Word: freude
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...untrue, says Sulloway: the notion that infants possessed sexual stirrings was fashionable during the 1890s, even before Freud wrote about it, and the idea that neurotic conflict had a sexual component was also conventional. Indeed, says the author, many of the ideas that Freud synthesized into psychoanalysis had been around for years: among them, such now familiar concepts as the unconscious, the pleasure principle, regression and sublimation. Fliess, a Berlin physician who was Freud's closest friend for years, convinced Freud that all human beings were bisexual, and also offered ideas on the latency period (low sexuality preceding puberty...
Synthesizing ideas already in the air is hardly disreputable-Darwin and Marx did much the same thing-but Sulloway thinks that Freud went a bit far to create a myth about his absolute originality. Freud once accused Sexologist Albert Moll of stealing his concept of infant sexuality, though Moll had published his ideas on the subject nearly a decade before. When many observers spotted some of Freud's ideas in the work of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Freud vehemently denied ever having read the two philosophers before inventing psychoanalysis. Sulloway thinks it unlikely: as a student in Vienna...
...later years, Freud also denied the links between psychoanalysis and biology, which Sulloway considers a tragic mistake. Freud's evolutionary notions of the instinctual and nonrational derive from Darwin, and in the 1890s he had dreamed of wedding psychology to biology. That all changed as Freud and his followers withdrew and obliterated all biological thinking from the movement...
...Freud always considered himself a "bold oppositionist," at his best warding off attackers. Around this notion, says Sulloway, grew the myth that Freud was beset on all sides for his shocking new ideas. In truth, much of the medical Establishment was on the same track as Freud, and his books were generally well received. In his three-volume biography, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones insists that The Interpretation of Dreams "had been hailed as fantastic and ridiculous." Comments Sulloway: "Actually the book was widely and favorably reviewed in popular and scientific periodicals and it was recognized...
Sulloway finds that many of Freud's accounts of his battles were colored by another part of the myth: that the world was out to squelch psychoanalysis right from the start. In fact, says the author, Freud's teachings were greeted respectfully. Only later did strong opposition arise, much of it in response to the arrogance and slashing attacks of Freud's group...