Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind

by Peter D. Kramer

Often referred to as "the father of psychoanalysis," Sigmund Freud championed the "talking cure" and charted the human unconscious. But though Freud compared himself to Copernicus and Darwin, his history as a physician is problematic. Historians have determined that Freud often misrepresented the course and outcome of his treatments—so that the facts would match his theories. Today Freud's legacy is in dispute, his commentators polarized into two one of defenders; the other, fierce detractors. Peter D. Kramer, himself a practicing psychiatrist and a leading national authority on mental health, offers a new take on this controversial figure, one both critical and sympathetic. He recognizes that although much of Freud's thought is now archaic, the discipline he invented has become an inescapable part of our culture, transforming the way we see ourselves. Freud was a myth-maker, a storyteller, a writer whose books will survive among the classics of our literature. The result of Kramer's inquiry is nothing less than a new standard history of Freud by a modern master of his thought.

Genres: Psychology, Biography, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Audiobook

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Peter D. Kramer is the author of eight books, including Ordinarily Well, Against Depression, Should You Leave?, the novels Spectacular Happiness and Death of the Great Man, and the international bestseller Listening to Prozac. Dr. Kramer hosted the nationally syndicated public radio program The Infinite Mind and has appeared on the major broadcast news and talk shows, including Today, Good Morning America, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Charlie Rose, and Fresh Air. His essays, op-eds, and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and elsewhere. For nearly forty years, Dr. Kramer taught and practiced psychiatry in Providence, Rhode Island, where he isEmeritus Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University. He now writes full time.

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The glimpse Kramer gives us of the life and work of Freud is touching, sympathetic, critical, and brief.

I am not a student or a scholar of psychology, and this was the first work I've read on the subject. At times I found myself lost in the terminology of the subject, and I forced myself to reread some paragraphs in order to grasp their meaning. I relied on online psychology dictionaries to give me some of the background that the author assumed I already possessed. All in all, it is obvious that Kramer is a thoughtful, well-read, intellectual individual who has substantial writing skill.

I was very impressed with his even-handedness when comparing Freud's theories to the practical application of those theories. Freud's case studies and treatments of patients were massively flawed and sometimes damaging. I was shocked at how Freud approached the treatment of some of his patients, although I did find many of the case studies Kramer included in this book amusing. At the same time, his theories, stripped down to their basic parts, had some merit. Freud theorized and theorized and theorized...he thought outside the box, even though that meant he was probably wrong. (But he never admitted it.)

Why I recommend this to psychology students and biography buffs: the book was well-written and complete, but it felt incomplete, like looking at a sketch of an oil painting. I'm sure Kramer covers all the bases of Freud's research, but at times I wanted more story, more detail. A psych person probably knows a lot of the details I do not, and a biography buff might be willing to overlook these lapses because of Kramer's focus on Freud's own mental process.

Kramer's basic point is that even though Freud's work has been discredited over and over again, it remains that he opened the door to a whole different world of treating people. This is even evident today, with the proliferation of pop culture references to Freud and his work. Freud's enduring pseudoscientific failures just prove that you don't have to be right to be famous!

[Desmond Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brief and relatively balanced biography of Freud by the psychiatrist Peter Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac and Should You Leave. Kramer doesn't hide his admiration for Freud, but dutifully and unenthusiastically reports his flaws, deceptions, narcissism, and grandiosity. He makes clear that Freud's ideas were a product of his time, social class, and above all his personal circumstances and ambitions. It is difficult now to understand how pervasive and influential Freud's ideas were, and how resistant he and his followers were to criticisms and to the reality of the failure of psychoanalysis to treat mental illness, or even to address the real problems that psychiatric patients faced. Kramer thinks that Freud's approach to talking with patients and many of the concepts that were part of his understanding of mental illness (concepts the author wryly describes as having "dubious lineage but ...broad utility") have been incorporated into modern therapy and psychiatry. This is a good basic introduction to Freud's life. To get a fuller (and much more humorous) picture of the milieu Freud was operating in, and a better understanding of the chicanery associated with Freud's followers and the golden years of psychoanalysis, read The Guru, The Bagman, and The Sceptic by Seamus O'Mahony.

[Daniel]

I admit it: this was a hate read. Not that I hated the book, but that I hate Freud and wanted to revel in it. This book gave me ample opportunity to do that. To my surprise, he likely never cheated on his wife. Just about everything else about him in this book makes him look very, very bad. It was a fun time, but that's probably not the best reason to read something. Learned what the ego, superego, and id are which was neat. Freud does not claim to have invented those, so that's another point in his favor.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having just done a refresher on Freud's psychoanalytic theories, I thought it might be worthwhile to pick up a biography for a peek at the man behind the Oepidal curtain. I admit without shame that I chose this one off the shelf for its brevity, as I wasn't sure my passing interest would sustain me through a more exhaustive treatment. By sheer chance, Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind turned out to be just what I was looking for - a quickly paced yet thorough synopsis of Freud's life paired with an examination of the most popular of his theories.

As I'm a bit disinclined to the Freudian approach, it was quite lovely to watch Kramer call bullshit on case study after case study and to expose Freud's utter lack of scientific rigour. In fact, based on the historical context provided by the author (which described how treatment of the mentally ill had started, before Freud became a fad, to focus on possible hereditary influences exacerbated by environmental factors), I got the very strong impression that Freud and his sexual hangups actually managed to set psychology back about fifty years.

Kramer is careful, however, to give the devil his due, and cites the most lasting of his influences, including his popularization of such now-common terms as 'projection' and 'identification.' He also credits Freud with something that's inarguable - a sheer, breath-taking scope of vision. Whether you buy into that vision or think it's utter crap, it's hard not to be at least a little impressed by the man who dared to dream it up.

[John McElhenney · Rating 4 out of 5]

While Freud set the framework for modern psycho-analysis, his methodologies and theories got the best of him. Freud was a brilliant thinker and poetic writer, but he believed his theories before they were proven, and then used his case studies to vet his preformed ideas. The expose of Freud's modern undoing is well done and well informed.

[Sebastian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Freud was a wild theorist who got a lot of things wrong, and whose reputation suffered from overzealous promotion of his unchecked theories, but nonetheless ushered in a set of new ideas in psychology that have endured (repression, projection, the importance of the subconscious, Id / Ego / Superego, etc). He is everything that an LLM could not be. He is sort of like George Gamow in biology: not correct, but his outlandishness made the world safe for theorizing.

This biography was fine but was too heavy on the descriptions of individual cases that Freud wrote about and too light on that exposition and explanation of the man and how he evolved over the years.

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Sigmund Freud had a somewhat abnormal childhood, which may explain a lot. He was born in 1856 to Jakob Freud and his third wife Amalia Nathanson who was 20 years his junior. Not only was Sigmund Amalia's first-born son but when her next son Julius was born in 1857 and died in infancy, Sigmund assumed particular importance to his mother even though she would go on to have 6 more kids in the following years. Accordingly, Sigmund's natural precociousness and intellect was mixed with a certain arrogance, self-confidence, and level of heroic delusion.[21-27]

His first academic works focused on cocaine. On the one hand his early writing is full of highly accurate observations and descriptions of how the drug affects mood and behavior of different profiles. On the other hand he vastly overstates its clinical efficacy [36-37] and was rightly criticized by the scientific community.

Freud next moved to Paris to study hysteria with French physician Jean-Martin Charcot. Once again he blundered, publishing his case observations with pomp and fanfare as novel findings only to be rebuked by a scientific establishment that pointed him to published studies with similar findings that he had simply failed to read. [43]

Perhaps his first real break was in 1895. Continuing work with Charcot he built on some ideas first put forward by Josef Breuer that hysteric symptoms were an expression of some repressed traumatic event from the past; a sort of mis-processed memory that could be identified and possibly cured ("talk cure") through discussion under hypnosis [55]. Was it right? Elements of it are definitely insightful. Was it original? Obviously Breuer and before him Shopenhauer had gestured in this direction. But it was a new formulation and its lasting impact was to make the subconcious both an object of focus for the medical community and a source of hope for treatment. [60]

Freud would soon take this direction a step too far. By the late 1890s he would claim that "at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience" [66] -- linking hysteria specifically to different types of adverse sexual experiences or specifically repressed sexual tensions or desires. His old colleague Breuer put it succinctly: "Freud is a man given to absolute and obsessive formlations: this is a psychical need which, in my opinion, leads to excessive generalization" [62]. Freud was so eager to develop a truly foundational theory of psychosis that he discarded obvious counterexamples and made spectacular leaps that discredited him in those years.

Freud was not necessarily discouraged and turned next to dreams. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1890) he argues that dreams may be a fruitful place to explore our repressed subconcious urges [83]. He was again too focused on finding e.g. Oedipal urges where none may exist but the balanced view is that this was another step forward for the more enduring finding that we probably do seek to repress and or displace certain unpleasant emotions in different ways, and perhaps what our concious mind won't acknowledge sometimes does come to life in our dreams [96-97].

In the following years Freud's popularity grew as a small group of apostles formed around him in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society [112] (established 1908). In 1909 Americans at Clark University eagerly adopted his school of thought and invited him to America; a popular essay examining the psyche of Leonardo Da Vinci through his art and writings (Leonardo, 1910) would further build the brand of psychoanalysis by making it a tool to understand some of the mysteries of historical figures. Sort of Dan Brown energy (funny that both focused on Da Vinci!).

The themes of the 1910s to the end of WWI were severalfold:
- Friction with some of his apostles like Adler and Jung as they evolved or even contradicted Freudian doctrine;
- Growing criticism of Freud because -- in spite of his lofty language -- psychoanalysis seemed to yield frighteningly few actually cured cases;
- A shifting of Freud's focus from individuals to examining society using his individual frameworks. This last one perhaps convenient because of the former.

This is when you get Civilization and its Discontents, Totem and Taboo, etc, as well as the more theoretical / abstract The Ego and Id.

Through the 20s Freud would struggle with cancer and in 1933, the rise of the Nazi party, which necessitated his fleeing to the UK. He would eventually pass in 1939 in exile in London.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid biography balanced between Freud's unique contributions (the criticality of the subconscious; concepts of id, ego, and superego; sexuality as a fundamental force within psychology) and his limitations (no clinical success, cocaine addiction, terrible partner for his collaborators) into a good story.

Freud was undoubtedly, one of the key minds in early 20th century thought as we unfurled the onion of the mind, and made a serious contribution by enabling the evolution from the uniquely Shakespearean development of an interior monologue to one in which large parts of our desires and motivations are hidden in our "subconscious."

Freud's focus is on pathologies of the children - how childhood and the process of growing up produces trauma which then results in disease - though his ideas are more generally related to questions of intergenerational family dynamics, the way in which children reflect and reject their parents and parents traumatize and shape their children. Writing as the shift from rural to urban living was accelerating and as the economy was becoming increasingly specialized, Freud dances around ideas of alienation, identity and values.

Fundamentally focused on the transition from animism to organized religion to science, the biography manages to maintain respect for Freud's unique theories even in the absence of their practical utility in the stated purpose (curing mental illness). In many cases, the biography shares appreciation for Freud's societal diagnosis while critiquing his ability to actually engage with his patients directly (a process described as "more literary than scientific").

The book concludes with the description of an erosion - as the specific elements of Freud were abandoned by himself and his acolytes, replaced with a general set of anthropological observations. At once brilliant, satanic, disciplined and cruel, Freud marks a key transition in the shift from a religious to a secular orientation of society by rejecting purely rational (scientific) explanations of psychology and reconnecting them with evolutionary animal drives. In this way, he was more shaman than scientist, creating intellectual space for the elements of human behavior which cannot be explained or understood through quantitative and empirical science.

[Rick Linde · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading this book, Sigmund Freud will be forever known in my mind as Sigmund Fraud. In reading this short biography I was struck by Freud's frequent and obvious mistakes and misrepresentations.

Freud liked to make sweeping generalizations about the causes of mental disturbances, attributing many to repressed memories of infantile sexuality. His quest for fame tainted much of his work, leading to grandiose, overly ambitious conclusions. I was also appalled by how he routinely disregarded his own teachings in his personal practice.

Despite this, Freud is considered the founder of psychoanalysis and a giant in the field of psychology. Go figure.

I suppose this book was destined to be a bit of a slog. Kramer, a capable writer, spends most of the book discussing Freud's seminal works and comparing them with modern thinking, usually unfavorably. Any book describing Freud's efforts to interpret dreams and cure hysteria was bound to be snooze-inducing. So don't expect a Jason Bourne novel.

The real problem with this book is a lack of context. The pre-existing state of the treatment of mental illness is only fleetingly discussed, making it difficult to tell if Freud's innovations were genuinely groundbreaking. The book also fails to explain adequately why his teachings have had such a lasting impact. With all his gaffs, Freud's legacy should have been small, but instead it has been huge. These unanswered questions hindered but did not spoil my enjoyment of the book.

In the final analysis, I must give the author a lot of credit. Kramer gave us a well written book about a brilliant but flawed man. it must be difficult to write a book about a guy with an outsized reputation whose theories, although novel at the time, have been discredited. My criticisms are largely aimed at Freud not Kramer. Most of the biographies I read are about men who conquered something. If you are interested in a book about ideas, this one does its job.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peter D. Kramer is a Clinical Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Kramer’s 2006 biography entitled Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind provided a very useful and well-balanced introduction to the biography of Sigmund Freud. The biography also is a useful, well-balanced, and readable introduction to the concepts of Freudian Psychiatry. Kramer was trained as a Freudian psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School in the 1970s, which was strongly influenced by Freudian psychiatry (10). Since the 1970s, psychiatry has moved on from Freudian psychiatry. Kramer even writes that some psychiatrists believe that Freudian psychiatry “represents an uncharacteristic interruption in the slow progress of psychiatry” (202) to understand the working of the human brain and mental illness. At the same time, Kramer believes that there are several aspects of psychiatric therapy of Freudian origins that are useful today in their more modern version (204, 206). Kramer is personally saddened that Freud seems a lot less competent, less loveable, and more complex in 2006 than Freud did in the 1970s (204), but in some ways that ties in very well with Freudian philosophy in regards to heroes according to Kramer (204). I found this book a very useful, readable, and well-done introduction to Freud the person and Freudian psychiatry.

[John Bond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good overview of Freud and psychotherapy. Love the Eminent Lives series.

[Joe Flynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice enough description of Freud’s cases and failures. Some technical psychoanalytic details are confusing but over all a concise summary to put an end to the subject of Freud.

[Anthony Mrozewski · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd give it 3.5 if there were half stars.

[Elis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gostei muito da escrita do livro, com críticas boas com contextos ótimos na minha opinião.

[Abhi V · Rating 4 out of 5]

Saddening, devastating. Freud was not a great man by any means, he was arguably a bad one, and the best of what's in Freud isn't properly his... (I may say more about this)....

[Bob Reutenauer · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Harper Perennial “Eminent Lives” series offers biographies that aim to be “succinct, essayistic, and enlivened by a strong point of view….great writers on great figures.” Kramer on Freud does the trick and more. This book aims to bring critical historical biography where hagiography or its opposite the “hatchet job” have held much of our attention. Is Freud a “savant or charlatan?” was a question in Vienna and beyond as early as the 1920s. Kramer answers affirmatively that he was both “inventor of modern mind” and a “false saint.” A “continent of knowledge” is the phrase a professor of mine once used to describe the open legacies of thinkers like Newton, Darwin, Marx, and Freud, who, now shown to be limited and often wrong established methods, concepts, and vocabularies that continue to dominate the fields of physics, biology, history, and psychology. Think Freud and think of complexes, drives, conflicts, repression, sublimation, transference, projection; of psychoanalysis, of mapping the unconscious by id-ego-superego, of dream interpretations; of infantile sexuality, of cigars. Saintly, it remains to be for one’s present critics to use the updated work of trailblazers. We don’t throw rocks at sainted Newton for not seeing quantum mechanics while resting in the apple orchard. But Freud.. well he was wacky wrong about, say , why boys fidget in shoe stores as they anticipate their foot entering the new shoe— “Where is it? Mommy! What have you let this man do to me?”— as castration anxiety. But still, even this— and his “Rat Man” and the “Wolf Man”—evoke saintly attributes of his case studies as contributions to early modernist literature— James Joyce and T.S. Eliot so many more— meaning and metaphor, aesthetics and decadence, in the fin-de-siècle Vienna of art for arts sake and wilting Victorianism. This is the water Freud swam in and stirred up vigorously. Not a Saint. Freud sometimes fit his facts to theory — even those “facts” derived from clinical observation of people who came to him for help. He made shit up and pissed people off. Kramer details, without defense, the many instances of documented, motivated mis-practice. He did some harm. The ideal silent empathic healer is not working from the manual when he urges divorce on a couple with an eye on his own stake in the eventual bequest from the estate. It is all there.

“We may feel saddened and depleted— I do— at the loss of a hero. But then, the gradual revelation of a less straightforward, less competent, less lovable Freud contains an affirmation of Freudian precepts. What Freud believed of humankind applies to his own life. We live at the mercy of our drives, shaped in childhood. What is hidden in people may not be admirable….. Our leaders— the embodiments of our ego-ideal— are our own constructions, arising from our needs….[R]ationality is at a premium, and fantasies abound.”

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve enjoyed all of the books I’ve read in this Eminent Lives series because they offer three things:

(1) A biographical sketch of the subject’s life, the “names and dates” piece that put their reasons for fame in context.
(2)The boundaries of scholarly opinion on the subject, both positive and negative that articulate the range of perspectives on the subject.
(3) The author’s postulation of why X person matters today.

Kramer’s book on Freud is at times brutal in its portrait of Freud’s unscrupulousness. He shows how Freud’s work was often the result of working backwards from a preconceived theory and how he had a pathological tendency to ignore unpleasant facts and evidence when it contradicted his ideas. But the subtitle of the book, “Inventor of the Modern Mind” is a reflection that we all live in the world Freud created. He wasn’t just a psychologist, he was a celebrity. He popularized psychoanalysis and brought psychology into the mainstream, introduced concepts and language that are so commonplace now that it’s easy to forget that they originated with him.

Kramer’s contention is that Freud didn’t have to be correct to be important. My high school psychology teacher said that while much of Freud’s work has essentially debunked, that he still created the foundation that the rest of modern psychology has been built on, even if that has been in opposition.

Kramer describes Freud as perhaps the last true thinker of the Enlightenment and that he perhaps better characterized as a philosopher than psychiatrist. I think that’s a fitting epitaph for him. His certainty about the way the world worked and deep drive to understand the human condition took him in all sorts of strange directions. His work probably says more about him than it does about his patients, but there is no doubt that we live in a world where our frames of reference for culture, language, and the mind are all in a sense indebted to the long shadow cast by Dr. Freud.

[Synthia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Often referred to as "the father of psychoanalysis," Sigmund Freud championed the "talking cure" and charted the human unconscious. But though Freud compared himself to Copernicus and Darwin, his history as a physician is problematic. Historians have determined that Freud often misrepresented the course and outcome of his treatments—so that the facts would match his theories. Today Freud's legacy is in dispute, his commentators polarized into two camps: one of defenders; the other, fierce detractors.

[Rodrigo Nemmen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good description of Freud's life and achievements. Along the way, the author summarizes his theories and psychoanalysis concepts: oedipus complex, fear of castration, penis envy, neurosis, root of religion, slips of tongue and many others. So the book serves as an overview of Freud's theories. However, my view of Freud was shaken after reading this book. The author was quite critical of Freud and constrasts his -- as the authors makes the point, outdated -- ideas with our current understanding of the mind and mental diseases and sexuality.

[Eoin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An elegant assassination. Kramer dismantles the myth of Freud without malice or exaggeration - only calm, verifiable information. Going in, I had imagined Freud as a pioneer who had fallen out of favor, due for a pendulum swing. Kramer's (convincing) thesis is that Freud generalized and exaggerated known theories of the mind until they were false, claiming they were original. Worthy of the Eminent Lives Series.

[Ezekiel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this a little hard to read at times, it could be the fact I lack a background in psychology, or just the way it was written, I'm not sure. At times, it often seemed needlessly verbose. The book succeeds though, in both capturing and showcasing the breadth of freuds work and the inherent problems with his methods.

[Jubeen · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is a one sided book that criticizes Freud from the first chapter till the very last. Although it shines light on some aspect of his life, the author fails to create the trust for us to believe many of his claims, by not mentioning anything good about Freud at all, except couple of pages at the end of the book.

[Shirley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to read this book because I learned some interesting and quirky things about Freud while on a web search. This book has quite a lot of information but it did not quite give me the information I wanted in the way I wanted to read it. I was looking for chronological and it jumped around a bit. Still a good read, though.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting primer on Freud's thought, explicated through a biographical sketch. In a way it's a big take down of the founder of psychoanalysis. But Kramer acknowledges Freud's brilliance despite his flaws of character and thinking. This is also a relatively easy read; the prose is very straightforward.

[Shruti G Gulati]

a journey through a life...a person of genius....i now realized he wasnt as much as we put him up to today...changed my insight and ideas of Freud

[Allyne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brief but devastating intellectual biography of Freud.

[Oan · Rating 4 out of 5]

i need books on Freudian psychoanalysis

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Freud does not come out of this looking good!

[Mike Mena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quick and enjoyable!