The Shy Superman

Sigmund Freud: Letters, 1873-1939. (Hogarth Press, 50s.) Freud and the Post-Freudians. By J. A. C. Brown. (Penguin Books, 3s. 6d.)

IT is difficult not to feel guilty reading through Freud's letters. He makes it so plain that he discourages public curiosity about his private

life; and yet, as Ernest Jones showed in his masterly biography, Freud's thought can be fully appreciated only in the context of his personal history. The selection of his letters which has been compiled by his son Ernst adds little to the biography in this respect; but it does convey vividly the character of this shy man.

The portrait which emerges is unflattering, but rings true, which is as Freud would have pre- ferred it: 'Wbat makes all autobiographies worthless is, after all, their mendacity.' In these letters he seldom indulges in self-analysis, although during the second half of his life he Practised it regularly. He is most revealing, as might be expected, in his letters to his future Wife. To her, as his confidence grew in the depth and assurance of her love, he was able to write of his discouragements, his hopes and disappoint- ments. Even to Martha Bernays he found it difficult to write about his (lin feelings. Years later, he wrote to Ernest Jones: 'It is not in my nature to give expression to my feelings of affec- tion, with the result that I often appear indif- ferent, but my, family knows better.'

He held a low estimate of his own intel- lectual endowment, regarding his achievements as due chiefly to persistence in a dogged pursuit of the truth; and he regretted the lack in his own Personality of 'that indefinite something which attracts people.' Freud recognised this quality in Others, among them C. G. Jung: 'I have in- variably found that something in my personality, Illy Words and ideas, strikes people as alien, Whereas to you all hearts are open.'

Partly, no doubt, this was an aspect of his character which could be traced back to his earliest years; but it could not fail to be re- inforced by the society in which he lived : a soeiety in which to be a Jew was always a handl- Fat) and might at any time expose one to sudden nominating outbursts of abuse. Freud described nne such incident in a letter to Martha Bernays, an altercation in a German train in which he challenged an offensive passenger to a fight. Here, as in his long letter about the events leading to the suicide of his young colleague, Nathan Weiss, Preud appears to forget himself and in so doing to display a vivid narrative gift. Usually, how-

ever, his style is deliberate and studied : one feels that he read his letters over to himself. His

OW n very extensive reading, which obtrudes repeatedly in quotations, may have conspired with his self-criticism to inhibit the naturalness of his writing.

He read widely in English and at an early age recognised a kindred spirit in John Stuart Mill: 'Very possibly he, was the man of the century Tost capable of freeing himself from the domina- hon of the usual prejudices. As a result—and this always goes hand in hand--he lacked the sense of the absurd.' The identification was far J°°1 ng exact; in the same letter he went on disagree vigorously with Mill abotit the

emancipation of women. On this point, at least as a young fiancé, Freud shared the usual preju- dices: 'the position of women cannot be other than it is, to be an adored sweetheart in youth and a beloved wife in maturity.' Nor was he lack-

ing in a sense of the absurd; there is a frequent quiet irony in his letters and on one occasion at least he wrote extremely entertainingly. This was in a letter to his family from Rome, in which he described a farcical performance of Carmen with a prima donna who 'looked a little like those English ladies sent abroad to scare the public.'

There is, however, a rather cold sobriety about most of these letters. They were written by a man who could command respect more readily than affection, and they are pervaded by a life- long bias toward a rather gloomy stoicism. This is shown not only in his self-criticism, but in his outlook on the world el cannot be an optimist and I believe I differ from the pessimists only in so far as wicked, stupid, senseless things don't upset me because I have accepted them from the beginning as part of what the world is composed of'), and on mankind CI can't help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless').

Among the most moving of these letters .are the ones written at the two extremes of his long career. As a young doctor, struggling to gain a foothold in Vienna, he knew the indignities and petty calculations of real penury. His fiancée shared his hopes that each new research project —the method for staining sections of the brain, the experiments with cocaine—might bring him recognition and a little money; but they 'had a long and anxious wait before his fortunes turned. Freud was twenty-nine when he achieved his first material success, with the award of a travel- ling grant to Paris. He wrote at once to Martha : 'I am quite unspeakably happy . . . just cannot get used to the idea that I am lucky too.'

It is strange, in the light of his ultimate achieve- ment, to read of him as a young man trying desperately to .catch his teacher's eye, writing excitedly to Martha whenever he feels he has 'made an impression' among his fellow-students at the Salpetriere or at Charcot's salon. Freud was curiouslYSiow in arriving at his real vocation. ,In his earlyttyears he showed no interest in 'psychiatry; he 'admitted a keener desire to study zoology than: medicine, and immersed himself for some years in research in physiology and neuro-anatoniy. At first he was frankly ambitious, eager to make a name for himself, but after some setbacks he resigned himself to being the pos- sessor of a very modest talent. Even when he

• began his true life-work, with his analysis of dreams, he had anxious periods in which he be- lieved he was mistaken and had bungled his career: it was only gradually that he became convinced of the lasting importance of his psychological discoveries. From then on, he tenaciously defended his ideas, giving little heed to his own success or notoriety.

Freud put so much of himself into his work

that there seemed little left for his private life. Certainly these personal letters convey very little sense of his peculiar genius—indeed of his being a genius at all. One consequence of his repeated self-deprecation is that the reader begins to find himself persuaded by it: he presents himself as a worthy, hard-working man who finally suc- ceeds in making a modest living as a psycho- therapist—and who might have turned his hand equally industriously to any other branch of his profession. He certainly differs from most psycho therapists in showing a rather refreshing lack of therapeutic enthusiasm; his passionate desire was to understand the processes underlying neurotic illness. The chief interest of therapy lay in its verification of the aetiological theories which he advanced.

The letters of the last two decades of his life are coloured by our knowledge of the physical suffering which he had to endure. He comments on his illness stoically, and never with self-pity, although toward the end he once admitted in a letter to Ernst: 'I am beginning to find life pretty inconvenient.' During these years his references to Anna, his brilliant and devoted daughter ('rny faithful Antigone') become numer- ous. It was a source of peculiar satisfaction to him that she was able not only to nurse him during his illness but to contribute in her own right to the advancement of psychoanalytic • thinking.

In his last years the rise of Nazism and the inhuman persecution of the Jews could only serve to confirm Freud's bleak assessment of his fellow-men. He faced these evil times reso- lutely, as he had met so many previous vicissi- tudes; one can imagine him reading his Horace, whom he liked to quote, and recognising t is similar in the lines which end : 'ab insolet ti temperatant lactitia, moriture Delli.' His final letters describe the escape to England with most of his family—four of his elderly sisters 'remained behind and were killed by the Nazis. Arriving 'n London in 1938, Freud was moved by the warmth of his reception. He found 'a blessed, a happy country inhabited by well-meaning, hospitable people,' a country in which letters addressed to 'Dr. Freud, London,' were delivered correctly and where a taxi-driver bringing Anna home exclaimed on seeing the number of the house: 'Oh, it's Dr. Freud's place.' All his life Freud had fought shy of personal honours; his ambi- tions were only for the advancement of what was sound in his scientific discoveries, but at this moment at least he lowered his guard and recog- nised that he was admired and made welcome not only as a thinker, but as a man.

Freud the man has gone, but the movement which he founded has taken root in Britain and America, and has proliferated into a number of contending. Schools. In' the reStilting confusion, it is difficult for a non-analyst to disentangle the basic contributions of Freud and the different emphases of his successors. Here J. A. C. Brown's new guide; Freud and. the POst-Freudians, serves like Ariadne's thread to lead us through the labyrinth. With 'a lively, personal and at times provocative approach, Dr. Brown h: s marshalled the material compactly into a stimu- lating and up-toclate review, which shows that Freud's frequently expressed hope has been realised at least in part. The series of psych( logical discoveries which he began has been enriched by able successors, and if psychoanalysis has not yet been fully accepted as a science, its teachings have permeated most branches of con- temporary temporary thought.

MORRIS CARSTAIR