The Wolf Man's Burden (review)

The historiographic literature about Freud has been abundant, even in the face of an increasingly positivistic atmosphere that has been hostile to the sides of psychoanalysis that qualify as mental or "spiritual." Books of Freud's letters, all of which sell poorly, still continue to be published, and in the end his various correspondences will overshadow in length the Standard Edition of his collected psychological works edited by James Strachey. But medicine has been turning back to the early-twentieth-century interest in classification and heredity, now that the insurance companies demand justification for therapeutic recommendations that turn out to be largely pharmacological. In a context in which the humanistic core of Freud's achievement threatens to be lost, it should be a real concern how it is going to be possible to justify further research on the history of psychoanalysis.

The Wolf Man's Burden comes with an advance blurb heralding its "admirable and nimble mastery of contemporary deconstructive discourse." If one were to suppose that the invocation of work emanating from Parisian intellectuals would help rescue the embattled cause of humanism, Lawrence Johnson's book would be evidence to convince fair-minded readers that the case is a weak one, and that the influence of Jacques Derrida and others has been largely baneful. The pretentiousness of the dedication to The Wolf Man's Burden turns out to be a tip-off to the quality of the book itself:

This book is dedicated to the memory of those who have been lost, and will continue to be lost, as an index of the fragile mortality of those of us yet surviving. (Without which life, and writing, would be senseless.)

This is such a poor book that it is difficult to resist the invitation to be cruel. The author proposes that the key to Freud's life, and the way to understand his most famous clinical case history, is the death of a brother of Freud's when he was two years old. Abraham and Torok, French analysts upon whom Johnson relies, had once proposed that the magic solution to understanding Freud was the boyhood arrest of his uncle. But I think this sort of naive trauma-hunting can only give Freud studies a bad name.

There are many weaknesses here. Johnson tells us, for example (p. 86), that the editors of the first version of the Freud-Fliess correspondence were Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey, when the truth is that they were the translators—the editors being instead Ernst Kris, Anna Freud, and Marie Bonaparte. And it is slipshod for him to refer to the one-volume abridgment of Ernest Jones's official biography of Freud, instead of to the full three-volume original text. Jones, by the way, did not ever live in America (p. 119), but rather Canada. The old myth that Alfred Adler constituted a "defection" (p. 106) gets recycled. It is a recent legend that Jung accused Freud of having an affair with his sister-in-law Minna (p. 119), while the truth is that he was merely alleging Freud's emotional involvement with her. Let the reader decide what to do with the proposition on page 67 that "the cancer of the mouth to which Freud succumbed in his later life may well be related to this need to keep the mouth full with a death."

The Wolf Man's Burden was a hard book for me to read. It is full of what I consider wild speculations about Freud's life. The proposition that the Wolf Man was any "rival to Freud" (p. 142) appears to me implausible. Lawrence Johnson can help bring Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as other of France's fashionable cultivated thinkers, into disrepute; by the standards of the old-fashioned history of ideas, they appear here to look like...