(4 of 5)
No one seeing Freud and his brother Alexander get off the train in Rome would have suspected that anything of this sort was happening. Freud behaved much like any other tourist. But in no time he was up against yet another father-figure —Michelangelo's famed statue of Moses in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli. Freud "used to flinch at the angry gaze as if he were one of the disobedient mob . . . 'But later, Freud promoted himself and identified himself with Moses. Thus he was able, writing in 1914 after the refections of Adler, Stekel and Jung, to put a new psychoanalytic interpretation on the 400-year-old statue. It did not he held, show Moses freshly descended from the Mount and about to chastise the Israelites for dancing about their golden calf. Rather, Freud read it as showing Moses deciding not to hasten after the mob lest he lose the Tablets of the Law This he called "the highest mental achievement . . . struggling successfully against an inward passion for the sake of a cause." Freud was often plagued by doubt about the value of his work, but when he remembered how tolerant he had been of apostates to his own creed, he could feel like Moses.
Man's Fate. The Jones biography shows again that Freud was essentially a Dessimist about mankind. "I don't rack my brains much about the problem of good and evil," he once wrote, "but on (he whole I have not found much of the good' in people ..."
What, in the dark recesses of this personality, was the origin of Freud's genius?
Dr. Jones wastes no time on anything so dubious as sublimated sexual energy, although he notes in a well-bred British way: "The more passionate side of married life subsided with him earlier than it does with many men." Neither does the analyst get much help from the periods of Freud's greatest creativity. These are marked by a banal anal factor. His productivity, the great man once wrote probably had much to do with the "enormous improvement" in the activity of his Konrad.
Seeking the wellspring of genius, Analyst Jones goes underground. The search for truth, he believes, was "the deepest and strongest driving force" in Freud's Me. What truth? Essentially the same thing as "the child's desire to know . the meaning of birth and what has brought it about." In Freud's early childhood there must have been a man who knew the secrets. "Well, there was his half brother Philipp [20 years his senior] whom he suspected of being his mother's mate . . ." Jones guesses that this half brother may have given young Sigmund some joking version of the facts of life that may have hurt the child. This relatively trivial explanation of what Jones justly calls a noble striving is typical of a danger that psychoanalysis often faces the danger of keeping its eyes not on the heights but on the mushrooms. But Analyst Jones is also conscious of the heights when he concludes :