The Great Destroyer

By * Brad Darrach

THE PASSIONS OF THE MIND by Irving Stone. 808 pages. Doubleday. $10.

Dr. Sigmund Freud was not the luckiest of men. After making the century's biggest breakthrough in the direction of mental health, he was denounced for his pains as "a sexual maniac" and "the Antichrist." Later his leading disciples deserted him. Then at the height of his fame he was hit by an incurable cancer and died without witnessing the full impact of his ideas. Though only 32 years have passed since his death, that impact now seems largely spent, and Freud himself sometimes appears little more than a joke saint of pop cult. Many of his ideas have been openly repudiated by the new humanistic psychologies, and some recently published evidence indicates that the apostle of emotional honesty carried on a tatty affair with his wife's younger sister. What Freud could use right now is a major revaluation by a responsible and generous biographer. No such luck. He has fallen into the hot little hands of Irving Stone.

Stone is the taxidermist of biography. He peels the surface off his famous subjects (Michelangelo, Van Goah, Mary Todd Lincoln) and stuffs them with gobs of unsorted data, pulpy dialogue and icky emotionalism. Not all fact yet hardly worth calling fiction, Stone's books have the intellectual value of slightly organized debris, but they sell. Lust for Life (1934) moved some 2 million copies in cloth and paperback. Approaching 3 million, The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961) is still going strong. The Passions of the Mind, released early to most booksellers, had sold 125,000 before its official publicaton date.

Eight hundred pages long and two inches thick, the book is an imposing object that should find many uses. It could serve, for instance, as a booster seat for Junior, a wheel chock for the family car, a dead weight that could instantly sink a prosperous 68-year-old author into the East River. Just don't try to read the thing. It isn't easy to transform one of the great creative adventures of human history into a load of bull, but Stone has turned the trick. The only fun his book provides is the chance to watch how he does it.

Stone's main mistake is non-selectivity. He spent five years in research, and seems more interested in the facts than he is in Freud. Even menus are printed in full, and at one point the story stands still while the author describes 37 of Freud's colleagues. Anal is the Freudian word for this sort of heap making, but Stone is unembarrassed and apparently unaware that the details have effaced the drama of Freud's life.

Where, for instance, is the veering frenzy of Freud's early years, the huge ambition thrusting out of old shtetl terrors and the hidden struggle with a Jewish mother who called him "mein goldener Sigi" till the day she died? As Stone presents him, the young Freud is just another nice, bright Jewish boy, "my son the doctor," and his long and lust-tormented engagement to Martha Bernays is a Victorian idyl of sweet reason and unspattered upholstery.

Sigi: Oh Martha, I love you so dearly.

Martha: I love you too, Sigi.

Sigi: What a day to be alive in Vienna!

Martha: What a day to be alive anywhere!

Only at the very end of their engagement does Sigi dare a leer.

Martha: Suppose we take a turn in the garden?

Sigi: What is on your lovely chest?

Stone also fails to convey the quivering nerve of Freud's first great challenge to Vienna's medical establishment --his flat declaration that hvsteria is a psychological and not a physical disease. Later on, Stone's hero greets every new discovery with the thunderstruck but essentially frivolous enthusiasm of a man who has just found a pearl in his oyster. In real life, Freud more often than not stumbled upon his great ideas as a man lost in the desert stumbles upon an oasis and, falling on his face, drinks for dear life. Stone occasionally mentions one or another of his hero's symptoms: indigestion, colitis, cardiac arrhythmia, migraine, fainting fits, massive compulsive cigar smoking, morbid distrust of close colleagues. But he fails to derive and dramatize the obvious diagnosis: Freud's passion to cure his culture was finally a drive to heal himself.

Lacking also in Stone's treatment is the least reference to Freud's affair with Martha's sister, Minna Bernays, or to his mysterious summers in Italy. Now really, Irving. Why put a fig leaf on the man who put fig leaves out of fashion? What's more, not a line in the book hints at Freud's battering effect on Western society in the '20s, when his vision burst like a Mongol horde upon a world still cluttered with Victorian mental furniture, and Jung hailed him as the "great destroyer." Not a line delineates Freud's painful limits as a psychologist: the 19th century prejudice that led him to identify mind with brain, the provincial and tiresomely condescending attitude toward women. Not a line conveys the greatness of this 126-lb. son of a small-time wool trader who fainted at the thought of death but stood up to the fury of a civilization for the sake of what he considered a great truth.

Freud once described himself in a sentence borrowed from Friedrich Hebbel: "He disturbed the sleep of the world." Stone, alas, has encapsuled him in a 2 Ib. 7 oz. sleeping pill.

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