Spring Books (I)
The rise of a minor poet
H. J. Eysenck
Freud and His Followers Paul Roazen (Allen Lane £10.00) This book is difficult to review because certain value judgments are implied in any assessment. What Paul Roazen has tried to do is 'to give a many-sided portrait of Freud as a child, a hardworking student, a revolu- tionary in psychology, a wit, healer and inspiring teacher, husband and father.' It draws on several hundred interviews made by the author with over seventy people who knew Freud personally, and in addition Roazen had access to unreleased papers by Freud's authorised biographer, Ernest Jones. The study deals extensively not only with Freud himself, but also with the 'rebels' who broke away—Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, Carl Jung and Otto Rank ; the loyalists', such as Ernest Jones, Karl Abraham, Sandor Ferenczi and A. A. Brill; the women—Ruth Mack Brunswick, Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein, and Anna Freud; and the younger generation, such as Wil- helm Reich, Franz Alexander, Sandor Rado, Erik Erikson, and Erich Fromm. And 'this study gives not only a vivid picture of the host of thinkers surrounding and following Freud, but also a flesh and blood picture of Freud as a man that it would be impossible to find elsewhere.' So much for the blurb, and I suppose the claim is largely justified—if this is what you want, then this book clearly is indispensable. The value judgment comes in when you ask yourself whether a book of six hundred and thirteen pages, devoted to a system which is now in its death throes, is really worth producing and reading? We now know that the methods of therapy which Freud intro- duced are pretty useless, and may be actu- ally harmful; that his theories have received no support from empirical research; that his concepts have failed to find the scientific proof which is needed to keep them alive. Why then bother with another hagiographic volume introducing to us the poet as scientist and healer ?
For that is what Freud was—a poet, a teller of stories, a master of the fairy tale, greater than Hans Christian Andersen or the Grimm Brothers. The award to him of the Goethe Prize was entirely justified; he was a novelist of genius. But a scientist ? Freud himself knew better; Ernest Jones quotes him as saying of himself: 'I am no scientist.' And a healer? There is no evi- dence in existence which can be used to demonstrate that patients treated by psycho- analysis recover any quicker or better than do similar patients not treated at all by any psychiatric method known to mankind, but left to their own devices. Some experienced psychoanalysts have argued in despair that Freud's method of treatment may even make patients worse; this may well be so, although here also proof is difficult to attain. Roazen has no such reservations; to him Freud is still the romantic psychological revolutionary who reformed a science in his own image. To him none of the criticisms of psychoanalysis, which are now so wide- spread, exist; he seems to take it for granted that all the ancient and creaking notions of Oedipus complexes, dream interpretations, and the like have some assignable meaning, and that arguing about them, as did the 'rebels' and the 'loyalists', has any more meaning than arguing about how many mother figures can dance on the point of a penis. There is a distinctly mediaeval smell about this book, and about the whole Freudian opus; it is all about religious dogma, shibboleths, and inquisitions, ra- ther than about facts, results, and science. So much the worse for science, many people have said; for them, reading Freudian nov- els wins every time over trying to assimilate facts concerning Pavlovian conditioning, or trying to figure out the results of an analysis of covariance.
Freud himself, of course, realised towards the end of his life the uselessness of analysis as a method of treatment ; he thought that his method would be retained as a decisive way of investigating mental life, rather than as a therapeutic device. This seems very unlikely; the method stands and falls, in the opinion of most people, with the success of the therapy based on it. If that does not work (as we now know pretty well it does not), then few will retain interest in a theory which produced it. Many critics have con- cluded from their reading of Freud's theo- ries and of his life that he elaborated a theory of neurosis which was essentially a projection of his own neurotic traits; this view has much to commend it. Readers of this book who are familiar with Freud's theories will find ample material with which to support such an idea. If it is true (and I believe there is more to it than one might think initially), then surely we have here another example of writing being used as a cathartic instrument for ridding the psyche of anxiety and intolerable pain. But of all writers who have tried this method, Freud surely is the only one to have succeeded in bamboozling whole generations into taking his vapourings seriously, and building a whole pseudo-scientific edifice on them. Mythology no doubt still has its attraction for some, but it should not be taken for serious science, or therapy, or psychology.
My doubts about this book are simply related to its theme; is it worth while to amass so much detailed information about the unseemly squabbles about meaningless issues between a group of the oddest people who ever got together in one room? The answer is probably in the affirmative. Freud was no scientist, and the house that Freud built has completely disintegrated before our very eyes. Yet he was also very influ- ential, more in the role of prophet than that of scientist; he reflected, and in turn en- couraged, certain lines of thought and con- duct which have had a large (and I would think disastrous) influence on modern life. Perhaps a close study of his life will tell us something about how to detect in the future such pretentious prophets, and anticipate the evil that they may do. Some of his followers, like the egregious Dr Spock, have repented, but others still spout the original doctrine, like true religious acolytes. No wonder Freud saw himself as Moses, lead- ing the mass of his followers into the promised land.
Given that this is how we ought to see Freud, Roazen's book certainly illuminates his life and his interaction with the other members of his circle. Their oddities come out very clearly, as well as their weaknesses, their neuroses, and their inability to get on with one another. Perhaps the best way to look at them is in the light of a psycho- therapy group, in which a dozen or so neurotics try to talk themselves out of their neurosis, under the guidance (one hopes) of a psychiatrist; it does not work, of course, but it does give rise to much occasional hilarity. The many pictures which constitute a particularly strong feature of this book illuminate one's understanding, or seem to do so; they alone would make anyone interested in the Freudian movement want to own this book. Roazen writes well and interestingly; if only he were a little more critical, this could have been a masterpiece.
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