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Freud's literary style has been much admired, and justly so. To anyone who has read much of his writing it is easy to understand why he received the Goethe prize for literature. Freud is vivid, personal, charmingly direct; he uses imaginative and original figures of speech, and often leads the reader along by a kind of stepwise development that enables him to penetrate into difficult or touchy areas with a minimum of effort.
Nevertheless, there are difficulties in understanding him, for all his lucidity. He is surprisingly easy to misinterpret; many subtleties of his thought are commonly missed or distorted.
If we can clearly apprehend the ways Freud thought, we may be able to gain a better understanding of what he has to teach us.
The term cognitive style refers to the organized configuration of an individual's ways of taking in, processing, and communicating information about his world, though it is often used loosely as equivalent to what Klein and his co-workers (Gardner, Holzman, Klein, Linton & Spence, 1959) referred to as principles of cognitive control, factors like leveling-sharpening or field-articulation. As Klein uses the terms today, cognitive controls are the constituent elements of cognitive style. Unfortunately, we cannot bring Freud into the laboratory to test him with aniseikonic lenses, Gottschaldt figures, and the rest of the battery used in that definitive study. The methods available turn out to be essentially those of the literary critic: to read Freud's work and try to make sense out of it, partly with the help of psychological concepts, partly with categories taken from rhetoric.
Perhaps as good a place to start as any is with Ernest Jones's well-known biography (1953-1957). Much of what he has to