Freud

...Myths may be attacked as false by the more materialistically minded of us, but they also are outward signs of the way the mind vivifies the world of matter with its own inner experience...

...Now, however, the center of world finance has shifted to the Asian rim...

...The general reader will be swept away by the depth of historical vision Gay brings in as background to a singular life so well written...

...The Western analytic tradition proved ineffec-tual in addressing the burning questions of a new generation that had embarked collectively on an inner spiritual quest...

...The opening section treats Freud Yearly medical training and marriage to Martha Bemays, before turning to Freud's col-laboration with, then separation from, the Viennese psychopathologist, Josef Breuer...

...These lights were driven away and all that remained were the lesser personalities...

...Perhaps it was an absurd conclu-sion...

...Small enough in number, and only a brief flirtation, the pundits will say...

...Subtly, perhaps unwittingly, Gay breathes con-tinued life into a number of myths about Freud and his methods...

...Given the enormous implications of such a shift in cultural context, and considering the unknown outcome of a major revolution now going on in the neurosciences related to the problem of consciousness, any sophisticated depth-psychology of the future may be so radically different that it is not likely to have Freud's name associ-ated with it...

...Counter-culture involvement in East-ern religion and philosophy was viewed as a passing fad...

...hence, Freud's personal symbol system has been widely taken up in psychoanalytic practice, thus hyposta-tized to the level of empirical evidence, and offered as "science...

...If there is no crisis when the son finally leaves home, then both father and son will invent one...

...Freud's most famous cases are examined-Dora, Schreber, Little Hans, The Rat Man, and Tlje Wolf Man-and Freud's various works are analyzed, great and small, on method, on the movement, and on the application of psychoanalysis to culture, religion, and philosophy...

...But in the end, Gay points out that the anti-Semitic note resurfaced as one of the key rationali-zations of Freud and his remaining Vien-nese followers against Jung and the entire Swiss circle...

...Jung may have dutifully succumbed to the father-complex, called himself a son and a disciple, but at the same time, Freud's own narcissistic neurosis required that he treat all his disciples simultane-ously as patients and as offspring who should show the proper measure of sub-servient infantilism...

...First, "Is psychoanalysis really a sci-ence...

...Eugene Taylor Gay produces a major section on Freud and the psychology of women, conclud-ing that psychoanalysis proved weak in understanding the feminine psyche, and he discusses Anna, Freud's spinster daugh-ter, who functionally inherited her fa-ther's mantle as leader of the psychoana-lytic cause...

...For this modern depth psychologists are in his debt, but at the present time, this is the most that can be said...

...But he does not acknowledge that, after surveying the European psychi-atric situation in the "early 1900s, Jung sided with Freud as the"nearest kind of depth-psychology to his more exotic, but more awakened interpretation of the spiri-tual dimension of ittner life...

...Freud fled from Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1938 and died in London a year and a half later, at age 83...

...as far as an older generation of eloquent and sympathetic adherents for whom psychoanalysis was the great vehicle of inner exploration, it may also be the last...

...Freud, in fact, treated all those who were his intellectual equals and close friends the same way...

...Gay does suggest that Jung never said anything to Freud at the end of their rela-tionship that he had not already said at the beginning...

...Yet, for an entire generation reacting against the dominance of European-based American high culture, the break was irrevocable...

...The end is dramatically presented...

...For decades, non-analysts have been asking for hard data and little has been forthcoming...

...Like any marriage gone awry, when they became divorced, the one who showed overt neurosis may have been only acting out for the both of them...

...Freud Peter Gay, known for his previous works on the Enlightenment and Vic-torian culture, has pro-duced his most impor-tant work to date and the best biography of Freud yet written...

...Myths live because they allow commerce between inner and outer realities, because they address questions that elude the domain of the merely rational...

...Each generation must fashion the myths by which it lives...

...For over thirty years, he has built his reputation as a seasoned scholar by articulating the broad sweep of forces affecting Western culture...

...Psychoanalysis took on such proportions, even in Freud's lifetime...

...Freud endured repeated surgery and was forced to live with a painful prosthesis for the last sixteen years of his life...

...In the 1930s psychoanalysis may have been in vogue, but for those in the postwar baby boom generation who par-ticipated in the counterculture movement of the 1960s, the introduction to inner experience has been through meditation...

...Major realignments within American business and industry are already under-way, and a more subtle but enduring crosscultural exchange in science, the arts, and literature may yet follow...

...Scholars will be drawn to the dense, thirty-eight-page bibliographic essay, which they no doubt will mine for a long time to come...

...and the end of the Fliess affair marks the beginning of Freud's relationship with Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, who soon became heir-apparent to the psychoanalytic throne...

...Attention was drawn to the East be-cause many of the Asian systems have embedded within them a depth psychol-ogy at least equal in sophistication to those produced in the West...

...Now we have his Freudt more narrowly focused on a single life, but revealing the source of Gay's true passion: how psychoanalysis has helped us interpret the inner working of individual personalities, known and unknown, in the creation of modern soci-ety...

...Now, in the last twenty-five years the mythic infrastructure that surrounded the Freudian empire has begun to dissolve...

...Yet his assertion that it was science and not religion made psychoanalysis the only system for understanding the dy-namics of inner experience to survive the modern positivist onslaught...

...But the high priests of culture always have dismissed such interests as inconsequen-tial...

...Clinicians will appreciate the acute psychological representation of Freud's major ideas...

...American popular philosophy has long been influ-enced by this alternative reality tradition...

...Professor Gay hides the essentially irrational nature of the Freud-Jung relationship in reasoned objectivity that gives more credit for sanity to Freud than to Jung...

...Taken in this vein, Freud, a Life for Our Time may not only be the best biography of Freud yet written...

...During this period, psychoanalysis emerged as an international movement and Freud developed his oftentimes con-tentious relationships with ah expanding group of followers and associates...

...In this respect, Freud tried but never succeeded completely in getting Jung to accept these projections...

...Freud himself advocated psychoanaly-sis as a science independent of, and there-fore at least equal to, neurology and psy-chiatry...

...The problem may be that Freud evolved a workable and teachable language of inner experience, part generic to modern per-sonality, and part generic to his own un-conscious...

...A crack appeared in the foundation of the giant dam and unbroken continuity with the past could no longer be assumed...

...The early years of "splendid isolation," and self-analysis are chronicled through Freud's correspondence with the Berlin physician Wilhelm Fliess...

...But by virtue of its eloquence, the work is also seductively convincing...

...The book is at once objective in its exhaustive analysis of archival documents and hagiographic in its final conclusion that Freud was indeed the great genius he believed himself to be...

...Thus their parting had to be a bloody one...

...No external standard exists to separate the two...

...No detail is spared concerning Freud's illnesses, which became acute in 1923 with the first operations for nasal cancer...

...Freud, for his part, tolerated Jung's eccentric ideas be-cause he desperately needed Jung to prove that psychoanalysis was more than just a Jewish Viennese movement...

...But by this analysis, I do not mean to detract from the important function of myth...

...No one believes it but those for whom it has already be-come a working system...

...A second myth that this book perpetu-ates is the view that Jung owed some kind of subservient debt to Freud...

...This conclusion is undeserved, because the real nature of their interaction was obscured in exces-sive mutual projection...

...Freud asserted and Gay accepts his hypothesis as fact, although the claim remains largely based on clinical obser-vation and literary evidence...

...In its place, young intellectuals of the new generation have developed an interest in the religious and philosophical traditions of Asia...