OH BOTHER:

Through a carefully documented chronological narrative of Freud's career, Crews succeeds in showing that from very early on Freud's ambition, egotism, and desire for money and fame led him to exploit "the ethical scientists and physicians of his era," whose professional standards of conduct he mimicked as and when necessary. He preyed on their research, sometimes using insights, arguments, and data without attribution or taking credit for research findings or arguments gleaned from others. Freud was also a predator of what he cynically called "goldfish"--the patients whom Crews describes as the "chronically agitated and fabulously wealthy ladies at the apex of Viennese Jewish society." Freud was a classic case of an upwardly mobile confidence man, perfecting techniques of deception that would continue throughout his life and would also characterize the inner ring of Freudians during the last twenty years of his life and since his death.

One of the main recurrent topics of this volume is Freud's use of cocaine, both as a private intoxicant and as a treatment for the ailments of his patients. Although he eventually recognized the drug's dangers, Freud, as Crews shows, was instrumental in causing or enabling the addiction of several colleagues, friends, and patients in an unscrupulous way that almost terminated his own career. Crews plausibly argues that many of Freud's boldly but covertly immoral actions--including concocting case studies that were actually personal fantasies and fictions--were the results of cocaine abuse. Despite Freud's ostensible skepticism regarding the occult, Crews compares his relationship to drugs to a satanic pact. "On April 30, 1884--Walpurgisnacht, or the folkloric night of supposed witchcraft and trafficking with the Devil," Crews tells us, Freud "tasted cocaine powder and imbibed his first .05 gram solution of it, marveling at its mood-elevating capacity. And from that night forward he would regard the drug as the most precious and restorative substance on earth."

Atheistic and contemptuous of his long-suffering wife's residual respect for her inherited Judaism, Freud descended into the deep, superstitious subjectivity of pagan German Romanticism. "On Walpurgisnacht in Goethe's Faust, Mephistopheles offers the hero a magical elixir that grants him both sexual and intellectual mastery," Crews points out. "Faust was already Freud's favorite work of serious literature, and it would remain so. The figure of Dr. Faust, risking his soul for freedom from ethical constraints that render the experience of other mortals so impoverished, would become central to his later self-conception as the founder of an anti-Christian science that could penetrate forbidden realms."

What could professional or moral standards mean to such a man? "Freud's enthusiasm" for cocaine, Crews tells us, "was boundless." Obsessed with self-flattering ideas of himself as a Nietzschean Superman, Freud was sure, within a month of first taking the cocaine, "that the 'magical remedy' [Zaubermittel] would prove to be his ticket to worldly success." Repeatedly experiencing its "emboldening" effects, "he had begun sending small amounts of it, along with commendations of its benefits, to his fiancée, to his sisters, and to trusted colleagues, who would presumably be encouraged to prescribe it to their patients for the alleviation of various complaints." Crews's description of the subsequent effects of cocaine on figures such as Freud's friend Fleischl are heartrending.

One of Crews's main arguments is that Freud was only minimally and even reluctantly a "scientist." Although his reputation rested on his carefully crafted self-portrait as a heroic yet ascetic man of reason, he actually despised the empirical habit of mind and the general canons of rationality that had informed educated people from Aristotle through Aquinas, Descartes, Samuel Johnson, Kant, and modern science. Not careful study but cocaine addiction was a key to Freud's own secret closet of obsessions, particularly his quasi-mystical self-conception. He seems to have loved irrationalist phrases such as "magical remedy" and "magical attraction" (zauberischen Reiz, which he used of a strong homophile attraction to Fleischl). The children of one of his wealthy, emotionally abused, and financially exploited patients saw him as an evil magician; the flattering identification of himself as a "magician" was one he was happy to develop among his own disciples. Crews depicts this group as a set of sorcerer's apprentices following the magic flute of an allegedly scientific pied piper.

Freud had little interest in people outside his charmed circle. He frequently expressed contempt for poor people who couldn't afford his expensive and lengthy services, seeing them as a Nietzschean herd or "massa damnata." "A Hippocratic sense that each human being deserves respectful treatment was never part of Freud's perspective," Crews writes. "Most people struck him as contemptible." Crews goes on to quote Freud's notorious letter to the Swiss Protestant minister-psychiatrist Rev. Oskar Pfister. "I have found little that is 'good' about human beings as a whole," Freud informed Pfister. "In my experience, most of them are trash."

Freud's attitude toward women, who provided the overwhelming majority of his cases, was similarly contemptuous and abusive. Crews's documentation of his behavior makes some of the most painful reading in this book. The allegedly happily married paterfamilias was in reality a domestic tyrant who ignored or abused his frequently pregnant wife (who bore him six children). Later he almost certainly deserted her sexually for her younger, sexier, live-in sister, Minna Bernays, with whom he took most of his holidays and for whom he probably procured a painfully botched abortion of a child they conceived. It is the story of a scoundrel and a megalomaniac, one styling himself, of course, "beyond good and evil."

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