Viennese Hedgehog

...Was Freud, in fact, aided by his relative lack of knowledge in psychology and psychiatry...

...What we need on psychoanalysis at present is not a book like Freud and His Followers, but a work locating Freud's ideas in an historical and sociological context...

...Did therapeutic failure lead to theoretical divergence, or vice versa...

...or his American contemporary, William James...

...Which conceptual model best describes the history of psychoanalysis and its internal evolution...

...indeed, he mentions some of them himself...

...The possessor of a tenacious, obsessional mind, Freud worked for the long haul...

...Unfortunately, Paul Roazen's lengthy work does not exactly elucidate these and other matters...

...Those who stayed became attached to Freud personally, and the result was an inevitable trend toward sycophancy, along with a narrowing of horizons to the point of provinciality...

...He developed his basic insights from his self-analysis during the 1890s, then proceeded to elaborate them into a coherent though never static theory of human behavior...

...Specifically, why did Freud succeed and not his early colleague, Joseph Breuer...

...It is scrupulously fair, particularly to the dissidents, and in this lies its major departure from the previous, hagiographic accounts by Ernest Jones and Max Schur...

...Though Roazen supplies the raw materials for this, he goes no further...

...Roazen claims, however, that in all cases the pupils, loyal or disloyal, gained more from "the Professor" than he from them...

...Was there a tendency for those with training in other fields to be more resistant to Freud's personality and ideas...

...Roazen argues that many of Adler's, Jung's and Rank's doctrines were pirated back into Freudianism by the women analysts (the emphasis upon the mother-child relationship, the 'importance of the pre-Oedipal stage), as well as by the ego psychologists Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann and Erik Erikson...

...Roazen reverts to this linkage several times in his study, and he often makes insightful comments...

...he practically never pursues them in a coherent manner...

...And to his theoretical creation, as well as the "family" that was dedicated, under his guidance, to its perpetuation, Freud eventually came to subordinate his private life...

...Such questions come to mind while reading Paul Roazen's Freud and His Followers...

...Are men such as Ernest Jones, with a keen polemical and organizational sense, necessary for the survival of an intellectual school...

...His mother's favorite, solidly if conventionally educated, reluctantly a physician, a cultural but not a religious Jew, and the most bourgeois of gentlemen, Freud was a highly unlikely subversive, or, as he himself would have it "conquistador...

...The shift from sect to church...

...Thus, he notes Freud's close relationship with his mother, his being surrounded by five sisters, and his dependence on his wife and sister-in-law (Roazen doubts an actual affair) and, later, on Anna...

...He was courtly, kind, even modest at times, but he could be cruel and unfeeling, dogmatic and unreasonable, when challenged on essentials...

...In short, for all his efforts to escape the "party line," Roazen continues to operate within the established range of discourse...

...The questions to be answered remain legion...

...Yet the point is never pursued with rigor and coherence...

...and Roazen's prose matches the movement of his thought: it is patchy and disjointed, rarely rising above what could be considered the serviceable...

...What should he or she not know - what encumbers, deadens, blunts the intellect and the imagination so as to render a creative breakthrough impossible...

...Freud was never entirely comfortable with the yes-men around him, but in truth he could not do without them...

...Still, aside from these areas, Roazen's discussions lack either a sure touch or a fresh angle of vision...

...He confines himself almost exclusively to the details, the interworkings of personalities and ideas within the movement...

...The bureaucratization of charisma...

...The chapters on Freud's ideas about, and practice of, therapy are quite enlightening - Roazen collects considerable evidence to show that Freud was flexible and open in his techniques, much less "Freudian" than what later came to be therapeutic orthodoxy...

...Early in the book, he suggests a close link between Freud's life and theories, only to bring the topic up short with the amazingly banal statement: "Had he been any other man he would never have been able to make the discoveries he did...

...In his later years, suffering from the excruciating effects of cancer, he used Anna, his chosen heiress, as a buffer against the rest of the world...

...His career, marked at the start by an intellectual daring and courage, was gradually transformed into a laborious drive for immortality by a man who admitted a desire to rank alongside Copernicus and Darwin...

...Roazen's own model appears to be the "family," with Freud as patriarch and his followers as sons and daughters, even grandsons and granddaughters, but he never thematizes this...

...For instance, he seems to confuse Freud's concepts of perversion and inversion (homosexuality...

...and he applies the term "metapsychological" to Freud's works on culture and religion from the '20s and '30s, although it properly refers to papers on psychosis, the unconscious, instinct theory, and narcissism that were written in the second decade of this century...

...author, "The Party of Eros" What does an individual need to know, in the widest sense, to create a systematic, far-reaching theory...

...Did Freud's life-long siege mentality have less to do with actual opposition than with the necessities of maintaining internal elan, and does this relate to the predominance of Jews in the psychoanalytic tradition...

...Was it inevitable that political radicals found it difficult to stay around...

...Yet he is too ready to see convergences, and glosses over what are in fact important theoretical differences...

...To bring up these issues is not to say that Roazen completely ignores them...

...Or how should we explain the types of heresy that emerged...

...For it is not at all self-evident, even in retrospect, that the founder of psychoanalysis was destined for intellectual greatness...

...Roazen's Freud was a hedgehog through and through...

...Yet what sticks in the mind, finally, is not any overarching thesis, only skillfully detailed sketches of the heretics and loyalists, and isolated chapters...

...According to the author, the first generation of followers was attracted by the startling power and relevance of Freud's ideas, but the best and the brightest - Adler, Jung, Rank - tended to become schismatics and were read out of the movement, often with ill-concealed glee, by the faithful...

...In an ironic way the psychoanalytic movement mirrored the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church that Freud as a Jew found so distasteful...

...Roazen has already shown this quite clearly in Brother Animal, his study of Victor Tausk...

...In particular, Freud drew closer to his female disciples - his daughter, Anna, Lou-Andreas Salome Helene Deutsch, Ruth Mack Brunswick...

...But he does so mainly in passing...

...Rarely does he step back to raise what have become some of the most important and interesting questions about the modern history of our culture...

...Based on extensive interviews with persons who had direct contact with Freud, and on letters to, from and about Freud, and on the central texts of the psychoanalytic tradition, Freud and His Followers seems to me a classic example of an overresearched and underconceptualized book...