Analyzing Freud

Because Sigmund Freud invented psychoanalysis, there was no old couchman around to analyze him and get him started on the right track--so he analyzed himself. Now Erich Fromm, one of the most eminent of today's analysts, who differs with Freud on many vital issues, has subjected the founder to a searching analysis from the outside. It is not the first such effort, but the best. In Sigmund Freud's Mission, (Harper; $3), German-born Author Fromm casts grave doubt on Biographer Ernest Jones's description of Freud's self-analysis as "an imperishable feat" (TIME, Sept. 19, 1955), which got most of the kinks out of his psyche. Far from it, says Fromm, who doubles in sociology and philosophy; in Freud's personality and temperament were many grave defects that he carried through life.

Items: "Lack of emotional warmth, closeness, love and enjoyment of life"; in his own life he treated love like a flower pressed in a book, "an object of science, but . . . dry and sterile." Most startling: "Freud, the great spokesman for sex, was altogether a typical puritan. To him, the aim of life for a civilized person was to suppress his emotional and sexual impulses." And from Freud's own pen is a clear statement that even within a supposedly ideal marriage his sex life was over when he was 41.

New Religion. "Dependency and insecurity are central elements in ... his neurosis." Freud was "deeply in need of motherly love, admiration and protection, full of self-confidence when these are bestowed on him, depressed and hopeless when they are missing. This insecurity, both emotional and material, makes him seek to control others who depend on him, so that he can depend on them."

Although Freud developed the hotly debated Oedipus complex from his feelings toward his mother, Fromm believes that he concealed their intensity even from himself. And while discovery of the "wish to remain attached to Mother" was a notable event, Freud destroyed its value by restricting it to instinctual desires. In analytic terms: "His own attachment to Mother was the basis of his discovery, and his resistance to seeing his attachment was the basis for the limitation and distortion of this very discovery."

In general, says Fromm. "Freud's aim was to found a movement for the ethical liberation of man, a new secular and scientific religion for an elite which was to guide mankind." What happened? His "messianic impulses" struck a response in followers who had no strong religious, political and philosophic convictions, but a hidden need for them. In "the movement" they found everything: "A dogma, a ritual, a leader, a hierarchy, the feeling of possessing the truth, of being superior to the uninitiated."

Forbidding Fruit. Fromm sees the same basis for the great popularity of psychoanalysis since the early 19305, especially in the U.S.: "Here is a middle class for whom life has lost meaning . . . Yet they are in search of a meaning, of an idea to devote themselves to, of an explanation of life which does not require faith or sacrifice." Often, he adds, patients "are much less concerned with being cured than with the exhilarating sensation of having found a spiritual home."

For all his strictures, Fromm sees Freud as "a truly great man." He concedes that "Western thought is impregnated with Freud's discoveries, and its future is unthinkable without the fruits of this impregnation." The trick is to cull the rotten fruit from the sound apples.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.