Books: Freudian Revival

In the U. S. heyday of Freudian psychology during the 20s, nearly every intelligentsiac bought at least “one simple popularization of Freud’s works and could reel off an impromptu psychoanalysis at the drop of a symbol. With Depression, Freud was more & more often supplanted either by such former disciples as Alfred Butler, who called his adaptation “Individual Psychology,” or by Karl Marx. To some observers, Freud’s declining popularity among common readers looked permanent.

But three months ago The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud was published as a Modern Library Giant (TIME, May 23). The original edition, cautiously figured to last six months, was 10,000 copies. With few critics paying it attention, it sold out in eleven days. A second edition of 20,000 copies has now dwindled to its last few thousand copies, and Freud has come back as the fastest-selling reprint throughout the U. S.

In London, meanwhile, living in exile in a rented house in St. John’s Wood with his wife and children, the frail, 82-year-old Viennese inventor of psychoanalysis has become a concentration point for a half-dozen leading U. S. publishers, who are bidding for his incomplete next book. Sums bid have not been disclosed, but are called “tremendous,” meaning, probably, somewhere between $10,000 and $25,000. That publishers are bidding on a good thing seems reasonably sure. Freud’s work-in-progress is a psychological study of the Old Testament, with special emphasis on Moses (who, thinks Freud, was Egyptian, not Jewish); his theme, that the Bible is an unconscious expression of man’s own fears and aspirations. (This thesis he first broached 25 years ago in Totem and Taboo, one of the six major works included in the Modern Library Giant.) Freud calls his prospective book one of his most important, expects of it no less far-reaching effects on contemporary religious thought than the invention of psychoanalysis had on contemporary culture generally.