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Biographer Jones believes that, far from realizing that he was "rapidly becoming a public menace," Freud merely thought of his fondness for cocaine as a sort of hobby. But when cases of cocaine poisoning and addiction began to pour in, Freud's hobby made him the center of a scandal. His colleagues were further scandalized when, under the influence of France's Charcot, Freud became an ardent supporter of hypnotism.
This was the turning point into "pure" psychology. In partnership with Dr. Josef Breuer (1842-1925), Freud published the case histories of five victims of hysteria—the most notable of which was the "Case of Anna O." Breuer had discovered that Anna tended to lose her symptoms if she were allowed to talk about them; Anna herself coined the happy phrase "chimney sweeping" to describe such therapy, and thus led the way to the idea of psychological "catharsis."
Object of Horror. Comedy took matters a stage further. Dr. Breuer became so fascinated by Anna's hysteria that Mrs. Breuer grew madly jealous. So Breuer stopped seeing Anna, who promptly flew into "the throes of an hysterical childbirth, the logical termination of a phantom pregnancy that had been invisibly developing in response to Breuer's ministrations."
Breuer fled "in a cold sweat" of shocked horror. But Colleague Freud remained, his mind suddenly stirred by the idea of a "sexual chemistry" at work in neuroses and of "catharsis" as the answer to it. He installed a couch in his consulting room, stretched his patients upon it, and urged them to sweep their chimneys. Sometimes he hypnotized them, sometimes encouraged them to be frank by asking gentle questions. But one day a patient "reproved him for interrupting her flow of thought," and Freud "took the hint." Another Freudian law, that of "free association" on the patient's part and silence on the doctor's, came into being.*
Jones traces clearly the successive steps taken by Freud from this simple beginning to the full-dress appearance of psychoanalysis in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). He tells vividly of Freud's decision to psychoanalyze himself—the results of which have been the basic pattern of analytical treatment ever since. As this first volume ends, he leaves Freud at the turn of the new century, his theory half-complete but already an object of horror to all respectable neurologists of the day.
Harsh Young Man. Biographer Jones lives up to his promise not to present "an idealized portrait" of his late master. The portrait he paints is of a harsh, opinionated young man, tormented for nearly 35 years by poverty but prepared promptly to sacrifice a hard-earned medical reputation to an audacious theory. Freud was quarrelsome, prone to tantrums when crossed. Once, opposed in an argument by Carl Jung, he fell on the floor in a dead faint. Far from being a "calm scientist," he deliberately sought out the extremes of love and hate. Observing that all the men he respected had "a characteristic manner," he made a mannerism of his "native tendency to uprightness and honesty"—and threw it in the face of the world to take or leave.