Books: A Special Kind of Being

A Special Kind of Being

LETTERS OF SIGMUND FREUD (470 pp.)— Selected and edited by Ernst L. Freud —Basic Books ($7.50).

Lives of great men are far less sublime than Longfellow thought, and their letters often prove it. If Sigmund Freud had not put his genius into psychoanalysis, even his son Ernst would have seen small reason to assemble this bundle of his father’s correspondence, some of it already mined by Ernest Jones in his famed biography of the Master. Freud’s letters are not brilliant, witty, or especially intimate. But their truculent honesty makes for a paradoxical and amusingly human revelation. The dedicated psychologist of sex was no sophisticate, but a square.

Freud considered himself unshockable, but a trip to Paris in 1885 made him blush. “I don’t think they know the meaning of shame or fear; the women no less than the men crowd round nudities.” His fiancee plans a tourist jaunt with a girl friend. Freud tut-tuts: “Should that be allowed? Two single girls traveling alone in North Germany!” At the age of 73, the famed silver-cord cutter is still in an Oedipal tangle with his 94-year-old mother: “I somehow could not forgive myself if I were to die before her.”

100,000 Kisses. All of this is vaguely endearing and even consoling—a little like watching a giant computer hash up some simple arithmetic. Dr. Freud is as lovable as Professor Pnin when he pores hopelessly over a train schedule or asks a stranger the way to a coffee shop while standing in front of a coffee shop. Nowhere is Freud more touchingly fallible than in his love letters to his fiancee Martha Bernays, which occupy half this book.

Freud’s poverty, plus Martha’s possessive mother, kept the couple all but separated during a four-year courtship. He was in Vienna, she was in Hamburg, and 19th century epistlemanship demanded a letter a day. Freud gushed anguished longing and Dutch-uncle lectures to his loved one. Martha was “my sweet princess,” “highly esteemed princess,” “dearest highly esteemed little princess,” and “Your Sigmund” sent her “100,000 kisses, all of which are to be cashed.” A penniless knight-errant, Freud was quite a gallant: “What can it be that you want … a tooth out of the Caliph’s jaw, a jewel from Queen Victoria’s crown, a giant’s autograph, or something equally fantastic which would mean putting on my armor at once and setting out for the Orient?” Into such hyperbolic reveries crept the unaffected but affecting confession: “I was in love with none and am now with one.” He was absurdly jealous and the two had their tiffs.

The Civil War. Freud had that arrogant, Joycean self-confidence that seems to mark many men of destiny before they make their mark. Before a glimmering of psychoanalysis had entered his mind, he told Martha that he was destroying his papers to make things difficult for his biographers: ”Each one of them will be right in his opinion of ‘The Development of the Hero,’ and I am already looking forward to seeing them go astray.”

Martha was the first to go astray, if she thought Freud was going to cash the full 100,000 kisses. Work came first, she became “beloved old dear,” and as his family grew, Freud tooled off on solitary holidays to Italy. He was better at fathering (six children) than at being a father. At 17, Daughter Sophie sprang her surprise engagement on him, and Freud only inquired with middle-class prudence about the young man’s financial condition. When this same daughter died of pneumonia eight years later, he bore the tragedy with a typically stoic detachment he himself recognized as chilly: “As a confirmed unbeliever I have no one to accuse and realize that there is no place where ] could lodge a complaint. Deep down I sense a bitter, irreparable narcissistic injury. My wife is profoundly affected in a more human way.” The letters show how little Freud had to sustain him, except for psychoanalysis. He had no faith in progress or people: “In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.”

It is, therefore, not surprising that the Oedipus complex explains Freud better than it does Oedipus. Psychoanalysis is a kind of battle map of the psyche in which Id, Superego and Ego are engaged in an endless civil war. That war was Sigmund Freud. He himself said, “I stand for an infinitely freer sexual life, although I myself have made very little use of such freedom.” He wanted to be a lawgiver, but he became a mythmaker. He wanted to be a scientist, but he was more nearly an artist—a type that he described as “a being of a special kind, exalted, autocratic . . . and at times rather incomprehensible.”