Carl Pietsch
FREUD'S "SPECIMEN DREAM"
Like nearly every great writer of the preceding century,
Freud was consciously creating a mythical life of himself from an
early age. This involved no particular duplicity, for he was living an
"autobiographical life" for his own sake as much as for
posterity-patterning his life upon the mythical biography of the
Romantic genius in order to structure and enhance his own creative
energies. Constructing his mythical life for himself as well as for his
biographers and later generations, he was "writing" his
autobiography in advance, as he lived it.
The mythic Freud has played as important a role as the scien–
tific Freud in the psychoanalytic movement and twentieth-century
intellectual life generally.
In
fact, it may be impossible to distinguish
the mythic from the scientific Freud. Of course, it has been sug–
gested that the myth of Freud as introspective genius detracts from
Freud's credibility as a scientist and from the intellectual respect–
ability of psychoanalysis. There is, however, nothing logically in–
consistent or unscientific in a mythic aura surrounding the
achievements of a scientific genius, except, perhaps, the concept of
the genius itself. Virtually all the giants of modern science have been
mythologized. Since the middle of the eighteenth century when the
category of the genius was itself invented, mythologizing great scien–
tists (as well as artists, political leaders and others) seems to have
become almost automatic. The canonization of geniuses is a general
feature of modern culture. The degree to which the myths of scien–
tific hero-geniuses have been integrated into the practice of science
has varied from one discipline to another. But for the practicing
psychoanalyst, a personal relationship to Freud the scientific
hero/genius seems inescapable.
In
fact, Freud may be the limiting
case of the mythical hero in science.
What is there about Freud's achievement that makes some per–
sonal attitude toward him as the founding genius of psychoanalysis
an inescapable dimension of this discipline? I believe that it stems
from the fact that Freud united in a single activity the creation of a
new discourse or science (psychoanalysis) and the excavation of his
own personality.
In
his writings, Freud appears not only as the
author, but often as the subject of investigation as well. His analysis
