SIGMUND FREUD: 1856-1956
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Freud's, ending as it did not merely in the loss of so many talented
disciples, but in his suffering as an old man at the hands of the Nazis,
in the loss of his library, in the cancer of the throat that so agonizingly
killed him, rewesents, as we feel, a remarkable ordeal. And the
tendency of most Americans who are sympathetic to psychoanalysis
is probably to feel, as David Riesman complains in
Individualism
Reconsidered,
that Freud believed in arduousness, that he could see
anything good only as the reward of extreme effort. From a social
point of view, when we consider the venomous, the unbelievable
hostility against him in anti-Semitic Vienna, and the contrast with
the sloppiness which was a Viennese joke and self-indulgence and
boast, Freud's grim laboriousness must have aroused particular
dis–
like and hostility. (It was
after
seeing patients all day and after
writing up his notes and correspondence that he would sit down,
after nine in the evening, to his own books. This routine went on day
after day, interrupted only by a walk and one evening a week playing
cards with his cronies. Only when he was sixty-five, Jones tells us,
did he allow himself a cup of coffee at five o'clock. He rarely drank
even wine.) But what both the corrupt society of Vienna, and
Americans who think that any extreme kind of moral exertion is
somehow unhealthy-what both miss is the extraordinary hold that
conviction of the truth has upon such a man as Freud, dominating
his life, holding him to his desk late into the night, forcing him at
the end, when he was dying of cancer in London, still to see patients.
And need it be noted that this was probably not a merciful gesture,
that Freud was not so much a healer as a scientist, that his patients
were the one laboratory in which this man could confirm and ad–
vance his theories? The hero is a hero because he has an heroic
destiny, and the very mark of such a destiny is that no one chooses
it; it chooses the man it shall be embodied in. The destiny is a cause,
an essential idea behind the perplexing surface of things. Just as it
chooses the hero, its oracle, its voice to the world, so in this knitting
together of hero and cause lies the essence of a suffering that he
cannot reject, any more than he could, anticipating the cost ahead,
not have chosen it. But truth, choosing him, pledged him to endure
what had to be. And it is. in this sense of the inescapability of the
truth that the characteristic devotion of the hero is found.
