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A volume on the subject of Freud and the Humanities is assuredly a welcome one, and editor Peregrine Horden has assembled a distinguished group of contributors: Charles Rycroft, Anthony Storr, Richard Ellmann, E. H. Gombrich, S. Dresden, Francis Huxley, and Hugh Lloyd-Jones. As with any anthology, however, the quality of the pieces is uneven, and a range of attitudes toward psychoanalysis is represented.
The two most impressive contributions are also those most sympathetic to Freud. In “Freud and Literary Biography,” Richard Ellmann addresses not only Freud's attitudes toward biography but also the influence psychoanalysis has had on the biographer's craft. As opposed to Charles Rycroft, who complains of the tendency of psychoanalysis “to use pathological phenomena as paradigms of normal experience” (p. 28), Ellmann pungently notes that in Freud's epoch “one touch of kinkiness makes the whole world kin” (p. 64). He likewise remarks that modern biographers have learned from Freud to be “analysts without couches” and to regard “all experience as symptomatic” (p. 67). Ellmann, however, is appropriately cautious about the dangers of trivialization, as when Edmund Wilson reduces Jonson's artistry to anal eroticism. His essay is animated by an ongoing polemic against Sartre's massive biography of Flaubert. Ellmann exposes several factual errors in Sartre's work and also criticizes his “eloquence about the unknown” (p. 73). As Richard Ellmann's fairmindedness and stature as the preeminent biographer of our time are not in doubt, readers of Sartre on Flaubert are advised to proceed with caution.
E. H. Gombrich is an art historian of world renown, but in “The Symbol of the Veil: Psychological Reflections on Schiller's Poetry,” he explores both the biographical roots and philosophical implications of Schiller's recurrent use of the motif of the concealment of a dangerous or forbidden truth behind a veil of illusion. Schiller's poetry -and indeed his oeuvre of plays and philosop