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Today the Freudian hypothesis is only 60 years old (and has been widely known for only half that time), and its author is 17 years dead. To a few thousand intellectuals concentrated most heavily in the English-speaking world and especially in the U.S., Freud survives as a great liberator who freed the human mind from medieval bondage. To millions his name and the terms he has willed to the language are things to be used, half in jest, to cover up a lapsus linguae ("a Freudian slip") or to explain a character defect ("Don't blame Johnny; it's just a defense mechanism"). His theories are a high-assay lode for the pickaxes of cartoonists and cocktail-party wits. To more millions who have heard of him only from the pulpit, Freud is the spade-bearded Antichrist, who debased mankind by insisting that all man's works, whether he desires it or not, are inspired by SEX.
His teachings, while never susceptible to the kind of proof that physical science demands, have set the direction of much of 20th century social sciences — psychology, anthropology, sociology—and they have drawn the charts for modern medicine's progress into the diagnosis and cure of mental illness. But he was in essence less a scientist than a philosopher, perhaps less a healer than the maker of a system of thought—and a mythos—acceptable to his time. His ideas, defying harness and too soaring to rest within the narrow confines of hospital ward and doctor's office, flared out to all compartments of 20th century life— religion, morals, philosophy, the arts, even commerce and industry, and the assembling of armies. The poet, W. H. Auden, captured him thus:
If often he was wrong and at times absurd, To us he is no more a person Now but a whole climate of opinion
Family Tangle. As is its wont, destiny picked an unlikely setting to bring forth one of its to-be-favored sons. Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856, eldest of eight children in his wool-merchant father's second brood. The place was Freiberg, in Moravia (now in Czechoslovakia and renamed Pribor). Jakob Freud was 41, his new wife 21. By his first marriage he had two sons; Emanuel, the elder, had already made him a grandfather by the time Sigmund was born, so the new arrival had a nephew who was older than himself.
This was not the only relationship that proved puzzling to the infant Sigmund: his other half brother, Philipp, was almost exactly his mother's age. So, according to psychoanalytic hindsight, his infant mind paired them off and "blamed" Philipp for his mother's pregnancies. The next baby, Julius, arrived when Sigmund was only eleven months old, and died at eight months. By an extraordinary reach, Analyst-Biographer Jones credits Sigmund with having wished Julius' death, and then having suffered unbearable guilt when the wish was fulfilled. More solid is the ev idence that Sigmund suffered pangs of jealousy when, at 2^, he again had to share his mother's warmth and love, this time with his first sister, Anna. He never liked or forgave her.