Louis Breger: Freud - Darkness In The Midst Of Vision

John Wiley

$45

Review: Stephen Appel*

All therapists and counsellors who trust in the curative powers of the client's own words are descendants of Sigmund Freud, whether they acknowledge it or not. So is every one of us who speculates on the hidden meanings of physical ailments, slips, dreams and actions.

I mention this only to remind us how profound the after-effects of Freud's psychology of the unconscious mind and of the talking cure have been. One can applaud, accept or condemn this state of affairs.

Freud's latest biographer chooses the third of these options. Louis Breger is a psychoanalyst, and Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision is based on a simple, but repetitious theory.

This is that Freud did not understand his own inner life; he developed a psychology of human beings which was based on a fallacious personal myth; all subsequent problems with psychoanalysis as a theory and a therapy can be accounted for by the infantile megalomania of its founder. This is simply too small an engine to move such a heavy load.

Freud complained that his critics argued, "Freud is a genius, but his ideas are wrong." Breger, too, gives with one hand while taking away with the other. He calls Freud's insights "brilliant" and his discoveries "profound." But he then rejects "the overblown theories, sweeping generalisations and personal biases that have plagued psychoanalysis since its inception."

All the familiar events are here: Freud's years of self-analysis, his relationship with the strange Wilhelm Fliess, the invention with Josef Breuer of psychotherapy, the book on dreams, the growth of the psychoanalytic movement and the feuds with Adler and Jung, the cancer of the pharynx from which Freud suffered for a decade, exile from Nazi Austria, death in London.

None of this will be new to readers familiar with Freud's life. Breger tells the story well, but not for a moment can he resist pushing his barrow.

In short, according to Breger, Sigmund Freud was a clever Jewish boy who, because he had unhappy family and social origins, dreamed of becoming a great man. His life's work was a direct consequence of his projection onto the world of his self-image.

The problem is that the lives of Van Gogh, or Dostoyevsky, or even Jesus Christ could be diminished with similar banal terms without adding anything to our understanding. Thus Breger slips from writing about his subject to writing him off.

Breger goes out of his way to reject the Oedipus complex.

Ironically, his painfully dogged argument has the effect of encouraging just such an explanation: the son turns the giant figure of the father into a dwarf, thereby killing him off and becoming the new, dominant (though much smaller) hero.

Neither fish nor fowl, this book leaves a stale and sour taste.

It is neither a stimulating critique nor a ripping yarn. For the former, I recommend Jeffrey Masson's outrageous but interesting The Assault on Truth.

And for the latter try Paul Ferris' Dr Freud. The standard biography, though, remains Peter Gay's Freud: A Life For Our Time.

* Dr Stephen Appel is on the staff of Auckland Family Counselling and Psychotherapy Centre.