SIGMUND FREUD: 1856-1956
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from the underbrush of the human soul, that makes Freud a hero.
Jones emphasizes this feeling for the truth as the greatest single mark
of Freud's mind, and I must confess, as someone who is not a
Freudian, that whatever the obscurities and unprovabilities of Freud–
ian doctrine, one gets an overwhelming sense in Freud's own work
that he is a man who seeks truth. In Jones's psychoanalytic terms,
this brings with it an instinct for the truth; I should rather call it
an individual gift for the truth, a mark of
S'p~ritual
character. What
a man sees, that is what he is; but he has really to
see
it, as Cezanne
saw the apple, and as so many highly theoretical Americans do not
see the thing they tell us they are writing about. The more a man
really sees, the more absurd and reckless he will seem to those who
can see only what the intellectual fashion gets them to see. Freud's
gift of truth, I have been saying,
is
not nullified by the highly specu–
lative character of Freud's mind. Indeed, the two go together: the
condition being what I do not find in Jung: the persuasion that
these things are unutterably real to the man himself.
Such a mind walks on the thin edge of an abyss. On one side
of you is not only all that is unknown, and perhaps unknowable, in–
describable, frighteningly obscure and vaguely obscene-but, for a
man so religiously trained in science as Freud was, and for whom
science was, indeed, a religion, there is the danger of seeming to fly
off beyond the sanctioned limits of science. And this danger Freud
incurred, as he incurs it still. One leading German psychiatrist stormed
at a scientific meeting, when psychoanalysis was brought up, that
it was a subject "for the police." At the Academy of Medicine in
New York, Freud was denounced as a typical "Viennese libertine."
Freud, the most laborious sublimate of men, the man whom
his
life–
long associate Jones calls "quite peculiarly monogamous," was iden–
tified with the Vienna of
La Ronde.
(On the one hand his findings
were scoffed at because so many of his first patients were repressed
Jewish ladies; on the other hand he was denounced as an example
of Viennese immorality.) The German neurologists were so entirely
united against him that at one meeting, when Sadger read a study
of the influence of his mother in C. F. Meyer's life, a Dr. Braatz
cried out that German ideals were at stake and that something drastic
should be done to protect them. (It was done; several of Freud's
sisters died in Auschwitz.) Freud had hoped that Jung's important
