The Triumph of Sigmund Freud

...one undermines the impulse of sublimation...

...It is, as a matter of fact, difficult to obtain from this volume a summary view of Freud's experiences with his patients, and of his degree of therapeutic success...

...Freud's one personal indulgence was the continuous smoking of strong cigars, which led finally to his fatal cancer of the mouth...

...In Jung's case, Swiss morality or Swiss social pressure was the diverting force...

...There are a number of incidental references to unsuccessful or incomplete treatments...

...Nor does he deal in Freudian terms with the passion for finding mushrooms which featured Freud's holidays in the mountains...

...It is not irrelevant to recall," he says, "that most of Adler's followers were, like himself, ardent Socialists," and were led by this "to concentrate on the sociological aspects of consciousness rather than on the repressed unconscious...

...Jones is explicit about the anti-Semitic feelings of the Swiss and other deviators from orthodox Freudianism...

...Anyone made aware by Freud of the manifold and often hidden relationships which connect the biologic, the psychologic and the social is tempted to try to understand how the life affected the theories, or the theories the life, to see the relation of both to the social situation which helped to shape them, and to use this as a kind of testing out of Freudian theory itself...

...What Freud said of criminal creativity, however, hardly applied to himself...

...But there is an even greater difficulty...

...Jung said: "We should do well not to burst out with the theory of sexuality in the foreground...

...We recall from the first volume his enthusiastic advocacy of the general use of cocaine, and his strange attraction to Fliess...

...Freud himself said in his revealing letter to Dr...

...By 1910, an international psychoanalytic movement had been organized, which not only continued through the First World War, but was strengthened by it, because of the interest in war neuroses and in what the war revealed generally about human nature and civilization...

...Freud always felt that no one had the right to apply the term "psychoanalysis" to theories incompatible with his own...

...contributor to many periodicals The second volume of Ernest Jones's magnificent life of Sigmund Freud is even better than the first, and yet it presents an almost impossible task to the lay reader who is truly interested in psychoanalysis...

...Therapy, he said, was not to make patients good, but to make them whole...

...His feelings found expression in one of his best known essays, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death...

...When I ask myself," he wrote in a candid letter to Dr...

...Though there was no place for ethics as such in psychoanalytic therapy, Freud himself was highly ethical...

...The writings are all individually summarized, but the more theoretical arguments, such as those having to do with narcissism, libidinal transformations, counter-cathexis, are necessarily difficult to follow in Jones's highly condensed exposition...

...Jones puts before us the development of Freud's life, his theories, and of the psychoanalytic movement, all in the context of the dramatic changes that were occurring in Europe at the same time...

...He wrote to another Swiss, the always loyal Pastor Pfister, that it was "incompatible with a good presentation of psychoanalysis...

...Since Jones, as I have said, regards orthodox Freudianism simply as truth, he does not consider the extent to which Freud's temperament, a very strongly marked one, led to particular emphases in therapy and theory...

...Without some such criminality there is no real achievement...

...Jones describes separately but relatedly Freud's family and personal life, his professional dealings with patients, colleagues, publishers, the University of Vienna, medical societies, and the organized psychoanalytic movement, and, finally, his developing ideas and techniques as revealed in published work, conversations, letters and notes on cases...

...I have many thoughts about that, especially on the ethical aspects of the question...

...I believe that in publicly announcing certain things one would saw off the branch on which civilization rests...

...Jones docs not emphasize the Freudian aspect of this...

...This assurance of certainty he had to have, though he was exploring a realm of complex subjective states, of total life histories, of psychic forces not available to direct examination or quantitative measurement...

...Famous cases on which important theories were based are discussed in some detail...

...Only in treating the deviations of former disciples like Adler, Stekel and Jung does he put the emphasis on causative factors of a personal nature...

...Jones does speak very illuminatingly, however, of the mixture of credulity and skepticism in Freud himself, and, despite his colossal intelligence and memory, his occasional naivete in judging other people...

...At the end of the present volume Jones writes very discerningly about the roots of Freud's need for certainty...

...Freudian orthodoxy speaks with the certainties of the physical sciences, without benefit of their measurements, controls, and testable hypotheses...

...Jones, a psychoanalyst who worked closely with Freud from 1908 until the master's death, devotes this volume to the "years of maturity" from 1901 to 1919...

...In public he was always courteous, and strictly observed the proprieties...

...Jones deals a little more psychoanalytically with Freud's feelings about Rome, Hannibal and Michelangelo's statue of Moses, but he goes no further than is authorized by Freud's own self-analysis...

...Freud showed "irrefutably" that Adler and Jung were contradicted in the "crucial test of factual experience," and that pathogenic events occurred too early in infancy to be influenced by the cultural variations and influences which Karen Horney and others tried later to introduce into psychoanalysis...

...Nevertheless, Freud's discoveries have added immeasurably to our insights, to our sense of the meaningfulness and problematic character of human experience...

...Ernest Jones's biography of a sympathetic, courageous man of genius does not resolve any of the questions raised by psychoanalysis, but it takes us back to the sources in one man's life of all that is both good and bad in psychoanalysis, of the humane freeing of love so that it may find its proper aim and object, and of such inhumane monstrosities of thought as may be found in almost any number of the Psychoanalytic Review...

...A number of younger men, mostly from outside Austria, such as Jung, Rank, Brill, Stekel, Ferenczi, Abraham, Sachs and Jones, accepted his principles and became his disciples...

...Concerning his love life he was absolutely reticent...

...One has to become a bad fellow, transcend the rules, sacrifice oneself, betray, and behave like the artist who buys paints with his wife's household money, or burns the furniture to warm the room for his model...

...He disliked pathological types and extremes of any kind...

...Freud found loose talk and loose behavior distasteful...

...He would brook no insults, however, especially in public displays of anti-Semitism, and was formidable in his courageous wrath...

...When the storm of opposition broke over psychoanalysis in the years before the First World War, the only Gentiles who survived it were Binswanger, Oberholzer, Pfister and myself...

...By his analysis in the single case of the '"Wolfman," Jones writes...

...Ernest Jones does not help much here, though he is scrupulous in his documentation and tries hard to be fair and objective...

...Putnam in 1915: "For my part I have never been concerned with any comprehensive synthesis, but always with certainy alone...

...In his personal life he represented to a remarkable degree that denial of instinctual gratification, which is described in Civilization and Its Discontents as the too-high price to pay for the benefits of civilization...

...In fact, once when Freud had a heat stroke while climbing an unshaded mountain in Italy in August, his son knew that something serious had occurred, for his father "so far forgot the conventions as to open his collar and throw off his tie...

...Freud had no patience with such hesitation...

...nothing else than"--which flavor so much psychoanalytic prose...

...To really master the logic of the theoretic changes and polemics and discoveries, one would have to read through the original works themselves in proper order...

...Though his incredibly long hours of work left him little time for them, he brought up his children generously and permissively, and had excellent relations with them throughout his life...

...Toward his wife he was devotedly monogamous, though he had old-fashioned ideas about the role of women...

...Putnam of Harvard, "why I have always behaved honorably, ready to spare others, and to be kind wherever possible, and why I did not give up doing so when I observed that in that way one harms oneself and becomes an anvil because other people are brutal and untrustworthy, then, it is true, I have no answer...

...And in the early days, when Freud and his methods were regarded with hostility, patients often broke off treatment because their family's doubts about psychoanalysis added to the burden of inner resistance...

...For him Freudian theory is not a personal or social expression, but a developing absolute truth...

...Freud himself reacted to the war at first like ordinary German and Austrian citizens, but by 1915 it had made him very thoughtful and productive...

...like most psychoanalysts, Jones considers a quantitative or statistical approach misleading...

...At the beginning of this period, Freud, having published some of his major discoveries in 1899 in The Interpretation of Dreams, was emerging from isolation...

...It does much to explain the "overdetermined" adjectives and adverbs--words like "obviously," "unmistakably," "wholly," "merely," "simply...

...with the certainties of religion, without benefit of supernatural myth, revelation and church...