From Oedipus to Marx to Freud
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writmg FROM OEDIPUS TO MARX TO FREUD BY PEARL K. BELL For a psychoanalyst, the writing of autobiography is, in one sense, something of a working sabbatical: The dredging up of...
...The final influence on Helene Deutsch, after her father and Lieberman, was Sigmund Freud, whom she met in 1918 when she was already a practicing psychiatrist...
...Unfortunately, everything in her memoir that follows her alliance with Freud is dully professional or evasively sentimental...
...Deutsch the psychoanalyst assesses this youthful scandal, "I have seldom seen so pure an Oedipal situation as was this fusion of love and politics...
...Freud's An Autobiographical Study is a coldly austere account of professional struggles and triumphs, with none of the personal detail one looks for in such a work...
...This esthetic, rather than therapeutic or "corrective," function of memory is the most interesting aspect of the book, and the most deceptive...
...Books like Marie Bonaparte's Ma Vie et la Psychoanalyse, Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Wilhelm Stekel's Autobiography, and Ernest Jones' Free Associations come to mind, but these attempts to set the house of memory in order for posterity are rare exceptions...
...One would therefore assume that the autobiographical memoir would be the least tempting of intellectual activities for a psychoanalyst and, indeed, the history of Freudianism is noticeably lacking in intimate records from the movement's founding fathers...
...Freud ordered her to stop the analysis because she was soon discussing nothing but Tausk's attacks on him, yet this episode is recounted by Paul Rozan in his book on Tausk, Brother Animal, and not by Dr...
...It helped, too, that about this time she made the acquaintance of Felix Deutsch, a highly gifted internist who was doing ground-breaking work in psychosomatic medicine...
...Similarly, she offers a long and tedious history of training analysis, while telling us nothing about the engrossing conflict between Freud and his brilliant, tragically pathological disciple, Victor Tausk, who was her an-alysand...
...She has waited a long time to tell her fascinating story, but if the passing of too many years has blunted some of the incidents and personalities that figure in her saga, it has also offered some unique advantages...
...More poignantly, Dr...
...As Dr...
...Deutsch has chosen to skimp about those very aspects of her long and energetic life that demand the fullest visibility...
...And whereas the ardent young girl is marvelously vivid, the redoubtable doctor is abstractly professional and personally vague...
...Here and there she touches upon the great debate on women and work, motherhood and career...
...When Lieberman was elected to the Viennese Parliament, Hala left Przemysl forever, following him and enrolling in the University...
...Deutsch insists that the dilemma was resolved by biology-"I was ripe for motherhood, and the nature of our relationship made it out of the question"-ene suspects that her willingness to end the affair stemmed more urgently from boredom and her own ruthless ambition...
...Deutsch is one of Freud's staunchest disciples...
...To the thin list of reminiscence about Freud and the development of psychoanalysis in the opening years of this century one can now add Helene Deutsch's Confrontations with Myself (Norton, 217 pp., $6.95...
...Since women were still excluded from law schools, she decided to study medicine...
...It is as though the father of psychoanalysis has taken on the untouchable sanctity of a graven image...
...Deutsch...
...Deutsch admits that her severe loneliness, since her husband's death in 1964, "has awakened in me a hunger to fill my depleted existence with the past...
...She was the first director of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Institute and, after emigrating to Boston in 1934, emerged as one of the leading training analysts in this country...
...Indeed, if the work ultimately emerges as curiously uneven, it is because the connection between these two creatures inhabiting the same enduring body is never portrayed persuasively as a single life...
...His wife was a tyrannically icy matron, and Hala detested her mother as fiercely as she loved her father...
...Whatever the motives, the writing of this memoir has enabled her to discover something about the nature of memory in old age: Its purpose "does not lie in 'knowing myself' nor in any renewed possibility of correcting old errors, expiating wrongs committed, retracting poor judgments, etc...
...From her earliest adolescence she was determined to escape the stifling family cocoon of mahogany materialism and respectability...
...Deutsch was there, in Vienna, when it all started...
...As she observes, "An old person's memoirs are written under certain distinct psychological conditions...
...At the same time, the analyst's necessary habit of detachment obviously makes it difficult for him to approach the story of his own life with the spontaneous subjectivity that honest autobiography demands...
...It was during this heady summer that she realized how crippling her liaison with Lieberman had become...
...At 16, this aggressively discontented and Oedipal girl, whose education had so far been limited to the cultural "finishing" considered sufficient for future wives and mothers, became an active Socialist...
...Admitting, for example, feelings of guilt about the sometimes necessary sacrifice of her son to her vocation, she honestly confesses that "when something in my personal life interfered with my scientific productivity, I was less happy and more aggressive...
...Writers & Writmg FROM OEDIPUS TO MARX TO FREUD BY PEARL K. BELL For a psychoanalyst, the writing of autobiography is, in one sense, something of a working sabbatical: The dredging up of long-buried memories represents the crucial element of the doctor's training analysis...
...In common with other rebels of her class and time, she found the gateway to freedom in political radicalism...
...the spurring and evaluation of remembrance flowing from his patients is his workaday reality...
...Neither does she attempt to answer the recent criticisms of The Psychology of Women, although she concedes that some of her study may by now be outdated...
...She also plunged headlong into a doomed affair with Herman Lieberman, a leading Polish Social Democrat 16 years older than herself, tethered to a wife and children...
...In the course of her revolutionary love affair, Hala organized strikes among women workers, threw herself in front of mounted police, marched, and sang the Marseillaise...
...For Confrontations with Myself is really about two different persons-ene, the gifted and ferociously ambitious Hala Rosenbach, the youngest of four children born into a bourgeois Jewish family in Poland, who ran off to Vienna to study medicine...
...actually, since the master had a contradictory urge to keep his public life private, and his private life public, his real autobiography is concealed in The Interpretation oj Dreams...
...In 1910, Hala accompanied Lieberman to the International Socialist Congress in Stockholm, and her descriptions of her meetings with Rosa Luxemburg and Angelica Balabanoff are witty and fresh...
...the other, the famous Freudian analyst Helene Deutsch, whom that rebellious girl eventually became...
...Perhaps, however, this is more than one can ask of an 88-year-old woman, who can so remarkably depict herself as the archetypal 20th-century female, the last of her extraordinary breed to streak heroically across the intellectual skies of her time -from Oedipus to Marx to Freud...
...If she resented this action, as she might understandably have done, she suppresses the fact here...
...Although Dr...
...It is a pity that Dr...
...A reader approaches her autobiography with particular excitement, though, because the 88-year-old Dr...
...Deutsch had a brief didactic analysis with Freud, which he broke off because he needed her hour for the Wolf-Man...
...Wilhelm Rosenbach of Przemysl, a classical Oedipal figure for his daughter, was a prominent lawyer and a warmly loving man...
...Given Kurt Eissler's angry rebuttal of Rozan, one longs for her first-hand view...
...The process of sublimation active in the writing of autobiography and the weakening of sexual impulses create an atmosphere for the free welling-up of memories...
...Theory is thus allowed to supervene the evidence of her own experience and needs, and her comments seem unsatisfactorily superficial...
...It lies in the memory process itself: the intense emotions that arise when we meet or confront once more the loved and hated figures of the past...
...Despite the declaration that psychoanalysis "was my last and most deeply experienced revolution," her description of those cataclysmic years has none of the ardent specificity she brought to the account of Hala Rosenbach...
...Best known, of course, for her classic two-volume study The Psychology of Women, recently the target of a fierce attack by the more aggressively anti-Freudian women's-liberation theorists, Dr...
...But instead of tackling the thorny complexity of this universal problem, she cuts off the subject by simply affirming her continuing belief that "motherhood is a full-time occupation...
Vol. 56 • July 1973 • No. 15
