Books
Freud and anti-Freud
Hans Keller
Karl Kraus and the Soul-Doctors: A Pioneer Critic and his Criticism of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis Thomas Szasz (Routledge & Kegan Paul £6.95) When the common intellectual reader dislikes a thinker, he accuses him of repeating — Freud ever since The Interpretat"M of Dreams, Szasz ever since The Myth of Mental Illness. When the common intellectual likes a thinker, however, he blames him fornot repeating himself —for developing his views far beyopil what the reader had come to cherish. The idiot. lias a point, of course, both ways. If Freud had died after The Interpretation of Dreams, the job he alone could do would have been done; yet, What he discovered later dated the dream book. If Szasz had died after The Myth, the job would have been done, but the crusader against crusades, especially creeping crusades, against 'the ostensibly, valueneutral languages of the "sciences" ', would never have fully emerged. This attempt to. . . deny valuation is, for obvious reasons, especially important and dangerous in psychology, psychiatry, PsYehoanalysis, and the so-called social sciences. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that the specialised languages of these disciplines serve virtually no other purpose than to conceal valuation behind an ostensibly scientific and therefore nonvaluational semantic screen.' This book's 'noble rhetorician' is Kraus, the unerring critic of concealed linguistic devaluation; its 'base rhetorician' is Freud, the practitioner of the craft: the whiteand-black story develops as simply as that, like a Western —of which Szasz may well be his fond, if I know anything about his naivety, whose devastating charm is Proportionate to the intellectual intensity behind it, and its ethical integrity too. Matters moral, however, are not as simple as that —even though Szasz is right in intimating that they are simpler than the commem intellectual's obscurantism would Make them appear. He does not, for !ri.stance, succeed in rehabilitating Kraus's — r,tle baptised Jew's — attitude towards the le.wish problem, which was marked by what 1.have called 'group self-contempt' — a conanion I have observed in all groups Persecuted or degraded by a surrounding group in authority, such as women, Jews, and prostitutes. Nor does Szasz as much as
ention, by way of contrast, Freud's excepo‘v tional and exemplary refusal to 'solve' his
n Jewish problem — to leave the Jewish r eligion in order to get himself an ordinary Professorship, even though, Philosophically, he had left his faith far behind.
In trying to establish an ethical polarity between Kraus and Freud, Szasz overrates Kraus the artist as generously as he gravely underestimates Freud the discoverer. But in the two central purposes of his book, he succeeds with his characteristic independence of thought and observation. For one thing, that is, he destroys the psychoanalytic myth about the Freud—Kraus relationship, while for another, he establishes Kraus as a penetrating critic of the psychiatric and psychoanalytic devaluation of ultimate human values — or, to pinch psychoanalysis's own magic term, of 'reality'. In this respect, the book is as modest as it is assertive: 'It's all been said before me,' is the implied reminder. The biblical psychoanalytic version of why Kraus turned against Freud and psychoanalysis, and Freud against Kraus ('who stands at the very bottom of my ladder of esteem'), is nothing short of scandalous: the most psychotic religious misrepresentations of history have nothing on it. It is all supposed to have been due to a paper which Fritz Wittels read to a meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on 12 January 1910, and which psychoanalysed Kraus out of existence. 'Freud found it clever and just, but urged special discretion in the study of living persons .. (Why dead persons can, ethically and legally, be slandered or libelled has never been clear to me.) The paper is said to have produced Kraus's negative attitude to psychoanalysis — which in its turn is supposed to have aroused Freud's just wrath. Szasz, however, shows that Kraus's criticism of psychoanalysis was well articu lated by 1908 — two years before Wittels's psycho-assassination of him; that Freud turned against Kraus as a jilted lover, in that 'the fifty-year-old Freud, on the brink of being world-famous, was courting the thirty-two-year-old Kraus, who rejected him; and that the apostle responsible for the myth was the Freud biographer Ernest Jones, 'that great falsifier of the history of psychoanalysis'. The lonely Freud's unhappy courtships seem to be altogether ignored by Holy Scripture and exegesis, because they don't fit the image of the saint. I am writing this review in Israel, whose intellectual society — at least in the circles in which I move — is psychoanalytically orientated. But it is Two selections from Karl Kraus have recently been published in English: In These Great Times (essays), and Half Truths and One-and-a-half Truths (aphorisms). Both books are edited by Harry Zohn, and are available from the Engendra Press, 4277 Esplanade, Montreal. Zionistically orientated too, and I learnt from an Israeli (ex-French) psychiatrist and psychoanalyst that although Freud and Theodor Herzl (the author of The Jewish State and the father of Israel) lived in the same street in Vienna (Berggasse), a few houses apart, they never properly met. Freud sent Herzl a copy of The Interpretation of Dreams, but elicited no response, and all that subsequently happened was a brief chance conversation in a tram. As my wife put it, Freud was interested in the interpretation of dreams, Herzl in their realisation; 'If you want it, it's no fairy tale' is a sentence of his which is famous here.
As for the reasons why Kraus, originally sympathetic, turned against Freud and psychoanalysis, they can be succinctly summarised by two aphoristic observations of his which Szasz is so enthusiastic about that he quotes each twice over, once in his text, and again in Part II of the book, which consists of selections from Kraus's writings: 'Nerve doctors who pathologise genius should have their heads bashed in with the collected works of the genius.'
But this is a truly inspired one: Thave done nothing more than show that there is a distinction between an urn and a chamber pot, and that it is this distinction above all that provides culture with elbow room. The others, those who fail to make this distinction, are divided into those who use the urn as chamber pot and those who use the chamber pot as urn.'
Szasz's comment is of equally inspired simplicity: 'Typically, the psychoanalyst insists that the urns of those he dislikes are really chamber pots, and that the chamber pots of those he likes are really urns; since his hatreds far outweigh his loves, he tends to change most urns into chamber pots.'
In a concluding summary, Szasz submits that 'more than any other person, the true artist is, of course, the supporter, interpreter, and mediator of dignity. This is why a great work of art can no more be undignified than a triangle can have four sides. A great work of science or technology can be undignified.' In his fight for human dignity, at once noble and fanatical, Szasz even goes so far as to make, earlier on in the book, 'the reality of evil' subtend 'the beauty of religion, faith, and spiritual resignation': never has an irreligious thinker shown comparable respect for 'world-views he himself has' good reason to reject,
The trouble is that the Westerner won't solve the story — that Freud was not only greater as a discoverer than Kraus was as an artist, but, in my view, greater as an artist too. Szasz accepts a critic's verdict that Kraus's style is 'the most brilliant in modern
German literature,' but compared to the style of Freud, the recipient of the Goethe prize for Literature in 1930, it well nigh vanishes into insignificance. Freud's style could not have been beautiful without being dignified and indeed truthful; that, at the same time, he 'pointed the way to the theory and practice of psychoanalytic character assassination' is a fact which Szasz demonstrates with unyielding logic. Do read him.
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