Archeologist of the Psyche
SUNDEL, ALFRED
WRITERS and WRITING Archeologist of the Psyche Freud: The Man and His Mind, 1856-1956. By Richard L. Schoenwald. Knopf. 250 pp. $4.00. Reviewed by Alfred Sundel Contributor to "Perspective,''...
...Dreams disguise our wishes from us, skimming the cream off our emotional undercurrents...
...he synthesized and advanced the bounds of psychological perception...
...He thus handed down to us the gift of monotheism...
...no one has done more than he in finding out just what makes us tick...
...his conclusions lay before us a controversial interpretation of the God-idea so reverently paid tribute the world over...
...Unifying the earlier schools of speculative and intuitive psychology (i.e., Sophocles, Spinoza, Dostoyevsky, etc...
...All of which carries with it the implication of an old truth, that God lies within...
...Libido, the atomic-fissionable world-source of human energy--manifesting itself in desires--thus winds up being canalized into anxiety, creative activity and other outlets...
...Sigmund Freud is no small name in this pantheon...
...Still a baby science, it has many long years to go before it can be measured fairly...
...In what smacks of being a doctoral thesis, he leads us on a chronological tour of Freudiana...
...Out of this situation societal inhibitions come to bear upon us to repress our desires, forcing them into our unconscious to boil and bubble and cause us trouble...
...These emotional undercurrents are life-lasting in the sense that our future desires are pre-conditioned by what happens to our earlier ones in childhood, in that area where a child's desire within the family runs into forbidden territory, and patterns of behavior are formed...
...Reviewed by Alfred Sundel Contributor to "Perspective,'' "Western Review," "Retort" Largely due to the pressures of Christian schisms, the descendants of the early Hebrew Patriarchs slowly became proscribed after the 4th century...
...Incest and murder were first tabooed because in the primal ages they were the primal urges: Individually or collectively, sons killed their father, feasted on his body and afterward possessed the females in their circle...
...Richard L. Schoenwald here offers us, in Freud's centennial year, a history of the giant's footsteps...
...On the other side of the ledger lies their creative consciousness, which, despite enormous prohibitions and countless brutal massacres, has survived through the ages to amass an amazing record of human achievement...
...fantasies indulge them...
...An archeologist of the human psyche, Freud unearthed the Dead Sea Scrolls of our personalities and was their Champollion, too...
...Later forced into ghettoes, then into usury and eventually into the mean trade of peddling, their history is watered with many tears...
...It has been argued by his more enthusiastic followers that he is the giant upon whose head all his successors and detractors stand, mainly to argue over his mistakes...
...Since then, things haven't changed much...
...Bearing the whips and scorn of his faith but not believing in it, Freud applied his dedicated humanistic insight to religion toward the end of his career...
...One needn't go that far overboard in praise, but certainly he looms large indeed on our daily scene...
...A man who claimed that the principal figure of his own Mosaic faith was an Egyptian cannot easily be suspected of swerving from a path he believed to be the One...
...Once again we encounter, in its sequence, Freud's emphasis on the lasting effects of family relations in our lives and their all-too-common dangers...
...and pagan names for the earlier successive perpetuations of the father-image being dropped from our root traditions, the Lord became our God...
...Abiram, the man of the Covenant, the progenitor of Judeo-Christian thought, could be said to have spoken not to a voice in the whirlwind, but to himself, to the projected father-image of his childhood, a magnificent, exalted and terrifying illusion successively perpetuated through the generations...
...In the meantime, it seeks to introduce us to ourselves, to unravel the riddle of our past, to explain to us why we behave as we do--not in ideal terms, but in human ones...
...Psychoanalysis is the boon Freud brought to mankind...
...The "family romance" (mother-son, father-daughter, sister-brother) is still with us today as before, only now with the lid clamped tight--part of a whole host of emotional undercurrents that are forever tugging at us...
...However one may react to Freud's ideas, his honesty and courage cannot be bypassed lightly...
...In recording the notches Freud made in his trail-blazing, Richard L. Schoenwald has not done the great doctor a disservice...
...If his writing lacks grace, it is marked by purpose and a certain striving persistence to continue on past his own difficulties of expression...
...Sticking to facts, the author can seldom warm to his subject--which is approached in a historian's manner--although his tone is respectfully sympathetic...
Vol. 39 • July 1956 • No. 27
