BOOKS
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Democracy-perhaps the best historical study of a political party that
has ever been written. Thus, it is all the more remarkable that he did
not include Dr. Victor Adler, the founder of Austrian Social Democ–
racy, among the galaxy of leaders he analyzed. Adler, as Schorske's
student William McGrath has shown
(Dionysian Art and Populist
Politics in Austria,
1974), used the public processions and rituals of a
Roman Catholic culture to build a socialist labor movement, and a
Christian appeal to a "day of rest" rather than a Marxist call for a strike
to establish the first May Day holiday. Adler crafted a psychology of
politics blending pagan ritual, nationalist allegory, and public proces–
sion to press his campaigns for equal suffrage and an eight-hour day.
But it is unfair to fault the author for what he chose not to include in
his book. For, the historical material is infinite and there is nothing in
the cases he chose to exclude which invalidates his theses; rather, as in
the case of Adler, the theses are stronger and more encompassing than
the focus of his evidence, and what may be added is consistent with
Schorske's synthesis .
The Interpretation of Dreams
is the primary text of psychoanaly–
sis.
It
stands magisterially as the explication of the psychoanalytic
method of dream analysis and as the internal autobiography of a major
figure of modern culture. The primary material is Sigmund Freud's
own dreams and associations -his inner life, conflicts, and identity.
Thus , notwithstanding his prudence (at a given point he stopped his
associations, saying to those for whom it was not enough, "Let them
tell more!"), we know more about the life and mind of Freud than
about any other person who ever lived. The unfolding "plot" of
Freud's
Traumdeutung
is also a complex' literary structure which
Schorske analyzes on the models of Augustine, Dante, and Rousseau.
Schorske proceeds adroitly to exhume and structure the social and
political contexts of Freud's creativity of which Freud was not only
unconscious, but which he, not being a cultural historian whose work
is informed by a Marxist sensibility, cou ld not even have conceptual–
ized. Schorske is no vulgar Marxist. What he has taken from Marx is a
keen sense of class socialization: how social origin and situation –
aristocrat, landlord, bourgeois, artisan, worker, or peasant-condition
the world view, tensions, and aspirations of their bearers.
The Freud that Schorske gives us is an assimilated son of a lower
middle-class, religiously observant Jewish merchant family from Mor–
avia. He is upwardly mobile in the professional world of Vienna and
solidly identified with the fortunes and aspirations of Austrian liberal-
