SIGMUND FREUD: 1856-1956
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in a great cause. And with all that I was always so powerless and
could not express the flowing passions even by a word or a poem.
So I have always suppressed myself and I believe that people must
notice that in me."
This instinctive self-trust of the gifted man is, paradoxically, a
gift that he can mistrust. Freud, then, had good sanction for mis–
trusting his, since his whole training in the school of Briicke was to
avoid the kind of speculation he was prone to make. Indeed, it was
just this tendency in himself that probably attracted him to that
utterly speculative character, Wilhelm Fliess, who was so busy work–
ing out a system of biological time on the basis of the menstrual cycle,
and whose attraction to Freud, and Freud's to him, was so obviously
founded on their common tendency to intellectual guesswork. But
since Freud distrusted this tendency until it could be put on a sci–
entific footing, and Fliess distrusted his own not at
all,
it is interesting
that the relation between them broke down-as was to happen later
with the equally speculative Jung. Although Freud was a "son" to
Fliess and a "father" to Jung, one can see that, despite the enormous
difference between Fliess and Jung, Freud had to assert in both cases
not merely the originality but the felt reality of one's hypotheses.
In both cases, however, we see that Freud is inherently not the
plodder he has been trained to be; that he is not a man who will
always be abashed by an older and more authoritative type like
Fliess; that the man who conceived psychoanalysis, who reached into
the unconscious, who generalized so confidently from his own dreams
and Jewish jokes, was the same man who, in this earlier period, was
so excited by the possibilities of cocaine that he tried it on his own
fiancee; who caught fire on seeing a particular case of hysteria; who
later was to insist that Moses was an Egyptian and that there is
a death wish. Obviously this man had the bold reach, the specula–
tive power, the gift of forming radical and breathtakingly funda–
mental hypotheses to an extraordinary degree. But how typical it
was of him, too, to say in a letter, when he was preparing himself
to write
Totem and Taboo:
"I am reading thick books without being
really interested in them since I already know the results; my instinct
tells me that. But they have to slither their way through all the ma–
terial on the subject. In that process one's insight gets clouded, there
are many things that don't fit and yet mustn't be forced." We can
