Psychoanalysis: Creation, Evolution, and Survival

Louis Breger. Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000. viii + 472 pp. Ill. $30.00 (cloth, 0-471-31628-8), $18.95 (paperbound, 0-471-07858-1).

Charles B. Strozier. Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. xiii + 495 pp. Ill. $35.00 (0-374-16880-6).

James E. Goggin and Eileen Brockman Goggin. Death of a "Jewish Science": Psychoanalysis in the Third Reich. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2001. xvi + 242 pp. $32.95 (1-55753-193-5).

These three books include the best biography of Sigmund Freud; the first life-study of Heinz Kohut, a leading psychoanalyst with an independent turn; and a new study of what happened to psychoanalysis in Germany in Hitler's time, when Freud was passing from the psychoanalytic scene and Kohut had not yet arrived.

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Los Angeles psychoanalyst and professor emeritus Louis Breger joins an imposing list of writers beginning with Ernest Jones, whose hagiography established some Freudian myths (later reinforced by historian Peter Gay). Social scientist Paul Roazen brought a critical perspective based on rich data ignored by others; but he, like Gay, Frank Sulloway, and the late Ronald Clark, lacks Breger's clinical perspective. Breger presents Freud as an intellectually gifted but emotionally starved child whose later self-analysis never came to grips with the pain of maternal deprivation. As a result, Freudian developmental theory treats attachment as primarily sexual. For Freud, relationship dynamics follow instinctual attraction as modified by fear.

Freud spent his first three and a half years in a one-room apartment in Freiberg, and most of his subsequent childhood in small quarters in the Jewish ghetto of Vienna. The precocious little boy witnessed many distressing events, including the births and nursing of the seven babies born in his first ten years; deaths, illnesses, and his parents' reactions to their poverty and business failures. Exposure to all these disasters was no doubt far more disturbing than seeing his mother unclothed. In other words, Freud created his Oedipal theory because his traumatic losses aroused overwhelming emotions that were impossible to manage alone, in a self-analysis. By turning to the Oedipal story, he created a comforting myth, one that allowed him to think that what most disturbed him was his adultlike sexual desire for his mother, and also promoted his weak father to a position of power (p. 19).

While faulting Freud's analysis, Breger remains sympathetic to his subject. His approach to the how and why of the dominant psychology of a century is a wonderful survey for the nonspecialist that will enlighten the analytic coterie too. Among the book's many insights perhaps the most startling concerns the impact of World War I upon Freud. (Barbara Breger, the author's wife and close collaborator, was primary author of the chapter in question, and is also credited with contributions on the women's movement in Europe and on the treatment of war neuroses.) Initially Freud endorsed the war, viewing the reality of death as a necessary truth and stimulant to life. He failed to take into account the fear, degradation, and despair that marked the battlefields and, for long after, the survivors. Stunned by its devastation of life and aware that "the Great War, unlike previous wars, had undermined a whole system of beliefs about human nature and Western culture" (p. 244), he came to condemn it. Then he applied some psychoanalytic ideas to the debate about why it happened as it did, and what was to come. These efforts, if somewhat simplistic and naively hopeful, released a creative burst in Freud, including his paper "Mourning and Melancholia." The postwar world was ready for anything that might help restore health, stability, and sense, including psychoanalysis. Breger points out in conclusion that the process of psychoanalysis can be and often is helpful "quite separate from interpretations and insight. The psychoanalytic...