Content area
Full Text
Soc (2008) 45:9698DOI 10.1007/s12115-007-9049-1
BOOK REVIEWS
Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind, by Peter D. Kramer
New York: HarperCollins, 2006. 213 pp. $21.95. ISBN-10: 0060598956; ISBN-13: 978-0060598952
Howard L. Kaye
Published online: 8 November 2007# Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2007
Published as part of a HarperCollins series on Eminent Lives, Peter Kramers new biography of Freud has clearly taken Lytton Stracheys Eminent Victorians as his model. Unfortunately, what Kramer has chosen to emulate is not Stracheys aspiration to a becoming brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significantwhat Strachey termed the first duty of a biographerbut Stracheys tendency to debunk, denigrate, and pathologize his subject. Certainly Freuds life and writings provide Kramer with abundant material, but Freuds failings as a scientist, a therapist, and a man have been amply demonstrated and widely publicized by others including Frank Sulloway, Frederick Crews, and Richard Webster, to name but a few of the Freud bashers.
In drawing up his own bill of particulars against Freud, Kramer finds nothing damning or diminishing, no matter how trivial or speculative, worth excluding. Kramers Freud is obsessive, ambitious, cruel, dictatorial, hypocritical, narcissistic, and nerdy in his personwhile swimming, Kramer tells us, Freud favors the breaststroke, to keep his beard dry (p. 108). As a scientist he was reckless, dishonest, and consistently mistaken; as a therapist he was incompetent, irresponsible, and shockingly unsympathetic(p. 211). Even the problems with the account written by Freuds early collaborator, Josef Breuer, of the latters successful treatment of Anna O. are not Breuers, but Freuds (p. 48). So suspicious has Kramer become, that he calls into question virtually every statement made by Freud about his life and times. Often, such mistrust is justified, as
in Kramers debunking of Freuds exaggerated claims of cures, but at times, Kramers systematic denigration of the man and his work is gratuitous and excessive, such as in the following dismissal of Freuds encounter with Viennese anti-Semitism: Although Freud would later complain that anti-Semitism impeded his professional progress, medicine was a calling open to Jews. In the 1880s, some 60 percent of the physicians in Vienna were Jewish as were half of the students in the medical school (p. 28). Blinded by his efforts to debunk Freuds...