Abstract
“Does the world need another biography of Sigmund Freud?” The question, posed by Joel Whitebook at the start of his “intellectual biography” devoted to the founder of psychoanalysis, is apt. For, indeed, Ernest Jones, Peter Gay, and more recently Adam Phillips and Elisabeth Roudinesco have already famously and extensively profiled the life, thought, and legacy of Freud. Whitebook’s answer is, most fortunately, “an emphatic yes” in that current advances in research and theory, and (often unfavorable) assessments of psychoanalysis as well, allow him “to sort out important unanswered questions concerning Freud’s life and address critical issues in contemporary psychoanalysis and philosophy” (p. 1). And what a sorting out it is!
One has only to enter “intellectual biography” into any internet search engine to see not only the number of volumes devoted to individuals who have left their mark on the thought of an era and beyond, but just how this kind of historical writing, a genre unto itself, is meant to unfold. Identifying the sociocultural context in which a particular contribution is deemed highly significant, tracing the life and work of the subject, analyzing the interrelation between them, and putting into high relief the historical implications of both—these are the rules of this formidable game. Numerous scholars have taken up the task and from Saint Augustine to Lenin, via Leibniz, Descartes, and Hume, from Karl Marx to Simone Weil and Richard Hofstadter, such biographies abound. Yet, while Whitebook delves deeply into the life of Freud and its relation to his monumental achievements, as well as the relevance of time and place to Freud’s theorizing, his objectives also lie elsewhere. To be sure, they are those of the author of any “intellectual biography,” but at the same time they are more narrowly delimited and purposeful. In brief, they are twofold: he seeks, first, to account for the minimal, indeed largely absent, role played by the mother (above all, the preoedipal mother) in Freud’s thinking and, second, to contextualize Freud’s life in terms of a “break with tradition.”
Long a communal blind spot eventually uncovered by a wave of feminist criticism (involving a number of feminists who were analysts themselves), the marginalized early mother was eventually to find her place in psychoanalysis. But why she had been relegated to the wings (at best) and at what cost to the development of the field are principal foci of Whitebook’s investigation. His endeavor to uncover the why is undertaken not simply because an entire generation of analysts failed to recognize the significance of “the missing mother,” but because this neglect reveals much about Freud himself. This, in fact, is the crux of Whitebook’s biography, a biography that is one but is not only that: the author, in a word, aims not simply to reiterate a life story so successfully narrated by others, but to understand the meaning of this absence (thereby rendering the early mother all that much more present) and to do so in such a way as to extend his thinking (and ours) well beyond the narrative chronology. Rather than focusing directly on the dichotomy between oedipal and preoedipal development, on the schism between the paternal and maternal aspects of psychic life, and on theoretical debates concerning the predominance of one over the other, it is on the basis of Hans Loewald’s questioning of the relationship between them and how the two developmental phases become “hierarchically structured in the psyche” (p. 159) that the author constructs his inquiry into Freud’s life story and work. The influence of Loewald is in fact felt throughout the book.
As for “the break with tradition,” Whitebook’s demonstration of how primordial it was for Freud the man and Freud the thinker is deeply engaging. “In the course of three generations, the Freuds went from being parochial Ostjuden, Eastern European Jews living in the constricted world of Galician Jewry on the eastern periphery of the Austrian Empire, to secularized Jews inhabiting one of the most cosmopolitan capitals of Western Europe” (p. 17). The consequences of that chronology were long-lasting and profoundly determinative. And Whitebook’s account of it is thereby closely interwoven into the “missing mother” narrative, into the tale of the boy unable to integrate into his psychic life the maternal figure and unable to come to terms with his own inclination to seek the ideal father. Therein, for Whitebook, resides the key to those relationships (with Fliess and Jung, among others) well known to all with an interest in the history of psychoanalysis but heretofore not investigated with the meaning and kind of insistence bestowed by Whitebook upon them.
By virtue of the exceptionally intelligent argumentation put forth on both fronts, then, and the rigor of Whitebook’s meticulous scholarship, this volume places its author squarely within the ranks of the intellects he most admires. A philosopher and clinician himself, he comes at the philosophical and psychoanalytic theorists on whose thinking he expounds knowing full well whereof he speaks. And it is not only that this is a superbly researched, clinically astute, and thought-provoking study of Freud’s own development and that of psychoanalysis overall, but that it enriches the reader as much by its expressive elegance as by its content.
And yet… There is a conundrum inherent in the writing of biography: namely, how one is to avoid conjecture. Endemic to psychobiography, which has long cast a shadow over applied psychoanalysis, is supposition—for how is one “to know” in the absence of the very subject whose psyche is under scrutiny. “We can reasonably surmise,” writes Whitebook, inducing a very different response in his reader from that provoked by “must have,” “which is probably why,” and the like. Indeed, “we can assume,” “most likely,” and so on pit themselves against the notion of truth, against, moreover, the “peculiar state of knowing and not knowing” (p. 350) to which Whitebook devotes several fascinating pages, albeit in the very distinct context of “disavowal.” Inquiring into this theoretical construct grounded in the traumata of Freud’s later life, Whitebook succeeds, as he does for the most part elsewhere, in avoiding the dangers of speculation and remains attentive to the risks of reductionism, thereby giving a kind of legitimacy to his study not to be had otherwise.
Truth, certainty and uncertainty, legitimacy—from such concerns arise what is central to the consideration of any biography: the author’s relation to his subject. “[B]iographical truth is not to be had,” Freud claimed in response to a proposal by Arnold Zweig that he write the novelist’s biography. “But the claim,” asserts Whitebook, though “treated as holy writ by most of his biographers,” requires examination. “The biographer’s inability to overcome his need to idealize his subject is, according to Freud, a central reason why their efforts are doomed to failure” (p. 13). Whitebook appears to have had no such difficulty. In fact, one has the sense with this reading of Freud that perhaps the author sees his subject as not only capable of error (notwithstanding his famed capacity to rethink and revise his theoretical views), but something more. How much the so-called limitations in Freud’s thinking are to be understood in the context of an effective nonidealization of the author’s subject, or in the context of a movement that, owing to some obscure motivation, tips a bit too far in that direction, or maybe even in the context of this reader’s own desire to idealize, is uncertain. Consider the following: “Freud’s fearful and contemptuous attitude toward passivity prevented him from analyzing it in himself, and this meant he could not adequately explore the significance of the topic for psychoanalytic theory in general . . .” (pp. 51–52). Can we really say we know this to be so? Or this: “Given our interest in Freud’s relation to the early mother and his repudiation of femininity, one cluster of transference dynamics in the Fliess relationship is especially relevant. The adamance with which Freud adhered to the ‘active-masculine’ position while denigrating ‘passivity’ and ‘femininity’ should raise the suspicion of an analytically oriented observer. It suggests that powerful counter-forces were at work pulling him in the opposite direction, and that he had to constantly combat and ward them off. It has, in short, the flavor of a ‘reaction formation’” (pp. 181–182). The danger of nitpicking is too great to cite further examples, but the point is that there is a lot of clinical analysis going on in this volume and that the limitations of the subject, his “unmodulated” strivings said to have resided “in dissociated regions of Freud’s mind” (p. 182), are linked (whether directly or indirectly) to all that Whitebook qualifies as limitations in his thinking. To be sure, such limitations appear more evident in this volume—centered as they are on the early “missing mother”—than what an idealizing biographer would put on display (to Whitebook’s credit), but one wonders if they might also be otherwise driven. That is to say that one is stimulated to think, and think deeply, about the veracity of the principal argument put forward, that the display of limitations is exceedingly provocative, promoting consideration of Freud’s theorizing from previously unexplored vantage points (even more to Whitebook’s credit).
As noted above, Whitebook’s explorations of Freud’s relationships (with Fliess, Jung, and others) are clearly among the most informed and eloquently articulated to date. And only an intellect as high-powered as that of this author could bring to bear on psychoanalysis the thinking of the philosophers who populated, in one way or another, Freud’s mind—Brentano, Hegel, Feuerbach, Spinoza, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and Adorno among them. Metaphysics as well as philosophy as such and the empiricist as opposed to materialist orientation of modernist thought, all are brought brilliantly to bear here on the development of psychoanalysis. How tempting it would be to say, “Whitebook is at his best when . . . ,” but too many “whens” come to mind. With finesse he refutes ideas such as, to name but one example, the death instinct being an innovation of the 1920s. Not only was the death instinct “present in Freud’s thinking almost from the beginning,” he tells us, but eros was the “radically new feature” of that decade (pp. 370–371). The evidence for his reassessments is consistently thorough and compelling. Yet it is when he deconstructs a given concept (eros, say) that he demonstrates the breadth of his hold on the science underlying Freud’s psychology and the depth of his hold on that psychology itself.
Discussing what he describes, only half-jokingly, as “attachment theory on a cellular level” (p. 371), for instance, Whitebook unfalteringly enters the arenas of physics and chemistry to elucidate the economic dimension of Freud’s tension-reducing notion of the pleasure principle. He then points to the difficulty Freud encountered with regard to his initial formulation of that principle—namely, its identification with death—and Freud’s revision of his notion of pleasure so as to avoid, by the admission of pleasurable tensions, its equation with tension reduction. Working his way toward a derailing, if not a retraction, of the “economic” perspective that was fundamental to his thinking since the start, Freud was obliged, Whitebook reveals, to admit, when unable to fully reconceptualize the qualitative as opposed to quantitative dimension of pleasure, that “we do not know” (p. 373).
For Loewald, Whitebook writes, “The way to correct the one-sided hypostatization of Oedipal theory over pre-Oedipal is not . . . to substitute ‘a paternal concept of reality’ with ‘a maternal one’—or, as André Green puts it somewhat more graphically, to replace ‘the Father of the horde with the Great Mother Goddess’.” Rather, the primary task of the psyche is “to achieve optimal integration with reality” lest reality integration be lost “via the loss of the self or via the loss of the object” (p. 167). Having explicated the Loewaldian perspective on the need to integrate the “paternal” and “maternal” perspectives, each of which has its own “complementary advantages and disadvantages” (p. 167), however, we come full circle to the subject’s own inadequate maternal experience, to “the missing mother” as the principal origin of Freud’s not insignificant theoretical limitations: “Freud’s lack of understanding of early infant-mother experience was a major source of his inability to theorize eros fully and recognize its ramifications for his overall theoretical position” (p. 373).
“Does the world need another biography of Sigmund Freud?” Perhaps no longer, for Whitebook has covered an extraordinary amount of territory. What one is left with upon closing the covers of this “intellectual biography,” it should be further noted, is something more than an identification of the sociocultural milieu in question, something more than a drawing out of the interrelation of the life and work of the subject, and something more than a comprehensive investigation into the historical implications of each: one is left, whether or not it was the author’s intention, with an ever deepening sense of compassion for one of the greatest thinkers, founders even, of the modern era.