Word: freud
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...Sigmund Freud idolized Hannibal. So much so that for years he was psychologically unable to enter Rome because Hannibal had never set foot in the city. In fact, Freud's ideas about himself were heavily tinged with mythic and military overtones. "I am actually not a man of science," he once told his friend Wilhelm Fliess, "not an experimenter, not a thinker... but a conquistador...
That self-conception of the embattled hero helps explain Freud's boldness and his endless attacks on opponents and colleagues. Yet according to a new study to be published this fall, it also had another, more surprising result: the standard version of Freud's struggles, as recounted by Freud and the Freudian historians, is heavily laced with legend, and much of the story is just plain false...
...Titled Freud: Biologist of the Mind (Basic Books), this iconoclastic study does not deny Freud's achievement. Says Author Frank J. Sulloway, 32, a historian of science and a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley: "What remains today of Freud's insights and influence ... provides ample testimony to his greatness." But according to Sulloway, who spent seven years on the book, the historical record has been manipulated by Freud's followers to make him appear more original, isolated and heroic than he really...
...Freudians tell it, Freud shocked Victorian sensibilities with his ideas on infant sexuality. Hostilely received by a narrow and deterministic medical Establishment, he retreated into his own private world to think up psychoanalysis all by himself...
Edel uses a novelist's skill to keep all this straight - if straight is the word. Strachey's Eminent Victorians, he notes, was written "in a new kind of ink - the ink of Vienna, of Sigmund Freud." Edel's portrait of Virginia Woolf includes a pow erful analysis of the roots of her art and madness. She was haunted by deaths in her family (symbolized by a horrible animal face that once appeared when she looked in a mirror) and sexually traumatized by her halfbrothers' childhood groping. At the same time, her identification with her dead...