On Mis-Statements of Would-Be Freud Biographers with Special Reference to the Tausk Controversy

In the 1920s, there was published in a medical journal an article that I am unable to identify now, in which the writer asserted that Freud was homosexual. He based this assertion, if I remember correctly, solely on the claim that Freud was supposed to have written that Leonardo da Vinci was homosexual—something that Freud had never, of course, asserted.

Those were the days when Freud was regarded as 'fair game' for anyone who, having been shocked by the results of his psychoanalytic research, desired to 'take it out' on him personally. This sort of pseudo-critic, whose sole aim was Freud's belittlement had, I thought, disappeared by now, but I was mistaken as I have learned from an article (Isou, 1973) in which Freud was called a sal flic ('dirty cop'), because of a paper published in 1906, in which he discussed the possibility of using Jung's association experiment in legal procedures. 'Sigmund Freud', this author wrote, 'thus became the accomplice, the "collaborator" of the police of one of the most reactionary states of his epoch' (author's italics; my translation).1 Despite such occasional regressions in our times, the stage of Freud criticism in which 'charges' were nothing more than invective and thus made little or no pretence of substantiation—that stage is practically finished and done with.

Approximately from the 1960s on, anti-Freudian literature by and large changed its style. If someone now desires to cast an aspersion on Freud, he generally has to proceed with a minimum of sophistication and to employ some documentation in order to create at least a semblance of proof. What some of these 'proofs' have consisted of, however, may at first be illustrated by some brief examples.

Percival Bailey, the renowned neurologist, has invested much energy in attacking Freud. On one occasion he quoted Freud as having written to Fliess (Bailey, 1961, p. 216): 'I do not want to read, because it stirs up too many thoughts and stints me of the satisfaction of disco