Appreciating Freud

Review of Lydia Flem, Freud the Man: An Intellectual Biography, Translated by Susan Fairfield. New York: Other Press, 2003. ISBN 1-59051-037-2, x1, 213 pages, $28.00.

Oddly, idiosyncratically intelligent, this book is not what it tells us it is. Indeed, it goes on to provoke repeated objections in its smaller statements as well. Yet it also defeats pedantic concern by its sensitive response to various facets of Freud’s grand and various being.

Making no effort to support its claims, Freud the Man is not an intellectual biography. I wonder if an editor imposed such a subtitle on a manuscript defying definition, which, furthermore, consorts oddly with the broad the Man before the specification. In any case the text makes no effort to establish and pursue the structure of intellectual biography, with its identification of ideas, their origins, development, and conclusions. The Man, moreover, is just barely a son, spouse, father, and world historical personality. He is the subject of a succession of pictorial slides, individually acute, exquisite, wrongheaded, and repetitive.

Consider the first three of the ten chapters teasingly headed “Creation Day by Day,” “Through the Train Window,” and “The Archeologist.” The first, sounding a number of themes, shows us Freud greeting one of his cherished objets d’art, pursuing “archaic history, link[ing] his archeological collection and his psychoanalytic approach,” receiving his patients transformed into the “tragic hero[es] Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, Dr. Faustus or the Witch,” lunching at one o’clock with wife and six children, writing to friends, and “dream[ing] of going to Italy at the end of summer.” This fine condensation sounds a number of themes which will be repeated throughout the book. The train window chapter travels through his Moravian past, his railway phobia, his dreaming of journeys, his “structural theory of the geography of ego, superego, and id,” and, again, archeology, which “presents us with a metaphor for the unconscious.” The third chapter, “The Archeologist,” develops the subject subtly, if repetitively, with notes on the “layers and stratifications in psychic material.” The other chapters operate similarly.

Rendered in English by a translator of comparable taste, these are expressions of an appreciation by a psychic and literary gourmet of the highest order. Yet too many statements are elliptical even to a knowledgeable person, claim too much, contradict themselves, or substitute sensibility for sense. Thus, “In his own eyes, Freud is not a therapist but a conqueror, an archaeologist, a detective of the human soul.” But is it not the essence of his works that he is at the same time therapist, conqueror, and all the rest? And why does Ms. Flem speculate on a time “when psychoanalytic treatment will have long disappeared?” She should, at least, argue the point. And why must she see an opposition between “scientific

Page 102

discourse” and psychoanalysis as “based on the particular, on language and emotion”? Surely the raison d’être of psychoanalysis is that though it is scientific it still must be felt. Contrariwise, Ms. Flem insists on seeing a profound similarity between Freud the archeologist (permit the repetition!) of private souls and the journalist and public man Theodor Herzl.

This is not the life of Freud “the Man.” It reads like an analysis, passing by vast areas not pressingly relevant to the cure, concentrating obsessively on others, quickly skirting others, or breaking off trains of thought when the hour is up. It is, however, a collection of fine insights, an appreciation to be appreciated.

Page 103