Great Observer

THE BASIC WRITINGS OF SIGMUND FREUD--Edited by Dr. A. A. Brill--Modem Library ($1.25).

Among scientists the theories of Sigmund Freud are still disputed, most vigorously by former. Freudians. But modern novelists have followed him like children after the Pied Piper. His influence has been the greatest single factor in determining the course of modern fiction, and future literary historians may well refer to Joyce and Mann as great Freudians in the way that Thackeray and George Eliot are now called great Victorians. Freud has exercised a greater literary influence than any other living writer. His 35 volumes are packed with literary allusions, with shrewd criticisms on poetry and fiction, with case histories that read like novels; but critics have not investigated his standing as a man of letters, which may turn out to be as great as his standing as a man of science.

Last week readers had a chance to see for themselves where Freud stood as a writer, when his faithful disciple, Dr. Abraham Arden Brill, brought out a handy, 1,001-page collection of six of his major works. The demonstration was not quite fair to Freud. For Dr. Brill included as Freud's basic writing heavy, abstract works like his Totem and Taboo, which is an important contribution to psychoanalytic theory, but hard reading for laymen. He left out such Freudian classics as The Case of Miss Elisabeth R, and The Case of Miss Lucy R. These early works of Freud, simply and artfully written, revealing an extraordinary grasp of character and a lightning insight into human motives, are as readable as the stories of Maupassant, which they somewhat resemble in their worldly, ironic tone.

Freud's writings are always dramatic. In the world that he pictures, man's ego is always at war with his unconscious; sons are at war with their fathers; man's sexual instinct, as deeply rooted as his hunger for food, is at war with the norms and conditions of social life. And contrary to the usual impression, most of Freud's writing deals with the simplicities and not with the abnormalities of human experiences: with people sleeping, dreaming, blundering and forgetting, not with sexual aberrations and sexual crimes.

The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud begins with Freud's amiable observations on the common phenomenon of forgetting. Aside from its jawbreaking title (The Psychopathology of Everyday Life) this is homely and domestic stuff, telling about people who forget their keys, lock themselves out of rooms which--unconsciously --they do not want to enter, forget the names of people they pretend to like, and forget engagements they do not want to keep. In this universal comedy of psychological errors, typesetters drop words from headlines, proofreaders overlook absurd mistakes, genteel ladies make slips of the tongue which transform innocent sentences into obscenities. But all these accidents, says Freud, are meaningful. People forget--which means that they drive from their conscious minds--incidents that have unpleasant associations for them, such as feelings of guilt. Chance or faulty actions bring them to light again, reveal the character of buried repressions, and in such actions the unconscious expresses itself.

If by day men are forever blundering, losing their keys and their memories, at night their sleep is a riot of fantasy. The second section of the Basic Writings is the 386-page Interpretation of Dreams. The motive of a dream, says Freud, is a wish; the content of a dream, no matter how fantastic, is the fulfillment of a wish. Lay readers are not likely to remember the closely-reasoned arguments with which Freud supports his theory. But they are likely to remember, as they remember characters in a good novel, the dreamers of the book: the lady who dreamed she was safe from army officers as long as she carried a man's hat down the street; the one who, for reasons closely connected with her fear of never being married, dreamed she was in a box at the opera, receiving lumps of coal from people in the stalls.

Before they have worked through the dry, lawyer-like prose of Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, or the strange jumble of jokes and explanations of Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, readers may recognize that Freud has all the characteristics of a great novelist except a desire to write novels. Clearest illustration of his artistic talent is The Case of Miss Elisabeth R. Miss Elisabeth was a young woman of good family, pretty and intelligent, who became Freud's patient when some mysterious nervous ailment prevented her from walking properly. The story she told him was "very dull and was woven of manifold painful experiences." Like a shrewd novelist building up sympathy for his heroine, Freud recounted Elisabeth's story. Her father had died and her sister, marrying soon after, had died in childbirth. Elisabeth blamed her brother-in-law for her sister's death. In fact, it seemed at first, she hated her brother-in-law. Elisabeth had been at a resort when she heard that her sister was dying, rushed to her bedside, arrived just after she died. Soon after, she had her first nervous attack. Brooding on her story, Freud could make no sense of it. He was almost ready to give up hope for her when he noticed that whenever she spoke of her brother-in-law, the pains in her legs increased. Prompting her gently, he got her to talk about her sister's death. Elisabeth remembered "a silence in the house, the oppressive darkness, the fact of not having been received by the brother-in-law. She then recalled standing before the bed seeing the deceased, and in the moment of the awful certainty that the beloved sister had died ... in that very moment another thought flashed through Elisabeth's brain, which now peremptorily repeated itself. The thought which flashed like dazzling lightning through the darkness was, 'Now he is free again, and I can become his wife.' "

Elisabeth was cured, but she hated Freud for unmasking her secret. Scientists may argue about the scientific value of such writing, but novelists do not. Hailing Freud as a master of prose, Novelist Thomas Mann summed up the feeling of many a modern writer when he called him the greatest living man of letters, whose discoveries pointed the way to an art which might be bolder, freer, blither "than any possible in our neurotic, fear-ridden, hate-ridden world."

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