Dr. Freud, a Life [Illustrated] [Hardcover]

Paul Ferris (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1998

This startling book provides new insight into an increasingly controversial figure whose work has left an indelible mark on the modern world.. In Dr. Freud, Paul Ferris presents a rich and complete biography, focused first and foremost on the details of Freuds life and family. This is a personal book about a long, contentious, and often desperate life, about a man who prized self-examination and studied contradictions as few before him had. In a style that avoids jargon, Ferris has written one of the most accessible and informative books to date about an increasingly controversial figure who left an indelible mark on the modern psyche. From a distance of years, it is all too easy to attack Sigmund Freud, to discount the originality of his ideas and scrutinize his flaws. Today, nearly sixty years after Freuds death, the field of psychoanalysis still swarms with controversy about his career. His work has been picked apart by fellow theorists, who seek either to canonize his intellectual prowess or to vilify both the man and his work.Paul Ferriss new biography avoids this fashionable polemic, attending to the details of Freuds personal existence. A balanced, fair-minded work, free from the technicalities of psychoanalytic jargon, Dr. Freud tells the story of a long, contentious, and often desperate life. He writes of Freuds obsessive interest in sexual frustration, noting the context of Freuds own passionless marriage, and recounts Freuds advocacy of cocaine as a miracle drug, without neglecting his regret at discovering its painful repercussions.Freud, his work, and his time emerge in fine detail in this robust and sympathetic portrait--a stunning look into the many aspects of a complex soul.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

There are so many biographies of Sigmund Freud, not to mention the mountains of scholarly matter surrounding his theories, that it's hard to imagine a fresh, readable, convincing new approach to his life and work. Paul Ferris--an outsider who has never been psychoanalyzed, much less trained as an analyst--has done the trick. Agnostic about the true value of Freud's achievements, Ferris prefers to proceed on the reasonable assumption that Freud is worth studying sheerly because of his overarching influence on our culture. Consequently, the early chapters involve some fence-sitting, with unnamed fanatical acolytes and critics alike held at arm's length.

But nothing is so striking as the extent to which this mainstream biographer has learned the lessons of Freud's harshest critics. There is no apology--and not much surprise even--in the description of Freud's entanglement with (and indefensible defense of) the homicidal quack Wilhelm Fliess. Whatever else one may admire in Freud, Ferris has no trouble being straightforward about shabby motives, unprofessional behavior, or Freud's arrogance in matters about which he was sometimes almost comically ignorant. What praise this biography does have to offer, meanwhile, is qualified. Ferris says Freud's great achievement was getting us to take sex seriously, but seems to admit that he may have replaced ignorance with confusion. He also expresses well-grounded awe for Freud's writing ability and productivity, but implies, in a well-judged chapter on the Dora case, both that the application of his writing talent to science was a serious loss to imaginative literature and that losing him to literature might have been a blessed release for some of his patients. --Richard Farr

From Publishers Weekly

When a British edition of Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life appeared in 1914, a London magazine described him as "the Sherlock Holmes of the Mind." Ferris, a Welsh novelist and biographer, approaches his subject as a shaper of 20th-century thinking who has been written about largely by his disciples as well as his rivals. Followers employed obfuscation to camouflage his flaws, while enemies emphasized his failings and the concepts that flunked the test of time, according to Ferris. On his part he sees Freud as a heroic but devious researcher who invented what he could not prove about the riddles of repression and conflict. His biography pauses here and there to reject familiar stories as fables or to label theories that do not hold up as "dangerously speculative." To Ferris, the most unworthy act by the popularizer of the incest motive in human behavior is Freud's psychoanalysis of his daughter, Anna, between 1918 and 1924. Whatever it did for either of themAand she would become an analyst herselfAit "extinguished" Anna's "potential for loving a man." Ferris considers her father's psychoanalysis of her a supreme act of selfishness by someone who understood everyone else's contradictions but his own. Photos.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; 1 edition (June 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1887178724
• ISBN-13: 978-1887178723
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,953,325 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Frank and honest., November 11, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Dr. Freud: A Life (Paperback)

This is the first biography that I have read (of any one) that has kept me interested to the last page. That says alot for the content and flow of the book. As a psychology student, I have studied Freud's theories. This book helped put it all in perspective, along side theries of Jung and Adler. It showed me how 'way out' his theories were for the time but how they had a certain logic given the type of patients he had and the attitiude towards sex at the time. It's a fascinating read - and strikes me as very frank and honest. There's no glamourising of the man himself - but why should there be.. It's a story of a man's life and an interesting one at that.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Highly readable but hardly objective, January 15, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Dr. Freud: A Life (Paperback)

Paul Ferris has undoubtly written a highly readable biography of one of the icons of the XX century. The book may be broken down into three main parts: the first one shows Freud until his mid-life or so and focuses on Freud's obsessive drive for recognition; the second part, is a very superficial account of Freud's threories intertwinded with some irrelevant details of his life, and the third one is an account of the internal and external struggle of the psychoanalytic movement.

Ferris' writing style is polished and entertaining. However, after 100 pages or so, Ferris (who acknowledges to have no psychology or psychiatry background) loses his objectivity and starts to criticize and put down Freud's theories. This is not necessarily bad, but the criticism is on very superficial grounds while failing to place Freud and his thought in the proper context of the late XIX and early XX. Freud thought is only presented in its outline (which is something expected of a biography) but for the sake of simplicity and brevity the outline lacks a meaningful presentation of the issues behind Freud's theories. The oversimplification of the essence of Freud's thought makes it appear somewhat grotesque and irrational.

There has been much dispute on Freud as a "scientist" and psychoanalisis as a "science" and Ferris has a go at both. Unfortunately, Ferris forgets that both Freud and his thought fall within the concept of "social science" not "physical science", thus many of the theories and implications are based on case studies, which obviously carry highly individualised connotations some of which can or cannot be generalised to the entire population.

In summary, this book joins sides against Freudian thought and therefore hardly provides a truthful insight into the man and his theories. A reader looking for an introduction to Freudian thought is advised to look elsewhere. A reader looking for some some insight into the man will find plenty of biased, irrelevant and selectively chosen details that do not paint the entire character of Freud.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is the best modern biography of Freud., August 29, 1998

By 

MICHAEL CHRISTIAN (BOSTON, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dr. Freud, a Life (Hardcover)

Factual and at times irreverent, the chief value of this excellent biography is its objective examination of Freud's work, his accomplishments and his failings, his genius and his humanity. If you're a slavish worshiper of the Freud myth, don't read it. But if you want the truth, it will open your eyes while it amuses and entertains with a prose style that is in itself a delight.