Images of Sigmund Freud

...In his impatience with any formulations not quantifiable, Madison seems quite characteristic of American academic psychology, and his quantifications have the familiar leaden ring: Resistance Check List, Thematic Rigidity Index, Life History Amnesia Index, Humor Remoteness Ratio, and so on...

...This "Freud" could not have discovered his way out of a paper bag...

...Madison's problem is a total want of esthetic imagination and a high humor-remoteness coefficient...

...The image it gives us is basically Jones' image, Freud as the good father, authoritative but benign...

...A Far Country is prefaced by the disclaimer: "No real person portrayed herein is still alive...

...It was Prince's father who was Mayor of Boston, as I know from having innocently reprinted Jones' statement, and having been promptly corrected by a correspondent...

...Freud's problem is his "inability to understand religious experience," that is, he refuses to learn "that God is his father...

...He confesses that most of his antiquities are copies...

...For all its failings, Freud and the Post-Freudians is far from useless...

...Jung asks in 1914 "whether a scientifically trained doctor can square it with his conscience to sell little bottles of Lourdes water...

...The book's chief value lies in its demonstration that in, say, the moderate and reasonable formulations of Otto Fenichel, so much of Freud's theory is now beyond dispute...

...The work is large, and ordered, and courageous, and magnanimous in intention," Trilling writes, "and of the life we can say nothing less...

...What puzzles and confuses is "Freud's lack of a differentiated terminology," his terminological vagueness and inconsistency about the basic concepts he called "repression" and "defense...

...His travel neurosis turns out to have been caused in his childhood when his mother attempted to hurl them both under a train (!), and at the play's end his wife, who has diagnosed the case from the mother's remarks, assures Freud that the neurosis will now vanish...

...Even then, his heart wasn't in it...

...The book is thus, for its different audience, improved, and anyone who needs or wants any of the deleted material still has it readily available in the original edition...

...Where Jung later rewrote these early articles, the editors print both versions, and we can observe the disappearance of the sexual references, unfortunate evidences of "a low cultural level...

...It is small wonder that confusion exists," Madison cries, bravely hacking his way through the jungle...

...The one most familiar, useful and welcome is the one-volume abridgement by Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus of Ernest Jones' important three-volume biography (The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Basic Books, 541 pp., $7.50...

...When Freud and his wife quarrel, in the Vienna of the 1890s, the maid tries to reconcile them...

...His mother is the nagging, son's-career-mad mother of "my son, the doctor" jokes...

...Denker's Freud talks to patients in the threedot style of high school literary magazines ("No earth beneath you only a void dark empty void ") and to his colleagues in a series of barked exclamations...

...This ambitious venture is fundamentally misguided, an effective means to an absurd end...

...Freud's ideas are just as ruthlessly...

...E. P. Whittemore, a freelancer who is a close observer of Cuban affairs, is also the author of The Press in Japan Today: A Case Study...

...For a Pelican, the book is extraordinarily full of mistakes...

...The latest volume in the Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Freud and Psychoanalysis (translated by R. F. C. Hull, Pantheon, 376 pp., $5.00), presents a sharply contrasting image of Freud, one that we might sum up as a heathen, sex-obsessed neurotic...

...His role was to be Freud's Lucifer, the brightest angel fallen, but really he reminds one more of Cardinal Newman, striding along in the firm faith that he is reforming the Church of England until one day he wakes up in Rome...

...We see a dazzling display of numberjugglery, a developing vocabulary of "ethical development" and "the profundity and beauty of the human soul," a firm denial of infantile sexuality in the same papers that reveal its omnipresence, an insistance that "the normal man is 'civic-minded and moral,' " dreamreadings that foresee the future like gypsy fortunetelling, mythic inflations and slogans about "biological destiny...

...Kildare and as Old Dr...

...Denker, a radio writer, is semi-literate, and as a consequence his figure of Freud (that fastidious stylist) is semi-literate too, using "like" for "as" and splitting infinitives...

...I counted a dozen serious errors of fact, and the names are so careless that the author of The Golden Bough emerges as "Sir George Fraser," the historian of the Renaissance is "Burchardt" throughout, and all names beginning with "J" are missing from the index...

...Technical discussions and scholarly documentation have been excised, along with digressions, trivia and some of Jones' whimsies...

...The larger question, why he chose Freud at all, I cannot answer...

...Psychoanalysis is about as quantifiable as a sonnet sequence...

...Freud was a very great man," Brown writes, but the later Freudians as well as the dissenters have shared his greatness no more than they have shared his "aristocratic distaste for the rabble...

...Denker's Freud is shown filing a dance program with his case notes, forgetting his patient's name, fondling her hand, telling her comforting little white lies...

...This is more sharply focussed as heroic in the fine tribute contained in Trilling's introduction...

...The editors have not corrected the one error of fact I am aware of in the book, the statement that Morton Prince had been Mayor of Boston...

...We can at least be grateful for that...

...Five have appeared in recent months, and they give an odd effect of talking about several different fellows of the same name...

...It is of course Denker's privilege to adapt reality to his dramaturgic needs, but not to call the resulting soap-opera hero "Freud...

...A new Pelican, Freud and the Post-Freudians, by J. A. C. Brown (Penguin Books, 225 pp., $.95), gives an engaging image of Freud as an aristocratic old gentleman pestered by bad children...

...The views of the competing schools of psychoanalysis are summarized with unusual fairness, and nothing important is omitted except the new ego psychology of Heinz Hartmann and Ernst Kris...

...Freud's theories are described as "the one-sided sexual reductions of the Viennese school," "a psychology which is a formulation of his own being," "a psychology of neurotic states of mind...

...For the record, this is W. H. R. Rivers' theory of the traumatic origin of neurosis, and Mary Baker Eddy's theory of cure...

...We see him dutifully producing sexual interpretations (roast chestnuts are female sex symbols "because of the split," firewood is a male sex symbol...

...A technical book by an American academic psychologist, Peter Madison, gives us an image of Freud that is probably typical of American academic psychology...

...How much of Freud's intellectual achievement must be thought of as a moral achievement," he declares...

...Its image of Freud is alternately as Young Dr...

...The dramatic climax of the play, the hysterically crippled heroine's throwing aside her crutches to walk, followed by the dying Freud's throwing away his wheelchair to walk, would not come off even at Lourdes...

...Denker's next dramatization, I learn from the newspapers, is to be of Louis Nizer's My Life in Court, where he should be more at home...

...Freud's early collaborator Joseph Breuer, in a particularly vicious caricature, is a self-confessed coward and trimmer...

...We can also watch the early development of Jung's own approach...

...Madison shows how dominated American psychiatry is by Freud's views, principally the theories he published from 1900 to 1915, but how little it understands his later theoretical modifications...

...travestied...

...By the time Jung died last year, Zurich was the greatest bottling works in the world...

...The book is Freud's Concept of Repression and Defense: Its Theoretical and Observational Language (University of Minnesota, 250 pp., $4.75), and its image is of a slipshod and disorderly genius...

...Finally we come to Henry Denker's successful Broadway play about Freud, A Far Country, just published (Random House, 134 pp., $3.50...

...Freud and Psychoanalysis devotes its first section to papers written from 1906 to 1912, when Jung was still a Freudian...

...Denker chose to dramatize the early case of "Elisabeth v. R.," I do not doubt, because it had a woman patient, a happy ending and no ugly infantile material...

...In accord with his self-image as the most rigorous of scientists, he answers with a firm negative...

...Gillespie, and it is a vulgar and meretricious travesty from start to finish...

...Brown's explanations of theory are often confused and confusing, he generally paraphrases where he might better quote, and some of his information is secondhand...

...Madison's ambition is no less than straightening out the terms, organizing them in a consistent and systematic fashion, then restating them in what Rudolf Carnap calls "observational" language and devising quantifications that will permit the evaluation of therapy...

...Where I have checked the abridgement, it has omitted little that the non-professional reader needs or would miss...

...He does all this quite successfully and usefully until the last, or quantifying, stage, when things become ludicrous...

...I cannot see how Freud can ever get beyond his own psychology," Jung concludes, "and relieve the patient of a suffering from which the doctor himself still suffers...

...and from the first article on, Jung hedges about how he does not "subscribe unconditionally," and how "one-sided" Freud's material is...

...The image of Jung himself that comes through is a complex one: brilliant, pompous, vain, unscrupulous, sometimes enormously winning...

...Situations in waiting rooms might be experimentally arranged," he writes, "in which seductive persons of the opposite sex would see how much interest could be aroused.' Madison delicately does not suggest the unit of measurement...