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PARTISAN REVIEW
Isbister has used certain recent biographical findings and specula–
tions about Freud without sufficient discrimination, and, even less
fortunately, his acquaintance with the corpus of Freud's work and
with collateral material is still further inadequate.
Despite these flaws, Isbister's book is worth examining because
of its ambitious scope and because in some ways it is representative
of current trends. I cannot recall a work of similar intellectual ambi–
tions that contains as many plain errors of fact, ordinary detail and
even literacy as Isbister's. Early on, for instance, Isbister refers to
Freud's father as having lived in "Galicia, a town now part of Poland."
This bit of creative geography will amuse many Spaniards and a
smaller number of Litvaks, but it is a representative illustration of
what new and inquiring readers can expect. Along similar lines, Is–
bister refers several times to Freud's contemporary and the alleged
discoverer of the site of Troy as Heinrich "Schliermann." For an ac–
count of the Melanie Klein/Anna Freud controversy in England, he
refers to an article by an analyst he calls Melitta "Schideberg," failing
both to get the name right and to identify the special place in the con–
troversy occupied by the misnamed person. This chronic incapacity
to get simple things straight shows up again when Isbister describes
Ernst Kris as "the historian of psychoanalysis." At an equally elemen–
tary level of failed literacy, we find Isbister referring to Freud as en–
during "the throws of his 'self-analysis'" - thinking of him no doubt as
some kind of psychic Hulk Hogan. Infantile sexuality is referred to
as "indifferentiated"; in the specimen dream of "Irma's injection" we
read about the "rubinal bones" of the nose; and he quotes Freud as
saying that Dora suffered from "gastalgias" - the first time, I believe,
that it has been so overtly suggested that Dora's cramps were also hot
air. And Isbister's apparatus of footnote references is so ridden with
errors, lacunae, absurdities and incoherences as to defy brief-or
perhaps even protracted - description.
None of these failings in fundamental detail would be worth
considering were it not for the particular ambition that Isbister de–
clares himself as pursuing. His book, he writes, aims to understand
Freud's works and ideas "within their proper biographical and in–
tellectual context." He intends to provide the reader with a "brief ac–
count" of Freud's life; alongside of and woven into that narrative, he
will sketch out "the details of the evolution of his ideas pointing out
some of their origins and some of the transformations Freud wrought
on them"; finally he will "assess those ideas, in relation to his life,
and our contemporary understanding of men, and in the light of ...
