(3 of 3)
Freud's reputation by that time was international, and Freudianisms were being filtered and watered down for popular consumption. In 1924 Colonel Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, offered the founding father $25,000 to come to Chicago and psychoanalyze Accused Murderers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, then on trial for their thrill killing of Bobby Franks. Freud refused, as he undoubtedly would have if Hollywood's Samuel Goldwyn had made good on his boast that he would offer $100,000 for the consulting services of the "greatest love specialist in the world."
Just how much Freud knew about the subject is unclear. Gay takes the conventional view that the master sublimated his sexual drive in his intellectual pursuits. Freud's letters to colleagues contain references to his weak libido, and though he had many attractive and exciting women friends, there is no evidence that they ever graduated from his couch to his bed.
Feminists exercised by Freud's ideas on penis envy and his position that a girl is a failed boy and a woman a castrated man may gather ammunition here for their cause. Gay finds Freud's ideas about the female psyche too willfully conceived to be convincing, and he repeatedly quotes Freud on his ignorance about the sex he referred to as the "dark continent."
In fact, the biographer is no less skeptical about many psychoanalytical formulations than Freud was himself. In his paper "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," for example, Freud expresses doubts about the effectiveness of the talking cure. If this is not good news for patients who pay $100 for a 50- minute hour, let them pay $25 for this excellent biography. That's what Freud charged for a full hour.