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osity tended, if anything, to make this principle too hard and fast.
For all biological explanations of human curiosity are too general
to .account for a Leonardo, a Newton, an Einstein, a Freud. But
the sense of the presence of larger things within the restricted family
circle, of things which we dare not think are real but which
are
real to us-this seems to me the essence of Freud's early struggles
to accept his gift of divination. The drama, then, is not that Freud
was eager for fame because he was "insecure," as so many people
who in our age recognize only the "integrated," the "well-organized"
personality seem to feel when they express their
surprise
that the
great man had so many anxieties. Freud was indeed eager for fame,
so much so that he was always looking for solutions in different fields
that would make his name. (In the golden era of positivism, all sub–
jects seemed to be laid out, so that it seemed that only keys were
needed to the various locks; Freud characteristically inaugurated a
new
field.)
The point about
his
early discoveries and near-discoveries,
surely, is not only that Freud was trying desperately to become famous
so that he could get some money to marry 8n and rise despite the
usual restrictions against him as a Jew. He was so aware of his
gift for something that he was trying to find the occasion that would
allow him to discover it. Hence, as we see in all these early scientific
efforts, he was either too impatient, as in the cocaine episode, where
he recklessly tried it out on everyone; or, as in the neurone episode,
too cautious, for he missed out, says Jones, by "not daring to pursue
his thoughts to their logical-and not far-off-conclusion." In the
.account of his early scientific experiments we feel, indeed, that Freud
had to a remarkable degree the gift of intellectual venturesomeness,
but we feel, too, that it is precisely this gift of believing too easily
on too little evidence, of
plunging-as
it must have seemed to his
teachers-too recklessly from one field to another that shocked his
innate scientific probity, pulled him to just short of the final prize, and
then stopped him, probably more puzzled than anything else that
he had not gone through to the end of his "hunch." In this early
period, at least, he was, to the extent that he was inwardly the boldest
of men, equally uncertain. He was shy about his boldness and ig–
norant, as yet, of where he would triumph. "I have often," he wrote
once, "felt as if I had inherited all the passion of our ancestors when
they defended the Temple, .as if I could joyfully cast away my life
