Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind

226 Pages·2006·2.33 MB·English

by  Peter D. Kramer

F r e u d
Inventor of the Modern Mind
Peter D. Kramer
e m i n e n t l i v e s
For my teachers,
for my patients,
and, as always,
for Rachel
Eminent Lives, a series of brief biographies by distinguished
authors on canonical figures, joins a long tradition in this lively
form, from Plutarch’s Lives to Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, Dr.
Johnson’s Lives of the Poets to Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victo-
rians. Pairing great subjects with writers known for their strong
sensibilities and sharp, lively points of view, the Eminent Lives
are ideal introductions designed to appeal to the general reader,
the student, and the scholar. “To preserve a becoming brevity
which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that
is significant,” wrote Strachey: “That, surely, is the fi rst duty of
the biographer.”
Contents
Chapter One Climate of Opinion 1
Chapter Two Development of the Hero 17
Chapter h ree Steps and Stumbles 28
Chapter Four The Problem of Psychology 44
Chapter Five Seduction 61
Chapter Six Dreams 82
Chapter Seven Consolidation 98
Chapter Eight Agenbite 115
Chapter Nine New World 127
Chapter Ten Frie nd and Foe 142
Chapter Eleven Structure 159
Chapter Twelve C ulture 176
Chapter h irteen Limitations 185
Chapter Fourteen Final Things 192
Chapter Fifteen Loss 200
Bibliographic Note 212
About the Author
Other Books by Peter D. Kramer
Other Books in the Eminent Lives Series
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
v

Chapter One
Climate of Opinion
I n 1922, a distraught husband framed a challenge for
Sigmund Freud: “Great Doctor, are you savant or charla-
tan?” Though he had interviewed her only briefly, Freud had
advised the man’s wife to leave him and marry her former
analyst, a patient and protégé of Freud’s. The injured party,
Abraham Bijur, was a person of means. He intended to make
his grievance public in the New York Times. But Bijur died just
after the letter was composed. Nearly seven decades would pass
before its contents were shared with the Times’s readers.
For most of those years, Freud was very much Bijur’s
“savant”—a towering intellectual figure. He was, to begin
with, the greatest psychiatrist of the age. He appeared to pos-
sess special powers of observation that allowed him to turn his
work with patients into innovative science. Using methods he
had himself developed, Freud had discovered and mapped the
unconscious. He had named the components of the mind and
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Peter D. Kramer
explored the principles by which they operated. He had charted
the sequence of human psychological growth, from infancy to
mature adulthood. He had identified the causes of most mental
illnesses and invented a method for treating them.
Freud was more than the parfit physician. He was also a
wise man, whose account of the diseased mind had profound
implications for our understanding of the human condition.
Beneath apparent rationality, Freud had discerned dark im-
pulses and contradictory yearnings that coalesced into predict-
able patterns he called complexes. He had demonstrated that,
in the culture and in the lives of individuals, hidden symbols
abound; our customs and behaviors simultaneously hide and
reveal sexual and aggressive drives incompatible with the re-
quirements of civilized society. Freud’s theories seemed to
update ancient philosophies, casting our lives as tragic dramas
of a distinctively modern sort. It was as if, before Freud, we had
never known ourselves.
Then, a quarter of a century ago, Freud’s status began to
change. Forgotten documents came to light. They showed
that Freud had regularly misrepresented the development of
his ideas and the details of his own life story. The new un-
derstanding of Freud’s clinical work was particularly troubling.
He had altered fact to fit theory, conducted therapies in ways
that bore scant relationship to his precepts, and claimed suc-
cess in treatments that had failed. How damaging were these
fi ndings, in light of Freud’s contributions? The answer to that
question might depend in part on the status of Freud’s ideas,
which were themselves falling from favor. Freud’s supporters
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FREUD
and his detractors took opposing positions, in the controversy
known as “the Freud Wars.” Bijur’s challenge moved to center
stage: savant or charlatan?
The case that so pained Abraham Bijur contributed to the reas-
sessment. Bijur, a financier, was married to a younger woman,
Angelika, who was wealthy in her own right. Angelika Bijur
had entered into a sexual relationship with her former analyst,
the prominent American psychiatrist Horace Frink.
Frink was married, with two young children. He had long
been prone to mood disorder, and in the course of the affair,
he became emotionally disturbed. Uncertain how to proceed,
Frink traveled to Vienna at Angelika Bijur’s expense to under-
take a course of analysis with Freud.
Frink had a difficult history. When he was eight, his father
suffered a business failure. The father moved in search of
work, taking his wife with him and leaving Frink in the care
of grandparents. When Frink was fifteen, his mother died of
tuberculosis. In his mid-twenties, Frink succumbed to depres-
sion. Despite psychoanalytic treatment, he became depressed
again in his thirties. Frink understood himself to be subject to
mood swings.
In 1921, at age thirty-eight, Frink consulted Freud. Frink
was in an agitated, sometimes euphoric state. He was waking at
three in the morning. He described himself as “more talkative
and full of fun than ever before in my life,” though he also ex-
perienced a “sense of unreality.” In retrospect—and in the eyes
of the doctor who took over after Freud withdrew from the
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