SIGMUND FREUD : 1856-1956
Alfred Kazin
PORTRAIT OF A HERO
The frontispiece to Volume II of Ernest Jones's biography!
of him shows Freud in 1906, age fifty. With his arms militantly
folded across his chest, the everlasting cigar in one hand, only one
somber eye visible in this profile of his tensely reflective face, he sits
for the photographer with such immense conscious self-possession that
it is impossible not to see this calm but vibrant look of mastery as
the goal of Freud's maturity and the manifestation of his intellectual
authority. This, we say to ourselves out of the midst of Jones's almost
thousand pages on Freud-this is what has persuaded so many who
do not believe his science; this is the face of the founder, the father
of his subject and the father in spirit to so many of his disciples; this
is the face not of the pleasure princi}¥e but of transcendent conscious–
ness; this is the man who in his dreams identified himself with
Joseph, in his writings with Moses. This is the look that wins respect
for the J ews and the deepest resentment-for this man lived apart
from the greater world around him, and yet claimed to understand
everything inside it. This is the look which I, living all my life among
the Freudians, the disciples, have never seen in the flesh. For this is
the face of a great man-a man who taught us not only to see, but,
as he said, to "tolerate a piece of reality." This man transformed
our sense of things. He is the only
kind
of man that ever works magic
in our lives. By devotion to his task, he becomes the most aloof of
men-the hero.
Ordinarily, the early life of a hero is not really significant. For
1 THE LIFE AND WORK OF SIGMUND FREUD, Vols. I and II. Basic
Books.
$6.75
each.
