those who came to pay him homage. When visited by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, his English publishers, they commented: 'He was not only a genius but an extraordinarily nice man with an unforgettable presence.' His old friend Yvette Guilbert came to see him in May 1939, leaving a photograph signed 'De tout mon coeur au grand Freud.' On 22 September he died 'with dignity and with- out self-pity, stoical to the last.'
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