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The jacket of this book informs us that the author is a psychoanalyst and Associate Professor (teaching English and comparative literature) at the Université de Montréal. G. H. Pollock, in his foreword, also informs us that Mohony, as “an outstanding scholar and master of language, who is also a well-trained, practicing clinical psychoanalyst, has written a book that will soon become a classic.” Mahoney approaches Freud as a literary expert, telling us what he believes we can learn about Freud from a study of his writing style. We are certainly treated to a display of expertise in literary criticism.
If the reviewer attempts to make a brief statement about the contents of this book, it is that we learn a great deal about Freud, the person, from his magnificent writing style (no surprise!) and that in his writing, Freud repeatedly displays and acts out the very psychoanalytic principles he is describing.
“It is around the designation of Freud as a scientist or artist that the most serious scholarship on his work as a writer turns” (p. 12). “Was Freud mostly an artist? Mostly a scientist? There is no shortage of champions for either position” (p. 13). Why bother to quantify his strengths in either role. We all know he was both.
Freud's style is said to illustrate the very ideas he enunciates. So the author states that Freud's “statement gives rise to the question whether Freud, like an analytic patient, remembers or repeats” (p. 58). “In an effort to relate the repetition compulsion to the instincts … Freud's own use of repetition is extraordinary” (p. 58). Examples of this nature—of exposition through enaction—abound throughout the book. This is hardly to be unexpected, since Freud did not claim that he was an exception to the conclusions he enunciated. “Surely Freud's prose … mimics its own content” (p. 64). In writing about the repetition compulsion, the number seven appears repeatedly and “Shengold quotes two letters in which Freud explains that his life is marked by