Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind - Hardcover

Kramer, Peter D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060598956 ISBN 13: 9780060598952

Publisher: Eminent Lives, 2006

Synopsis

Often referred to as "the father of psychoanalysis," Sigmund Freud championed the "talking cure" and charted the human unconscious. But though Freud compared himself to Copernicus and Darwin, his history as a physician is problematic. Historians have determined that Freud often misrepresented the course and outcome of his treatments―so that the facts would match his theories. Today Freud's legacy is in dispute, his commentators polarized into two camps: one of defenders; the other, fierce detractors.

Peter D. Kramer, himself a practicing psychiatrist and a leading national authority on mental health, offers a new take on this controversial figure, one both critical and sympathetic. He recognizes that although much of Freud's thought is now archaic, the discipline he invented has become an inescapable part of our culture, transforming the way we see ourselves. Freud was a myth-maker, a storyteller, a writer whose books will survive among the classics of our literature. The result of Kramer's inquiry is nothing less than a new standard history of Freud by a modern master of his thought.

About this title

About the Author

Peter D. Kramer, M.D., "possibly the best-known psychiatrist in America" (New York Times), is the bestselling author of Listening to Prozac, Should You Leave?, Spectacular Happiness, Moments of Engagement, and Against Depression. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he is a professor at Brown University and maintains a private practice.

From the Back Cover

Often referred to as "the father of psychoanalysis," Sigmund Freud championed the "talking cure" and charted the human unconscious. But though Freud compared himself to Copernicus and Darwin, his history as a physician is problematic. Historians have determined that Freud often misrepresented the course and outcome of his treatments—so that the facts would match his theories. Today Freud's legacy is in dispute, his commentators polarized into two camps: one of defenders; the other, fierce detractors.

Peter D. Kramer, himself a practicing psychiatrist and a leading national authority on mental health, offers a new take on this controversial figure, one both critical and sympathetic. He recognizes that although much of Freud's thought is now archaic, the discipline he invented has become an inescapable part of our culture, transforming the way we see ourselves. Freud was a myth-maker, a storyteller, a writer whose books will survive among the classics of our literature. The result of Kramer's inquiry is nothing less than a new standard history of Freud by a modern master of his thought.

Reviews

Reviewed by Howard Gardner The initial impression conveyed by Peter Kramer's short biography of Freud is jarring. The book is part of a new series of "Eminent Lives," and its subtitle credits Freud -- not Einstein, Picasso or Kafka -- with the invention of the modern mind. And yet, drawing on information that was uncovered in the 1980s, Kramer opens with a damning picture of Freud pressuring a young American patient to leave his wife, marry a wealthy woman and persuade her to donate money to the psychoanalytic movement. Freud is depicted in this debacle as an unsavory, narcissistic character who deceives himself, lies to others, diagnoses incompetently and -- most distressingly -- is willing to sacrifice the welfare of patients for financial gain. Far from indulging in hagiography, Kramer seems engaged in pathography -- the unfrocking of a false saint.

Though the outlines of Freud's life are known to most readers, no biographical account can omit them. In brisk and vividly written chapters, we encounter Freud as the favored son of his mother; a talented student of whom much is expected (not least by himself); the young medical researcher who wanders among subspecialties; his initially unsuccessful efforts to attain fame, on the one hand, and his courting of disaster -- owing to his uncritical embrace of cocaine -- on the other; the faithful though remote husband and father; the colleague of Joseph Breuer, with whom he explores the intriguing symptoms of hysteria and the power of the "talking cure"; the odd friendship with the wacky Wilhelm Fliess; the once-in-a-lifetime discovery of dreams as the "royal road" to mental life; the copious articles and books that, while controversial, formed modern consciousness; the struggle to build psychoanalysis as a field; the dramatic escape from Nazism in 1938; and the painful death from cancer in London the following year.

In reconciling Freud's remarkable achievements with his flaws as a person and as a scientist, scholar and therapist, Kramer employs two techniques. First, he uses Freud's own psychoanalytic insights to explain his personality and behavior. Wielding the tools of the well-informed biographer and expert clinician, Kramer pinpoints the sources in Freud's own life of his belief in sibling rivalry and the Oedipal complex; his abiding interests in anxiety, panic and obsessiveness; his fascination with the therapeutic processes of transference and countertransference; his increasing attention, with age and calamitous world events, to the power of aggression and the death instinct. Even the focus on sexuality is attributed to Freud's own fantasies and frustrations. Contrary to what Freud wished the world to believe, his achievements came not from observations or successes in the therapeutic chamber, but rather from his own understandings and misunderstandings of himself.

Kramer's second technique is itself two-pronged. In reviewing Freud's various discoveries and claims, Kramer is extremely critical of the data on which they rest. He argues that Freud lacked evidence for his claims about the meaning of dreams, the unconscious, jokes, slips of the tongue, hysteric symptoms, phobias, childhood sexuality and numerous other phenomena that he claimed to have illuminated. Moreover, Kramer draws on current understandings of such conditions and symptoms -- now seen as due to biological causes or to much simpler antecedents -- to challenge Freud's achievement further.

But then, in what appears a complete turnaround, Kramer goes on to credit Freud with powerful, mind-changing insights. As he summarizes, "Stripped down, Freud's categories may sound by turns commonplace and arbitrary. But because he told compelling stories, because he legitimated defiance of convention, because he argued vehemently for an ever-changing set of viewpoints, Freud started a discussion and set its terms. He popularized psychology and gave rise, ultimately, to our own era, the age of self-examination and memoir." And so, he merits both unsparing critique and sincere praise.

As a sometime biographer of Freud, I am persuaded by Kramer's account of the role played by Freud's life in the development of his ideas. Freud emerges as a prototypical projecter -- one who discerns in others what is actually present in oneself. I am less convinced by Kramer's critiques of Freud's various discoveries. Kramer devotes attention to Freud's most outlandish claims, while rarely citing the strongest supporting evidence. No reader of Kramer alone would appreciate the extent to which Freud airs doubts, responds to criticisms, admits his changes of mind and presents extensive transcripts that readers can judge for themselves. Also, it seems unrealistic to expect Freud to have anticipated the results of a century's study of phenomena, many of which he was the first to identify and ponder.

Still, in the end, Kramer succeeds in reconciling the two Freuds -- the inventor of the modern mind and the false saint -- and that is a considerable achievement.

Reviewed by Howard Gardner
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Looking closely at Freud's approach to specific patients and revisiting some of his lesser-known publications (including a vigorous campaign in support of cocaine as a mood-enhancer and anesthetic), Kramer finds in this irreverent biography a man who "displayed bad character in the service of bad science." Kramer's task is a difficult one, in large part because, in anticipation of his own legacy, Freud began destroying his personal documents at an early age. It's this kind of hubris ("as for the biographers ... we have no desire to make it too easy for them") which enabled him to hide the fact that he was "more devious and less original than he made himself out to be;" it also makes him a fascinating subject. Kramer is careful to give Freud's major contributions-including the recognition that symptoms can "reveal hints of thoughts and feelings pushed out of awareness" and that psychoanalysis's unfettered exploration of the subconscious can offer patients a haven for exploring otherwise repressed thoughts-their due. But he is unsparing in his assessment of Freud's errors in judgment: "there is a disturbing consistency in Freud's indifference to inconvenient facts. ... he bullied his patients and misrepresented his results." Kramer's study is a refreshing and thorough work that readers of all levels of familiarity with Freud's work can appreciate.
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Discredited as science, the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) continue to influence our culture, a paradox that informs this brief biography. Kramer, who also wrote the best-selling Listening to Prozac (1993), presents Freud's work fairly while hammering problematic aspects uncovered by critical scholarship that permanently damaged Freud's reputation. Freud's famous case histories, for example, often were not exactly as he presented them. The unconscious, dream interpretation, repression, transference, and the id, ego, and superego--the Freudian vocabulary and the point of view it expresses do not much strike Kramer, a doctor as well as writer, as being clinically effective. He is more impressed by their bursting into mainstream society, where they sanctioned talk about sex and depicted it as being in conflict with societal norms. To that extent, Freud remains important, interesting, and included in college curricula. Kramer's profile is an excellent preface to full-scale biographies such as Peter Gay's Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988). Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Freud

Inventor of the Modern MindBy Peter Kramer

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright ©2006 Peter Kramer
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060598956

Chapter One

Climate of Opinion

In 1922, a distraught husband framed a challenge for Sigmund Freud: "Great Doctor, are you savant or charlatan?" 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 possess 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 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 impulses and contradictory yearnings that coalesced into predictable 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 requirements 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 understanding 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 success in treatments that had failed. How damaging were these findings, 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 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 reassessment. 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 undertake 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 depression. 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 experienced a "sense of unreality." In retrospect—and in the eyes of the doctor who took over after Freud withdrew from the case—Frink was entering the manic phase of a long-established manic-depressive disorder.

In the first hours of treatment, Freud leaped to a formulation grounded in one of the less well-developed aspects of his own theory: Freud decided that Frink had latent homosexual tendencies. Apparently it was Frink's admiring posture in the consulting room and his indecisiveness in private life that led Freud to this conclusion. Frink resisted this train of thought. Freud was adamant. Any delay in pursuing vigorous heterosexual satisfaction would endanger Frink's psychic health.

In a matter of weeks, Freud had Frink insist that Angelika Bijur join them. In a letter, she later reported: "When I saw Freud, he advised my getting a divorce because of my own incomplete existence . . . and because if I threw Dr. F. over now he would never again try to come back to normality and probably develop into a homosexual though in a highly disguised way."

This forceful intervention—cure through action rather than insight—was at odds with the principles of psychoanalysis, and Freud moved to keep his role hidden. In a letter to Frink, Freud noted that he had cautioned Angelika Bijur not to "repeat to foreign people I had advised her to marry you on the threat of a nervous breakdown. It gives them a false idea of the kind of advice that is compatible with analysis and is very likely to be used against analysis."

Neither Frink nor Angelika Bijur was fully persuaded. Still, at Freud's suggestion, the lovers met with Abraham Bijur in Paris to break the bad news. Bijur was outraged. Addressing Freud in writing, Bijur asked: "How can you give a judgment that ruins a man's home and happiness, without at least knowing the victim so as to see if he is worthy of the punishment, or if through him a better solution cannot be found?" Shortly after, Bijur died of cancer.

Continues...

Excerpted from Freudby Peter Kramer Copyright ©2006 by Peter Kramer. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Eminent Lives
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060598956
• ISBN 13: 9780060598952
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224