Medicine: Freud 75

Professor Sigmund Freud’s 75th birthday last week was full of incident.The Vienna Medical Society, which derided his first exposition of psychoanalysis 45 years ago so brutally that the sensitive student vowed never again to enter its rooms, made him an honorary member. Professor Julius Wagner-Jauregg (Nobel Prize), long Freud’s opponent, acclaimed him thus: “Recognition by enemies is worth more than any amount of applause from supporters.” In Manhattan and other centres scholars assembled for Freud homage dinners. And one of his most successful acolytes, Dr. Fritz Wittels of Vienna and Manhattan, published Freud and His Time.*

The book is both a panegyric of Professor Freud and Freudism. Besides magnifying Freud’s effects on psychology, philosophy, art, drama, education and law, all certainly profound, Dr. Wittels begins his gloria in excelsis by linking Goethe and Freud. He ends with Einstein and Freud. The Goethe-Freud link is generally justifiable. Both men began as empirical investigators and ended as rationalizing scientists. And it was a Goethe essay which transformed Dr. Freud’s early disinclination to medicine into a probing interest. The Einstein-Freud theory shows that Dr. Wittels has knowledge of Albert Einstein, Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans, but the best food in the book is its reports of Freud’s and Wittels’ clinical experiences.

The unacademic tone of Dr. Wittels’ book is just the sort of thing which has stimulated opposition to Professor Freud’s theories throughout his long career. Against that opposition he, always a shy man, built the fastness of his Vienna home. Last week, while savants did him homage the world over, he did not emerge from his retreat. Illness was his good excuse. His wife and Anna, the only unmarried one of their six children, would not admit even relatives.

*Liveright ($4).