Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst

"Adam Phillips is our finest writer about (and with) psychoanalysis. His Freud biography is scintillating, in part because it’s an anti-biography. He takes on Freud’s own anti-biographical stance: Freud himself, as we know, was against biography, at least his own (Given that a single dream can take thirty pages to describe, if a stranger could even access it, biography becomes something of an impossibility). Then, too, most of lived life is hidden from biographers. So what’s the point of the procedure? In any case, it’s clear that Freud didn’t want to be written about in that way. He was a great destroyer of what would have become his early archive and periodically tore up all early letters and papers, shedding a skin perhaps. It’s an interesting position for a man who rummages in the attics or basements of other’s narratives. Adam Phillips takes on Freud’s suspicions of the biographical project and yet writes this wonderful biography of the early Freud. He gives us a two-page summary of Freud’s entire life—that’s it, those are the facts. Then he focuses in on childhood, the early life, and the world in which Freud lived through to the period of The Interpretation of Dreams, and the key texts up to 1906: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life , Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious , and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexual ity. His contention is that if Freud had stopped there, the world would still have a full theory of psychoanalysis. What it would not have is the movement Freud and his followers then went on to create and the reification of psychoanalysis through an institution. Phillips prefers the aliveness of the first adventurous Freud to the man engaged in followers and a movement. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He ruminates on Freud’s Jewishness, the ways in which migration at the early age of four from a small town in Moravia to Vienna played into Freud’s sense of the world, his ability to penetrate and conjugate marginality. He probes the kinds of things that Freud internalized as a Jewish child, not a believer, but equally not a belonger within the society in which the family found itself. This is, in effect, a biography of how psychoanalysis came to be through Freud’s responses to and internalization of the everyday world he inhabited as a child and secular Jew, in a society which finds both child and Jew unruly, foreign, incomprehensible, dare we say, hysterical. In Phillips’s brilliant interpretation, the scientist’s test tube is replaced by the hysteric. Freud becomes absorbed in showing us ‘how ingenious we are at not knowing ourselves.’ And how knowing ourselves can become the problem rather than the solution. When Phillips writes it, the marginalization of Jews in European society—their never quite belonging, never quite knowing what’s important in terms of status, the challenge they face in overcoming all these things, their experience—becomes key to the areas Freud’s psychoanalysis sets out to understand. So the marginality of the Jew and the child, both outsiders to the settled adult world, become key to Freud’s thinking. Since we increasingly inhabit a world of ‘migrants’, of dispossession and margins, his thinking again seems fresh. He’s a wonderful writer, and he’s a writer who is eminently quotable as well, because he himself has a tendency to be not only witty, but paradoxical. That allows him to include a great deal within one sentence. And he loves paradox, that core Freudian position of ambivalence. He quotes Charcot, for example, in this book, “theory is good, but it doesn’t prevent things from existing.” Anyhow, it’s a radical biography because it stops short, before you move on to the psychoanalytic movement and the training institutes of psychoanalysis. Adam Phillips’s own position is that the most interesting part of psychoanalysis lies with younger Freud, that period of dreams and adventure and a kind of radicalism which doesn’t allow itself to be institutionalized."