Freud the Man

An Intellectual Biography

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by Lydia Flem,

Translated by Susan Fairfield

The Other Press

Due/Published October 2003, 224 pages, cloth

ISBN 1590510372

The world knows Freud as a thinker, one of the founding giants of modern culture. Now Lydia Flem paints a portrait of Freud the man: a father, husband and friend, a secular Jew with passion for classical antiquity and European culture, torn between his need to be fully accepted in an antisemitic society and remaining faithful to his origins.

Flem enters into the depths of Freud's creativity, showing how his thinking is connected to his immersion in the arts, the history of religions, and mythology. The intimate details of his daily life, his relationships with women, his poetic gifts, his travels, his dreams, his letters to family, friends and colleagues: all reveal his vision of the unconscious. We accompany Freud on his walks through Vienna and Rome; look over his shoulder as he writes to his fiancee; learn the significance of the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian figurines that stand before him on his desk as he conceives his groundbreaking ideas; and discover the books, read in childhood, that later shaped his self-analysis and his theoretical development.

From the 6-year-old gleefully tearing up a book illustrated with pictures of Persia; to the young doctor balancing his scientific training with his love of Shakespeare; to the psychoanalyst in his prime, conquering the resistance to his theories; to the old man, ravaged by illness, forced to flee into exile in England, Lydia Flem leads us deep into the life of Freud.

Review

Freud’s love of cigars, his interest in Shakespeare, and his conflicted feelings about Judaism are well documented, but did you know that, unable to wait, he often celebrated his children’s birthday the day before, or that he enjoyed English mystery novels, or that he was fascinated with railway travel? Or, what of his relationships with women: his wife, sister-in-law, the charming French singer Yvette Guibert, Princess Marie Bonaparte, and the brilliant Lou Andréas Salomé? Lydia Flem’s intriguing and lively new study of Freud, which reads like a novel and an intellectual biography, charts his daily activities, friendships, wide-ranging interests, and family life. Her study takes us from Freud as a young boy to his final days in London as we read about the textual sources and personal experiences that informed his ideas about psychoanalysis. Flem shows the ways in which Freud drew connections between his sessions with patients, varied readings, and his inner life to develop his theories of psychoanalysis and the human psyche. She explains, “Through the threefold path of the personal, the pathological, and the cultural, what he [Freud] is trying to do is interpret the unknown of the human soul.” Flem’s vivid and imaginative work follows Freud as he sees patients, reads books, walks around Vienna, shops for archeological artifacts, travels, and spends time with his family. Though one could hardly claim a shortage of books on Freud, Flem’s book does offer a truly novel understanding of Freud and the inextricable connection between Freud the man and Freud the thinker.