Freud Rediscovered

Shortly before his death in September 1980, the philosopher Walter Kaufmann completed the final volume of a trilogy entitled Discovering the Mind. The recent publication of this remarkable work has passed almost without notice; few specialist booksellers have even heard of it; and although the book is subtitled Freud versus Adler and Jung, most of my psychoanalytic colleagues were ignorant of its existence. I myself came across it only by chance. The late Anna Freud, Freud's daughter, had received a copy from an unknown source and invited me to read it.

All this is quite unusually surprising for a book substantially concerned with Freud and his achievements. In recent years a spate of books and articles about him have received widespread attention in specialist journals, and what is often considered the more respectable press. In not a few instances, both the works themselves and the comments of their reviewers were as lacking in taste as they were in accuracy. In some, the customary disclaimer—that, in spite of all, Freud was a ‘great man’—did little to disguise the nature of the attacks on him.

Nowadays, even the more restrained criticisms are often coloured by a kind of malign innuendo which serves to cast doubt on his achievements. Historical and biographical accuracy rarely stands out as a motivation. The fact that some of these assessments are made by people with scholarly pretensions merely compounds the offence. Many thoughtful people take the view that attempts to belittle a man's work by assaults upon his character have no effect on the discerning reader. Achievements can, and should, be assessed independently of everything else. This viewpoint is bound to command sympathy. Most of us can think of examples, especially in art and literature, where it is easy to preserve the distinction. But what if human character is itself a stepping-stone to advance in the human sciences? Or science in general, for that matter? Kaufmann tackles this question with boldness a