The Secret Artist: A Close Reading of Sigmund Freud. By Lesley Chamberlain. Quartet. 339pp, £12.50 in UK
Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision. By Louis Breger. Wiley. 472pp, £19.99 in UK
The Interpretation of Dreams: A new translation by Joyce Crick. By Sigmund Freud. OUP. 458pp, £20 in UK
By now we are all Freudians, whether we like it or not. And in the past decade or so, many have decided they do not like it at all. If you have been away with the Foreign Legion or were lately rescued from a desert island, you may not be aware of the Freud Wars which have been raging since the 1980s. The stakes are high, especially in America, where battle was first joined, and where more than a quarter of a million registered psychoanalysts are fighting not only for their convictions but for their livelihoods too. The matter at issue is simple, though momentous: was Freud a great innovative thinker and scientist, a healer who forced mankind to acknowledge its darkest secrets and thus liberate itself or, on the contrary, was he a monstrous charlatan "quite lacking in the empirical and ethical scruples that we would hope to find in any responsible scientist", a "saturnine self-dramatizer who defies us to see through his bravado and provides us with tantalizing autobiographical clues for doing so", a thoroughgoing cynic suffering from "the nihilism of a disillusioned revolutionary who had deemed the species not worth saving after all"?
These three quotations are from The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute (1995), which collects two long, fiercely critical essays on Freud written for the New York Review of Books by Frederick Crews, along with responses to the pieces from a number of analysts, critics and patients. Crews, former chair of the English department at the University of California at Berkeley, was for many years a convinced Freudian, and wrote some brilliant literary criticism illuminated by the light of Freud's theories. In the 1990s, however, he underwent a Damascene conversion, and is today one of the most virulent opponents of Freud and his teachings. Hell hath no fury like a disciple turned apostate. His argument in The Memory Wars is, inter alia, that Freud "has been the most overrated figure in the entire history of science and medicine - one who wrought immense harm through the propagation of false etiologies, mistaken diagnoses, and fruitless lines of inquiry", and that psychoanalysis in America - and, one assumes, elsewhere as well - had become discredited, and its practitioners demoralised, until it and they were saved by the phenomenon of "recovered memory". The theory, highly controversial, is that many psychological illnesses are due to unconsciously repressed experiences of childhood sexual abuse. It grew in the 1980s and early 1990s "from virtual non-existence to epidemic frequency", so that now, of America's quarter million psychotherapists, more than 50,000, according to statistics quoted by Crews, are willing to help their clients realise that they must have suffered early abuse. "Those professionals have been joined," Crews observes, "by countless untrained operators who use the yellow pages and flea market ads [and now, one assumes, the Internet] to solicit `incest work'." These are serious matters. But was Freud himself a serious medical practitioner, never mind a scientist? One of the charges against Freud brought by Crews - who posits a figure "darker but far more interesting than the canonical one" - is that, far from being the man of science he longed and pretended to be, he was at bottom a visionary but endlessly calculating artist, engaged in casting himself as the hero of a multi-volume fictional opus that is part epic, part detective story, and part satire on human self-interestedness and animality.
Although Lesley Chamberlain - journalist, scholar, linguist, and author most recently of Nietzsche in Turin, a superb and moving meditation on the philosopher's last months of sanity - is dismissive of most of Crews's onslaught on Freud's reputation, considering it vulgar and hysterical, she would concur with the characterisation of him as a "secret artist", as is indicated by the title of her fine and subtle study of Freud the creative writer. On the first page of her introduction she lays out her thesis:
By artist I mean not just the common claim that Freud is a good writer. Art demands a different order of talent, one which is creative and transformative, and brings with it a vision of possible imaginative structures which the artist also goes some way towards realizing. Stylishness is only an adjunct to this more fundamental business. I argue that Freud is fundamentally an artist, but that the artistic expression of his desires and fears is repressed.
Chamberlain takes Freud's real enterprise to be autobiographical. All his books, from The Interpretation of Dreams right through to late works such as Civilisation and Its Discontents, form not so much what Crews sees as a "multi-volume fictional opus", but a poetically charged account of Freud's own self in all its obsessiveness, ambition, insecurity, rage and, of course, genius. "The interests of science," Chamberlain writes, "gave him the justification for near-perfect control over what should become known about himself publicly, while at the same time the theories he invented allowed him to . . . create or produce something out of himself." Chamberlain clearly recognises Freud's covertly expressed "antagonism towards the received authority of high art and the respectability of its practitioners". That is, he would like, he would dearly love, to be himself a great artist - Chamberlain, stooping to a little vulgarity herself, calls his response to art "pen envy" - but knows that he has not the genius for it, or, more prosaically, that he has not the linguistic mastery for it, and therefore must devalue the achievements of others. The envy is never assuaged. In The Interpretation of Dreams, which Freud always considered his finest and most characteristic work, he sets out the stories of his dreams and his Sherlock Holmesian unravelling of their clues as artistically organised narratives, all the while claiming that what he is engaged in is in reality a scientific enterprise: thus he is allowed to mimic art, without having to compete directly as art.
There is detectable everywhere in Freud's writing the furious resentment - albeit strictly controlled - of the failed artist. On the few occasions when, as in the case of Leonardo, for instance, he directly considers the psyche of a maker of great art, he as good as confesses his bafflement in the face of the mystery of creativity. Really, he does not know how the trick is worked. Lesley Chamberlain aptly quotes the critic Lionel Trilling:
. . . it must seem to a literary man that Freud sees literature [read: art in general] not from within but from without . . . He is always outside the process. Much as he responds to the product, he does not really imagine the process. He does not have what we call the feel for the thing.
The hunger to be an artist, allied with the inability to create real art or even to understand intimately how it is made by others, was a lash that drove Freud's ambition, his determination to be recognised as a Great Man. In his fine new biography of Freud, Louis Breger, Professor Emeritus of Psychoanalytic Studies at the California Institute of Technology and founding President of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, traces the long, intricate and secretive course of that campaign. Breger is no apologist for Freud, but neither is he as ferocious an unmasker as Crews and his crew. This is a balanced, judicious portrait - and all the more condemnatory for that. At the start of his introduction, suggestively titled "The Development of the Hero", Breger remarks that
Freud's face is instantly recognizable: the wise, gray-haired genius with his cigar, neatly trimmed beard, and finely tailored suit; the psychoanalyst whose gaze seems to penetrate the depths of the human soul . . . What the world does not know is that Freud worked hard to create this image; it is an integral part of a personal myth that he embellished over the years, a vision of his life that is part truth and part pseudo-history, a mix of fact and fantasy. Even the penetrating gaze is something he appropriated from two of the heroes of his university days: his mentors Ernst Brucke and Jean-Marie Charcot.
Breger's Freud is a genius, of course, but also a ruthless schemer. He fixed on the Oedipus Complex, which he worked up largely out of his own infant experiences, as a timeless paradigm true for all people in all places at all times. "A single idea of general value dawned on me," he wrote to his friend Fliess. "I have found, in my own case too, the phenomena of being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood." He will allow nothing and no one to stand in the way of his ambition to impose this theory on his colleagues and on his patients. Friends and promoters are dropped when their usefulness is at an end. The account of his treatment of the kindly Josef Breuer, who promoted him in his early days, even supporting him financially for a time, is horribly sad. His enmity toward those who broke from his circle, such as Otto Rank and Sandor Ferenczi, was bitter and unremitting: even at the end of his life, when he was a world-famous figure, he was still trying to score against these and other old enemies, as he saw them. Yet he genuinely wished to release man from the chains forged in his own soul. To that end he constantly urges us poor, frail, haunted human beings to stop trying to be as good as we think we should be, in order that we might thereby become as good as we can be. As Lesley Chamberlain puts it,
So much of Freud's mission was to dispel the ignorant pride that surrounded an idealized picture of mankind as abstemious, rational, nature's best and getting ever better. Just because we are out the other side we shouldn't forget the poor individual who thought of herself, quietly, secretly, as abnormally lustful and cruel. Let's be thankful Freud came to her rescue.
Against such pleading, however, Breger's biography presents its ineluctable evidence. It is a frightening and, in the end, pitiful portrait of a great but deeply flawed figure unable to come to terms with the deep cracks in his own character. Evidence for his greatness, if evidence is needed, is available in Joyce Crick's clear, clean and pared-down re-translation of The Interpretation of Dreams, first published in 1899. Over the years Freud added much new material to this, his earliest and perhaps finest work, but Crick has decided to return to the first edition, in an attempt to show the "contours of Freud's original dream theory", which in subsequent editions "became increasingly blurred". Aside from its value as a medical or scientific treatise, the Interpretation is a fascinating and endlessly entertaining work, as clever as anything by Arthur Conan Doyle - interestingly, one of Freud's favourite writers. The young Freud writes with studied calm and reticence, making lucid and simple - suspiciously so, perhaps - the chaotic night world of the dreamer. Yet the vision at the heart of his enterprise is dark. Lesley Chamberlain, in one of her finest passages, sums it up:
The Freudian horror story is one of blood, incest, shit, war-cries and murder. It is a descent into the primitive, which resides in every one of us. We are born with the primitive lusts of our wild ancestors dormant within us, and in our own way still dance round our totems, and shun our taboos. The child in us, as we were then and as mankind once was, and the way we are now, with our childishness pushed back into the unconscious, is an ignoble, illiterate savage, driven by hunger and equipped with cunning. Even the idealistic Plato said the parents of Eros were Need and Cunning, and Freud seems to develop this idea to the point of self-destruction. One might want to think of reason - as embodied by Enlightenment Man - as being buried by a mudslide of untrained erotic desire . . .
Oedipus wrecks, all right.
John Banville is Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times