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Philipp, who was so much older that, since he was given to "joking"
about it, he could be thought of as the mate of Freud's own mother.
As Jones spfculatively works it out, the little Freud thought that
Philipp "evidently knew all the secrets," but that he could not be
trusted to tell the truth about them. And so perhaps it was "this in–
significant little man," Jones surmises, who "through his mere exist–
ence . . . fortuitously struck the spark that lit the future Freud's
determination to trust himself alone, to resist the impulses to believe
in others more than in himself...." This explanation of Freud's
inquisitive genius is something that one may be permitted to doubt
in favor of the intrinsic gift of curiosity itself. And yet the decisive
fact in Jones's account is exactly Freud's confidence that in his own
situation he could find the nucleus of reality.
This kind of confidence reminds one of Thoreau's saying that
a poet learns to watch his own moods as narrowly as a cat, and
points to that gift for being convinced of the significance of one's
own experiences that seems to me the essence of being an artist. But
this confidence may also signify that spiritual ability to generalize on
the basis of their restricted experiences which seems to be an es–
sential of Jewish consciousness. Nothing is so astonishing in the his–
tory of the Jews as this disparity between their history of exile, of
marginal existence, of actual worldly inexperience, even, in the ghetto
-something which by contrast with Western civilization looks like a
long sleep-and their belief that reality is consistent, all of one piece,
and that where
they
are is pfrspective enough on the "world" and
the world's great and the issues of heaven and earth. Indeed, one
might even say that one can measure the degree of originality one
finds among Jewish intellectuals by this ability to trust themselves,
and even declare that where this faith in the essential correspondence
between themselves and the world is at once intense and yet clouded
by self-doubt, as in Kafka, the results in their work are significantly
equivocal.
Now Freud would have assented to this "gift of conviction,"
as I call it, but would have located it not in the Jewish genius but
in the scientific conviction of the biological identity of mankind. The
mechanistic school of physiology in which he was trained under
Briicke was the school that supplanted Schelling's romantic view of
