Book review: Freud’s Discontents
Élisabeth Roudinesco - Freud: In His Time and Ours
Reviewed by Samuel Moyn
Reviewed by Samuel Moyn
...Psychoanalysis
communed with an age of crisis. Instead of believing that pathologies could be
described or drugged away, Freudians wanted us to work through them. There was
no going back to earlier beliefs that humans could regard themselves as
rational animals. Psychoanalysis was about facing the sheer disorder unreason
threatened, rather than looking away.
What has been lost by
the decline in psychoanalysis’s public relevance has not only been Freud’s
system of thought but the delicate balance he embraced between science and
culture, reason and passion, the Enlightenment and its Romantic critics. Freud,
as Thomas Mann observed in 1929, “unquestionably belongs with those writers of
the nineteenth century” who “stand opposed to rationalism.” Spurning the
“shallow and outworn idealistic optimism of the daylight cult of Apollo,”
Freud
believed that psychology had to embrace rather than ignore the fragility of
reason. But Freud not only sought to emphasize reason’s embattlement; he also
sought to lend a hand in its struggle against the stronger passions. By
revealing the weaknesses in the elaborate structure of human rationality,
psychoanalysis ultimately helped serve “enlightenment.” Freud’s psychoanalysis
was, as Mann put it, “Romanticism turned scientific.” He wanted reason to win
out, but not by understating its vulnerability.
Élisabeth Roudinesco’s
new biography, Freud:
In His Time and Ours, is a welcome reminder of Freud’s considerable
influence on 20th-century intellectual life. More important, she puts center
stage Freud’s complex brand of rationalism and the full scope of his
achievements, which went far beyond offering a cure for individuals. In
particular, Roudinesco captures Freud’s recognition of the insurmountable ways
in which our irrational desires and longings shape who we are and how we act.
This correction is
needed not only to give us a more accurate sense of Freud’s innovations, but
also to contrast it against today’s more complacent assumptions about human
rationality. Despite what economists and psychologists and political scientists
insist, the rational self is not always master in its own house—whether in
individual life or in collective experience.
* * *
Roudinesco’s biography
is the third major one since Freud’s death. The British psychoanalyst Ernest
Jones penned a massive study of the master’s life over the course of the 1950s.
Thirty years later, the accomplished historian Peter Gay—who also trained as a
psychoanalyst as he turned to write Freud’s life—published what has now become
the standard work.
Jones’s study was
remarkable for its breadth. But it was Gay who benefited from a flood of new
information that has long since slowed to a trickle, including many revelations
about Freud’s life offered by the release of some of his well-protected
correspondence, as well as access Gay had to those who personally knew Freud.
Compared to Jones’s
three volumes and Gay’s exhaustive 800 pages, Roudinesco’s biography is the
slighter narrative. She also cannot displace Gay’s synthesis. Yet her version
has other points of distinction. In particular, she offers insights into some
of the ambiguities in psychoanalysis that Gay and Jones glossed over.
The high points of
Freud’s biography used to be well-known. Born to a Jewish family in the town of
Freiberg in Mähren—then in the Austro-Hungarian empire, now in the Czech
Republic—Freud had a childhood that paralleled an age of liberal ascendancy in
Central Europe. Trained as a doctor in Vienna and Paris, Freud built a career
for himself as a man of science, hoping to decipher the reigning middle-class
maladies of his day, notably hysteria. After several false starts, he wrote The
Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, which marked a breakthrough in his
thinking by regarding our nightly visions as “the royal road” to the
unconscious life.
During World War I,
Freud’s thought was greatly influenced by his anxiety over his sons who were
fighting at the front. He was affected even more by his exposure to cases of
wartime trauma, especially shell shock. And while his sometimes rebellious
coterie of disciples spread his ideas far and wide, Freud’s own work took on a
new and more tragic inflection. With the liberal ascendancy now a pleasant
memory, Vienna had become a cauldron of political radicalism and cultural
experiment, and Freud found himself at its center. He published in psychology
and medicine but also in anthropology, art history, and cultural criticism. The
books he wrote during this period ranged in genre from autobiography to literary
criticism to social theory, and his subjects included Moses, Leonardo da Vinci,
and Woodrow Wilson.
Freud’s productive
years in Vienna came to a swift end in 1934 when Christian populists brought
down the Austrian Republic. Four years later, Germany absorbed the country in
the Anschluss, an event that Freud noted laconically in his diary with the
entry “Finis Austriae.” He spent his final year in London, ministered to by his
daughter Anna, a psychoanalyst in her own right. Suffering from a painful mouth
cancer for close to two decades, he passed away secure in the knowledge that
while unreason had triumphed in Europe, he had created a far-flung movement
that was attempting to understand it.
* * *
Like Jones and Gay,
Roudinesco recounts Freud’s life and the development of his thought with great
flair. But there are some special novelties in her narrative, particularly in
contrast to Gay’s study... read more:
