Becoming Freud The making of a psychoanalyst

THIS BOOK IS a biography not of Freud and psychoanalysis but of Freud as psychoanalysis. Adam Phillips explains that what the reader does not need in any biographer's attempt to write "that impossible thing, a Freudian life of the young Freud, is the always fanciful (i.e. wishful), novelettish setting of scenes, and thumbnail sketches of characters, with their suppositions about what people were thinking and feeling and doing." What is needed, he believes, is what he supplies: a sketchy chronology of Freud's first 50 years threaded through the step-by-step story, richly told and richly interpreted, of how psychoanalysis came to be. Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in what is now the Czech Republic. He received a medical degree in 1882 and went to Paris in 1885 to study with the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who was treating hysteria with hypnosis. He married and set up a private practice, specializing in psychological disorders, in Vienna, where he would live most of his life. Around that time, his colleague Josef Breuer successfully treated a patient suffering from hysteria simply by encouraging her to talk freely about her earliest memory of the onset of her symptoms. Freud formulated the idea that many neuroses originated in traumatic experiences that had occurred in the past and, too painful to be lived with, had remained hidden from our conscious selves. He concluded that there was an unconscious wherein resided a huge amount of information about ourselves that, if brought to light, would relieve us of our mental distress. The rest is history. "Becoming Freud" is based on the Clark lectures given at Trinity College, Cambridge, this past spring. Different versions of these lectures were also given at the University of York and at Wolfson College, Oxford. Ample time, then, for Phillips to have refined his thoughts on his subject and woven them into the lucid and imaginative narrative that we have before us. "The facts of a life," he begins, "were among the many things that Freud's work has changed our way of thinking about. ... He will show us how and why we bury the facts of our lives, and how, through the language of psychoanalysis, we can both retrieve these facts and describe them in a different way." One of these ways has to do with the fantasy-ridden longing to see ourselves in a heroic (self-justifying?) light. "But heroism," Phillips continues, "was another cultural ideal that would look different after psychoanalysis." Freud would realize "that the idea of heroism was an attempted self-cure for our flagrant vulnerability." Freud was stunned by the stories people invent in describing their childhoods. In time he would become absorbed in showing us "how ingenious we are at not knowing ourselves, and how knowing ourselves ... has become the problem rather than the solution." THE DISCOVERY OF and exploration of the unconscious was the central drama of Freud's life, the one thing he kept passionate faith with throughout private and professional vicissitudes. It was through attention to the unconscious that he made his major discoveries, the most important being that from birth to death we are, every last one of us, divided against ourselves. We both want to grow up and don't want to grow up; hunger for sexual pleasure, dread sexual pleasure; hate our own aggressions - our anger, our cruelty, our humiliations - yet these are derived from the grievances we are least willing to part with. The hope of achieving an integrated self is a vain one as we are equally divided about our own suffering; we do in fact love it and want - nay, intend - never to relinquish it. What Freud found most difficult to cure in his patients, Phillips tells us, "was their (mostly unconscious) wish not to be cured." There's not an analysand in the world who will not recognize the bitter if profound truth of these words. As a historian of analysis once said, the best one can hope for in analysis is reconciliation, not cure. But oh! that reconciliation. What a gift it is. In the years between 1900 and 1906 Freud wrote most of his important books: "The Interpretation of Dreams," "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life," "Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious," "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality." If he had died in 1906, Phillips posits, the world would still have a completed theory of psychoanalysis. What it would not necessarily have is an analytic movement; which I think might just be fine with Phillips. Adam Phillips is, I believe, one of the most engaging writers in the world on analysis and the analytic movement. He is also a writer who, over many years and far too many books, has tallen ever more deeply in love with his own prose. He is prolix to a fault, and repetition is his middle name. In this book, however, his deficiencies stand him in good stead. "Perhaps" he actually muses, "all a biographer can do, from a psychoanalytic point of view, is to keep repeating himself by describing the recurring preoccupations that make a life. And allow, and allow for, a measure of incoherence." Phillips is indeed repetitious here - what he says at the beginning he says in the middle and says yet again at the end - but the result is far from incoherent. The repetitions provide texture; texture provides clarity; clarity appreciation. Phillips's own love of the beauty and power of psychoanalysis here serves both him and the reader wonderfully well. VIVIAN GORNICK'S new memoir will be published next spring.

Renowned psychoanalyst Phillips (One Way and Another) conjures up a vibrant portrait of Sigmund Freud, examining psychiatry's most famous figure as it contends with the difficulties of placing his life in biographic form. In contrast to the more popular focus on an older Freud, Phillips introduces us to a younger version: the eldest son of Jewish immigrants, gifted but troubled by childhood trauma, whose future ideas were founded upon these aspects of his upbringing. And so the emergence of psychoanalysis comes at the end of this story, implying that the widely influential school of thought is merely one aspect of Freud's larger story. The book's brevity speaks, perhaps, to the ways in which Freud's life resists complete documentation; in fact, biography represents the very type of reshaped and repurposed story of the past that Freud so famously attributed to dreams. Phillips's perspective, then, becomes openly interpretive, taken not as historical fact but rather as exploratory speculation of the very blatant ambiguities surrounding Freud's life. Much like psychoanalysis itself, this book does not seek to claim and advance any singular sense of truth; instead, it encourages us to relish in the illuminations, indeed the very uncertainties of the process. As such, it's a biography that might even have received the approval of Freud himself. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.