Sigmund Freud, still hailed as “the most famous and most controversial thinker of the 20th century,” published 20 books and more than 300 articles during his long lifetime. He also left extensive drafts, notes, diaries, and annotations in his vast library, ransomed from the Nazis by Princess Marie Bonaparte upon his forced relocation from Vienna to London in 1938, a year before he died.
Of the more than 20,000 letters Freud wrote, about half survive. The man has already been the subject of several dozen biographies. Indeed, as the French historian and psychoanalyst Élisabeth Roudinesco remarks: “Every moment of Freud’s life has been discussed and every line of his work interpreted in multiple ways.” There have been countless essays on “Freud and . . . religion, Freud and women, Freud the clinician, Freud the family man, Freud with his cigars, Freud and neurons, Freud and dogs . . . and so on.” And then, of course, there are the Freud-bashers, among whom still more versions can be found: “Freud the rapacious, Freud the organizer of a clinical gulag, the demoniacal, incestuous, lying, counterfeiting, fascist Freud.” As Roudinesco notes:
So why would we ever need another biography of Freud?
Precisely for the reason that Roudinesco wrote this brilliant new book: because Sigmund Freud, declared dead more times than anyone can count, is nevertheless very much alive. And despite the vast profusion of materials by and about him, or perhaps as a consequence of them, “we have great difficulty knowing who Freud really was, so thoroughly have the commentaries, fantasies, legends, and rumors masked the reality of this thinker, in his time and in ours.” The need is even more acute now that the Sigmund Freud Archive at the Library of Congress—with reams of correspondence, family documents, patients’ files, notebooks, photographs, school records, interviews, etc.—has finally, after almost 70 years of continuous collection, been opened fully to researchers.
Roudinesco, author of many previous works on psychoanalysis, has made extensive use of this huge trove, and Freud: In His Time and Ours is the culmination of her life’s work. No matter how much or how little you know of Freud, reading it is eye-opening and deeply satisfying.
Scrupulous and exhaustive in her use of every imaginable source, Roudinesco performs a huge public service by debunking dozens of errors, myths, caricatures, and rumors that have long circulated about Freud. And by truly situating his life within the philosophic systems and political currents that gave rise to his ideas, she avoids rehashing details already widely known about what he did at any particular moment. Instead, she explains why he wrote what he did at each point in his life. And instead of a timeline of events at the end, Roudinesco provides as complete a list of Freud’s patients as can be assembled from existing sources, as well as a family tree spanning five generations.
She seems to have read absolutely everything, published or unpublished—and in the rare instances where she did not directly consult a source, she states this openly. The Freud Archives, founded by the exiled psychoanalyst Kurt Eissler in New York in 1951, began as an effort to document the Viennese world from which Freud had been largely extracted by his official biographer, the canny Londoner Ernest Jones. During a 30-year period, Eissler obsessively sought out every letter, document, photograph, and interview created by or about Freud. He persuaded every analyst who had known Freud personally as well as most members of his extended family to contribute their own documents and testimonies.
Eissler then imposed hegemonic control over this entire archive, refusing access to professional historians and granting it only to those psychoanalysts who were members of the International Psychoanalytic Association. As the first biographer to have access to the full archive, Roudinesco is able to restore Freud to the world in which he actually lived.
And among her many ways of contextualizing Freud historically—in his culture, his family, among his intellectual friends and adversaries—Roudinesco also refreshingly includes, “as a counterpoint, the stories of selected patients, [who] led parallel lives that had nothing to do with the presentation of their ‘cases’ ” by psychoanalysts, and whose interpretations are of interest in their own right.
In beautifully evocative prose, she takes us into a “society in which women had no means other than the display of a suffering body to express their aspirations to freedom.” These women, diagnosed as “hysteric” and long dismissed as malingerers and manipulators, became, in the privacy of Freud’s office, “the major players in the construction of an approach based on listening: a practice focused on internal rather than external states. . . . Their existential distress allowed male scientists to develop a new theory of subjectivity.” In this new world, not only the doctor spoke: “Psychoanalysis restored speech to the subject,” writes Roudinesco, and understood “the patient, rather than the doctor, possessed the power to come to terms with mental suffering.”
Roudinesco takes clear positions on controversial issues, carefully assessing the evidence and picking her way through paths strewn with polemic and innuendo. For example, despite the many criticisms of Freud’s abandonment of the so-called seduction theory, she argues that he remained “the vigorous defender of suffering patients” against “the accusations of those who maintained that the confessions of hysterics were not trustworthy, or that they were induced by the doctors themselves.” By creating a theory that “accepted simultaneously the existence of fantasy and that of trauma,” Freud was insisting on the complexities of psychic life. Roudinesco plunges us back into the unconscious mind, where ambiguity and contradiction abound, and the yes-no answers of the courtroom—did this really happen in exactly this way?—cease being the only arbiter of what is experienced as true or not.
Freud’s elegantly crafted and provocative case histories gave “unusual, lively accounts of the everyday dramas of the private insanity dissimulated under the appearances of complete normality.” Awarded the Goethe Prize for Literature in 1930, he was “inventing a new origin narrative in which the modern subject was the hero not of a simple pathology but of a tragedy.” In each of his famous cases, Freud drew on Greek myth, anthropology, history, and literature, writing “with immense narrative talent, an account that could be read as a novel.”
Roudinesco demonstrates convincingly that despite Ernest Jones’s determined effort to remake Freud solely in the image of a scientist, he remained attracted to the occult, to mythology and legend—and of course, to dreams. He took cocaine, kept a journal of his dreams and symptoms, participated in moments of telepathy and table turning, and wrote a famous paper on
“the uncanny.”
He also worked 16-18 hours a day, adhered to strict mealtimes, and “always looked visitors straight in the eye, as if seeking to show that he never missed a thing.” Freud read or spoke eight modern and ancient languages, “had no patience for any form of negligence,” played cards with old friends on Saturday evenings, and had his beard trimmed by a barber every morning. He never saw the point of Surrealism, or the avant-garde, or Expressionism, and remained attached to “the world of yesterday,” as his friend Stefan Zweig called it.
Roudinesco admits that “like many founders, Freud chose to be a ferocious guardian of his own concepts and inventions,” and she is understandably impatient with the “senseless jousts” in which he and Carl Jung struggled to establish the superiority of their respective versions of analytic theory and method. “Each had his own way of wielding the instruments for exploring the psyche so as to make the other suffer,” she remarks, and it took the outbreak of World War I, when analysts in different countries could no longer meet together or correspond easily, to end the “ludicrous war” between Jung and Freud.
Later, when yet another world war threatened to destroy everything he had done, Freud stubbornly persisted in thinking that psychoanalysis could “remain ‘neutral’ in the face of all social change, and thus ‘apolitical.’ ” Roudinesco reveals the absurdity of his “blind conviction” that this approach could survive under Nazism and, in uncompromising terms, presents Jung’s and Jones’s collaboration with the Nazis, not by appealing to stereotype or veiled accusation, like so many others, but by quoting their actual words.
Freud never expected psychoanalysis to meet with much interest in America. After his only visit, to speak at the celebrated Clark University conference in Worcester in 1909, he confided to a friend: “My success will be brief. The Americans treat me the way a child treats a new doll: fun to play with, but soon to be replaced by another new toy.” Ironically, as Roudinesco notes:
She is excellent at identifying and critiquing Freud’s blind spots without vilifying him in a more general sense, allowing him to be a fallible person living in a historical moment, not a symbol. And she acknowledges his personal weaknesses without denying his intellectual courage: “Despite years of work on himself, Freud was as neurotic as ever,” she remarks of the man who, at age 61, continued to suffer from various physical and mental ills and avidly to smoke cigars, despite the first signs of what was later diagnosed as cancer of the mouth, the disease from which he would ultimately die after dozens of operations and years of disfigurement and suffering.
Refreshingly, Roudinesco restores some vivid examples of what appear to be Freud’s shocking departures from “correct” psychoanalytic practice—loaning money to his patients, analyzing his daughter—to the world in which they actually occurred. The many specifications and boundaries now considered the hallmark, indeed sometimes the caricature, of the psychoanalyst—remaining largely silent, taking a neutral stance, never giving advice—were only rarely practiced by Freud. His patients, especially in the early years before the field started to become institutionalized in the 1920s, came largely from the same bourgeois Jewish community in Vienna as he did. It was natural for a person he treated to refer his cousin or mistress or child; many people (then and now) go to doctors who have successfully helped someone they know. And psychoanalysis before the Second World War was an insular and incestuous field, where there was rarely more than a degree or two of separation between colleagues, lovers, patients, or friends.
Freud, who “adored rumors,” was “always inclined to intervene in the amorous adventures of his disciples,” and the early history of the field is filled with the picaresque consequences. The rules of psychoanalytic practice with which we are familiar today were invented by Freud’s colleagues in the first generation of analysts, intended not for them but for those who would follow in decades to come.
Throughout her book, Roudinesco engages in a lively dialogue with Freud and his work, and with dozens of other commentators, analysts, and historians. Respectful, except to those who make serious errors or simply repeat rumors, she is happy to accept the insights of others but still stakes out her own interpretations. In so doing, she gives us anew the man who did more than anyone else in the 20th century to shape our ways of understanding ourselves. No brain scan is ever going to destroy a belief in our own subjectivity. Love him, hate him, declare him dead yet again—Freud remains a force to be contended with.
As events in the world, and in our own country, make us wonder whether human life ever progresses to the point of being free of cruelty or violence, we would do well to remember Sigmund Freud. The absolute depravity of World War I, and its shocking erasure of any distinction between combatants and civilians, profoundly shaped his thinking. The simultaneous presence in every individual of the most evil and the most generous impulses makes society an inherent contradiction. Freud forces us to confront this deeply distressing fact, which is one reason we’ll never let him die.
Gail A. Hornstein, professor of psychology at Mount Holyoke, is the author of To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World: The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann.
