A Piece of the True Couch FREUD: A LIFE FOR OUR TIME by Peter Gay; Norton; 810 pages; $25

By R.Z. Sheppard

Just before 82-year-old Sigmund Freud was allowed to leave German-occupied Austria in 1938, the SS insisted he sign a statement claiming he had been treated well. He complied with a flourish: "I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone." This defiant and, under the circumstances, risky display of contempt was typical of the man who invented psychoanalysis. Throughout his life, Freud sought to maintain control. In his final hours, suffering through the last stages of throat cancer in 1939, he told the physician who had accompanied him to England to "make an end of it." The doctor obediently administered enough morphine to induce a coma from which the patient never awakened.

Freud's urge to preside is evident throughout Peter Gay's admiring, though hardly reverential biography. Yale's Sterling Professor of History and author of The Enlightenment and The Bourgeois Experience is a graduate of the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. Yet if he is a doctrinaire Freudian, he does not show it. The great man, in Gay's eyes, was the product of a culture and period as well as of his upbringing. Yes, he had a beautiful, strong-minded mother whom he once saw naked, or, as he put it, matrem nudam. But he was also a Jew in the Austro-Hungarian Empire at a time of ferment in the arts and sciences. Gay's Freud emerges slowly but heroically from this background as an ambitious outsider driven by what the author calls a "greed for knowledge" and a scarcely suppressed desire to conquer the exclusive Gentile world.

Freud the boy identified himself with Hannibal of Carthage. Freud the founder of the new "mind science" continually sought to assert his authority over associates, nearly all of them Jews. His colleagues appear to have been a touchy lot. Minor disputes frequently ended in nasty breakups and castings- out. But Freud's greatest distress came in dealing with Carl Jung, the son of a Swiss pastor, whose differences with his Viennese teacher had origins in the varying perspectives of Christianity and Judaism. Gay describes two meetings with Jung at which Freud fainted.

At home Freud was the image of the stalwart, bourgeois paterfamilias. His household, including wife, six children, sister-in-law and a Chow named Jo-Fi, revolved around his activities. The man who stunned the world with his theories about human behavior adhered to a thoroughly conventional routine, as Gay describes it:

"Up by seven, he would see psychoanalytic patients from eight to twelve. Dinner was punctually at one: at the stroke of the clock, the household assembled around the dining-room table; Freud appeared from his study, his wife sat down facing him at the other end, and the maid materialized, bearing the soup tureen. Then came a walk to restore the circulation, perhaps to deliver proofs or buy cigars. Consultations were at three, and after that, he saw more analytic patients, often until nine in the evening. Then came supper, sometimes a short game of cards with his sister-in-law Minna, or a walk with his wife or one of his daughters, often ending up at a cafe, where they could read the papers or, in the summer, eat an ice."

Mrs. Freud, Martha Bernays, makes modest appearances early in the book as a model hausfrau, but after delivering the opinion that psychoanalysis is a "form of pornography," she is rarely heard from again. The woman in Freud's later life was his daughter and intellectual heir Anna. She followed in her father's professional footsteps and, in all but conjugal function, became a dutiful substitute spouse.

Gay, a scholar of the Enlightenment era, tends to view his subject as a direct descendant of 18th century atheists and rationalists like Voltaire and Diderot. Therefore it is with deepening irony that the reader discovers that by the 1920s, psychoanalysis had begun to resemble a religion. Freud's apostles begat apostates who in turn spawned heresies and a bemusing number of therapeutic sects, each claiming to have a piece of the true couch.

) It is easy to see why. Freud's theories of dreams as wish fulfillments, of infant sexuality and Oedipal rage, had the power of revelation. They could not (and still cannot) be proved by laboratory experiment, but their palpable rightness can be sensed in mythology, legend and archaeology. Not surprisingly, Freud's famous office at Berggasse 19 was filled with antiquities from Egypt and classical Greece.

Freud was an unimposing man, 5 ft. 7 in. tall and nearly always dressed in conservative coat and tie. He did, however, have a penetrating stare, and an English analyst who visited him after World War I noted the "forward thrust of his head and critical exploring gaze of his keenly piercing eyes." There was the neatly trimmed beard and the ever present cigar. He was addicted. Writing to his fiancee in the early 1880s, Freud the lover justified his tobacco habit with the romantic observation that "smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss." Elsewhere, in a professional mode, he declared that cigars are a substitute for masturbation.

To judge from Gay's accounts, too much has been made of Freud's cocaine dependency. As a young man he used the drug to chase the blues, relax on social occasions and, as he wrote to his future bride, make himself feel like a "big wild man." The substance did cause him ego problems when another physician beat him to the journals with his findings on the pain-killing properties of coca. His own paper on the subject was well received, but as he wrote in an 1884 letter to his sister-in-law, "the cocaine business has indeed brought me much honor, but the lion's share to others."

At the age of 66, Freud discovered what he called a "leukoplastic growth on my jaw and palate." He correctly identified the cause as smoking, and was worried enough to suspect cancer. He was right; but apparently the man who knew so much about the mechanisms of denial in others had little influence over his own defenses. Rather than seek the opinion of a leading specialist, he selected a rhinologist of whom he had a low opinion. Was this an example of the celebrated "death wish," or perhaps just another instance of his need to be the boss? Macht nichts. The nose doctor operated and botched the job. Freud was left hemorrhaging on a cot in a small room that he shared with a retarded dwarf. The fellow summoned a nurse, though it is unlikely that he realized he was saving a giant.

Freud's reputation by that time was international, and Freudianisms were being filtered and watered down for popular consumption. In 1924 Colonel Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, offered the founding father $25,000 to come to Chicago and psychoanalyze Accused Murderers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, then on trial for their thrill killing of Bobby Franks. Freud refused, as he undoubtedly would have if Hollywood's Samuel Goldwyn had made good on his boast that he would offer $100,000 for the consulting services of the "greatest love specialist in the world."

Just how much Freud knew about the subject is unclear. Gay takes the conventional view that the master sublimated his sexual drive in his intellectual pursuits. Freud's letters to colleagues contain references to his weak libido, and though he had many attractive and exciting women friends, there is no evidence that they ever graduated from his couch to his bed.

Feminists exercised by Freud's ideas on penis envy and his position that a girl is a failed boy and a woman a castrated man may gather ammunition here for their cause. Gay finds Freud's ideas about the female psyche too willfully conceived to be convincing, and he repeatedly quotes Freud on his ignorance about the sex he referred to as the "dark continent."

In fact, the biographer is no less skeptical about many psychoanalytical formulations than Freud was himself. In his paper "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," for example, Freud expresses doubts about the effectiveness of the talking cure. If this is not good news for patients who pay $100 for a 50- minute hour, let them pay $25 for this excellent biography. That's what Freud charged for a full hour.