Sigmund Freud, the Never-Ending Storyteller

With Sigmund Freud, there are always two ways to begin. Here’s the first: Sigmund Freud was the genius of the twentieth century, without whom we would not know ourselves as intimately as we do. And here’s the second: Sigmund Freud was a colossal fraud who ruined innumerable lives. Freud long ago became a messiah to some and a pernicious phony to others. But no matter your stance, it’s difficult to deny the insistent reasons we’re still squabbling about this man, nor is it easy to dismiss the reality that Freud’s ideas had a torsional influence on nearly every element of twentieth-century thought. Modernity just doesn’t seem possible without him.

Once you study Freud deeply, once you comprehend and internalize his severe storytelling, his literary antiscience of the mind, it’s impossible to see your own childhood, or your own children, the same way again. It’s because of Freud that millions who’ve never read a word of Sophocles feel perfectly at ease telling you all about Oedipus, and never mind if they usually don’t know what they’re saying, if they get the Theban King all wrong, as Freud himself seems to have done. Attic tragedy can’t be psychoanalytical or Freudian because it cares nothing for sexuality, because unlike our childhoods and our psyches, tragedy is a heroic collision of the accidental and the ordained. Freud fixed on the Oedipus myth because it’s a perfect detective story, and what’s psychoanalysis but two detectives—the analyst and the analysand—attempting to solve the baffling crimes of the unconscious?

Adam Phillips’s new study, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, is an effective breviary and defense of Sigmund Freud, and not because it dazzles with a tightrope act of theory, but because it simply and directly underscores Freud’s tremendous accomplishments of comprehension. It also sugarcoats or ignores altogether Freud’s immense flaws and the toxic harm he caused to actual lives, but we’ll come to that. Where many write about Freud as if he were either der Übermensch or its opposite, Phillips does a fine job of humanizing this cerebral behemoth, of spotlighting the importance of Freud’s wife and children. The Freuds had six children in eight years at just about the time Freud was beginning to formulate the catacomb credos that would become psychoanalysis. It’s unlikely that psychoanalysis would have come into being at all if the Freuds hadn’t been exposed daily to the wail and tumult of a diapers-and-bottles domesticity.

Nor would psychoanalysis have happened if its founder hadn’t been a self-conscious Jew ever vigilant of the role of Jewish history in Europe. Along with Christ, Karl Marx, and Albert Einstein, Freud is one-fourth of the Jews of literal and intellectual revolution, the quartet who made the planet quake. Borrowing from a brigade of top scholars who have examined the nexus between psychoanalysis and Freud’s conception of his own Jewishness—including Harold Bloom, Peter Gay, and Philip Rieff, each of whom goes unmentioned in this connection—Phillips rightly believes that European Jewish history helped make Freud possible, because however else we’d like to describe psychoanalysis, it is foremost a Jewish reading of the psyche in the world, an outsider’s psycho-emotional apprehension for other outsiders. Freud was nervous, though not unduly, about his theories being tagged “Jewish” because he understood that the tag was normally wielded in the snaky lisp of the anti-Semite.

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...