Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision

It has been a long time since I have come across a book title that so aptly summarizes its subject, in this case the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Louis Breger provides a splendid historical overview of Freud's importance in the development of the healing art of mental health, but it is certainly not an attractive man who emerges from these pages. It is to the author's credit that he makes every effort to explain why Freud does not engender in the public arena the warm regard of the second generation psychoanalysts, many of them orphaned by their autocratic intellectual leader. Himself a practicing psychoanalyst, Breger traces Freud's Austrian developmental years and his early forays into medicine. Freud was born in 1856; his family was numerous and poor; his mother appeared to do most of the worrying for the family while his unruffled father carved out a precarious existence. Freud's disillusionment with his father and his jealousy for his mother's attention amidst a near constant stream of young rivals--mostly girls--in an environment of little privacy is usually given as the traditional spawning ground of his best known theories regarding the Oedipus Complex and the natural role of women. Breger, however, examines this childhood more critically. Young Freud suffered several significant losses in his early years--the death of his infant brother Julius, for example, or the firing of his beloved housemaid Monika, who actually served as a surrogate mother for a time when his own mother was afflicted with grief and depression. But most of all, Freud missed his mother, who understandably was emotionally unavailable to him, though as a youth Freud could certainly not understand her predicament. Breger observes that her son could never bring to his consciousness his deep anger at her, and it is the author's contention that this subconscious pain was the fuel for the father-son warfare so central to the Freudian system; in essence a subterfuge for what really ailed him. The masculine oedipal trauma as the source of neurosis was the only explanation Freud would tolerate for nearly all of his 80 years--and it would impair his work and cost him his closest friends in years to come. And yet, Freud's predicament was hardly unusual in his time. There were many poor children who did not get what they needed from their parents. My only critique of Breger's analysis is his omission of treatment of Freud's driving ambition to "be someone great." The author does note that in his escapes to imagination, Freud throughout his life identified with Hannibal, an interesting military choice for a scientist. Freud's first medical work was highly technical for the time, neurological research under the gifted Ernst Brucke, but after some years he left organized research to work with the charismatic Jean-Martin Charcotte, "The Napoleon of Neuroses." Charcotte made some respectable progress in the understanding of hysteria, though his cultivated flamboyant sty

Breger gives us a more vivid picture of Freud as a person, including his daily routines and personal relationships, and how he constructed a mythology of his own life and then universalized this myth as psychological bedrock for humanity in the form of the oedipal theory. The idea in the oedipus complex that the little boy looks up to an overpowering father with whom he also engages in murderous competitive rivalry - at least in fantasy- in fact denied the reality of Freud's relationship with his father, who he loved but saw as weak and ineffective. The oedipal rival actually represented Freud's wish for a stronger, more potent father. This is one essential insight in a book that puts Freud in three dimensional historical space, in a way that previous historians failed to- who either put him on a pedestal, or else tended to bash him. Breger does neither, and lets us see him as a great thinker with huge blindspots and incapacities for tolerating other points of view, which has left a bitter legacy within psychoanalysis. Breger is a lucid and moving writer, as is also evidenced in his previous, also profound, biography of Dostoevsky.

This is a fine book which is well-written on many levels. The style is lucid and friendly: Dr. Breger's writing is surprisingly accessible even to lay people like me.Many of the insights it offers into Freud's own thinking and development are original and valuable. For instance, the fact that Freud, wanting to become a "great scientist", chose for his models revolutionaries like Kepler and Darwin rather than healers like Pasteur and Koch [Intro. p. 2] struck me right from the outset as an eye-opening observation. The fact that some of Freud's most famous theories were developed utterly without any scientific backup or citation to experimental/ observational evidence (such as the theory of penis envy, discussed at several places in the book but particularly at 332-334) comes to light in the pages of this book with humor, wit, and great persuasive force. Viewed purely as a critique of Freud, this book is wonderful because it presents an original and persuasive view which I don't think has ever been seen before. It is useful also because by reading it, you may re-visit all the reading about Freud you did in your college days, and it is satisfying to have such an overview available in one book that's fun to read.But the book is interesting also because of the extraordinary vividness with which it portrays Freud's world: the Jewish ghetto, and the intellectual world of Vienna before WWII. If you read this book for no other purpose than to dip yourself into that world, and to remind yourself of the ideals to which its inhabitants subscribed, you will still be satisfied and edified.Dr. Breger is a professional psychoanalyst, and the "point of view" reflected in these pages shows both sharp powers of observation and, at the same, time, the kind of warmth that only serious professionals can develop when they are committed - as Dr. Breger seems to be - to helping people. Freud is of course beyond help, although it seems he might have benefitted from a course of therapy with this author! But Dr. Breger speaks in a tone of voice that makes us feel that he wants to help us, his readers, see something clearly and move out of any fixation with respect to Freud in which we might have been trapped.

Dr. Breger has done both the psychoanalytic world and the public in general a major service by providing us with a clear picture of both Freud as a man and of the development of psychoanalytic thought from Freud's early ideas to the current state of the science. We are given a very believable picture of Freud as a man, as a thinker and as a leader. This is sophisticated research and writing. Readers will come away having seen reality clashing with long held myths and reality winning. No longer must the public feel that all psychoanalytic thinking started and ended with Freud but the field has really progressed. All this along with brilliant and extremely readable prose.

Despite all the biographies of Freud out there, none have been written by actual psychoanalysts which means no one has really looked at Freud's life, especially his early family life, from a psychoanalytic perspective. Breger's portrait is endearing and a little tragic - it shows us how many of Freud's ideas emerged from his own struggles with the loss and pain of his early experience. Breger's story is as much a biography of early psychoanalysis as it is of Freud's life, and not the mythical, heroic version of Freud's life that he wrote for himself and his biographers have clung too. This is Freud uncensored!