408
PARTISAN REVIEW
A DISCIPLE'S PICTURE OF FREUD
FREUD, MASTER AND FRIEND.
By Hanns Sachs. Harvard University
Press.
$2.50.
T
HE AUTHOR of this work is a practising psychoanalyst who was closely
associated with Freud for thirty years, most notably from 1909 to
1918. The book is written in an admittedly subjective vein. Sachs speaks
of it as a part of his own autobiography inasmuch as the events and ideas
which it records are so intimately bound up with the most significant
part of his own life. It is also in another sense subjective-the sense of
a personal duty which the author performs as the sole survivor from a
group of half a dozen early associates of Freud, including Rank, Abra–
ham, Eitington, Jones and Ferenczi, who rather consistently maintained
a harmonious relationship with the father of psychoanalysis-as opposed
to such early dissenters as Adler, Stekel and Jung.
The author takes pains to admit his subjective approach-perhaps
even to extol it. "I can hardly be expected to be objective," he writes.
"I have never thought of Freud as an 'object' and I am not going to
start to
clo
it now. Does this mean the condemnation in advance of
wh«t I am going to tell as unreliable stuff made up by an uncritical
enthusia>t? Holy Boswell, come to my assistance! You were not ashamed
to tell your readers and everyone else who wanted to hear it (and a great
many who did not) that you 'idolized' Dr. Samuel Johnson." It would
be difficult to exceed the degree of identification with the father of psy–
choanalysis which this loyal son experienced. Even the characterization
"Master and Friend" seems tame in the setting of such statements as:
"My first opening of the
Traumdeutung (Interpretation of Dreams)
was the moment of destiny for me-like meeting the 'femme fatale,'
only with a decidedly more favorable result. Up to that time I had been
a young man who was supposedly studying law but not living up to the
supposition-a type common enough among the middle class in Vienna
at the turn of the century. When I had finished the book, I had found
the one thing worth while for me to live for; many years later I dis–
covered that it was also the only thing I could live by." In keeping with
this orientation Sachs shows repeatedly how his life was dominated by
what Freud was, thought and did. Only once, he is concerned to show,
did he give Freud cause for definite disapproval. "Only once in thirty–
five years! That is not such a bad record."
Under the circumstances it is not surprising that the treatment of
Freud in these pages has at times a tone of special pleading. In an early
chapter entitled "Vienna" Sachs gives a socio-psychological picture of
that much romanticized city-an analysis intended above all to destroy
the illusion that Freud was identified in any way with the spirit of the
place in which he lived and worked for most of his long life. While
Vienna represented-to put it mildly-"insincerity
~ithout
hypocrisy,"
