Ernest Jones's Freud

...master, again and again...

...Paul, too, had great merits, as a disciple and in his own right, but what was transmitted to the world was Paul's view of Christ and his teachings, not those of Jesus himself...

...Apparently the reviewers' veneration for the biographee blinded them to obvious shortcomings of biographer and biography...

...it is a prerequisite of greatness among those who found movements Paul is the greatest example of discipleship in the history of our culture, for it is his Jesus that lives, not the historical one...

...6.75...

...Thus, the truly significant value of these volumes derives from the passages where Freud is quoted, from the anecdotes about him, the facts about his life, and that of some of the figures who surrounded him...

...In place of Freud's own writings, we are told to accept as the only authorized version the "more trustworthy," objective "vulgate," the disciple's translation of Freud's work into a language foreign to his thinking...

...Unfortunately for his readers, Dr...

...Evidence lacking, this reviewer is willing to believe that the relationship was merely platonic...

...During work on the last volume (or volumes), Jones probably knew that the end of his own life was approaching and he worked against time...

...Indeed this, his most important book, is disposed of in some 14 pages, most of which are taken up by an enumeration of the many editions in which it appeared and how much Freud was paid in royalties...

...Since the world is expected to accept Jones's picture of Freud and of psychoanalysis, we must ask whether this is desirable for Freud, for psychoanalysis, and for the world...

...Jones's original contribution to this movement was very great indeed...

...After having read Jones's biography, this reviewer feels that Freud was right about most things, including his view of the predicament in which his biographer would find himself...

...If one of his children was absent, Freud "would point mutely at the vacant chair with his knife or fork and look inquiringly to his wife at the other end of the table...

...The review begins as follows: "Great masters need great disciples...

...Still, it would be wrong to conclude that there is no value in acquainting oneself with this biography...

...Nor are we told that the leading aristocracy was not only not anti-Semitic but strongly opposed to the low-middle-class anti-Semitism of Lueger...

...Jones does not necessarily deserve the full indictment Freud made before he had even so much as contemplated such a biography, but the reception given these volumes runs very much counter to what Freud thought about biographies in general...

...Critics of Freud among his early disciples (other than Jones) were never motivated by valid reasoning but only by jealousy, if not psychopathic motives...

...But the reader will have to be careful to draw his own conclusions from what Jones reports, and not accept his many misinterpretations...

...In view of these reactions, further discussion may be worthwhile...

...For long stretches it belabors the now obvious, while often failing to tell us what we want most to know about the hero and his creation...

...Yes, as Paul brought Christ rather than Jesus to the world, Jones has now given us his image of Freud and of psychoanalysis...

...It is particularly distressing that a biography of Freud written by a distinguished analyst should be so un-psychoanalytic in this and many other ways...

...that psychoanalysis will not be what Freud labored for but what Jones made of it...

...In the New Yorker, of all magazines, we are told it is a "superb drama...

...Some of this was to be expected...

...Volume II, 1901-1919, Years of Maturity...

...Fortunately for him, Freud retained his Jones...

...This quotation, coming after the more than 1,200 pages that precede it in Ernest Jones's biography, persuades us once more, if further reasons were needed, what a very wise man Freud was and how correctly he viewed man and his efforts...

...What kind of woman was she...

...512 pp...

...So in 1936 the 80-year-old Sigmund Freud, with his own biography in mind, expressed himself to Arnold Zweig, who had proposed to write it...

...Again and again, we hear how Jones was correct from the beginning and how Freud often erred in his judgment of friends, of ideas, and even of his own writings...

...Most distressing, for those who try to understand Freud from this biography, is its failure to set Freud within the context of his society and the culture which formed the woof out of which his life, and thus his work of psychoanalysis, were woven...

...to messages carried out into the world rather than verifiable data which can and should be subjected to scientific scrutiny...

...In the same review we are told that "Jones completed the task of reconciliation...

...Here it is: The disciple's rendering of his master's writings into a foreign language is "considerably more trustworthy" than what the master himself said in his own language...

...author, "Love Is Not Enough," "Truants from Life...

...This particular psychoanalytic biographer seems to have felt that sexual attractions between sister-in-law and brother-in-law need not -even be considered as a possibility, even if the two shared home, ideas, holidays—the husband so interested in the woman's company that he left wife and children behind...

...In trying to do all, he failed in each...

...By comparison, the second and third volumes suffer seriously from these shortcomings and from being so largely taken up with inadequate expositions of Freud's writings and a biased history of the psychoanalytic movement...

...So Freud's supposed hatred of Vienna was thus the expression of a deep early love that became frustrated by anti-Semitism in the early 20th century, a frustration the more keenly felt as the earlier love was never given up...

...To the New York Times reviewer, it is one of the outstanding biographies of the age...

...For example, Freud before his self-analysis is described as a very neurotic individual, which he undoubtedly was...

...he has brought Freud to the world...

...Jones also shows himself unfamiliar with a correlary pattern among the intellectual society of Vienna: namely, the pretense of thinking disparagingly of Vienna, which was nothing but a cover-up of the irrational love-attachment to the city and its culture...

...7.50...

...he chose to live there despite the anti-Semitism...

...Here, as in many other instances, the great discovery of the ambivalence of human emotions seems not to apply to Freud—not, at least, according to his biographer...

...So closely was the biographer's life interwoven with his hero's that it seems fitting that with "finis" written on Freud's biography, his own days ended, too...

...For a Jewish family of the 1880s to have lived in a flat of six rooms meant that they were quite well off...

...But this is only one of many examples of Jones's total misunderstanding of the Vienna which was so important in shaping the man Freud...

...How unpsychoanalytic Jones as biographer can be is further illustrated by how he disposes of what may have been one of Freud's most important intimate relations...

...Those close to Freud, such as Ferenczi, who was closest of all, were unfortunately terribly neurotic (we are told) ; Rank, his close collaborator for years, was subject to more than neurotic depression, often to distorted judgment...

...Instead of recognizing this and explaining its neurotic ambivalent nature to the reader, Jones presents the negative side of Freud's ambivalence without ever elucidating those positive aspects that were obviously stronger, since they always won out...

...Reviewed by Bruno Bettelheim Psychiatrist...

...What of psychoanalysis and what it tries to teach, if this was so ? Those who have wondered about this relationship seem to have been more psycho-analytically inclined than the psychoanalytic biographer who labels (rather than discusses) their speculation as "malicious gossip...

...Unfortunately this biography, though voluminous, has many shortcomings in all three respects...

...It contains too many revealing incidents of Freud's history, too many meaningful glimpses into his daily life, which are not available elsewhere...

...One must wonder about the man, Freud, who traveled for long periods alone with this mature woman, roomed in hotels with her, but did not find her sexually attractive...

...That master is fortunate who does not see, among his disciples, the closest fall away . Inevitably, Luther had his Carlstadt...

...Although this is not the definitive biography of Freud, it is definitely an official biography, presenting that picture of him which members of the inner circle of official psychoanalysis wish to have accepted as definitive...

...6.75...

...here the reviewer probably confused the fascinating story of Freud's life with the pedestrian way in which Jones has presented it...

...Here they are, the allusions to uncritical belief rather than to the rational mind...

...Among the Jews of the next generations, an oft-repeated and much-enjoyed riddle was the question of how to prove that the Jews were the chosen people when they had always been persecuted or in misery...

...If we want to know Jesus, we go to the historical Jesus, not the Pauline Christ...

...For example, we are told that Berlin's relative liberalism aroused the envy of Freud, who "had to live in a city ruled by the anti-Semitic Major Lueger, and where anti-Semitism prevailed...

...Freud, who was recognized as one of the great masters of modern German, who was so deeply concerned with how he put his ideas into words in the language he loved...

...If he was such a man, would it not be the prime task of a psychoanalytic biographer to explain it in some detail...

...What kind of man was Freud that he should choose as the preferred companion of his mature years a woman sexually unattractive to him...

...director, Orthogenic School, University of Chicago "Whoever undertakes to write a biography binds himself to lying, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to flummery and even to hiding his own lack of understanding...

...Therefore, it is even more regrettable that in writing its history he tries so hard to prove that, except for himself, who feels free to criticize, only those of Freud's followers who were never critical of anything the master said or did were entirely free of neurosis and were, like Jones, motivated only by the highest morality...

...These true disciples were never touched by any ambivalence, and this was more true of his biographer than of anyone...

...But whenever he presents it he decides it in his own favor, as against Freud and Freud's other disciples...

...As a collection of anecdotes, they are of very great merit...

...To have this authoritative statement about the nature of psychoanalytic therapy, with its utter refutation of the technicians of the deep interpretations and the artisans of the dynamic dissection of the human psyche, makes one grateful for these volumes...

...I select the last—whether Freud meant what he wrote, or what Jones made of it— because I believe that the issue can be stated here more clearly than through the many statements about how Freud was wrong and Jones was right about persons and ideas...

...Jones is unfortunately no longer here to defend himself...

...As a biography of Freud the man and as a statement about psychoanalysis, they have many shortcomings...

...For example, Jones describes Freud's early years as a boy and later as a student at the University of Vienna as if he had been poverty stricken but, despite it and by his own strength, worked his way to fame and success...

...This is another example, in which these volumes abound, of Jones deciding that he was righter than Freud...

...No, despite the many merits of the three volumes...

...Repeatedly he mentions Freud's hatred for Vienna, and strangely enough does not question why, if he claimed to hate Vienna so much, he could not bring himself to leave it but remained there after the Nazis came, until it was impossible to stay any longer...

...whether to give us an objective history of the psychoanalytic movement, or a justification for its vagaries...

...But his self-analysis which, like the analysis of any other person, formed the crucial psychological event of his adult life, is dealt with on barely nine pages out of a life-history nearly 1,500 pages long...

...Therefore, he could not and needed not, as in the later volumes, so often point to himself as the one who bad been correct from the start...

...to the founding of religion rather than to scientific discovery...

...But the fact is that Freud did not have to live in Vienna...

...Speaking of Freud and his sister-in-law, who for 42 years was part of his household circle, Jones simply states authoritatively that "there was no sexual attraction on either side...

...With such pretensions, it must be asked whether these three volumes render a picture of Freud that does justice to him and to psychonanalysis...

...In this reviewer's opinion the answer is No...

...And we are to believe that a translation is more trustworthy...

...Of this principle of psychoanalysis his official biographer remained so unaware that he never so much as mentioned it as a possibility...

...In an excerpt from a letter to Jung, Freud says of his method of therapy that "it is in essence a cure through love...

...537 pp...

...Only one of many anecdotes may be quoted to show how revealing of Freud these volumes can be as source material: Jones tells how, during meals, Freud would not talk to his family because he enjoyed his food so much that he concentrated on eating instead...

...yet Jones fails utterly to understand it...

...The man who wrote The Future of an Illusion is treated as if he were the founder of a religion, in need of apostles whose lives of their master will be more important than the master's real life since, we are told, it is the former which will live in the world...

...The answer was: "But you forget how good we had it under Franz Josef...

...Time magazine, not usually friendly to psychoanalysis and quite critical of Freud, called it a masterpiece of contemporary biography...

...The hardships of anti-Semitism came later, were superimposed on an entirely different basis of gratitude and expectation, built up during the lifetime of Freud's father and Freud's own earliest years...

...Strange, indeed, is the fate of books and their authors...

...What might Freud have thought had he been presented with the idea that a translation into a foreign language was more trustworthy than what he himself had written...

...And it would do, if Freud had been just another man and not the shaper of modern man's thought of man...

...Since much of this was not available before in printed form, we must be grateful for it...

...The deep attachment to the empire of Franz Josef and to Vienna, which Freud shared with most of his Jewish contemporaries, must be understood as part of the tremendous social and economic advancement that his father's generation experienced...

...if this were just another effort at presenting the life of Freud, and not what is officially and widely acclaimed as the definitive biography of Freud and of psychonanalysis—more, as one of the greatest biographies of modern times...

...But why such meager fare...

...Since this is the core of my criticism, I should let Jones speak for himself on at least one of these three issues...

...The ambiguities and contradictions, so essential to Freud's humanity and to psychoanalysis as a growing and developing science of man's mind, are eliminated...

...But then we must be told what this must have meant for the man and the woman...

...All this despite the tedious repetition, the oversimplified exposition of Freud's theories, and the long stretches of Jones's history of the psychoanalytic movement which are mainly an uninspired rewrite of the much more exciting history Freud published many years ago...

...But it is neither the historical Freud nor the true history of psychoanalysis...

...The abundant material on it, readily available in The Interpretation of Dreams, is untapped...

...After reporting Freud's comment on those who might wish to write his biography, Jones adds that he feels sure that "Freud would have been surprised to find that one could get nearer to the truth about himself than he imagined possible...

...Jones himself states this problem of disciples vs...

...Volume III, 1919-1939, The Last Phase...

...The extremely laudatory response to this biography, particularly to the first and second volumes, was probably due to the curiosity which the founder of psychoanalysis evokes, to the wish to learn more about the early history of psychoanalysis and the kind of person and experiences it took to invent it...

...This and much more suggest that a reviewer should be considerate rather than critical of an author who strove hard and put his best into what was certainly a labor of love...

...Why so interlarded with directions by a tired teacher to eager students, over hundreds of pages, about how they must and must not understand the genius of Freud, the life histories of his followers, and their motives for remaining "true" to Freud or parting ways with him...

...She would explain that the child was not coming in to dinner or that something or other had detained him, whereupon Freud, with his curiosity satisfied, would nod silently and proceed with his meal...

...Of the original 'Committee'—founded by Jones to create a 'bodyguard around Freud' and at the same time to carry his message out into the world— some died and others departed...

...Ernest Jones remained...

...Jones could not make up his mind whether he wanted to give us the story of Freud's life, or an exposition of psychoanalysis...

...One may imagine how the skeptical Freud, worn down by the tiring questions of this disciple about supposed contradictions and ambiguities, finally gave in, realizing that it was hopeless to get Jones to understand that being able to accept living, thinking and working with seeming or real ambiguities forms the essence of psychoanalysis...

...One letter that Freud wrote to his family from Rome (which Jones fortunately reprints), excerpts from others of his letters to be found in the text and the appendices to Volumes II and III, quotations such as the one mentioned at the start of this review— these reveal more of Freud than do the many hundreds of pages in which Jones writes about him...

...As a history of the psychoanalytic movement, they do injustice to the personalities and contributions of many who were closest to Freud and hence are misleading...

...This process has continued ever since with the noteworthy result that the English translation of Freud's works [will] be considerably more trustworthy than any German version...

...Freud had not merely his Jung but also his Rank and Ferenczi...

...Such an extension of hero worship—from the person described to his biography and the person who wrote it—is certainly an interesting psychological phenomenon, about which Freud might have had much to say...

...In reality, while Freud's parents were not well-to-do, they certainly belonged to the Jewish middle class and were by no means poor...

...there are also many errors of omission and commission...

...Doing justice to the extremely complex person who was Freud, while at the same time explaining the intricate personalities of those who surrounded him, retelling the ambivalent relationships that existed between them and their master and among one another, would be difficult for any biographer, let alone a very old man whose personal participation and obvious partisanship dimmed objectivity...

...The first volume reads much better than the following two if only because it deals mostly with Freud's life before Jones entered it...

...This thought became certainty when even in the official Journal of the American Sociological Society, an organ usually devoted to critical judgment not blind admiration, I found spelled out what I secretly feared as I read the three volumes and their reviews: that there is danger that the future will receive not the teachings of Freud but the explanations of Jones...

...But to return to the definitive volumes: What a splendid history of Freud the man could now be written if official psychoanalysis had not sealed the Freud archives, with over 2,500 of his letters, for fifty years...

...If not, fealty to Freud and the importance of psychoanalysis should take precedence over respect for his biographer, and these volumes should be subjected to scrutiny, even if Dr...

...Speaking of himself and his collaborators on "the enormous labor of translating Freud's work," Jones writes: "We sent him question after question about slight ambiguities in his expositions, and made various suggestions concerning inner contradictions and the like...

...Before that time, there was no need for him to see Freud and his relation to his other followers the way Jones wished to see them...

...What likeness of Freud would emerge if these letters could be made available in their entirety, instead of the parsimonious and puritanic selection which Jones has presented in ways that barely allow us to get a feeling for Freud as a human being...

...Perhaps, given this weekly's bias, they were pleased that it so obviously failed to bring Freud the man to life...

...And, as a statement of the society and times out of which Freud (and with him psychoanalysis) grew, they are a failure...

...One wonders even more how it was possible for this woman not to become sexually attracted to Freud...

...But any student of psychoanalysis knows that the picture a disciple gives of his master tells more about the disciple than the master...

...But they were excellent when compared with the near ghettolike existence from which Freud's father escaped by his move to Vienna...

...The conditions of Freud's life may seem deprived by the standards of a good middle-class British subject of today...

...It is within this social context that Freud's life must be comprehended...

...Jones gave us the Freud he understood, psychoanalysis as he interpreted it...

...It was, therefore, the lower-class anti-Semitism which, in a strange way, brought the Jewish intelligentsia into even closer contact with an upper-upper class aristocracy that would otherwise have remained closed to it...

...Because of this experience of ever greater self-realization, the Jews of Vienna, in the last half of the 19th century, had no choice but to love it so dearlv...