BOOKS

Freud's Jungle Book

Colin Welch

READING FREUD by Peter Gay What eminent man shared what eccentric view with Lord Palmerston, Hen- ry James, Mark Twain and Bismarck — a group not notably cranky? The view was that Shakespeare, the supposedly ill- educated son of supposedly illiterate par- ents, could not have written Shakespeare. The eminent man was Freud.

It was Richard Strauss, I think, who subtitled his genial late-flowering sym- phony for wind instruments `chippings from a happy workshop'. Professor Gay might have used much the same words for this present collection. He wrote a magisterial life of Freud and various other works in which Freud made a memorable appearance. And now here are all the fascinating little odds and ends which wouldn't quite fit in or turned up a bit late or called for further thought and investiga- tion. Professor Gay's actual subtitle for them is 'Explorations and Entertainments', and exploratory and highly entertaining indeed they are. They mostly reveal Freud from odd angles, at ease or lolling in a dressing gown with a book and a cigar. They reveal his odd habits, hobbies, pre- occupations, quirks and crotchets, some endearing, some amusing, some harmlessly unworthy, some mystifying.

We explore, for instance, that late con- viction of Freud's that Shakespeare, whom he adored in English as in German, was written not by the ignorant petty bourgeois actor but by 'the nobly born and exquisite- ly cultivated, passionately dissolute, some- what déclassé aristocrat', the 17th Earl of Oxford.

He certainly didn't carry all his disciples along with him into these bizarre fields. A pupil intermittently analysed by Freud had misgivings. The arrival of the Earl of Oxford was pretty well for him the 13th stroke of the clock, which cast doubt on all that had gone before. If Freud believed `anyone else wrote Shapespeare's plays', he averred, 'I would not have any confi- dence in his judgment and could not go on with my analysis' — though he did. James Strachey, Freud's principal English trans- lator, was appalled by a passage in which Freud identified one John Thomas Looney as the thinker who had converted him to the Earl of Oxford theory. Strachey ex- plained that Looney's 'unfortunate name' would have a bad effect on the 'average English reader' (it can't, indeed, have helped much in his career as a schoolmas- ter). Freud, however, was unimpressed by this 'cheap shot', as Gay rather sniffily calls it, though he did attach great importance to names and the act of naming, as this book later makes clear.

Yale University Press, f16.96, pp. 240

Ernest Jones drily commented that `something in Freud's mentality led him to take a special interest in people not being what they seemed to be'. Indeed: wasn't it his métier, or the foundation of it? Apart from Shakespeare, Moses too had to be for him someone other than he seemed — an Egyptian, in fact, to the scandal alike of piety and scholarship.

Was Freud himself as he seemed? We think of him as a giant intellectual revolu- tionary. How much of him shown here is conventionally or even exaggeratedly bourgeois? He was proud of his bourgeois family, though he 'the paterfamilias' travelled fastidiously first class by train while they travelled third. A Jew, never denying the fact, he yet insisted on giving them all non-Jewish names. A mystery: the names of his daughters, Mathilde, Sophie and Anna, are declared by Gay `to support the view that Jewishness meant something to him'. Why so? They are not Jewish names. No woman's libber, Freud more or less forced his wife, a believer, to join him in that blank atheism which seems to me particularly odd in one so fascinated by the dark mysteries and irrational impulses which infest the heart of man. The weirder man is seen to be, surely, the less likely that he can be explained, as Freud sought to, in purely mechanistic and determinist terms. Irrationality, which Freud recog- nised, is not the child of reason.

Freud was addicted to Jewish jokes, and analysed them too. Several are quoted here, mostly funny. Two Eastern Euro- pean Jews run into one another near a bath house. One asks, 'have you taken a bath?'

`Why, is one missing?' To Gay these pleasantries are 'crude caricatures', aggres- sive and tendentious, 'feeble efforts', re- vealing 'a measure of barely concealed hostility' against Eastern European Jews, supposed 'strangers to comb, soap and refined manners'. Well, as Gay admits, Freud's culture was overrun with such jokes and, moreover, the Holocaust had not then made sniggering into a crime or revealed the horror behind the chuckle.

Freud once named for a publisher, not the ten greatest books he'd read, but the ten most congenial to him, friendly and enjoyable. It was an astonishingly con- servative and unpretentious list. Missing were Ibsen, Shaw, Wilde and Strindberg, though we know he'd read them. Missing too were Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud and Verlaine. Included were such cosy favourites as Kipling's Jungle Book, Gott- fried Keller, Macaulay (!) and Mark Twain. One of Zola's worst books was included, presumably because its spicy subject matter interested him.

A clue here to Freud's relationship with the arts (music he did not care for). He was prodigiously well read and cultivated, but what he valued in the arts was not primari- ly form or beauty but meaning, above all what a work of art told him about its creator. He regarded all serious literature as Goethe regarded his own work - fragments of a great confession. I may indeed be unfit to review fiction, as a hack has declared. I suspect that Freud, for all his gifts, was even less fit. He didn't seem even to recognise the existence of fiction in any worthwhile sense. It was for him all fact, not 'historical' fact, perhaps, but a record of the author's real discontents, translated into literature. He utterly ignored or mistrusted the independent productive power of the creative imagina- tion.

Modest and limited, too, seemed his revolutionary purpose and programme. He firmly told an American that he was interested in only one reform — a drastic loosening of restrictions on sexual conduct — and no other. Neither Marx nor Lenin was so humble-seeming, though to be sure the subversion of all conventional sexual morality is no small matter. A good bourgeois Freud may have been but, as Gay wittily puts it, he was making explo- sives in his drawing or, better, consulting room.

Attractively modest too at first glance is Freud's inability or refusal to expect suc- cess. 'Therapeutic optimism', the peddling of infallible psychological curses, confid- ence that a wholly rational self would emerge from treatment — such fantasies had no place in Freud's psychology, dourly free of illusions in these respects. Doubts, however, arise. To expect nothing is, as Arland Ussher once said, to be dis- appointed twice. Moreover, don't we right- ly expect a certain 'therapeutic optimism' of, say, a surgeon? Don't we expect him to tell us with some confidence that we will be better off without this limb or that organ? From a psychoanalyst who is a therapeu- tic pessimist we might well flee, as did Dora, one of Freud's most conspicuous failures. To launch on a lengthy course of treatment without overmuch certainty or even hope is not really a mark of modesty.

Successful analysis will, according to Gay, shake the shackles from the patient's wrists. But the analyst 'cannot and does not wish to dictate (to the patient) how to use his hand'. Does this not seem a shade irresponsible, like the idealist who releases all the prisoners from Strangeways or a criminal lunatic asylum, without thought of all the evil consequences which may ensue?

Freud, according to Gay, brought `appalling news about human nature', un- covered in us all monstrous lusts and murderous desires. Treatment from him can have been no picnic. As a disciple put it, 'to look at the Medusa's head is no parlour game'. We are to be confronted with all these horrors, not with any secure hope of cure or exorcism, but at the behest of a therapeutic pessimist who, again with modesty more apparent than real, bade his followers eschew all moral teaching and not act as 'models of maturity to be imitated by their adorers [sic] on the couch'. How can we help asking `cui bono?', what's the good of it all? And from Professor Eysenck we get an answer — a sceptical shrug or wink.

Freudians are fond of the word 'slavery'. Neurosis is for them slavery; infancy and childhood are slavery no less. One might go the whole hog and call life itself slavery. From all these slaveries Freud sought to liberate us. But there is no free lunch. There is a price to pay for manumission. Non-Freudians may ask, is it to submit to another slavery, to confess with despair one's own inability to solve one's prob- lems, to sink into dependence on another mortal, to subside into solipsism and self- absorption, to sacrifice self-respect and individuality, to become another of the `adorers on the couch'?

With respect to Freud, the most 'appal- ling news' he could bring me, did I believe it, would be that I needed his services. I would be more ashamed thereby than by any belatedly revealed desire to murder my own father or make love to my mother. To ask God's help seems to me less humili- ating.