THE YOUNG FREUD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 774, 21 May 1954, Page 26

THE YOUNG FREUD

SIGMUND FREUD: LIFE AND WORK. Volume 1, The Young Freud (1856-1900), by Ernest Jones; the Hogarth Press, English price 27/6. "1 HAVE been very lazy, because the moderate misery necessary for intensive work refuses to appear," wrote Freud in 1896. In his inability to work well when he was fit and happy (at any rate, in the 1890's), he was like many an artist-a comparison perhaps‘ not inapt, for Freud’s greatest work was done when his creative imagination was released from the too strict discipline of his scholastic upbringing. In the ‘90s he not only was seldom happy but suffered so much from "a very considerable" neurosis that "there could have.

been only occasional intervals when life seemed much worth living." His suffering, and_ his passionate dependence on Fliess, a man intellectually his inferior, were greatest in the last three years of the century. Those were

the years when, struggling to explore the depths of his own unconscious, he did his most original work; and they are the climax of "The Young Freud." This book is the first part of a threevolume work: a record of the main facts of Freud’s life and an attempt to relate his personality and experiences to the devélopment of his ideas. Dr. Jones is well fitted to discuss the way Freud's jdeas developed-to examine, for instance, his important work in neurology -because, besides being a close friend and collaborator for 40 years, he went through the same disciplines on his way to psycho-analysis. He never baulks at the task of illuminating the most abstruse ideas: the last section of the book is, in fact, an extensive and invaluable footnote to the difficult seventh chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams. The general reader will be interested most in the chapters about Freud’s personal life. Dr. Jones has drawn on much new material. including some 1500 love letters; and the story he tells of the jealous lover, quarrelling with his fiancée’s family and insisting that she take his side, is so human. in the widest sense, that it disposes of any doubt about the author’s abilitv to take a detached view of his subject... Not meant to be popular. but absorbing all the same, this is in every way an outstanding work. All who read. it will wait impatiently for the rest of what is certain to become the authorita-

tive biography.

F.A.

J.