How Would Freud have written his Biography? The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads Adam Phillips’ Becoming Freud – The Making of a Psychoanalyst

Adam Phillips’ slender biography of Freud published this year (2014) and titled “Becoming Freud” is one that I was quite intrigued to read.  It is brief, written by an analyst who is also the editor of the new Penguin Standard Edition of Freud – someone who is editing the new translations without speaking German!  Does he get Freud?  Well, he spends the first chapter clarifying that, from Freud’s perspective, there is no such thing as an accurate biography.  From Freud’s (via Phillips) perspective, the biography is more about the biographer than about the object of the biography, just as this blog is more about me than about Adam Phillips’ work, and just as what you think or say about this blog is more about you than me, Phillips, or Freud.  From Freud’s perspective, it is the subjective experience of the person that matters.  And this is, I believe, at the heart of what it is that Freud had to say and certainly Phillips takes this stance as well.

So Phillips' approach to Freud is not to flat footedly analyze him by attributing actions to hypothesized unconscious motivations as others have sometimes done; instead  he takes a swirling, free associational stab at describing Freud’s history – what is known and so much that is unknown and, in a weird approach for a psychoanalyst, he analyzes not Freud the person so much as Freud the socio- psychoanalytic individual who emerges at a particular point in history – the history of European thought – he sees Freud as a left over Romantic as the world is becoming modern (ironically largely at his prodding) – and he emerges at a particular point in the history of European Judaism – Freud may be a Godless Jew, but he is deeply determined, Phillips believes, by his cultural origins.

It is important to realize that this is one of a series of books about famous Jews, and it is central to Phillips’ thesis that Freud, as a Jew in Anti-Semitic Vienna and as an immigrant from Moravia was a man standing on the margins.  This prepared him to hear the voices within himself and his patients that were being silenced by the dominant majority.   Freud’s unconscious then, in Phillips’ reading, is the unconscious of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents; Freud’s commentary on the ways in which civilization needs must squelch the voice of the individual for the common good – and how this, in turn, leads the individual to want to articulate something nameless and forbidden – the urge to assert him or herself, and these forces must be repressed for the good of the order – so they go underground – they become the unconscious.

This process occurs for (or to) every member of society.  But for those who are privileged, they don’t quite see what they are giving up because they are given so much in return.  And, as the executors of the next social order, they do to others what was done to them (we call it “identification with the aggressor”), and they do it with impunity because it is, after all, how they have come to profit in the ways that they have.  As a Jew, Freud both is (25% of University students in Vienna when Freud was in college were Jewish) and is not (only 9% of the population of Vienna was Jewish) a member of a privileged class.  One of the dangers of a meritocracy, which Vienna briefly was, is that the minority may move into positions of power, and when this happens, those who held power are not pleased, and they may retaliate – hopefully not usually as brutally as the Nazis did, but it is a risk.  But Phillips’ position is a different one – it is that Freud actually craved being taken over by another – having a mentor who would show him the ropes – assimilate him – and, to his credit, he strongly resisted this despite being drawn to it in a series of relationships with attractive and powerful mentors.  Freud worked to maintain his “splendid isolation” throughout his professional career – guarding against the possibility that what he had to say would be poisoned, not just by the intent of the other, but by his wish to have his work validated – to be loved by a maternal, personally erosive other who would incorporate him.

So this is an interesting biography from two perspectives.  The facts of Freud’s life are not talked about until page 38 – it takes that long to tell us that those facts, while relevant, cannot adequately describe Freud’s world analytically because he is not there in an analytic relationship to talk about it – and then that Phillips says all but nothing about the last half of Freud’s development as a systematizer of the psychoanalytic movement.  He all but says that he wishes Freud would have died after teaching us about dreams and slips of the tongue, after telling us about the unconscious – while his thinking was young and free and he was describing humans in revolt – because, and this he doesn’t state, the part that he leaves out is the description of the mind as a structure – with the familiar super ego, ego, and id – and this mind of Freud’s – his last invention – is one that, I think, Phillips would say (or I am saying for him) is the mind of the politician who created a movement – a movement that, like all political movements, ends up repressing those who would belong and discarding those who don’t toe the line.  Freud became the very thing that his revolutionary idea was rebelling against – at least if I am reading Phillips accurately.  And more than that, despite his fear of being incorporated, he may have been – perhaps without knowing it – as he came to identify with the aggressor/oppressor and describe a mind – this structured mind – that is the mind of the slave; of the person who has bought into what civilization has to offer and has sold his soul to wallow in its comforts.

Last night, I wandered into a Barnes and Noble and there, in the vestibule, were stacks of books with “90 second” synopses of various fields.  I picked up the one on psychology, and there was Freud, summarized in a page, and he was referred to as the guy who gave us the superego, ego and id.  That was basically it.  This later mind, this mind that is a description not of human potential – not of what we could become – but the mind of who we are – the mind of those of us who have figured out how to repress/suppress and distance ourselves from our dreams – not those of us who have figured out how to live in dialogue with them; those of us who are living to find – and in some sense to live out – our dreams.  Freud is, then, being presented (at least in my view of Phillips’ position) as the ultimate squelcher rather than as a symbol of freedom…

I have taken some liberties in the last paragraph, indeed throughout this essay, but it is, at least until you read it, my essay and so I will play with taking Phillips’ ideas to the extreme.  But lest you think that I am some kind of revolutionary who gets the way that Freud, and then the world, turned the revolutionary Freud into the repressor, please know that I have written a textbook chapter that commits the same sin as the book in Barnes and Noble’s (OK, I used more words to do it than the 90 second version) and it is Phillips’ book that is creating, for me, this dichotomy – the dichotomy between Freud the revolutionary and Freud the systematizer.  And the dichotomy between my adolescent, fancy filled self who would take an idea and run with it and my old, tired self, who takes and passes on things that I have heard or read but never quite understood and teach them as if I had – as if I had created them (which Freud – through Phillips – maintains we must for something to be truly our own, and therefore transferable).  I so frequently do not create them; instead of authoring them so that I know them so thoroughly – or so poorly - that I can put them out there in all their shabby glory, I simply mouth the words.  So, at least in this moment, at the risk of doing violence to Phillips, I am maintaining that Freud took a left turn.  That he veered off the track of exposing The Man – and instead, while describing him – invited us to make use of Him and his ways – to become The Man.

So, this biography, unlike the standard biographies that have dispensed with Freud’s early life by page 38, in part because there is so little there to talk about, and then goes on to talk about the rest of Freud’s life for 500 pages, this biography takes longer to get to those facts and then spends time swirling those facts around, putting them into the sociopolitical/philosophical context, and spinning Freud – the consummate repressed middle class achiever who articulated the language of sex and aggression that ushered in an era culminating in Oprah openness and the idolization of the subjective – out of the threads of what we know about his family, but also what Phillips vividly imagines, allowing his fantasies, tempered by his close reading of Freud’s texts and his knowledge of the available facts, to create a tapestry that is rich and dense.

This perspective has had a profound impact on what it means – to my mind – to work analytically.  It has reminded me that we are revolutionaries.  When I read on the psychoanalytic listserve debates about whether psychoanalysts should be politically active with members of the psychoanalytic community remembering, back in the day, how liberal – even revolutionary – analysts have been, and when I think about how stuffy and constricted psychoanalytic politics can be, I am intrigued by the tension between these two positions.  We are frequently simultaneously potential agents of change, and very conservative operators, teaching people how to operate the mechanism they have been handed more efficiently – helping them become mentally healthy rather than truly, terrifyingly alive.  Are we afraid of the radical charge that we have given to ourselves (And are we mirroring Freud in doing this)?  Do we turn away from the essence of what we could be out of fear or even horror (As he may have)?  And do we cling to a notion of what we could be – do we remain closeted rebels – and work to undue the workings of the institutions that we build to spread the word (As he did, creating enmity among like-minded folks)?  Do we really believe that it is wise to help our patients give voice to the parts of themselves that hate the oppressive others – including their analysts – and to assert themselves?  Do we sometimes boil that down to simply helping them assert themselves in socially sanctioned ways?

As a gentile – born an Episcopalian and to all kinds of privilege – I find that Phillips’ Freud speaks particularly clearly to me – or to the adolescent version of myself which I still, in many ways think of as the core person that I am.  And I know that I have pursued analytic training for many reasons, not the least of which is to achieve the status of guru – of knower – as well as to obtain knowledge – and comfort.  Ironically, there is a wish to touch the live wire, to engage with the forbidden, not necessarily to be shocked, but to be safe from shock; not to be ostracized, but to recover from the ostracism of having been on the outside, of having been made fun of.  I want to know, as did Freud, perhaps as do we all, what makes the universe go – how it is that things work and what our place is in that.  And Freud’s answer, at least his early one, according to Phillips, is that neither the world inside of ourselves nor the one around us is a neat and orderly one.  We can give order to it, but it is a shifting, changing, moving world that will stay forever and always one step ahead of us.  We can get on and enjoy the ride, or get off, pretending that we have it figured out.  Phillips thinks that Freud got off, and he is disappointed in him for doing so - because the wonderful thing about being the outsider who becomes empowered is that you have the ability to notice that the emperor is wearing no clothes (or so many that he no longer knows what fun it is to skinny dip).

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