Where is Freud?

Where is Freud? Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2014,178 pp. $26. Hardcover.

Sigmund Freud had one of the most fertile and original minds in modern times. Other creative geniuses of Freud's time, Alfred Einstein and Pablo Picasso, made revolutionary breakthroughs in their mid-twenties. Freud was forty-one when his first major discoveries took place. At the time, he had a medical practice, a wife, and six children. How in mid-life Freud became an innovator is a remarkable story. Adam Phillips, a British psychoanalyst and editor of the Penguin translations of Freud, in Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst appears to be taking on that task, covering Freud's life until age fifty. Phillips strays from what his title implies. Often, he seems more interested in side issues than he is in tracing what led to Freud developing psychoanalysis. At the age of 41, in August 1897, Freud wrote of his own "little hysteria." Phillips does not mention this, nor does he give much detail on the turmoil Freud went through between his father's death in October 1896 and his breakthroughs between September and November 1897. To understand any individual, knowing how their dilemmas and divisions impact on their life is central. In Phillips account, Sigmund Freud the actual person, is a remote presence in what purports to be a biography.

On one hand, Phillips describes himself as a biographer. On the other hand, as does Freud, Phillips sometimes is skeptical about what truths biographers can find. Much of the first part of this book is an exposition on Freud's critique of biography. Phillips himself has unusual views on what biography entails. He writes, "The biographer can only select the childhood memories already selected for him by his subject" (p. 46). He also says, "Childhood memories are evidence, but not of childhood, only of desire (and of desire as fiction)" (p. 45). In the first quote, Phillips seems to be confusing traditional psychoanalysis with the biographer's tasks. Unlike the analyst, the writer of another's life accumulates recollections from others on the subject's childhood and seeks documents that can confirm or falsify events and/or remembrances. Certainly recollections are faulty, but not all memories are disguised desires, and biographers...