In the opening pages of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller books are memorably divided into certain useful categories: Books You Needn’t Read, Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Need To Read First, Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered, and so on. Most intriguing of all these categories is Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them Too. Along similar lines is Mr Crawford’s observation in Mansfield Park: ‘Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman’s constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with him by instinct.’ The same could be said of Dickens: it is quite possible to know the plot, the names of characters and even quote lines from novels of his that one has never (oh, the shame of it if it ever came out) actually read.
Among modern non-fiction writers whose all-pervasive influence is so firmly established in the collective cultural consciousness that there seems little need to sit down and read them, Sigmund Freud must come near the top of the list. Terms he coined now pepper everyday speech while his theories inform the way we think about ourselves and each other. In Freud’s Wizard, Brenda Maddox makes a persuasive case for the possibility that Freud’s ideas might never have achieved global penetration without Ernest Jones, the diminutive, dapper Welsh doctor who devoted his life to translating, interpreting and popularising Freud’s work. Jones published the first book in English on psychoanalysis, wrote the first major biography of Freud and penned classic original and influential papers.
Maddox skilfully plots the events of Jones’s domestic and professional life while outlining the competing theories which came to define different branches of psychoanalysis with clarity and perspective. As rich as anything in the book is the insight into the relationships between Freud, Jung, Jones, Klein et al. and their relentless habit of interpreting each other’s professional conduct in terms of the new discipline.
Freud criticised Sándor Ferenczi’s over-familiarity with patients, unhesitatingly interpreting it as Ferenczi’s desire to ‘mother’ his patients, as his own mother had not loved him enough. Jones saw the uneasy relationship of the American Psychoanalytic Association to the International Association in terms of an unresolved father–son complex. Hanns Sachs identified Otto Rank’s contradiction of Freud’s emphasis on the Oedipus complex as an expression of the complex itself. Regarding Jones, Freud wrote to a colleague in 1929, ‘I am a piece of his superego, which is dissatisfied with his ego. He fears to discover this dissatisfaction in me, and as a by-product of his pathological displacement, he has to take care that I have reason to be dissatisfied.’
Despite the impulse to uncover the hidden self which propelled Jones, his is not a story without mysteries. Maddox pays serious attention to a charge of child abuse levelled at Jones in his early years as a doctor in London, and notes that while in North America he paid $500 to a female patient who blackmailed him, yet these remain isolated, unresolved incidents. She comes to another dead-end at the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Jones’s first wife, the beautiful Welsh musician Morfydd Owen, in the second year of their marriage. It may be that there is nothing more to know, but it is difficult to imagine a psychoanalyst neglecting to mine these seams for all they are worth.
Jones was vastly well-read in a variety of fields, which enabled him to make pertinent and original connections that the passage of time has rendered commonplace. Regarding Shakespeare, for example, he detected compulsion neurosis in Lady Macbeth’s ‘morbid desire for cleanliness’; he noted that Iago was subconsciously in love with Othello; and he interpreted Hamlet in terms of the Oedipal theory. (Laurence Olivier, who consulted him on the subject, drew heavily on Jones’s construction of Iago and Hamlet in his own ground-breaking performances on stage and screen.)
Reading Freud’s Wizard may well have the effect of putting Freud’s own works into another of Calvino’s categories: Books You’ve Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It’s Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them. For those who lack the time and stamina this requires, Freud’s Wizard slips comfortably into a serviceable category of my own invention: Books That Save You The Bother Of Reading The Books You Ought To Have Read.
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