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Reading this book is a pleasure. It gathers for fresh review much of the material Freud left in letters, published for the first time only in the last decade, of his evolving loves and their vicissitudes. From his adolescent friend Silberstein and his love from afar for Gisela, to his capacities to invest admiringly in his teachers—elders such as the esteemed Brücke and the younger Fleischl-Marxow—to his devotion to the great Charcot, his love for Martha, and of course his fascination with Breuer, Freud left us a record of his intertwined loves, evolving work, and growth as a person. Most fortunate indeed, for us as students of creative growth, is his passionate love affair in letters to his friend and colleague Fliess, as Freud discovered the science and treatment of psychoanalysis.
For many analysts, reading a book about Freud's developing life and loves in adolescence and in midlife, as he discovers and defines psychoanalysis, is exciting. This is so not out of any idolatry of Freud, but because the details of Freud's discoveries and their connection to his own development are redolent of each analyst's personal evolution. Analysts must, to be alive in their vocation, discover for themselves, in the territories of this field, their own “truths” regarding their personal growth and their stumbles along the way. They search for and find their own view of their patients' problems and efforts at recovery. They find their particular, often faulty “analytic” attempts to understand and help these patients as human beings, and themselves as analysts. Doing this involves an effort to organize a personal conception of what is true and valuable in what they know of psychoanalysis. In these extraordinary letters we can follow Freud, the stumbling, human genius doing just that.
Peter Newton's Freud: From Youthful Dream to Mid-Life Crisis views the illuminating love stories of its subject's youth and young adulthood fr