Freud, Biologist of the Mind

...This is not an unmasking, however, it is an interpretation of human behavior, of struggles for recognition, of movements to preserve a valued position, and, of course, of wishful thinking...

...he wishes to trace the history of an idea, to locate its extended family and patriarch, to understand why one person emerges in history as speaking it with such force that posterity relents and awards that person sole guardianship...

...The primary gap is reflected in the opening quote...

...And, as if making what he knows to be a good and timely interpretation, his calm, firm attention to the facts communicates to his charge the confidence that psychoanalysis itself can now accept its own truths...

...it is also a brilliant and ultimately a tender piece of analysis...

...As though reconstructing in the space of an amnesia, Sulloway has devoted his book to filling in historical gaps...

...Though Freud himself, at various points, and certainly the movement/organization that he founded 25 April 1980:251 lay claim to psychoanalysis as a pure psychology, Sulloway sees and emphasizes Freud's connections to biology...

...One has the exhilarating sense of being in on the ground floor of what will become a soaring edifice, of overhearing the builders struggle with their technical reverses, their theoretical insistences, and frequently their competitive natures...

...The concept of the forward thrust of evolution is even seen as theoretically requiring, in order to account for the phenomenon of regression, some reversing or involuting forcehence, the hypothetical construct (which also fits certain clinical data, like the fixation to trauma) of the death instinct...

...His effort is a balancing one, an effort to illuminate but also to cut through "the politics of knowledge" and find a fair apportionment of what he frequently speaks of as Freud's ' 'debt'' to his scientific contemporaries and teachers...

...His premise is indeed that the young, promising, and ambitious neuroanatomist of the spinal ganglia paper (as well as literally dozens of other researches, ranging in topic from the gonadal structure of the eel to the medicinal properties of cocaine to childhood cerebral palsy) is one and the same as, intellectually continuous with, the Freud of The Interpretation of Dreams and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality...

...in other words, the latency phase of individual development as literally the ontogenetic precipitate of the species' survival of the Ice Age...

...It is a marvelous feature of this book that it offers a lingering, more respectful look at potential psychoanalytic fall-guys: particularly Josef Breuer and Wilhelm Fleiss, who emerge as intellectually solid, wonderfully complex individuals, related to Freud along highly valued theoretical and temperamental lines...

...Sulloway sees his task as one of intellectual biography...

...Most of these myths reduce to a view of Freud as pure psychologist, with his life's work safely differentiated from its potentially engulfing mother-science, biology, or to a view of Freud as hero, creating the independent science of psychoanalysis from the depths of his own self-analysis...

...Though, to use the American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan's phrase, Freud shrinks a bit to life-size in this volume, his intellectual achievement stands...

...Nevertheless, I must be he, and I think I was happier about that discovery than about others since...

...The fact that both men, among others, might require such historical rescue reflects, according to Sulloway, the overwhelming sociopsychological forces of myth-generation and -maintenance of work in the history of the psychoanalytic (as in the history of any social or scientific) movement...

...It is, of course, immediately apparent that the concept of evolution, of the understanding of the present via the past, is central to psychoanalytic developmental psychology, particularly to Freud's understanding of the neuroses...

...M. Gerard Fromm "IT IS making severe demands on the unity of the personality to try to make me identify myself with die author of the paper on the spinal ganglia of the petromyzon...

...Commonweal: 252...

...Toward the end of the book, there is a simple listing of 26 specific and general myths, associated with early psychoanalytic history, along with their particular functions and the references which refute them...

...It is absolutely astonishing, however, to realize the steadfastness and the boldness with which Freud and his colleagues rigorously applied the biogenetic law (that is, that the history of the individual recapitulates the history of the species) to the theoretical problems generated by their clinical observations: Ferenczi's speculation, for example, that the diphasic aspect of human sexual development (the fact that unlike lower-order animals, infantile sexuality in man peaks around age five, submerges for several years, then erupts for a second time and now with continuity at puberty) must reflect prehistoric trauma...

...With these words of Freud, written when he was 68 and referring to a paper published nearly a half-century earlier, Sulloway begins his diligent, carefully reasoned, and authoritative examination of Freud's intellectual development, more particularly, of his fundamental and sustained connections to biology and of the mythologizing processes which have denied those connections...

...Sulloway does not play up the irony in the fact that psychoanalysis, of all sciences, has denied its origins and deified its originator, if anything, he ends on a note of apology and genuine admiration...

...These indeed are weighty, though surprisingly never tedious, matters...

...Sulloway demonstrates convincingly that for Freud himself evolutionary considerations at the level of the species seemed finally to organize and resolve pressing theoretical problems about the nature of repression, the centrality of sex as the specific cause of neurosis, and the various forms of neurosis along a developmental continuum...

...This book is a work of monumental scholarship...

...Specifically, he argues that Freud, like many scientists of his day, aspired to a biologically reductionistic theory of psychological phenomena, that with his aborted Project for a Scientific Psychology in 1895, he was forced to give up a neurophysiological theory of pyschological defenses, but that he then found, and built his entire theoretical superstructure upon, another less mechanistic model of biological reductionism—namely, the evolutionary model of Charles Darwin...

...Sulloway sees in the biography of psychoanalytic ideas a process that he calls' 'historical 'decontextualization'," a process essentially of attrition whereby the engaging scientific questions of the late nineteenth century and the people who formulated and most imaginatively sought to answer them, whereby the scientific milieu itself, created by a network of thinkers and the objects of their thought, somehow slips below the threshold of current knowledge and memory...

...With compelling scholarship and a clear and graceful style, he follows the biological thread throughout Freud's grand design...