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Mrs. Freud, Martha Bernays, makes modest appearances early in the book as a model hausfrau, but after delivering the opinion that psychoanalysis is a "form of pornography," she is rarely heard from again. The woman in Freud's later life was his daughter and intellectual heir Anna. She followed in her father's professional footsteps and, in all but conjugal function, became a dutiful substitute spouse.
Gay, a scholar of the Enlightenment era, tends to view his subject as a direct descendant of 18th century atheists and rationalists like Voltaire and Diderot. Therefore it is with deepening irony that the reader discovers that by the 1920s, psychoanalysis had begun to resemble a religion. Freud's apostles begat apostates who in turn spawned heresies and a bemusing number of therapeutic sects, each claiming to have a piece of the true couch.
) It is easy to see why. Freud's theories of dreams as wish fulfillments, of infant sexuality and Oedipal rage, had the power of revelation. They could not (and still cannot) be proved by laboratory experiment, but their palpable rightness can be sensed in mythology, legend and archaeology. Not surprisingly, Freud's famous office at Berggasse 19 was filled with antiquities from Egypt and classical Greece.
Freud was an unimposing man, 5 ft. 7 in. tall and nearly always dressed in conservative coat and tie. He did, however, have a penetrating stare, and an English analyst who visited him after World War I noted the "forward thrust of his head and critical exploring gaze of his keenly piercing eyes." There was the neatly trimmed beard and the ever present cigar. He was addicted. Writing to his fiancee in the early 1880s, Freud the lover justified his tobacco habit with the romantic observation that "smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss." Elsewhere, in a professional mode, he declared that cigars are a substitute for masturbation.
To judge from Gay's accounts, too much has been made of Freud's cocaine dependency. As a young man he used the drug to chase the blues, relax on social occasions and, as he wrote to his future bride, make himself feel like a "big wild man." The substance did cause him ego problems when another physician beat him to the journals with his findings on the pain-killing properties of coca. His own paper on the subject was well received, but as he wrote in an 1884 letter to his sister-in-law, "the cocaine business has indeed brought me much honor, but the lion's share to others."
At the age of 66, Freud discovered what he called a "leukoplastic growth on my jaw and palate." He correctly identified the cause as smoking, and was worried enough to suspect cancer. He was right; but apparently the man who knew so much about the mechanisms of denial in others had little influence over his own defenses. Rather than seek the opinion of a leading specialist, he selected a rhinologist of whom he had a low opinion. Was this an example of the celebrated "death wish," or perhaps just another instance of his need to be the boss? Macht nichts. The nose doctor operated and botched the job. Freud was left hemorrhaging on a cot in a small room that he shared with a retarded dwarf. The fellow summoned a nurse, though it is unlikely that he realized he was saving a giant.