SIGMUND FRAUD?

FLAWED... BUT WAS HE REALLY

Freud: The Making Of An Illusion Frederick Crews Profile Books €33 ★★★★★

Even before I cracked the spine of this weighty book on Sigmund Freud, I was in no doubt its author had come to bury the father of psychoanalysis, not to praise him. The name ‘Freud’ on the cover is amended to read ‘Fraud’ – and in respect of the promised full-frontal attack on the man who lent his name to a slip and left us with an Oedipus complex, this book does not disappoint.

Any thin strands of sympathy for the subject emerge at the outset, before Freud’s professional persona took shape. When the 17-year-old Sigmund – who changed his name from the more Jewish-sounding Schlomo Sigismund at age 14 – enrolled at the University of Vienna in 1873, there were numerous pressures upon his youthful shoulders.

He was the son of Jacob, a bankrupt wool merchant with no further prospects of employment, and Amalie, Jacob’s much younger wife. The family, dependent on the charity of relatives, pinned its prospects on the academically gifted Sigmund, the eldest of eight. But even here, Frederick Crews energetically signals the flawed character to come: ‘He would gradually acquire a sense of isolation, a mistrust of others’ motives, and a panicked conviction that only some extraordinary breakthrough or windfall could allow him to realise his dreams.’

Thereafter, his portrait of Freud is of a calculatingly selfish, recklessly greedy charlatan – on the make and on the take – painstakingly rendered in innumerable authorial brush strokes. It requires Crews, a professor of English at University of California, Berkeley, and the sworn enemy of ‘Freudolatry’, not only to stockpile evidence with which to attack Freud, but also to do retrospective battle with those who lionised him.

The author chips away at any notion that Freud approached his research with scientific rigour, demonstrating convincingly that ‘he would rest comprehensive generalisations on untested insights from a few cases or even from just one, his own’.

Freud’s early talents were centred on the literary and philosophical, reflecting his ambitions to be either a poet or a novelist. His instinct for fiction was not wasted: as Crews depicts it, Freud’s most consistent talent was the ability to conceive of brave new roles for himself, often going back to tweak the details of a case or incident in order to depict his professional judgments in a more favourable light. Long before others, he was the guardian of his own myth.

The young Sigmund did not wish to pursue the life of the physician, and his sister Anna revealed that the sight of blood was intolerable to him. For someone physically squeamish, the corridors of the mind may have seemed a less repulsive source of investigation – although the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger was surprised to hear Freud say of his patients: ‘I could throttle every one of them.’ Crews’s long charge sheet includes Freud’s early enthusiasm for the properties of cocaine, which he not only took regularly himself (jovially threatening his fiancée, Martha Bernays, that she would be erotically overpowered by ‘a big strong man who has cocaine in his body’), but also prescribed freely to patients. He encouraged his dear friend and benefactor Ernst Fleischl, who suffered agony from a surgical accident, to take cocaine to ‘cure’ his existing morphine addiction. This resulted in Fleischl becoming a hopeless double addict, sliding into a desperate condition even while Freud was still falsely presenting the treatment as a clinical success.

Crews points out that this did not make the Freud of the 1880s a sociopath, but then refines his criticism almost to make it more damning, describing ‘an insecure and ambitious young man’ who was ‘desperate to achieve distinction by any means that lay at hand’.

A frequent accusation here is that Freud advanced his career while strategically denigrating the reputation of helpful colleagues and disregarding the wellbeing of his patients. Yet although Crews is keen to emphasise a streak of quackery in his subject, the territory of

mental health at the time was awash with it. Freud, for instance, worked with the famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière clinic in Paris, where patients such as Blanche Wittmann, ‘The Queen of Hysterics’, were encouraged to expose their deliciously shocking behaviours to the gaze of the beau monde while Charcot ‘hypnotised’ them (in fact, as Charcot’s critics observed, these theatrical displays involved considerable complicity between doctor and patient).

When Freud returned to Vienna, he attracted female patients rich both in money and neuroses (one, the formidable Anna von Lieben, was a lucrative ‘Hauptklientin’, or important client, for whom he missed a reunion with a friend, openly fearing that she might get well in his absence). Massage, hypnosis and drugs all featured in Freud’s treatment at the time. In his dealings with women, he often emerges in a poor light: his wife Martha was left to look after their six children while he travelled around Europe with her more glamorous, single sister Minna, with whom Crews seems certain he had an affair. And many of his female clients appeared unhappy with the way their ailments and histories were determinedly shoe-horned into ill-fitting sexual theories.

This book is elegantly written and densely argued, yet it has a whiff of obsession that is a little offputting. The author, an erstwhile admirer of Freud, now presents the case against him with the intensity of a man bearing an armful of bulging files against his ex-wife.

While much of the criticism may be valid, his steering of our interpretation can feel overbearing and unfair, such as when he queries whether Freud really felt the sting of anti-Semitism at university, as Freud said he did. Given what we know of the dark currents in society at the time, on this instance I would be inclined to trust Freud over Crews.

Who was this book written for? The wider reverence for Freud’s psychoanalytic theory has already waned, and he is now seen more as a pioneer who raised valuable questions than a master who held all the answers.

In seeking to pulverise Freud’s character, this will no doubt be a punchy addition to the ongoing argument over his significance among scholars. General readers more interested in Freud’s life, however, might be advised to look elsewhere. Craig Brown is away