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Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision

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Many years ago, an old teacher of mine commented to me that the published writings about Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis could fill a suburban library. This could be a slight exaggeration, but the biographies and published essays that one can find on a university library catalogue, for example, reach a remarkable number. Even today, the interest in the man and his work continues unabated, more in the general humanities, however, than psychology itself. What is this unrelenting fascination about Freud that draws so many people to his life and work? This is a hard question to answer, but an interesting one to consider. In the latest contribution to the Freud canon, ~Freud- Darkness in the Midst of Vision~ Louis Breger attempts a somewhat new interpretation of Freud and psychoanalysis, and a successful one.

In the 'Background and Sources' at the back of the text, Breger writes an interesting comment: he states that there are basically three camps or perspectives of the man - the first are the 'fiercely' loyal combatants, the defenders of psychoanalytic orthodoxy; Freud's words are considered gosple and no divergence is permitted. In the second camp are the sharp and brutal critics, who dismiss Freud and psychoanalysis in its entirety. The third category (where Breger places himself) are not worshiping sycophants or radical critics, but those who see the significance of Freud's work, and acknowledge his contributions with a balanced assessment of the man and psychoanalysis in general. This book manages to capture the spirit of the third cartegory with brilliance of insight, objectivity and compassion.

I've read many accounts of Freud and the history of psychoanalysis from hagiography, (Ernest Jones' three-volume mythology) to chatty, uninformed rumour mongering, (Paul Ferris -Dr. Freud A Life) and found Breger's to be the most clinically informed and fair of them all.

Breger set out to dismantle the many myths surrounding the history of Freud and psychoananlysis. This book is straightforward historical revisionism at its most readable form. He writes of the origins of psychoanalysis and its intellectual development against its historical milieu, that gives the reader a true context in which the movement was born and the reasons why it catapulted into international popularity after the First World War. The text cuts through the folklore and the intentionally generated romance of the subject, revealing a clear well-researched account, which remains as out of the ordinary as the myths themselves.

Even with all of Freud's faults and flaws of personality, his steel-like dogmatism and refusal to accept any further developments (contrary to his own) from his followers or divergence from his questionable theories, continues to incite interest and fascination generation after generation. It is his utter strength of personality that was his true genius, that reaches out from the past and grabs our attention. To dismiss this highly original thinker is a mistake. And Louis Breger's ~Freud - Darkness in the Midst of Vision~ emphasises this fact in a lucid, fresh and graceful manner.

Breger gives us a more vivid picture of Freud as a person, including his daily routines and personal relationships, and how he constructed a mythology of his own life and then universalized this myth as psychological bedrock for humanity in the form of the oedipal theory. The idea in the oedipus complex that the little boy looks up to an overpowering father with whom he also engages in murderous competitive rivalry - at least in fantasy- in fact denied the reality of Freud's relationship with his father, who he loved but saw as weak and ineffective. The oedipal rival actually represented Freud's wish for a stronger, more potent father. This is one essential insight in a book that puts Freud in three dimensional historical space, in a way that previous historians failed to- who either put him on a pedestal, or else tended to bash him. Breger does neither, and lets us see him as a great thinker with huge blindspots and incapacities for tolerating other points of view, which has left a bitter legacy within psychoanalysis. Breger is a lucid and moving writer, as is also evidenced in his previous, also profound, biography of Dostoevsky.

Despite all the biographies of Freud out there, none have been written by actual psychoanalysts which means no one has really looked at Freud's life, especially his early family life, from a psychoanalytic perspective. Breger's portrait is endearing and a little tragic - it shows us how many of Freud's ideas emerged from his own struggles with the loss and pain of his early experience. Breger's story is as much a biography of early psychoanalysis as it is of Freud's life, and not the mythical, heroic version of Freud's life that he wrote for himself and his biographers have clung too. This is Freud uncensored!

This is a fine book which is well-written on many levels. The style is lucid and friendly: Dr. Breger's writing is surprisingly accessible even to lay people like me.

Many of the insights it offers into Freud's own thinking and development are original and valuable. For instance, the fact that Freud, wanting to become a "great scientist", chose for his models revolutionaries like Kepler and Darwin rather than healers like Pasteur and Koch [Intro. p. 2] struck me right from the outset as an eye-opening observation. The fact that some of Freud's most famous theories were developed utterly without any scientific backup or citation to experimental/ observational evidence (such as the theory of penis envy, discussed at several places in the book but particularly at 332-334) comes to light in the pages of this book with humor, wit, and great persuasive force. Viewed purely as a critique of Freud, this book is wonderful because it presents an original and persuasive view which I don't think has ever been seen before. It is useful also because by reading it, you may re-visit all the reading about Freud you did in your college days, and it is satisfying to have such an overview available in one book that's fun to read.

But the book is interesting also because of the extraordinary vividness with which it portrays Freud's world: the Jewish ghetto, and the intellectual world of Vienna before WWII. If you read this book for no other purpose than to dip yourself into that world, and to remind yourself of the ideals to which its inhabitants subscribed, you will still be satisfied and edified.

Dr. Breger is a professional psychoanalyst, and the "point of view" reflected in these pages shows both sharp powers of observation and, at the same, time, the kind of warmth that only serious professionals can develop when they are committed - as Dr. Breger seems to be - to helping people. Freud is of course beyond help, although it seems he might have benefitted from a course of therapy with this author! But Dr. Breger speaks in a tone of voice that makes us feel that he wants to help us, his readers, see something clearly and move out of any fixation with respect to Freud in which we might have been trapped.

I do recommend this book. Although - it might have been better titled 'Occasional Vision in the Midst of Darkness.' Breger does have some bones to pick with Freud; and well he might, there are many bones to pick. While the author is careful to remind us that without Freud there is no Jung, no Adler, nothing of pschyoanalysis, I would like have seen a broader exposition of the challenge Freud faced in having the psyche taken seriously by scientists at all. It might be difficult at this distance to see him as the rebel rather than as the old established authority - but I think we would have a clearer vision of his life if Breger had reminded us as much of the difficulties Freud faced as those he caused.

That said - this book rings true to me.

The narrative flow of the book is like a litany of failed friendships, ruined by Freuds inability to tolerate dissent, even by those who loved him well. When we beleive in the devil we tend to see him everywhere. Freud's devil was his own thoery of the Oedipal Complex. He saw every disciple as an Oedipal threat to the paternal authority of his ideas. In fighting this devil, he closed himself off to those voices capable of expanding and correcting his theories where they needed it most. This has left many of his thoeries dogmatic dead ends, and those defending and practising them intellctually dishonest and stunted.

I am not expert in psychoanalysis. What drew me into this book was the humanization of this slightly stooped, ambitious, clearly brilliant, altogether bourgeois, autocratic, but - yes - great man. Breger shows us, mostly sympathetically, a thoroughly human man, with all the foibles and prejudices of his time. But Breger also shows us the other side of the coin - a fanatic drive for personal fame and a chilling cruelty to all of the many who even slightly questioned his drive for mythic status. We realize the revolution in the late 19th and early 20th centuries wrought by Freud's brilliant, if now widely regarded as deeply flawed, insights into the nature of the mind. Indeed, that there is such a thing as a subconscious, an id ("the horse"), ego ("the man on horseback"), and superego (the rider's "internal voice"). There are so many famous Freudian phrases that virtually all his basic theses have "passed into the common domain", almost biblically, in Breger's typically serviceable prose.

I would recommend this aptly titled "Freud: darkness in the midst of vision" to any interested lay person, not for critiques of Freudian theories, though they are well-presented and solidly researched. Rather, I recommend this for Breger's at times soaring descriptions of Freud's utterly fascinating inner demons and his tempestuous relationships with colleagues: the 'Napoleon of neuroses' Charcot; Brucke of the "terrifying blue eyes"; his 'beautiful' Ernst Fleischl, whom he bathed, and whose photo was the only one in his consulting room, 45 years after Fleischl's death. The [narcotics], the nicotine addiction, the erotic Jung, the dissenter Adler, the hagiographer Anna Freud, and on and on --explosive relationships powerfully described. Through it all, Breger mostly succeeds in giving us a balanced criticism of Freud's ideas and, more excitingly, an intimate view of the deeply complex man. The rare photos, integrated into the text, are a treat.

Dr. Breger has done both the psychoanalytic world and the public in general a major service by providing us with a clear picture of both Freud as a man and of the development of psychoanalytic thought from Freud's early ideas to the current state of the science. We are given a very believable picture of Freud as a man, as a thinker and as a leader. This is sophisticated research and writing. Readers will come away having seen reality clashing with long held myths and reality winning. No longer must the public feel that all psychoanalytic thinking started and ended with Freud but the field has really progressed. All this along with brilliant and extremely readable prose.

Breger's description of Freud's life is most apt for those curious about Freud's personal, familial, and intellectual relationships during his youth and through the development of the psychoanalytic movement. Here we see Freud the hard-working father, but also the autocratic leader of his movement, the members of which had to be absolutely loyal to him or risk expulsion. I had two problems with the book. First, Breger's account of nearly all of Freud's relationships fits a single pattern (first, loyalty to Freud, then intellectual independence, followed by rejection from the moevement), which makes reading predictable and ultimately repetitive. Surely many of Freud's relationships differed from this pattern in important respects--respects de-emphasized in this account. Second, it is unclear from this biography what original and permanent contributions Freud made at all to the history of ideas. Breger's account makes Freud out to be wrong-headed in almost every aspect of his thought, lodging convenient criticisms of hindsight which may have been unavailable in Freud's day. In short, the book is not the best for an introduction to Freud as a thinker. It is probably better for those who have read other biographies of Freud and want another perspective.

It is refreshing to come across a biography of Freud--and an analytical biography at that--without an obvious agenda or an ax to grind: in other words, without idealization (Jones, Gay) or retaliation (Crews at his most sarcastic).

Professor Breger's fine book eschews the pleasure of peeling the narcissistic Freud like an onion and instead looks into his early woundings, repressed longings for love, and lifelong grandiosity and thirst for fame while never losing sight of Freud's accomplishments. I teach depth psychology to graduates and undergrads and have recommended this scholarly and lucid book to them as a means for understanding (as Jung put it) "a man in the grip of his daimon."

Dr. Breger has provided us with a unique, somewhat unnerving view of Freud in his new book. Those of us who have been exposed to the most common view of Freud, as a genius and scientific hero of our times will be somewhat taken aback when reading what the new research and even newer contemporary views of Frued reveal. Breger is definitely not among those many authors who writes about Freud from an idealizing point of view. Yet Breger is a trained clinician who has used some Freudean concepts successfully in his work for many years. He recognizes and identifies the numerous ways in which many of Freud's ideas were groundbreaking and are still useful today. But that is not the major thrust of this book. Breger therefore does not dwell on this recognition and praise of Freud's accomplishments and as such these points might be missed by those looking to justify their prior positive views of Freud and psychoanalysis. Instead Breger takes us on an in depth contemporary look at Freud's unrecognized pathology. He does this through an analysis of Freud's relationshops with collegues, family, friends and patients. For the most part, Freud's relationships follow a significant pattern. Freud, who was never analyzed by another, and only underwent an analysis by himself through his own interaction with a trusted, but untrained collegue, never was able to recognize the significance of the profound traumatic effects of numerous early losses in his life as documented by Breger. As a result, Freud's ability to become intimate with others in a truly non-heirarchical manner was impaired. The effects of this impairment on his handling of relationships within the psychoanalytic movement and his theory building were profound. He shunned and isolated those that disagreed with him and developed a theory that remained focussed only on the inner workings of one person, the patient. Freud was never was able to incorporate the other person in the duo, the inner workings of the analyst, into his theory. Contemporary analysts who have taken many years to shake the profound influence of Freud on their thinking now view the analyst/patient duo as inseparable in theory building. But when analysts who were in the early psychoanalytic movement attempted to approach these concepts Freud and his loyal subordinates effectively silenced and libelled them privately and publicly. Breger's arguments are so well documented and illustrated that it is hard, try as we may, to avoid the similar conclusions that he has reached. This is an uncomfortable but welcome look at a man who admittedly changed our culture in a significant manner. But it is a welcome one and one that reinforces the effectiveness of use the psychoanalytic process, a use that has always empasized the importance of facing uncomfortable psychological truths rather than avoiding them.