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The latest book from Leonard Shengold has a double thrust: it is about both Freud's strivings for greatness in the wake of the remembered pronouncement quoted in the book's title and about the place of Freud as an ideal in our lives. According to Freud's account in the Interpretation of Dreams, Jacob Freud's condemnation of his son was issued when the very young Sigmund intruded into his parents' bedroom and urinated on the floor. The context suggests that the memory screens a primal scene experience and its effects on the little Sigmund were far-reaching. It fired his vengeance into ambition. He would become something. He chose Hannibal, the Carthaginian general, as an ideal, while also enshrining in his memory an image of his father as craven and pitiful. His father was the fearful Jew who bent down in the gutter before an anti-Semite to pick up the hat the Austrian had knocked off his head.
Shengold organizes his book in a way that allows him to intertwine an essay on our general human need for ideals with Freud's life as illustration. Along the way he places one or two telling clinical vignettes from his own practice and a very rich consideration of Freud's complex relationships with Fliess, Abraham, and Jung. He begins with a mildly self-revelatory chapter that includes an account of his freshman year infatuation with Professor Lionel Trilling. He makes the point about immature and mature ideals very simply: “Trilling idealized Freud (but not uncritically), and I idealized Trilling (completely uncritically)” (p. 1). He moves on to illustrate the roots of such idealization in an original experience that includes one's own and the other's body in an amalgam by describing his work with a psychotic patient who thought Dr.