The Man Who Knew Freud

The Man Who Knew Freud Few psychiatrists ever took Sigmund Freud as calmly as did James Tucker Fisher. Perhaps it was his background. Fisher spent the best years of his boyhood in the saddle herding cattle on an Illinois farm, did not learn to read & write until he was 13, dropped out of M.I.T., made a fortune in San Diego real estate, became a veterinarian, and decided not to practice the profession when a proper Bostonian lady refused to marry a "horse doctor." So Fisher went to Harvard, got his M.D. and became a mind doctor.

That was just before the turn of the century and before Freud had become a legend. As Psychiatrist Fisher, 88, tells it now in A Few Buttons Missing (Lippincott; $3.50), he found Freud "but one of the many distinguished men under whom I studied. And, frankly, one of the less impressive." He adds: "I learned a great deal more about Sigmund Freud by reading about him than I ever learned by listening to him. And I had to wait until he was heralded by the world at large before I . . . could derive any satisfaction from explaining that I used to know him when."

Unlearn & Relearn. In his wise and witty book (written in collaboration with Lowell S. Hawley, onetime newspaperman), Dr. Fisher describes his postgraduate days in Vienna as "a turbulent, hectic period--where the task each morning was to forget three-fourths of what had been learned the day before and had subsequently been disproved; and where the task each night was to remember half of what had been purposely forgotten in the morning because the theories which disproved these things had been themselves disproved."

But, Dr. Fisher adds: "Despite any. . . reservations that have prevented me from becoming a rah-rah boy of the Freudian school, I am quite sure that the contributions of Sigmund Freud toward the advancement of psychotherapy far outweigh the contributions of any other ten men I have met."

After nearly 50 years of practice, mostly in Los Angeles, Psychiatrist Fisher has come to this conclusion: "If you were to take the sum total of all the authoritative articles ever written by the most qualified of psychologists and psychiatrists . . . if you were to take the whole of the meat and none of the parsley, and if you were to have these unadulterated bits of pure scientific knowledge concisely expressed by the most capable of living poets, you would have an awkward and incomplete summation of the Sermon on the Mount." Undoing the Damage. Along the way, Dr. Fisher learned the happy knack of combining psychiatric skill with commonsense, down-to-earth solutions. His attitude is clear in these Fisherisms: P:"No man who has lived with cows on the prairie and who has studied them in the laboratory can fail to ask . . . why aren't there more contented people?" P:On self-analysis: "The psychiatrist, like the plumber, may find his most difficult task is that of repairing the damage done by those who first tried to analyze the trouble and repair it themselves." P:"Five minutes of honest relaxation playing with a kitten and a piece of string can be a better therapy than a frantic trip around the world . . ." P:"During [World War II] it became my peculiar duty to serve as psychiatric examiner at the military induction center in Los Angeles--a task, that might be compared with an attempt to judge the quality of the rivets in a jet plane as it zips past at 700 miles an hour."

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