Young Dr. Freud

THE LIFE AND WORK OF SIGMUND FREUD: VOL. I. (428 pp.)--Ernest Jones--Basic Books ($6.75).

The late famed Sigmund Freud was a 28-year-old nobody when he wrote to his fiancee: "I have just carried out one resolution which one group of people . . . will feel acutely . . . my biographers. I have destroyed all my diaries . . . Let the biographers chafe; we won't make it too easy for them. Let each one believe he is right in his 'Conception of the Development of the Hero': even now I enjoy the thought of how they will all go astray."

It is Biographer Ernest Jones's earnest hope that this "interesting fantasy" may "prove to have been exaggerated," and his hope is justified. When young Freud poked precocious fun at his biographers, he had not so much as glimpsed the theory that was to revolutionize much of 20th century thinking. It had not occurred to young Dr. Freud that 13 years later (1897) he would discover psychoanalysis by psychoanalyzing himself, and that this self-analysis would force him to resurrect memories and facts of greater importance than those he destroyed at 28. Nor could he imagine that a day would come when his fantasy of greatness would have turned so real that he would stand in need of a friendly, well-informed biographer.

Britain's Dr. Ernest Jones is just the right man for the job. For years he was one of Freud's closest friends (TIME, Aug. 10), and the Freud family has turned over to him a trove of unpublished letters and confidential information. The present volume is only the first of a projected three, but it is enough to suggest that the completed work will be a masterpiece of contemporary biography.

Psychologist Jones describes his task as "dauntingly stupendous." What makes it so, apart from the mass of research involved, is the special relation between Hero Freud and Biographer Jones. As analyst, Disciple Jones has to analyze the master of analysis. As biographer he must try to be objective about a man toward whom he has every reason to be subjective. Anyone who lacked Jones's imperturbable patience and sense of humor would collapse into hysterical symptoms at the thought of such a business.

Feeling of a Conqueror. Looking into Freud's childhood is like looking at psychoanalysis studying its reflection in a mirror. All the principal Freudian units are, quite "unconsciously," making their first grand march through the streets of Wonderland--with lusty Private Libido (infantile sexuality) beating his big drum, and General Repression sternly rebuking Major Oedipus (for jealousy of father coupled with excessive love of mother). And yet an air of medieval superstition mingles with this up-to-date atmosphere. Sigmund was "born in a caul," i.e., with part of his prenatal envelope still swaddling him, and an old woman, straight out of folklore, turned up to assure the proud mother that she had brought "a great man into the world." A wandering poet confidently predicted that the "little blackamoor" (as mother Freud called her jet-haired "Sigi") would "probably become a [cabinet] minister."

The little boy found encouragement in these stimulation factors. But he found far more (as psychoanalysts see it) in being breast-fed by a doting mother. "A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother," he wrote, "keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success."

But there were complications. Freud was the eldest son, but of his father's second marriage; he was thus born uncle to nieces and nephews older than himself --"one of the many paradoxes his young mind had to grapple with." Like other firstborns, he suffered the pain of having to share his mother with "intruders" (younger brothers and sisters). Author Jones has a lot of tricky unraveling to do for this tangled period, and comes out at the end with a neat ball of womb-symbols, erotic fantasies and thwarted infantile greed. Of this last, "traces . . . remained in [Freud's] later life in the form of slightly undue anxiety about catching trains." This is perhaps an understatement: Freud liked to be on the platform a good hour before the symbolic breast, pulled out.

Men & Crayfish. Father Jakob Freud was a just and kindly wool merchant, but his principal weakness, woolgathering, kept the growing family poor. In 1859, when Sigmund was three, father Jakob abandoned his son's birthplace, the Moravian town of Freiburg, and went after better business first in Leipzig and then Vienna. Freud so hated this uprooting that he detested Vienna ever after. To travel, to leave Vienna behind, became a lifelong passion. But one of the greatest love-hate paradoxes in Freud's life is that while regularly railing at Vienna, he stuck closely to it. For 47 years he lived in the same Viennese house; and when Briton Jones arrived to take him away, on the day after the Nazi invasion of Austria, Freud dug in his heels for a moment. "This is my post and I can never leave it," he said.

At an early age he went in search of "power over men." So, says Jones, does every human being. Like other boys, Freud dreamed first of being a mighty general, switched (at twelve) to dreams of legal and "ministerial" fame. Only at 17, influenced perhaps by the anti-Semitic barriers to Habsburg politics, did he decide that "the ultimate secret of power was not force but understanding," and that understanding, in turn, must begin with the study of the nature of man. Warned by his father's example, he suppressed his natural love of "speculative rumination," and entered (1873) the "exact" science of medicine.

"My life," he said much later, "has been aimed at one goal only: to infer or to guess how the mental apparatus is constructed and what forces interplay and counteract in it." But he began, like any other laboratory neurology student of his day, by dissecting the spines of eels and the nerve fibers of crayfish.

Black-Eyed Martha. Twenty years of work made Freud "a first-class neurologist, a hard worker, a close thinker." But he showed no signs of imaginative genius. This was partly because of his determination to discipline his fanciful mind, but largely because in 1882 he fell madly in love and felt he could not get married until he had built up a solid reputation.

Before he met his bride, Martha Bernays, Dr. Freud seems to have had little interest in women. He channeled all his energy into his work--which is what Dr. Jones means when he describes Freud's young manhood as one of "extensive sublimations resulting from considerable repression." But black-eyed Martha loosed the repressions. In the four years of their engagement, Freud wrote her more than 900 impassioned letters, which Jones is "privileged to have been the only person" to examine.

The letters, Jones thinks, are "a not unworthy contribution to the great love literature of the world." Written in a style often "reminiscent of Goethe," they combine "exquisite tenderness . . . range of vocabulary . . . wealth of allusion.'' They are also a fascinating guide to the man behind the neurologist: from them emerges suddenly a tough, jealous, ferocious figure, resembling a young Napoleon.

Freud refused to let Martha meet her previous boy friends. "Woe to him if he becomes my enemy," he growled of one of them. "I am made of harder stuff than he is . . . I can be ruthless." He ordered her to stop the practices of religion (orthodox Judaism), to "change her fondness for being on good terms with everybody," to realize that henceforth she belonged only to Freud and must invariably take his side. He rebuked her for having gone "aside to pull up your stockings" while they were taking a walk, and refused her permission to ice-skate ("It might necessitate being arm-in-arm with another man"). When she met his domineering demands with amiable tact, Freud became enraged. Martha must learn, he insisted, that "sparing each other can only lead to estrangement." Every disagreement must be probed, dissected and fought out to the bitter end.

Cocaine & Catharsis. Martha put up with all this because she knew that Sigi was madly in love with her, and that he was one of those men who cannot express their love until they have first released a spate of anger and mistrust. She also knew that he was an ambitious man fighting desperately against poverty and putting aside every penny to be able to marry her. His high-strung state at this time is shown by a clinical anecdote. Expecting a visit from Martha, Freud found that when he laid his stethoscope on a patient's heart, he could hear "nothing but the rushing of a railway train."

A more serious symptom of Freud's condition was his sudden passion for cocaine. "The essential constituent of coca leaves" had only recently been introduced into Europe, and young Freud went crazy over the "magical drug." Convinced that it was harmless, he gave it to his patients (one of whom died), pressed it on all his friends (including Martha), and himself took "very small doses of it regularly against depression and . . . indigestion." He wrote a paper describing "the most gorgeous excitement" it aroused in animals, and exulted in the "virility" it aroused in him. "Woe to you, my Princess, when I come," he wrote Martha. "I will kiss you quite red . . . And if you are froward, you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body."

Biographer Jones believes that, far from realizing that he was "rapidly becoming a public menace," Freud merely thought of his fondness for cocaine as a sort of hobby. But when cases of cocaine poisoning and addiction began to pour in, Freud's hobby made him the center of a scandal. His colleagues were further scandalized when, under the influence of France's Charcot, Freud became an ardent supporter of hypnotism.

This was the turning point into "pure" psychology. In partnership with Dr. Josef Breuer (1842-1925), Freud published the case histories of five victims of hysteria--the most notable of which was the "Case of Anna O." Breuer had discovered that Anna tended to lose her symptoms if she were allowed to talk about them; Anna herself coined the happy phrase "chimney sweeping" to describe such therapy, and thus led the way to the idea of psychological "catharsis."

Object of Horror. Comedy took matters a stage further. Dr. Breuer became so fascinated by Anna's hysteria that Mrs. Breuer grew madly jealous. So Breuer stopped seeing Anna, who promptly flew into "the throes of an hysterical childbirth, the logical termination of a phantom pregnancy that had been invisibly developing in response to Breuer's ministrations."

Breuer fled "in a cold sweat" of shocked horror. But Colleague Freud remained, his mind suddenly stirred by the idea of a "sexual chemistry" at work in neuroses and of "catharsis" as the answer to it. He installed a couch in his consulting room, stretched his patients upon it, and urged them to sweep their chimneys. Sometimes he hypnotized them, sometimes encouraged them to be frank by asking gentle questions. But one day a patient "reproved him for interrupting her flow of thought," and Freud "took the hint." Another Freudian law, that of "free association" on the patient's part and silence on the doctor's, came into being.*

Jones traces clearly the successive steps taken by Freud from this simple beginning to the full-dress appearance of psychoanalysis in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). He tells vividly of Freud's decision to psychoanalyze himself--the results of which have been the basic pattern of analytical treatment ever since. As this first volume ends, he leaves Freud at the turn of the new century, his theory half-complete but already an object of horror to all respectable neurologists of the day.

Harsh Young Man. Biographer Jones lives up to his promise not to present "an idealized portrait" of his late master. The portrait he paints is of a harsh, opinionated young man, tormented for nearly 35 years by poverty but prepared promptly to sacrifice a hard-earned medical reputation to an audacious theory. Freud was quarrelsome, prone to tantrums when crossed. Once, opposed in an argument by Carl Jung, he fell on the floor in a dead faint. Far from being a "calm scientist," he deliberately sought out the extremes of love and hate. Observing that all the men he respected had "a characteristic manner," he made a mannerism of his "native tendency to uprightness and honesty"--and threw it in the face of the world to take or leave.

It would be too much to expect Dr. Jones to be as objective about Freud's beliefs as he is about Freud's personality. To Jones, psychoanalysis is not a theory which may sooner or later be displaced by some other theory; it is an eternal truth which may grow bigger and better but will never be disproved.

Biographer Jones believes that Freud was the first man ever to "know himself," the first to examine depths whose "inner resistance" had baffled all others "from Solon to Montaigne, from Juvenal to Schopenhauer." But stout partisanship in no way dulls the brilliance of Jones's biography, any more than it did in the case of James Boswell's celebrated admiration for Samuel Johnson.

* Dr. Jones's own unbreakable silence during chimney sweeping has given rise to the hyperbolical legend that his patients hear him speak only twice: "How do you do?" at the first meeting, "Goodbye" at the last.

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