What is the Magic of Freud that sends his apologists, explicators, defenders and even his cadre of worshipers, to such dross? Here is George Prochnik in the TLS:
The first time Sigmund Freud wrote of destroying his papers he was twenty-one years old. He was writing to Eduard Silberstein, an intimate friend of his youth and the sole other member of the Academia Castellana, a make-believe Spanish literary society anchored in Cervantes trivia, which served them as a secret forum for airing playful fantasies and precocious world-weariness. Freud invited Silberstein to help expunge the record of their relations by conjuring up a pleasant winter evening in which they could come together to burn their archives “in a solemn auto-da-fé”. The next occasion was eight years later, in a letter to his then fiancée Martha Bernays, during what he described as a “bad, barren month”, waiting for money from a chemist to finance further research into cocaine, doing almost nothing except browsing through Russian history and toying with two rabbits who continually nibbled turnips and messed up his floor. His only real accomplishment, he told Martha then, was to have nearly completed his intention of doing something that would dismay various unborn, unfortunate people – namely his future biographers. He’d destroyed all his notes from the past fourteen years, along with correspondence and the original manuscripts of his scientific papers. In 1907, he once again burned a huge trove of private documents. Finally, in 1938, just before escaping Nazified Vienna, he delegated to his daughter Anna the task of overseeing another bonfire of his letters, which she undertook together with his disciple Marie Bonaparte.
The Reader is put directly within the early Freudian milieu, as recreated in Prochnik’s vivid evocation, across a lifetime? It’s like a bad movie, or a thriller, though not like Graham Greens ‘entertainments’, or even like Eric Ambler’s beautifully realized novels!
But Prochnik can’t quite emancipated himself from his status of acolyte/apologist, in a minor key, tending to the imperative of the care and the maintenance, of his would be Historical Sketch, as a kind of apologetic? Think of each paragraph as a entry in a loose-leaf notebook.
Freud has often been approached by biographers not only as a subject whose life merits fresh exposition owing to evolving perspectives on psychoanalysis, but also as someone who masked and elided key parts of his story. His distaste for the very premiss of the biographical project is on record. When his friend the novelist Arnold Zweig told Freud that he wanted to write his life story, Freud retorted that he felt far too affectionately toward Zweig to permit such a misstep. “Anyone who writes a biography is committed to lies, concealments, hypocrisy, flattery and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth does not exist, and if it did we could not use it.” Topping off the critique he announced, “Truth is unobtainable, mankind does not deserve it, and in any case is not our Prince Hamlet right when he asks who would escape whipping were he used after his desert”. In light of all Freud’s suppressive tactics and declarations, it seems fair to wonder what he was trying to keep under wraps.
In the last sentence Prochnik wonders of Freud’s motives. He offers this :
Freud’s standard biographers have typically fallen into two categories: those who believe his obfuscations are meant to cover up the fraudulence of his entire undertaking, and those who view Freud’s cloaked actions and emotions as either irrelevant or misunderstood features of his transcendent genius. Into this vexed arena comes Mortal Secrets, an accessible, fluent introduction to Freud’s life and work by the clinical psychologist and prolific author Frank Tallis. Tallis’s book moves crisply between biographical scenes, snapshots of Vienna’s golden age, retellings of Freud’s significant case histories, and well-crafted summaries of Freud’s principal theories. Interspersed throughout are brief discursions into Freud’s relevance to contemporary psychologists and neurologists, along with efforts to show how Freud’s ideas continue to reverberate through popular culture
But just rhetorical moments away lurks… I’ll place in italics the various attacks on the ‘Science of Psychoanalysis’ because Freud was its ‘inventor/practitioner’ over time. Yet a regular reader of its current partitioners, notices that they have completely eliminated that arcane Freudian vocabulary. ‘Freud bashers”, like Frederick Crews’ Crews laid waste to the cult of Freud in the pages of the New York Review Of Books.
And in his Freud biography
George Prochnik next paragraph features more … I’ll put in italics this collection with the comparison of Freud with Isaac Newton. In sum for Prochnik there is an enlightened position on Freud, balanced by a collection of acolytes, hero’s and scoundrels!
In contrast to both the “Freud bashers”, like Frederick Crews, and the dwindling tribe of dazzled, truculent hagiographers, Tallis aims for an even-handed portrait of his subject, and in large measure succeeds. The heat of the attacks on Freud’s legacy has cooled with the fading of his iconic status and the sheer passage of time. Tallis is thus able to acknowledge the justice of many specific critiques of Freud’s record – especially with respect to his problematic treatment of particular patients – without needing to suggest that these failures require us to jettison the entire Freudian project. “Dismissing Freud because of his shortcomings is like dismissing Sir Isaac Newton because he was a disagreeable misanthrope whose personal papers reveal a gullible fascination with alchemy and esotericism”, Tallis writes. Newton may not be the optimal analogue, since the scientific legitimacy of his core project is almost universally accepted, whereas the stature of psychoanalysis as an empirically verifiable scientific endeavour has been continually contested, but the general message is clear: when it comes to Freud’s contributions, our gains dramatically outweigh the deficiencies.
Reader there are 2377 more words: I offer this synopsis:
Editor: On ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Life’ : 113 words.
Editor: On the utterly preposterous the Oedipus complex: 504 words
Editor : On ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ : 34 words
Editor: On The Interpretation of Dreams’ : 363 words
Editor : Autobiographical Study: 178 words
The Reader confronts more of George Prochnik unimpressive attempt, at the marriage of Literary Pretention, and the moldering remains of Psychoanalyses!
Throughout his life, Freud famously suffered from acute anxiety about growing old and infirm, even going so far as to suggest that after the age of fifty psychoanalysis might no longer work since by then “the elasticity of the mental processes, on which treatment depends, is as a rule lacking”. Was that the secret he most longed to bury? Not some sensational personal escapade like the rumoured affair with his sister-in-law Minna, nor a shocking misrepresentation of a patient’s biography, but the skull hidden behind the defiant countenance in his photographs? This would mark the point at which what Freud describes as the psychologically determinative “instinct for knowledge” breaks down.
Whatever else, it appears that along with his Oedipal situation, Freud had a colossal Sphinx complex, and this remains unresolved.
Is there no end of the Freud Apologists and their project of historical revisionism, rehabilitation? Although Prof. Zaretsky offers Freud as ‘political’, that breaks new ground in Freudian Rehabilitation. But the Project remains the same. The chorus of respectable bourgeois apologists has grown since the reviews for Adam Phillips’ ‘Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst’. The ‘science’ of psychoanalysis, that once morphed into a metaphysic has once again been adapted to the needs of a political pragmatism, as the in order too of rescue from political/intellectual/moral irrelevance. Describe the journey from science to metaphysic to politics as a kind of map of the desperate acolytes. A sample of the reviews of the Phillips’ book:
Mr. William Geraldi’s review titled ‘Sigmund Freud, the Never-Ending Storyteller’ certainly takes first place in this collection of reviews of Mr. Phillips Freudian Revisionism: this review makes these astounding pronouncements on ‘psychoanalysis’ and the ‘ Freudian unconscious in particular’ was ‘was from the beginning a Jewish literary enterprise.’ Given this what can any reader make of the original Freudian claim of psychoanalysis as a ‘science’ and as Freud’s status as ‘physician’ ?
‘Phillips writes that “the modern individual Sigmund Freud would eventually describe was a person under continuous threat with little knowledge of what was really happening to him”—a Jew, in other words, as Freud himself admitted in The Resistances to Psychoanalysis. The paradoxes at the hub of Freud—the heaving dichotomies of life/death, sex/death, past/present, present/future, sickness/health—are human paradoxes, to be sure, but they are human paradoxes expertly manifest in Hebraic mythos. Phillips contends that “Freud’s work shows us … that nothing in our lives is self-evident, that not even the facts of our lives speak for themselves.” Consider how that assertion applies both to the Torah and to the indispensible modern Jewish writers, from Bruno Schulz and Franz Kafka to Primo Levi and Isaac Bashevis Singer, and you’ll begin to see how psychoanalysis in general and the Freudian unconscious in particular—that dark swamp of our minds—was from the beginning a Jewish literary enterprise.’
There is more:
‘In reference to every Freudian’s loving or bitter impulse to tackle the august founder, Bloom speaks of “the burden of the writing psychoanalyst, who is tempted to a battle he is doomed to lose,” meaning that Freud can be an oily, protean subject, whether approached from the logical, biographical, or pedagogical angle. The one angle not doomed to failure is the one that Peter Brooks takes in Psychoanalysis and Storytelling and that Adam Phillips emphasizes here (with no mention of Brooks): Freud the storyteller. Brooks calls psychoanalysis “not only narrative and linguistic but also oral, a praxis of narrative construction within a context of live storytelling.” Say what you will about the psycholinguistics of Jacques Lacan, but Freud and his theory have always been about language, the language of the self telling stories, “this new language for the heart and soul and conscience of modern people,” as Phillips phrases it.’
For the surprising literary antecedent to Freud’s ‘psychoanalytic project’, Cervantes’ Quixote, see ‘Freud’s Paranoid Quest, Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion by John C. Farrell, Chapter 6 ‘Freud as Quixote’:
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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