Solving the riddle of Sigmund Freud’s attitude to death
MORTAL SECRETS Freud, Vienna and the discovery of the modern mind
FRANK TALLIS 496pp. Abacus. £25.
THE FIRST TIME Sigmund Freud wrote of destroying his papers he was twenty-one years old. He was writing to Eduard Silberstein, an intimate friend of his youth and the sole other member of the Academia Castellana, a makebelieve Spanish literary society anchored in Cervantes trivia, which served them as a secret forum for airing playful fantasies and precocious world-weariness. Freud invited Silberstein to help expunge the record of their relations by conjuring up a pleasant winter evening in which they could come together to burn their archives “in a solemn auto-da-fé”. The next occasion was eight years later, in a letter to his then fiancée Martha Bernays, during what he described as a “bad, barren month”, waiting for money from a chemist to finance further research into cocaine, doing almost nothing except browsing through Russian history and toying with two rabbits who continually nibbled turnips and messed up his floor. His only real accomplishment, he told Martha then, was to have nearly completed his intention of doing something that would dismay various unborn, unfortunate people – namely his future biographers. He’d destroyed all his notes from the past fourteen years, along with correspondence and the original manuscripts of his scientific papers. In 1907, he once again burned a huge trove of private documents. Finally, in 1938, just before escaping Nazified Vienna, he delegated to his daughter Anna the task of overseeing another bonfire of his letters, which she undertook together with his disciple Marie Bonaparte.
Freud has often been approached by biographers not only as a subject whose life merits fresh exposition owing to evolving perspectives on psychoanalysis, but also as someone who masked and elided key parts of his story. His distaste for the very premiss of the biographical project is on record. When his friend the novelist Arnold Zweig told Freud that he wanted to write his life story, Freud retorted that he felt far too affectionately toward Zweig to permit such a misstep. “Anyone who writes a biography is committed to lies, concealments, hypocrisy, flattery and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth does not exist, and if it did we could not use it.” Topping off the critique he announced, “Truth is unobtainable, mankind does not deserve it, and in any case is not our Prince Hamlet right when he asks who would escape whipping were he used after his desert”. In light of all Freud’s suppressive tactics and declarations, it seems fair to wonder what he was trying to keep under wraps.
Was Freud averse to biographical excavation bec
