Sigmund Freud gets his turn on the couch in this week’s TLS. Frank Tallis’s Mortal Secrets, reviewed by George Prochnik, asks intriguing questions of psychoanalysis’s founding father that bear on the biographer’s craft. What motive led Freud to burn his personal papers at various times in his life? Why did he resist the attention of even friendly biographers? Freud’s brush-off to the novelist Arnold Zweig, for instance, surely demands further interrogation. “Biographical truth does not exist, and if it did we could not use it”, said Freud, adding, “truth is not obtainable, mankind does not deserve it”. Freud then suggestively quotes Hamlet “when he asks who would escape a whipping were he used after his desert”.
Perhaps this was a form of modesty. The Master came to think that there were natural limits to the quest for self-discovery he pioneered. Freud understood that “even his most cherished methodologies [would] only penetrate so far” into the “innermost realm” of the unconscious. Supplementing Freud’s famous notion of the Oedipus complex, Prochnik identifies Freud’s “Sphinx complex”. The good doctor perched over his patients guiding them to solve the riddles of their behaviour. But what was the secret that Freud himslef tried to bury. A private sexual escapade or fear of decrepitude and death? Caught between Freud bashers who consider his life’s work fraudulent and hagiographers who have nothing to declare except his genius, Tallis presents an even-handed portrait: “dismissing Freud because of his sho
