Nothing But a Conquistador

...Ferris details the follies of Freud's experiments with cocaine...

...It is rather like overhearing Einstein confess that relativity was merely a dodge...

...Between 1953 and 1957 amore adoring three-volume work by the loyal Ernest Jones was issued...

...That Freud himself was wholly on the side of sublimation, the redirection of these desires toward higher "civilized," goals, did not influence them in many cases...

...On the very first page he tells us precisely where he is taking us: "'Charlatan' is too strong for my taste...

...Ferenczi also wrote of " 'the advice'—Freud's advice—'not to let patients learn anything about the technique,' and 'the pessimistic view, shared with only a trusted few, that neurotics are a rabble, good only to support us financially and to allow us to learn from their cases: psychoanalysis as a therapy may be useless.'" Reading such words takes one's breath away...

...People spoke about "repression," "fantasy," "hysteria," "transference," "counter-transference," and "Freudian slips" as though they were standard items in our common stock of human behavior...

...his early faith in Fliess...

...In some quarters that vocabulary still retains a certain authority, though by now it is the doddering authority of habit rather than of contemporary science or liberationist ideology...

...To be sure, Ferris does have a point of view...

...In other words, not until well into the next century...

...Oh, the sly power of that negative: not a charlatan...

...His is a chatty, cheerily anecdotal, fashionably snoopy, tastefully prurient work —in short, an amusing and readable book for the mass market...

...Ferris' biography is strongest where Freud and his circle were touched by scandal or intrigue, of which there was a good deal...

...Freud was an extraordinary figure even though his general theory of the mind is now widely regarded as deficient...

...ruthless' and 'devious' seem acceptable, as long as they are words intended not to diminish Freud's stature but on the contrary to suggest the scale of his endeavor to explain our nature...

...The Freud family and the trustees of his estate were deeply displeased when renegade scholar Jeffrey Moussaief Masson chose in 1985 to publish them in an unexpurgated edition...

...If so, that reality never broke the surface of public life...

...I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador—an adventurer, if you want it translated—with all the curiosity, daring and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort...

...In later years, the friendship would be an embarrassment to the Freud circle, and it did not help any that Fliess' biomysticism included a belief in the psychic and sexual power of bodily and lunar cycles...

...It is now under attack by scientists and historians, and by the year 2000, a hundred years after the original publication of Freud's Die Traumdeutung (published in English 13 years later as The Interpretation of Dreams), psychoanalysis may be an exhibit in the museum of medical curiosities, like the leech, the enema or, more to the point, the "nasal reflex neurosis" of Freud's erstwhile medical colleague, Wilhelm Fliess...

...He ultimately married the mother, but not before having a fling with her sister...

...author, "After the Revolution: Studies in Contemporaiy American Jewish imagination" By the middle of this century, Sigmund Freud had influenced the civilized world's conception of itself in a way that has rarely been granted to individuals other than absolute dictators and high priests...

...He wrote to Fliess, for instance, that The Interpretation of Dreams would have 2,467 mistakes in it and then, catching himself, explained the meaning of 2,467 in a way that would sound to any nonFreudian like pure mumbo jumbo...

...He was not above performing operations on patients' noses in order to relieve their neurotic symptoms, and when one of Freud's patients, Emma Eckstein, almost died after such an operation, Freud was quick to leap to his friend's defense...

...Given what we now know about Freud's slovenly methods of inference, his cavalier way with evidence, his insistent (some would say "bullying") treatment of patients, his aloofness toward colleagues, his quarrels with former comrades-inarmchairs—Fliess, Stekel, Alfred Adler, Jung, Otto Rank, Ferenczi—and the whitewashing of the record, Ferris might well have been far harsher...

...Then there was Freud's youthful friendship with Wilhelm Fliess, a fellow explorer into the tangled web of Viennese sexuality, who believed in a mystical sympathy between the genitals and the nose that he called the "nasal reflex...

...The father of psychoanalysis was also drawn to numerology, and some of his interpretations hinged upon the mystical meaning, for him, of certain numbers...

...and the self-analysis known to no one except himself on which he founded his doctrines...

...Freud: A Life is the latest in a long string of full or partial biographies dating back to one by disenchanted disciple Fritz Wittels in 1924...

...It even included Freud's most trusted disciple, Sandor Ferenczi, who for years romanced a married woman, Gizella Palos, and her daughter Elma...

...Especially since at the conceptual heart of Freudian thought lay sex, and infantile sex in particular, the movement tended to attract men—and some women —who seized upon the system's doctrines as excuses to act out their desires...

...Whatever else may be true, Freud did not appear to use the authority of his role and his ideas to seduce women...

...Nevertheless, Freud invariably stood apart from the full implications of his theory, though it may be that his deepest companionship, with his wife's sister, Minna Bernays, was in fact a hidden romance...

...He was, rather, an intellectual seducer of men, and through them, of entire cultures...

...Others—among them Carl Jung and Ernest Jones—would be notorious for their liaisons, some of them painful and even tragic...

...He wrote about himself to Fliess: "I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker...

...He wrote Fliess that Eckstein's bleeding was caused by sexual longing, rather than the halfyard of gauze left in her nose...

...But the word is out of the bag, and if "ruthless" and "devious" don't quite add up to it, neither do they add up to endorsing Freud as a scientist...

...We are still a long way from understanding exactly what it was that gave psychoanalysis such centrality in our civilization, considering the fact that its therapeutic techniques are of dubious merit and most of its claims concerning the mind cannot be verified...

...Ferris has uncovered evidence that Freud's involvement with cocaine was far more thoroughgoing, that he employed it casually to fly through social occasions, and that Ernest Jones, in writing the authorized biography, soft-pedaled what he knew in order to brighten Freud's image...

...Among Jews in particular, a knowledge of Freud—sometimes packaged with Marx—was a badge of modernization...

...The group included a later disciple, Wilhelm Reich, who would be expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association for libidinizing therapy, and would found his own school of treatment based on "the function of the orgasm...

...He sheds no new light, though, on psychoanalysis as a theory of the mind...

...See the recently published Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confronta Legend, edited by Crews...

...In Europeand the United States, Freudian principles of analysis became, as W. H. Auden said of their originator, "a whole climate of opinion...

...Ferris has read the basic sources and done some original spadework...

...Was it not confession...

...Two of his "naughty boys," Fritz Wittels and Wilhelm Stekel, were hands-on practitioners and saw in psychoanalysis all the license they needed to seduce women by challenging their repressions...

...his belief in telepathy and indulgence in numerology...

...And we won't have Freud himself in sharp focus until every last item in the Freud Archive has been unsealed and read by scholars...

...In Freud's hands, interpretation took on the muscle of legislation, or perhaps even of ukase...

...turned...

...Subtly, cautiously, he sustains the case against psychoanalysis...

...his interventions into the private lives of his disciples...

...Among Christians, "infantile sexuality" stood in for sin and "the talking cure" was the royal road to redemption...

...The author also covers the thundering denunciations of schismatics in the psychoanalytic movement...

...Paul Ferris' Dr...

...the role of therapeutic suggestion in the manufacture of his patients' memories...

...These days library shelves groan under the weight of Freud books, and if there is any substantial reason to pick up Ferris it is because the British novelist and biographer, having no turf to defend, writes with humor and a degree of balance about a man who otherwise attracts either impassioned defenders or exasperated foes...

...into selfpromotional success on...

...Freud's blunders in anointing a successor, Carl Jung, and an American representative, the clinically depressed Horace Frink...

...and the efforts, begun by Freud himself and taken up by biographers and loyalists, to sanitize the record...

...Unfortunately, because a book like Ferris' sees Freud and his movement only from the outside, and at a distance, it does not get us very far into the mystery...

...He brings an instinctive irony and a keen sense of character and drama to the awesome task of organizing the vast archive of Freudiana...

...He reminds us that Freud knew he was not a scientist...

...True to his own fascination with the figure of Moses, Freud was a lawgiver whose maps of the unconscious mind spoke with authority about the mysterious part of us once called the soul, but that he taught us to call the psyche...

...Ferris further points out that in a private diary Ferenczi, the confidant who did not break with Freud until the early 1930s, denounced his profession for "its insincerity and said it was more concerned with making life comfortable for analysts than for patients...

...a grandiose scale...

...Freud eventually destroyed all the letters he had received from Fliess, who stubbornly kept all of his from Freud...

...On the subject of cocaine, for example, it is generally believed that Freud developed an enthusiasm for it, quickly discovered its addictive power, and backed away...

...It does underscore for us, however, that we won't see psychoanalysis plainly until the profit has been removed...

...Psychoanalysis, the "science" the vocabulary belongs to, was invented almost out of whole cloth by Freud (and to a degree by his English translator, James Strachey...

...Indeed Frederick Crews, one of Freud's most outspoken contemporary critics, confidently calls psychoanalysis "a therapeutic and scientific fiasco" that Freud, "as stubborn, resourceful, and cynical as he was ambitious...