The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION On several occasions Sigmund Freud expressed himself strongly against being made the subject of biographical study, giving it as one of his reasons that the only important thing about him was his ideas—his personal life, he said, could not possibly be of the slightest concern to the world. The suffrage of the world has not sustained his opinion. Freud as a person stands before us with an exceptional distinctness and significance, and it is possible to say of him that there is no great figure of modern times who, seen as a developing mind and temperament, is of such singular interest. If we ask why this is so, the first answer must of course be the magnitude and nature of his achievement. The effect that psychoanalysis has had upon the life of the West is incalculable. Beginning as a theory of certain illnesses of the mind, it went on to become a radically new and momentous theory of mind itself. Of the intellectual disciplines that have to do with the nature and destiny of mankind, there is none that has not responded to the force of this theory. Its concepts have established themselves in popular thought, though often in crude and sometimes in perverted form, making not merely a new vocabulary but a new mode of judgment. We are inevitably curious about the personal existence of the man who brought about this profound and pervasive change in our mental habits, and the more so because Freud's ideas have reference to our own existence as persons and because they are almost always experienced in an intensely personal way. Beyond this first natural curiosity there is another reason for our interest in Freud's life, a reason which is chiefly intellectual, or perhaps we should say pedagogic. This relates to the part that Freud's biography plays in facilitating our comprehension of psychoanalysis. Like certain other disciplines, psychoanalysis is more clearly and firmly understood if it is studied in its historical development. But the basic history of psychoanalysis is the account of how it grew in Freud's own mind, for Freud developed its concepts all by himself. The intellectual distinction of his early coadjutors is not being denied if we say that none of them—with the exception of Josef Breuer, who was something other and more than a coadjutor -contributed anything essential to the theory of psychoanalysis. The help they gave Freud consisted chiefly in their re- VI'V' V i i >