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The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud
Ernest Jones’s three-volume The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud was first published in the mid-1950s. This edited and abridged volume omits the portions of the trilogy that dealt principally with the technical aspects of Freud’s work and is designed for the lay reader. Jones portrays Freud’s childhood and adolescence; the excitement and trials of his four-year engagement to Martha Bernays; his early experiments with hypnotism and cocaine; the slow rise of his reputation and constant battles against distortion and slander; the painful defections of close associates; the years of international eminence; the onset of cancer and his stoicism in the face of an agonizing death.
672 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1953
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Ernest Jones
242 books17 followersAlfred Ernest Jones was a neurologist and psychoanalyst, and Sigmund Freud’s official biographer. Jones was the first English-speaking practitioner of psychoanalysis and became its leading exponent in the English-speaking world where, as President of both the British Psycho-Analytical Society and the International Psychoanalytic Association in the 1920s and 1930s, he exercised a formative influence in the establishment of its organisations, institutions and publications.
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December 4, 2024"How extraordinarily suspicious Jews could be of the faintest sign of anti-Semitism and of how many remarks or actions could be interpreted in that sense...Freud had the common Jewish sensitiveness to the slightest hint of anti-Semitism and he made very few friends who were not Jews.”
~Ernest Jones, "The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud"
~Ernest Jones, "The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud"
March 20, 2018
Ernest Jones, a Welsh neurologist, a disciple and life-long friend of Sigmund Freud and here his biographer, according to what little other information can be gained about him was arrested in 1906 and charged with ‘indecent assault’ on two adolescent girls encountered in his capacity as Inspector of schools for mentally defective children. He was acquitted on the grounds that the girls had made it up. The episode sounds rather fishy when such peccadilloes were not targeted with the weighty censoriousness they are now, but Dr Jones for a while was under a cloud and for some years exiled himself to Canada, though very probably as much because of his association with the highly controversial ideas of psychoanalysis than any gross professional misconduct. The incidental repercussions however were more momentous: Freud amended all his previous opinions and based his new theories on the foundation of infantile sexuality, that even small children are by no means pure and innocent - or rather in their unformed innocence have ideas which mean little to them but would appal an adult mind - and moreover that these fantasies determine all their later development, to the conventions of the time, or even of the present time, deeply shocking.
As his biographer admits, Freud himself would not have approved at all of this book, he thought private lives should be private and he wished to be remembered only for his work. He seems not to have been shy of one detail though: he wrote himself, “a man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror”, and as with many other things he said, that’s close to the mark. Jones defends himself against the charge of disobeying his Master in this respect by claiming that his purpose was to set the record straight in the face of the misinterpretations and “calumnies” that were already appearing before Freud was dead and have proliferated wildly ever since. Indeed, in terms of cultural and social influence, Sigmund Freud along with Jesus Christ was one of the most innocently dangerous men who ever lived, a conqueror veritably, because there can be hardly anyone unaware of their names or un-effected to some degree by them whether consciously or not, and not always for commendable reasons.
Nothing visibly scandalous, except for a reputation based more on rumour and speculation, ever troubled the personal life of Sigmund Freud. He came from a family of German Jewish merchants of apparently irreproachable respectability who moved to Vienna when the eldest son was still young and lived on “limited means”. At the age of seventeen he was enrolled as a medical student at the University of Vienna, not out of any particular interest in the subject as much as for lack of any other specific aim towards which to channel his energies, and although obviously highly intelligent and “bookish” (already knowing several languages including Greek and Latin) did not exactly excel as a future medical practitioner. His interest was in the neurological laboratory and in a burning question of the day, whether the higher and lower forms of life were intrinsically different or differentiated only according to a principal of evolutionary development. By extremely hard work and assiduous application, not without an eye out for influential contacts, he rose up through the ranks of ponderously-complicated Teutonic academic bureaucracy, less he proclaimed from ambition than to be able to afford to marry. A suitable candidate had already presented herself, daughter of a more orthodox and better-placed Jewish family and at whose mother the atheistical young Freud was inclined to scoff. The courtship was prolonged and brought out a possessive and dictatorial side of the suiter, himself with little or no sexual experience and not of gallant temperament; some of his rivals were ‘artists’, who he despised as worldlings in whom emotion over-ran reason, and may explain his opinion of all the arts as ‘neurotic substitutes’ (he had an aversion to music as well), an otherwise extraordinarily philistine view and seemingly rather strange for someone subsequently to become renowned as the founder of a ‘sexual revolution’, though that idea would have horrified him; ‘Freudianism’ was initially – and to some extent has remained - a prudish bourgeois quasi-religious cult suggestively implying arcane mysteries subsequently taken over by more licentiously-inclined people as a justification for their own bad behaviour, but I’ll come back to that because matrimonial plans were interrupted by an unfortunate mistake of judgement which Freud with more odd ambiguity put down to his fiancée’s “distractions” though “without blaming her”. He started experimenting with cocaine, then a more or less unknown drug which he believed would be more effective and less addictive than morphine. Experiments with frogs, dogs and rabbits seemed to work and then he tried it on himself, inducing a wonderful state of euphoria and vitality. On some of his colleagues the consequences were disastrous. Freud’s hopes of fame and fortune went up in smoke, and to minimize any self-reproaches he came up with the idea that only certain nervous systems, including his own, were immune to addiction. Anyway, he’d at least achieved a certain name for himself, which was his primary aim. The marriage went ahead in 1886 when he was thirty.
Freud had already shown himself to be so over-bearing, socially maladroit and almost insanely jealous of any other man in sight that it was hardly surprising that he should demand from a wife complete devotion to himself to the point of renouncing every other affiliation, even to her own family. No modern miss would put up with that, but young ladies then, if they knew nothing else, were well trained in the skill of ‘managing’ men, surreptitiously getting their own way and even, perhaps, extracting a vengeance. Frau Doktor Freud must have been well trained to have entered into such an arrangement with a man who the cynic might suspect was in need of a bit of psychoanalysis himself; how she managed is left to the reader’s imagination except for the assertion that he was a “loving” and attentive family man.
Initially interested only in neuro-anatomy, under the influence of Charcot in Paris and Breuer in Vienna, Freud rather reluctantly was led to the conclusion that certain nervous ailments were caused not by any physiological pathology but were entirely psychological in origin. Rejecting ordinary medical practice in favour of ‘scientific’ laboratory research, he was nonetheless compelled for financial reasons to see private patients with nervous disorders of a type generally subsumed under the heading of ‘hysteria’, on whom he experimented with hypnosis, electricity, hot baths, massages and so on to no lasting effect. Trying another tack, encouraging his patients to say whatever came into their minds however irrelevant, distasteful or even improper, he was as appalled as had been his mentor Breuer to find young females ‘making advances’ to him and realised that it not so much accidental incidents at an early age that were as decisive as sexual interpretations made of them at or after puberty, and moreover that such aberrations could occur also in males. ‘Psychoanalysis’ was born when the word first appeared in a learned journal in 1896.
A year later, in Dr Jones’ own words, “We come here to the only really extraordinary experience in Freud’s life”. To cut through his cautious circumlocutions, Freud fell in love not only as an admiring colleague but “passionately” with Wilhelm Fliess, disparaged here as “intellectually inferior”. Fliess was a year or two younger, also a married neurologist, but of a much more charming, worldly and imaginative and outspoken disposition, in contrast to the straight-laced and rigidly anti-philosophical Freud. Frau Fliess made herself troublesome over the association, which perhaps says enough. Later, Freud destroyed all the letters he had received; by a series of complicated accidents his own survived and found their way into his biographer’s possession where one detects they were very carefully edited – his disciple’s principal aim is evidently to spare his master’s reputation, perhaps also his own, from the faintest breath of personal reproof - not only to make Fliess sound rather dotty, a superstitious fascination with certain numbers for instance, but to credit him only with ‘inspiring’ his companion to make the “heroically courageous” step towards psychoanalyzing himself, if heroic courage is necessary to overcome some sort of extreme emotional crisis involving his “remarkable dependence on Fliess” and a “profound sense of forbiddenness which evoked anxiety and other distressing and paralyzing moods”. This, he decided, was a re-enactment of his ambiguous feelings towards his own father displaced onto a younger and more attractive man. Like most of Freud’s theories there’s certainly something in that, but the ‘Oedipus complex’ is to later eyes perhaps a little over-blown to explain a more basic and straightforward state of affairs which the participants, or at least one of them, were simply unwilling to accept according to the proscriptions of their time and place. Freud came later to lay it down almost as a law that ‘homosexuality’ (as well as various other forms of ‘male hysteria’) was the result of an unresolved hostility to a father, thus one could say betraying his own ignorance and fear of the subject since the few ‘patients’ on whom he based this notion were as confused and timid as himself otherwise they wouldn’t have had to need to appear in his clinic in the first place. As Gore Vidal has pointed out ‘homosexual’ is not a noun but an adjective, and it was only the late nineteenth century German mania for classifying everything that changed it into one.
The value of understanding oneself is an ancient philosophical virtue which many have striven for, but Freud made heavy weather of it, perhaps protesting too much as was said of Lady Macbeth. In fact, by his own standards he was extremely neurotic, though he preferred, with reference to himself, to use the more generous word neurasthenic and transformed himself – again quoting his biographer – into a man of “noble serenity”. Well, perhaps, he endured later in life with great dignity and stoicism and even humour a forced flight from everything he knew and a terrible and fatal illness, which in itself is proof of moral sincerity and true virtue. At the same time a sort of stubborn insistence on always being right – he didn’t take criticism or ‘treachery’ easily – led him to the belief that what was no doubt true of himself must therefore be true for everyone else, or at least for all other men; he admitted that female psychology was beyond him unless it were merely the agitations of “penis envy” – another near hit, but no more so than the allegedly universal male fear of “castration”. Such ‘inhibitions’ may indeed exist in the deeper recesses of the human mind, but mostly at a level where they hardly matter for all practical purposes and when so many other psychological influences are more overtly predominant. A lot of the rest of this fairly long book is taken up with an exposition of what could be called technical details, of interest only to specialists and revolving around what Jones calls Freud’s Magnum Opus, The Interpretation of Dreams, a weighty tome though which could wade only the most determined students, and interest is not increased by the author’s persistently sycophantic yet self-important tone. Perhaps a personal anecdote is appropriate: for a period I lived in a house in North London very near the one in which Freud had spent his last years (it’s now a ‘museum’) and in which Anna Freud, his daughter, was still hanging on as reigning queen of British psychoanalysis, though not without competition from one or two other ladies with ambitions to usurp her. It was a quarrelsome and gossipy clique and someone, whether truthfully or not, put it about that Miss Freud in an unguarded moment had let out that as children they were required to present themselves to their father at breakfast and recount their dreams. Not having had any, or not remembering, or too embarrassed but too intimidated to disobey, they made up any fanciful ideas that came into their heads, all of which were faithfully recorded and analyzed as gospel. That is indeed how some of the resulting opus could read. It sounds of course a needlessly frivolous comment on what represents a seriously-intended and deeply thoughtful work of scholarship and a major step forward in the development of psychoanalytic theory, but as a review of the time of its publication observed “uncritical minds would be delighted to join in this play of ideas and would end up in complete mysticism and chaotic arbitrariness”; another, more harshly but also more perceptively, wrote that “the imaginative thoughts of an artist had triumphed over the scientific investigator”. In spite of his early aversion to ‘artists’ and a strict insistence on his own capacity as an objective observer modified later into a certain delight in the antiquities and collections of the great museums of Italy together with a fluent and graceful prose style that would not disgrace a major writer of fiction, the flaw in Sigmund Freud is that he failed to see that there may be no great division between art and science and that each, if practised with proper conscientiousness, may arrive at very similar results and in fact rely on each on the other to do so. His ‘study’ of Leonardo da Vinci indicates no great approval of the ‘pleasure principle’ and was confined to what he assumed were that painter’s mental disturbances without the slightest consideration of the significance and beauty of the paintings. It might not be unfair to sum up Freud’s character as that of an artist manqué with a staunch ‘resistance’ – his technical expression - to a ‘bohemian’ side which he could not condone, but whether his own psychoanalysis revealed that contradiction will have to remain a secret to himself.
Having achieved his ‘serenity’ the rest of Freud’s life was spent in consolidating his fame … or notoriety, which often amounts to the same thing. If The Interpretation of Dreams could be acceptable as the ramblings of an interesting mind, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905 could not: it was “revoltingly obscene” - the 'obscenity' then, it should be added, being in the minds of readers unaccustomed to such sensible plainess of speaking about something we all know but generally prefer to avoid. Although a pornographist then or now could hardly stifle a yawn over it, many ears then were pricked up in anticipatory excitement and all too keen to confess themselves to a doctor of such advanced views. Grotesque stories were eagerly related, true or imaginary didn’t matter (see, for example, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis by Otto Fenichel, who like several others of the inner circle ended up in a lunatic asylum). His relations with colleagues, disciples and followers in his immediate circle not surprisingly became increasing acrimonious, sometimes little more than rancorous schoolboy bickerings over split hairs (in the recounting of which Dr Jones twists around like an eel trying to exonerate himself from any accusations of betrayal) and produced a good deal of prodigious nonsense in the form of learned articles best mercifully forgotten. The final years are tragic. Austria was economically ruined in the First War and the Viennese reduced to scrounging in the streets. Freud continued scribbling away night and day in an effort to attract high-paying American patients. Still more seriously, in 1923 he was showing symptoms of cancer of the jaw, enduring for the rest of his life many gruesome operations, constant pain and difficulty in speaking. As the financial state of things continued to deteriorate so did the German political climate. In 1933 when the Nazi regime was already expunging any reference to psychoanalysis and replacing it with ‘socialist re-conversion’ – exactly imitating the Russian Bolsheviks who’d won the first round, a prime example of ‘identification with the aggressor’ - Freud was being advised to get out of Austria. He refused to relinquish his hard-won possessions or his doctors and become a wanderer on the face of the earth dependent on the charity of strangers, remarking wryly “they only burn my books, in the middle ages they would have burnt my body”. He finally gave in five years later after the Germans had invaded Austria and was escorted to London where he died after two more agonizing years later and finally with adulatory international recognition at the age of 82. Such is the legend of the Discovery of the Mind.
Let’s not of course dismiss or belittle Freud’s ideas and their genuinely innovative genesis, the result of immense intellectual labour and dedication; to be aware of them can aid greatly in our understanding of ourselves and others. But then so equally can great literature or philosophy, which had been saying in less clinical and dogmatic form much the same thing for hundreds if not thousands of years before, and actually as a ‘treatment’ psychoanalysis is more often than not quite ineffective, if indeed any longer even very relevant since emotional disorders are as susceptible to fashion as anything else and the cases of hysterical paralysis and so on in which Freud specialised are now rare. If I say Freud was ‘dangerous’ it was certainly not by intent but because by inference his influence was to eradicate free will, what used to be called strength of character, and replace it with an irreligious determinism which may be satisfactory enough as far as the physical sciences go but goes hopelessly awry when applied to the so-called behavioural ones; if everything has a potentially decipherable cause, even if it can never be exactly specified, the individual is left free of blame for his own mistakes, he’s merely a victim of circumstance, a creed enthusiastically endorsed and propagated by those of his shifty-sounding or just mad disciples and their successors who took up residence in the more salubrious parts of the United States and profited from the burgeoning therapy industry. Now we’re seeing more and more the consequences of that when it has descended to an even more vulgar level devoid of any ameliorating sense of wider morality, ‘neurotic’ replaced with either the vaguely-defined and too carelessly thrown about but more ominous label of ‘psychopathy’, not a disarrangement of the emotions but an irremediable absence of vital affect, or an almost schizophrenic disunity between exaggerated sentimentality and common sense, each condition arguably brought about by previous generations of parents too susceptible to the laxness of the therapeutic mentality.
As his biographer admits, Freud himself would not have approved at all of this book, he thought private lives should be private and he wished to be remembered only for his work. He seems not to have been shy of one detail though: he wrote himself, “a man who has been the indisputable favourite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror”, and as with many other things he said, that’s close to the mark. Jones defends himself against the charge of disobeying his Master in this respect by claiming that his purpose was to set the record straight in the face of the misinterpretations and “calumnies” that were already appearing before Freud was dead and have proliferated wildly ever since. Indeed, in terms of cultural and social influence, Sigmund Freud along with Jesus Christ was one of the most innocently dangerous men who ever lived, a conqueror veritably, because there can be hardly anyone unaware of their names or un-effected to some degree by them whether consciously or not, and not always for commendable reasons.
Nothing visibly scandalous, except for a reputation based more on rumour and speculation, ever troubled the personal life of Sigmund Freud. He came from a family of German Jewish merchants of apparently irreproachable respectability who moved to Vienna when the eldest son was still young and lived on “limited means”. At the age of seventeen he was enrolled as a medical student at the University of Vienna, not out of any particular interest in the subject as much as for lack of any other specific aim towards which to channel his energies, and although obviously highly intelligent and “bookish” (already knowing several languages including Greek and Latin) did not exactly excel as a future medical practitioner. His interest was in the neurological laboratory and in a burning question of the day, whether the higher and lower forms of life were intrinsically different or differentiated only according to a principal of evolutionary development. By extremely hard work and assiduous application, not without an eye out for influential contacts, he rose up through the ranks of ponderously-complicated Teutonic academic bureaucracy, less he proclaimed from ambition than to be able to afford to marry. A suitable candidate had already presented herself, daughter of a more orthodox and better-placed Jewish family and at whose mother the atheistical young Freud was inclined to scoff. The courtship was prolonged and brought out a possessive and dictatorial side of the suiter, himself with little or no sexual experience and not of gallant temperament; some of his rivals were ‘artists’, who he despised as worldlings in whom emotion over-ran reason, and may explain his opinion of all the arts as ‘neurotic substitutes’ (he had an aversion to music as well), an otherwise extraordinarily philistine view and seemingly rather strange for someone subsequently to become renowned as the founder of a ‘sexual revolution’, though that idea would have horrified him; ‘Freudianism’ was initially – and to some extent has remained - a prudish bourgeois quasi-religious cult suggestively implying arcane mysteries subsequently taken over by more licentiously-inclined people as a justification for their own bad behaviour, but I’ll come back to that because matrimonial plans were interrupted by an unfortunate mistake of judgement which Freud with more odd ambiguity put down to his fiancée’s “distractions” though “without blaming her”. He started experimenting with cocaine, then a more or less unknown drug which he believed would be more effective and less addictive than morphine. Experiments with frogs, dogs and rabbits seemed to work and then he tried it on himself, inducing a wonderful state of euphoria and vitality. On some of his colleagues the consequences were disastrous. Freud’s hopes of fame and fortune went up in smoke, and to minimize any self-reproaches he came up with the idea that only certain nervous systems, including his own, were immune to addiction. Anyway, he’d at least achieved a certain name for himself, which was his primary aim. The marriage went ahead in 1886 when he was thirty.
Freud had already shown himself to be so over-bearing, socially maladroit and almost insanely jealous of any other man in sight that it was hardly surprising that he should demand from a wife complete devotion to himself to the point of renouncing every other affiliation, even to her own family. No modern miss would put up with that, but young ladies then, if they knew nothing else, were well trained in the skill of ‘managing’ men, surreptitiously getting their own way and even, perhaps, extracting a vengeance. Frau Doktor Freud must have been well trained to have entered into such an arrangement with a man who the cynic might suspect was in need of a bit of psychoanalysis himself; how she managed is left to the reader’s imagination except for the assertion that he was a “loving” and attentive family man.
Initially interested only in neuro-anatomy, under the influence of Charcot in Paris and Breuer in Vienna, Freud rather reluctantly was led to the conclusion that certain nervous ailments were caused not by any physiological pathology but were entirely psychological in origin. Rejecting ordinary medical practice in favour of ‘scientific’ laboratory research, he was nonetheless compelled for financial reasons to see private patients with nervous disorders of a type generally subsumed under the heading of ‘hysteria’, on whom he experimented with hypnosis, electricity, hot baths, massages and so on to no lasting effect. Trying another tack, encouraging his patients to say whatever came into their minds however irrelevant, distasteful or even improper, he was as appalled as had been his mentor Breuer to find young females ‘making advances’ to him and realised that it not so much accidental incidents at an early age that were as decisive as sexual interpretations made of them at or after puberty, and moreover that such aberrations could occur also in males. ‘Psychoanalysis’ was born when the word first appeared in a learned journal in 1896.
A year later, in Dr Jones’ own words, “We come here to the only really extraordinary experience in Freud’s life”. To cut through his cautious circumlocutions, Freud fell in love not only as an admiring colleague but “passionately” with Wilhelm Fliess, disparaged here as “intellectually inferior”. Fliess was a year or two younger, also a married neurologist, but of a much more charming, worldly and imaginative and outspoken disposition, in contrast to the straight-laced and rigidly anti-philosophical Freud. Frau Fliess made herself troublesome over the association, which perhaps says enough. Later, Freud destroyed all the letters he had received; by a series of complicated accidents his own survived and found their way into his biographer’s possession where one detects they were very carefully edited – his disciple’s principal aim is evidently to spare his master’s reputation, perhaps also his own, from the faintest breath of personal reproof - not only to make Fliess sound rather dotty, a superstitious fascination with certain numbers for instance, but to credit him only with ‘inspiring’ his companion to make the “heroically courageous” step towards psychoanalyzing himself, if heroic courage is necessary to overcome some sort of extreme emotional crisis involving his “remarkable dependence on Fliess” and a “profound sense of forbiddenness which evoked anxiety and other distressing and paralyzing moods”. This, he decided, was a re-enactment of his ambiguous feelings towards his own father displaced onto a younger and more attractive man. Like most of Freud’s theories there’s certainly something in that, but the ‘Oedipus complex’ is to later eyes perhaps a little over-blown to explain a more basic and straightforward state of affairs which the participants, or at least one of them, were simply unwilling to accept according to the proscriptions of their time and place. Freud came later to lay it down almost as a law that ‘homosexuality’ (as well as various other forms of ‘male hysteria’) was the result of an unresolved hostility to a father, thus one could say betraying his own ignorance and fear of the subject since the few ‘patients’ on whom he based this notion were as confused and timid as himself otherwise they wouldn’t have had to need to appear in his clinic in the first place. As Gore Vidal has pointed out ‘homosexual’ is not a noun but an adjective, and it was only the late nineteenth century German mania for classifying everything that changed it into one.
The value of understanding oneself is an ancient philosophical virtue which many have striven for, but Freud made heavy weather of it, perhaps protesting too much as was said of Lady Macbeth. In fact, by his own standards he was extremely neurotic, though he preferred, with reference to himself, to use the more generous word neurasthenic and transformed himself – again quoting his biographer – into a man of “noble serenity”. Well, perhaps, he endured later in life with great dignity and stoicism and even humour a forced flight from everything he knew and a terrible and fatal illness, which in itself is proof of moral sincerity and true virtue. At the same time a sort of stubborn insistence on always being right – he didn’t take criticism or ‘treachery’ easily – led him to the belief that what was no doubt true of himself must therefore be true for everyone else, or at least for all other men; he admitted that female psychology was beyond him unless it were merely the agitations of “penis envy” – another near hit, but no more so than the allegedly universal male fear of “castration”. Such ‘inhibitions’ may indeed exist in the deeper recesses of the human mind, but mostly at a level where they hardly matter for all practical purposes and when so many other psychological influences are more overtly predominant. A lot of the rest of this fairly long book is taken up with an exposition of what could be called technical details, of interest only to specialists and revolving around what Jones calls Freud’s Magnum Opus, The Interpretation of Dreams, a weighty tome though which could wade only the most determined students, and interest is not increased by the author’s persistently sycophantic yet self-important tone. Perhaps a personal anecdote is appropriate: for a period I lived in a house in North London very near the one in which Freud had spent his last years (it’s now a ‘museum’) and in which Anna Freud, his daughter, was still hanging on as reigning queen of British psychoanalysis, though not without competition from one or two other ladies with ambitions to usurp her. It was a quarrelsome and gossipy clique and someone, whether truthfully or not, put it about that Miss Freud in an unguarded moment had let out that as children they were required to present themselves to their father at breakfast and recount their dreams. Not having had any, or not remembering, or too embarrassed but too intimidated to disobey, they made up any fanciful ideas that came into their heads, all of which were faithfully recorded and analyzed as gospel. That is indeed how some of the resulting opus could read. It sounds of course a needlessly frivolous comment on what represents a seriously-intended and deeply thoughtful work of scholarship and a major step forward in the development of psychoanalytic theory, but as a review of the time of its publication observed “uncritical minds would be delighted to join in this play of ideas and would end up in complete mysticism and chaotic arbitrariness”; another, more harshly but also more perceptively, wrote that “the imaginative thoughts of an artist had triumphed over the scientific investigator”. In spite of his early aversion to ‘artists’ and a strict insistence on his own capacity as an objective observer modified later into a certain delight in the antiquities and collections of the great museums of Italy together with a fluent and graceful prose style that would not disgrace a major writer of fiction, the flaw in Sigmund Freud is that he failed to see that there may be no great division between art and science and that each, if practised with proper conscientiousness, may arrive at very similar results and in fact rely on each on the other to do so. His ‘study’ of Leonardo da Vinci indicates no great approval of the ‘pleasure principle’ and was confined to what he assumed were that painter’s mental disturbances without the slightest consideration of the significance and beauty of the paintings. It might not be unfair to sum up Freud’s character as that of an artist manqué with a staunch ‘resistance’ – his technical expression - to a ‘bohemian’ side which he could not condone, but whether his own psychoanalysis revealed that contradiction will have to remain a secret to himself.
Having achieved his ‘serenity’ the rest of Freud’s life was spent in consolidating his fame … or notoriety, which often amounts to the same thing. If The Interpretation of Dreams could be acceptable as the ramblings of an interesting mind, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905 could not: it was “revoltingly obscene” - the 'obscenity' then, it should be added, being in the minds of readers unaccustomed to such sensible plainess of speaking about something we all know but generally prefer to avoid. Although a pornographist then or now could hardly stifle a yawn over it, many ears then were pricked up in anticipatory excitement and all too keen to confess themselves to a doctor of such advanced views. Grotesque stories were eagerly related, true or imaginary didn’t matter (see, for example, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis by Otto Fenichel, who like several others of the inner circle ended up in a lunatic asylum). His relations with colleagues, disciples and followers in his immediate circle not surprisingly became increasing acrimonious, sometimes little more than rancorous schoolboy bickerings over split hairs (in the recounting of which Dr Jones twists around like an eel trying to exonerate himself from any accusations of betrayal) and produced a good deal of prodigious nonsense in the form of learned articles best mercifully forgotten. The final years are tragic. Austria was economically ruined in the First War and the Viennese reduced to scrounging in the streets. Freud continued scribbling away night and day in an effort to attract high-paying American patients. Still more seriously, in 1923 he was showing symptoms of cancer of the jaw, enduring for the rest of his life many gruesome operations, constant pain and difficulty in speaking. As the financial state of things continued to deteriorate so did the German political climate. In 1933 when the Nazi regime was already expunging any reference to psychoanalysis and replacing it with ‘socialist re-conversion’ – exactly imitating the Russian Bolsheviks who’d won the first round, a prime example of ‘identification with the aggressor’ - Freud was being advised to get out of Austria. He refused to relinquish his hard-won possessions or his doctors and become a wanderer on the face of the earth dependent on the charity of strangers, remarking wryly “they only burn my books, in the middle ages they would have burnt my body”. He finally gave in five years later after the Germans had invaded Austria and was escorted to London where he died after two more agonizing years later and finally with adulatory international recognition at the age of 82. Such is the legend of the Discovery of the Mind.
Let’s not of course dismiss or belittle Freud’s ideas and their genuinely innovative genesis, the result of immense intellectual labour and dedication; to be aware of them can aid greatly in our understanding of ourselves and others. But then so equally can great literature or philosophy, which had been saying in less clinical and dogmatic form much the same thing for hundreds if not thousands of years before, and actually as a ‘treatment’ psychoanalysis is more often than not quite ineffective, if indeed any longer even very relevant since emotional disorders are as susceptible to fashion as anything else and the cases of hysterical paralysis and so on in which Freud specialised are now rare. If I say Freud was ‘dangerous’ it was certainly not by intent but because by inference his influence was to eradicate free will, what used to be called strength of character, and replace it with an irreligious determinism which may be satisfactory enough as far as the physical sciences go but goes hopelessly awry when applied to the so-called behavioural ones; if everything has a potentially decipherable cause, even if it can never be exactly specified, the individual is left free of blame for his own mistakes, he’s merely a victim of circumstance, a creed enthusiastically endorsed and propagated by those of his shifty-sounding or just mad disciples and their successors who took up residence in the more salubrious parts of the United States and profited from the burgeoning therapy industry. Now we’re seeing more and more the consequences of that when it has descended to an even more vulgar level devoid of any ameliorating sense of wider morality, ‘neurotic’ replaced with either the vaguely-defined and too carelessly thrown about but more ominous label of ‘psychopathy’, not a disarrangement of the emotions but an irremediable absence of vital affect, or an almost schizophrenic disunity between exaggerated sentimentality and common sense, each condition arguably brought about by previous generations of parents too susceptible to the laxness of the therapeutic mentality.
November 17, 2012
Conocer la vida de este gran maestro me resultó bastante inspirador. Mi único conflicto son los tintes "interpretativos" de E. Jones para con Freud (por momentos parece que hace "análisis aplicado") pero, por conocer la vida de este gran hombre, uno debería estar dispuesto a bancar ciertos atropellos. En el libro se exponen cartas, frases presentes en las pláticas privadas, confesiones, un poco de teoría psicoanalítica.
October 28, 2017
Muy bueno los primeros años de Sigmund Freud su biñez y juventud su relación con Flies, con Breuer, sua celos de Martha , los comienzos de si autoanálisis. ", sus penurias económicas. Lectura muy llevadera y sumamente interesante.
October 25, 2017
It's an essencial book for the study of psychoanalysis and understanding how things were developed, there was no magic but a lot of work, difficulties, suffering and commitment!!! After this lecture most of the obscure things I found hardly to understand was put in a context and made sense.
December 19, 2007
(in your best movie-announcer voice) "The years succeeding World War I were extremely hard. Everything had come to a standstill in Vienna and life there was scarcely bearable. The monotonous diet of thin vegetable soup was far from being adequately nourishing and the pangs of hunger were continuous. The winters...were the worst of all, with their completely unheated rooms and feeble illumination. It needed a tough spirit to endure sitting still and treating patients for hour after hour in the deadly cold, even if equipped with an overcoat..." It needed Freud.
This work of hagiography drags by the end. Thank the English professors, it was abridged; I would never want to attempt reading the complete three volume work. Books One and Two make for great reads, the third Book, however, gets less interesting with each page - a surprise since that period of history has such narrative potential.
As the first major English biography of Freud, this is worth your time. Never underestimate the man who changed how so many of us articulate our innerlives. Also never show up to his lectures without an invitation. And never take him to a certain hotel room in Munich, he faints everytime he's there.
Strange tales, familiar thoughts, strange connections.
This work of hagiography drags by the end. Thank the English professors, it was abridged; I would never want to attempt reading the complete three volume work. Books One and Two make for great reads, the third Book, however, gets less interesting with each page - a surprise since that period of history has such narrative potential.
As the first major English biography of Freud, this is worth your time. Never underestimate the man who changed how so many of us articulate our innerlives. Also never show up to his lectures without an invitation. And never take him to a certain hotel room in Munich, he faints everytime he's there.
Strange tales, familiar thoughts, strange connections.
March 15, 2012
bir biyografi için yeterince akıcı ve düzenli olmuş. psikanaliz hakkında daha fazla şey öğrenmeyi umuyordum, pek öyle olmadı.
Freud'un kişiliği düşündüğümden ya da popüler olarak bilinenden çok farklıymış. Yahudiliği tamamen kültür olarak-ama oldukça tutucu bir biçimde- yaşayan bir inançsız mesela, bana ilginç görünmüştü. Para hakkındaki düşüncesini de benimsedim: paraya çok fazla değer verip onu biriktirmek derdinde değil fakat yaşamak için gerekliliğini de küçümsememekte. daha fazlası için okursunuz artık.
Freud'un kişiliği düşündüğümden ya da popüler olarak bilinenden çok farklıymış. Yahudiliği tamamen kültür olarak-ama oldukça tutucu bir biçimde- yaşayan bir inançsız mesela, bana ilginç görünmüştü. Para hakkındaki düşüncesini de benimsedim: paraya çok fazla değer verip onu biriktirmek derdinde değil fakat yaşamak için gerekliliğini de küçümsememekte. daha fazlası için okursunuz artık.
February 14, 2016
An incredibly interesting account of the world's most famous psychotherapist. However, some parts are seriously tedious and long-winded. Haven't finished it.
March 29, 2022
I read the Reader's Digest Version of this book. The book was interesting and gave me an insight to Freud's life and his thinking.
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January 22, 2009926.1 Jon
April 9, 2017
I enjoyed this version of Freud's life in biography. In comparison to Peter Gay's well received "Freud: A life for our times" I found Jones' writing easier to digest, less tangential and less historically/contextually oriented (for better for worse). It seems to me that as a close friend of Freud's, Jones' views are written through the eyes of a fond friend and admirer, more than objective biographer. Rather than discrediting the book, this made it all the more enjoyable as one could get a sense of what it was like to know Freud, at least through Jones' eyes.
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