SIGMUND FREUD: 185b-195b
189
what counts with him is not, as with us, the search for "matur–
ity," for "integration," but the tales of his mastery over the secret
and the forbidden, the recital of his ability to make nature yield up
its secrets. The early struggles of the hero may have a purely dramatic
element. For we who know what he must become can still watch
with suspense as a Freud discovers cocaine and does not develop his
discovery, or comes to the verge of discovering the neurone without
fully realizing it. His destiny lies elsewhere, and generally, these early
struggles are decisive only as they lead to the discovery of his true
vocation. But in a man like Freud, whose interest so peculiarly was
the self, and who even formally documented his science from his
own dreams and self-analysis, this early period becomes the very ma–
terial which the hero will rework into the fully forged personality
he needs for his appointed work. For this reason the intensely Jewish
background of Freud becomes not, as critics of psychoanalysis often
say, a limitation of his knowledge to idle rep,ressed ladies of the
Jewish bourgeoisie in Vienna, but serves instead, as a Jewish back–
ground often does for certain thinkers, as a microcosm of the world,
a guide to that larger reality in which they do not share. This confi–
dence may not be valid. The point is that a Jew can think that it
is, for he does see an essential unifying principle of identity running
through human experience. The very mark of Freud's ability to specu–
late so largely on the basis of what would seem very restricted evi–
dence is, indeed, a measure of his ability not merely to come to terms
with himself, to suffer so many early anxieties and to rise above
them-but to
use
these disabilities as a guide to the elucidation of
many larger problems.
This, for me, is the fascination of Jones's first volume. And it
is a ·measure of the unforced but remarkable artistic tact of Freud's
biographer that even the second volume, which carries us to Freud
in his sixties, should close so beautifully, like a musical
da capo,
on
those probable childhood musings by the little Freud about his com–
plicated family situation which, Jones thinks, explains Freud's pas–
sion for the truth and his aggressive independence in seeking it out.
This link between early sexual curiosity and the passion for knowledge
is, of course, standard Freudian doctrine. Freud applied it to the sci–
entific side of Leonardo da Vinci, and Jones centers Freud's curi–
osity, finally, on his need to ferret out the truth about his half-brother
