Sigmund Freud’s theory and practice of psychoanalysis was one of the most influential intellectual trends of the modern age alongside the ideas of Darwin, Marx, and Einstein. It should be no surprise that an extensive biography of this man would be written and it also would be expected that it would be dense and heavy on analysis of the king of all analysts. Peter Gay’s Freud: A Life for Our Time fulfills this necessity. It is largely a successful biography because it puts Freud’s ideas into context, showing how his theories were born from the social matrices of his family and career.
Freud grew up Jewish in the Austro-Hungarian empire in a town called Pribor which translates to “silverware” in Czech and is now a part of the Moravian half of the Czech Republic. His life growing up was not especially unique in any way. However, despite being a lifelong atheist, his Jewish identity had a strong impact on his thinking. In college he studied biology and eventually went into medicine. He spent one summer in the unusual pursuit of dissecting eels in search of their genitals as part of a research project investigating the hypothesis that these sea creatures are hermaphroditic. He was unable to find their private parts. Try psychoanalyzing that. For the most part, though, Freud’s younger years and family life were ordinary but Peter Gay does draw connections between the relationship he had with his parents and his development of psychoanalytical theory.
After becoming a physician, Freud found a new father figure in a doctor named Fliess. The elder man was a bit of a quack, utilizing hypnosis since some patients often complained of ailments when there was no obvious physical cause. These psychosomatic afflictions were later classified by Freud under the diagnosis of “hysteria” although “hypochondria” would be the more acceptable term these days. Freud came to realize that hypnosis did not ever cure these hysterias but he believed that those patients were legitimately suffering from something, more specifically something that originated in the mind. From there he developed his concepts of the unconscious, neuroses, the Oedipal complex, suppression, sublimation, and all the rest of the jargon that became associated with psychoanalysis.
The practice of psychotherapy was conducted by talking sessions in which the contents of thoughts, especially dreams and fantasies, were interpreted to reveal unresolved psychological conflicts that resulted from traumatic experiences suffered during a child’s infantile sexual development.
Not all of these theories were new. As Gay points out, religious mystics, artists, and poets had been alluding to the existence of the unconscious all throughout history and in a way, saying Freud discovered the unconscious is akin to saying that Columbus discovered America. But Freud did articulate this concept in a way that makes it accessible to more than just the artistic and intellectual elite whose concepts were vague to begin with. One example is the conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle that is mediated by the ego. This is a new version of the Dionysian-Apollonian dichotomy but Freud’s new conceptualization of this had wide ranging effects on our interpretations of history, religion, and human nature. These applications of analysis would be taken up later in his final literary works. In his own way, Freud was a giant standing on the shoulders of giants.
After mentioning Freud’s book publications, the establishment of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society, and the rapid spread of interest in psychoanalysis, Peter Gay’s biography takes a major turning point when he writes about Freud’s famous case histories. It is here that we get a sense of how the theory is applied to practice. One interesting case was the Rat Man; this poor guy was tormented by dreams of having live rats stuffed up his butt and the torment was made worse because he sometimes enjoyed these dreams. This was half a century before the urban legend of gerbling took hold of the American public’s imagination; maybe that urban legend was a product of anal-masochistic guilt expressed by adolescents who desired punishment from their fathers for having unconscious fantasies of transgression or something like that. The case of the Wolf Man was a curiosity too. This Russian aristocrat had a dream where a family of wolves were watching him from a tree and Freud interpreted it as a fantasy of sublimated sexuality. Although psychoanalysis quickly became popular, it seems that some of Freud’s interpretations were dubious at best from the start. But the psychoanalytic system had a logic of its own and the pieces all appeared to fit together. At the heart of this all is the Oedipus complex. Freud’s case histories were interesting and important but Gay could be faulted for not introducing this unconscious childhood fantasy until this section of the book. In fact, he never really explains it in detail. He just assumes that the readers know all about what it is. Older readers might get it all but younger readers may need to supplement this book with some research of their own.
Aside from Freud’s theories, practices, and publications, another major theme of this biography is the activities of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society. Freud was respected by most other members of his organization but not everyone was happy. Power struggles were endemic and often manifested in the form of disagreements over theoretical concepts. The most notorious one happened between Freud and Carl Jung, who Freud had chosen to be his successor in the dissemination of psychoanalysis. But Jung had his own ideas, especially about religion and the occult, and chose to leave on unfriendly terms. Peter Gay demonstrates how how the analysts clashed and argued by analyzing each other and then Gay analyzes Freud’s analyses. If you want to analyze Gay’s interpretation of Freud’s analysis of the analysts then you will probably go crazy so it’s just best to take some of this in stride and don’t get too caught up in it.
Other topics covered are Freud’s later writings, his health problems in old age, his life during the two world wars, and his relationship with his daughter Anna who went on to become a prominent psychologist herself. And Peter Gay’s opinions about Freud are not entirely uncritical. For example, he points out some contradictions in Freud’s view of women which at times appeared favorable to the idea of sexual equality and at others not so much, especially in his rejection of the feminist movement. But that was mostly because Freud did not want psychoanalysis to become political. Another contradiction was that Freud’s ideas were subversive to bourgeois values yet psychoanalysis was used as a means of maintaining the status quo. Of course, nobody ever said that Freud did not have a complex mind.
One particular thing that left a gaping hole in this biography is an examination of Freud’s legacy. The book abruptly ends when Freud dies. The influence of this great thinker has never gone away so what does the author make of that? We never find out. A critical examination of Freud’s theories would be useful too. Psychoanalysis is now widely considered to be a pseudoscience and not many people buy the ideas of infantile fantasies in all the details Freud laid out. There is no doubt that children have ambiguous feelings about their parents and that they go through different stages in the development of their sexuality but there is no way of verifying what happens in their unconscious as these processes take place. By designing a theoretical system, Freud invented a way of shaping and molding people’s understanding of their own minds but this leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that the Oedipus complex was implanted by the analyst rather than being revealed through the process of therapy. Furthermore, Freud’s system is overtly authoritarian in nature and can be interpreted as a means of trapping and containing libidinal energy rather than liberating it from neuroses.
In the long run, we still can not be entirely sure what to make of Freud. Was he important only from a historical perspective? Can we disregard him altogether? Did he have some ideas that are worth holding on to? Answering those questions is a task for future generations. He appears to have been right about the structure of the psyche while the minute details are completely wrong. At least Peter Gay did not indulge in such details like the belief that forks and spoons are phallic symbols while shoes and windows are unconsciously thought of as your mother’s vagina. Sparing us these details was a wise editorial decision since they would distract the reader from some of the more significant issues that Freud grappled with.
Freud: A Life for Our Time is as good a biography as we could hope to get. Peter Gay’s Germanic writing style, by which I mean anal-retentive in his attention to detail, makes it a long and plodding read but at least he focused on the right things and wisely chose what parts to leave out. Freud was a pioneer in the exploration of the mind’s contents and his life is worthy of being written out in one good, responsibly written book. There is no character-assassination or yellow journalism here. If you only read one book on Freud, this one should be it.
Gay, Peter. Freud: A Life for Our Time. W.W. Norton & Company, New York/London: 1988.
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