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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The Goldfinch – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel

Editorial Note - 9/10/2019  I am expecting people to start accessing this post soon as the movie, made from the book, is coming out this weekend.  I have seen the film, and have posted on it here.  While I was waiting for the film to come out, I had some concerns about whether an 800 page book could be made into a film, especially because the writing style is based in the "flashbulb memory" function that is part and parcel of traumatic memory, as described below.  As a result of seeing the ads for the film I also reread the post and a couple head's up before you read it:  I assume, in the post (though not on all posts in this site) that you have read the book.  I hope that seeing the movie will suffice to orient you to the post.  If you have neither read the book nor seen the film, this may help prepare you for the film - though I think you may get a little lost in the read.  In any case, enjoy!


I hate this book!  It is disorienting.  I had to read the first bit three times and still couldn’t quite make sense of it.  There are places where just the simple math doesn’t add up.  There are sentences that were terrible.  Steven King reviewed this novel and he said that what you look for in an 800 page novel is that the wheels don’t fall off.  He feels that they don’t.  I think they wobble.  A lot.

I love this book!  The characters in this book are incredibly three dimensional, gritty and realistic – that is when they aren’t made of fairy dust and everything sweet and unbelievable.  The narrator is incredibly easy to identify with – a character who wanders through a crazy life, observing it, taking it in, and, for the most part, remaining largely unaware of the activity he is engaging in and his role in shaping the world that he will inhabit.  Even when he fires a gun, it feels like an accident rather than an intentional activity.

I think the things I hate about this book are, for the most part, intentional.  If not intentional, they are at least consistent with the central concern of the book, which is how trauma alters us.  How it takes who we are – the external and internal context of our lives - and splinters us so that we preserve, but also protect ourselves from the feelings of loss that we both want to know and not know, because knowing hurts too deeply.  I suspect that the book won the Pulitzer in part because it portrays a post 9/11 America – one that is splintered and confused – and this portrayal is primarily in the psychological functioning of the central characters, but we also see, almost as an added bonus, the decadent American world that they are walking through.

The central image is the Goldfinch, a pivotal and enigmatic painting that lands in the lap of the protagonist.  It is a simple painting.  A goldfinch is chained, by a delicately wrought bracelet, to its perch.  It was painted by a Dutch Master who died young, and, fittingly, violently, in a gunpowder factory explosion.  Fittingly because, in the book, the painting comes into the hands of the boy as the result of a violent explosion.  The boy then becomes as chained to the painting as the goldfinch is to his perch.  But the boy is attached to more than the painting; he is attached to his mother and then to his father, to his friend Boris – one of the too real characters – to another survivor of the blast and the man who cares for both survivors whom he meets as the result of the blast.  But also, and most directly, he is attached to the actions that he takes, despite his sense that they emerge largely on their own.

The painting itself is also, in the way that it is painted, a representation of the book (or vice versa).  It is a masterpiece.  The painting is a piece of trompe l’oeil painted in 1654 by Carel Fabritius.  It is both tantalizing in its realistic depiction of the bird, and has modern strokes that look like impressionist dollops of paint.  In other words, it is, despite the simplicity of the subject and the sparseness of the execution, an incredibly complex, dense and engaging work of art.

The other works of art in this book are produced by Hobie, the accidental caregiver who takes in Theo, the main character.  Hobie is an adorable bear of a man who has learned a great deal about the restoration of the finest pieces of furniture.  For his own amusement, he cobbles together bits of cast off furniture and creates Frankensteinian monsters that are beautiful in their own way – again, I think, like this book, which Stephen King notes, borrows heavily from prior masters, especially Charles Dickens.  And the painting and the furniture, not just in their content, but in their execution resemble the inner world of the traumatized Theo.  He hangs onto the adoration of his mother, to the style of his father (which he imitates without quite knowing that he is doing it), to his connections to other trauma survivors – Boris who has been through hell with his own Dad – and Pippa, the other survivor of the explosion, but also to Hobie, the caregiver.

The violent explosion that sets this book in motion is, from the perspective of Theo, entirely and totally random.  Oh, sure, there were specific things that lead him to be in the museum on a school day, but that the explosion happened at that moment is random and all that flows from it feels strangely, oddly, accidental, including the very basics of his existence; that he is alive.

A relatively recent article that I read about the psychoanalytic treatment of combat trauma suggests that part of the reason that PTSD is not more frequent than it is among warriors is that they are frequently able to connect with each other – and that this connection with another survivor helps them to feel less fragmented – less cut off from the world.  They are able to begin healing the wound before it becomes unbridgeable.  Theo is drawn to Pippa but she is evanescent – out of reach, intermittently present and therefor more disturbing than comforting – creating a desire for connection rather than an actual one.  The relationship with Boris is more complex – he is present and helps Theo navigate the ongoing traumatic situations that they face, but he is also hardened to the world by his own lonely history of trauma and this makes him an interesting mirror – a fun house mirror that is distorting – but also makes him essentially inaccessible to Theo.

So Theo is on his own.  He turns to various others but it is Hobie that provides the anchor and the fulcrum that he uses to move forward with his life.  And Theo does this not as a passive recipient of care, but as an active provider of care, offering organization and income to Hobie.  In fact, the generosity of his actions blinds he, and us, to the greater danger that he poses to Hobie.  We avoid recognizing what a cad he is, as does he, because his motives are pure – his wishes simple – at least apparently.

Theo is, like each of us, and like America itself, blind to how complex his motivation is and to the manifold unintended consequences that must, inevitably, arise from his actions.  When they come, in the particularly virulent form that they do, he is blindsided and dumbfounded, taken aback by just how out of kilter things are, at least some aspects of which we have been painfully aware for a very long time.  Despite our awareness and discomfort, we are still surprised (or at least I am) by the savagery that his actions unleash.  We are surprised by the actions in the world and the actions within the character that he becomes, without being conscious of it, very actively engaged in directly observable aggressive behavior.  And it disorients him further.  This is not who he is, he says to himself, as if it were someone else who were doing all that he is so apparently doing.

The book begins near the end of the story, when Theo is in the process of reeling from the trauma that he has brought on himself – though it feels like it is visited on him by powers outside of himself.  The rest of the book is told in flashback, and it would seem that we would get that we are, then, working forward to this inevitable moment with which we began.  It seems that we should know where all of this leads.  But even with the advantage of knowing the future, we can’t predict it, and hurtle towards it blissfully unaware – sort of like a teenager who will inevitably be told “I told you so,” but not get it because, though he was told, it didn’t make any sense.

The disorientation in this book is, mercifully not Kafkaesque.  The author is not engaged (hopefully), as Kafka was, in a vision that became the holocaust.  After all, it is told not from the perspective of the oppressed but from the perspective of the disoriented, traumatized person of privilege, who is traumatized not just by the intensity of the experience, but by the sense of disorientation that comes from discovering that the privilege of the position is not impervious to the environment but dependent on it.  The book is disorienting in the ways that we can feel after watching too much television – as if the turning of the day into night, the events that have been going on around us, aren’t really real, but are imaginary.  And this dream – and how can trauma that simply falls out of the sky feel like anything but a dream – feels ephemeral and unreal as do our resulting actions.  But those actions are real and have real consequences.

Suffice it to say that this book, despite its length, mirrors life and does not wrap itself neatly in a bow.  Instead the world continues to move forward.  Despite that, I did not feel, as I frequently do, a wish for the story to continue.  Not just because 800 pages had worn me out, but because there was something quite satisfying in all that had been stirred and the time that had been spent looking at the resulting swirls.  I felt like a customer in Hobie’s store – one who had used a mirror to inspect the underside of his furniture, who had seen in the width of the grain that this was modern lumber, not ancient, a person who knew this was not an original piece of work – it is not one that should command a price because of its age and the contact that I would have with an original master through owning some of her work, but knowing instead that it was a contemporary monstrosity – one that is cobbled together out of the bits and pieces of the modern world.  And that, despite its monstrous quality, despite the tacky and sleazy corners, the overall perspective is pleasing and that I will buy this work of art – not as a forgery or a derivative product – but as something that has virtue in its own right – despite its flaws.

Will the world continue to embrace us despite our flaws?  Can we avoid hurtling towards inevitable moments of unintended violence that we barely acknowledge?  Can we free ourselves from the beautifully wrought ball and chain of inherited violence?  We are probably no more free, and perhaps less so, than Theo.  We are no more self-aware, perhaps less so, and our experience is splintered by the traumas we have survived, small and large, some of us more so than others.  Despite this, we have the capacity to make amends.  We have the capacity to struggle to integrate what seems so desperately disparate.  Perhaps, like Theo, we will survive to live and appreciate a new day and the irony of it all.


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