The Life And Work of Sigmund Freud

"Jones certainly had access to things that weren’t available in the public sphere again for many, many years within the voluminous Freud correspondence. He liberally used Freud’s letters to his wife, Martha—he saw an unabridged version of those. He had all his own letters from Freud. Ernest Jones was a very important part of the psychoanalytic establishment, certainly in Britain, where he set up the psychoanalytic society and the training institute. He was an editor of the international journal. He did a lot of ambassadorial jobs within the larger psychoanalytic movement. What I like about this biography, which has been disputed by Freud detractors in particular, and has been overtaken by different ways of writing biography, is that it has a huge energy, an aliveness. This is somebody who actually knew Freud over many years and pretty well, telling us about his mentor. Jones was 20 years younger than Freud. Not only did he know Freud and his family and all the first players within psychoanalysis, but he has a very lively knowledge of them. He feels unafraid to me. He doesn’t feel like somebody who’s been cowed into taking a particular view, which perhaps Anna Freud or others might have preferred him to have. He’s pretty adventurous at the same time. This was a book which, when it first came out, was considered to be part of the warts-and-all school of biography. Now that we’ve had so many decades of Freud detractors, and styles of biographical writing have changed, it feels much more like an idealizing biography. It was, in any case, the first Freud biography in English and the first big biography to deal both with the life and the ideas. Later biographers of Freud tended to separate out the intellectual biography from the lived biography, which is perhaps odd in itself, since a lot of psychoanalysis is based on self-interpretation. Absolutely. On top of that, it’s not always clear what happened in real life. Our biographers can’t chart our day-to-days. We can barely remember them ourselves. These things are not straightforward. But what Jones did is lay down the main tropes of Freud’s life, as it was seen through the 20th century, with timelines attached. There are three volumes and three periods, the ideas that come out of them, and the kind of character that emerges from them—all skilfully written and filled with detail as well as, often enough, Freud’s own humour. So the young Freud is a dreamer. In the big sense, as well as in a localized, what-I-did-last-night sense, a dreamer and an adventurer, a kind of Don Quixote figure, although he becomes more of a Sancho Panza as the descriptions of him go on. He’s an adventurer, a rebel and brave in this first period of life. On top of that, there’s his love affair with Martha, which lasts for a frustrating ‘forever’ in the way of Viennese life at the time, where you had to have enough money to set up house before you could marry. You feel the need for a change of convention in the passion of Freud’s letters, theorized later, when he makes his attack on ‘civilized sexual morality’. The Freud of ‘maturity’ of the second volume (1901-1919) is the Freud who sets out the finer points of theory and practice, becomes internationally important as a thinker, but also becomes involved in painful dissension with his ‘followers,’ perhaps most importantly with C.G. Jung . Finally, in ‘the last phase’ a sharper image of Freud the stoic comes into view: this is the Freud of illness as well as a final burst of new ideas, a repositioning of his theory with the ego, id and super-ego and Beyond the Pleasure Principle ; and then the painful coming of Nazism and exile. Yes, ‘civilized sexual morality’ had psychological consequences: it tried to keep certainly middle-class women long ignorant of the facts of life, it delayed marriage, induced female frigidity and/or the development of the kinds of symptoms Freud and Breuer write about in the Studies in Hysteria . It instigated and kept in place a double standard which served neither gender very well and made women’s lives far harder. There’s been an interesting biography called Saving Freud , about him as an exile. It’s recently come out and it depicts the harrowing last years of Nazi ascendancy in Vienna and the many people who came together to save the Freud family and facilitate their exodus from Vienna to London. Princess Marie Bonaparte was key. When Freud arrived in London—he was very frail by then—he was thrilled to be able to ‘die in freedom’ as he quipped. Yes. The Nazis had raided the Freud home (and of course before that had destroyed the press). Large sums were necessary to permit the family to leave Vienna. Before leaving, the Gestapo made Freud sign a testimonial to the fact that he had not been mistreated by them, but had been treated with ‘respect and consideration’. Freud signed and added beneath his signature, ‘I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone.’ Freud had a lively and very dry wit. He doesn’t just write about jokes and the psychopathologies of everyday life, slips, and so on. He is witty, great at words that carry multiple possible meanings: there’s humour as well as great stoicism in his character. But the ongoing cancer, the thirty-four surgical procedures to his jaw, the prosthesis, the huge pain were no joke."