Did Freud Build His Own Legend?

A new study analyzes the myth of the Master

Sigmund Freud idolized Hannibal. So much so that for years he was psychologically unable to enter Rome because Hannibal had never set foot in the city. In fact, Freud's ideas about himself were heavily tinged with mythic and military overtones. "I am actually not a man of science," he once told his friend Wilhelm Fliess, "not an experimenter, not a thinker... but a conquistador."

That self-conception of the embattled hero helps explain Freud's boldness and his endless attacks on opponents and colleagues. Yet according to a new study to be published this fall, it also had another, more surprising result: the standard version of Freud's struggles, as recounted by Freud and the Freudian historians, is heavily laced with legend, and much of the story is just plain false.

Titled Freud: Biologist of the Mind (Basic Books), this iconoclastic study does not deny Freud's achievement. Says Author Frank J. Sulloway, 32, a historian of science and a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley: "What remains today of Freud's insights and influence ... provides ample testimony to his greatness." But according to Sulloway, who spent seven years on the book, the historical record has been manipulated by Freud's followers to make him appear more original, isolated and heroic than he really was.

As the Freudians tell it, Freud shocked Victorian sensibilities with his ideas on infant sexuality. Hostilely received by a narrow and deterministic medical Establishment, he retreated into his own private world to think up psychoanalysis all by himself.

All untrue, says Sulloway: the notion that infants possessed sexual stirrings was fashionable during the 1890s, even before Freud wrote about it, and the idea that neurotic conflict had a sexual component was also conventional. Indeed, says the author, many of the ideas that Freud synthesized into psychoanalysis had been around for years: among them, such now familiar concepts as the unconscious, the pleasure principle, regression and sublimation. Fliess, a Berlin physician who was Freud's closest friend for years, convinced Freud that all human beings were bisexual, and also offered ideas on the latency period (low sexuality preceding puberty), reaction formation (a defensive attraction to desires that are opposite of one's deeper, dangerous wishes) and something very close to the Freudian id. But, says Sulloway, Freud's disciples later dismissed Fliess as a crackpot, partly to make Freud appear as the originator of these concepts.

Synthesizing ideas already in the air is hardly disreputable--Darwin and Marx did much the same thing--but Sulloway thinks that Freud went a bit far to create a myth about his absolute originality. Freud once accused Sexologist Albert Moll of stealing his concept of infant sexuality, though Moll had published his ideas on the subject nearly a decade before. When many observers spotted some of Freud's ideas in the work of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Freud vehemently denied ever having read the two philosophers before inventing psychoanalysis. Sulloway thinks it unlikely: as a student in Vienna he was a member of a study group that concentrated on the ideas of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

In his later years, Freud also denied the links between psychoanalysis and biology, which Sulloway considers a tragic mistake. Freud's evolutionary notions of the instinctual and nonrational derive from Darwin, and in the 1890s he had dreamed of wedding psychology to biology. That all changed as Freud and his followers withdrew and obliterated all biological thinking from the movement.

Freud always considered himself a "bold oppositionist," at his best warding off attackers. Around this notion, says Sulloway, grew the myth that Freud was beset on all sides for his shocking new ideas. In truth, much of the medical Establishment was on the same track as Freud, and his books were generally well received. In his three-volume biography, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones insists that The Interpretation of Dreams "had been hailed as fantastic and ridiculous." Comments Sulloway: "Actually the book was widely and favorably reviewed in popular and scientific periodicals and it was recognized by a good number of its reviewers as 'epochmaking' and 'profound.'" Freud portrayed the cool reaction to an 1886 speech he gave on male hysteria as pigheadedness by an entrenched medical Establishment. In Sulloway's view, the doctors were unimpressed because Freud's message was old-hat--the bumptious young Freud had presumed to lecture his elders on matters they already well knew.

Sulloway finds that many of Freud's accounts of his battles were colored by another part of the myth: that the world was out to squelch psychoanalysis right from the start. In fact, says the author, Freud's teachings were greeted respectfully. Only later did strong opposition arise, much of it in response to the arrogance and slashing attacks of Freud's group.

In Sulloway's view, the Freudians painted themselves into a corner very early, cutting themselves off from the world of science, blotting out the context of Freud's discoveries, and withdrawing into a sectlike movement obsessed with orthodoxy. Much of this flowed from Freud's view of himself as a lonely, beleaguered hero. Sulloway does not doubt that the myths warped the movement. But he grudgingly concedes that the stuff of legend was already there. "After all," he says, "Freud really was a hero."

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