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The Secret Artist: A Close Reading of Sigmund Freud

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This book is a lot like the comedy film, "The Aristocrats." Maybe not at the beginning, where the ability of writers is in the long dark tunnel of trying to find something to say, but by Chapter 8, "Music, Painting, and Comedy of the Night," parts of the book which seem like a documentary on the editorial board of `The Onion' are secondary to considerations of "hysterical conversions" (p. 189), which, "if it resembles a work of art, then the genre in question is surreal or absurd. Compulsive neurosis generates more meanings, but the wrong ones." (p. 189). The Ratman is associated with an "Oriental" (p. 190) torture as an example of "the perverse tergiversation of a psyche in conflict," (p. 190). "In the unconscious our passions are headless, with detachable identities, like live parts kept in stock in a joke shop, which we can draw on any time we need to assemble an identity." As in the comics retelling of imaginative variety acts, "our unconscious minds, unconstrained by the need to produce a grammatical or logical structure, behave like circus acts, throwing all definite reality into the air." (p. 191). "A chiasmus is inscribed in the Oedipal family situation where, against the norm, son loves mother and daughter loves father. This is the prime instance of animated rhetoric lying at the heart of Freud's view of the world." (p. 192). It is also key to a variety act called "The Aristocrats," according to the joke endlessly embellished in the movie "The Aristocrats."

The intellectual activities of modern life mirror a world in which "the same person can feel love and hostility, attraction and the desire to gain revenge. Splitting and doubling seem to be approximate psychic mobilizations of the synecdoche, another trope by which the name of part of the object stands in for the whole (or the whole stands for the part) but then acquires a new poetic life of its own in the poetic text." (pp. 192-193).

"Freud amplifies the unconscious; he creates a fantastic arena for what, in a desperate attempt at meaning, we call our personality; like Nietzsche he shows the sustaining power of metaphor, but also that we live in the depths of delusion. Nietzsche and Freud tell us that the human mind primarily has a gift for the ornamentation of life, not the analytical confrontation of which Western culture was for so long proud." (p. 194). This book seems entirely serious when it confronts "A chill comes over one at the spectacle of so much unconscious mimicry ruling once proud human autonomy" (p. 194) in Freud "writing perhaps the most bizarre poems to life ever to have entered the Western canon, for they are close to nonsense." (p. 194). Also, with a note of appreciation, "Nietzsche is a musician. Freud is a painter." (p. 195).

The Secret Artist: A Close Reading Of Sigmund Freud by journalist and educator Lesley Chamberlain is a deep and perceptive study of the written works of Sigmund Freud, considered to be the founder of modern psychotherapy. In an effort to help readers better understand the mind of Freud, The Secret Artist closely dissects his writings with intense attention to detail. A thoughtful, scholarly, erudite, informative work, The Secret Artist is very highly recommended reading for students of Freud's pioneering work, as well as the non-specialist general reader with an interest in the history of psychotherapy.

Early in this terrific book the versatile British scholar Lesley Chamberlain writes of the young Sigmund Freud that what he "wanted and already expected was success," and that his writings "radiate the confidence and ambition and talent that would make it possible; but also the complexity that would not make it easy." This is a complex story and a scholarly work that presupposes the reader's positive regard for Freud (if not as a scientist, as an artist) and then aims to greatly enlarge upon it.

Freud the analyst is revealed as a "secret artist," not furtively artistic but, rather, unconsciously artistic. He was, she writes, a pioneer and an utterly original thinker and writer who contributed amply to our present-day notions of the forms and possibilities of literature. In her view Freud virtually "fathered the creative writing class" by legitimizing not only subject matter but writing forms that had hitherto been considered unsuitable for public consumption. From Freud we inherited new literary forms for self-revelation, self-discovery, and confession.

Chamberlain shows how Freud devised "the "double-well," an "artistic form with a moral component," a new way to tell a story in which "a dream sits on the divide." His stories about his patients have more in common with contemporary novellas than the medical case histories of their time, extending at times "a typical Freudian invitation to the reader, to pull the [...] thread and see where it leads."

Chamberlain examines Freud positively without minimizing his shortcomings. "Freud was not a model of tolerance by today's standards, " she writes, and cites his views on homosexuality, women's sexuality (on which she says he was "underinformed"). Nonetheless, Chamberlain writes that Freud "gave us a more relaxed attitude toward sex, freed from values of God and the soul, and gender, and divorced from insensitive stereotypes." This is, then, no small thing.

Chamberlain has accomplished an unusual and stimulating combination of biography, literary analysis, intelligent conjecture, and thrilling narrative. Her writing is crystal-clear, she tackles complicated things, and explains them wonderfully well. Freud's wide-ranging creative and personal relationships to philosophy, the visual arts, poetry, nature, music are explored. Along with a good index and bibliography, here are over a hundred pages of fluid and impossible-to-resist (because so interesting and energetic) "Notes, Arguments, and Explanations."

Well worth reading.