BOOKS
PSYCHOANALYSIS: OLD AND NEW
FREUD: THE MAN AND THE CAUSE. By Ronald W. Clark.
Random
House. $19.95.
PSYCHOANALYZING PSYCHOANALYSIS: FREUD AND THE HIDDEN
FAULT OF THE FATHER. By Marie Balmary.
Translated by Ned Lukacher.
Johns Hopkins University Press. $15.95.
Ronald Clark is a professional biographer and had access
to some of the material collected in the major Freud archive
in
the
Library of Congress for his book,
Freud: The Man and the Cause,
published two years ago . He also was able to consult the
unused material that Ernest Jones, author of the three-volume
authorized biography of Freud , had left behind in England. In addi–
tion he had access to an archive of family letters exchanged by Freud
and his nephew Samuel that had been turned up in Manchester.
Moreover, new material pertaining to Freud's early life had been
discovered in both his place of birth in what is now Czechoslovakia
and in Vienna. And as the older generations of psychoanalysts have
gone to their just rewards, they too have left their bits of memorabil–
ia, gossip, documents, letters, and so on behind them. Clark made a
thorough sweep through
all
of this material and produced a volume
that brought the biographical reader up to date on the largest part of
this store of newly available information.
This material is of different orders and qualities of interest.
Some of it is altogether trivial and of no conceivable account. For
example, during Freud's single visit to America, in 1909, after he
and his colleagues had traveled to Worcester, Massachusetts, and
Clark University, where Freud received an honorary degree and
delivered his famous five lectures on psychoanalysis, they went on a
tour to see Niagara Falls, and after that were entertained as guests at
James Putnam's camp in the Adirondacks. Before he left Europe,
Freud had declared that when faced with a difficult project, such as
speaking to a foreign audience, "it was helpful to provide a lightning
conductor for one's emotions by deflecting one's attention onto a
subsidiary goal." Hence, he lightheartedly affirmed, his purpose in
going to America was inspired by the "hope of catching sight of a
wild porcupine
and
to give some lectures. " When he eventually got
to Putnam's mountain camp, after his exertions at Clark University
